On the Third Day, Boulder (barrier)
VI.vii.
— Seven. Heaven. Elevenenineightseven. Tricks or treats in a He-Man cheap plastic full body sleeve toddling about with a hard plastic wicked orange pumpkin carved like a candy bank held in his hand like barbel by a pliable black plastic strap, twisted on itself severally. Candy was still an emotional experience for Milo, the immersive sweet stickliness of a Starburst oozed scrumptiously around his palate, and delight melted to transcendence like chocolate kisses when this photograph was taken, his mother would say as she strolled through the scrapbook with family friends or visiting relatives. Not all of it, though, just the last part. I don’t know what most of that means.
Unsticking his gaze from the mer-siren for just a moment, he settled on his mother again. “Why so small?” he thought he asked, for she appeared miniaturized down there at the end of small twins, one of whom he felt close to, the other an idea of a king of a remote tribe in the Amazon, distant and undisturbable. He could at best only know of one. How could she be so far from these little legs? Does it matter? Does it antimatter? He would one day think in his dreams.
Rarefied and secured in a tiny plastic Petri dish sanctuary, lived a young man who had but leg, and it was rituals before he was allowed to use a carved staff to improve his balance. So hop around he would, and he got very adept at it. They would take him along on hunts because he was more precise than other trackers at predicting exactly where the prey went. With his strength and exceptional one-vector balance he moved like a four-legged beast, knew exactly what physical choices the hunted would make when presented the terrain. To him, it was as clear as a paved road, or a drawn arrow. There is always only one best way to negotiate certain terrain.
On one such occasion, amidst crude remarks and insensitive japes from his compatriots — make no mistake, merely because his difference was useful and made him an invaluable asset, it does not necessarily make anyone accepted, respected or liked — he stopped suddenly as he first saw the doe along the path that he’d expected to find her on. She was pregnant, very recently. So much so that he was certain they would find the birthed foal nearby. She was mortally wounded, fallen against an arced boulder in the rocky section of the forest. She looked at him as the rest of the hunting party quickly arrived.
The doe seemed remote and cringing from his touch, as if thrust backward onto the concavity of a globe, his hands didn’t reach as far as he knew they could. And the plainting mew of the deer reminded him of the face of his Queen Mother, who didn’t kill him even under contrary advice once his deformity was evident. Her face mutating in the distance was then branded with his own as well. This multi-headed hydra lay there still, but breathing.
Do you want the kill?
No, he replied. But then reflected on his own destiny that he once saw in a dream of a fictional land of huge shiny stone huts as vast as the eye could see. Where people traveled in enormous shiny beetle shells that moved themselves and they ate foods in colors he’d never seen before. He loved telling his mates about it and anyone would listen, as it gave him license to revisit this domain of magic and fairies. They either sat agape in amazement getting small glimpses of this unchartable invisible city of dream tribes or they would fold their hands over their chest and try to fall asleep near the barking fire to perhaps encourage a dream of this sanctuary, far outside our plastic bubble of existence.
And the boy was wise and eventually became King of the tribe and the nearby adherents.
On the day he reflected upon this, however, he changed his mind.
— Yes. Give me the bow. And as he lifted the weapon and aimed, he believed that this was a distinct sign from the ancients, and perhaps this was how he gets out of this prison and ascends.
And as he released the string he realized he had made a grievous error.
As distant as she was, Milo just wanted to reach out and hug her back. She was wearing the same blouse she wore in church that day Milo first shook. He felt his most recent tremors relax from his muscles, and the anxiety of loss and fear that he would be judged heartlessly and ruthlessly for failing to protect the burden he carried. The sin before original sin. That to atone for it, he would need to be sentenced to death.
But when he falls on that fateful march, he will be able to take comfort in the loving arms of his mother, garbed in her costume of God. Whether she needs to bend down to pull him up by the armpits into an hug, or she needs to launch herself onto her tip-toes to reach you, her embrace will always be well-stocked, well-prepared and inviting.
‘Don’t go on, my son.’
But mama, I must.
“No, you’re not leaving for my sake, Milo. If it were for me, you would stay and be the part of this family that I need. You are doing this for your father. Because of your father.”
This is my path. My judgment. Not his.
‘Because you think that this is what it takes to be a big man. You always wanted to be a little man when you were just a boy, and now you want to be a big man and you’re still a little boy.’
I understand one thing more now that I didn’t as a little boy. That we don’t belong here.
‘Is this how you get to belong? Is this what you want?’
She had a knack for demanding responses to unanswerable questions. No, they’re not unanswerable, answerable, she hiccuped after several glasses of wine, you just gotta think about them. Yet she could never share examples of how one might accurately think them through.
But if you fight through your own defensiveness and give her a hug, she buries herself right in, as if greedy for your body heat, greedy to leave an impression. The potato salad had gone cold at Dad’s funeral, and she couldn’t endure the cavalcade of industry leeches, paparazzi and other parasitic hangers-on. He had gone young, but not so young that anyone had claimed he still had his greatest works left inside him. Milo still had his wheelchair, but generally got around with his pimp-daddy cane, as Dad referred to it, and reactive stabilizing brace.
He had brought Nina with him, even though they were only recently hooked up, and he couldn’t really tell yet if she was with him for a joyride with fame or because she was really interested in him. What he presumed from his epiphanal instant of broadened perspective was that they weren’t going to last long. So he considered that he would enjoy the ride of her writhing, riddling curves as well, and they’d have his old room to themselves. It was a way of showing Dad’s memory that you were indeed a big man with his own merits that extended beyond the obligation of respect. As if he could have just found purchase for his seed anywhere, that he deigned in his kingly whim to accept you as his only son. He paid for a handful of several others, but the money only meant so much, which Milo interpreted as meaning he wasn’t going to inherit anything more than his alleged half-siblings, all of whom were denied paternity tests at the last minute in exchange for a heftier down payment. Milo never got to ask his father if he was as surprised as Milo was that there were so few “gold-diggers” given.
But he felt strangely bold that day, as if shielded by a cocoon of invulnerability from emotional violence. Some load of his burden had lifted, even if he hadn’t planned for its removal. He didn’t care to investigate more deeply into the impact his father’s sudden death would have on his own psyche, he was merely going to enjoy this newfound freedom of mobility through the experiential world.
He calls the moment of collapse a “co-incidence,” a remembering all at once of all of his experiences up to some point which, looked at from the present, seemed to be of his biological death far in the future. But now it’s nothing more than the memory of remembering everything about his existence. So he still has to hunt and peck at his own psychological infrastructure to revisit fuzzier instances of once-experienced memory.
Since the incident, daily experiences do actually seem more “vivid,” twice (as they are) imprinted on the landscape of the self. He has an exceptional intuition for what to do next, even when he isn’t actively attempting to recall the “co-incidence.” He has had to contemplate and he knows he’s done it many times, but that he never comes to a better conclusion of it, even at the end of selves. He believes it has something to do with purposeful action, meaning that which is not purely biological and phenomenologically evident, but the choices we make in conjunction with other sentient entities. They’ve shaped us, and we make a request to shape them through shared experiences and communication. At least that’s the case when we act in allegiance with our better selves, and we resort to force when relying on our baser instincts. The “co-incidence” made him smarter for just these reasons. Some part of him, even if deep-down and cached in the subconscious, already knows it’s view on all of life’s lessons, a perspective forged unique among all others, and not specifically because of his special glorious encounter with coincidence. But because every single instantiation is uniquely writ and encrypted, to be decoded and understood solely by oneself. (We’d best pray we’re watching!)
At first, Milo experienced déjà vu so incessantly that he had no idea how much time had passed as his conscious self tried to unpack the layered experiential data from the emotional activation in the present, the cursor of attention had lost connection with the synchronizing signal as executive function was providing too much information. It’s not mechanically prepared to need such explicit governing. Adaptation, that ever-loving survival St. Bernard kit, kicked in, and his perception began to deprioritize anticipated duplicate data originating from deep memory retrieval.
No matter how vivid or brilliant a particular ‘future’ memory, he would never be able to predict exactly how he would feel when those moments arrived. He could understand that something was going to hurt, and he mentally and emotionally rebelled against the ultimate execution of the action, but the pain of the gravel grinding into his skin he only experienced once — as it occurred in the present. So on the whole he came to value the sensational more highly and deeply enjoyed the thrill of the ride.
So Milo’s body was implicitly more intensely ‘home’ than it is for most, his being decorated with the ever-temporary savor of his lineage of moments. And love, this enveloping loving energy that started in his mother’s bosom and radiated from the ends of time to the ends of his limbs to his heart, was a deeply whelming and humbling bliss.
Whether his dick was pistoning inside of Nina’s tight and complicit pussy or his mother wrapped herself around his ribcage, the ecstasy was profound, and in such moments he felt protected by the sheltering branches of knowledge and could relax, consoled, safe and sacred.
This is the last time he will see his mother’s face as a boy.
When he next sees her, he will have returned from the underworld as a man.
Won’t you be with me then, my friend?
— No, I’m not going with you, Moses. This is between you and Aaron, and you’ll need to work it out yourselves. Who am I? Well, either you or Aaron, of course, but I’d be damned if I knew which one!
Then overpowering glare of the sun pushes us into a forced state of deference. I cannot look at you, for you are so brilliant that it will hurt me to try to view or even understand you. Your formulae are beyond my control, so I only ask:
Set me down on the ground to set me free.
“6”