First, the best of New Year’s to one and all. I appreciate your readership, and I thank you kindly for ‘tuning in’ from time to time.
We just had our New Year’s traditional dinner of pork chops topped with sauerkraut, snow peas, mash potatoes with a wee dollop of butter on top. The sauerkraut is supposed to provide for good luck and money to better survive the year, and I wish the same for you. - Richard
Mid-afternoon. All your pertinent documents are filed and updated. You have backed up your computer to two independent external hard drives. The cat sits on your lap watching the screen or your fingers working and you are feeling good about the writing. This is a draft of Chapter Six but it will need an audio-draft to take its place. Let’s make the deadline for this by the thirteenth as that is the day your Class of Sixty has its bi-monthly meeting and you can take a copy of the CD to Aunt Patsy and Uncle Ernie. For now, we will begin with Chapter Seven, its introduction and the continuing game of chess. - Amorella.
Chapter Six (8921 words)
Scene 1
Merlyn stood, looking out the one way mirrored window in his privacy shelter ruminating on yesterday’s events. Two of his favorite pets sat near him, one, a small red fox he had nurtured and tamed in life, and the other a black and white Egyptian short haired cat who had taken a liking to Merlyn and decided he needed the company, so the cat, having little else to do, provided it for shelter and food. That was the price both had for the special services of kindness and affection that only the lower animals can sometimes provide to human beings. Merlyn has secret names for each of these animals and intends to keep it that way. Not so private were the moves of the game as he looked away from the window to the chess board on the simple table by the bed.
Move 16 W. Queen’s Rook to Bishop 1 Black Pawn to Queen 3
Move 17 W. Pawn to Queen’s Rook 3 Black Knight to Bishop 3
Move 18 W. Queen to Queen 3 Black Knight to Queen 1
Scene 2
Morning, the eighth day. Mario stirs and rises from his bed like a dead man. The upper corner of the northwest wall holds an immediate attraction. The corner lines, thought Mario. The perpendicular line from floor corner to the ceiling, to where the right and left ceiling horizontals meet. Edge lines. I think I came in from a corner. I am dead and was once alive. Perhaps a part of myself was always dead. The Living do not have the time to being conscious or even unconscious of being dead. Somewhere though, in the corner of our minds, we have always been dead. Mario suddenly smiled at the silliness of it. Minds don’t have corners. Without physics there are no lines. Before life, before the environment of life, what did we relate to? Here we are at the mercy of each other’s accepted shared reality. Personal identity demands a certain acceptance in order that we survive in life. We are built to fit into an environment larger than the concept of ourselves. This is a necessity. A potential future must exist in order for us to fill it with our conscious selves. Otherwise, why would we, the Dead, continue to exist?
We still dream so there is a discernable difference between our dreaming and our reality of being Dead. Thoughts do not do us Justice. The virtues, the standards, are our future place. We survive here, in Elysium, within the structure of Justice. The other Dead, the Dead from other cultures of the world of Earth must survive in the same definition, in the same virtue. Otherwise, the shamans could not have gathered to dance above the waters of the Styx.
I will ask Thales. We need to think of the Greater Place of All the Dead as a virtue. We need to define its limits and create a geography that allows us to travel one unto the other. The shaman know how to do it, or if they do not know they use the lines of reality to move from one culture to another.
Why do the Living exist at all? What is the purpose of physics when we only have the memory of it here? Consciousness is important in both life and death.
And, so Mario’s morning began. Thought lumbered onto more thought but how to build a concept of Justice where the Dead of all cultures can meet and where the Dead can at least cross back into the consciousness of the Living.
Scene 3
Salamon also awakes early and finds himself stretched between the two ladies Kassandra and her long time friend Agathia.
It is a puzzle how I arrived in this seemingly favorable position, he thought while not moving for he did not wish to disturb neither the lady on his right or his left. He stared up into the early morning sky still awash with a multitude of starlight as the full moon appeared to set down almost at the top of the rocky hill if the western distance.
In youth of life, thought Salamon, this would have been a grander adventure but in Elysium we are as three rather empty shells at slight touch on a beach – three colorfully naked heartsansoulsanminds flowing through each of our spiritual shells, which when entered appear empty and spent. It is no wonder at night we are mostly at rest either singularly or comfortably together.
I think, continued Salamon, that I would not exist without the touch of these other two. We are quite simply as an atomic glue together, as one, unglued to others we are lost fragment of air whether we know it or not. Only in us, a multitude of Dead, is there the sufficiency of ghostly atmosphere for a god or goddess to take a breathe.
We do not know the inner themes of our now natural environment. I think rationally that the gods need air to survive but what if they are as fish and too much of us Dead will drown the immortality out of them. It is possible. Thinking among the Dead makes many more possibilities than the Living might hope to conjure by reason or imagination alone. How will the Living think to grow once we return in mass or small gatherings and whisper to them how it is on this side of the River Styx? In a darker thought he added, even, as it were, on both sides of the River Styx?
Is it all I wonder, for a sense of definition and place of our species as and atmosphere. How will it be once each cultural nakedly touches the other as I touch these sleeping airy ladies? For the Living to breathe us in and out of their raw lungs what would we be? Invisible? A warm or cool front? What is the other mix that adds the clouds and weather for the sport of gods and goddesses alike? How is it when the mighty Zeus and one of his lovelies pant in such a spiritual passion? Are we sucked in and out without a conscious thought? Blown from one set of godly lungs into another?
I await politely and patiently for these my friends, these ladies to awaken from their slumber and secret dreams. What will today bring that others have not? I think the Dead are not set to rise up together no matter what the calling. We live in hope alone for another breath of fresh Earth air. It will never happen. To sleep in peace, it too will never happen. The Nature that holds us here is so weighted as to not let us go together or alone. It will come to mischief. There is not a perfect god or goddess among the entire pantheon. It is no wonder the base soul itself must remain eternally vigilant. The heart must have means to wall itself up and the mind must have the lids to close to either the darkness or the light. Such as it is to be dead and naked between two shirtless women. Each, Agathia and Kassandra, is a bookend to myself only by position on the bed. Yet, not doubt, either of these beautiful and mysterious women’s pages would be better read books than those dreamed and read by myself. We Dead are held as much by our secret answers as we are by our public questions. That is the fact of so much mindly air.
Scene 4
An unusually frosty late Fall pre-dawn nests on the vegetation along the presently named town of al Kifl in Babylonia in the sixth century BCE. The Euphrates, low this time of year, flows to old Ezekiel’s left as he stands for the last time, looking across the river and the desert west towards his birthplace, Israel. His last thought, ‘I see my Israel coming at me on this commonly dry and strong southwesterly wind.’
Focus fell from the tired eyes and large spots of color erased the details of sight. Ezekiel felt his head silently float across the river as his priestly body collapsed without tension for the first time in his long life. The Euphrates below and sky above. ‘I never turned to see the rising sun,’ settled on his mind like the cool morning frost and he never thought to look back to see his limp body on the light mustard brown streaked sandstone and dull edged gray to black shale clothing the sides of one of the two great rivers in Nebuchadnezzar II’s Babylon. Babylon, whose much earlier great Mesopotamia’s king, Hammurabi, had carved the world’s first known coded laws in stone.
I look for my father priest, thought Ezekiel and “Buzi!” called out from his now naked mind, seemingly flowing like a river from his once skull dressed brain. A revelation: I am Ezekiel still.
What moments before would have appeared as a desert royal blue sky changed substance before free Ezekiel’s eye-filled mind and took on a thickness of an airy coating. The dense substance appeared eight hundred times thicker than earthly air. His mind slowed to a stillness as Ezekiel sensed he suddenly plugged a pipe. His mental senses scattered into the surrounding royal blue thick ambience, floating out about an arm’s length in all directions. The perception of the moment: My mind grows tiny thin squid-like sea-hairs.
Ezekiel thought to reach out and touch the floating mind-hair ends and felt forearms tug at his sides where none existed. A thousand mind-tipped eyes budded and bobbed. I am broken into a multitude of crystal pieces, each as a crudely cut star in my own worldly heavens. I have no earthly floor. Yet, I am Ezekiel still.
Ezekiel’s mind transcends into light itself. Reason becomes substance. The now ten-thousand eye-hairs settled into skin first and into a shadow-like human form second. What is it to be this Ezekiel?
Youth flew into few. Troubling times and heartfelt confusions. Singing praises to G-D. I promise to sing of Angels through my life. I promise to love G-D. I promise to love the songs worth singing to Rachael my beautiful love of promise. This is love to give. A state of bliss in an angel’s heart. O Israel, the love of Angel’s. G-D’s promise. G-D’s promise. To serve the Tribe’s common good, I promise to give such voice as my father’s voice.
“Ezekiel” echoes across new ears.
‘Who is this?’ whispered this new tongued dead man surprised he was but a predetermined construction with neither an in or out to run into.
Make do, boy, and listen to what you have left to listen to, heard new ears. Make light in the darkness for old friends.
Ezekiel
Ezekiel
Ezekiel
Ezekiel
Ezekiel
Ezekiel
Self reflection without a mirror in the House.
Scene 5
Ezekiel felt a sensation in the back of his neck he did not have, and felt his head he also did not have move forward and down. L:ight, manifestation of courageous humility, appeared and stood in front and above Ezekiel, the L:ight took on an oddly discovered heaviness until was absorbed into a fully formed more youthful likeness of the once-prophet-to-be.
Later, Aristotle would seize on the concept of L:ight and conjure it into stone of the philosopher, a way to forward time through an object to evolve into its ultimate immortality, even as Mother Earth’s lead can be transmuted into her ultimate immortality gold. Aristotle secretly thought, in the science of our tangible Earth we have the mind and can envision Plato’s immortal Forms.
Ezekiel secretly thought that he was about to meet an Angel but he met an old friend instead.
“Ezekiel, this is Isaac.”
Ezekiel felt a smile form within first. “Isaac, friend of my youth?”
“The same.”
“Your voice comforts me.”
“See yourself with my eyes.”
Ezekiel saw nothing but felt his face shift slight modifications, first, his lips, ears and nose, then eyebrows, cheeks and chin. He said, “I feel tiny pressures, a sculpturing breeze.”
“You are now similar to who your friends and family witnessed.”
Ezekiel meant to asked Isaac, “When do I meet an Angel?” but found the thought immediately unnerved him.
Instead, he saw his comrade. “You are as I wish you to be.” For such I thank G-D, rolled by his mind like a glimpse of sunlight.
Scene Six
Ezekiel’s inner light diffracted at his edge of consciousness. A single ray quietly plunged into his mind as a sunbeam may break through the surface of water.
Surprised, Ezekiel suddenly consciously pronounced, ‘Who is the least angelic-like of all my dead friends? And then he declared, ‘That is who I most wish to see.’
The shadows of this scattered thought felt as shades of dispersed bubbles of mind dictating matter. ‘I wish for G-D himself,’ uncommonly came to pass between the dark balloon-minded chimera below and the inner light above.
As Ezekiel had not just wished for G-D, his consciousness froze at the thought.
What came next was an event-in-mind that Ezekiel or anyone else could not have expected in either life or death.
It is the beginning and my spine shivers. I am inside and there is no way out. This is the reason my forearms shiver. I am non-thought. My fingers are cold and I am ice forming on the Great River. I am a floating icy continuity of uncommon ground. I am Ezekiel dancing . . . I am namelessness dancing . . . I am as a string of poetic devices – dancing. No-thing.
h-e-r-e
To exist and not to exist at once. Unthreaded and detached logic scurries off on the tails of nonlinear un-dotted explanation points. To exist and not to exist. A dash of one and a zero. A dash of zero and a one.
To this Ezekiel thinks, ‘I do not to exist and am able to reflect on this fact at the same time. This is the bottom line of being Dead. The top line is that the righteous will be reunited with their loved ones, that is the spirit of the words.’
***
Takis caught hold in Thales’ heart and antenna-like directed Ezekiel’s words indirectly from himself to Thales . . . “the spirit of the words,” entered Takis’s mind from soul or heart, Takis knew not which. Reunited, thought Takis, the Dead and the Living. What appears to be a one way street need not be. If the Living can come to the Dead, then the Dead can return to the Living. But first the Dead must return to the centeredness of our Mother’s heart. It is the heart not the soul or mind that brings the Dead together. We shamans have focused on the rhythms of the soul not the turbulence in the heart. One does not dance to a rebellion, on drives a rebellion with righteous indignation.
Scene Seven
Mid-morning of the eighth day. Thales sat on a chipped out and smoothed white stone bench in front of his private sanctuary, a gift from Aeneas’s father, or so he had been told by the disguised ancient shaman, Takis, who had just delivered it. “Each morning sit on this and glance to the few clouds in the sky to clear your mind,” had suggested the old deliverer.
A gift from Aeneas’s father, Anchises? Strange. I don’t think I ever spoke to him. He smiled, I remember joking with Kassandra about Thales’s father when she wondered about how it would have been to be Thales’s mother and to have made love with Zeus. He paused. I did talk with Aeneas later that same day. Kassandra told me to ask about his father. Thales shook his head. I don’t think I did, I spent most of that time in The Mikroikia talking to Aeneas about his mother the first time I met him directly.
Anchises sent me this chair, this gift, for the pleasure of my thinking. A gracious response as I originally thought or remembered Anchises to his son, Aeneas, and Aeneas must have told him so. The gift is out of kindness for being remembered.
Thales slouched slightly creating more comfort for the corporal body he does not have. The heart is the giving place and is thus more important than the soul. We have to communicated with the Dead of other cultural tribes with our hearts not our souls or even our minds.
How does one do this? I exist first through my mind. We Dead dress this place, Elysium, for our collective comfort by our collective mind. Mind first. Reason, the skeletal structure, is always the Prime. Without the self-structure of mind thought cannot exist.
What then is the structure of the heart? Is it a vessel or a vehicle, or both? What dwells in the individual and collective hearts of the Dead that differs from the hearts of the Living? Our collective heart must somehow communicate with the collective heart of other cultural tribes? Thales found himself snickering. How could anyone possibly feel that our collective minds could do anything but structure? Our collective tribal reason and will allows us to survive in such a place as this. What is our common ground with the other tribes beside surviving death? Perhaps nothing.
A communicative thought may dwell in either the heart or the mind. This is easily observed Here as well as when we were Living. A heart registers charged passions; degrees of full or empty as the element of water and the mind registers basic degrees up or down as sky and ground. A heart is charged with temperaments. A mind holds minute matters from open to closed. We are collectively closed to our fellow cousins, we are all sons and daughters of our original Mother.
These are Thales’s first thoughts while sitting on the generous gift from the ever elusive shaman, Takis; a mind without the usual social filters when need be.
Scene Eight
Nearing noon by Earth standards, Thales found himself sitting on his favorite bench near the seven steps down to the small rectangular stone pool in Garden Park off the northeast corner of the east-west Plaka Street and north-south Eleusis. The Temple to Athena sets directly on the corner of Eleusis and Plaka. Thales was glancing down to the reflective waters of the pool but thinking about the virgin, Goddess Athena instead.
Were I to have sprung from the head of Zeus I would do my own wheeled reckoning. I am not so clever as Salamon who thinks the Supervisor, who is some way works for Zeus. Kassandra believes the Supervisor is god-like Betweener or directly connected with Hera. A shimmering on the surface of the water in the pool reminded Thales of Poseidon and he quickly re-connected with the myth that the only time Athena and Poseidon ever cooperated was when Athena created a chariot and Poseidon prepared the horses to drive it. I wonder, is the heart as the chariot or the horses in carrying my thoughts to the foreign Dead who do not know me? The soul may connect to all souls, in which case it is the heart, the passion, that drives the communication, the thought across the Styx to the Egyptians or Phoenicians. Earlier today I swear I felt such a thought coming from nowhere. The realized focus dulled into a thought or a foreign presence, then quietly disappeared from consciousness.
“Hello, Thales,” said Aeneas as he sat beside his friend. “I was told you wanted to meet here . . . something about my father.”
Thales smiled warmly, “Yes, your father sent me a surprise gift today even though we have never met.”
“Why would he do that?” replied Aeneas bluntly.
“I do not know. I thought you might.”
“I rarely see the man,” said Aeneas abruptly. “He is with his friends not his family.”
“Anchises gave me a stone bench for quiet thinking.”
“You have a chair and a bed. What need have you for a bench?” Then he quickly added, ”Did he deliver it himself?”
“No. An old man did. One I have not seen before. Why anyone would wish to look old when there is no need in this place is beyond me.”
Pride, thought Aeneas suddenly. “Did the old man have gapped front teeth and a large nose?”
“No,” replied Thales, “no large nose. In fact he was rather hairless, but his teeth appeared strangely cloud white, and I believe there was a small gap between the two front ones. Do you know the ancient?”
“No, I do not. The one I was thinking on had a large nose and a ruddy complexion.”
“This man was moon pale by the looks of him,” noted Thales, at once disappointed.
***
Early afternoon. Mario and Sophia invite Aeneas into her private abode where they each sit on one of the three chairs available.
Aeneas glances about the subdued atmosphere of the room which is lined with wood planks covering the stone. He thinks, this is as a simple structure, a shed. Why all the wood? Just the stone frame around the window, the open sky does not seem as connected as with the usual stone interior. I don’t like it.
“What brings you, Aeneas?” asked Sophia.
“I am glad you are both here. Takis gave Thales a stone bench thinking this morning and told him it was a gift from my father. At least that is what he told me. My father would have no reason to give Thales a gift. He has never met him as far as I know.”
Mario mumbled, mostly to himself, “Why is this important?”
“I could think of no reason,” replied Aeneas, “but the point is that I discovered through the conversation with Thales, that Takis had disguised himself. I reasoned him out because he stood old and he had a slight gap between his teeth.
Mario chuckled, “Those yellowed teeth of his. He wears them as if they are an honor.”
“No, Mario. Thales said they were white and that Takis’s complexion was pale. It was a purposeful disguise.”
Sophia suddenly spoke, “Takis doesn’t even know Thales nor Thales, Takis as far as I know. There is no reason for a disguise.”
“Thales said he was visiting Kassandra this afternoon.”
“What does this have to do with searching for our foreign relatives across the Styx?” suggested Sophia. “You and Mario should be the ones to first make communication with our equally dead cousins.”
Mario noted, “We are not shamans. We were let in as observers. I assume that Takis will bring one of the foreign Dead here when he captures one.”
“What good will that do, Mario?”
“I will talk to Mother,” said Sophia, “and find out what Takis is up to.”
“What if Mother doesn’t know?” responded Aeneas without much thought.
Sophia quietly thought, Takis has knowledge we do not. It is not a friendly sign. She said, “Our Mother knows. Mothers know everything.”
***
Scene Nine
Lying on their backs the bed padding drifts beneath their minds. Thales toyed with and between Kassandra’s fingers only to slowly and methodically capture the middle and ring finger of her left hand and quietly grasp the two as if they were his own. She moved sensuously in such a way to follow through in a similar manner and grasp the ring and middle fingers of his right hand. His right arm and her left lay hard and close between their bodies while her right arm and his left stretched across their chests to rest. One clasping above the other clasping below. Neither then moved while nearly full moon slowly moved a short distance from east to west above.
In a natural cadence each unloosed the clasped fingers and rolled on their sides to face one a finger or two apart. Kassandra looked for the slightest of smiles but saw none rise into his lips. She whispered, “With such a pleasant moonlight as this for cover I am surprised you are not more content in my bed.”
“You were good to touch and hold; content is not so easy with this present, this wandering mind.”
She smiled and joked, “I thought it was your fingers that have been doing most of the wandering,” she giggled, “penetrating my foggy thoughts as casually as this amorous moonlight.” She frowned and spoke more straight-forward and friend-like, “Still no smile. My bed like my mind is no turntable of slow motion, Thales. It scares me when you are hard thinking with eyes so dark and wall-like.”
“I worry that Zeus rests just above us. Zeus or the Supervisor sits just beyond the top corners of the walls, close enough to curtain some of this too bright moonlight you just spoke so softly of.”
Her frown fell into concern as she slowly distanced herself a hand’s width away, “That blank stare I’ve witnessed before Thales. It is frightening enough to capture my love and hold it as a bar between us.”
He grumbled without a thought and said, “You are a silly woman,” then quickly but gravely added, “I mean, you are being silly, woman.” In the pause of such personal hours his mind roared into her unmoving silence as she turned two fists of distance from him and faced the ever silent beauty of a puff of clouds above rolling shadows across the stone wall as if it were her own centeredness, strong and resilient, a woman who knows who she is no matter what the weather of the soul.
Thales angrily thought, she does not realize how close the gods are. Is this the Supervisor? Zeus’s older brother or he himself. A blast of lightning will do me no harm. What can a god to do me? Kick me out of Elysium? For what reason? No. I am kept here where I might be a useful foil to the Rebellion. That is not going to happen. I would, could I be, in madness first. What good is a chaotic mind to a god? Willing madness is a first choice.
Seemingly talking to the stone Kassandra suddenly and directly said aloud, “Thales. You will be lost.”
The rush of thought froze as existence nearly disappeared into a kernel of Thales’s soul. A lost mind? My soul left bobbling in the wasteland as a simple twig? Parts divided – soul and mind. A soul without fuel. Heartfelt inner lined but unreasoning. How did Kassandra know to say such a thing? Coincidence? Too quiet, she is, as if feigning sleep – it is said that a honeybee can grow mad and desert the hive. No place to go, no orientation to get there in any case. It would be us were it not for our Mother. Our hive is she alone. We are but scattered shades first of her biology and now only slivers of her soul. Bubbles of what was once real. Once popped unknown and unheard. Of no use – even a feigned use would do. Not here though, not with Zeus’s ear above to echo my thoughts to one once loved. He paused in the nearly silent breeze of mind, -- was it so long ago that we, with loving hands and fingers held, rested here? With no center I return to Mother. She is the only goddess. Elysium is but her outer garment we tally within grasping like children to her curtain. Little much is Here and little less is Now. The soul has no energy, no power. It is little more than an illusion, a worn kernel of imaginary self. No one fathered Zeus. Fatherless and unnatural are the gods themselves. We are the only ones – alone and soulless. Scattered minds and hearts are the all. Mother, we are still within, unborn.
“We are undead not unborn,” replied Kassandra.
“You read my thought?”
“I heard your voice from inside my mind. I heard you say, ‘Mother, we are unborn.’”
“What before?”
“Nothing, those are the only words.”
“I don’t think I thought those words exactly.”
“I only know what I heard.” Kassandra paused and looked directly into and through his eyes. She said, “We cannot afford madness here.”
He turned his head, stared into the sky and mumbled, “Mother is reason alone.”
She whispered, “We exist in reason, Thales.”
“Then, what is the meaning, the purpose?”
“To find ourselves. Thales, there is no other meaning.”
He found himself in a smile. “You believe this?”
“What else?” left her lips and reflected his own. Her left hand touched his right and the fingers clasped methodically as if it were their primary nature.
Above, outside the west wall of her inner home, the Supervisor in mind drifted, a thinly ballooned wall of sorts, separating is from shall be. Distance is important for such things, whether the minds are beyond dead or living. A wall is a gift within itself. Humans when united by mind or body discount reality with something else entirely, something built in for their own protection, a strong scent of camouflage.
Drawing unknowingly on this selective bead of disguise, Thales suddenly realized, ‘I love this woman better than all I now know of nature.’ At that very moment the close and timely presence of Zeus or the Supervisor evaporated from Thales’s what is.
***
Scene Ten
Early evening of the eighth day; supper at The Mikroikia. Salamon, Mario and Sophia walk into the local eatery for communal flavor, taste and conversation. Each has an agenda for discussion and once seated towards the public back wall and each with a cup of semi-sweet white wine at hand, Sophia begins with Athena lying as a gray shadow underneath the table. Strapped as a muddled though golden mouthpiece, a trumpet, is sheathed flat out at her starred waist looking a bit from the café’s floor as small ordered Orion’s belt. If one were of another culture she may appear as the smoothed arch-angelic figure, Michael. Not here though, not in Elysium. Truly, this slight shade under-tabled, is the highest of Betweeners below the Supervisor or so some culturally biased readers may think. A beam of light may be what it is, but prismed by pre-supposed human thought becomes conceptually a finely constrained and variegated word choice that ultimately appears less than heranhis actual reasoning would have it.
Salamon is the first to speak. “We need to build the bridge as far onto the Styx as we can. It is a show of solidarity among us.”
Sophia silently acknowledges him and glances to Mario.
“I agree, Salamon, but we may have a problem with the older Dead. Takis already speaks with the other Dead, the Egyptian Dead, for instance, and those of other earth cultures also. I have witnessed this first hand. He knew we were building the bridge but did nothing to encourage us, or Mother either I would imagine.”
“I assume Takis has his reasons,” responded Sophia quietly.
“We assume all of our Dead are with us on this mission to return to Earth but there is more than one method, I am sure of it. The methods for the Rebellion are going to divide the ranks. No question that we are all equally dead. Our spiritual stuffing allows our consciousness in this air along the bank of the Styx.”
“Dignity,” says Sophia quietly. “We must maintain our human dignity.”
“That’s how we exist at all, isn’t it?” asked Salamon rhetorically.
“I am sure Takis and Mother would agree,” noted Mario, “but even so there is going to be division.” He almost added, ‘among the troops.’
The three sat silently at the table as if thought had melted from their minds. The predispositioned thoughts of Sophia, Mario and Salamon dripped from the heart of their spineless minds into the mouth of Athena for her further suckling.
Division there will be, recognized the mighty Betweener goddess under table. Their methods will be the mark of division, not the goal. Nearly seven hundred more generations of Dead before this Rebellion will be resolved by a second.
Scene Eleven
Athena sat as a ready stone-like stenographer while facing her father, the dark skinned Zeus. She smiled politely after a silence and said, “What do you wish to do?”
“What need I do? As you say, there will be division among the Dead. That will end this rebellion before it really begins.”
“It will be as always, father, the older Dead will split from the younger. They miss the old ways.”
Zeus slid in the thought, “They miss being closer to the gods than the younger.”
“An illusion,” smirked Athena.
Zeus muttered, “It makes little difference among the Dead just as it made little difference among the Living. Most of their reality is illusionary but they go about their business indifferent to whatever setting they happen to be in.”
“Survival.”
“To that they are not indifferent. That means little to the Dead.”
Athena snapped, “You are wrong. The Dead fear loss of dignity. This is the reason they continue with the bridge building across the Styx.”
“Why so?”
She responded, “They enjoy the illusion the focus brings. Connecting with the other Dead.”
“The shamans broke that molded thinking long ago.”
Athena’s calm smile sat as a shield unnoticed to her father. She said, “These Dead do not trust their own kind.”
“Division will always be their downfall,” answered Zeus gruffly.
She sworded words at her father, “The Dead exist. They are our illusion too. A social contract exists within the species.”
Ignoring her tone he ordered one of his own, “Let’s do away with this contract.”
With deliberately control Athena responded, “It is by an indeterminable will over which we nor they have control.”
“Like our own existence?” countered Zeus as he thought, we compromise our own reality.
Not likely, voiced the air between the two.
Both god and goddess felt the Voice as it were a foundational element, an unknown, a mystery particle scratching the bottom of the Styx, imagination alone mispronounced it as a slight shiver in the god-mind.
Again, Zeus glanced at the ceiling to remember, a piece is still missing. And, he returned his eye to his warrior daughter discovering neither a particle nor wave reflected.
Good, ruminated Zeus in methodology, I digest best in and between my own sense of imagination.
Scene Twelve
The Olympian evening sky sheeted in folds overhead hiding and shifting a silent secret light. Unconscious shade sowed down on two unwitting messengers to unknown predators with sight.
In a sudden unwilled apprehension, Aeneas probed beneath the right shoulder of Agathia’s loose toga as it were the only reality in all of Elysium.
Agathia rolled and turned with honest annoyance, “What is it, Aeneas, that you would have me do beyond the simplest of pleasures, whisper to Sophia that the belly I presently rest my ear on would rather dance above the surface of Styx with Takis than sleep in her uncompromising wisdom?”
Scene Thirteen
Agathia need not have concerned herself with Sophia this night as the woman was about to embark on an adventure of her own as Salamon opened the door to his personal shelter to her for the first time.
After entering, Sophia anxiously sat down in the chair nearest the door. “I don’t think I have been to your privacy before?”
“I have been to yours though,” smiled Salamon.
She smiled demurely, “We three were ready for a discussion.”
He sat across from her in the windowless four-cornered room with the open ceiling architecture receiving the seemingly natural twilight. Salamon noted, “That three-way bed-talk was about Mother’s original culture, that’s the way I remember it – that Mother was pre-Greek.”
“What I remember most was the question, ‘Where are all the other Dead?’”
Salamon piped, “Mother is the key to bridging this.”
Sophia grumbled, “What I am afraid of, Salamon, is that our bridge will not become the symbol I am hoping for.”
“It isn’t a symbol alone, Sophia. “We are into the construction. There may be a real connection, a real bridge for the Dead even if we cannot bridge the Living.”
Salamon spoke comfortably, “It would make sense if the Egyptian Dead were on the other side of the Styx.”
She blurted,, “Mother knows things.”
“I am sure of it.”
“Why doesn’t she tell us the truth?”
“About us Greeks or the Dead?”
She sighed, “We are the Dead, Salamon.”
“I meant the other Dead, Sophia. Don’t twist me.”
“Panagiotakis also knows. He probably controls Mother. It would not be unheard of in a shaman.”
“I cannot imagine that. Mother is his grandchild.”
She balked, “Why is he not considered our Father? Tell me that Salamon.”
“Relax, Sophia. Lie down and relax.” He thrust his index finger skyward, “We can observe the heavens from the mattress. Create our own constellations with a few sips of wine and say what comes to mind.”
She handily glanced and remarked, “I thought when I died I’d be closer to stars yet here they still are.”
“See, a conversation. I’ll pull a couple of wine glasses from the wall cabinet .”
“Sophia quickly added, “We can conjure our favorite fruit for a mix.”
“That’s what I like to hear.” He spritely walked over and selected two glass tumblers and two shallow saucers from the common cupboard setting on the floor along the west wall.
Sophia rested herself on the knee high mattress. “Why do you have the grass surrounding the bed?”
“I like to feel it with hands and feet while sleeping. I’ll roll over, seemingly to frieze into sleeping stone and awake with the blades tickling my toes. Sleepy stone coming to life amongst blades of grass.”
Sophia discerned, he’s quaint or odd, I’m not sure which.
Salamon handed her a glass and dish, sat down on the edge of the mattress with her and empty goblet toasted empty goblet. Each sipped and tasted their best memory of grape. They sat awhile and said little, eventually held hands and fell onto the mattress and observed the twilight rolling into starlight.
Sophia whispered, “When I was young I loved the mystery of the moon more than the sun.” She paused, “Here we are with no sun for the light of day, and the moon ever shines in day or night as it did when we were living.”
“I had not thought that about the moon, Sophia,” replied Salamon.
“She still dresses into one of her four quarters. A pretty sight even in waning.” Sophia closed her eyes secretly smiling into memories of youth.
Sophia is so much smarter than myself, realized Salamon. Yet our fingers enjoy their stimulation. The sun still shines within Sophia’s touch. And shortly . . .
. . . On the mattress in early evening. Sophia loosed her garment and rolled onto her back. She playfully reached to Salamon’s waist as he easefully listed and distributed himself between her extended thighs and pushed his hands palms on the mattress beyond her shoulders for balance.
Sophia placed her left arm so her hand gripped his fictional flesh to the right of his spine where she placed her arm in such a way that her hand pulled to accommodate her outspread right thigh.
Her feet arched and her toes involuntarily squiggled as he slowly thrust in and pulled nearly out in a machine-like rhythm accelerating his pelvis through ever-quicker motions. Salamon, automatically minded in his ridged air-like driver, a perfect attachment by will alone. Repeatedly their pelvises clapped their shared passion.
Real enough, reflected Salamon. These rush of motions trigger the living memory of body. Nature can exist even here in Elysium. Sophia allowed me to pin her with ease – an accepted signal without a second thought. Still, she is as Pandora. Her wriggling toes moved independently like her feet. I pierced her shell. She swallowed me whole – and I, in turn, was resurrected through the friction of my own body. Real enough in this Elysium. And shortly after . . .
. . . How would it really be, asked Salamon, if, when dead, we met with someone who had killed our parents or grandparents?
This is a problem, thought Sophia. We have been thinking the Dead would unite to find a way home, to Earth, back to the Living. She mumbled, “I would imagine this kind of thing has been resolved.”
“Like it is resolved within our own culture?” asked Salamon. “People avoid others or ignore them. You ostracize your enemy as others do you. We can always disappear in such situations and do. Avoidance. How is that going to work if we Dead have to unite on a common front?”
“This is painful to think on, Salamon. Fratricides. Incest. Premeditated murder. People spend most of their time speculating what was going on in the perpetrator’s mind. Then floods of anger and wish for vengeance for lack of justice in our family ties.”
Salamon chuckled darkly and commented, “It appears there is no divine justice here, at least not amongst our own cultural tribes.”
“We are here in Elysium. Where are the other Greeks? Are they in Tartarus? Is this truly the division?”
“Then we unite with other Dead who are as we are, the good, the considered heroes of the culture. The evil in each civilization is banished. That is how it seems,” responded Salamon.
“Divine Justice then is swift and without retribution either way. We each, as we are, satisfied with our friends, neighbors and acquaintances in this place.” Sophia, thus satisfied, added with a sparkle, “We have common Greek ground in Justice.”
He grinned and proclaimed, “All the Greek Dead?”
She desirably responded with a siren’s alluring eyes, “I should think.”
Mattress on the floor in the evening. Salamon, turned to lay on his upraised back, supporting by his elbows and focusing on Sophia’s lower back. Sophia’s left hand rests on the mattress as she tucked and rested her right hand on his inner right thigh with a slight index and middle finger touch. She said in her reassuring tone, “Do you feel it now?”
Salamon’s satisfying smile remains unseen by Sophia. He replied straightforwardly, “You are wonderfully arched – a bridge of affection.”
She inched her softly bent rump up and closer to his upper chest. “How’s this?” she asked patiently.
Salamon did not reply, enjoying the slight prickle of inner and outer feminine rounded parts across his ribs as well as the nearly unconscious contact with her left breast just above his left knee.
Face bent down if she were speaking to her lover in a totality of secrets Sophia whispered, “My dear Salamon, where are you?”
“I sense your unusual warmth but am little stirred.” Deeper voiced he said, “I am more interested in the widening of your backside.”
Sophia lightly squeezed her right hand, playfully and discretely. She commented, “A little stirring is truthfully put.” Such as it is, she thought. Mind outlines the body, hands and bodily warmth. The illusionary sense of being wholly bodied once more. The hand can grasp a once masculinity. This fervent tubular swelling of passionate enthusiasm fills within my functioning hand. The unanticipated pleasurable surprises trickle slowly, perspiration-like along the ancient bodily ways of man-kind. Arousal and salivation – breathing, ever a genuine semblance bordering life and death. Our pupils dilate or appear to. We become one, a fleshy bubble to hold the skinless mind. This is what it is to be dead and still human. And, a very short while later . . .
. . . Salamon whispers with wishful anticipation, “Shall we circle?”
She nibbled a bite of ear, and erotically ordered, “Work up from between my toes with a bridging tongue and I will shimmer as the mighty Styx.”
Mattress on the floor late evening. Sophia suddenly discovered that she was more conscious of Salamon’s right hand, thumb and fingers spread across the back of her right hip than his unconsciously moving tongue stroking her snuggle warm, semi-erected passion. His right hand is solid. His other hand rests, comforting my outer thigh just above my left knee. Salamon tempts sucking something not fully between and here. A small fleshy flint. Does he remember the taste of feminine moisture on his nose? What is the male enchantment? The born man-child comes head first, is it his plan of subterfuge, to worm his way back in? I give him the two things he wants in the moment. A metaphor. Sharing what I don’t have with what he doesn’t have. As in life, it is the thought of giving the most of one’s private self.
I sniff too, thinks Sophia, and I lick a taste of memory. I remember the sharpness of watching a man beside himself. Automaticity. I can flatten a man much as a runaway oxen can. I can run him down with lip and tongue. Within arching bodies, in little more than are not breathing, we are what we are, a sharing, naked with the only utilities we have to share, our senses. Salamon’s thoughts and feelings are consciously drowned in this reflexive moment. He is not even here. I am that good, I am as solid as my clasping right hand. Salamon fell asleep semi-solid and still chuckling . . .
. . . As he awoke, Sophia stirred and mumbled, “Why am I not exhausted? I wake up and feel refreshed then the old storm in the back of my head rises and I wonder what this being Dead is all about.” She added, “I wonder about this rebellion.” Are the gods behind this, she thought, then quickly concluded as usual, there are no gods. We are here just like we were alive. We have no control over either circumstance. What we are makes us who we are first.
He formed a seriousness in her words on the rebellion and commented, “The bridge is a form of justice. We are building it by our own design. All of the Dead can walk upon it and we will take it as far out onto the River Styx as this nature will allow us.”
She asked stubbornly, “Who is this Supervisor who is supposedly constantly observing and controlling this nature we survive in?”
Salamon stretched then casually placed his hands behind his gathered mind-in-his-head. Sophia gave him a look and threw a blanket over his nakedness below.
He smirked, “Why’d you do that?”
She smiled politely and replied, “To warm you up.”
He closed his eyes, sighed, and suddenly felt surprisingly alive. With those self-directed feelings to slow to light nerves Salamon resurrected below the navel and in the immediacy forgot Sophia’s question.
Mattress on the floor in the later evening. Salamon is lying with his back arched at thirty degrees leaning on his right elbow and forearm, his legs are stretched mostly together and flat out with his tensioned toes slightly spread. He considers the self-generating thought: ‘if we were real’.
His left arm and hand lean straightforward with his large-knuckled long fingers spread fan-like across the full of Sophia’s lower belly enwrapped in a fantasy designed for gently lifting her soul into his own. Salamon’s thumb is calmly threaded teasingly between her semi-swollen outer lips onto the tip of Sophia’s cozy Gibraltar-shaped passion. A mirage of flowing life energy settled on the spiritual union but that was not to be.
Pressure-parted, Sophia senses a memory of sexual energy wanting to disperse in gentle shivering shocks and quakes above Salamon’s slowly methodical push-and-pulling. To become whole and full bodied is her desire more than the sex itself. To feel auto-stimulated is to become shaman-like, sparked and inner tingling with a wild-minded woman’s intensity of the here and now. Oh, and oh, again.
Meanwhile her softly curved bottom rests on the top of his thighs so she might lightly brush the movement of his well placed cullions. Sophia anchored her raised back with her outstretched arms with palms mattress flat with legs spread, her left ankle touching the back of his partially raised right hand while her right foot with heel raised is well toed for support and pointed away from his narrowed waist. Oh.
Sophia’s neck and head arch forward for a centered peek of male viewing further south between taut breasts swelled. She thinks, I am up here, she thinks and down there too. Two places at once, such as it is, oh, making love and being Dead both at once – oh, oh my. And, after a restful nighttime nap . . .
. . . What are we doing here? I have too much to do, thought Sophia. Too much Mother, too much me. She glanced down at the deeply sleeping stone crusted Salamon. She wondered, what is this all about, Salamon? How long is this relationship going to last?
Such a question. Sophia looked up into the dark sky and grumbled, “Forever sunless. Whenever will we see the light?”
She probed Salamon’s cold left arm thinking – marble. I am here making cryptal love with marble. Transformation with a fingertip’s touch. De-stoning, Salamon said, “You’re awake?”
Sophia grinned, “And, now you are too.”
“I should be tired.”
“You were,” she replied, “stone cold.”
He quickly reflected, “Every new day is a resurrection.”
She quipped, “It’s not yet morning.”
“Another go?” smilingly slipped out.
You are kidding, thought Sophia. What would be the purpose? Where is the meaning with matters overdone?
Grinning, Salamon reached and gently pulled her down. “We can cuddle.”
She teased, “You need to get warm.” On their chosen sides, rotisserie-like, the two easily lay arm in arm and feet contentedly caressing. Sophia whispered matter of factly, ‘We two warm the heavens.’
Mattress on the floor, late. Salamon lay flat and rested on his back. Sophia stood naked above him.
Sophia inched slowly down. To coordinate Salamon rose into a sitting position with as much anticipation as he could muster. Shortly, he pleasantly found her sitting on the focus of much of his warm semi-solid anticipation. With the fingers of her right hand she spread her much exercised lips and nudged him into place. Then she sat tall with her back parallel to his. Her taut breasts front and center to his neck Salamon quickly found himself bending his mouth instinctively forward to a potential taste of awaiting spiritual nourishment. Lips and tongue, a twist of pleasure mutually felt. He did not notice her more experienced eyes were observing contently above his own.
I feel him within and without. Who is changed more in this parallel frontal positioning? The flesh, the thought of flesh keeps his mind busy on the essentials of fingertips as his right hand appears fresh with a single finger heading towards my bottom just far enough for me to tingle of playful entrance. Erection or finger, I don’t know which counts more in my present, private bottomful of two-way joy.
Contentment is staying this prayful way until morning, thought Sophia, heaven is in the one of being.
Scene 14
“This short scene focuses on how-things-work in the realm of reasonable metaphysics,” the Supervisor speaking here. As with the Greeks in those days, the modern reader is educated also. The melding of science and philosophy is the dual track these books run on. In those ancient Greek days people more easily understood the Gods of the Pantheon because they were presented anthropomorphically; they were presented in human form performing human-like functions in a godly manner. This principle is well understood today and is still in accepted use. For instance, on the ceiling the of Sistine Chapel God’s hand is outstretched to the hand of Adam. In an updated manner, this device is used here to facilitate a greater understanding of how things work in this fourth and fifth books of the Merlyn’s Mind series.
Picture if you will, a human-like hand of Betweeners, a fully functioning hand (female or male). The index finger (right or left hand) represents me, the Supervisor or Zeus. I point things out, I enlighten. The middle finger represents Athena to the ancient Greeks, but in the modern culture of the writer, the one whose name appears as legal author, the agnostic, has a basic background that is Judeo-Christian-Moslem. For the sake of understanding a particular spiritual level, these characters are angelic-like in their nature. Thus, the middle finger, who is as Athena is as Michael in modern times. If your spiritual or, if you will, mythological tendencies lean to another religion with angelic-like creatures, then substitute a more familiar angelic name. Make up your own if you wish.
Continuing, the ring finger in ancient Greek would be Apollo, a son of Zeus, a speaker of truth. The modern counterpart in this series is Gabriel. The little finger, is Apollo’s twin, Artemis, who forever looks through the eyes of Zeus into humanity, both the Dead and the Living. Her modern counterpart is Raphael. These are four of the five digits or extensions of the Hand. Betweeners, as being the space between the fingers also.
The opposing thumb in this anthropomorphic exercise is Beyond, and is an invisible personification of Necessity not Will. In this particular scene no dialogue need be expressed in their closed conference. This simple raised compressed and pliable fist with thumb untucked and pressed against the index and middle finger will do. Thus pictured, one can understanding of how things are among the Supervisor and his accompanying business associates.
***
The End of Chapter Six
of the fourth book in the Merlyn’s Mind series
©2010 Richard H. Orndorff
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