Day 48

Just a post today.

            The man greatly resembled Charles mom, he realized.  Charles was placed in lodgings in a unfamiliar camp deep in the woods.  Aboriginal friends from the depth of the forest looked on through their spyglasses.  The thick canopy of trees permitted no sunlight, but plenty of photosynthesis.  From overhead, this area looked like a green mountain.

            Charles spent the next weeks in complete solitude.  The man left him there alone, returning to his ordinary form and running through a laundry list of dos and don’ts with him before his departure.

            “There’s plenty to eat if you know where to look,”  The man gestured to the fungus on trees, the berries hanging from tall branches, salamanders and slugs that lived along the course of the stream which provided clean water for him.  “By the end of your tenure, you may discover what’s missing…  Continuing on, here’s your bathroom facility…”

            The man gestured to the forest for each different utility that came down the list.  Each time, Charles would notice thigns which weren’t applicable to the series before.  “This is your kitchen,”  He pointed at a fire which burnt furiously in a contained pit, its most remote embers leaping for their independence and disappearing.  “That’s Bork.”  A shirtless man with tribal tattoos and a totem pole for a head glanced up from the folded paperback in his mitt, and then back down. 

“Does Mr. Goodwin know you brought another one down?”  He indifferently asserted under his breath.  Rising with an inward sigh, he picked up an oversized log and heaved it into the abyss of the fire. 

“Ignore him, he’ll do his job, he might complain a little bit, but he’ll keep working.”  The angel man said, using his hand as a partition.

He lead Charles to a section which was adorned with a giant white line down the middle.  “I think you get it, but you don’t cross this line and no one will bug you.”

Normal sized eyes peered from beyond the line, and then normal sized unnormally dressed folks assembled in a line.  They looked like a hungry defensiveline anxiously waiting for the quarterback to call the play.  All and all, it looked too staged for Charles, who considered stepping over the line just to see what would happen.

There was a store on the premises, the man informed Charles with much proudness.  “They use beans and rope for currency.  It’s a complicated form of weaving which we don’t expect you to understand.”  The man left Charles to the whim of the man inside, who was busy helping an elderly couple choose an air heater.  “There’s a condimium on the other side, prime locale.”  The absent voice of the man informed Charles.

Charles bought some groceries, a hammock, and a pair of shorts.  He had been wearing the same scientist suit for what seemed like months, when in actuality it had only been about two days.  He had no idea why he hadn’t changed when he was at home.  Home, he assumed with the logical extrapolation of recent events, was destroyed or on the moon. 

Feet shuffled passed the closed door of his cabin, and they disappeared when he opened it.  He spent the nights reserved to thought, finding the problems of his world growing further and further away.  He wouldn’t have a chance to fill in the missing persons report, but he himself was now a missing person, and he could always say he was kidnapped.  He sat in a chair with a blue back across from the door, with a great view out of the window of beautifully colored trees shedding their leaves.  The wind was a playful spirit, reassuring Charles that there was more to life than the wasted time he spent doing whatever boring work he had been up to.

He took long walks with a flashlight, passing neighborhing spirits who walked past him in the same tired pursuit.  The flashlight was in all manors necessary, but it also worked as a sort of magnifying glass, drawing attention and focus to whatever was in front of him.  All of the walking paths in the area led Charles directly back to his cabin, at night it was nearly impossible for him to find the white line that he should not stumble over.

He had a gas powered stove in his chamber which he used to cook stews for himself.  The time consuming nature of the cooking helped fill his nights with fragrances, often advertising a better taste than his food would possess.  He invariably burnt himself attempting to bite into beef stock and radishes too readily, but snacking only made him hungrier and he found himself more often than not insatiably hungry.  He eventually abandoned the idea of cooking alone for the more entertaining prospect of befriending Bork, who cultivated more satisfying smells.

Bork used a giant rod to skewer hogs that were kept in a soundproof pen.  “No use hearing them squeel”, he shrugged to Charles the first time he stabbed one through.  He’d hold them over the enormous fire like smores, shaking them off the rod violently and unapologetically when they were suitably burnt.  He seemed indifferent to Charles’ presence, resigning himself to the position of a permanent fixture in these woods.

Charles ate canned ham on a stick, Bork wouldn’t let him have any of his roasted pig.  He ripped the entrails out of the pig and cast them into the forest, eliciting oohs and ahs from an invisible audience by his sheer showmanship.  He ate the face of the pig, starting with the nostrils, and placed the rest in a purple tupperware container that he air conditioned underground.

Bork told a story about his lost tribe, who he believed was still alive somewhere.

“There was a second tribe in the forest back then.  It lived on the other side of the lake.  They ate nothing but fruit, grains, and leaves, and were not happy when we killed and skinned their dogs and swine.  We coaxed them over about it being just a misunderstanding, but when they saw the way our young ones tore into the bones of the creatures their faces didn’t look good… they were mortified.”  Charles felt like he was watching an old B-Movie with a white guy pretending to be indian.  He already knew the next part, his people got into a fight with the other tribe, they killed eachother, yada yada yada.  He continued anyway, “So, I’m a kid like 4 or 5, I’m knee deep in guts, I make the serious decision to come back here and live on the pig meat.  I meat the red caped guy, a few other guys in suits, they want to invest here, keep the commerce coming, keep the pigs coming, yeah.”

He explained this over the course of hours but time went slowly.  Charles could feel someone watching them from deep in the woods somewhere.  Or maybe there was a group of them.

“Nice mullet.”  Bork commented as he unwrapped a twinkie and shoved it into his gullet.  A man wearing a full denim suit and a red hat turned backwards sat at the logs across from them.  The logs formed a semi circle, the opposite side being a pile of lumber.  Soon a man in a grey hooded sweatshirt and a tall skinny woman wearing breakaway jogging pants.  They talked among themselves about the weather and not being on such a kind of retreat before in their life.  Charles joined the conversation but had nothing of value to add.

When the darkness started to scatter the flames into shadows, Bork got grim and serious.  He insisted by grunting repeatedly that everyone get up and join him in a prayer circle.  The intensity of the flames picked up as he sprinkled a chemical mixture from a bag onto it,

“Do not be deceived easily by your enemies.  They will bore into your mind until you feel it is part of you.”  He hummed in harmony with the wind and flames.  The wind went higher, and he went higher.  He met it with tremendous vigor, closing his eyes and flexing his upper body muscles as he rose in a loud crescendo.  The observers clapped humorlessly.

A projection appeared in the trees of Anne, with duct tape over her mouth and chains constricting her movement.  Charles abruptly sat up and spit out coconut milk. 

“This is…”  Bork called to the top of the tree canopy.  “This is the one you lost.”

“I lost her, yes, I did lose her.  She was kidnapped, wasn’t she?”

The guy with the red hat stretched his arms over his head, said he was “hitting the sack”, and flashed a peace sign as he walked off.  The man in the grey hooded sweatshirt was dozing while propped up on one elbow.  The woman in the gray sweatshirt, however, watched intently. 

“If you’re going to find her, you will have to cross the white line.”  Bork stated the obvious.

“Should I arm myself?  Do I disguise myself as one of them?” 

Charles looked ridiculous.  He gutted the pillows of a couch that he discovered in the dumpster behind the little market place.   He bought black paint with a bucket of “money” he borrowed from Bork, who wasn’t all bad apparently.  He was pretty sure the black paint on his flesh would keep his pores from breathing and that this could lead to asphyxiation, so was careful to only make little dots on his own skin.  Shoving a hatchet inside of the three piece woolen snowman aboriginal suit he checked himself in the mirror. 

“You are pretending to be the sand god Obari.  You kind of looked like him already.”  Bork pointed at a picture in a periodical magazine.  It was in an issue which featured modern tribes that still used idolatry. 

Charles thought he looked ridiculous.  He didn’t know who he was dealing with or how he would find them on the other side of the line, but felt required to cross it anyway.  He grunted and walked with long strides, a character tick that Bork promised would go over swimmingly.