The Wolves

‘The rest of the world is like a war we celebrate…’

Will was on a train, at night.  Dea sat across from him in the traincar compartment, reading aloud briefly from a book.  It was just the two of them in the compartment.

Dea finished the quote, ‘…undying.’

Will shook his head, trying to distract himself, detach his face from the jaws of a monster.  A dragon, or, a lion.  He took in a deep breath and let it out, looking out the window.

Corridors of trees rose up alongside the moving train, zipping past, fell halls and depths into the wood they passed through, all to the North.  The compartment was on the right shoulder of the forward moving vehicle.  Will thought of industry, of machines, looking out the window into the fading swamp-green of the almost end of day.  Two wolves ran with the train.  One white.  One black.  Appearing, out the window, many legged so fast they moved.  They seemed to fly across the rising and falling ground, the humps and hills of rising earth embanked in mounds along the tracks, or letting out and cresting into the fields of standing trees.  The wolves moved like insects, towards a light hanging ever forward and away.  They were a delicate fury of limbs like teeth and pelts of thick, flexing fur, throwing themselves forward, unendingly breathing.  Minutes were left before night would claim the whole of the train, the wolves, Will and Dea, pushing day another circle away, ever needed dawn frozen and wasted till its tortured re-arrival and rest.  Together Will, Dea, and the two wolves headed West with the train’s other passengers, away from where the absenting sun would most likely rise on the morrow.

 In Makiki before departure Will and Dea had waited to board together, Will talking to the two wolves briefly before the creatures had silently stalked off to the rear of the train platform to wait.  A cloud had descended down upon the crowd then, from nowhere seemingly, as the group waited for the traincar doors to open.  A cloud that drank white impressions from their bodies, faces, and bulging pockets.  Somewhere, someone on the platform had screamed in surprise.  Lightly, softly.  Then the cloud was no more, dissipating and, seemingly, reforming as feet and legs, enormous and bare and dark.  There had risen a yammering of mistrust and consent in the passengers waiting.

Dea had put up Will in her house a good ten months then, after their meeting and the affair that had started.  Hopping back and forth from the mainland continent once, the couple had pretty much stayed together for a year and a half, listing into each other’s roil and naked hurt.  Lusting.  Fucking.  Eating and organizing and living together.  The trip to the mainland had brought them closer together, and, they thought, as they had discussed, it was possible that this trip would too.  If not… then the time had come wherein the two of them would have to say goodbye.  Will was following the train as far as Pearl City, where a solstice celebration was to be had.  There was a park where he had once sat with The Empress.  He was returning there.  All these ghouls he had gathered – nearly two years of a love affair and so much to show for it – he needed to let loose now into the world, in some way.  Finally ready, again.  To begin…

Above and aside the boarding doors of the train a Plenish Kitya had fully formed, standing up out of the dissipating cloud.  The giant humynoid figure stood unmoving, naked except for a long pair of enormous trousers patched together with bed-blankets, as was most common for Plenishes to be clothed with.

Dea would be leaving off to her own celebrants and festivities, on the shores to the West.  Then?  Another trip to the mainland, for her.  Another adventure to chase, alone this time.  Probably…

The Kitya, looking out to the East, stood thirty stories tall.  Its nose was nearly as long as a humyn persyn itself, its legs wrapped in a hundred quilts stitched to one another with cord.  It wore no belt.  Its voice had rumbled down from above the crowd waiting on the platform to board,

‘Freeeenzy hofa nather whilling…  You’d beeee nather whilling… fishhh kildrennnn.’

A couple people called back up to it, shouting.  There were always those who tried to communicate with the Plenishes.

Will had stood in his plain overcoat, curmudgeonly and smoking, the cigarette like a twig stuck out his fist.  Dea, next to him on the platform, was reading from the book in her hands.  Every couple minutes she would read aloud, one line or two.  Or she would laugh, then turn a page.  Occasionally she glanced up, looking at the Kitya or over at the two wolves.  They waited patiently on their haunches down the line at the rear traincar, sitting, watching the crowd.  The black one panted with their head hanging down, their mouth open.  The wolves, unbothered by any of the trainstation workers, looked as small as mice next to the giant bare right foot of the Plenish.  The two beasts were nearly as big as a mean or womyn, their heads and snouts longer than a forearm.  They were as large, at least, as either Will or Dea.  The white one had watched Dea as they all waited, not without her noticing.

After a time a whistle sounded.  The traincar doors opened.  People started to pile on.

Neither one of them, Dea nor Will, thought of much as they had boarded through the traincar doors.  They made their way to their compartment, Will looking down at his ticket every couple seconds.  They had found the room, gone in.  Put down their bags.  Taken their seats.  Will had sat down facing forward, to the West.  Dea faced backwards.  East.

The couple had never known a love as pulling as theirs.  As engulfing, straining, yanking, breaking.  It pulled at them, pulled them toward one another, empty vesseled and terror muted shattering.  It was a cacophony.  But, Will had thought right before the whistle had sounded the train’s departure, furiously blank, limpid, calm, …it is ending now.

Out the window as the two of them rode night had come fast.  Will, staring and musing over the thoughts of the hour, had seen the train draw past the Plenish Kitya giant and speed up, leaving the station.  The wolves, the black one named Hope, the white, Fear, ran with the train tirelessly.  Occasionally Hope would glance into the window of the compartment at Will, panting and sprinting, not a paw or stride missed or misplaced.  They ran inhumynly fast; but, neither wolf was humyn.  Fear, their eyes ahead and always shining, bright, had sprinted in front of Hope, always a pace ahead, a streak of white blowing through the distance toward the setting sun.

Night began to fall.

The two wolves were Will’s most trusted companions.  Trusted more, he thought, than he trusted Dea.  It could not be helped though.

A blackness took all of the forest from sight then, and Will had looked away from the trainlights and from the window, glancing distractedly around the compartment.  He needed a fucking cigarette.  Coth damn.  …

There was a silence in the traincar, like the click clicking of the wheels on the tracks became as muted as bread for just a moment.  A war we celebrate undying… Will thought.  What the fuck does that mean.  She must have read it to me cause she knew I would like it.  All around him Will could feel a cushion of place: starchy, fluffy, coddling.  He wanted to retch, but swallowed and snapped his head up to look at Dea.  She looked up at him, the book in her hands, her round face empty, even of expectation.  A second passed without inflection in the air.  And then she smiled.

‘What?’

‘I wasn’t sure if you were still breathing,’ Will replied.  He had not been sure whether or not she had still been breathing.

Dea rolled her eyes and Will was immediately exasperated with himself.  He ground his ass down into his seat, trying to force his body to swallow its need, its urge, to speak.  I cannot do this, he thought.  I do not want to do this.  Why are we doing this?

…

He looked back out the window, thought of the long metal line of traincars, thought of the empty compartments and the full compartments, thought of places, forests and roads between here, where he was, and Pearl City.  The wolves ran and ran.  He needed a cigarette.  The thought stole him from his worry about talking.  Rubbing one sneakered foot with the other, the left with the right, Will let out another loud sigh.  But he was lost in thought.  He did not know the noises he made.

The wolves had names. They were people.  They, Will guessed, only talked to Will; but he did not know that Dea had spoken before with both of them, though Hope more so.  Fear on few occasions.  They had been given to him as sort of gifts; or, he had welcomed them into his life and they he, into theirs, nine years ago.  A cab driver, in Northern Washington.  Will had been picked up on the way to the airport at Sea Tac, leaving from Tacoma, and the cab driver had asked him where he was going.  The conversation had gone like this:

‘Uh…, oh, oh…’ Will had adjusted himself in the cab’s backseat, acclimating to the idea of the ride to the airport, then the getting on the plane, the clean starched passenger cabin, the fear and aversion, not exactly revulsion, at the idea of being in the airports, being around so many humyns…  More like disgust.  Disgust and fear.  But baseless, objectless.  A palpable rejecting rejected vomiting of attention.  ‘I, um, I got to get to the airport,’ he said.

The cab had pulled South along Tacoma Avenue, the main drag of downtown Tacoma, highest in a set of parallel avenues set astride a tiered hill unfolding upward from the harbor.  Will’s mind had still been grasping from the night previously spent at his apartments.  Two blocks from the Public Library, one from the downtown jail, three floors up.  On the Northwest corner of a building of apartments called The Emerson.

Recoiling fright.  Cloaks of invisibility.  Dreamtime porridge.  His then close friend Bumose loud and obnoxiously caustic the whole of the evening.  When not mothering.  When not calming, reassuring, supporting.  When not mocking.  Anything.  Everything.

Will did not know it then, in the cab, though he knew it on the train ride, thinking: that night was nothing, nothing contrasted with what would come, only a matter of weeks after he was given Hope and Fear.

                ‘What do you do?’ the cabby had asked.

                ‘Oh, I, uh, I write.  I write poetry,’ Will had said.

                ‘Funny,’ the cabby said, speaking slowly, ‘I write poetry too.  I’ve been writing poetry for twenty years.  …  Driving my cab during the day, writing poetry at night.  …  To God.’

                Will’s attention turned like a sick twist in the mouth.  Felicoth…

                And right then he had heard it.

                Mewling.  From the front passenger seat.

                Will coughed.  ‘Um…, what’s that you got there?’ he had asked.  Earnest all at once.  Past the point of needing distraction.  Steered clear by abrupt and slinking curiosity.  He leaned up and over the seat, politely poising with his hands on the headrest.  ‘Oh…’

                There was a basket.  A blue towel in it, half hidden under two wolf pups, one white as a feather, and one black as a hammer.  The cabby didn’t even turn around.  ‘Oh,’ Will said again, staring at the two wolves.  The pups looked to him like they were not really real.  He knew somehow, then even, in that first moment, without fully hearing the cabby’s talking to him and without fully knowing where he was, but knowing that he was, that the pups were meant to be his.  He knew then, already knew, that they were two of his companions in this life.  The cabby was just a bystander in-between his life with them and all that had come before.  And the cabby said then,

                ‘You couldn’t take these guys off my hands could you?’

                ‘Really?’ Will had said, not bemused at all, just…richly confounded.  Blank.  Warm.  The wolf pups smelled like a newly powered-up computer belly, like two living potpourri bags from his parents’ estates.  They smelled like they were still too small to wound with their tiny leering mouths and teeth.  Like they had been dipped, full bodied, in milk.  The white one looked up at him, shiny and black nose like a single point of an ever taller candle, reaching up and up and up, eyes looking uncomprehendingly into Will’s.  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do,’ Will said.  The black one seemed to be half asleep, gazing directly into the pho-leather of the seatback, mewing slowly, evenly and repeatedly, at nothing.

                ‘You’ll see you needn’t do much of anything at all.  They raise themselves these days, like everyone since your generation.’  The cabby pulled onto the highway, lefting into the basic, snotty sadness of the wet concrete.  That strip of highway, mournful.  Heading East now, and then North – they would turn North after that, soon, and be quieter for the most of the ride – Will and the cabby looked together out the windshield of the car and watched the highway lights grin to midnight.

               

                When Will had returned back to Tacoma from his trip, the visiting of the family, the new family, and all of it, he had walked up to his building, The Emerson, ready to talk with his roommates and be home at last.  Done with the courtly ordeal that was his father’s militaristic idealistic love, Will’s unknown-self, his father’s unknown self…  Will had climbed the steps of The Emerson to the front door and the basket had been right there.  On the stoop.  Set, sitting, to the right of the glass door.

The two pups, one week older, but no different.  Will had looked on them and breathed long and deep, letting out the breath, grounded.  Sitting down next to the basket, adjusting the blue towel that mostly covered the two of them, he tried and failed to figure out what was going on.  This is a city.  There are people here.  The cabby let these two dogs, these…wolves, to me…  I can have them now.  I don’t know how to take care of them.  I just want to be home…  …  …What a fuckin trip.  He looked out into the street, to the professional building across the road, mindblank.  For some reason he thought of dancing as he sat there on the steps.  Thought of dancing with the two pups biting at his legs, his feet; all people all full and joyous; Bumose and Unity, his roommates, dancing round in a circle with him, hands clasped, heads back.  All people there, somehow, and joyous, and happy.  Celebrating.  Rapturous.  Throats calling and heads back.  Will just…sat there.  Trying to think.  Trying to figure it out.  He felt, then, like what really was.  He felt correct: like he had come home.

                The two wolves had begun mewling then, sniffing at the air, poking their noses out of the blanket.  He’d have to name them…

After 30 minutes and a failed attempt to light a cigarette Will had taken up the basket and climbed the stairs to the third floor and his corner rooms.

                Painted birds, wings outstretched, adorned the walls of the traincar compartment.  The paint was of an older type in appearance; muted olives, bark browns, reds and oranges not much different from one another.  The birds seemed all pigeons.  Curlicues and lines of fan and trump sashed and coiled around the corners and round the bottoms of the walls between the bed and the trunk, the trunk and the seats.  The only reason Will could afford such a compartment to ride in was because of the government and his thieving.  The swindling.  The system.  Capitalism and the State.  Such a fat pay check for poets in today’s world…  So little to keep one from doing one’s work, right?

                Will remained looking out the window, looking out through the reflection of the burnt light of the room, into the dark night that was getting ever darker.  The visible trees were closer together now, and deeply set across a flat thoroughfare.  They were passing through a thicker wood.  There seemed a wall, all made of passing lines of tree, like railroad tiers set on end, like another track – outside the window and squarely sideways – running on and on with Will’s eyes the only wheels following its lines.  It was just passed eight hours passed midday.  Solstice was a week’s time away.  Alongside the traincars, through and around and past the trees dense with night, the wolves ran.  One white.  One black.  Thrown, it seemed, through the air and across the earth.

                He had taken them upstairs with him and laid the basket down outside his door.  A name was written on the door.  Not Will’s name, but the name of the apartment itself.  Will’s apartment.  ‘Arco Domus’.  Scrawled on the door in gold script, (done by Will himself, in a thick gold-paint pen).  And written beneath the title, in red and black marker the phrase: ‘Welcome to the afterlife.’

               

…

               

                ‘This doesn’t make sense,’ Dea said from across the train compartment.

                ‘What doesn’t make sense?’

                ‘This book is supposed to be funny, but it’s just fucking tragic.  These kids are living in this old abandoned house outside of their old town during the war and they’re just fucking with each other and they never get it together.  And all the adults want to kill them.  Fucking book.’

                Will looked at her.  Dea quickly was annoyed at his glare and looked back to the book.  ‘Never mind.’

                ‘No.  Why is it supposed to be funny.’

                ‘I don’t know.  I just said that.’

                …  The two of them paused.

                ‘What are we doing, Dea?’ Will asked.  She let out a measured, exasperated breath and looked up at him again.

                ‘What do you mean?’  There was no answer.  Will knew that if he was going to try and talk through this he had better not go about it like this, so…casual, so haphazard.  She didn’t care.  She didn’t want to hear it.  Dea didn’t even think it was happening.

                ‘I, um…’ Will stuttered, and faltering he tried to gain the ground to talk.  A child’s voice came high and shrill and happy from the traincar compartment in front of them, some indistinct phrase.  It sounded like, ‘OoOsome wentatue!’

‘Is this what we are supposed to be doing?’

                ‘What are you talking about?’ Dea responded.  Her eyes.  He never looked into her eyes.  He didn’t want the screaming to come back again, in this place.

                ‘I,’ he began slowly, very measured, carefully trod, ‘I don’t think that we are working, as a couple.  And we have talked about this time that is here now, when we knew it was going to come – those months ago.  I think that time has finally happened; the time for us to break things off peaceably, and leave in friendship.  Merry met, merry part.  …  I think too that it is important that we stay together and be married.  You have said you do not want to do that; even though when I proposed to you on the beach you said that you would.’  Will sat up and adjusted himself in the chair.  He coughed in the back of his throat.  Post nasal drip.  Swallowed.  ‘I know you are a demon.  Or one of the faithful – and you will not tell me.  It doesn’t matter if this is true or not, or if it makes sense.  Regardless of whether you actually are these things you are them to me.  Does that make sense to you?’

                She took in a deep breath and steadied herself.  ‘Yes.’  Her face looked open to him, blank and open and careful and benign.  Not carefully benign… just – right.

                Will hacked at his post nasal drip again.  Breathed in.  Stayed quiet.  Looked down between them at the floor.

               

                They were silent for a long while.

                ‘Do you want to be with me?’

                ‘The question is not whether I love you, you know,’ Will responded.  ‘Do you know that?’

                She was still.  ‘I guess.  …  No, I suppose I don’t.  I don’t understand.’

                They were getting back into it, but things were still calm.  Still.  Quiet.  Still.  Calm.

                ‘There are five worlds, right?’ he said to Dea.

                ‘The context-planes aren’t worlds, Will.’  She was going to get short with him.  Fed up.  He needed to be careful.

                ‘I suppose I need to be exact with my words – So … let me talk slowly, then.  Please.’  Dea took in another breath and remained immobile, sitting, calm, not thrown by the urges he had to deal with, not lashed and roped by the addictions, the thoughts, the slights – and the views of the planes, that fucking cacophony.  Not like he was.  He didn’t know how she did it.  She waited.  How?!?

                ‘On Jefiadeth there are many religions,’ he started, ‘And people are born and live and die.  Anarchism is the closest we can come to the truth of how to live ethically on that plane.  Anarchism excludes most mention of any revealed truth of any religion.  It postulates a way out of colonialism and domination itself.  In Jefiadeth, in that context-plane, those are the only pressing problems.  Capitalism.  Hunger.  Domination in humyn and non-humyn society.  The high-ups who want to order all of us into their quazi-ghettos and real ghettos.  How we live our real, physical lives, in our bodies, that’s what matters in the place of Jefiadeth.  There you’re just Dea, my friend, comrade.  My lover.

On Transgrenthiaden, though, there is only one religion.  Felicoth’s religion.  It’s not just a different world within the same world.  It’s not just a context-plane.  It’s a reality.  Separate.  Overlapping, overlaid, and distinct.  Happening simultaneously to Jefiadeth and the other worlds.  And more, there is only one context-plane in Transgrenthiaden’s world, not five.  And there you are as ignorant as me.  I don’t know who I am there…what I am doing…  I think I might know, but I’m not sure, and I’m not sure I want to be sure.  But there your soul, your self, is as endless as mine, and you are as endangered as I – by Felicoth.  Felicoth…’ Will broke off.  Took a breath.  Continued.  ‘On Wuoelia there needs not even be a religion, per se.  You are a part of everyone else and a part of who all of you are…to me; I alone interact with you.  I know how ridiculous that sounds.  But hear me out.  Dea, I know there is not just one person in Wuoelia.  There are two.  There you are…an angel, or something.  Or a facet of the Goddess.  The third plane is not solitude like they think.  It is relational dualism.’

‘Not a Kitya?’ Dea interrupted, looking at him with scorn.  ‘I get to be of the Goddess, and not a Kitya?’

‘Fuck, I don’t know,’ Will said, gesturing toward the night outside.  ‘I really don’t.  Maybe you’re a facet of the God.  Maybe you’re really Coth.  I don’t know.  But I think you’re a Wahlidell.  I think, think, that you are a part of the Goddess.  But only cause I want that to be.  The wholly other…something like that.  I still haven’t figured it out…’  He paused and took a breath.  The two of them were still.  The air in the traincar’s compartment was still.  It felt as though they were not moving.  ‘On Helizica-Crel-Oon,’ he moved to finish, ‘there are all of us beings, all of us.  And you and I.  And we never die.  Or something…’  Will lifted his right hand into the air to gesture, cupping something like he was about to explain the idea of a deathless world, but he dropped his arm.  Looking out the window he roughly brushed off the knees of his black jeans, though nothing was on them except a bit of wolf hair.  Then he sat there for a few breaths and continued.  Looking into the window his reflection stared back at him, the one white blur of the pale wolf all he could see outside, superimposed on the image of himself sitting in the compartment chair.  ‘In Helizica you are almost ageless, endless.’  He spoke measured and slow.  ‘You are a member of the family of immortal beings.  And I… am being tested.  Or something…’

The trainlights bled out into the night.  Will’s face looked haggard, but strong.  Tired in the opaque light reflected in the glass plane.  Scrutinizing of itself scrutinizing itself.  His beard fell dark a handspans length below his chin.  His hair was cropped short.  His eyes, beady and stuck, caught by themselves in the reflection, were framed behind the glasses that stood atop his wide nose.  He continued, softly.

‘But in Crespa…’

                ‘Crespa is not a context-plane,’ Dea interrupted again, not just exasperated.  Angry.  Will did not even look away from the window, but his eyes left their reflection, staring through.  The white shadow, lit by the starboard lights of the train, flitted through the dark.

                ‘Fine…  Fine,’ he breathed.  ‘But still, there appears to be a world where I am already dead, or where I’m damned, or in a fix of some sort.  A really intense fucking fix.  I know you think there is only one world…  I don’t know how you can believe that, that’s faithful talk, but…  What about these other truths?  What about the other possibilities?  We are against rule…’  He relaxed and looked up to the trim of the birds and the painted winds and streamers along where the wall and window met the ceiling.  ‘So why aren’t we against the rule of this dimension, against reality itself.  You know this, though…’

‘Don’t tell me what I do and don’t know.  Or what I am and am not against.’

‘Yeah…  I know.  I rescind it.  I apologize.  I… …I talk of what I do not know.’

There was a silence in the car for a breath’s span, and then a loud, masculine voice sounded out their door, to the left, the compartment across the corridor.  ‘Felesi thow!  Would I bmeggeh hhwe…’  Then silence again.

The couple sat together in the break, in the absence, Will willing himself not to look at her.  He became lost in the thoughts again, let them take him.  He concluded,

‘In Crespa you are a demoness…  I’m not, look,’ he cleared his throat, ‘I’m not saying anything, really, here.  I’m not saying that you are only a demoness, or even that you are one.  But there are five worlds, Dea, not four.  …  I experience the fifth.  It seems it experiences me, too.  I’m not saying it…’

She interrupted again, ‘There are four context-planes!  And you,’ her voice cut sharp and hateful; Will looked at her.  Her hand was in the air, pointing at him, ‘Are the most selfish Witch I know of, you fucking asshole.’

‘Is it better if I don’t say anything at all?’ he yelled then, furious.  Mostly furious with himself, but misdirected poorly.  Rising to standing he walked quickly left toward the door and, opening it, went out into the hall, shutting the door behind him.

Fucking furious.  Fucking womyn, god damn.  What the fuck does ze expect from my fucking mouth if ze doesn’t even want it open, and then constantly fucking complains that it is stuck shut.  Fuck.

The hallway was mostly red.  Gold goblin trim painted along the bottom of the corridor’s walls.  Plush runner carpet.  Dark wood.  Then, the metal of the entranceway to the forepart of the car.  The little room for the exit door, the door to the restroom, the singular windows on each wall.  He headed up to this forecabin, looked starboard and port out of the train, then walked up to the bathroom door and rapped quickly his knuckles on the metal.  No answer.  He went in.  Turned around.  Locked the door.  Sat down on the shitter’s lid and yanked at his pack of cigarettes in his left pocket till he pulled them out.  Took them up and brought one out, lighting it.

He inhaled.  And leaned back…  Fucking fen, here I come…

He thought about that night: bringing Hope and Fear home for the first time.  Opening the door to Arco Domus a smell of brewing ginger had hit him, buffeting against that weird smell of earth and rubber that came from the carpets outside in the building’s hallway.  He had walked in and lifted his voice,

‘Haloo!  Who’s home?’

Bumose had looked round the corner from the bedroom, through the kitchen.

‘Hi,’ Bumose said in greeting.  Subdued always, whenever I am not around…  Where’s Unity?

‘Where’s Unity?’ Will asked.

‘I’m right here!’ she shouted, exclamatory, ever of almost too much cheer.  Her voice came from the direction of the bedroom.

‘Come help me with something,’ Will had called, turning around.  He picked up the basket, both pups now awake, and, taking them into the apartment he closed the door.

Bumose walked through the kitchen and the wood room looking at the basket just as Unity rounded from the day room and brought her hands up to cover her mouth, displaying what would to a callous heart seem to be exaggerated joy.

‘Oh… my… Coth!’ she said, through her hands, ‘Puppies!’

‘Cool!’ Bumose added, reaching out a hand to pet them.  He scratched the white pup on its head and behind its ears.  ‘These are wolves.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you bring them from Michigan?  Can we keep them?  We’re going to have puppies now!  I…, oh my gosh,’ Unity said.  She reached out a hand.

‘Do you think we can take care of them?’ Bumose asked.  ‘Can you?  Where did you find them?’

‘I didn’t,’ Will had said, ‘They were left for me.  On the door step.  There was this cabby, the night we…  The night I flew out.’  Bumose looked up from the pups at him, quickly.  The black pup lifted up and yawned, a tiny mouth opening and then snapping shut.  Unity pulled back her hand and jumped, then took her skirt in her hands and started to dance around the day room, singing,

‘We have dogs!  We have dogs!  We got puppies!  We got PUPPIES!!!!’

Will, grinning, watched her, laughed aloud, then looked back down to the wolf pups.  ‘I suppose I should give them their names now then.’

‘What are we going to do with them, Will?’ Bumose asked, walking round the foyer till he stood out of the light from the ceiling lamp.  He had both hands in the basket, scratching and petting hard, both pups licking him.

Will swallowed, happy to see his roommates, his friends, but, as always, nervous in Bumose’s presence, nervous being in the circle of his scrutiny.  Will tried to stand straighter, and handed the basket off into Bumose’s arms, who took it, cooing warnings as if William would drop it and hurt the dogs.

‘They’re mine,’ Will said, ‘That’s that.  I have to stay with them cause they’re, well, not mine, but, well, at least I’m theirs.  Or something.  It’s just what is.  It’s what has to be.  …’  He paused.  ‘They have names.’  Bumose looked up at him, pretty taken with the young wolves.  His eyes were wide, leaning into that peace that he naturally felt for the living.  He looked, holding the basket, like he was happy.

‘What are their names!?  What are their names!?’ Unity cried, dancing in from the bedroom.  ‘Barf and Roderick!  No, Thistletoe and Thumbelina!’

Will’s lips pursed and switched about on his mouth.  Back then he had had hardly a hair on his young face.  He was nervous with their joy.  His friends had always known more of living in the world than he.  In some way, it had seemed.  He, he realized suddenly then, did not even really regard the young wolves as living beings…not the way Bumose did, nor Unity.  Both of their eyes were so wide.  So amazed to welcome the two new people into their place, their lives.  They would have to make room for them, more room.  Already there wasn’t a lot.  Could he keep the wolves even?  As in, keep them healthy and well cared for?  That meant well loved, right?  Or was it well fed?  He’d have to walk them every day, that he knew, but even as he thought about it he somehow knew that it wasn’t really true.  The wolves were him.  They were parts of him.  This isn’t from Helizica-Crel-Oon.  They aren’t really beings, like most persyns and beings.  They’re apparitions, maybe?  But the wolves seem living like any other animal…  They must be singular themselves, Will thought, but…me as well.  Partly.  I don’t know.  If they are of a plane they’re of Wuoelia.  Wahlidells.  Not Kityas.  Coth I fucking hope, Will thought.

They certainly seemed to be living, breathing persyns.  Persyns and animals, just like he himself was; but tied to him.  That he knew.  He had known it in the cab, looking over the seat at them, as surely as if he had looked at a watch and known the time.

‘Hope,’ Will said, laying down his unmarked hands on the heads of the pups, now fully awake, the black one nuzzling Bumose’s chest, the white one standing on the edge of the basket, ‘and Fear.’  He stroked the black wolf, rubbed under his throat and watched Fear look around the apartment’s foyer from the edge of the basket.  ‘Welcome home you two.  Meet Bumose.  And that’s Unity.  I suppose I have to figure out how to take care of you now.  I guess I will then.’  He had looked up to Bumose then.  ‘It’s good to be back.’

Leaning back on the shitter in the traincar’s bathroom Will smoked and remembered that night.  Fear, he knew, was still running point outside.  They would chase the train till it arrived in Pearl City.  Might as well, he thought, and he then began to steel himself to open the door to his fen.

All people have a way of feeling like they are both alone and unobserved.  To some it comes naturally; that is, some people naturally feel like they are not being observed when they are alone and in, for instance, a room with no windows.  Some even have so little self-consciousness they can be alone, to a degree, when walking down the street of a large city.  Some know, though, that satellites can read heat signatures, and that cell phones can record conversations, even when turned off.  Some know that to be in nature, in the world that is, out in the wilderness of the forest or at home in their own town, is to be surrounded by other beings, ones which, if not directly observing, are nevertheless affected by your presence in some way.  Some know, or believe, that there is a God, or Goddess, who can ‘see’ and know all that they do and say and feel.  Some feel the eyes of ‘their people’ always on them, regardless of whether they are talking with anyone, sitting with anyone, near to anyone.  They feel that they are being seen and maybe even judged for who they are and what they do.  Every moment, of every day and night.  Whether even they are conscious of it or not.  For these people though, even these people, it is possible to go to a place where they can know, or believe, that they are being unobserved; a place where they are not seen, where they are safe from scrutiny.  Different doors and ways allow different people to get to these places, and for different people these places are different.  For Will that solitary place was his fen.

The spell to open the fen was threefold.  First, it required a degree of calmness.  Sitting or standing or walking Will had to, at least, be centered enough to be able to remember the fen in the first place, which he didn’t always.  Second, there was a slight and small meditation, a flexing of the muscles in the temples and the eyes.  With his eyes closed this eventually brought about a sensation and vision in the blackness of two orbs of light and a field of vision within the black itself, a light without sight.  Third, Will had to speak into this blackness.  The words of the spell.  The final step, the opening words to the fen, were a line of poetry:

“Across a slab of centuries, the living

 flesh need not doubt itself or what they meant.”

This phrase Will had memorized recently.  Before he knew the lines, before reading them, there had been other lines, other phrases.  Other spells that worked to open the way to the fen.  The first time he had opened to it he had found the place by accident.  But it had never much changed.  The fen and moor that opened up to Will once the spell had been said was a lonely place.  But a good place.  It was a warren, a plane, set apart from any other plane.  A place of solitude.  Like Crespa, Will thought, but truly empty – of anyone else.  A place where he could be himself and not feel judged or hated.  A place where, he thought, if he stayed he may be able to stay forever.

Will took another drag of the cigarette and then stood up to lift the toilet seat beneath him and flush the cigarette butt.

‘Fuckin might as well,’ he said aloud.  He readied himself, went into the meditation flexing the temples on both sides of his eyes, and spoke the Blackburn lines into the quiet of the small restroom.  ‘Across a slab of centuries, the living flesh need not doubt itself or what they meant.’  These lines were, to Will, proof that there was a God, or a Goddess.  Maybe even proof that God was not like Coth at all.  It was also, Will had thought before, proof that Felicoth did not exist.  The lines were proof of time itself though.  Proof that time did in-fact exist.  That Crespa was but a fancy of his life-horror.  As far as proof could be had, could be felt.  It really had been two thousand some years since some mean had supposedly come to earth to do whatever it was that he did.  The lines said that, seemed to say that, to Will.  Time existed.  And, in time, billions of humyns – who knew or did not know what Earth was in somewhat of an equal measure.

An image appeared in the air to Will’s right after he opened his eyes.  An empty gray slate sky and a long rolling hill that stretched ever so slightly up and up and off, away.  One tree, a thin, scraggly young oak, no more than a year’s age in growing, stood up out of the brown of the earth only feet from where Will sat on the shitter in the restroom.  He stood up.  ‘Thank fucking Coth,’ he said aloud, and pulled out another cigarette before stuffing the rest back into his left pocket.  He walked, then, through the wall that lost substance and reality moment by moment out onto the solid earth of the empty moor, breathing in the air and taking out his lighter to have another smoke.  So happy, at last…

Here is an account of Will’s morning and time on the fen:

Walking out onto the fen’s hills, turning left and heading up a slope to the West, Will felt good for the first time in days.  No… weeks.  But when he got to the top of the hill he saw a figure standing there.

This had never, ever happened before.

No one else ever came to the fen.  That was the whole point of it.  Only Will had access to it; it was his fen and his moor, his coast, and the house out on the coast was his house.  He did not own it, (how could anyone own a dimension?), but neither did anyone else.  At times Kityas and Wahlidells came, sometimes whole processions of them, floating parades of spirits and packs of Wahlidellian monster animals, roving and yipping and jumping on one another, staring at Will, yammering.  Up the hill, though, was a real persyn.  Not an aspect of the God or the Goddess.  Not a facet of reality.  Not a creature of the fen’s plane itself, or a plant of growing, a tree that belonged to the fen.  It was a humyn.  A humyn, and, what’s more, Will knew them.

It was The Empress.

Holy fucking hell…

Cigarette in his left hand he stalked up the hill towards her, not even careful – beyond caring, really.  He reached the crest.  The morning sun behind him to the East past the bogs shown muted and bright, the whole area washed in gray light like a rusted glass sea.  The Empress was staring off to the South.  She turned to him.

Holy fuck…  God damn; what does she want?  More of this shit.  It never fucking ends.  It was that Plenish, wasn’t it.  Coth…  I’m, well… …I’m fucked.

The Empress regarded him.

‘Hello Will.’

‘Hi Mom.’

‘You ready to go home?’

‘You don’t even know the half of it.’

The Empress turned round to the North and pointed.  Will looked.  Off in the distance high mountains loomed against a far horizon, and, miles away, there stood the largest, tallest, most terrifyingly huge Plenish Will had ever seen.

‘Oh fuck…’

‘No cursing,’ The Empress said, turning back to Will.  ‘Do you want to make a break for it?’

‘Seriously…?  Mom, Felicoth is after me.  I’m fucked.’

‘Will, stop it with the cursing.’  The Empress was decked out in a long Elizabethan dress, whites and blues of fabric laid over one another, a high collar, and upon her head a crown.  The fabric of the dress was completely clean, starchy, pressed, perfect.  It reached down to the ground of the moor’s hill, the short brown tangly bracken of scrub that cushioned both their feet, but didn’t seem to be touching that ground, though the hems bent in on themselves at the earth.  One leg swung out, revealing a black, shiny shoe, and The Empress began walking West down the hill.  Will followed.

‘What the fuck is going on, Mom?  How are you here?’

‘Will.  …  Do you really want the answer to that question?  Or not?’

Will let out a sign of breath.  He moved to walk next to the womyn, his mother.  From her left side he looked out and down the hills of the moor, how they sloped gradually down to the sea and to the small outcrop of land that jutted into the sea in a small bay, covered with houses and simple roads, about a hundred dwellings in total making the empty town.  A hundred yards from the farthest house white sand beaches curled along the coast under a leaden sky.

‘Coth is after me.’

‘Well, come home for a while and get sane.  You’re not thinking very clearly, now, are you?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I live here, Will.’

‘No you don’t.  How did you get here?’

The Empress’s short hair was swept back under the crown, the diadem, on her head.  The jeweled diadem was made of silver, adorned with jewels set into patterns of flowers, five petals each, pink quartz and green agate.

‘If I tell you that I live here I do.  Why would I lie?  I’m alive, right?  And I’m right here.’

‘That’s not what you meant.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What the fuck, Mom.  Seriously.’

‘Stop cursing, Will.’

The two of them plodded along, down and down and down toward the village.  The Empress began to explain.

‘If you really need me, I’m here for you, Will.  I was in my own warren and I knew that you were having a hard time, so I came here.  Don’t make a big deal out of nothing.’

‘I’ve never heard of anyone going to…another persyn’s warren before.’

‘Well, there’s a first time for everything, right?’

Will let out a frustrated, capitulating breath.  He took the last drag of the cigarette and flicked it off to his left.

‘Don’t just throw your trash wherever you want it, Will.’

‘Mom, this is my warren.  I don’t even know what’s going on…’

‘That much is clear.’

The Empress went on.  ‘When we get to your house I will go next door.  I’ve taken the liberty to have some of my Wahlidells move my things into it.  I want you to rest, relax, and in a couple days we’ll go to see the Doctor.’

‘I don’t want to fuckin see Coth!  I’ve seen two Plenishes today.  Two!  Felicoth wants me dead, yo.  …’ Will took out another cigarette from his pack.  He looked away to the south, down the coast and out to sea.  The roiling clouds out at the farthest reaches of the sea’s horizon stormed with grays and whites, lightning bolts cutting and striking through the mass of vaporous air, rain falling and the cloud bank moving inexorably South and farther South.  ‘I’m damned, Mom.’

‘Why would you say that?  Don’t run your mouth like a fool.  I don’t want to hear any talk of how you’re an anti-christ, or that you’re damned.  You’re not damned.  Don’t think these negative things.  If you think negative then you’ll get something negative too.’

‘That’s not fuckin true.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘My thoughts, my opinions, don’t make reality.  They don’t determine what is real.’

Down the hill the moorland ducked undersight and then rose back up a ways, stretching out over and on towards the village by the bay.  From the dip in the moor two creatures came, wandering towards The Empress and Will, climbing towards them up the hill.  The monster on the left was smaller and seemed the ward of the monster on the right, which was rounder and had longer, spindly legs.  It carried a bundle of sticks in each hand and one on its back.  The bundle of sticks in its left, clawed hand was being used as a walking stick.  To its left the child creature, hairier, staring up at Will unblinking with an intent glare, folded and unfolded a set of wings upon its back, large and batlike and skin-stretched wings.  Will laughed to himself, almost a cough, and lit the other cigarette.  They passed the two monsters.

‘How are you guys doing?’ he asked the creatures.

‘Listen to your mother,’ the larger creature croaked, passing without a look at him.  Will looked back over his shoulder at the two of them, just in time to see the small one glancing back over their flexing wings, their big bugged eyes glaring watery at him in what seemed to be nervousness.

‘Fuck…’

‘Will.  You are not thinking clearly right now.’

Will was silent.

‘We’ll see what the Doctor says when we see him,’ The Empress said, striding along.  A bolt of lightning lit off far at sea, out through the open ocean air along the line of the horizon, and a thundering crack followed, muted by distance, short, but loud enough.

Will had nothing else to say, so he merely followed The Empress until they got to the village, and then bid her farewell and went into his house.

Plenishes were renowned for installing the fear of Coth in believers.  It was said that a well determined faith was like a Plenish Kitya, rising up into the sky, feet on solid ground, coming fully formed from a cloud of mystery, unintelligible to most of those who happened to be near.  The only Wahlidells that were as large as the Plenishes, that Will had ever seen, were the Tellyans and the Klips, and, if one could call them large, the Clobroshes.  But Clobroshes were mostly unsolid and cloud-like apparitions, not even creatures, per se, and although they were by far the largest of the large Wahlidells the biggest Kityas always had seemed to Will to be regularly bigger than all of the Goddess’s creatures.

The creatures of Earth and the four worlds were of this sort: There were Kityas, who were messengers of or aspects of or children of the God, known in most of the West by the name Coth, and by the faithful as Felicoth.  The Goddess had messengers too, but most of her aspects or children were free, worshiping the Goddess by their very existence, free to live their lives and go about their creaturely business.  Whereas the God had messengers, the Goddess had dancers, singers, storytellers, and celebrants.  At circles, where Will and Dea and other Witches would worship, the Goddess would attend by way of these; as opposed to churches, where the faithful gathered or prayed – there the God’s messengers would visit, baring public or private missives from the God to his followers.  There were other creatures besides this, most notably the three groups of Canterians, Belips, and Frezid-Crulashes, but they were generally recognized by all but the faithful of Felicoth as being unaligned.  And, in Will’s life, all but the Canterians were rarely around.  Canterians were embodied Ideas, more viscerally strange than either the God’s Kityas or the Goddess’s Wahlidells, and, most thought that they were not even of the four worlds, but existed as sort of children of humynity, or the humyn mind.  And they were often violent, known for pursuing their own aims in most things, contrary to the lives of those of humyn society and the desires, opinions and doings of those who had been civilized.  Religious though they be or not.

The stringent and well entrenched belief that each humyn had a Kitya, or a Wahlidell, or both, as a persynal guardian or whatnot Will did not share.  No Wahlidell had ever made contact with Will to announce that it was his, persynally his private guardian and emissary to the rooms or halls of the Goddess; and certainly no Kitya had ever told him so either.  He knew people, intimately even, that thought so, said that they knew this was the case, most notably Will’s friend Caspian, one of the two twins that Will knew so well and seemed, Will thought, to be singular players among his Jati.  Will’s belief in the concept of a Jati, though it was an on and off belief and often Will doubted its reality, was shared by billions of humyns – the idea was, basically, that in coming to the world a persyn was born tied to a handful of other souls, and set to go through their life, and in fact all their lives and manifestations, with that particular collective of souls.  Will had no hard evidence for this faith, but it had crept into him on a day a few years back, and he had found the hunch hard to shake.  He wasn’t certain which people were of the Jati, in his life, and he wasn’t clear about how the process worked, but things in his life and his thoughts seemed to point towards the existence of Jatis, and Will was damned if he could figure out reality in the first place anyway.  So, he thought, any idea was equally as legitimate as a possible truth than any other.

With the exception of the story of Felicoth.

‘It’s all a part of his plan.’  So would the faithful say.  God, ‘Coth’ the faithful of Christianity would say, was, sometime around two thousand years past, manifested physically on Earth.  Born, they said, to a womyn outside of the bounds of physics and without a male seed.  The progeny of Coth, named Feli, had grown to a young mean’s age, had been killed, and, somehow, brought back to life, or forever lived having not fully died, as a Kitya of sorts themselves.  Feli had been born without male seed, so it was believed.  Could pray fire upon Wahlidells and Canterians, Belips, and Frezid-Crulashes.  Could bring his followers to other planets in the universe, planets hospitable to humyn life, and travel back and forth instantaneously through space, even before his death and ascendancy to Kitya kingship, as the stories told.  A direct line of knowledge and communication to Coth, that was what Feli was known for, maybe above all other things.  That, and drinking the poison that killed him.

Too many times Will had tried to force his own hand to drink poisons too, to, somehow, follow in Feli’s footsteps.  He was, somewhat, one of the faithful.  In his own way.  At times.  Then, on his fen, his mother The Empress a house over doing whatever it was that she was doing, reading probably, Will did not really count himself among the faithful.  He was a winged one, he thought, a member of the armies of Rezik, the Adversary.  Or he was, simply, a Witch.  The Goddess, Glell, was the being whom Will worshiped.  He was not certain this would ‘save’ him, and he was not certain that Glell was whom she was known to be, or even that she existed like Will sometimes thought she did.  But worshiping her made him…happy.  It brought him peace.  That Glell and Coth could be the same.  That there, in the deities, was a singular but faceted love and beingness – that seemed to be at the root of his hope, of recent.  Glell, the Goddess, seemed to Will to be a path, one of many, towards the more deep, more fundamental and foundational truths or truth or Truth of the world.  Having left Felicoth and Feli, to a major degree, he found himself happy and, really, at peace at last with his spiritualism and his worship.  To be a Witch was, to him, the extent of his path towards a divine interpretation and interaction.  It was all he wanted toward that end.  It filled him, at times, with a great stillness, a life and assurance.  A peace beyond reason.

Though, even if all of this was true Will still, often, too often for him to stomach actually, had a fierce faith in Feli, the mean who had been born without male humyn seed who supposedly was Coth himself.  There in the fen’s village Will laid for hours that day in his house, as the fen and moor’s sun circled overhead.  Thinking of it all.  How did The Empress get access to my warren? He wondered, And those Wahlidells, they seemed to know her…  And the fucking Plenish Kitya, by those fucking mountains, how the fuck was the god damned thing so big?  Fucking a mile high.  I’ll never fucking escape Coth.  He fucking has me; Coth damn I’m fucking fucked.  He laid thinking at a window seat in the dining room of the house, a long red cushion under him, smoking the last of his cigarettes.

After hours of this, the day stretching long, The Empress had come and stood outside of the window he lay at.  The table under him that formed the base of the makeshift window seat creaked as Will sat up and looked through the open window at The Empress.  She stood idly in the house’s small yard, holding a set of headphones and an mp3 player.

‘Yo,’ he said, ‘What’s up.’

‘Are you okay?’ his mother asked him.

Was he okay…  ‘Yeah.  It’s alright.  Pretty much.’  He had come to pretty much one main thought after the whole afternoon.  It was: ‘Stop thinking about Felicoth.’

In doing this one thing, so far for the past hour, he had totally failed.

The Empress surreptitiously rolled her eyes.

‘I think you should try meditation,’ she announced, ‘It’s exercise for the brain.  Your brain needs exercise like the rest of your body.  You need to be able to tell it to do what you want it to, not have it telling you to do things.  Control your own brain instead of letting it control you.’

After an arrest in Washington, seven years previous, Will had been diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder.  A diagnosis he did not fully buy into, and one that his mother, and most of those in his life believed to be evidentiary.  The Empress did not believe in Felicoth.  She thought that his obsession with the God was a factor of his disease, a facet of it.  Not to mention Will’s inability, seeming inability, to provide for himself, take care of some of his normal needs, like his teeth, his sleeping, his diet, his hungers.  Most of this, Will thought, was evidential of the existential flexing of reality, or, the existentialism that could be grown into by one in a position of enough privilege and free time.  It was not really a disease, Will thought.  Not, at least, was there a disease at the source of his pain, his hardship, whatever that really was.  Life itself, he thought and would say, is hard.  Life itself breaks you down.  People that believe in a mythical functionality tended to be rich, middle class, white…

But, Will’s mind was eating him alive.  All day he had been thinking of the Jati.  Those he felt his soulkin, Dea, M., Bumose, Adam, Chandra, Lone, they all had disappeared is his mind’s sight.  All their words, all the times together, all the years together.  The Jati, as he thought about it, seemed to be somehow the whole of humynity.  Reincarnation, yes.  But of Will’s soul.  Will, and no one else, was born again into the next life; and, outside of time.  All souls were Will, in his next life, split or duplicated into a countless array, given a world alone and apart from Felicoth as a reward for Will’s stubborn blasphemy.  It seemed, and Will could not shake the thought, the experience of it even, that when he interacted with another humyn they were wholly aware of everything Will thought, everything he would say, everything he had ever done before.  He couldn’t shake it.  It was ‘the body of Christ’ inverted.  One huge anti-god being – in the afterlife which was Earth and the four worlds.  He couldn’t shake it.  As careful as he could try to be with his words and his attention his ears told him, over and over, in noises from the fen, in the conversation with Dea on the train, in the voice of his mother, that he was completely alone with himself in a plane of wholesale reincarnation and, simultaneously, damnation.

All this was perceptible to The Empress, to some degree.  When Will couldn’t take the pressures in his head he would go to her; at times.  Go to the family home in Pearl City, and rest.  He had called her before getting on the train.  Told her that he was losing his shit and that he needed to get away for a couple days.  The Empress had asked him if he had a doctor’s appointment coming up: his Psychologist.  Yes, he had answered, it was in four days.  Then stay and rest and get yourself together until you can see the Doctor and see what he says, his mother had said.  The ‘Doctor’ was another name for Feli among the faithful.  Will wasn’t sure if his mother knew this or if she had no idea, but a part of himself knew, knew, that she was not talking about his psychologist Dr. Kurtz.

Of all of this he hadn’t mentioned anything to her.  They had split at the village after walking down from the moor and he hadn’t seen her all day.  If there was anything he wanted to tell her it was that the Plenish from the start of the trainride and then the huge one after arriving on the fen were, to Will, undeniable evidence that he was doomed.  That morning he had sat reading with Dea.  She, unaware of the strain he was under, sat relaxed and reading, laughing with the characters in the book and whatever antics she was reading of.  Will had been reading the Holy Book.  The old prophets: Zelicheinia.  Brest.  A bit of The World’s Beginnings.  It was rotting his brain and his will and his hope even as he lay there in the window, afternoon now brighter on the chill windswept beach streets, in the cold house.  A vision had come while reading, of a Plenish in the East, a Plenish king.  Feli, Will was sure of it.  The sight had come to him reading the book of Zelicheinia.  The Plenish was as tall as a mountain, flying through the atmosphere, light pouring and shooting from their eyes and mouth, a sword in their hand.  In judgment, perfect and hateful and wrothful and final flowing from the Plenish king, from Feli, the mountainous adjudicator of the World stepped upon the bodies and corpses of sinners, treading out the death of Will, in absolute horror and true, serious, life.  There had been, in the sight, the vision Will had seen, no escape whatsoever.  There was no escape; Feli would have his vengeance and there was nothing to stop it that Will could do.  Merely forestall it, in a play of begging for mercy.  Dea had been reading next to him as he laid on the futon in their single room apartment, and at each burst of her laughter Will had been thinking, seeing, a particularly horrible thing that Feli’s judgment would bring.  He thought of being cut up and eaten forever for having eaten animal flesh while alive; Dea let out a huge guwaff and turned a page in her book.  He thought of the light of truth burning and bursting from Feli’s eyes; Dea snorted in hilarity and derision.  She was, Will had been certain, in on it.  She was a Kitya after all…

By the time the two of them, with Hope and Fear, had gotten to the train station Will had forced his mind to put these sights and thoughts aside for the time being.  But lying down at the window seat in his house on the fen they had all rushed back with a vengeance.  He had looked into the refrigerator upon coming inside and seen some foods that his mother’s Wahlidells most likely had dropped off for him.  A tupperware container, opaque, hard, beige.  In it had been beef tenderloin.  Part of some poor cow…  He had turned from it and closed the door of the fridge, forcing his mind away.  On the window seat, though, he could not help but think of the cow parts in the fridge, and being given reprisal for letting it just sit in there – being, he imagined, held in a pack of great chunks of ice for eighty years while Feli celebrated with Dea and Soue and Knife, and all his friends, only to be taken out again at the end of the freezing, waiting, agonizing sentence to be thrown onto a fire to cook while those he had always known laughed with joy at his demise and torment.  What was he supposed to do with these ideas, if Feli really was coming to ‘judge the living and the dead’, if Feli really was real?

‘Will…  Are you alright?’ his mother asked him again.  He had been staring up at the sky out the window.  A house across the street had the afternoon sun perched on the apex of its roof, right on the roof’s corner.  Staring into the sun like an opium eater, like a dead man, Will had forgotten his mother’s presence for a moment, thinking of her laughing hilariously with Dea at the court of Felicoth.

But these were not things that were made easier to forget if one talked about them out loud.

‘It’s just strange, mother.  I think I know what’s going on, but my mind will turn and turn and turn.  I cannot tie it down.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about, Will.  Here is my mp3 player.  Try to do the meditations on here.  They are guided meditations so you can start training your mind.  I really think it will help.’

That last bit had been said with so much seeming honesty that Will had looked over at The Empress directly.  She honestly seems to love me, he thought suddenly.  Maybe I’m not totally correct about all this.  Maybe I am just crazy…  It was a hope that he would hold out for, no matter what the cost.  If he could…

He took the mp3 player and headphones his mother was extending to him.

‘I’ll try mom.’

‘That’s good.  I’ll be next door if you need me.  We can go to the Doctor’s together on Thorsday for your appointment.’

If I can…

‘Sure thing, mom.  Thanks.’

The Empress turned her face to the side, looking up to the sun.

‘There!  Did you hear that?  A white rumpled Shanna.  My favorite bird.  I didn’t think you had them in your warren!  How nice; it’s my favorite.’

Will took in a deep breath, happy for a moment.  Distracted from all the crazy shit.  He listened for the bird.  Again the warble came across the air of the yard.

‘There it is again.  Don’t I sound beautiful,’ The Empress said.  She turned around and walked off toward her house.

Don’t I sound beautiful? Will thought.  What the fuck!  Is she just relating to all of life or was that another clue, like Dea’s laughter?  Did I even hear her right?  Coth damn, what the fuck is going on?

He untangled the cord of the headphones and put them on.  Stop thinking stop thinking stop thinking.  He flipped through the songs on the device and found the meditations.  Put one on and laid back on the cushion and the table beneath it.

‘This is a guided meditation.  Practice, for the next forty five minutes, being very, very relaxed,’ the meditation began, after a bowl chime had sounded clearly three times.  Will listened, looking up at the light of day playing across the ceiling of the dining room, trying not to think.  He closed his eyes after a while and followed the meditation as it directed his attention to different parts of his body, but, like the rest of the day had been, he could not turn off the associations.  He was just more relaxed about it.  When the meditation took him into his left hand he could think of nothing but that it was full of sin, less chewed on and less scarred then his right, from when he had been arrested in Washington and had chewed through much of his wrists to try to escape from handcuffs.  When the meditation directed his attention to his right thigh Will thought, ‘Ah yes, the body of Sengan.  I contain the whole universe inside of me, and all living things, as all humyns do.  That quadrant of the universe, located in my right thigh and in the far reaches of space…’ and he saw a great explosion in his upper leg within his mind, imagined the billions of miles and thousands of habitable planets bursting into etheric fire, extinguished forever, ‘…is gone.’  Thus the meditation continued for the forty five minutes.  Before it was over Will was asleep.

Upon returning to Tacoma Will had written a letter to his sister, Tabitha.  It read, in part:

Tabitha had written him back promptly.  Following is an excerpt from the return letter:

Life in Arco Domus with the addition of the two wolves had become, quickly, intense.  To put things blandly.

Firstly, the wolves did not need to be walked.  To the surprise and amazement of the three roommates, Bumose especially, although Unity was as delighted as if a zeppelin had landed on the building’s roof to whisk her away, the wolves could somehow climb down and up the side of the building, in and out through the windows.  How they could do this the three kids had not been able to tell, though they watched the wolves time and again worrying for their safety.

The first time it had happened it was Hope who had climbed out, and, yelling suddenly, Bumose had raced over to the window, arm outstretched to catch the pup before it fell.  But when Bumose had moaned, sticking his body out the window to see how hurt the fallen pup was he had suddenly exclaimed aloud,

‘What that fuck?!  Hope is climbing down the face of the wall!’

Unity and Will had raced over to the adjacent window and looked out, in time to see Hope scratching down the side of the building.

The three of them were in an uproar about it and raced outside promptly to retrieve the pup.  When Hope had made their way to the ground they quickly scampered off, too quick for any of the three to react, and the roommates had to chase the wolf around the building and down a block before Bumose scooped them up.

After a long night watching the pups climb carefully out and down the three stories from the apartment the three roommates were in agreement that the two wolves were not simply animals.

‘What I don’t get,’ Bumose had said, ‘Is that in every way they are very much apparently real wolves.  They don’t display any signs of a Wahlidell.  They’re certainly not Belips.  I mean, they even look like wolves.  They have no mark.  They don’t talk.  They’re wolves!’

But soon after, three days later, Fear had said their first word.

Will and Bumose were in the middle of writing a play.  The Exaltation of the Heresiarch.  The play was structured as follows: The main characters were all Canterians.  Humynoid Canterians.  That is, each actor in the play was to play an Idea and be the embodiment of that Idea.  The main characters were Betrayal, Vanity, Cowardice, Greed, Illusion, and Hatred.  Out of all of those platonic purities Bumose had only ever seen in reality two Canterians which were on the list, Will one.  Betrayal and Illusion, for Bumose.  And Will had seen Hatred, three times over his then twenty one years.  The funny thing about the play was that the actors on stage were to shed their roles at the beginning of the play’s third act.  Betrayal, in the play, turns about on the stage and announces that they don’t want to act anymore.  They make some speech about the recognition of death and then just stand, refusing to play the role of Betrayal and instead interacting with all of the other actors as their real self, the self of whatever actor that would be playing Betrayal.  In this way the Canterian Betrayal morphs into the Canterian Honor.  The rest of the actors all follow suit, through a costume change.  Vanity into Humility.  Cowardice into Valor.  Greed into Justice.  And so on.  The boys were having quite a time at the writing of the play.  The majority of every day was spent drinking wine, smoking, watching after the pups as they ran about the apartment, and shouting back and forth at each other lines that would be good for Betrayal or Vanity.

Bumose, all things considered, was holding up at the apartment splendidly.  He had flown out to Tacoma with Will from a return trip that Will had taken to Oahu to see Bumose and the rest of his friends, Bazooka especially.  About a month after Unity had flown out as well, to Bumose’s chagrin.  Did the apartment have enough space?  Did he even want to live with someone else besides Will?  Bumose had, somehow, been taken with Will; back on Oahu they had spent a night together naked and carousing, lovers for an hour amidst drink and smoke and songs from Bumose’s guitar.  After that night even the most of their days had been spent together.  Bumose kept his feelings largely to himself, but Will, young then, was not quiet about wanting to love him back if he could.

Being, though, interested in womyn as lovers, Will had been acutely affected by Unity’s arrival.  The two, Unity and Will, soon became a couple of sorts, of staggering and stumbling sorts, making love on the floor with Bumose only paces away, talking to one another more than either did to Bumose, making promises neither had the maturity to keep.  Bumose had their birthday late in the year, approaching the advent of solstice and Senganal, and Unity and Will had gotten him many gifts for the occasion, some of which they had made themselves.  The day was a break in time between Bumose being shunted aside before and after being choked with the couple’s affection in the small, crowded living quarters.

Bumose was, naturally, very much a theatrical persyn.  He was concerned with the performance of daily living, as much as social life included poise and play.  He spent his days on his laptop, figuring through the computer’s language, or reading and laying about while Will wrote and Unity played with the pups.  He bathed more than the other two, spoke clearly more than they, and forcefully and with authority.  His attentions to the world were like a knife, whereas Will’s were more likened to a net.  Unity’s like a merry-go-round.  Bumose seemed, to Will, to be a black, sucking spot in the air behind Will in the bedroom, Will out, most days, at his desk in the day room where he wrote, working on a few different writing projects besides The Exaltation.  Bumose’s presence would cut at Will, and Will could not bring himself to hate Bumose for it, or to blame him.  He blamed himself.  It was yet another failure in a long list that Will kept complied in his mind.  His misdirected life, his misdirected attentions.  The alterations of hope and fear upon the blanket of his concern for the world.  He wasn’t sure of much, then, (and really never would be, even through his late twenties), but he felt sure that he was, somehow, doing wrong.  That, to Will, was an often occurring sensation.

Will could, he imagined, feel Bumose’s eye on him, feel the boy’s attention drain him of solitude and certainty and movement.  He wanted to be there for Bumose, wanted, then in those days, to love everyone in fact.  Bumose included.  One did not have enough time for such broad affairs though, Will had come to believe.  If two people were interested in one’s attention to try to love both was to love neither.  To not give time to one was certainly to allow oneself the space to give time to another, but it was a betrayal too.  One that could not be shed like a role in the third act.

The day Fear spoke Will and Bumose were in the bedroom, writing and drinking.

‘You will never give anyone what they want, Betrayal!’ Bumose had said, scathingly, acting out Vanity’s part.  ‘I have reached the embrace of nothingness without your aid.  You drag me down to the Earth with your silly words.  Dread gravity!’

Will was acting out the role of Betrayal, the boys trying to find a way to the end of the play’s second act.

‘I love you and I am not ashamed to say it!’ Will had responded.

‘Your words are poison.  The nothing that you are you even know not.  While I have made that nothing the ground of my being.’  Bumose passed Will the bottle of wine and Will handed him the cigarette that he was smoking, headed over to the window and looked out down the hill of a side street.

‘I am unsure if these things you say are true, Vanity.  I don’t know what to believe anymore.  I merely make it through the day, crawl through the night, asking from no one what I alone can give.  Do…  Do you trust me?’

‘Trust you?  I’d sooner break you over the altar of your own ignorance,’ Bumose muttered in reply, kneeling down next to the window with Will.

‘Break me, Vanity?’ Will asked softly, taking the cigarette back from Bumose’s outstretched hand.  ‘It seems I love beauty more than you.  There are other beautiful things.  Other people that hold the truth you claim to know more than most.’

Bumose was silent for a spell, working out what could be the next line.  He took a swig from the bottle of wine.

‘If you do not see how you are hurting the people in your life, Betrayal, you are not seeing past your own reflection.  If you are to go beyond you must go.  Be gone from here!’

Will looked at him.  Bumose’s short, curly hair and thick mustache shined in the light of the kitchen and smelled of sweat and waxen humyn candles, like Bumose had lit a fire in his skull and was burning down the tallow of his flesh.  His large eyes widened and his always animated eyebrows shot back on his forehead.

‘Do you think you can follow through with your promises, Betrayal?  Without breaking the hearts of those whom you claim to love?’ Bumose finished.

‘No,’ Will had answered.  ‘I suppose I can’t.’

The two of them were silent, looking out the window and down the street, the late moon moving to set on the Western horizon.

‘Promise.’

The word had come from nowhere.  The boys looked around.  To their left Fear was playing with the blankets of the sleeping area, tearing at them with their little white teeth and shaking them about.  The blankets were all of a color, white and beige and off-white; the colored blankets were on the floor of the day room where Unity slept or read or dawdled.  Upon the sleeping area’s nest of blankets Fear looked like a white flower on a patch of old snow.  The two boys looked at the wolf, who in turn regarded them, Will especially.  It repeated the word, its small mouth snapping open and its tongue lapping its teeth.

‘Promise.’

‘Holy fuck,’ Bumose said, breaking role.  ‘Maybe they are Belips.  Fear just spoke.’

‘He said ‘Promise,’’ Will responded.  He was looking at the pup sadly, for some reason taken with a pointed melancholy at the sound of Fear’s first word.  Will did not know it then but the wolves would only very, very seldomly speak with him in the earshot of other humyns.  It was just what would end up becoming their natures.

Hope crawled in backwards and bandy legged from the day room pulling a bright green blanket with them in their teeth.  Having yanked the blanket halfway across the threshold of the two rooms Hope dropped it and turned around to regard their sibling.

‘Promise,’ Hope said, and jumped on Fear landing on the pup with all four paws.  The two wolves wrestled and bit at one another as Will and Bumose exchanged glances.

Unity wandered in.

‘I was waiting for them to speak.  I knew they would speak.  They are both a part of Will and Will cannot keep himself shut up.’  Unity seemed strangely calm; she was usually of such a maelstrom.  Ridiculous cheer.  Over-loud.  Caustic and petulant and obnoxiously scornful and playful.

‘Why do you say that, that they are a part of me?’ Will asked.

‘Because when you talk in your sleep when you are having nightmares Fear stands up at attention, their ears twitching.  And Hope stretches out and lets Fear be dominant.’

Will looked at Bumose.

‘What?  It’s true,’ Bumose said, ‘At least last night I saw it when you went to bed early.’

Will knew that he talked in his sleep.  Enough people in his life had told him so.  And he certainly had nightmares.  They outnumbered his good dreams that he could remember ten to one.

‘Why didn’t you guys tell me?’ Will asked, his hurt exacerbated by the wine he had imbibed.

‘You are so fuckin important, aren’t you?’ Bumose asked sarcastically.

‘I was going to tell you,’ Unity responded, still quiet and withdrawn, ‘But I forgot.’

‘Fuck…’ Will said.

Bumose looked up at Unity and the two of them exchanged glances.

‘What!’ will exclaimed.

‘Well, we thought that you weren’t going to take care of the puppies well, cause you don’t really care about anyone else.  But they take care of themselves.  We…  We think it is unfair how you now outnumber us in the apartment.  It’s three to one.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Bumose interjected.

‘You try living with three of me,’ Unity said to Will.  ‘I play with them all day and you and Bumose do nothing but work on that stupid play.’

Bumose rolled his eyes.

‘Fuck, I didn’t know so much unrest was breeding in the ranks,’ Will answered jokingly, standing up and sitting on the windowsill.  He pulled on the cigarette and released a cloud of smoke into the room.  Bumose was looking at him.  ‘I don’t want to be an asshole, man.  Seriously.’

Bumose rolled his eyes again.

‘Come all the way out here,’ he muttered.

Will was struck dumb.  Is there anything that I can do?, he thought.  Do they hate me?  Why?  He hadn’t even had known that his friends were so upset.  Bumose was wearing the shirt that Will and Unity had illustrated for his birthday.  The drawing on the shirt was of a fire with a hundred mouths, full of grinning fangs.  It was possible that it was just a melancholy moment in the night, a melancholy that had taken all three of them, as sadness in one or two tended to do, turning toward and into a communal, shared feeling and event.

‘I don’t know what to do, guys,’ Will said.  ‘The crushing weight of this all has me.  I feel like the claws are digging into my eyes.  Like I cannot see anything anymore.  Like I cannot see you.’  He looked to Unity, who was staring right at him, and then, guilty that he was looking upon his lover with Bumose right next to him, having just been working on the play with him, Will looked at Bumose too to include him in the apology.  The explanation.  ‘The color is draining from the world.  I cannot see the life of this all.  It’s like the world is suddenly disappearing…’

‘’The world is suddenly disappearing!’’ Bumose spat out, scorning, copy catting Will’s apology and turning it into a scathing curse.  ‘Everything’s a tragedy with you.’

            Unity turned around and went back into the day room without a word.  She sat down cross legged and picked up her book to read.  Will dragged on the cigarette and tried not to look at Bumose.