Music soothed the savage beast, as did eating the musician.

∼  Amaurón, Original Con: Sequence

   Up to this point, Jack's life had been a series of moments he would never remember. Each new fold in his rapidly maturing brain had warped the wood of his earliest mental junk drawer so that he could never open it again, or so it seemed until one day in college his friend Skeeter asked him, "What's the last thing you don't remember?"

   Jack rearranged himself in the bean bag chair. He closed his textbook and said in a low tone, "That's not a particularly odd question, not by your standards."

   Skeeter lifted his lanky frame from his stuffed arm chair and walked barefoot across his dorm room. He gazed out the double windows, with his hands stuffed in the rear pockets of his jeans. "Not the last thing you've forgotten today." He leaned back slightly and looked over his shoulder at Jack. "That would be whether you're a man or a mouse, but what took place in your life immediately before . . . the first thing you do remember?"

   Jack put the cap on his yellow highlighter and pointed it at him. "I'm flattered, Skeets. Only a true friend would give a shit."

   "Lovely turn of phrase."

   "Your mind, it's always somewhere in the past."

   "In-deed-a-ly. The privilege of a humanities major is to journey back and forth effortlessly. So, what's your answer?"

   "This is another of your tests, isn't it?"

   Skeeter answered flatly, "Everything in life is a test, Jack." His face brightened. "So, if the cat hasn't got your tongue, my furry little friend, what's the last thing you don't remember?"

   Jack gazed at the ceiling as if watching a scene from long ago. "There I was, staring out of a small hole at the bottom of the wainscoting in my parents' kitchen." He squinted to see more clearly. "Yes, I was nibbling a piece of cheese and wondering whether that dapper fellow across the road, Stuart Little, had the same tailor as James Bond."

   Skeeter walked to his wooden desk chair and gave it a spin. He caught Jack's eye and began walking four fingers through the air. "Come on Mickey, think." He retracted two fingers and said, "Be a man," he went back to using four fingers, "or scurry back in time and tell me what happened to you in that moment or two that you can't remember?"

   "What is this?"

   "Die Sendung mit der Maus."

   "No Kraut, and I'm not really interested in yet another of your trick questions, so just tell me."

   "Ah! It does involve quite a trick, and yes, I do know the answer, but don't give up quite so easily, as Dawson would have counseled Basil. Hint: take all the time you need." He plunked himself in the chair, crossed his legs and propped them on the desktop. He engaged Jack with an eager look. Jack said nothing, preferring to use his friend's impatience against him. Skeeter tapped his finger on the blotter at one-second intervals. He said to the slow rhythm, "Start with what you can recall." Then he added shallow nods to the beat. "What's your, earl-y, est-rec, oh-lec, shun?"

   Jack withdrew inside his head, where he saw people he recognized parading through familiar scenes. They seemed to march forward, but with each step their clothing and hairstyles reverted back to ever-earlier styles. Their faces softened young. Their color faded to shades of black and white. Slowly, a dense silent fog engulfed them, leaving Jack alone, weightless, expectant, hopeful. A wisp of air brushed his cheek. Bolder, it swirled behind him and gave him an unexpected push. Then stronger, more insistent, it began to howl in his ears, teasing, chiding and deriding. What exactly? He didn't know. It would be years before he realized that others resented his outwardly optimistic predisposition and seemingly effortless confidence. Annoyed, the wind tugged and pushed. Then it grabbed him roughly, lifted him, and heaved him through the all-encompassing gray, which began to thin and shred as he plummeted down, down, down. A primal scream pierced his head! And ceased only when he tumbled onto a brightly-colored stage for Act I, Scene I of his earliest Kinflick.

   He was as if newly awakened from the soundest sleep, with his head face down on soft grass. He felt it tickle his nose. He could smell the dank earth below, where the dreaded earth-beetles dined. His eyes opened to an old brown apple core at someone's stopped feet. He heard a mild exclamation, "My God!" He recognized his mother's voice. He knew it was her hands scooping him up. He caught a glimpse of his Uncle Philip, a moment before shards of light cut through the leafy canopy above and stabbed his tender eyes. Wincing, he buried his face into her shoulder.

   Fran tried to pry him away for an inspection, but he held tightly to her blouse. She sat down at the picnic table, unsnapped his soiled bib, and asked, "What happened?"

   He had no idea.

   "Are you OK?"

   Jack thought . . . I am.

   Apparently, he'd tumbled out of his highchair, which he saw sprawled on the grass along with a piece of bread soaked with grape juice from his plastic sippy cup.

   Skeeter summoned him. "Something happened. What was it?"

   "I was two years old, lying face-down in the grass."

   "Who picked you up, Pelagius? I know! You were eyeball-to-eyeball with a hookah-smoking caterpillar, who asked in a languid, sleepy voice, 'Who are you?'"

   "Probably."

   "Did you hear or feel anything?"

   "A casual shout that broke the silence. An unimaginable touch."

   Skeeter put his eyebrows together and asked with a fiendish tone, "Did you cry, when you were born to this great stage of fools?"

   Jack sensed a literary allusion and guessed. "Shakespeare's Puck or Falstaff?"

   "Pay attention Jack! All the clues are important. My face, my tone—well?"

   "Weirder than usual, but only a little."

   "A regal leer!"

   "Ah! Cordelia's loving father."

   No, the fall hadn't made Jack cry, not at first anyway. He was too busy noticing his relatives' stares, their eyes quickly shifting from concern to something far more disquieting, the suggestion—no, it was more!—the accusation that he'd done something to precipitate his fall. They seemed to know what it was.

   He didn't.

   Immediately, Jack experienced something else new: a wave of what he would later learn was a fusion of guilt and shame. He had no idea where it came from.

   He didn't like it.

   The faces continued to stare. Ah! What evil looks from old and young. They hung about his neck and dragged his head down into his mother's shoulder, where at last he finally cried. Each heave of his small chest made him realize:

   He didn't like them.

   Not at the moment, anyway. Jack rubbed his teary face into the cotton blouse. He breathed in the familiar scent, expecting the aromatherapy to soothe him, but his scraped elbow stung with pain. Somehow he knew it was a consequence of his fall, a punishment, a penalty meted out by . . .

   Whoever it was, he disliked that person even more.

   What had he done? Nothing he could remember. It was a total mystery to him, and not knowing, well, that was something he really didn't like.

   And it made him mad.

   His mother brushed grass from his sailor's outfit. "Look at you, fallen overboard into a deep green sea," she laughed. "Be careful some big scary fish doesn't swallow you whole! Now then, time to clean you up, my little man." She hustled him toward the ranch-style house, calling over her shoulder, "Back in a jiff, ladies."

   "Where were you?" asked Skeeter.

   "At a picnic."

   "In Grover's Corner?"

   "No, in Maine, at my Aunt Greta's house in Scarborough. I was wearing a sailor's suit."

   "Were you Popeye or Bluto?"

    "I am what I am, and that's all what I am: a deckhand on the Pequod."

   "That's not the same thing as 'I will be what I will be,' is it?" Jack didn't answer. "Go on with your story."

   "I remember seeing my Uncle Phil. We were in his orchard where he often paced." Jack rubbed the arms of his plaid flannel shirt. "The day was cool, so it must have been late summer."

   "Are you sure it wasn't a bright cold day in April and all the clocks were striking thirteen?"

    "That wasn't due to happen for another thirty years or so. It was autumn. Some leaves had fallen. It was probably my birthday. I love September."

   "For everything there is a season."

   Jack remembered the smell of burgers and hotdogs sizzling on a charcoal grille. Men in chino pants and sports shirts stood nearby chatting, probably commiserating about yet another dismal Red Sox season, poking the food out of frustration. On the nearby picnic table, bowls of potato- and egg-salad, bags of potato chips, jars of gherkins, plates of sliced and cool cucumber and tangy tomato were all destinations on the red-check tablecloth that mapped Greta's Downeast land of milk and honey.

   "And a time for every purpose," added Skeeter.

   Women telling tales. "Yakking up a storm," his Grampa Pete would have said. His mother, aunts and grandmother all taking turns on the soapbox, each pretending to listen while looking for the chance to get a word in edgewise.

    "I heard she's shacked-up, the little . . . " the young voice censored by older eyes, "but knowing her mother, well."

    "Exactly. The apple doesn't fall—"

    "Very far from the tree. No sirree, Bob."

    Jack had no real interest in the conversation. His stubby fingers pushed a piece of bread through a bowl of Ma Lum's famous apple sauce, chasing away a fly, which flitted off to investigate the other sweet aromas of Scarborough fare: parsley, sage, rosemary, and fresh-picked thyme. Then the calamity struck.

    "Time to clean you up, my little man."

    And not long after that it was time to return to Rivermouth, and time for Jack's bath, and time to put on his pajamas, and then time to listen to his mother read from the Just-So Stories, and then time for her to say his prayers slowly so that he could parrot each line.

Now I lay me down to sleep . . . with Wynken, Blynken and Nod.

    And although his eyes drooped ever lower, he would ask her to read another timeless tale. She would lean over and let a lingering kiss seal his eyes closed, leaving him suspended in darkness, hearing only her promise of lots more time tomorrow, listening to the soft tick of his heart, awaiting the first talk of tomorrow.

    Tomorrow is easy—on the young mind, lasting only for an instant of overnight darkness; but today is uncharted—stretching across brightly-lit landscapes eager to show him all their possibilities:²⁷ the smell of his baseball glove, the cry of "ready or not, here I come," the taste of Mrs. Hanbury's warm madeleines, the sticky pine-pitch of his tree house, and his mother's on-going assurances of yet another tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, each creeping at a petty pace, each beginning with Jack poised in a brief moment of uncertainty, hovering somewhere between the dreamy reality of the night before and the firmness of a sister's hand stirring him awake, her voice mildly surprised, "Why, what a long sleep you've had!"

   Yester's daze, when all his troubles seemed so far away. Now in nooks, as foes, they sneer and prey. Oh Jack believes in yesterplay.

   Suddenly! Skeeter realized that Jack knew the answer to his question. He leapt from his chair and blurted, "A universal experience."

   "I suppose so," said Jack.

   "In that fleeting moment before you awoke, you were slipping through the ether on the Kairos-to-Chronos Express. The hands on the station clock beckoned, 'come hither and play.' Its silent voice assured you, 'Yes, it's time. It's Time in time with your time . . . although I find it hard to believe that news of your arrival would engender rapture.'"

   "Fleeing the white Queen, is that why I fell?"

   "Some people claim that there's a woman to blame, but you know," Skeeter raised his eyebrows and looked amused, "freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell. You, my friend, fell smack dab into Time." He scratched the stubble of his chin in thought. "I wonder, where else might you have landed, with what other family, or in what other dimension? No fall is Newtonian straight," he snaked his hand toward the window, "not with all that gravitational warping going on out there."

   Jack extended his hands with their palms up and bobbed them like a pair of scales. "With which family, the Tudors or the Cantys, but undoubtedly," he clapped his hands loudly, "with a thud."

   "You are a libra."

   "Fuck off."

   "Charming idiom. Combine your thud with all the others and what have you got? A baby boom." Skeeter sang, "People try to put us d-down."

   "Are you talkin' 'bout my generation?"

   "Just because we get around."

   "Our generation is special," said Jack, "but then again, mine always are. Wouldn't miss one 'for all the tea in China,' as my Grandma used to say."

   Skeeter rushed out of his chair and began flipping through his record albums. "I've got just the song," he said, extracting a vinyl disc and putting it on the stereo. A moment later, a drumstick took on the syncopated beat of a clock by alternately striking the edge of a snare drum and a cowbell. A single word, "Cuckoo." Then a crescendo of primal "Woooooooooo." A guitar picked up the rhythm, a brotherly voice filled the chamber.

Time has come today. Young hearts can go their way!

    Jack leapt to his feet and began to dance. Skeeter turned the volume louder, rose and whirled, imaging himself Zorba on a moonlit beach.

Can't put it off another day. I don't care what others say.

Time had come today.

Time—Uncle Walt's mystic baffling wonder
(Tio Jorge's abismal problema del tiempo),

without which everything would happen                                             at once,

or not at all,

which       is        essentially         the                                    same                         thing

becauseEverywhereplusEverywhen

multiplied by                     (or     possibly     extruded                    from)             Everybody

equals Everything,

                                        when                             your soul's been psychedelicized,

and you hear yourself                                        ask a Hippo,

"What then is time?"

And he must confess, "If no one asks me, I know.

If I wish to explain it . . . I know not."                                          

Undoubtedly,

There are things to realize.

    Things that a college kid had only just begun to contemplate, such as LCpl. Levesque home from Vietnam, not home really, but buried in his native soil of Great Falls amidst the beetles, enduring the myth of eternal return, resting in peace, although it was an altogether different tranquility than the one in Jack's dorm room, with its new-found, parent-free, airy freedom.

    The soldier's silence haunted.

    Unexpected, it crept inside of Jack and lingered, waiting for the seemingly endless banter inside his head to quiet so that he could take its notice, so that he might truly understand that he too was once . . . that he was upon a time . . . that he was jogging with Faustus down the same restless course that Time doth run with calm and silent foot until one day Jack ran out of Time altogether, tripping with his last stride and falling into a granite-dotted New Hampshire field. Put out to pasture. Retired with a solemn High Mass for a going-away party, with no parting gifts, please! No superfluous gold watch awarded because Jack would never have to be on time again. Jack, poof! Gone with the wind that carried Time's final sullen "good-bye," the solitary toll of a church bell ringing in perfect harmony with the chime of a towered bell clock.

   Bong!

   Which was not an exclamation but a question: Would he be saved by the bell, saved after a life of serving hard Time for the crimes of others, saved for all eternity by a prescription for Viaticum filled and taken faithfully so that he might be spared the fiery flames in just the nick of time?

   If nothing else, he would be saved from the illusions of "making time" and "taking time," and "keeping time," and pretending that "time was on his side." Freed, he would be, from answering the silliest question of all, "Excuse me, Jack, do you have the time?" For the time being, it had him.

   Tempus? Fug it! No longer would he be obliged to huddle beneath a tree (just another tramp en attendant) waiting to hear if Time would tell—anything at all.

   Bossy ol' Time. Always of the essence, continually trying to manage his affairs, constantly demanding more from him and relentlessly intimating that he just might procrastinate a little less. Be more efficient! Work longer hours! He'd try, really he would. Then an evening would come when Jack, working late once again, would abruptly stop. He'd storm down the hall and barge straight into Time's office and shout, "I'm over Time!" (A tad rude, yes, but that's what people do when they no longer have to watch themselves.) Finished with telling time, he would tell Time, "Your time is up! Hickory dickory dock, no more tick-talk."

   Never! —which sounds like a very long time, but in reality it's no time at all, which has been true since . . . time out of mind.

   Slamming Time's door behind him, Jack could fling his scarf of fine imported Gilgamesh over his shoulder and walk away, crooning confidently as he went I got, got, got, got no time. He'd be on his way to better things with—go on, guess who—that's right, the best friend of all the darling children, the sentry at the pearly gates of Never Land, primus inter pares of the good ol' Lost Boys network, Saint Peter himself.

   In the mean time ruled by alarming clocks, on that day long ago in Scarborough, there was Jack, as he was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be whirl without end—a man. Eventually, he would appear in later editions, but always wedded to himself in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad, in joy as well as sorrow, forsaking himself for no other, and that included his wife who was nothing, nothing more than the greatest gift he would ever give himself, which only confirmed for him that love is essentially a what's-in-it-for-me proposition, a notion she thoroughly rejected.

   Opposites attract? Damn straight they do.

   "Jack?" asked Skeeter.

   "I think so."

   "What's going on in that murine mind of yours?"

   "As I'm to understand it, I arrived on the tick of the cosmic clock."

   "Ontic, yes, very good, a fortuitous pun, but excellent nonetheless," murmured Skeeter. The word reminded him of another. "Noumenon. Were you?"

   "New men on what, cocaine?"

   "Oh, Jack," Skeeter said with despair. "Noumenon—the genuine article—ding an sich."

   "Me?"

   "The thing-in-itself. You arrived as a baby independent of thought. As yet un-interpreted by yourself and others." Jack looked clueless. "Never mind. Go on with your tale Pixie. Or are you Dixie?"

   "To tell you the truth, Jinksy, it has often occurred to me that others have written the soundtrack to my life." He began to gather his texts and notebooks.

   "Just the instrumental bits, surely. It's your job to compose the lyrics, to write the plot."

   Jack started stuffing his belongings into his Boy Scout backpack. "Not an easy task unless, of course, the words have already been written down for me." He pointed up. "Tout ce qui nous arrive de bien et de mal ici-bas était écrit là-haut."

   "No frog."

   "Already written by some higher authority," explained Jack.

   "That's absurd."

   "I agree and that's why I continue to search for my muse, someone to aid my adventurous song."

   "Someone to help the simple pollock swim the course of time?"

   "Perch," corrected Jack, remembering the spell Merlyn cast on the future king of England so that he could swim as a fish in the castle moat.

   Jack walked over to Skeeter's bookshelf saying, "A very wise tench once told me that direction is the better part of valor. Fair enough, but as to which direction was best, he had no advice." He took down the copy of The Great Gatsby he had given Skeeter. "Still unread, I see." He flipped to its last page. "Keeping with the riparian theme, I quote, 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'"

   "Throw out your anchor, ol' boy, quick."

   "Fitzgerald did, a tombstone with those very words."

   "Ah, the metaphorical Jack."

   "I'm not a metaphor. Speak clearly."

   "I heard a song on the radio with a clever metaphor," said Skeeter who sang, "we're captive on the carousel of time."

   Jack remembered the song. It said that he couldn't return to the past. That was true. He could only look behind from where he came. Hold on! A carousel would bring him right back to the beginning over and over again, at least that's the way it worked in the good ol' U.S. of A. (The order of Canada might be different.) So a rider like Jack could be a pedantic jerk again and again and again, trapped in a vicious cycle, captured in a circle game in which the tension of his mainspring slowly ebbed—out, out—little, less, nothing but frost for a graveyard sheet. Out, out brief candle, the flame extinguished by the rush of air as Springheel Jack jumped over the candlestick, calling out as he flew, "So long moon. So long cow jumping over the moon." Oh yes, Jack was nimble and Jack was quick, but he often wondered, why bother being slick, when the penalty was the same . . . as for those who were thick?

   "I suppose it's reaching too far, trying to grasp the golden ring, that makes most people fall off the carousel," said Skeeter.

   "Up, down, up, down, up, down, too," said Jack.

   "On the day you die, Jack, how would you like to be remembered?"

   "I'll probably exit as Aldous Huxley and C.S. Lewis did, as the only memorable death anywhere in the world that day, perhaps with the word 'rosebud' on my lips."

   Jack over and out? His sound and fury signifying nothing, replaced by the sounds of silence. Hello darkness my old friend . . . Jack no longer chasing the masters' tales with the tick, tick, tick of his petit iambics?

All the world's a stage, the bard forlornly notes.
We're all just merely players, including you, you dope.
So listen to O'Casey, when he adds his Paddy verse:
We strut and preen with every scene—desperately unrehearsed.
Yet from time to time we get it right, or so we each believe.
The words we treasure, oh so dear? Our beloved soliloquies!

   "Jack? Earth to Jack," said Skeeter.

   "Houston, we've had a problem."

   "This is Houston, say again please."

   "As I was telling you," said Jack, "I fell. My mother took me in the house. She cleaned me up and then we would have stood in the hallway looking at all the family photographs, with her explaining who everybody was because that's what she always did. But she never had a thing to say about the far-out oil painting my aunt Greta kept at the end of the hall. It was eerie, let me tell ya. Everyone had an opinion as to what it depicted: a midnight gale, an unnatural combat, a blasted heath, a winter scene, a breaking up of—"

   "The Beatles? Antony and Cleopatra, or rather Richard and Liz? Who said breaking up is hard to do?"

   Jack ignored him. "And of course my mother would have paused for a while in front of the grandfather clock. Kevin was supposed to have inherited it—she being the eldest sister and primogeniture a natural right when it suited her—but my aunt Greta scoffed it from my grandparents' house after they were killed."

   "If a clock ticks in a hall and no one hears it, does time pass?" asked Skeeter, explaining, "That's a twist on Berkeley's unanswerable question."

   "Here's a better one: If Skeeter talks and I choose not to listen, did he speak?"

   "Berkeley suggested esse est percipi, or 'to be is to be perceived.' What do you think about that?" They fell silent until Skeeter asked, "Do you suppose he meant people as well as sound? If one goes through life unheard, may we assume he or she never really existed?"

   "Lives of quiet desperation," said Jack. "Isn't that what we're supposed to be living?"

   "Not us. We're immune as long as our tuition bills are paid," said Skeeter.

   "That is the popular perception, and perception is reality."

   Skeeter snapped his fingers. "Doors of Perception—let's listen to The Doors." He rose to put on a record. "Do you believe that reality is what you can get away with?"

   "Is my reality your reality?" asked Jack, who then sang with the music, when you're strange."

   "Perception," Skeeter mused slowly. "How do you think you're perceived, Jack? Is that more or less important than how you see yourself? How do you see yourself?"

   Like everyone else his age, impressionable, like a warm piece of virgin vinyl constantly molded into discs, each imprinted with the zany zeitgeist of free love, hawks v. doves, don't let the man above put your soul on ice, an ethos gleaned from books and films and music and the bottoms of coffee mugs and beer glasses—and laid down in the tracks of his mind.

   He once heard an earnest girl named Gwen say that there was very little music in the name Jack, but he could feel each record slide down the spindle of his spine.

   Clack!

   Turn, turn, turn—the vinyl's edge inexorably tracing an hermeneutic circle, he finds himself marching to the ineluctable music of an orchestra that plays behind the scenes.

   Clack!

   Jack answered Skeeter, "I see myself as vertiginous vinyl."

   "Cool."

   Jack agrees, and why not? His vinyl is coated with youthful invincibility. It repels most inconvenient truths, including the fact that vinyl is susceptible to deep and permanent scratches just like one's forehead. He's not really concerned that in the coming years his vinyl will be at the mercy of the changing seasons, the heat of summer bringing the risk of warping and the cold of winter threatening to freeze his material in that distorted state, causing his voice to vacillate between clear and warbled, and rendering the wisdom he has acquired, cherishes, and so desperately wants to impart to others discredited. Embarrassingly so.

   Clack!

   

The sound resurrects the last time he saw Grandma Nora. He sees her sitting below him in a nursing home chair. So tiny, yet the palsy of her folded hands shakes his armor. The droop of her lower lip slackens his confidence. Her courteous gaze, the one she offered people on first meeting them, is now for him. He does not know what to say to this woman, who would have never done anything to cause him any discomfort, who taught him the value of the stinging Should Bee.

Clack!

The jarring sound erases her face, but only smears the truth that his vinyl will also age hard and brittle. The fall of every one of his records will damage the grooves of the one below until one day his stylus skips ahead, inexplicably leaving his thoughts unfinished as it jumps ahead to the next. Then, perhaps, his needle will become stuck altogether, with his scratchy words repeating and annoying, repeating and annoying, while his family and friends whisper what he cannot realize: his records have fulfilled their destiny, all records having been made to be broken.

   Clack!

   "Jack, you were born in Rivermouth," said Skeeter. "Tell me, is your soundtrack the story of a bad boy?"

   Being bad, thought Jack, was simply an unavoidable part of the educational process. See Jackanapes at his desk. The evil one towers over him, tapping his palm with his ruler, expecting his pupil to cower, but finding the young man prodding him with sticks of various lengths and sneering, "So, Big Fella, you say that all sin is a manifestation of ingratitude." Poke. "Is it really?" Jab. "Tell me more." Stab. "Show me!" He did, teaching Jack what others deny, that one must know evil to appreciate goodness.

   Oh yes, Jack's vinyl has an A-side, which is popular and makes everyone smile and want to dance. It also has a B-side, which can be urchin rude, of manners crude, of un-angelic voice. No matter which side he plays, his lyrical voice comes forth in stereo, allowing him to say nearly the same thing in different directions—at the same time. Ooh, how entertaining that is! How delightfully more gratifying than the timorous monaural voice so many others settled for.

   His two-sided brain operates on two levels, conscious and unconscious. Binary electrical pulses race through his nervous system, so he too can sing the body electric. It is little wonder that every choice he makes involves both an acceptance and a simultaneous rejection. Choosing—it's a never-ending process because Jack lives in a realm of endless dualities, of daylight and darkness, of the humanity of Gene McCarthy and the vulgarity of Tricky Dick, of careers in the Peace Corps and lives engaged in the ol' ultra-violence, of sobriety and escape, of the wise and the otherwise, of on-and-off, and on again down roads paved with hope and despair.

   The green woods of Jack's childhood have yellowed, and he finds himself standing at many a sharp-tined fork in the road. No matter which path he takes, it bleeds into a four-lane superhighway jammed with discourteous drivers obsessed with blowing their own horns. Unsure of which lane to use, or which exit to take, he often pulls his lazy college-boy ass into a rest area and turns off his motor. He props his feet on the dashboard and wonders whether the virtuous rules of the road he admires—the Via Romana—have been completely abandoned on today's interstate highway system. He props his feet on the dashboard and reads until his eyes weary. He flicks on the radio and discovers that whether he pushes the pre-set buttons, or turns the tuning dial, the song never changes. Dueling banjos mock his divided will, taunting him with one infuriating and immutable fact: life is an endless quandary of choosing between what he would like to do and what he should do.

   His fingers find the correct knob on his radio, but he struggles with the balance control. He fiddles and diddles until he's fed up. He searches his mind for a simple solution and wonders, oh bard, is it true? Is there nothing either good or bad but thinking so?

   High on intellectualism, Jack cruises down that multivious freeway from time to time, passing through the wide gate and learning by going where he has to go. The kaleidoscopic scenery, and the self-reliant Devil's children with whom he wrestles, teach him that many things are often more easily defined by what they are not.

   He arrives in Sandburg and strolls down sidewalks filled with heroes and hoodlums, of that he is certain, but the comic and tragic people wear two faces, so he finds himself struggling to determine who is whom. As a reminder of this dilemma, he buys a postcard of the town's Fourth of July parade and mails it to himself with a single request scribbled on the back: Tell me, Lord Shakenspear, why do some rise by sin and others by virtue fall?

   He informs Skeeter, "I struggle with my volume control as well."

   "You can rant, but you haven't answered my question. What of the old miching mallecho—mischief? Is it a form of self-entertainment you simply cannot do without? Or perhaps you require something even more sinister. What would you do if Lt. Calley gave you the order, Sgt. Pepper?"

   Jack re-positioned himself in his chair. "Why do you suppose chicks dig bad guys like James Dean, Jim Morrison, Jimmy Cagney, and Jimi Hendrix?"

   "No one is allowed to answer a question with a question, Sarge."

   "Then I'm doomed; we're all doomed."

   Skeeter tilted his head in thought. Then he formed his hand into a six-shooter, fired a shot at Jack, and blew the smoke from his fingertip. "Do you long to ride the dusty trails of the Wild West with the notorious James Gang?"

   "Yea, but as slick-fingered Joe Walsh!" Jack stood and took up his air guitar. "I see myself out of the cradle," he picked his strings, "endlessly rocking." He tapped his larynx. "Out of the mocking bird's throat comes the musical shuttle."

   "And if that mockingbird don't sing?"

   Jack gave him a grave look. "Don't ever kill your mockingbird, Skeets. That would be a senseless, sinful slaughter. Be like me. I am the musical boy asking himself in song,

Pray tell me true, young ruffian, do,
if thus you live from choice,
or if in your unhallowed ways
you really don't rejoice!

   "Did you make that up?"

   "The words, alas! aren't mine! I found them in native fields . . . of far superior rhyme!" He tilted an ear upwards. "Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears, and sometimes," he twirled his index finger at the side of his head and said spookily, "voices."

   "Ooooh."

   "I hear," continued Jack, "not merely the volumes of sound. I am moved by the exquisite meanings."

   "Not always, surely," said Skeeter. "Rock 'n roll lyrics can be dreadfully lame, which is why I adore the greatest rock 'n roll instrumental ever written, which is?" Jack looked quizzical. "Come on, wipe that dumbfound look off your face." Jack held up a finger to signal that the answer was on the tip of his tongue. "It's . . . the Allman Brothers'—"

   "Jessica!" shouted Jack. "I tell you, the man that hath no music in himself is fit for treasons, Strat-O-Matic baseball, and goils."

   "You're definitely losing it, Jack."

   "The name is Lorenzo. Remember him? Last seen eloping with a boy."

   "Goils only! Or rather, the one woman who rules my heart, the comely but dangerous Kriemhild!" With that Skeeter wheeled out of his chair and opened the small white door to his refrigerator. "Would you like a beer, Mrs. Frisby?"

   "Sure. Flip me an anhyzer. The problem with you, Skeets, is that you're loveless. You covet the wench on the St. Pauli Girl label, but you don't respect her. You must respect someone before you can truly be said to love them." He sang, "R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me." He took up his guitar. "That's why you loathe sweet tunes," he held a note with a grimace, "where a note grown strong relents and recoils, and climbs and closes—"

   "Love songs depress me. They remind me of the women I let slip away," said Skeeter. He handed Jack a bottle. "I shall hate sweet music my whole life long, Algernon."

   "I'm Jack. Algernon Moncrieff is my friend." He raised an imaginary rifle at Skeeter. "And I'm not the doctor's son, who was playing with a loaded gun. He pointed it towards his sister, aimed very carefully—BANG!—but missed her!" Jack spun on his heels and turned the gun into a guitar. He extended his arm and fingered various chords on his beer bottle, singing soulfully, "I'm Uncle Walt's nephew. I sing . . . the body electric!" He struck a chord violently and quivered his voice. "Yin!" He flailed again. "Yang!"

   "Compared to B.B. King, you're a child with a BB gun."

   Jack came to a halt. "Child?" He let his arms flag to his sides and said calmly, "I can still remember how that music used to make me smile. Frère Jacques, frère Jacques, dormez vous?"

   "Quiet, Anatole."

   "Les plus beaux mots du monde ne sont que de vains sons, si on ne les comprend pas."

   Skeeter scowled. "Allman Brothers—let's listen to Jessica." Jack started to speak, but Skeeter silenced him with a pointed finger.

   As Skeeter knelt to find the record, Jack couldn't resist. "In this bawdy lair I must tell you, 'La musique souvent me prend comme une mer!'"

   "Aufhalten!" growled Skeeter.

   Jack finished in a low, plaintive tone, "Vers ma pâle étoile." He took a long drink of beer, belched, and asked, "It's time to play the music? It's time to light the lights?" Skeeter slid the recording from its paper jacket, prompting Jack to say, "The orchestra has sufficiently tuned the instruments." Skeeter placed it on the spinning turntable and lifted the tone arm. Jack announced, "The baton has given the signal." The needle slid into the song. A guitar, a piano, and then the rest of the music took their minds away for several minutes. When it finished, Skeeter turned off the machine and returned to his arm chair. He hoisted his bottle in salute. "Dickey Betts."

   Jack returned the toast, "Uncle Walt, the pair of them in concert at the Fillmore East. Why don't you get a cassette-player, Skeets?"

   "No way. I'm not going to spend money I don't have to replace albums I already own. 'New Lamps for Old,' is a ballad well-worth remembering. Besides, who wants a bunch of recordings that end with the warning, 'this tape will self-destruct in five seconds?'"

   Jack chuckled, "Not spend money? That's a subversive, downright un-American sentiment. Well done!"

   "Up the revolution! Damn the affluent society!"

   "That's not the conventional wisdom."

   "In-deed-a-ly."

   A sly look came across Jack's face. "Hey, Skeets, speaking of records, I've got a trivia question for you. Who wrote 'forward, forward, let us range. Let the great world spin forever, down the ringing grooves of change.' It was on the Sangsara Records label. Name the artist."

   "I suspect it was you," his voice lingered, "or some other Jack." He looked thoughtful. "Not the Wolfman. Merridew! That's it, Jack Merridew."

   "Wrong lord." He locked eyes with Skeeter. "What's it all about, Alfie?"

   "That's a hint, isn't it? You can be utterly exasperating when you show off your sticky brain."

   "Touché!"

   "No frog! If you really want to impress me, Jack, if you truly want to be proclaimed Rhapsode-in-Residence, recite all eighteen minutes of Alice's Restaurant."

   "Alice? I remember her. 'The words of the old song kept ringing through her head like the ticking of a clock.'"

   "Officer Obie, arrest that man—for fraud! He's no DJ."

   "I'm Jack Clondale, a J.C., made in the image."

   "You're a blasphemous J.D.," said Skeeter.

   Jack knocked back the last of his beer and collapsed into the bean bag chair, which hissed air. He stretched out his arms, crossed his feet, and dropped his chin onto his chest.

   Skeeter ended the momentary silence. "I get it. Three days later."

   Jack's eyes sprung open. "Stored up here," he tapped his head, "are the words to God-knows how many songs!" He sang, "People's words are coming back to me in waves of . . . of . . . mindless sophistry.

   "Shades of mediocrity," corrected Skeeter.

   "Like tempting breasts on bar honeys, I need dumb ones to comfort me." He smiled. "Or so said the simple Simon to the Pie Man. It's incredible, really. You're driving down the road and any one of a million songs comes on the radio. Easily, you recall every word. What's that all about, Alfie? It's the same thing with dialogue from countless films and television shows. Problem is, I can't remember—"

   "How to say an Act of Contrition? Deus meus . . . That is guilt written all over your face, isn't it Jack? Do you wear the mark of Cain?" He studied Jack's face carefully. "Hmm. Does he or doesn't he? Only his Herr-dresser knows for sure."

   "That would be Frau Eva?"

   "In your case, it would be either Fräulein Hilda or Frau Blücher."

   Jack raised his elbows to shoulder height, stacked his hands under his chin, and sighed, "I ain't got nobody, and nobody cares for me."

   Skeeter shook his head. "No one can remember your name, oh mouse who wrote the disrespectful letter to Santa, but everyone knows that Windy has stormy eyes that flash at the sound of lies."

   Jack lowered his arms and said, "I can think of far worse lyrics. How about 'there were plants and birds, and rocks and things.' THINGS! You can make a gold record these days—win a Grammy Award—with a fourth-grade vocabulary!" He howled with laughter.

   Skeeter continued the song's lyric, "There was sand and hills and rings. WAS! –when wuz we taught to complement nouns and verbs, sixth grade? And RINGS! Rings of what?"

   "Pot smoke, obviously," laughed Jack, who sang more of the song, "'Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain." They convulsed with belly-laughter, Jack managing to spit out, "Sheer poetry! –from an imaginary garden with real shrooms in them." After they quieted, he said, "It's not just rock stars that write crap. Take Robert Frost's 'two roads diverged in a yellow wood.' Surely it was only one road that diverged. A person can only travel one road at a time, unless you're Oscar Wilde or possibly Timothy Leary."

   "It's called 'poetic license.' He was using 'diverged' as an adjective to describe the two roads that lay ahead. I really need to explain this?"

   "But it's not an adjective. It's a verb."

   "Why must you always be a pedantic jerk?"

   "Can't help it. Pedantry fuels the fiery lyrics in my head, and that music is always," he pursed his lips in thought, "inclined to carol, over and over and over again, my friend, there's no end." He looked at Skeeter for recognition. Finding none, he stuck his left thumb in his mouth. He fingered a sax with his right hand.

   "Presley," said Skeeter.

   "Wrong king and you know it."

   "What did you expect from someone who's the right king in the wrong realm?" He looked at Jack pensively. "Did you ever feel as though you were standing on the shore holding your mother's hand one minute and the next thing you knew you were all alone on an island drifting away?"

   "Not really, but unlike you I have friends."

   "You're my friend."

   "I'm your Boswell."

   "Impossible. You're an American. I see you as Ben Franklin's Amos."

   "Now you're the one who's losing it. I do know what you mean, though. There certainly is a lot going on in my life that I never planned."

   "Oh, you probably did." Skeeter walked four fingers through the air. "But the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. You just don't remember the planning sessions." He tapped his skull. "Unreliable memories, especially when it comes to our early years. Our mothers mixed too much Lethe water with our powdered formulas, so beware your image in the convex mirror, John. Keep a weather-eye out for Freud's 'screen memories.' Deckerinnerungen. Be wary of cryptomnesia."

   "Crypto's milk of magnesia?"

   "Cryptomnesia. Think of it as Kryptonite to your subconscious."

   Skeeter looked at the wall clock and asked, "Where has all the time gone?"

   "The eternal question," said Jack. "Where does Time go after it's passed by, some other place for others to enjoy?"

   "Or loathe," said Skeeter. "Crapola happens. You're suggesting the radical notion of 'a time in place' rather than . . . 'a place in time.' Consider the implications."

   The door to the room opened. Danny Brentley's curly head leaned in and asked, "Hey, what are you guys up to?"

   "This is one of the hundreds of meetings where people are learning about nam-myoho-renge-kyo and gohonzon," said Skeeter.

   "To the last detail," added Jack with a salute.

   Danny returned the gesture and said, "You're something else, Jack."

   "I know, both gingham dog and calico cat, the old Dutch clock it told me that."

   "Have you been eavesdropping?" asked Skeeter.

   Danny answered, "As for you, no one has any idea what you are."

   "Excellent! Now what can we do for you?"

   "I need help," he said, stepping inside.

   "You're lucky," said Skeeter. "The doctor is in."

   Jack asked, "And her advice is?"

   "Snap out of it," said Skeeter, who extended his hand. "Five cents, please."

   Danny slapped the textbook he was holding. "I mean memorizing these terms for my Developmental Psychology course. Don't look at me like that. I'm taking it because there's this serious babe I'm dying to, oh, never mind."

   "There are easier ways," said Jack. "Candy is dandy," he waved his beer bottle, "but liquor is quicker."

   "With hot chicks like Pam Wenton, maybe, but not with Professor Jelearn."

   Skeeter pointed at Jack. "He's your man," said Skeeter. "No one knows more about life in the fetal position. Just let him curl up on a sofa and he'll explain it all, if you can keep his thumb out of his mouth."

   "I used to think about all kinds of things while hanging out in my crib," said Jack.

   "Really?" asked Danny.

   "On the first part of my journey," said Jack, "there were grants, by nerds, of clocks with springs." He saw Skeeter smile. "You know, things can always be improved in America." Skeeter laughed.

NEXT SECTION: Chapter 7 - Autumn's Fall (Annotated)