The Man Who Was Never Wrong

Prologue.

            In my youth I dreamed of silly things. I wanted to know all and see all and feel all. I wanted to be a traveler after hearing something about highways my favorite film director had said. Something about getting lost (and found) on the road of travel, and listening to music to explode your head to the sky as you soar down the road at midnight. And I think exploding heads have a lot to do with knowing and seeing and feeling. So does the sky. Look at the color of the sky. Blue. Blew your head open. Man, can you picture an exploding head, where the fire of an explosion is replaced by brain and blood and cosmic energy and consciousness? What does consciousness even look like? I’ve got to know. You probably can’t see it. I think it’s part of a bigger mystery. Part of something called Truth and Beauty. When I was old enough, I gave up dreams of knowing all, but my want of travel grew stronger. My interest in knowing and seeing and feeling all had turned me onto studying things like the mind, the subconscious, the personal and impersonal. Secrets of  man and mind, world and time, mysteries that have no answer.

            You know what? Never you mind any of that. Forget everything you read above. It is immaterial. Immaterial, friend. Pick up below, for it is the beginning of my tale.

I.

            I made the decision to seek out Truth and Beauty as soon as I graduated from Harvard, or maybe it was Princeton. I graduated from both. One for undergrad, one for grad school. I forget which was which, they’re both so full of sweaters and penny loafers and tennis players that telling them apart is hard if you don’t pay attention. Never in my formal education did I learn what Truth and Beauty really meant. Even the words alone, Truth: I had no real idea why capital T truth mattered; Beauty: isn’t this subjective, anyway? Having studied full courses of feminist theory, literary criticism, social science, postmodernism, and beat poetry, I was very keen on things that could not be well defined, or understood, or even shown to exist. I was into esoteric concepts, heavy into intangible stuff and interpretive stuff and stream of consciousness stuff. So as soon as my formal Ivy League top tier education came to a close, I got to real life education. Street smarts instead of book smarts. And after a long week of deep wondering, I decided there was no better place to catch a mean case of the Street Smarts than the backwoods of Kentucky. Having known a guy at Harvard, or maybe Princeton, who grew up in a trailer park in Alabama, I figured I was familiar enough with the people and their dialects and their culture to swoop on down to America’s 15^th state (learned that at Princeton, pal) to engulf myself in their ways.

II.

            I got to the little town of Mudpocket, Kentucky on a Friday morning. It was my first time in a southern villa, and the people were real hospitable. Look how I wrote that. I said “real” whereas a civilized person from the north normally writes “really,” since it’s an adverb. The south was already having a noticeable effect on me. I stayed at a bed and breakfast called Winchester Sprocket, and met the owner, a guy named Rasp Varmstead. He had meaty calves and a gut that hung out of his unbuttoned flannel, a shirt I was unable to determine the brand of. I’m even ending my sentences with prepositions now, something northern and proper folks don’t do, on account of being educated. You can see the way the south worked its way into my psyche early on. Oops. There it is again.

            The Winchester Sprocket was not stylish or sophisticated, but it was quaint and comfortable, built of creaking wood and stone and charm. Rasp gave me a little tour, explained to me the brief history of the building, but said very little of the town. All he said concerning Mudpocket was the churches were respectable, and his particular one, Mudpocket Baptist Church and Community Center, was the best. He said Gregor the preacher was his best friend, and had once been more than a friend to him, until the Light of the Lord intervened, through fellowship in Christ, and by the Hand of God, and the two had been brought back to Jesus. What that all  meant I didn’t know. But Rasp, like all the people down south, was not shy, and had no shortage of words to toss my way. What that all meant, he said, without provocation, was that he and Gregor had been homosexual lovers for some time, close to ten years. They had met at church camp, as counselors, and fell into deep feeling for one another. As their comradeship grew stronger, so did their desires, and one quiet night, as the campers slept, Gregor and Rasp touched each other in lustful ways, sinful ways that burned under the eyes of the Lord. For years they continued their relationship, even while carrying on heterosexual charade relationships publicly. I hadn’t asked for Rasp’s intimate personal history, but sharing stories is like sharing germs in the south, so I let it happen. Gregor went on to be a preacher, and the two started living together. When their relationship was uncovered, Gregor volunteered both himself and Rasp to undergo Christian Healing for Homosexual Men, a new kind of camp set up by the church for homosexuals. And according to Rasp, it worked. They were shown the fiery pits of hell that awaited them, and by some combination of prayer and fellowship, they were cured of all homosexual desire. Still best friends, though. Rasp moved out, opened a bed and breakfast, and the rest was history. I didn’t press the matter. I asked no more questions for the time being, and said I’d better go get myself acquainted with things.

A few other guests were staying at the Winchester, including a Chinese couple, which surprised me, as I never imagined Chinese people existed in America below the Mason-Dixon line, since part of what let us in the north know we were so important and intellectual and well-developed, especially in places like Cambridge or Princeton, was our number of Chinese people. Dad always told me the density of Chinese people around you gives you some idea of how important and smart your locale really is, and I came to find this was true during my time in school. You could always tell the bad neighborhoods by the lack of Chinese people, and you could always tell if you were in a science or engineering part of the university by the presence of Chinese people. The Chinese couple at the Winchester Sprocket were trying to sell a bottle of wine to the other guests. The room that was supposed to be the living room or public hang-out of the bed and breakfast had a fireplace, a few tables, old folks were sitting here and there, playing cards, talking in southern dialects, showing off their dentures. The Chinese woman set the wine bottle on a stool in the corner of the room and this beautiful music came out of it. The music was all acoustic guitars and pianos and violins, and voices of ethereal Chinese, slow in parts, almost fast in others, melodic like a dream. It went from dirge to anthem without effort, smoothly and beautifully, and back again, as a complete circle of feeling and expression. No one could believe it, but most didn’t care. I was bewildered.

            “Very cheap!” said the Chinese man. He was sitting at a table by the stool, so anyone who wanted to inquire about the singing wine could sit with him and chat. His wife was at a piano at the far end of the room, moving her fingers over the keys like she was playing along with the music that we all knew was coming from the wine. Since the piano was closer to me than the wine bottle, I sat beside her and got to talking.

            “Is it really the wine making that music?”

            “Yes.” Her voice was fantastic, melodic, its qualities paled only by comparison to the wine.

            “It’s beautiful. I feel like I know this song. It touches me in a way I haven’t been touched since…” and I drifted off into memories and thoughts that left me no time for talking about wine. Candlelight flickered in my mind’s eye against stone walls and wooden altars, and I became enjoined with old philosophies that died eons before my name ever came from my parents’ lips. The music carried me there. Pulled me down within myself, to a chapel of emotions and memories beyond memories. The secrets of the self started to swim to my surface, a trick I knew all too well from my time in a Harvard hypnotherapy course I took one summer. I enjoyed the atmosphere of the Winchester, and even more I enjoyed the music’s sedation of my id, but I had to get to business. I shook myself from the wine’s aural stranglehold, said goodbye to the woman, stood and left the bed and breakfast, back into the humid Kentucky air.

           

III.

            Right outside the dirty diner across from the Winchester I met the kind of man I was looking for. Rasp  said I’d find someone here willing to show me around. Loop “Leach” Swamp was his name, and he had an eye-patch and no teeth or lips. You know the stereotypical old southern man with no teeth and no lips, I bet. This was him. He had some small white hairs on his chin, must have been in his late 60’s, smelled of sweat and pig shit, and he had a firm handshake.

            “You come lookin’ fer investors in yer big picture?” he asked, followed by a backwoods cackle.

            I took this to be a dig about my khakis and socks, because I admittedly looked like a rich stock broker, and the word ‘investor’ struck me as a redneck’s way of joking about what we do up north. I later came to realize it was a joke about my entire appearance, which he likened to a Hollywood actor. It was complimentary, regardless.

            “No sir, I came to seek Truth and Beauty.” I offered my hand for a shake.

            He snickered and shook my hand. He spit something into the dirt, kicked at it, then asked me what I meant by those words. I said I had trouble figuring that out, myself.

            “Best place I know’s to start up the hill ther’… e’rybody up ther’, specially’ Hope, got somethin’ to talk about.”

            Loop Swamp took me in his pickup to the top of the hill where there was a small house with a rusty truck frame in the yard, and a dilapidated fence tracing a large piece of land off to the side. He introduced me to his wife, Hope Dipp Swamp—a frumpy dump truck of a woman—and said I’d meet others inside, all shouting and doing something they shouldn’t be. Briefly I reflected that Hope seemed to have not only Loop’s surname attached to her first name, but her own maiden name right there in the middle. Such a thing was unexpected so deep in the south, to find a woman obviously in touch with liberal and progressive ideals, and the strong feminine individuality to assert herself as an individual independent from her husband. Or perhaps it was simply a middle name. Life is full of puzzles. I took a step into the house and was accosted by a smell that had undergone eons of evolution into a kind of lifeform all its own. Imagine if you will a smell, a mere smell, that has evolved past invisible scent, into something of substance, something solid, something tangible and overpowering and conscious. Its qualities of smell have undergone uncounted years of quiet growth into something more heinous, changing from mildly unpleasant aroma to paralyzing stench, before finally taking the step into higher forms, forms which pervade and invade, solidify, render you immobile and barely conscious, gripping you tight in its festering maw. This is the kind of horrid pungency one encountered when walking into the Swamp household, choked into submission by a fully materialized essence of caustic sensation. I cried out, fell to my knees, and a decrepit woman of no less than 90 years cackled at me from a wheelchair, a cackle much like that of Loop’s. For a moment I was in a nightmare.

            “This the ol’ estate,” said my guide. “That there’s Maw. We call ‘er Cactus Tung cuz o’ her sharp tongue, and her rough n’ dry mouth, built like a spider’s paradise. Say ‘howdy,’ Maw.”

            “Hehhhehhhowwwwdeh!” screeched the old bonesack. Her right arm was half an arm, ending a little before the elbow. This being the first thing I noticed in the house aside from the violent smell of ageless rot, I was already prepared to abandon my search for Truth and Beauty, desperate for my home back at Princeton or Harvard.

            “Fine home, a fine home,” I said, bringing myself back to my feet, fully aware of my surroundings again. The home was small, ‘cozy’ as they say. Mold and something that looked like animal droppings was on the walls, the sound of chickens was audible from another room, and Loop and Hope stood on either side of me, smiling gloomy grins at me like I was Jesus Christ.

IV.

            To introduce myself I did what I always do around those I’ve just met; I showed off a little of my French, I made mention of the last five countries I’d visited, presenting my passport as proof, I referenced cultural landmarks around the world. I shared with the lower class the culture and behaviors of higher class individuals, a thing I knew they didn’t get much of in these parts. Needless to say the Swamps were left unimpressed by my French, my tales of Paris nightlife, they were still standing (except for Cactus Tung, who was always seated) after I showed off my frequent visitor’s passes to the museums of New York City, and a collection of photos from Venice. I had exhausted my usual means of icebreaking, and stared into the vacant faces of my hosts.

            “How ‘bout moonshine?” offered Loop, finally. I accepted, and soon we were all four out on the back porch drinking powerful stuff from glass bottles. Laughter filled the humid spring air, the hell-smell of the home was hardly noticeable outside with the rank fumes of moonshine wafting among us. Old Cactus Tung said something in a primordial deep south dialect every now and then that was lost on me, but tore through Loop and Hope like a rocket through early 1940’s European sky, splitting them into laughing splinters every which way.

           “Lemme tell you ‘bout the boy,” Loop said at one point, on his third bottle of spirits. He and Hope had a son, I could tell from pictures on the walls of the abode. “Tom’s a little loony, see. Been all regular for years ‘til he got another self growin’ up inside him. A second self. Doctor says it’s diss… disassociating…”

            “Dissociative,” offered Hope, her lips shiny from the moonshine, and her voice rocky like an Irish beach.

            “Dissoshative,” he tried, he damn well tried, but it wouldn’t come out.

            “Dissociative personality disorda’,” said Hope. Her eyes seemed to gleam with a heavenly ferocity I couldn’t stomach, so I burped a pre-puke burp, and spit on the porch a yellow and green and brown amalgamation of gut-works. “Tom’s got a second self that’s just like another boy, same age, but timid, lil diff’rent. Come about in just the last few days.”

            “Calls ‘imself Moby, don’t he?”

            “Yuh huh, Loop.” Hope Dipp nodded like a felon hearing her parole officer tell the details of her innocence. “Lemme show you somethin’ Doc.” She got up and went inside. They called me Doc because I had a doctorate. From Harvard or Princeton. My remarks about high society were lost on them except for the details about my being a doctor. They thought I could do medicinal stuff, but my Ph.D is in Women’s Studies, a field I shouldn’t have expected them to understand. At one point Hope asked me to check her cervix for worms, but I said that wasn’t my field, I was more into poems and slogans and public speakers and blogs. She said if I studied women I ought to know about cervixes, but I couldn’t talk her down. Loop had to sedate her with a handful of Camel cigarette ash. As a women’s studies doctor from high society, I had a problem with that, with him trying to restrain her. As a visitor to their place in the world, a seer of cultures, I kept quiet.

           Hope Dipp came back outside with a journal of Tom’s. “Take a dip in this,” she said,  dropping it on my lap.  I opened it and read Tom’s fantastical tales of recent insanity.

            I walked into the house on my first day alive. No idea what to expect, but I felt satisfaction as I walked up the front stairs, waved goodbye to Marla and Jasmine by the road, as they walked home.  Was good meeting them, waking up to find them by my side. I wanted to be inside them so bad, cuz I wanted my throb-cock to spit all over their pussylips, but when I got inside I forgot everything. A smell came over me like a hillside. Soon as I got in the door I turned and looked into the dining room, saw a wrinkled old woman with one arm smiling at me, sun shining past her from the window, and I just about passed out. I screamed, the world got blurry, and I remember pulling myself to my feet when the horror was gone. Who the fuck was that? Old hag with a half arm, rolling around in a chair. I cried for an hour. I said some words to the man of the house, the father, and now I’m fading out.

--Moby

            “This is your son, eh?” I asked.

            “Sure nuff,” said Loop. He spit into the air, took a swig of the moonshine, and rubbed the sparse hairs of his chin. “But it ain’t mah son writin’ it. It’s his otherself. Tom ain’t no boy of the pen; he more into dirt and trucks, not journals. Boy got some thangs to work out’s my guess.” He sounded down. For the first time since I’d met him that morning, Loop “Leach” Swamp was on a level I could relate to. An emotional level.

V.

            We carried on drinking and talking until the late afternoon, when Hope said Tom would be coming home. The moonshine was getting low, old Cactus Tung had passed out some hours earlier, and Loop said  he still had things to show me that might take me closer to the Truth and Beauty I was looking for. The porch faced the collapsing fence off to the side that I had seen when I first came to the house. Standing from his rocking chair and swallowing the last drops of his moonshine, Loop told me to get up and follow him. We walked down to the fence while Hope threw blankets over Cactus Tung and sang ancient sounding country songs against the wind.

            When we stopped in front of the fence, Loop lit a cigarette, it must have been his twentieth of the day, and said, “Got some thangs to show yuh before the boy gets home.”

            We stepped over the rotting wood and walked about a hundred feet into the field, past large artificial looking hole in the ground Loop didn’t say anything about, until we arrived at a large oak tree (I learned trees at Harvard) with a skeleton hanging from it.

            “Oh my goodness gracious,” I said, clenching the sides of my khaki pants in my fingers. “Of course I would see a lynched man my first day in the south! What was his crime? Huh? Touched a white girl? Drank from the wrong fountain?”

            “Fuck, boy, it ain’t a lynchin’. This here’s my brother Blogger Swamp, God rest his bones. Got killed by Magic Johnson three years ago.”

            At Harvard and Princeton and the other Top Schools we didn’t care for ball sports, but I knew the name Magic Johnson. A basketball star of the 80s, an AIDS man living forever on his great fortune and good health. The implications of murder were shocking, even considering the violent trends among pro athletes. I always thought Magic Johnson above such behavior.

            “Magic Johnson?! I have to say I don’t believe it. What was he doing in Mudpocket, Kentucky?”

            “Lives here,” said Loop, lighting another cigarette, had to be his twenty fifth. Then he pointed past the field, to a dense green of trees. “Back there, somewhere.”

            “You’re pulling my leg, Mr. Swamp.”

            He sniffed the air. “Mister Fancypants, we don’t lie ‘round these parts. Lemme show you.” His eyes were fixed on my pants, and I noticed I was still gripping them tight out of fear of skeletons. Had I gone to Yale, skeletons would be a regular thing for me, a sight that probably gave me more pleasure than discomfort, but I’m a Harvard and Princeton man. Skeletons don’t do it for me. They make me nervous. Loop tugged at the hand of the skeleton, and that’s when I noticed it was missing a leg, and there was jewelry on the finger bones. Loop slid a few shiny rings off the fingers, and headed back to the house. I asked about the hole in the ground, and Loop muttered something about Tom digging it the night before, and that it was just something kids do. While we walked, I thought about the musical wine back at the Winchester Sprocket. If this stuff with the Swamps didn’t pan out, at least I’d have something swell to investigate when I went in for the night.

VI.

            Back in the house we huddled up on the couch, Loop, Hope, and me, thigh-to-thigh. Cactus Tung was snoring in her wheelchair in the other room, and a little girl no more than eight years of age was whistling show tunes in her bedroom. Hope Dipp said the girl was their niece, Blogger Swamp’s daughter. Poor girl still didn’t know her dad was dead. Neither did Tom, which is why Loop wanted to show me this stuff before he got home.

            The TV was on in front of us. An old kind of TV, the kind you’d see in the 80’s, with fuzzy picture, very fat in all directions, not like the sleek tech we have in the civilized world of the north. Loop had hooked up a small cassette to the VHS player and it was clear we were about to watch a home video.

            “Blogger was a newsman,” Loop explained. “Always had this video camera attached to ‘is head. Fancy piece o’ work, I tell ya. Real expensive.”

            “Amateur newsman,” interjected Hope, chewing on the end of a cigarette and a celery stick. She was between her husband and me, and she smelled radiant, like a perfume girl at Macy’s. The ghastly, living, pulsating smell of the home was subdued by my moonshine intoxication, but Hope’s essence somehow remained powerful in my nose. The crust in the carpet looked like dried vomit and chicken shit, but I said nothing. I could still hear chickens in another room.

            “Newsman all the same,” said Loop. He continued. “Blogger was a man interested in the kinda thangs that made Mudpocket a place of fassuh…. Fassy…”

            “Fascination,” offered Hope.

            “Fascination. Got up at the crack o’ dawn e’ry day just to film the thangs that went on. Wasn’t long before he found Magic Johnson livin’ among us.”

            The video was remarkably stable for being filmed by an amateur, but this was due to the camera being fastened to Blogger’s head. It started with a few shots into a car window acting as a mirror, so we could see Blogger’s face. He was handsome for a southern guy, with the same shaped face as Loop.

            “First thang’s first,” spoke Blogger into the window. “He’s black as sin.”

            “Talkin’ about Magic Johnson,” said Loop, reaching over his wife to tap me on the knee, as though I wasn’t watching.

            “Now the man down at Winchester Sprocket says someone or some thang been kidnappin’ his guests from their rooms, or from the patio in the night. I’m investigatin’ to find out what or who it is.” The video cut out, and came back on as Blogger was interviewing Rasp Varmstead in front of the Winchester Sprocket. I didn’t hear what was said because Loop was busy giving me the run down.

            “This the day before Blogger found Magic Johnson snatchin’ up them guests. You’ll see.” He fast-forwarded, trying to get to the important parts before Tom came home. Hope Dipp rubbed her thigh against mine, but my khakis kept our skin a safe distance.

            “There it is!” yelled Hope. Loop hit play and the screen was filled with the hulking body of a black snake that had to be fifty feet long.

           “Good gosh almighty! Here we got our culprit! Just spotted this old feller swallowin’ one them out-o-towners.” Blogger’s camera was shaking as he spoke, because he was chasing the snake into the shrubs not far from the Winchester B&B. Hollers of a town mob were audible in the background, and for a second the camera turned to show a group of people carrying pitchforks, just like the movies and myths about the old south. They were following Blogger, yelling that he shouldn’t get too close.

            “But ol’ Blogger, God rest his bones, got too close,” said Loop, his voice drooping into a deep south mourning. He hit fast-forward again, and stopped on a scene in which the large black snake was wrapped around Blogger, dragging him into the woods. But instead of screaming, Blogger was reporting the incident to the camera with a calm voice, a very collected account of his situation.

            “Big ol’ sucker pullin’ me back to his home, I betcha,” he said, his voice unshaken with the kind of horror I’d have felt in his place. “Got a grip like a hydraulic fist, GotDAYUM! Can’t hardly feel my legs no more.” The camera tilted to show Blogger’s legs between the thick coiling body of the behemoth black snake, and his hands occasionally pounding on the rough scaly skin in hopes of freeing himself. “We’ll see where this thang takes me, then do it from thur.”

            “Blogger was in that snake’s den for days, just filming the thang, eatin’ jerky from his vest pocket, watchin’ the thang as it digested its food.” Loop fast-forwarded to a scene of the snake in the daytime trying to swallow a dead deer. After some number of days, Blogger took the camera off his head and placed it on the snake’s, which was the size of a human head—huge for a snake. The remainder of the video was Blogger talking to the camera while the snake stayed coiled around him, watching him die slow, eating dead things in front of him. Blogger tried to get his hands on some of the leftover meat, but never could reach far enough. Loop didn’t let me watch the whole thing, but narrated it for me, said Blogger sang songs to the camera, called the snake Magic Johnson on account of that being his favorite basketball player, and after starvation set in, he started saying some wild things about life and death and the visions he was having. He died after four days in the snake’s grasp. The video ended with the snake chewing on him and swallowing him mostly whole.

            The camera was recovered weeks later in the brush right at the edge of Loop’s land, and Blogger’s body was recovered from a pile of snake shit after Loop hired a search team with the money he made selling the camera. Strange story, to be sure.

            “We ain’t tell the kids Blogger’s dead,” said Hope Dipp, her hands snug between her thighs. “Just say he gone up north where the winter never ends, so he can get some snow to power his new camera. The kids buy it cuz they don’t know nothin’ ‘bout cameras.”

            I didn’t know what to make of any of this. Loop left the room to use the toilet, and right about then Hope put her hands on mine, and pulled them toward her, asking me to touch her like only a studier of women could. I struggled to tell her that’s not the kind of studies I did, and as she grabbed my penis and forced my hands into her pants, I repeated in the dark of my mind the mantra we learned in class: Rape is man against woman, rape is man against woman, rape is man against woman. I knew I wasn’t being raped. But I knew if I tried to stop this I’d be raping her, emotionally. I went with it, and soon the front door flew open.

            “Maw and paw, I’m home!” It was a young boy.

            “Tom!” shouted Loop from the toilet.

            Hope said nothing, because her tongue was busy exploring my shaved chest.

VII.

            I shoved Hope off me, felt terrible for assaulting a woman, apologized sincerely and meaningfully, and helped her back to her feet just in time for Tom to walk into the living room. He stood on what looked to be one of many dried puke stains. “Where’s paw?” he asked.

            A toilet flushed, and Loop returned, saying, “I’m here, boy. How was school?”

            “How many blades it take to cut grass?” asked Tom.

            “This one of his jokes,” Loop said as an aside, looking to me and winking. “No idea boy, how many?”

            “A whole truckfull!” and Tom laughed himself silly, a real rabid and uncontrollable laugh like he might be handicapped. He slapped the walls and kicked the couch, that’s how amused he was.

            “Dang, boy! That’s a good one!” Loop looked to me again, chuckling. “Tom loves his trucks, didn’t I say so? Got a new joke about trucks e’ryday.”

            Hope swooped in and threw her arms around her son, kissed him all over the face. I didn’t get sick or anything at the sight, but the bad smell crept back into my senses. I was sobering up. There’s that preposition at the end of a sentence again. I had to go.

            “Folks, it’s been real nice getting to know all of you, but I have some work to do elsewhere. I’d love to continue our…”

            “Come on back if you curious ‘bout anythang else, pardner,” said Loop, all smiles and gums. “Our home is an open door.”

            I went out that open door and walked back through town in the humid Kentucky air. A certain calmness came over me in that hilly villa. Quiet and warm, hardly a motor to be heard for blocks, and even the sounds that sprang up were like nature’s intentional song. Part of this was alright, part of this was unsettling. The sun started to glow orange as I walked past antique shops and made a few stops at windows to see what sort of fancy ancient items still existed in the world, before hopping along and searching for a place to eat. None of the restaurants in Mudpocket looked appetizing, because I have high caliber taste, the pallet of high society, sophisticated taste buds designed for caviar, European jelly, kale sandwiches, things served on square plates, drizzled in complex sauces, garnished with subtle plants only haut monde Sirs and Madams can understand. I began instinctively looking for a news stand to buy a copy of The New Yorker, and as I walked I was stuck in a trance pondering the merits of serious literary fiction, a thing of such massive importance to me, which I came to realize only in a land surely devoid of it, that I would fall asleep that night masturbating to thoughts of it, for certainly none would be found in this town. I made a bet with myself that there wasn’t a book store for miles, and although I didn’t search, I am sure I was the victor of that wager.

            As I silently congratulated myself for being of greater stock than the southern status quo, I found a place called Darlarla’s Cafeteria. The smells coming from the door were the polar opposite of the Swamps’ home, and told me I was hungry. I went in.

            The things on the menu were the kind of entrees you’d find in a trendy bistro or pub in New York City paying homage to primitive foods of other regions, but for one tenth the price. Although it tasted fine, I couldn’t convince my tongue that a meager two dollar sandwich was as good as its twenty dollar New York recreation. As I suspected, I could not get a glass of Chardonnay in the establishment, so I drank milk with my sandwich, a truly pedestrian way to dine. Perhaps I was wrong in coming to Kentucky to find Truth and Beauty. To a lower breed of folk, a land of simple minds. This was a place that wore its authenticity on its sleeve. No class, no sophistication, no polish…

            But I graduated from Harvard and Princeton, two of the best schools in the world. I knew the likelihood that I could be wrong about anything was astonishingly low.

            I paid my check and a tip, but before I left, a husky, balding fellow with a neatly trimmed mustache sat down at my table, uninvited. He wore all white, except for his light blue tie.

            “Welcome to Mudpocket, stranger,” he said. “Name’s Gregor. You lookin’ for a place of worship come Sunday mornin’, I think I can guide you to the right place.” I couldn’t tell what glowed brighter, his smile or his personality.

            “Oh, hello, Gregor. I’m—”

            “Mudpocket Baptist Church and Community Center, right down the street, there,” his finger pointing straight out the door. “We gotta nine a.m. service, a ten o’clock service, and a noon service, a community lunch, a meet and greet after each service o’course. You been in town long?”

            “Arrived today, in fact. Thank you for your invitation, but God sucks.” I was right to the point, something I learned to be in Harvard’s Atheist Club.

            “Well, now, son, that ain’t no way to start off a rapport with no one, insultin’ God the All pow’rful, and all.”

            “Sorry, Gregor. You’re right. But I’ve got to get going. If I see you around town I’d love to talk religion with you. Debate God, and such.” My Atheist debate skills were still sharp, and I looked for any reason to exercise them at all.

            “Sure thing, m’boy. You take care yourself. Ya look strong and noble, the way God likes ‘em.”

VIII.

            Alluring music was still coming from the public space at the Winchester Sprocket when I returned in the evening. I had a bag full of antiques slung over my shoulder, all of which were going to  make ludicrous gifts for my friends back home once they let the irony and goofiness sink in. They knew me for my humor and my unrepentant irony, something greatly appreciated in big cities. I dropped the antiques in my room and came back to the public area to listen to the wine. There it was, still on the stool, still lulling listeners in with its haunting melodies, the Chinese couple sitting together beside it, speaking fast and subdued.

            “I’d like to buy your wine,” I interrupted, opening my wallet.

            “Six dollars,” said the man, and his wife smiled, and he stuck out his hand.

            Where I come from six dollars gets you the worst of wines. You can’t even get drinkable beer for that price, so I was hesitant. But the musical qualities of the spirit were evident, so I shelled out six dollars. The music ceased abruptly, the woman took the bottle off the stool and handed it to me.

           “It’s yours, sir.” Her voice was as I remembered it by the piano, a melody all its own. “Please drink responsibly.”

            The bottle had no label, cork stuck in the top, and was dark green.

            “Does it have a name?” I asked.

            The couple looked at one another then back at me. “Sake,” said the man.

            “So not a wine, but a Japanese rice beverage?” My knowledge of Oriental drink would floor them, I was sure. This worldly, travelled man standing before them must have been unexpected in the south, a veritable treasure of class and culture they no doubt would expect in the north, not in this land of forgotten time and stagnant society.

            The man shrugged and the woman smiled. “You are right. Please drink responsibly.”

            I pulled up a chair and put the wine beside me. I used my Ivy League charisma to introduce myself to the couple, and to learn a little about what brought them to Mudpocket, and to learn the history of the wine, or the Sake, if truly Sake it was. Conversation started slow, as every time they wished to speak they looked at one another as if waiting for the other’s approval, then spoke slow and intentionally, maybe a little shy, maybe a little intimidated, maybe both. But when I showed off my  skill in Mandarin things really got moving, and the couple spun a yarn for me that was as vivid and melodramatic as an Egyptian opera.

IX.

            Because this story is mine, and focuses on the events of my own search for Truth and Beauty I will not waste time and space with details of the captivating tale shared with me by Yin and Yang. But I will gladly relate the important aspects below:

             In Feudal Japan, sometime in the 1700s, a wealthy landowner hired eight poor Chinese women stolen from the mainland to tend to his rice fields. He was a cruel man, known for his wealth, his land, and his meanness to the locals. I found my mind wondering when the specifics of his role and name were explained, so I can say nothing on that. But he was of course very mean to these eight poor women who spent all day tending to his rice fields. The landowner had many vices, and perhaps his greatest one was his heavy drinking, a thing he could afford to do, given his wealth. He was also, as the story goes, a thief and a rapist who could commit any crime he wished, and go unpunished because of his status and his power. When he had drunk all the alcohol in the land, the winemakers and distillers and brewers were sorry to report to the landowner they could no longer meet his needs. He had his eight poor women make Sake from his rice, and serve it to him in tiny ceramic bowls from England. When the man would pass out from heavy drinking late in the day, the women, all living in a tiny hut at the far end of the land, would come together and sing magical music together. This practice went on for many years, and they became very good at what they did. When their music started attracting the attention of locals, the landowner became angry, and wouldn’t you be upset too, if you were getting unwanted visitors to your large plots of land? My answer is yes. So instead of asking these people to leave, this angry landowner simply got more drunk and took out his rage on these eight women. Sadly, his way of raging on them involved countless instances of rape, and beatings, and cutting their hair and making them eat it. As I said, he was very cruel.

            Oddly, only one of the eight women became pregnant, the others were infertile. The landowner immediately told the woman to kill her child, but she refused. The landowner made the same demand almost every day, for years. In their first act of unity and defiance, the women banded together in song and in spirit, and as the landowner came into their tiny hut one day, with a sword to cut the young boy into pieces, the women broke into the beautiful music they had practiced for so long. Hearing it up close, and so touched by the Sake’s intoxicating effects, the landowner was stunned. He dropped the sword and began to weep all over the ground. Quickly, the mother of the child picked up the sword and cut off the landowner’s head! It was a sweet victory, but as I have said, this landowner was of high status in the land, and soon the police, or what passed for police in Feudal Japan, caught wind of the beheading. All the women were caught right away except the mother, who hid with her child in the fields of rice for days as the police searched for her. She snuck to the landowner’s house, where his last bottle of Sake sat on a table, unopened, and having had nothing to eat or drink for days, she went to drink it.

The police, though, were hiding in the home and tried to arrest her. In her struggle, she threw the wine bottle to her young boy, barely old enough to run, and shouted “Run!” to him. It was in Japanese of course, which is “Kaketsukeru!” (learned that at Princeton) which rolls off the tongue less easily, especially in a situation like that. The little boy ran, sake in hand, and by some bizarre feat, evaded the police entirely, eventually hopping on a boat to China, to return to his mother’s home. He grew up, continued his life, and never left that bottle of sake behind. The bottle was passed from generation to generation, always with some variation of the words, “This is the blood of our mother!”

            The details as to how that bottle of sake became tainted with magic and music were lost on me, because I was thinking about how much I’d love to drink it while they told it. Though I believe the music had something to do with the old music sung by the eight women who made the sake. As Yin and Yang related to me the peculiar nature of the spirit’s spirit, they also related to me their own history. Yin, the man, was a descendent of this boy who fled from Japan, back to the land of his mother. The bottle had been in the family all that time, unopened, untainted by air. Aged into what was likely a robust and powerful flavor, Yin and Yang told me it was time the bottle left their family and found a new home. I laughed and pointed to my stomach, saying, “What a home it’ll be!” The couple had traveled the world showing off their singing wine, but most were put off by the whole thing because it seemed like a freakshow, having a couple of Chinese people trying to pawn off a bottle of sake, a Japanese drink. That’s why they came to America to start a new sales pitch. “Very cheap.” They knew in America a Japanese person and a Chinese person are practically the same thing. They just had to find the right place to sell it.

            That’s the story of the wine. I will also point out Yin and Yang were impressed I graduated from Harvard.

X.

            That night I lied awake in my room with the bottle of sake on the bedside table, and it sang to me ten variations of melancholy melodies. I spoke to it as you would an old friend, though we had only known each other a matter of hours. The wine, as I will call it, for sake is a stupid word for a drink, never spoke back, but never ceased to caress my mind with its music. While it lulled me into an interval of almost-slumber, I thought about the Swamps, the skeleton in the tree, the great snake Magic Johnson, and young Tom’s ailment of dissociative personality. So strange, this small town of Mudpocket, I thought. What mysteries it holds. Perhaps somewhere there lies a key to Truth and Beauty.

            “Might I drink you, wine?” I asked, shaking myself from a sleepy daze. “I am so thirsty. I have water, but oh wine, water does not do for me what a fine drink will do.”

            The wine’s music went on through the night, as though that were enough of a reply to my query. Hours later, it was coming on morning by this point, I asked again. “Wine! I am so tired. I will not sleep without your warmth in me. Give yourself to me.”

            I observed the wine’s age, well over 200 years, maybe nearing 300, and admired the dark green bottle holding it. Even more I adored the music it sang, but I finally succumbed to the temptation and wanted to taste what my six dollars had bought. A singing wine is fine, probably incredible to some, but I had to taste it. No man alive had tasted a wine so old, so I felt something special when I uncorked it and poured the light cloudy sake into my Harvard coffee mug. Still the singing came, though a little quieter.

            Having learned a lot about wines during my time in wine clubs, I detected a clear acidity that reinforced the sweetness, a sugary peak with starch as its foreground, a mature freshness, a robustness that underlined and also challenged its unfiltered mash, an ancient wooden barrel fermentation, a distinct hint of grain and berry, a questionable presence, but altogether inspiring for a modern taster.

            I poured a second cup, the singing diminished a little more, and I sipped it down. As I fell away from the world of the conscious, I thought I heard hissing outside my window. But there is that state where dreams become confused with reality, so make of it what you will. I fell asleep, besieged by dreams of light, visions of eternity and blood, and feelings of smallness.

XI.

            In the morning I thought I heard singing inside me. The music of the sake came from the bottle and from my guts, and I felt something akin to a hangover, but the opposite. I was fresh and lively, on top of the world, eager to get back into the Kentucky wind to find Truth and Beauty wherever it may lie. Sensitivity to light and sound seemed heightened, my mood was lively, and breakfast in the big public room was delicious, maybe due to  enhanced taste buds, maybe because it was good. Yin and Yang sat at a table drinking tea, so I pulled up a chair and told them the wine was delicious.

            They looked at one another and laughed. I asked what they were going to do with their six brand new dollars, and asked if it was even worth it, to travel the world trying to sell a bottle of sake for six dollars. They seemed unconcerned.

            “Good that you are pleased with the wine,” said Yin. “We will return to Beijing and use your money to invest in businesses. We have enjoyed seeing the world.”

            I furrowed my brows, and wanted to point out all the money they wasted traveling the world would have been better put to use investing, since the return of six dollars was not at all worth it. My superior business sense was a product of both Princeton and Harvard, and although I wanted to flaunt my education to the Chinese, I was in too high spirits from the sake, and nodded with them, wishing them the best of luck in future enterprises. I shook both their hands, and left.

             Mudpocket was warm that Saturday morning. The smell of breakfast meats and tobacco smoke was in the air, with a mild wind blowing past the ears, through the streets, across the building faces, and off to some faraway place. Somewhere in that wind was Truth and Beauty. For a second I entertained the idea that breakfast meat and tobacco were truth and beauty, but that’s horse shit.

            I decided to go to the Swamp residence, hoping to speak to Loop about Magic Johnson. The singing sake inside me made me think looking for a massive black snake could be fun. Before I was to do anything I needed another dose of the ol’ music. I ran back to my room, took another swig of the sake, it sang a few notes more quietly than before, but resonated within me, and I ran back outside. Rasp Varmstead had just stepped out to  smoke a pipe, and immediately got to telling me what a beautiful day it was. I agreed, nodded, smiled and laughed. Beautiful, sure. Nice weather, indeed.

            “Yer lookin’ fer truth and beauty, aint’cha?” he finally said, after a moment of silent puffing on his pipe, while he stared down the street at the Mudpocket Baptist Church and Community Center. I nodded. “How yer search goin’?”

            “I’ve got a lot of leads, you might say. I met Loop Swamp yesterday. He took me up to his house, introduced me to his family, told me about Magic Johnson, really gave me some food for thought.”

            Rasp chuckled at me. “Ol’ Leach Swamp. A good guy. Got a good family. A strong family. Shame what happened to ol’ Blogger Swamp. He told you ‘bout that, I s’pose? Magic Fuckin’ Johnson slitherin’ all about, eatin’ up my guests, then eatin’ on ol’ Leach’s brother.”

            “He told me the story. It is a sad one.”

            “So truth and beauty. What would’ya say….” And he puffed long on his pipe, “them words actually mean?”

            I didn’t for a moment expect anyone in the south to understand esoteric concepts like Truth and Beauty, or to even have the capacity to question such ideas. But here I was, being questioned by a meaty-legged bed and breakfast owner about my quest. Answering in a pedestrian way would be difficult.

            “Mr. Varmstead, the knowledge I seek hasn’t got a well defined form, you see? Truth is something evident and objective, something, I guess, that makes sense on a logical level. Beauty is something interpreted, subjective, and it makes sense on the level of desire and aesthetic appreciation.”

            Rasp blew a couple balls of smoke out his nose and nodded. “So, yer sayin’ the sun up there, that there sun could be truth. And in a way, that there sun could be beauty.”

            I looked at the sun, was blinded instantly, felt stupid, and glared at the man. “Yessir, in a way. Maybe. But… it’s not that simple. My understanding is it’s more complicated than that.”

            “How so? Why it gotta be complicated at all? It ain’t truth if it’s complicated, now is it? Truth gotta be simple. And beauty—well hell, I ain’t never seen beauty in complexity. Simplicity is beauty. Look around yuh. Look at Mudpocket. Twenty streets, seven stoplights, less than a thousand people. Ain’t nothin’ more beautiful than Mudpocket, on my life.”

            I could see I was getting nowhere fast with this man. Stuck in his common-folk interpretation of the world, uninterested in the learned ways of philosophers and higher thinkers, he was content smoking his pipe and waving at townspeople as they walked by, thinking ignorant thoughts about higher concepts. Could I enlighten this redneck with verbiage from my women’s studies courses?  Might I elucidate the important things in life for him with the syllabus from my upper division literature classes? Would a foray into postmodernism mean anything to this sweat-soaked hog of a man? Would a brief introduction to my learnings of critical theory evolve his mind? Not likely. I know a lost cause when I see one. I pulled out my electric cigarette, a fashionable item I expected not to use in the south, but lit it up in the presence of big Rasp Varmstead to show him that we at least had something in common—an appreciation for comfort. I wouldn’t use the word “clement” around him to describe the weather, I wouldn’t describe myself as a man beaming with tumescence, or any other regular ways of conversing in my literary circles up north, where we fixated on our thesauruses mid-conversation to outdo one another with interesting ways of speech. No, I would treat Rasp the way he wanted. Like a southern man who knew nothing of truth and beauty, but wallowed in the comfort of the familiar. I wanted to ask him about Gregor, his ex-lover, current best friend. I wanted to learn more about the mythical reformed ex-gay, to expose his contradictions, to dig into the deep of his aching soul, to see if that’s where Truth and Beauty resided. But no. Lying to yourself? That’s not truth. That’s not beauty.

            With an audible sigh, I said goodbye to Rasp after my e-cig had run down, and made my way toward the Swamp house.

XII.

            The hill to the house seemed steeper going up than coming down. Young Tom Swamp came strolling down from the house, not looking where he was going, and ran into my legs, toppling me to the ground.

            “Tom!” I shouted through the cloud of dirt that rose around me. “Sorry pal, I didn’t see you ‘til it was too late.” I was cutting my words in half. Another side effect of southern living.

            Tom glared at me, his eyes were not the welcoming eyes I met the day before. “Tom’s asleep. I’m Moby. I have no time to talk. Goodbye, stranger.” His southern accent had been replaced by a malevolent kind of dialect, out of some cosmic moat, where words are stars, and ideas are galactic clusters. I knew I didn’t want to mess with the boy. He continued walking down the hill, and I noticed he was covered in dirt.

            My knock on the door of the Swamp house was met with the clucking of chickens inside, and the unmistakable sound of Cactus Tung cackling. Because no one came to the door, and I knew in the south they had different rules for social etiquette, I let myself in.

            “Hello, Swamps!” I said, followed immediately by a kick in the face of highly evolved, terrorizing smells I had somehow forgotten. I fell to the floor gasping for air, hearing the panicked flight and screams of chickens not far off.

            “Hope, go see what it is!” yelled Loop.

            “I got one! Got this sucker by the legs!”

            “I said check the door, Hope!”

            My eyes were blurred with tears, but I saw Hope standing over me, holding a flapping chicken in her hands.

            “Howdy!” She let go of the chicken, and it spiraled around the room, feathers flying in every direction, and squawking as though it, too, hated the unearthly smells of the house.

            “Hope, WHO IS IT!?” Loop came running into the room, two chickens fighting him, pecking at his head, a third chicken flapping around his knees, squawking at nothing in particular. Feathers surrounded him like a cloud. “Help me with these chickens, woman!”

            Hope helped me to my feet. Cactus Tung’s cackle was still coming from another room, and I noticed the crying of a young girl. Their niece. Without knowing what was happening, I helped Hope and Loop wrangle the chickens. This meant we chased the chickens around the house, the Swamps’ blubbery bellies and liquid thighs jiggling all about the place, sweaty and almost naked, feathers sticking to them, and the smells of body odor joining the already gut wrenching stench of the home. There must have been ten chickens in that house, and each seemed to have a bloodlust for Hope or Loop. The head cock, the toughest of the bunch, gave me a few good cuts on my hands, but in a matter of minutes we had the birds exhausted, and moved them into a room at the end of the hall. That’s where the little girl was, and a soon as the chickens came into the room, her sobs turned to laugher, and she ran through puddles of chicken shit to greet us. The window in the room was wide open, and the chickens flew out the window, one by one, until only the girl was there, saying things in such a thick southern accent I could understand none of it.

            When things calmed down and Cactus Tung’s laughter—which incidentally had nothing to do with the chickens or anything happening in the house or even in that time period—diminished, Hope and Loop asked me to join them for brunch in the kitchen. My appetite was destroyed by the house’s odors, but I sat with them while they ate.

            “I saw Tom as I was coming up the hill.”

            They stopped mid-chew, Hope actually dropping all the mushed up meatloaf out of her mouth, and asked where he was headed.

          “Not sure. He said he didn’t have time to talk. And he didn’t remember meeting me.”

            Loop and Hope looked at each other, then back at me.

           “Moby,” muttered Loop. “Damn boy. Seems that sumbitch is changin’ Tom’s whole, uh, whatisit, his uh,…” he looked to Hope for help, who only shrugged as she shoveled the food back in her mouth. “His persona. Changin’ his whole persona. Last I saw Tom he was out back diggin’ in the ground.”

            “Coulda been Moby,” said Hope. Loop nodded and finished his meatloaf without a word. “I think he found out ‘bout ol’ Blogger, Loop.” Hope used her fingernail to pick meatloaf from between her teeth, which I couldn’t watch, as I didn’t want to puke all over the kitchen. I was convinced they wouldn’t have cleaned it up anyway. “This mornin’ he was mopin’ around the livin’ room with his truck toys, but not really smilin’, though I know it wadn’t Moby, cuz he still talked to me.”

            “Now how you s’pose he found out?” asked Loop. “I keep e’rythang locked away so the boy and the girl can’t be snoopin’ and findin’ out nothin’.”

            “Might I ask about the skeleton?” I asked. “That skeleton in the tree outside seems like a pretty conspicuous piece of evidence to just leave lying around for Tom to see. And his cousin.”

            “Awe shit, no way. I got stories I tell Tom about that skeleton. Tell him it’s a man named Tall Bones Liquor Basket. Told him all sorts uh tales about them bones. He thinks it’s a highwayman from the caveman days who been buried ‘round here for thousands uh years. No worry, there. Trus’ me, Tom ain’t suspicious ‘bout the bones.”

            “Leach,” Hope said, coughing bits of meatloaf into her hand, “I think he found the tapes ya dun pulled out yesterday to show to our friend here.”

            Things faded out for me at that moment, and a feeling came over me in the kitchen. Maybe it was a thought, maybe it was  an awareness. Calling it a feeling might be wrong. It was something. I sat and stared at the hospitable southerners before me, but it’s like my mind was turned off, and all I could hear was the  music of the wine, the sake. It tore through me, it lit up my synapses, I saw blinding golden light around the room, like I was transcending everything material, moving into energetic states past the realm of human understanding. Loop’s and Hope’s words started to become visible to me, shapes and colors and vibrations and a encapsulating warmth , like I was sitting too long on the beach, took hold. Those Chinese had sold me something more fantastic than I could imagine—and my imagination was counted as one of the best among my peers in the Princeton Dramady Club, where we mixed high-stakes drama with high-brow comedy, and performed every Tuesday night at banquets and fraternities. Even this kind of imagination could not fathom the secrets of the sake inside me. Part of me wanted it gone, part of me wanted my entire body to turn into this sake so that it would become the very essence of my being.

            I didn’t snap out of it entirely, but by the time things were clear again and I felt like my mouth could move into shapes required for words, the Swamps were standing, throwing their dishes into the sink, and shouting things about Tom, about tracking him down, bringing him home on account of his being so loopy with the multiple personalities. Still, my head was full of stars and rainbows and galactic centers. I didn’t think I’d be much help.

            “I cannot help,” I barely said, trying to stand up.

            “Sit tight, pardner,” said Loop, running into the other room. I heard chickens again. They had come back into the house. Cactus Tung was rolling into the kitchen right about then. She started saying things to Hope I couldn’t hope to decipher. The sake allowed me to see her words as they flew from her toothless mouth, her infected hole of a mouth, the rotten maw of Maw, but they were cryptic, they were Finnegan’s Wake, they were beyond me. This marked the first time I allowed myself to admit something was beyond me, out of the reach of my phenomenal mind, a mind that aced its way through Priiiiinceton and Haaaaarvard. I squinted  to see the words with clearer vision, but no, they were not words as I knew them. Yet Hope responded in tune with the old wheelchair rider.

XIII.

            “Hope, wegottaGO!” Loop screamed, running into the kitchen with a rope tied into a lasso, and a cowboy hat on his head. “Tom prolly out there doin’ some kinda shit he shouldn’t be.”

            Hope and Cactus Tung said some things and I stood up with great effort, barely stable, and smiled into the golden blinding twilight that still flooded my vision.

            “Let’s go!” I shouted, and someone took me by the hands, and we ran outside, down the hill. I heard Cactus Tung screeching as her chair rolled without resistance all the way down, flying over bumps and rocks in her way, her cackle occasionally ripping the hot air to pieces around us, waving her one and a half arms overhead.

            During our descent, as my pulse sped up, the sake’s music flooded my guts and my veins, its vibrations turned my muscle into mush. Memories from my semesters studying postmodernist thought flew through my mind, lectures from visiting professors rambled in my ears, the word puzzles and thought fragments of our texts carried me away, made me weightless, filled me with that sense of intellectual superiority one relishes, but hopes is not scrutinized too closely for fear of it vanishing in a puff of smoke. Passages of postmodern ideation thought banal by smug scientists, logicians, engineers, and mathematicians, for its so-called absence of honest thought, absence of substantial knowledge, or its supposedly cryptic, unintelligible labyrinthine language designed to conceal falsity and ugliness and laziness below its surface, but understood to be important beyond traditional explanation by us higher thinking scholars of subjective truths were taking over my cerebral cortex. Don’t ask what part of it, for I know nothing of anatomy besides what was relevant to my studies, they just took over the whole thing. The whole bulging, swelling, bleeding thing. Everything in that cortex was combusting, maybe because of the sake, maybe because of the humid southern air, maybe because of the thrill of fighting gravity while running down a hill, maybe because of my intellectual strength flexing in the late summer breeze. Voices went wheezing by in my mind’s ear, voices accusing the academic content of my last 10 years of being nothing but vacuous rhetoric by charlatans. No, no, NO. The sake was doing this. This blasted music inside me, it had to stop. It made me question everything. It forced me to peer into the dark waters of untapped thought and untapped primal reality, to look past the ripples on the surface reflecting the moon’s light and maybe my own splendorous face, and instead into the deep bottom of the bay inhabited by sharks and octopuses. I was done with this introspective rubbish, I defied the sake’s commandments, and I let myself fall into a rag-doll ball, rolling down the hill with my limbs flopping over me, clouds of dust and rocks building up around me until I reached the bottom. The pain of the fall and the constant surge of adrenaline over the course of the tortuous tumble cleared my head. All I could think of was the present, the now, the hot air, the bright sun, the search for Tom.

            “Damn, pardner! You OK?” Loop was standing above me, and Hope came to my side shortly after. Still the cloud of dirt hung above us.

            For the third or fourth time that morning, I brought myself to my feet. I dusted myself off, looked over my torn and dirtied clothes, and nodded at Loop. “Let’s find your boy.”

XIV.

            Children were running all over the streets in town. It was Saturday, so that’s what happens in Mudpocket when there’s no school. Kids everywhere; one group of kids singing church songs, another playing kick the can, a testament to how out of touch with the times Mudpocket was. Another group of kids, slightly older, early teens, Tom’s age, were sitting by an ice cream parlor doing nothing but breathing. We eyed them all, but couldn’t find Tom. Cactus Tung was ahead of us by half a block, rolling along without looking, swerving into the road at intervals, barely missing cars and bikes, still cackling at nothing. We might have appeared a motley crew to people of high society, but in Mudpocket we looked like any other group of friends; a fat couple with most of their skin showing and most of their teeth missing, a fit man dressed fashionably but dirtied and bruised by the tribulations of the day, and an elderly study of dementia rolling free on wheels of liberty. And liberty wheels they were, because this was when I first noticed the tiny American flag sticking out of Cactus Tung’s wheelchair, blowing hard in the dusty wind.

            She flipped over by a sewer grate, and a man in a white suit helped her up. It was Gregor.

            “Gonna ask the preacher!” said Loop. He hustled over to his fallen mother, pulled his pants  up to cover his crack, and put a hand on the preacher’s shoulder. I saw them speak, but Hope and I were too far away to hear their words. She exchanged glances with me, glances I considered innocent and without sexuality, but that I could tell were oozing in provocation. “Women’s studies…” she whispered. Before she was able to touch me, Loop, Gregor, and Cactus Tung joined us. Still the wine in me danced and sang.

            “But he ain’t gonna answer to ‘Tom,’” Loop was saying to Gregor.

            “Why not? Tom’s a fine name for a boy of his age,” said Gregor, caressing his blue tie.

            “He goin’ by Moby, now,” said Hope, “just for a lil while.”

            “Why’s that?”

            “Family secret,” said Loop, after a moment of thought.

            “And how you doin’, stranger?” Gregor said in my direction, throwing his hand out for a shake. “Good t’see ya again. You gonna come to the service tomorrow mornin’?”

            I was already nodding and grinning, a sort of conditioned response I give to people when they ask how I’m doing. Unfortunately, this grin-nod combo carried on after his question about church, wrongly implying I’d be there.

            “Oh, no, I’m afraid not. I’m on a search, and will be busy.”

            “Hell, boy, we’re gonna find Tom before then. Ain’t gonna take long!” He threw his head from side to side, looking at the Swamps, as if to say, ‘get a load of this dumb fucker!’

            “A different kind of search, Mr. Gregor. A search for Truth and Beauty.”

            “Well I’ll be shipped to Hong Kong in a breadbasket!” the preacher exclaimed. “Church is the number one place, I might have to even say, the only place to find truth and beauty! Heck, that’s what it’s all about! The Lord’s truth, and God’s beauty. The beauty of salvation through Christ!”

             Right about here is when the sake took hold again, like it was a steel hand around my spine. It pulled me to the ground, flopped me over on the pavement, within feet of slow passing cars. I heard my companions gasp at my strange actions, and I tried to tell them I was not in control. But the sake’s music blared over everything, bounced off buildings, whipped down the streets. I tried to imagine I still had about me a dignified air, even while writhing helplessly in the road, but I knew this was not the case. With desperate glances I looked at my companions to see if they heard the music too, and it seemed they did, because Hope was gyrating her whale-sized hips in time with the beautiful tune. Tragic melodies weighed me down, the Japanese drink sent me spiraling through a luminiferous ether, my vision was filled again with bright light and golden glares.

            “Truth in God’s word, my son. And beauty in his vision of mankind’s ascent to the Holy lands of Heaven.” Gregor’s voice echoed in my mind’s shining white marble hallways. I wanted to throw water on his mouth but I was squirming in music from a different land, a different time, a different people. I was helpless.

            “Thomas!” shouted an old woman. It was Cactus Tung. This was the first thing she’d said I could understand. My companions looked up and saw young Tom Swamp, and I followed their gaze as well as I could, but my neck was slowed by the sake’s oriental languor. He was somewhere on the other side of the road, where the Winchester Sprocket was. I rolled over, fighting against the sake’s unholy hold, and for the fourth or fifth time that day, I pulled myself off the ground, to my feet, and into action.

XV.

            We ran across the street, but I had my mind occupied by thoughts of young twenty-somethings moving to Manhattan to live the dream of fresh, fashionable, suave lifestyles, trendy coffee houses, time on the subway reading the New Yorker, eyeing the latest in mod style and mod living and mod existence. I was unable to focus on the present, on the immediate, and was instead preoccupied by the esoteric, the distant, the superficial and sharp and smart egocentric dressings of young folk in the prime of life, eating, sleeping, shitting, and breathing the ostentatious ritz of dapper individuals surrendering individualism for socialism, forfeiting identity for community, and dropping their old lives and old selves for something new, as ants in the dramatic passageways of New York, the great northern heritage of ubermensch heroes.

            So vapid and uninspired was this town around me, the rustic little Mudpocket. I bet no one came here in the  prime of life to find themselves, to get lost in culture and to grow via immersion in the world. No. No humanists like myself would ever venture to Mudpocket to learn anything, because what is there to learn? What was I doing here? Looking for Truth and Beauty? Not knowing what either of these things looked like, part of me wondered if I’d know them when I saw them. Maybe it was the search itself. The journey, as they say.

            Tom Swamp was standing in front of the Winchester Sprocket with his arms raised like he was spreading the Red Sea, his back to us, yelling loud things toward something unseen.

            “Moby!” yelled Loop. He put his arms out to stop all of us before we got too close to the boy. He seemed to think we should keep our distance.

            “He doin’ them weird thangs,” said Hope to Gregor, who nodded and made the sign of the cross over himself.

            “Moby! Come home, boy.”

            Tom turned to face us, but the look on his face said he wasn’t going anywhere. A woman’s scream jumped out at us from the Winchester Sprocket, and in seconds a beautiful blonde came running out the front door. Her hair blew in the Kentucky wind, her slender body moved gracefully like an Olympic sprinter on a light jog, and my heart was clenched at the sight of her. But make no mistake; I did not acknowledge her in a sexual way, I noticed her not like a piece of meat, but as a liberated, intelligent, strong, thoughtful being, oppressed by a patriarchy, and a victim of something or other that none could specify, for my PhD in Women’s Studies had indoctrinated me well on the path to enlightenment. The only thing wrong with her by my account was the look on her face of pure terror as she ran toward us.

            The doors crashed open and a black hulk of a snake came slithering out in pursuit of the beautiful woman, seeming to be a never ending serpent of infinite length.

            “Holy shit!” screamed Loop, pushing Hope and  his mother aside. Gregor and I dove out of the snake’s path, and I pulled the woman with us. Tom didn’t budge.

            The woman was suddenly snatched away from me by the snake’s enormous mouth, screaming and crying as she was lifted ten feet into the air. The snake had be now completely exited the bed and breakfast, and I saw in his coiled up tail the Chinese woman, Yang, not making any noise, but hammering her hands on the snake’s huge body. What madness we were witnesses to! What uncontrollable chaos we helplessly watched!

            “Help! Oh, fuck, help!” screamed the pretty girl. But like a small sad mouse in a snake’s lair, she was swallowed in one wide gulp, the snake’s neck muscles pulling her down into slow digestion.

            I jumped to my feet to help, but Gregor grabbed my leg and shouted that it was hopeless, that she was with God now, and that even in the belly of the unholy serpent Satan one can find salvation. So fleeting was that model of captivating beauty, so brief was our connection, and so hurt I was that now it had ended, and so had she. Yin and Rasp Varmstead came running out of the bed and breakfast behind the snake, both yelling abusive things at Magic Johnson as he toyed with us tiny people.

            Hope crawled toward Tom, but it was more of a blubbery roll than a crawl, amorphously moving along the hot ground like a blob of fat and grease toward something less severe, out of some emotion, something like love. And watching the young boy stare thoughtlessly at the snake, and Hope reach out panting, hoping to save him, it hit me that maybe this was beauty, maybe even Beauty. A mother’s love for her child. A mother like a whale, swimming toward her calf to save it. To save her whale son. Moby, the whale. Hope comes toward you, white whale, hope reaches to you, hopes to save you from the serpent.

            And Yin beat at the snake’s tail with fists of his own, hoping to save his quiet wife from the serpent’s clutch. And the rest of us stood up in the shadow of the great snake, watched its head as it watched us, as its tongue flicked out to absorb our essence, to smell which  of us would be best to join the girl in his stomach. And then I saw Rasp Varmstead make eye contact with Gregor. Perhaps it was the immediate danger that pushed them to stare at each other so obviously and so lovingly, or perhaps it was the song of the sake that still resonated lightly from my guts that made them take romantic airs. But their stare was penetrating. In that stare I saw their penetration, their private moments in dark rooms, naked and sweaty, heavy moaning, hard touching, fast breathing, wet moving. Their imperfect bodies made only a more perfect image in my mind, a perfect image of love. Was this truth? Even, Truth? I had no idea.

            Hope tried to pick up Tom like she did the day before, when I first met him, but the boy resisted. Moby was active, and he pushed away Hope, pushed away hope, and with a running start, jumped onto Magic Johnson, climbed up the thick black body like a squirrel up a tree, until he reached the head.

            “Tom!” shouted Hope and Loop at the same time, immediately followed by Cactus Tung emitting a frail, “Thomas!” just above a grunt.

            “Tom is asleep,” said Tom, or Moby, in a dry, authoritative tone. He held onto the snake’s head like the boy in the Neverending Story holds onto that flying dog’s head. It appeared that Magic Johnson was at ease with the boy.

            On the surface things seemed to be going poorly. But my years in Ivy League schools taught me many things,  among which was how to look below the surface to find real substance, to find the real meaning behind everything. And as I did so, the sake played delicate measures in my body, which poured lightly over the crowd that was now forming in the street, where townspeople watched from a safe distance the infamous Magic Johnson in his first public appearance.

XVI.

            Rasp Varmstead shouted something to the snake about him snatching up his guests, and Gregor said something about him snatching up all God’s sheep. Moby whispered into the snake’s ear, and the black mass began to slither away from the bed and breakfast, down the street, much to the dismay of the crowd that had formed there, who parted like the Red Sea for the beast to pass. Still, Yang was in the coiled tail, and Yin ran after the great serpent shouting in Chinese, along with Hope, Loop, and Cactus Tung, who shouted in deep fried metaphors and sentence fragments at their boy.

            I ran into the Winchester Sprocket to grab the bottle of sake, then quickly joined the posse, following Magic Johnson and Moby up the hill toward the Swamp house. The sake made music to set the mood for our ascent.

            Chickens were flapping all over the place when we arrived, and little niece Swamp was running about the yard giggling at them. When the snake and Moby ignored her and the chickens, she kept playing, but Loop ordered her inside. The chickens followed.

            Magic Johnson slithered around to the backyard, where Moby had dug his hole in the ground, and waited beside it.

            “Tom, you and that snake getaway from that goddamn hole!” Loop was out of breath, about to fall over. Hope had already fallen over beside the house, and was drinking water from the hose. Rasp, Gregor, and Yin were discussing plans for snake wrangling, a thing only Rasp had any experience with, and not for decades. I was sipping on the sake, taking it all in as a man not of action, but as a man of observation, contemplation, questions, and no answers. That has always been  my role in life, and I knew in times of peril it was best not to try changing things up just for the spice of life. A humanist’s finest experiences are those unexperienced, felt by some indirect path, where he’s still free to think without influence, to judge without reason, to mock without pause, to nod without sincerity. With a musical drink, these are each made easier.

            My radical mind towered like a palm tree over these southern folk as I watched them in a dramatic confrontation I was unequipped to handle. I looked down in awe and sadness, a sadness that was the product of both my enlightenment and the predicament that was before me. For here, the harsh lessons of my liberal arts education were being acted out in horrid detail. A woman crying for her son. A woman helpless in the tail of a black snake. A woman lying in the stomach of said snake, digesting slowly. Another girl, young, sent inside the house to be barred off from the action. Victims, all of them. All playing the role handed down to them by society! My voyage to the land of wild ways was now a voyage to the empire of patriarchal gender roles, a thing we learned to fear at Harvard and Princeton. Here I was, knee deep in inequality. I watched the men as they plotted together the next move in their so far unsuccessful coupe. A critical reader might say I was the only useless one of the bunch, just standing there drinking my sake, not offering to help, sweltering in the summer sun. But the philosopher cannot lift his hand for action, or he ceases to be a philosopher. The social justice advocate cannot do anything physical or demanding, or his actions outshine his words and his slogans. A feminist, if he is a man, cannot be proactive or helpful or a person of action, or he is supporting the oppressive gender roles he wishes to see crushed. I was chained down by my own superiority. Rendered useless by my own sea of knowledge. With each gulp of wine I turned more mellow and more inside myself, more in tune with the music, and less in touch with reality, with the world just beyond my fingertips.

            “Tom get offa that dragon!” screamed Hope, running closer, the water from the hose having drenched her whale body. Loop grabbed her at the sides, and all of them stood at the edge of the massive pit the boy had dug that morning.

            “In these final hours,” trumpeted young Moby, “I have become one with the earth. I know the ways of the snake, the secrets of Magic Johnson, and I will accompany him to the center of our planet, where we will fuse with Mother Earth at her core, saving all life from a fate far worse than death and suffering.”

            Gregor and Rasp held hands, and Hope and Loop looked each other in the eyes. Yin cried out for his wife. Cactus Tung swatted at flies.

            “Do not mourn me when I am gone, mother and father. You are only the creators of my counterpart, Tom Swamp, who is useless to me now, but was vital for me to come into being. He is safe, and he always will be. He is in here.” Moby pointed to his heart. “He is unevolved, stagnant inside this shell. It is not for him to decide on my fate, or my path. I am separate. I am evolved beyond him and you and everyone.”

            I felt that the boy neglected me, for he could no doubt tell I was a sort of higher form myself, an uber-intellectual who only hung around out of self interest, the most telling of intellectual traits.

            “I am formidable to all your minds, especially yours,” and he pointed at me. He had to be mistaken. “The most vapid of them all, you stand alone as a pitiful caricature of loneliness and narcissism and inflated ego and quasi-intelligence. But you are not merely a zero like all these others. You  are a negative. You are below nothing.”

            I admit I felt a little shock at these words, especially coming from such a young boy. But he looked impeccable up there on that snake’s head, and who was I to question him? He was only a kid. He didn’t know what he was talking about.

            Moby whispered again into the snake’s ear, and Yang was released from his coiled tail. She fell to the earth, and crawled to meet Yin beside the hole, where they embraced like fairytale lovers given a second chance.

            “Tom, don’t leave us!” yelled Loop. Tears were streaming down his cheeks. “We got some o’ yer puddin’ in the fridge from last night. Still cold and fresh! Yer favorite kind, all chocolate and banana!”

            Moby shook his head and put his hand forward. “It is yours, Loop “Leach” Swamp. No more pudding for us. Goodbye.”

            The snake flicked its tongue at us, then dove into the massive hole, Moby still clinging to its head. The tail flopped up in the air as the snake burrowed under the dirt, slid swiftly down, down, down, through the hole that seemed to go forever. Everyone ran to the edge, even me, and as the end of the snake’s tail went down the hole we peered over the edge into a deep black hole. We couldn’t see the bottom. Mournful melodies came from the sake, permeating over all the vast scene of despair. We were left to assume the hole went as deep as the boy said: to the center of the earth. No telling how.

            Hope screeched a mother’s screech into the deep hole, and it echoed lightly off the rock and dirt walls, but was eaten up by darkness.

            “How far you think it goes?” Rasp said to Gregor, who shrugged his shoulders.

            Hope collapsed at the mouth of the hole, Loop consoled her, and Cactus Tung rolled around like a blind bat. The Chinese couple came to console Hope and Loop as well, then turned to me and looked at the bottle of sake in my hand.

            “You have seen Truth and Beauty today?” said Yin. He looked at his wife, touched her face, and kissed her cheek.

            I threw back another gulp of the sake, the last drop. “Hmm. I don’t know. I don’t suppose I can say what Truth and Beauty even are. Part of me wonders what that boy on the snake was talking about. Saving all life from what? From something worse than death? That’s awfully cryptic. Other parts of me wonder… ah… hell…”

            I commended the two on the delicious wine, and remarked on all the flavors I had tasted when I first poured a glass. They laughed, and  Yin said it was just rice and water and one or two other things, and that I was just making up the rest because I fancied myself a dandy person from high society. I took this as a compliment, and really saw no other way to interpret it. The way I interpreted that was that I’m the kind of person who sees the beauty in life, even if, you know, maybe it’s not even there. And as I walked down the hill with them, back to the Winchester Sprocket, a thought passed through my mind that maybe this was Truth and Beauty after all. But the deafening pitch of the sake’s music made it hard to think, and by the time I was back to the bed and breakfast I passed out from either heat exhaustion or intoxication.

            The next day I would go back north and tell all my friends about my trip. They would ask about Truth and Beauty and I would beg of them to be the proper literary critics and postmodernists their years of education had taught them to be, so they could find those themselves in the guts of the story.

The End.