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excerpts from

Two Witnesses

A Meta-Novel
by j jackson




Part One




I sit in a hospital waiting room, waiting, for no one.

The old man in the hospital waiting room spoke to me as if I had been a long time friend, even though I just met him that very minute.
"It started a long time ago," he said, "when I was about thirty, I guess, or earlier. First, there were the skin problems. My ear canals would dry up and flake. It got worse later. The skin on my legs and feet dried up, and I got these fungus infections that I couldn't get to go away. I had to take more and more care to make sure I treated and moisturized my skin and my feet, to protect them. Then I started to develop back problems, pains. At first they were only dull aches. Then they got sharper and turned into sharpening pains, so I had to start taking pain killers. Then I developed a heart problem---atrial fibrillation. These problems got worse over the years. I began to learn that I had to monitor my physical condition more closely. I began to sit or lie for hours at a time, paying attention to how my bones fit together, my spinal vertebrae mostly. I traced the pain from my spine out into the various problem areas. I saw how my spine alignment affected my health. I went to chiropractors, but they didn't do anything I couldn't do for myself, so I took the time to do it myself, just sitting or lying still and repositioning my bones until they felt just right. As the years went by I had to spend more and more time at it. I couldn't work at a job any more because I spent so much time at it, that and the fact that, if I didn't do it, the stresses of life and work built to such a level that I would have self-destructed. I learned how my spine controlled my heart. I learned to trace the pain from my spine into all parts of my body and to interpret the conditions there, to trace the conditions back to the spine and correct them just by paying attention to the way I sat or stood or walked or slept. Now, if I want to live pain-free and healthy, I have to spend half the day stretching and exercising, and pay attention to it constantly to maintain a balance, an alignment of my frame. If I don't, I get sick and get really severe pain. And I have to watch how much caffeine I drink. I have to balance myself exactly between too much, which makes my heart palpitate, and too little, which makes me not want to do the exercises, and then I start to get depressed. And now I'm beginning to notice that what I eat needs to be kept in balance too. I'm just learning all about that. When I was young I could just live my life without these worries, without having to go to all this trouble, but now I have to pay attention to my life, to keep it all in tune, aligned and balanced, to prevent health problems. It's becoming a full time occupation for me---life."
His explanation, which I found interesting, or rather, I found the man himself interesting, was interrupted, for although he seemed to be finished, I'm sure he could have gone on talking about himself much longer. As he himself said, it was his full-time occupation. But another man wandered in off the street, speaking, to no one in particular and waylaid our attentions:
"...they feel they can't afford to isolate people with mental problems, they even feel they can't afford to incarcerate too many criminals, if they do, they only have to let them out again, 'cause the courts say the jails are too crowded, so they end up paroling them early, five years for murder, I know a man got ten months for rape, hell, that's worth it, ten months, they even feel, the Literaries, that they can't force people who have diseases to be isolated against their will, like the lungers, even when they get the treatment until their symptoms are relieved, then abandon it, stupid assholes, and get lost until they show up again with the super-bug, resistant to the medicine they'd been taking, incurable by any means, and infectious..."
At the word infectious, which the man pronounced slowly in a raised voice, everyone in the waiting room turned toward him, although they had been consciously trying to avoid acknowledging his presence, for he spoke to no one. He sat beside a dirty ragged man sitting by a large potted fern. Even I'd looked straight up at him, before he'd sat, more to observe the reaction of the others than to see him, because I'd been surreptitiously watching him and carefully listening since he'd entered, without checking in at the desk, without having any real reason to be here at all, other than his own, which was probably at least as interesting as his soliloquy, which continued without pause:
"...they create the problems, the losers who think that people's civil rights are more important than society, I mean, if they try to violate my civil rights, yeah, I'm going to give them a fight, and they're gonna back down, being the wimps they are, but if they didn't, if they had some balls," he shouted the word "balls," "hey, okay, I'd submit, what choice would I have anyway, if I didn't they'd just kill me, if they had the balls, but they don't, so I just go on living and free, but I don't want to be wiped out by some killer super-bug cause they let unsanitary assholes roam the streets, I mean, what the hell! they create the problems they want to solve---maybe that makes sense, come to think a it, cause if they solved all the problems, they'd be outta jobs, but meanwhile they make sure everybody gets their god-given right to infect others and prey on others and intimidate others, and I'll keep doing it, if I have to, in order to keep alive, and I will keep alive, cause they're helpless, they can't do nothin about nothin."
The man stood up and walked toward the door, his thin legs jutting out to the sides at the knees like a cowboy---but he was no cowboy---his feet turned in, still talking, he never stopped talking.
"...society is characterized by those characters who crawl out of the woodwork, or the cement work, the sewer-works, every time there's an incident to be taken advantage of..." His words trailed off into the night as the automatic doors closed behind him, and I almost rose to follow him, to hear the end of his speech, but I suspected that there was no end. He certainly had been the most interesting thing to happen there in the hour and a half I'd been sitting there. I go there often, when I'm bored, when I need to be stimulated, to find stories. It's a good place to spend time now that the only visual media remaining is corporate propaganda.
I looked away from the door and around at the other people. A middle-aged black man sat a seat away. He looked over at me as I looked toward him. His soupy brown eyes had no visible pupils and the color faded into the bloodshot whites instead of there being a clear-cut distinction, as in normal eyes. The things that most impress me about people's eyes are the pupils, the access to their centers, and the way the colors stand out against the whites. This man blurred my impression of him. I knew why.
He was a thin old wiry black man in a worn black leather jacket and faded jeans. He leaned toward me after a while, after he looked a long while into my eyes. It took him a long while to react. He leaned slowly and when he had closed the space between us to half of its original distance, he opened his mouth slowly, revealing bad, stained teeth, and said, "hey li' he coo'," and he almost smiled as he slowly raised his arm as if it were an effort and half-pointed at the door.
I smiled back at him. "Yeah," I said, looking away toward the door. "He's cool. We're all cool."




Pirate broadcasters roam the planet, spreading the word.

UNDERGROUND NEWS REPORT

All of the best people, whether they know it or not, have given up on the world and retreat in their own private way from it. The most articulate among them express the hopelessness. The rest struggle along disgusted. The only people left to run the mainstream society are those who mouth the empty message of hope---politicians, businessmen, people who are out to grab something for themselves, money, power, glory, by trying to sell to the masses a message of false hope. And scientists like [name deleted] who espouse hope as a technological offshoot into a cybernetic infinity of spacetime, even though they may be theoretically correct, are looked upon with suspicion and irrelevancy. The real hope, if any, lies in the theories of real people like Jack, who tell us how the world will soon near its destruction, until the disgust of its alienated people builds through hopeless frustration into the extremity of desperation and snaps the world organism into existence.

Kronk
from the wilderness






I pursue a sexy taxi driver.

I drove down the highway along the shore trying to look out over the sand to the ocean, but the traffic was heavy and I couldn't keep my concentration there, having to continually return it to the road. I noticed in my rear-view a bleach-blond taxi-driver babe with red-lensed sunglasses, hard-soft face, white-tanned complexion weaving her way in and out of fast traffic. She pulled up alongside me in the right lane. I looked over at her. She stared straight ahead. Suddenly speeding again, she swerved into my lane in front of me. So I tried to follow, the sunglasses mainly having caught my attention. I tried to stay close, but she lost me by darting across two lanes and swinging off the exit to Marineland as I zipped on passed in the left lane.
I saw her again about an hour later as I drove past a self-serve car wash, so I speeded to a stop off onto the side of the road and backed along the apron against horn-blowing traffic until I reached the car wash entrance. Her cab sat out in front of the place, and she bent over into the back seat, vacuuming, an open can of beer on the hood in the sun. I pulled up and stopped behind the cab, got out, closed the door and leaned back against it.
She looked up at me through the rear window.
"Yeah?" she said. "What the fuck you want?"
I made a motion with my head toward the vacuuming machine.
"Oh," she said, as if she were disappointed. "Wait a minute."
I nodded in acknowledgement, but she wasn't looking at me. I watched her, bending into the back seat. She wore tight cut-off jeans, too tight, like she wore them ten tears ago when she was twenty pounds thinner. She wasn't fat, she rounded out very nicely, but cellulite and folds of flab at the edges of the tattered denim showed that she had seen better years.
She finished vacuuming, straightened up out of the cab, walked toward the machine to hang up the hose, but turned toward me instead and held the hose out to me. I looked into her eyes through the red lenses.
"You want this or not?"
I started at her quickly to take the hose at her command.
"Hot day, huh?" I said as she handed it to me.
"They're all hot." She turned away.
I put a quarter into the machine, but it didn't turn on.
"Dammit," I said, and I slapped the thing. She turned back at me. I looked at her and shrugged. She gave me a look that said, "You are a stupid piece of shit."
"They take two quarters now," she said and turned away again, back toward her cab. I nodded, again to no one.
I reached into my pocket, knowing I had no more change.
"Shit," I said. She turned again as she was about to get into her cab. I looked up at her, with my head bent toward the ground.
"You got some kinda problem?" she said.
"You got any change?"
"Yeah, I got lotsa change."
"Got a dollar's worth?"
She gave me a disgusted look, reached into the front seat and came out with a brown paper bag.
I said, "You know, what would be even better would be a quarter and one of those beers." I saw the six pack laying on the front seat.
"That's a cheap beer," she said.
"Two dollars?"
She grabbed a beer and walked over to me and stood in front of me, staring straight at me with her hands down at her sides, the beer in the left and the quarter in the right in a clenched fist. I handed her two dollars bills. She didn't take it right away, but just kept staring at me. I looked back at her, uncomfortably, into her eyes. I decided she had taken an interest in me, trying to figure out who and what I am. I tried to hide the discomfort I'd suddenly felt.
Finally, she reached up and handed me the beer, took the bills from me, and handed me the quarter.
"Thank you," I said, still staring right into her red-lensed eyes.
She didn't turn, or even look away. She laughed. But it wasn't a humorous laugh. It was dry and sarcastic, yet I couldn't look away.
Time felt like it was slipping, like it will feel when I am high again from the...from the stuff I don't do any more. She knows it, how I feel, and I know it, because if I didn't I'd be defeated, so I just stare at her as I put the quarter in my pocket and open the beer.

It's just another day in the lowly hood of Hollywood, a place that sets itself up on a pedestal like the sign in order to make itself seem more than it is, which is nothing more than a ragtag collection of unbalanced people with grossly distorted self-images who have managed, through an expeditious use of alacritous chicanery and celerity to dispatch themselves into positions that belie their basic emotional states. In any other town, they'd be working in bars and restaurants or walking the streets. They came to this place driven by an intuition to avoid just that fate. They had nothing to lose and everything to gain. They could fail just as easily here as anywhere else, but if they succeeded, they would have it made. That's why the ones who've made it look down so harshly on the ones who didn't. They see themselves down there. This babe is stuck somewhere in between, looking down from where she thinks she should be, but isn't.




memories

At the top of the alley that ran behind the house I lived in as a kid something significant happened to me, but I can't remember what it was. One night I dreamed about it, and when I awoke, as I lay in the early morning light, I thought of it, intensely; and well-focused on it, I gradually came upon the answer and I held it in consciousness for a short while, its meaning pulsing in my mind, and I almost understood its importance to my present life; but I fell back into sleep, and when I awoke again, the understanding was gone.

At a place where I worked when I was younger, my boss, a black woman who's nickname was Skipper (she told us to call her that), left a message for me to come and see her when I came in to work. My mind raced with my heart when I got the message: I reviewed everything I'd done to try to understand what it was she wanted. I became convinced she was going to fire me. I didn't know what I'd done, but I knew I did it. I always did.
When I got to her office, she asked me to sit down. I thought, if you're going to fire me, I'd rather stand. But I sat anyway.
She asked me about an employee who worked for me, how he was doing. I told her he was all right, not the greatest worker in the world, but he did okay. I always said that back then, even if they were absolutely no good. I felt I had to cover up for them to higher management, even when I told them themselves the truth, to try to improve their performance. I tried to protect them. I felt I never wanted to fire anyone, or be the cause of their dismissal.
Skipper looked as if she didn't believe me. I wondered what was up, and the relief I'd felt only a minute earlier when I realized I would not be immediately dismissed myself faded as I felt a newly growing paranoia. I wondered what it was she'd heard.
She asked me about Clarisse, if I had a good rapport with her, if she opened up to me. Skipper didn't seem to have an agenda, she didn't seem to want to find fault in me, but she always seemed that way, and maybe she really felt that way, but I didn't know, I couldn't read her so well as I could read others. I thought a while before I responded, that, no, Clarisse and I didn't speak to each other very much. Skipper then asked if I felt that Clarisse held back, if she tried to avoid me, or others.
"Not at all," I said. "She seems very open." And in a sudden fit of openness myself, I said, "She'd be very open toward me, if I allowed her."
"I see. And why don't you?"
"I think..." I hesitated, and thought, again, "...if I let Clarisse approach me more closely, I'd be---I don't know---manipulated, taken advantage of---in some way." I didn't say that I thought she might be able to take a sexual advantage of me.
Skipper only nodded. That was all she'd wanted to know.
I'd had the feeling that she was building toward something as we spoke, that these questions about these two employees were only a preliminary to something else she wanted to know, but if they were, she never got to it, or she got to it without me knowing it.

At another place I worked, an Eastern Division of Automated, after I was eventually fired, I would go back to visit friends, because I could get in without anyone knowing it, the complex of buildings being dispersed among other companies in an industrial park, so access was easy from a number of different directions.
When I think back on that time, I marvel at the balls I had, at how I would work my way around, not only at that place, but anywhere. You can go anywhere and do anything, if people think you belong. All you have to do, mostly, to get them to think that is to believe it yourself.
After a few years of my notorious exploits (everyone knew me or knew of me, but no one important ever caught me), Regina, my boss, the woman (if you can call her that) who fired me [in conjunction with Sergio, the owner; she never could do anything on her own; she had no backbone, no balls (although she thought she did) and spend her time crawling around the floor oozing a trail of slime] somehow got wind of what I was up to, and she began looking for me. Then, once, she caught me, but being the indirect, misdirected person that she is, instead of marching right up to me and causing me to be thrown out, she tried to talk to me, to cajole me; but I was having no part of it, I always suspected her when she acted this way and she always acted this way, so as she spoke, I walked away from her, and she walked along behind me. I never responded to her, I just continued walking until, when I went around a corner out ahead of her, knowing that an aperature in the concrete wall covered by bushes existed where no one could have known of its presence, I slipped through it and watched from behind the wall as she came around the corner and pulled up short, dumbfounded by my disappearance, as if it were magic. I could have reached out through the bushes and goosed her right there, I was so close. She looked around. Her line of sight scanned right past me. She saw nothing, but she didn't discontinue her search. She started off down to the end of the block where she could have circled the wall and found me, so I started off myself, down into the new construction, into an unfinished basement, before she could get to a place where she could see me.
She hovered around a long time before she left. Her persistence worried me. She wanted, no doubt, to convince me of the error of my ways, so that I would voluntarily give up my intrusions; but I always refused to give in to her pretentiously caring attitude. She thinks she is so good and proper, and she has no idea of the damage she does, refusing to take a stand against people, employees and the rest of the world. I knew better. I learned the hard way that you have to assert yourself and your beliefs, even if they end up working against you in the short run. In the long run, it is always in your best interest to be who you really are.
After Regina left the area, I crawled out of the excavation and up the side of the hill, escaping out into the real world. A friend of mine, a woman I've known for a long time, a woman I've never allowed to get close to me, although she has wanted to, a close friend, but only a friend, owns a small restaurant and bed and breakfast next to the industrial park. It's a unique place, one of a kind, and perhaps that's why it survived in this strange atmosphere of built-up industrialization as the corporations spread like a virus over the area where residential neighborhoods skirt gray concrete block buildings, the only separation between the two disparate areas being a deteriorating cyclone fence and trees to hide it from the residential sides.
My friend, Amanda, created her place thirty years ago by converting an old one-floor motel, tearing down most of it, the parts that were beyond repair, which was more than two-thirds of it. She remodeled what was left, and the result is an unusual ranch-style building, small restaurant at the front, almost like a lunch counter except for its elegant ambience. Half-hidden by ornamental trees and bushes, its entrance is not so readily available to those who do not know it. She doesn't advertise and is not intent upon making tons of money from a consumer public, but rather is content to cater to an exclusive clientele, well-established customers. Amanda doesn't need money, having set herself up comfortably many years ago, and so she squirrels away the little bit she makes, improving her net-worth. She's an excellent business person who supports herself on her investments.
The tree-covered walkway into the restaurant is bounded by high hedges which conceal gardens, accessible only from deep inside the complex, the reserve of residents and guests. I used to go to this place when I need a pleasant retreat from the busy business world, and when I wanted to use it as a staging point for my escapades into the industrial park. She lets me stay for free, although if she is full up, I have to sleep on a cot on the enclosed porch in back.
Amanda had a grandson who had been staying with her. Her daughter was having problems. She never had a father---Amanda has been single all her life---and so her daughter carries on the tradition, living out the single mother script, suffering for her own sake, unable to see life in any other way. And so Amanda would baby-sit, sometimes for months at a time, while her daughter went about trying to figure out how to live her life.
One day I went there to visit, not planning to stay, when her grandson, Tommy, was there, sitting on the small front porch hidden off to the right of the restaurant entrance in front of the kitchen window, where Amanda could look out on him as she cooked. I always enter this way, across the porch, to avoid the restaurant, and I was surprised to come across him there. He looked scared, and so I pulled up short, to avoid frightening him. I said hello to him, but he wouldn't respond. Amanda smiled at me from the window.
I sat in a chair across the small porch. A toy truck lay at my feet. I began to move it back and forth with my shoe. I saw that Tommy's sight was attracted to the motion, so I reached down and with my hand I continued to move the truck, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, as if I were having fun. He hurried over to join me, taking the truck from me, and when I sat back up, he pushed it into my feet, offering it back to me. I bent back down and pushed it back to him and we began a game of pushing the truck back and forth between us which lasted for quite a while.
I was surprised that he didn't lose interest.
So the next time I came to visit, I brought him a new toy truck, but he wasn't there, his mother had come to take him. So I put the truck into the trunk of my car, where it remained for several years, until I moved out of the area, heading into the west.

I knew a woman, Chris, who had a lot of trouble, knowing me.
She avoided me for years, after she decided she knew who I was.
She decided incorrectly, and I did not correct the misperception, because I didn't understand too well then either what was going on between our minds. I was too hurt in those days, before I knew how to deal with life and love. And anyway, although her impression was wrong, literally, there was a lot of psychological truth to to it, buried beneath my surface.
But I meet Chris again many years later after having seen her in the interim only once for a few minutes at a local club. We meet again at a picnic, each of us more mature, I guess. Her second marriage is now over. The guy, a foreigner, turned out to be a domineering type, which took her totally by surprise. She thought him special when she met him in Europe on vacation.
Chris and I have always related so well that we hardly need to speak. Automatically, we pick up where we left off, this time with less awkward physical hesitation. We always did respond to each other on an intellectual and spiritual level, but we were both too hung up, back then, to ever get together. But now, we fall together spontaneously, without words, at the first opportunity, at dusk, among the trees off to the side of the picnic grounds after most of the others have left.
She lies on top of me. She shivers. I wrap her in my arms, to try to keep her warm, even though it's not cold. She kisses me, becoming more and more aroused. She reaches down between us to undo my jeans. She slips herself over me, eclipsing me in an overwhelming warmth as at the same time I feel she melts into me as she lies perched on top of me, fully up against me at every point, petite as I hold her with my arms fully encompassing her. She's a small girl, yet as large as the cosmos. I've always known this. As she moves above me, on me, she breathes life into me, becomes more aroused than I've ever known any woman to be, becomes increasingly filled with the abandon of ecstasy that I never really feel myself, yet I understand it through the empathy I experience with the women I am with. She collapses onto me, again and again, before she does something, I don't know what, I don't know how she does it, or how she would ever know, which allows me to release myself from a tenure I didn't know I held until I let it go, spilling over into her every part of me, all of everything I ever held back, all of the tension, all of anything that ever held me from feeling bound to a single body in a single solar system. Is this ecstasy I now experience? I don't think so. Spiritual ecstasy, maybe, or something nearing it, but physically it is not much more than the deepest relaxation.
I must have fallen asleep, holding her above me in my arms. When I awoke it was fully dark, and she was gone. I don't know where this is going yet. I feel like this must go somewhere. This is not the kind of experience that should be left hanging. I'd like to find her, but I don't know where she lives. I may never see her again. She doesn't know I left the area and am living out here now.

from Two Witnesses
© 1998 j a jackson


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