Day 61!: Motherhood

           I called it Motherhood for no reason.  Being truly random.  Even though the more I read about psychology and philosophy and freewill and whatnot, apparently true randomness is impossible.  Like Stephen King writing The Shining, I won't realize my character I'm writing about is just myself.  But that's how you can build up a head of steam and get the words out, to believe it's coming from nowhere, your illogical life provides the "in between the lines".  Ok that's all I have for this stupid tirade.  Now read my stupid story.  I've noticed that my blog hits keep going up even though I have no new fans or comments, this is an interesting development.  Illogical, right?  If I keep doing this maybe I can "monetize" eventually.
           Other thing, I plan on becoming a late bloomer.  I'm "autosuggesting" this, even though from my reading of legitimate science shit I know "autosuggestion" is a load of hooey lewis.  I still have to believe that you can make your brain believe anything you want, because that's why it's a brain.  And that's why I'm still going on Day 61, suckers.
 

            The witch stood and removed a black leather suitcase out of thin air.  She grabbed it as if it were an invisible particle traveling through the air that only she could see. 

            Chief watched eagerly from his chair.  He shifted and shut one eye, the leathery creak underneath him with every movement.  When their eyes made contact he went cold, an imaginary storm cloud forming over his head.  He thought about some of his favorite witches from popular culture, the wicked witch of the west, the warty green nosed generic halloween witches, the witches in Macbeth.  They weren’t normally this active, this lucid.  Although, hanging in front of him suspended at boot in the face height, she refrained from cackling, and the Chief thought this was good because then he didn’t have to go running out of the room.

            “Well if you know who I am already, you should know I’m just here to rescue that… kid.”  Charles stammered, leaning forward on his hands.

            “Sign!”  The witch demanded, with intangible force.  Chief felt sweat starting to build beneath his arms, his forehead going cold.  He slumped forward, suddenly losing the strength in his torso.

            The witch peeled the black leather case open with her long disgusting fingernail and removed the paper from inside with the ring and index finger of the same hand.  She breathed a heavy contiminated clear fume out with a gurgle, not human breathing. Her arms swung over her head and she lunged forward with a strip of parchment, it rolling at the end like a long string of register tape.  It made sense why they had the sticks normally on the top of ancient decrees. 

            Chief started, like he just woke from a bad dream.  He regained his posture and rose to the balls of his feet, his arms dead weight at his side.  He felt like the room was filling with feral bathwater, it creeping up beyond his neck.  He looked down, the leather wasn’t leather, he was sitting on a dishevelled spring mattress, the pointy rusty springs prodding like barbs into his legs.  He couldn’t feel them prodding, although the wetness of blood started to creep into his system.  He thought if he could open his eyes again, like an eagle switching its cornea beyond cloud level, that he might wake up indisposed in a hotel room bathtub.

            He fought the urge to transfer control of his own arms to this witch, although the thought soothed and comforted him.  He could almost see the angel on one shoulder and the rational minded angel on the other, like the stories he had saw on TV of near-death experiences.  He pressed his neck forward like a patient attempting to demonstrate his motor skills to a skeptical doctor, and suddenly snapped back awake, it was still the castle, the witch was still a witch, the creaky mattress was still leather.

            “If you want me to sign that, I’m going to have to read over it first.”  He said, matter of factly, hoping to speed the process up as to not fall for any of her Jedi mind tricks again.  As if put in rewind, the witch dropped the paper into Chief’s lap and retracted to her perch, after seconds she remained there a static image, like she had been there all along.  She resumed her drubbing, humming “God Bless America”.

            Chief knew better than to sign over his soul, but none of this is real, he thought.  Maybe if I sign it over, this whole business will end.

            Pretty run of the mill paperwork, a bunch of boring legal mumbo jumbo followed by revisions, clauses, smaller type, bolded text, red letterings.  He’d signed many of these in the divorce hearings, relinquished his rights to being the primary caretaker, signing alimony checks, all but losing his identity completely.

            He signed and rose, it’s just my name, he thought.  Let’s get this over with.  He didn’t know what prevented his violent urges to just kick this witch into the wall, pound her face into oblivion and destroy this whole imagination.  He somehow knew it wouldn’t fix anything, much less change anything.  Somewhere inside he believed this was the continuation of a dream, where the logic stops making sense when you identify the strings holding he shabby world together.  Everything freezes and you are suddenly the only thing moving in a frozen world. 

            He pried his body up a limb at a time.  The ornamentations in the room stared into his soul, the mirror called for attention, the chairs spoke his name.  The witch wasn’t a witch, she was just resembled a human more than anything else in the room.  He suddenly came to the actualization that maybe he had wandered directly into Charles, this wasn’t really the presence of dark matter.

            He wondered if he had fed the meter, if he had left the stove on.  He suddenly remembered his awful apartment, the broken fireplace which now might as well not have been there, the closet which was jus ta door over a broken section of the wall.  He tore out the carpet in a halfassed attempt to replace it, then halfassedly decided he liked the hardwood floor underneath it enough not to replace it.    He was jealous of Charles suddenly, if this castle here was Charles, he had never reached the point of disconnectivity where his own false world became real.  It had all just become depressing, pathetic, and hyperreal.  He shut it out because he could, the means to the end had been enough.

            He leaned on the wall as he followed it out of the room, suddenly off balance and drunk.  Everything started to feel two dimensional, his eyes were becoming useless, he kept bumping into hidden digits that were surreptitiously hidden like Christmas presents.  He stumbled back into the dark hall, there it was, now the cackle was beginning.  The room with the bookcase was back, but the staircase was gone, the outside world was covered in the bright lights of constant fireworks.  The History book had transformed into a book about Lemons, he couldn’t tell whether this was what it was all along.  Chief began to cackle along with the witch, sticking his head out of the window and pulling his weightless body up at an 180 degree angle with little effort.  He was suddenly underwater, no concept of where he really was.

            An arm reached out and tugged at his coat.  “Buddy!”  A tall mousey girl wearing glasses stared down at him with a friendly, albeit glib expression.  He pushed himself back up onto his feet, and here he was, a hallway extending like a pennant, him at the needle shaped end.  His legs were his again, his facial muscles functioning as well. 

           

            The explosion woke Charles up.  The crisping of the tree branches, crescendo of the flames outward push, he was back to his senses.  He returned to his desk, spinning the pen between his fingers between spending minutes attempting to let his best ideas come to him. 

            “Just think,”  Mr. Pulp said.  “If you just let your mind think, you sit in that chair, think about what you want to create, it creates itself.”

            He understood the man had to reinforce his worldview on others to be succesful.  His mission in these lab experiments was to create new versions of himself through immersion therapy, it was like learning a new language.  He wasn’t all that crazy, anyway, just faciliating the creative inventions of these young scientists.  I’m here to discover how to get good at anything, he thought.  I’m not here because I’m already good at anything.

            Nancy dropped off the paper wth his thermos and lunchbox.  She rolled her eyes, she was getting sick of him forgetting it on the hood of his car every day.  She didn’t understand how a young up-and-comer, someone who’s job she envied, could make such thoughtless mistakes on a daily basis.  He paged through his rolodex, leaning back in his padded office chair.  The calendar said it was the twenty first, it was his two month anniversary at this place.  The time flew by, between his constant anxiety and difficulty in learning how to cook for himself his time had all but sucked itself up.  His life was now part of a vaccuum, he was inside of it, no longer struggling on the outside trying to force his way in.  He finally relaxed, let the tides of time take over, the rhythm of life ease him in, baby step after baby step.

            He opened the door to his office and peaked down the hall.  Cubicles were a thing of the past, Mr. Pulp had said, we paid the extra money to get you your own offices because you need to make your own place here.  He had emphasized this fact ad nauseum, we want you to be comfortable.  Still, at the end of his calendar he saw a deadline approaching, he would have to present a general concept of what his research would be.  Something about memory, he thought.  The way it’s connected to imagination.  It’s an intrinsic study, you just come up with a test and you learn from the results, not the concept.

            He shook his coat loose from the deep mirrored closet, seeing the reflection of the second floor secretary on the sliding doors mirror as he closed it.  “Hold my calls,”  He said with self indulgent delight.  “It’s funny I get to tell someone to hold my calls.”  Nancy scoffed after the elevator shut behind him.

            Mr. Pulp was showing blue blazered men the facilities, the state of the art, clandestine immaculate working conditions.  His enthusiasm was easily translated into any language, the men followed him with their eyes tiredely, it was hard to tell whether they were investors or donors.  Charles passed through the heavy glass door, pulling his keys out of his windbreaker.  The smell of outside made him sneeze, the pollen getting to him quickly.  He got in the car and left the windows up, readjusting his seatbelt and mirror and turning the radio on.

            *urges it forward*