Eluthia Ch 6

Agitated breaths faltered from Uncle Willard’s black hole of a mouth. Palpitations knocked at his chest like an unannounced guest waiting at the summit of his anxieties. At least that was the projection of tomorrow for now. But that was the guilt you harbored when a Will was not even your own. Forging somebody else’s birth certificate does not even warrant that you even have a will of your own in the first place. Yet, Willard had his best intentions for a person whose mind had become saturated to the point of vinegar.

 

Willard embraced the letter addressed to Minus from his parents in an iron grip, the folds of the letter aged by time and Uncle Willard’s fist. The letter was the only last remnants that evidenced the true calling of Minus’s unperturbed destiny. Yet, Willard had had the advantage of the longest chronological time spent with Minus. Despite the letter, Minus’s folks were just ghosts from another photo book era. Willard forged the creation of Minus period, his handprints were practically all over him.

 

Minus use to be Willard’s wayward subject and drunken protégé, but now Minus was steering in the other direction, and in directions Willard would never dream, pun intended.

 

His room was full of department store mannequins. Some he had modified to his own liking by cutting their eyes out, severing a limb here and there. Two posed cattycornered by his door, the notion of human life only a dream. Some were partially clothed, some totally nude. The two by the door had shards of glass for eyes. In the corner by his bed a mannequin was reduced to a torso.

 

After Minus departed from the drinking soirée lifestyle, Will certainly comforted himself with queer company full of drunken anecdotes of the times when he designed department store mannequins and furnished them to the first mall the city had acquired. That irreparable dream of the chase of the fix, his swelling hands cupping the bottle, Will was the reality manifesto, the drunken surveyor of Minus’s past. In those mannequins’ eyes, was the still-life representation of their relationship. Forged intimacy inked the contract, and somewhere behind the font spelled the ghostly aura of Minus’s mother and father. Will would not let his memory of Minus’s father and mother flesh out.

 

Will envied Minus’s dead father more the same reason he resented Minus. Both were free spirits, but at least he had Minus chained to a doorstep fantasy. And Will, so far, controlled what recollection Minus had of his father save for the Van Gogh like self portrait of Caleb Wellington over his dresser, and Will made sure that Minus’s memories of his dad were just mere abstract brushstrokes.

 

Caleb Wellington was a freelance entrepreneur and painter, and free in every aspect of the word. Willard Wellington saw something in his brother that he did not see in himself, a lively pride in relationship to his work. Will was the blue- collar dock worker who sometimes partnered with his brother Caleb, but failed to follow through on profitable exchanges because of his alcoholic excesses. So he attempted to ink blot his brother out of the picture.

 

Even after Caleb’s death, Will continued to rot in his thinking, and the resentment never died. He took guardianship of Caleb Jr, but thereafter continued to see more of his father in him, so he went in great lengths to blot out Caleb Jr’s primary identity, and then coined a new name for him, Minus.

 

Willard’s relationship to himself and Minus encumbered a fictional story imparted to the whims of intoxication. So the story went: The doors parted with invisible silences and the walls and the floor rippled around him. The white light tunneled through him and the next thing he knew he was in a vacant parking lot. Its silences unfavorable, so he left. The street no different, filled with cars in the middle of the road looked like they had not been driven in years, parked in places that would have warranted a ticket. This place’s familiar call fished out Will’s brain in the sky, and the buildings echoed both classical and modern day influences. Something archaic yet novel was here. Like a voice in his head that filtered him out of the womb. Something before time yet created this instant.

                     

 

Willard enters into what appears to be a gigantic boiler room filled with many rooms for insane children. Pipes skirmish all across the ceiling and he continues to weigh this place in his mind. Floating brass iron platforms waver from side to side. This place is rubbish in functionality. Nothing has a purpose here. Just an iron age that stayed in the dark ages. The tenses of time tantalize in this asylum. A voice speaks of Anochromada. “Turn the axels. This Matter is Mind. Turn the axels until it is complete.” The children cry insane laughter. Baby beds fill some rooms. Garbage cans are thrown about. Yet the place is eerily empty. As far as the compass can see. There is no Willard here. The metal pipes grind in recession. The axels turn the receiving mind.

 

And the axels did turn in Will’s mind until it churned the story he knew. Minus was an orphan boy, and not just any orphan boy. He was not born out of wedlock, nor was he virgin born. He was an accident whose origin was from the nothingness, yet deep in Will’s soul you could hear the axels grinding and turning. Sr. Caleb Wellington’s ghost had dreamt up Minus. Minus was the product of a dream.

 

And Will resented Caleb Wellington’s dream.

 

The supposed budding of the relationship between Minus and Will amounted to memories coaxed in alcohol and the fantasies impersonated those corkscrew mannequin eyes, eyes that discarded any human immanence of being. Will meandered in the hallway of dreams, the camera panning to the ghostly photographs of Caleb and Marie Wellington, a pictorial reality he tenaciously tried to undo.  

 

Minus awakened at snail’s pace as if being drudged slowly out from his mother’s womb, but the headache that pummeled his temples from such a begrudging nap transitioned his waking up to a sudden and profound shot out of a cannon. While staring in meditation at his oceanic adorned walls, trying to remember the dream of how lost he had been while trudging down those roads, sauntering from mini-dream to mini-dream, from snapshot to snapshot, Minus received the inkling that his life was forged, that his corporeal body barely touched the surface of his bed covers. Caleb Jr., however, remained in some other secret window.

 

Minus peered from the only bedside window he knew containing that world at large whose infinitesimal activity surfaced on the head of pin. On the outer edges of that pin, he could not be held accountable until those landmarks were in sight. In the meantime he could only create those phantom outer edges as he went. That was what it took to compensate for those drunken years in the bottle spent hanging in the fermented vines, swinging aimlessly from ghostly pasts to shadowed futures, generating vibrations in a black hole shaped heart. He scuffled with the puzzle pieces, certain fragments revealing partial lucid memories of his mother and father in the foyer area of their adorned plantation styled house in the Garden District of New Orleans. Marie Wellington was chanting lullabies to him on the piano, his father depicted the scene loosely on a canvas embroidered with velvet blues and pinks, coming together with a heavenly purple that illuminated the ancient city. It was here that Minus’s memories coerced the missing fragments of that childhood. He could remember Greek columns towering in the entrance way of their house with his father’s acrylic paintings of clock faces adorning along the walls of the circular stairway as it escalated into dark rooms where his uncle stood in muted, stagnant form, his finger prodding his chin. The context around him, however, faded into black, Willard taking his hammer ensconced size hand to cover the rest of that historical façade that Minus relished in wonder.

 

Once Minus’s memory breached that hand, he could not discriminate any further memories of his mom and dad, his memories like roadmaps had been cut out and thrown away, yet after he had gotten sober those memories carelessly taped back together again. Yet his creative powers envisioned something else entirely, mixing the oils of dreams and that rigidness of the sudden rapture of falling out of bed, experiencing auditory hallucinations of his mother on the piano, and visual glimpses of his father depicted on the portrait above his dresser drawer. That terror of being jolted, the fingers of the elusive sandman coating the furniture of his room with a film noir tint. Sometimes Minus became entranced as to the origins of his sensations, an improvisational tune, perchance, would render in his head a musical progression of familiarity not quite placated in the waking hours. But somehow the randomness fused into the memories of his mother and father’s gothic house. That was where his memories of his father and mother had lain, at least for now, in the temples of the Forgotten Palace.

 

‘Eyes without speaking, mouths without hearing, but the palpitations of the clock somehow performed their movements. The people with clock faces orchestrated magic in this temple, walking down further to the friends of long ago. Shades of earth and aluminum structures follow. Take a closer look and find yourself surrounded by department store mannequins, an imitation of life, entering the mall of unusual stores. The mall of linen. The mall of masks. A mall of mannequins.

 

January 31

 

Uncle Will, in the meantime, had not seen Minus in a few days, despite that Minus lived in the basement underneath him. To get out of the house Minus had to exit out of the door, and make way to the stairs that exited to the front door in the entrance area of Will’s upstairs establishment. They finally met in the foyer at the front door.

 

Will possessed a frazzled look, his fizzy, stringy hair formed knots in the most unusual places. He looked like he had not slept in days. Minus tried to elude him like a bird who has been spotted in the bush.

 

“Well, well, Minus. Still in the bat cave, huh?”

 

Minus nodded his head in agreement, averting his eyes to the floor.

 

“I believe you have your own little birdhouse to Will.”

 

“Hey, I’m still the man of the house. I don’t see how you spend time in that bizarre room of yours. Especially with that eerie picture of your father.”

 

“I’m remembering things better.” Minus said to change the subject.

Will started to became unsettled in the stomach as to what he remembered.

“I think about my folks a lot.” Said Minus.

 

“Oh yes, them. Been a long time.”  Said Willard. He stretched and repositioned his posture, and pulled up his pants around his enlarged gut. “Odd that you mention them. You were only six when they died.”

 

“It’s that photograph of my father.”

 

“Oh yes, that sullen painter look.” Said Willard as he liked this conversation less and less. “Why such a hermit these days Minus?  We use to tear up the town together.”

 

Minus didn’t bother to explain. Didn’t need to. Sharing spiritual hope with this fellow is about as successful as domesticating a badger. He nodded his eyes to the floor again to avoid answering.

 

“Things are different now.” Said Minus.

 

“You use to never worry about such silly things.”

 

“Yeah, I was also confused and drunk.” Yet Minus had to admit that he was still confused. “Yeah, well. Like I said things are different.” “You never did say much about my parents, even while we were cutting up.” 

 

“Nothing much to say about them.”

 

“Listen, I gotta go to work. See you later.”

 

And Minus ended the conversation by walking out the door.

 

The monotony started to cease, the buzzing of irritating routines of home life mirrored something quite different. The uncomfortable silence with his uncle somehow mimicked the vacancies of Minus’s earlier timeline. Yet Minus’s feet and hands hankered down like anvils, in which he could not fight the invisible enemy he thought responsible for his missing mother and father.

 

Rage is an invisible ghost, and an elusive enemy, an ancient enemy that has destroyed civilizations, usurped Kings for other Kings, pitted princes against princes, incited riots against dictators and revolutionized false hopes in alien governments. The invisible enemy was right there in the room with Minus and Will, the conversation leaving him to chisel away at his own deformities, and to chase false hope into a world of dreams. There the feather would carry on in the wind.

 

Driving to work, Minus outlined the suspects in his mind and took no leads from it. He discerned contempt from the faces of other drivers on the highway. Every whim in his mind was a possible specter of the accused. He attempted to take some kind of answer from the faces of other drivers. “Look at her eyes.” He thought. Her eyes encased in shadows. “Did she see it too.” He thought. “The rage?” Other faces he thought, the man driving the Lexus, his nose pointy, and his cheeks fat with wealth. “His greed” Minus thought. “Has consumed me.” “Guilty” Minus asserted.

 

“Death to who Poise themselves as nobility.” Minus thought. How can such confidence be so impervious? Free will lies abandoned in the desert, along with the pyramids and other ancient monuments that paid homage to their gods. But in Eluthia, there are some trinkets, packages and boxes waiting to be discovered. Minus, dare not, I say, open them foolishly. The appointed time will come.