In The Chalk Circle, Part 3

FROM JOURNAL NUMBER FIFTY-TWO 
Saturday, March 12, 2010
9:06—In the Giant Bagel [Now gone forever—and I can find no photographic record of its existence—lost to us!] near the train station on Cortelyou Road, Brooklyn.

This dump always seems to be functioning at a minimal level, and appears to be designed to repel any potential customers. The place is laid out all wrong somehow—unclassifiable, anecdotal architecture—depending upon where my eye falls, I may alternately feel that I am in a dime-store casbah, an abandoned minimalist luncheonette, or perhaps the stuccoed coat-room of a run-down Greek restaurant. Smell of rancid grease—only two or three tables—there’s usually no one else in here—oppressive music—most of the staff can be won over with a few convivial remarks (which I’m normally not capable of).
Melancholy view of Cortelyou Road from the window table that I normally manage to secure.
The best thing about the place is the large white sign outside, with the huge orange type announcing “Giant Bagel”.

Feeling a little better today. Ah!—a fresh journal—a new start. I am slowly starting to lay the groundwork for my disability/compensation onslaught! I have been on the run for over ten f*cking years—ever since the attack—and I’m still not out of the woods! The dust from the pulverized towers is still in my body: microscopic slivers of asbestos, coated with deadly chemical compounds! Ruined my health! Bastards! I called up the WTC Compensation Center (or whatever it’s called) yesterday and started the ball rolling. They are supposed to call me within seven days and then I can come in for an appointment. Meanwhile, I’m gonna get all of my medical history together and write down all the names, dates, addresses, etc.
The music in here is cutting right through my head! Who needs this screeching early in the morning?

Thursday, March 17, 2010
1:01—In the Albatross Café off Union Square

In the crepuscular confines of the back room—air is always stuffy—odor of garbage, rotten food, and ammonia—a hidden generator hums and vibrates at a nameless pitch—windows look in/out onto the pale yellow brick of the interior courtyard of the apartment complex: a strange view, as if looking through the glass of an aquarium—people pass by, but rarely turn to look into the interior of this lost wedge of space, but when they do it’s always a shock and fills me with dread—a small patch of sky visible—horrid radio noise pumped in and giant tv screen bolted to the wall at the far end of the narrow aisle makes the room feel even more claustrophobic—commentators bark furiously, as if aware of the competing radio—sounds commingle—tuned in/out conversations—all add up to sonic disconnect and burbling tide-wash of uncertainty and distraction—the whole raised to a penitential frequency. Why do I subject myself to it? Because the quality of the bagels is unmatched, and the coffee is borderline acceptable. I return, again and again.
Someone from the 911 Benefits called me and took down some info. He’ll be sending me a package with a whole bunch of forms and stuff. I think I better wait until I hear back from them before I call anyone else—I’ll just get all confused. I’ll probably hear back from them next week, hopefully.

3:48—WSQ—North-West quadrant, on a bench facing North.
Afternoon settles on the Park, ghostly and with a gentleness...
For some reason, the renovation has seemingly come to a momentary standstill, and consequently the noise and pollution is at a minimum.

I just got hit with a huge ball of pollen buds or whatever they’re called—it fell off a tree and landed right on my head!—hit me hard—and it burst into a million bits of fluff and fibers! 

It was about the size of a ping-pong ball—all heavy and moist—and now it’s all in my hair, down my neck and back and in my shirt—all over the damn place! Now I’m all itching, and full of microscopic, asbestos-like fibers! I had no idea those things were so nasty. It was almost like someone threw it at me—or the tree threw it at me! I don’t like this—it’s a curse of some sort—what if those fibers get into my system and mess me up somehow—what if they somehow begin to sprout inside me?

I consider this a bad omen...

TO BE CONTINUED
/// supernatural fiction  ///  Washington Square Park ///
lucid dreaming  ///  911 ///

Evening (Conclusion)

The Mask had started to slip—a demon’s face revealed in the terrifying visage and uncontrolled rage of my father. Cracks began to appear everywhere: the growing isolation, the fear and confusion, the complete blank of my future. I couldn’t imagine what I could possibly do in this world. Where would I be able to work or live? I didn’t feel capable of anything.

The familiar green face of the Q-20 bus started to rise as it came up the hill to my left. The Q-20!  The words “College Point” lettered across the banner on top of the windshield. Back in those days they used to have a roll of canvas set in the space above the windshield with the numbers and destinations in black letters that the driver would operate with a hand-crank. Yes, it was the Q-20, alright, there was no doubt about that. The Q-20 was the very first bus I had ever ridden and the name alone carried a weight of memories that stretched back to my early childhood. Slowly it revealed itself, like a ship on the horizon, the green and white colors assuring me of it’s identity, as it rose up the hill at the end of 14th avenue. It came to a stop right in front of me as the old, accordion doors opened up as the driver pulled a lever.

I took a seat near the back. It was half empty, just a few passengers—no one I recognized, fortunately. The raking sunlight blasted through the windows and created a flickering effect that seemed to hypnotize me. Familiar landmarks washed by my field of vision; the overpass, the small patch of woods by the highway exit. I had been down this street since ancient times—the route forever stamped into my mind. Now I traveled it in a fever, hardly able to focus on anything for more than a second.

A woman stared at me from across the aisle of the bus. She must have seen that there was something wrong with me. I averted my gaze and looked to the left at the scenery flying by. I could still feel her gazing at me and the tension became intolerable. I was pinned down like a lab specimen, unable to move as time slowed down to a standstill. I felt like screaming. I couldn’t concentrate. I heard murmuring from the back of the bus and I slowly realized that others had become aware of my existence. I thought I detected a mocking sound in the air. The traffic conspired against me—long waits at intersections, missed lights, passengers getting on and off— all prolonged my torment. This was not only excruciating, but it also interrupted my fleeting and precious experience of the transition into Evening. It just wasn’t fair—why couldn’t they just leave me alone in my misery and contemplation? I thought I heard the woman say something but I couldn’t be sure if it was directed at me and I was too afraid to turn my head to see.

Gears meshed, wheels turned, cylinders pumped back and forth. My neck ached from the unbearable tension. I hated this little town filled with sadistic louts with no minds to dream with. The bus turned right onto Union Street—just as expected—the corner bar, still there; onward past the empty lots and the Garden Jewish Center as the road forked at the bottom of the hill. Up the hill we went, bearing left as the apartment complexes came into view. Up ahead, the towers of Flushing High School loomed above the tree-tops. Then the wide expanse of Northern Boulevard, as we passed the familiar row of  stores that are forever etched in my mind: Robert Hall Men’s Clothing on the corner, Aqua-Pet Hobby Den, Gum Kew Restaurant, and the great, dark, gothic facade of the YMCA. All these are now long gone save for the YMCA. Up the hill, and then the right turn onto Roosevelt Avenue as the last stop loomed up ahead at the corner of Main Street. I was drowning in a sea of memories as all the old buildings floated by in a haze of atomized and illuminated dust particles.


THE TOWN

The ancient town of Flushing still retained most of it’s former character at this time, before the complete transformation of a few decades later. This was still the old town of Flushing that I knew from earliest childhood, still holding on as the decade of the 1960’s swept through everyone’s lives and altered things forever. In my state of near delirium, the intersection of Roosevelt and Main, the buildings, the stores, the people, all seemed atomized and daubed with a thick coat of crumbling, phosphorescent paint. I moved through this gauze of pain and longing, back there in this dream town, at once familiar yet unknown to me now. A thousand scenes floated in my mind as I struggled to tear my gaze away from all this. I heard the murmurings of voices long faded from memory, reverberating down the old brick and concrete, the tops of buildings, the cornices, turrets, and architectural ornaments from another era, long before my time. My Time! Stolen from me by a wicked jester! The Precious Time! Irretrievable Time! A fine, luminous dust: all that’s left now! Once taken away and then it’s too late. You can never get it back and it’s all too late, far too late in the day, as day turns into Evening, pulling you along, calling you: hurry up! You’re already woefully late! All your classmates have already moved on and left you behind—they’re somewhere else now, out of your reach. You failed at some point along the line—you fell out of step: you’ll never catch up! As Day turns to Evening and Evening to Night . . .


NOTES SOUNDED AND LOST

You’ll fall into despair! Roads deceive you, call you down false routes, back-roads to places long dead in your dreams. The corner of Nowhere and Nowhere, the Avenue of Deceit and Despair, Wrong-Turn Road, Somewhere-Along-The-Line Road. I return every night in my dreams: streets meld and morph—elastic roads take you where they want. The bend in the lane takes you back down that familiar route right back to unlived times and unsavored places and all the precious things that you missed out on are revealed to you now.

The drama was reaching it’s apogee as I surveyed the unholy illumination at the intersection of Main Street and Roosevelt Avenue. A fearful spectacle! I paused and looked back up the hill of Roosevelt Avenue, then down Main Street towards the great old face of the RKO Keith's Theater, still intact, long before they gutted the interior and locked the doors forever. I turned again and glanced up Kissena Boulevard, towards the library and the old Prospect Theater. No time!

The light was receding very rapidly now as I waited on Roosevelt Avenue for the Q-27 bus. Purple and blue now dominating as the oranges and reds and yellows were pulled by the retreating sun around the curve of night. I got on the bus and it headed down Roosevelt towards the fleeing red and orange sky, and by this I hoped to buy more time, but I knew that we would make the left turn up ahead, as the route was deeply inscribed in my memory. The apartment buildings loomed up ahead, with the taupe and clay-colored bricks that told me to try very hard to remember when I had first set eyes on them. When? Twenty-five years ago? Echoes of places that were maddeningly familiar, yet too vague to pinpoint and the bus kept moving and there was no time to rack my brain
trying to remember. We lurched ahead, past more tantalizingly familiar buildings—but again, no time to linger. The view spun out in a movie-reel projection, too fast to contemplate, too fast to recapture. People hurried on, scuttling here and there as if their lives depended on it. Up Kissena Blvd. we went, as a feeling of despair took hold of me. The scene was half familiar and half unknown as I perceived that many changes and alterations to the landscape had occurred when I wasn’t looking or perhaps I had been distracted and hadn’t noticed. Maybe these changes were made only at night, to deceive people, to make them not notice them as if it were possible to sneak the changes in so as not to unduly upset your feelings at being raked along with the inevitable destruction of all that you once knew.

On and on, through a darkening twilight as we passed the graveyard on Utopia Parkway, strange vistas and hopeless views, all jumbled up in my increasingly distorted senses. Drawing nearer and nearer to the college as the night grabbed hold of the bus and sucked us into despair and fear.


THE CAMPUS

I got off the bus into an enveloping, ink-black cloud: the deserted campus! I knew right away that my plan had failed. 

I walked into the wide, circular area that was the main entrance to the campus. A few stragglers were making their way down the hill towards the avenue as I stood in the middle of the circle. I stayed there for some time, slowly turning and staring at the deserted buildings on the now lifeless campus and looking up at a low-hanging and hostile night-sky that offered no relief from this emptiness and isolation. Even so, I kept staring up into the blackness trying to reach out to indefinable things, memories, forgotten hopes, familiar sights: but the sky was of a low and oppressive nature, no stars or constellations visible—just a gray-black swirl of  clouds that filled me with a vague fear and unease. It was time to go back home . . .


NIGHT CODA

The blackness of the bus windows was disturbing and nightmarish—all glossy, liquid-obsidian panes. I couldn’t see outside. I wanted to drink in the night-scape of the passing streets and houses but the black-mirror panes threw my own image back at me and caused an end to my rapturous views of the town. I was confronted with the starkness of my own pale and blinking image—framed by the glossy blackness and glare of the internal lights of the bus. I was revealed to myself and thrown into stark relief—forced to contemplate my own image: the observer becomes the observed and the duality was forced upon me.

The bus was cut off from the outside world—the magic light show had come to an end—only the stark and hideous reflections in the impenetrability of the glass remained. The bus had become a world of it’s own—a night-chamber cut off from everything else. I was turned in upon myself and conscious of myself as an object and hyper-aware of my own naked psyche reflected back at me, hurtling through the night-suburb, rushing back towards the house with it’s dead relics of my childhood and the fear of entombment in the
lifelessness of the now altered childhood home.

I am left with the deep fear of a black and morbid mirror that throws back at you the image of your pale and trembling face as you churn on and on through the dense night of a city known to some as Absentia, forty long and luminous years later...


 

/// loneliness /// nostalgia /// alienation ///

The Loadstone

he Loadstone buried under the South West Quadrant of Washington Square, and how I dug it up one night in a dream and discovered a partial explanation of the Chess Circle

A slowly rotating afternoon . . .

Irrelevant postulations and dire jottings.
Aphasiatic conjectures under a lowering sky as the Poison* slowly wears off.
Circumnavigation of the Fountain in a time of utmost dread and dislocation.
Fountain-thoughts trail off with the spray . . .

4:21—
Chess Quadrant as seen from a distance of approximately 30 yards—enveloped in a yellow-green haze of pollen and particulates . . .
South West Quadrant as fed by waves of Historical Discontent.
Fulminating bismuth and churning conjecture.
Masks catch fire and spin wildly.
Loud-Mouth Meridians as madmen scream obscenities all day and deep into the lantern night.
Molten jive and hairy palms.
Sulphuric Death\Chant
Threats and insults linger in the air long after their authors have departed.
Strident lectures aimed at no one and everyone.
Verbosciterium!
Murder is in the air!
Criminal potentates incur infinitesimal advantages on checkered squares.
Clocks stopped at precise moments.
Small islands of Kindness and Peace amongst the raging battles.
Hot-spectrum experiments at End-of-the-World Park.
Third eye locked onto artificial satellite.
Pineal gland park-quiz.
The Great List of Atavistic Excuses.
Sleeping Souls of Old Telemetric Park.
The Periodic Table contaminated during a game of chance.
Dissolute Fountain/Miasma—falling off the edge of the Imploded Solar Calendar.
The Geometry of Despair and Dissolution.
Estranged in Echolalia
Stasis at the periphery . . .

Shadows grow longer across the Circle as the afternoon rotates out of existence at the behest of colossal and incomprehensible forces

6:03—
Pulled over onto the cool end of the palette now as celestial forces exert their mighty influence. Park Circle and Fountain are pulled into impending darkness as they are whirled through time and space . . .

I walk dejectedly along one of the oblique meridians as I exit the Park and turn onto Serigraph Street where it merges with Inquisition  and head north to Little West Colloquy.
Then along the tracks that twist and turn and dive and rise again through dank and odious tunnels of electro-spark toxins and moldering dust and dirt—bursting to the surface once again, through the charred and rusted stations and soot-filled buildings of the Substrate City, and then down Subliminal Street and Arcane Avenue, towards Teleport and Scepter.

Then:
Posthumous longings in a bio-chamber of regret and bitterness.
Toxic delirium amid night-sweats and chem-soaked pillow.
Dreams colored in obscure hues and revelations in a vague language . . .

Under the sway of a murky and dreadful constellation, and oblivious of any moral codes, I re-enter the now-deserted park under the cover of night and pry loose several of the flagstones in the Chess Circle in the Southwest Quadrant and claw through the dirt and sand until I find a large stone of singular qualities buried in the exact center of the Circle: the Loadstone! Imported from Magnesia itself, and doubtless responsible for the frenzied aberrations of that charged quadrant! 

Hiding it under my shirt, I steal out of the park without bothering to cover up the evidence of my criminal excavations. As I move through the damp and yellow phosphor of the night-streets of Abscondia, I become aware that I am dreaming. Even so, I still feel a tremendous sense of guilt and fear of punishment.

*  *  *  *  *   *

Upon awakening I feel no less guilty and am troubled by a singular worry:
What if I am to be held accountable for my theft even though I merely dreamed it?



*Methylene Chloride

/// Washington Square Park /// lucid dreaming /// guilt ///

In The Chalk Circle, Part 1

ately I’ve begun to notice something extraordinary: as I begin to drift off to sleep each night, I have been increasingly able to pinpoint the exact moment when sleep begins. I become aware of the distinct line between waking and dreaming thoughts. The key to achieving this is to be acutely attentive to the nature of the thought: a dream-thought is readily identifiable because of its irregular and irrational nature. As an example, a few nights ago I dreamt that I was in the vestibule of my grandparents house—the old one, that used to stand way up at the top of the hill—and my grandmother was speaking to me. Aha! Impossible! Because I know that she is dead, and the old house was sold decades ago—therefore this was clearly a dream-thought! 

    The impact of such a realization often causes me to snap awake immediately, triumphantly proclaiming to myself: “This is sleep!” But the next step is even more extraordinary: the trick is to not let yourself be jolted awake by the revelation of the initial dream-thought, and to continue to dream, but with the conscious awareness of doing so! This is a kind of inner alchemy—a discipline—that should be practiced and cultivated in order to unlock the mysteries of each nocturnal flight. The dreams can even be influenced and controlled with this method, and extraordinary powers might become available to the practitioner of this occult method.
    I will begin an experiment: I will keep my journal by my bedside and try to locate the thoughts that occur directly on either side of the sleeping/waking divide, and then try to hold on to them in my memory and write them down when I awake the next morning.

FROM JOURNAL NUMBER
FORTY-EIGHT:

Wednesday, July 8, 2007
3:46—Washington Square Park, NYC
On the rim of the Old Fountain: High Summer in the park—beautiful afternoon in the Sunken Amphitheater—my thoughts trail off with the fountain spray...
 

Then...
The pen moves hesitantly...waiting for instructions from it’s master, who has succumbed to the dissipations of the mighty Doldrums. The Great Torpor has me in its grip and the Fatigue stretches for miles, coloring the sky and trees and faces, while holding me motionless...
    On certain days, the Fountaineers have been known to pump in water from the Sargasso which then sprays up from the old fountain and disperses into the park/crater, bringing with it the spirit of the Doldrums: of ships’s masts standing motionless and perfectly perpendicular in the dead calm—of sailors sprawled on the bleached decks under a monstrous sun. On other days, perhaps on a whim, these same Fountaineers will divert waters from a tributary of the Congo, and bringing with it all the characteristics of that terrifying and mighty river...

TO BE CONTINUED


/// supernatural fiction ///  Washington Square Park /// lucid dreaming