Eluthia Ch 7

Somewhere in the back alley of Minus’s story, the Ullkrest began to unweave the threads that held the course of memory together, sowing new threads because he knew memory could be tricky, and he could manipulate the Sleeper who dared deep in slumber. Deep in that repose, he could forge new memories for the Dreamer, specifically in Minus’s case, the pursuit of his dead past, his dead mother and father, and his dead identity would be morphed into some other monstrous transformation. The Anachromada was the destroyer of memories, and the maker of new ones.

 

Welled deep inside Minus’s brain was a vague pictorial of his once lived Garden District home. The clock faces orchestrated symphonic destruction, paintings whose owner use to be Senior Caleb Wellington. The Greek columns that usurped the height of that home was now the pedestals of a horrific fortress, towering over the bridges where Minus use to dream of his carefree days in the foyer while his mother instrumented the lullaby of his youth.

 

Uncle Will, however, was the instrumental subconscious at work, impulsive, full of clutter as his desk indicated so with all the paperwork and empty gin bottles. The unused mannequin dolls in his bedroom peered with a sullen masked depression. Their ineptness a reminder of Uncle Will’s stubborn belief that the past could be relieved in ceramic consciousness.

 

The Ullkrest was impervious to belief. Dreams did not depend on such rigidity. He could manufacture any possible nightmare, any strenuous voyage otherwise heroic or epic in a string of instances that gathered no plot, but his limited sanity buffered a world of mechanical chaos, a dead world of unused cars, vacant buildings, and roads that were indifferent to direction.

 

The Ullkrest lingered in the dreamy junkyards, in air conditioning vents, in abandoned schools, in horrific apocalyptic cities that never have seen the light of day in millenniums, in innocuous back alleys, but the landscape always changed when the eye lingered to find the definite outlines of what was seen.

 

Highways circled in loop fashion, landscapes tethered in patches of both rural and inner city, rocky terrain and endless caves patched another area, but if you ventured a mile or so then Sumonesthestra exercised no restraint at all. In those enveloped skies towers hovered, and great red forest trees braced the surface of the jello blue skies. Sumonesthestra tells this story of Minus:

 

Before fear there was childhood. There are lots of wooden enclaves and forestry areas and self made tree houses. The trees form wooden chutes and transgress from one childhood memory to another. Deep chasms form between the tree islands. They are deep, musky and misty. Some of my friends are here.

           

This self- imposed happiness only lasts so long. The colors start to bleed and amalgamate into something else. The horizon warrants attention. Yet it can’t impose itself on the eye. Like an elementary school picture, it is hard to tell where the sky begins and the horizon ends. The sky pours down. And I am flying. Tornadoes determined to detract my flight. Some are black and some are white. Some made of the dark green earth.

 

The Ullkrest was the voyeur, the exploiter of the deranged mental maps he schemed from persons with loose leaf social restraints and unanchored identities. Minus and Will were perfect.

 

Minus, loosely grounded, feathered in the Ullkrest’s blizzard winds like a ragdoll. With nine months in sobriety, his dreams becoming more lucid, his memories still piecemeal like newspaper cut outs only to tape them back together again, the result was a fragmented experimental poem. Hopefully, Minus’s mind would turn to the wooden chutes of childhood where he use to play.

 

However, the Ullkrest would not cease intercepting Minus’s fears and mushrooming those fears into the caves of Eluthia, caverns once where the primitive hearth burned, shamanic dances appeased the hearty gods, and the pictorials on the cave walls dripped with blood depicting the uncanny mental ooze of man. Gooey filmed dreams would shake the pillars, the projected images on the wall would change, the Ullkrest dissolving the myths and symbols of our time. He was a neurosis that initiated the bloodletting of our mother’s milk.

 

The ancient caves of Eluthia spouted dreams from every pore, sometimes fired from the infirmary embers of volcanic passion producing rapid dreams of carnage or unadulterated pleasures, in which usually the scenes were fleeting. Some sifted through the cold placid lands of solitude that revolted in past regressions, and specter encounters of old feelings, ghosts. Some from the dark green earth and the traveling airs of whimsical fantasies.

 

But you have to give it to the Ullkrest, he was creative by harnessing a new element out of the common four that had been elusive for so long, the ether throes of the dream palate whose mind forged manacles clung.

 

The Ullkrest paid special attention to the mind manacles of Caleb Jr (as Minus is known in Eluthia) especially since he had a soft, vulnerable mind that had already been divided by the toxic lifestyle he led before, and the new sober life he lived now, but he also possessed a highly creative dream palate.

 

Minus also inclined himself toward the dreamy aspects of his life. Minus recalled certain sounds, tastes and smells from his dreams when he heard his Uncle mention the watery, rusted pipes, the clanging of the machinery, the mindless industrial clatter and the cries of insane laughter. When his Uncle smoked his pipe he could faintly smell the roads he had traveled, olfactory images of cut grass gave way to the insane roads that led to the parties in which he was lost, the friends he had long ago when everything had an internal story and an internal dialogue that now chattered nonsense. In the pit of Minus’s stomach brewed an impeding doom of the ripping of his current reality as his sense perceptions had begun to acknowledge the mirrored dream world like the flickering of a candle in a dark room.

 

Ullkrest had begun to engineer his own profane conception of Eluthia, imposing unnatural shapes and a definitive inelastic world of flesh and stone, a perverse opposition to the fluidity and flux of this world. His creation, the Anochromada, was an asylum of nightmares, and he needed Minus’s dream palate to spread the course of dreams into the waking world.

 

Minus fell into a dry, insipid spell over the past few days, and he could not remember his dreams, could not draw any resourceful contingency from them to his present waking life. Where was there to go, he thought? To his Uncle, never. What was once the awe inspiring colorful world was now just a dry chalkboard full of dry dreams and dry realities? Maybe they were just dreams after all. Why would they be anything more? From his now lackluster life, Minus was beginning to think that he had been drawing some kind of power from his dreams. Now Minus had hit a brick wall intrusion, his uncle.

 

 His uncle was blocking him from something and he wanted to know from what? Uncle Ted had been acting strange lately by staying out of Minus’s way, consorting and making anonymous phone calls in his office, arranging papers. Minus overheard a phone call he was making. He mentioned somebody named Caleb, and the name sounded vaguely familiar. Minus’s ears raised when he mentioned something about a birth certificate.

 

The phone call also included his uncle’s tiring job at the boiler room and his complaining of living on old wages and old fuel. His uncle grew tired of the heat and the clanging and clinging of the machinery. The building he worked at was very old with green metallic paint that was beginning to peel. The centralized heating unit clattered with unusual sounds as if a mechanical monstrosity was trying to escape. These sounds began to unnerve him, its mechanical laughter mocking him. Uncle Ted’s routine consisted of maintaining the centralized heating of an abandoned mall that had gone out of business ten years ago, but the place was up for renovation. Like any boiler room, pipes cascaded up and around the ceilings, old used mannequin parts were strewn about looking like an Andy Warhol motif.

 

Coming home from work, Uncle Ted smelled like a firecracker that had sparked its last fuse, a combination of fire, sod, soot and alcohol, an ethanol firecracker. As soon as the scent hit Minus’s nose, Minus’s dormant dream world rippled, cat tailing that unforgettable childhood nightmare where he was locked in the bathroom and where the door had stood was an enclosing of pipes and his Uncle’s demonic voice could be heard echoing just outside while Minus suffocated inside his own industrial nightmare. A chain reaction occurred, reminding him also of the cackling mannequins, the abandoned mall, the birth certificate with the name Caleb, the inheritance, the room with many dresser drawers, a campfire in the dark night, and the mechanical monsters of Ullkrest. Minus could feel the synapses in his brain firing feelings of anxiety and depression. At least he thought his Uncle had walked in. Maybe he was apprehending his exclamatory return to his bedroom telling him he was a bum like his father.

 

His memories like roadmaps had been cut out and thrown away, yet carelessly taped back together again.