Eluthia Ch 3

 Minus felt like a puppeteer stalling, persuaded by dancing shadows, that his movements were not exerted by self-will. Furthermore, there was an other side that performed those exertions gracefully without inhibition. A world created without deliberation and sexual vanity, a world whose streets that met the horizon and the vertical axis of the deep blue skies, flowers and trees stretched their potential, the billowing light casting the reflection that represents the real you, the light tries to catch up to the darkness where Minus meanders his footsteps over glass houses.

 

Memory began to soften as Minus accumulated more sobriety time. The locality of any past experience was limited to plush landscapes. The thresholds of memory and dream crossed over every time Minus engaged in total recall concerning his parents and his childhood friends, similar to an LSD induced dues ze vous. Discerning the past from the present had become a harrowing mind job. When Minus attempted to distinguish the two, his mind would slip into theatrical scenes of himself as some faint character in a movie. Additionally, his using past still trailed behind him like some recent distinct odor of burnt toast.

 

Minus had suffered from a minor head injury while he was on the dirt bike with Val. His speech, motor skills and reasoning were intact, but only tiny mirror fragments of his early childhood remained in view. His recollections replayed inconsonant sketches and unintelligible plot sequences, some parts of his life invented by imagination and other memoirs rebuffed by other time periods of his life. His personal excesses had blotted out the rest of his memory.

 

Minus had a circle of friends in his earlier adolescence whose names he could not mark without substituting other messy reminders of intoxication. As with any circle of friends there remained a secret, and as Gerald, his AA sponsor and employer, told him, “your sobriety is only as great as your worst secret.”

 

The night at the campfire, the fire continued with an authoritative blaze, patience waited for time, but time did not come. Acid trips always thrived with those types of reverberations. It was like memory had locked, yet still thrusting forward while Beef showed his physical endurance by impulsively feeding the fire with Christmas trees, Shawn boasted of his mathematical insights of that night and Valentino directed the conversations. Minus went through a sort of dream hemorrhage, baffled by the thoughts of that night, the exchanges unending.

 

 

Instead of writing about dreams, let’s live it. C’mon let’s go biking.” Said Val.

 

“Yeah Minus, don’t be scared, biking ‘ll make you man. Give you a hard-on.” Said beef.

 

They windswept through the dirt roads and Minus held on drudgingly passenger side on Val’s bike like a fetus to the womb. Beef swerved from side to side like a daredevil. Shawn did doughnuts like a frantic circus sideshow. They surfaced right up to a hill, its underbelly like a tidal wave demanding them to turn back. The watery mud on the turf gave in, hydroplaning them into oblivion.

 

As Minus attempted to recollect that night at the campfire, he stumbled for memory. Only the conversations crept inside. Only fragments of fireside days warmed his thoughts enough to remember. Days of football bouts minus the yardage discreet enough not to awaken the neighbors next door. Remembrances of having a heart made of stone, a stone hard enough to bear the destruction of demon alcohol and the drudges and grudges that went with it contrasted to the their Tree house frivolities of innocence when everything made anew was not contrived. At least in childhood affirmations, memory led from one chute into another, sliding effortlessly into the next mischievous endeavor without the harm of guilt. The tree house days had been long gone; only a memory you would see in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Now with a sober eye, those tree house days were snug in a canister, along with old photos, rusted nails and baseball cards. Minus was in hopes that maybe, just maybe, memory was a slingshot away.

 

But what he could remember, Valentino was the next best thing compared to his uncle. Val’s eccentricity allowed Minus to go beyond the obtrusion of the levee walls. The levee had been Minus’s own little island of what little action he could muster on his own. He provided vision where his uncle staked him with rigid thought foundations of padded cells forcing him to muster drunken contemplations that only bounced back with repetitive synergy. Will locked and keyed Minus’s imagination for fear that he would illuminate those qualities of his father. Will envied Val’s bohemian charisma, but he was also threatened by his ability to break down walls. He did not want Val to bring down Minus’s walls because he had gone through too much trouble to make him stay that way. Will had buried the thought of Caleb Wellington Sr to the grave, designed the sullen basement where Minus dwelled. Minus had been Will’s dirty secret who he kept locked in the basement for so long. To Will he was the orphan boy with no name.

 

A couple of years before the campfire incident, Val urged Minus to trespass into the abandoned Elysian Mall that Will had recently invested to renew. The parking lot was taped off from the rest of the market square, bits of gravel overwhelmed the asphalt, the siding peeled, and the old Elysian Mall sign barely hung on its last screw, dry weeds and vines cascaded up and down the spine of the building. The rest of the world had moved on while Elysian Mall stood at the pinnacle of the wear and tear of old money. It especially did not match with the rest of downtown. With polished, contemporary chrome buildings surrounding it, it seemed out of place. Yet, this was the last pleasant memory of Val he had stored.

 

The Elysian mall opened in 1964 in uptown New Orleans, but the commercial malls took over. New Orleans traditionalists went through a series of trials to try to restore the place because of its unique French architecture. Demolition had begun in 1996 until an appeal was made to keep it as a celebration of a distinct architecture you would only find in New Orleans. The mall was spared except for places in the paneling where the recking ball bashed through. Will would later be the contractor who would sign to renew the place, yet efforts for rebuilding would later be stalled for a number of years to come.

 

Inside the mall, some of the stores were barely still intact minus the merchandising. The steel caged doors were coated with cobwebs, and a mannequin here and there jutted out a pose despite that what silhouetted behind them was not made for picture taking. It was completely dark save for the large beams of sunlight that cracked through the paneled walls.

 

Val brushed aside the “Do Not Trespass” sign with careless regard. A huge portion of the entrance to the mall had been jetted out by the recking ball while the rest of the building remained intact and somehow maintained coloration, its incompletion the depiction of an accidental Stone Henge or the monumental Olympus that catered to the pantheon gods.

 

Minus gawked at the large expanse before him; white Greek columns and the Spanish balconies towered above him. It must had been seven stories high. A renaissance mall if there ever was one.

 

“It is something, ain’t it?” Said Val. Val kicked over a few clumps of dead concrete that obstructed his path. Debris was everywhere. Minus and Val had already entered a few feet beyond the entrance where the roof of the place met them halfway despite the opening expanse of the sky behind them. He passed a joint to Minus.

 

“Yes it is.” Said Minus.

 

Val swallowed a large helping of Jim Beam and then chased it with sprite. Then he passed it to Minus. Val then makes a mockery of one of the mannequins by placing the spliff into its mouth. Minus reveres in the moment.

 

“They say its haunted.” Said Minus

 

“Well its pretty gothic looking, but haunted. Haunted by what, some disgruntled employee or dispirited customer who didn’t get what they wanted?”

 

“Uhmm, no. but this place use to be all marsh, and natives use to inhabit this part.”

“Natives, huh. You’ve done your research school boy.” Said Val.

 

Minus whispered to himself. “I think I’ve dreamt about this place.”

 

“The natives used a tool they called the dreamcatcher. They would use it to harness the visions they had from their dreams to bring about good fortune. Some dreams brought good but others brought bad. It’s all speculative.” Said Minus.

 

 “So your Uncle worked here, huh? The place itself outclasses the man in my opinion.”

 

“Yes, as a contractor.”

 

“He helped build the place?”

 

“No, he set up the boiler room. He now maintains the storage down there.”

 

“It figures he didn’t build it. The coon a*s has no imagination.”

 

“HEELLOO!” Val communicates to the dead with his abrupt greeting. His voice carries throughout the building. “Man, this place is creepy yet charming at the same time.”

 

“So you still livin with the fat man huh?” Said Val.

 

“Yes. In the basement.”

 

“Fishing for dreams, huh? Sounds like your fishing for some kind of fortune or even hope yourself. I would be if I lived with that deranged uncle of yours. And meanwhile he is like some pantheon god up there while you’re stuck down there? I never did like him, even the first time when I met him. He seemed threatened by me.” Said Val.

 

“Yeah, he would never invite you in. Why did you want to come here?” Said Minus.

 

“Well, I wanted to vandalize the place at first. But now I see there is a sad beauty to it.”

 

“Yeah, so did I.” Said Minus

 

“What, vandalize or empathize?” Said Val.

 

“I guess both. You know, my uncle isn’t such a bad guy. He is just …” And Minus stumbled for that very word that described their relationship.

 

Val did provide a way out, but his methods were self-destructive enabling Minus to see around corners and walk down hallways whose shadows were too atrocious for the common onlooker. Val took detours that other men dared not; through roads at the beckoning of the bottle’s end, through LSD coarse fibers that sparked sensations and opened forbidden doors. Val took a stuntman’s exit that had left a mark on Minus for years to come.

 

Val eventually had become swept away slowly by a bitterness of his own of not being able to break down his own walls. Artificial highs only took him so far.

 

The streetcars zoomed by leaving a plethora of traces in its wake. The sun at five o’ clock shadow tinged St. Charles Ave with an oil painting gloss. Minus felt better during the night. The Night’s wings flared in posture, its feather tapped him with a cool, calming affect, the soothing rapture of the ink-filled darkness. In darkness, Minus could pretend who he wanted to be. The sun for him was too blindingly rude, especially in the mornings when he did not know where the day would take him, and where his thoughts may linger in those empty pockets. His thoughts took him through detours where sane men have fallen.

 

 The members at the AA meeting were shuffling about, setting up coffee. The twelve steps scrolled behind the chairperson

 

Minus spoke. “You know after two years of sobriety, I cannot help notice how lush and vivid everything is to me now. It goes to show how much I was driving on automatic pilot because I did not want to face my emotions. Now I see and feel everything and can finally remember what I did the night before. I have tried every drug except heroin, and sobriety is by far the most mind-expanding drug I have ever been on. I say that because I now have memories, some I want to remember and some I want to forget about coming into shape. It has been by far the strangest year of my life.”

 

Minus would be driving home from work to an AA meeting, the traffic beside him in droves like cattle, the passengers and drivers with faces frozen in space as if caught by the collar and eyes tangled by an invisible apparition. Coming out of the dark, the sun crashed against the horizon resulting in a bleeding sky, the clouds spacing and breaking up were lulled to sleep on this cascaded sunset night. Everybody and everything seemed to be dreaming: the people in traffic, the sun, the sky. Some invisible presence not necessarily spiritual seemed to blink in synchronicity with Minus’s shuddering eyes, and you could see the ghost in the machine in there waiting in his dilated pupils.