Sol White's Book of the Dead

SOL WHITE’S BOOK OF THE DEAD

PART I

THE TRUTH THE DEAD KNOW

OR

HISTORY OF COLORED BASE BALL

1. 1900 Chicago Columbia Giants

Sol White finished writing in his journal as Harry Buckner walked up to him. The back of the train car was sweltering hot. Middle of the summer in Michigan. Sweat dripped from White’s nose onto the page. He’d just finished documenting the team’s last game at Columbia Park, against a group of automotive factory workers. They’d won handily, thanks to the pitching of Cannon Ball Miller, 14-2.

“Them boys played in front of the Sphinx,” Buckner drawled. He was a Kentucky kid; had been with the Giants since he’d joined pro ball. White looked up at him. The tilted cap and mustache loomed.

“So what?”

“We could get on over there. Play the Unions next year. Let Home Run see if he can knock the rest of the nose off that thing.”

Sol smiled. It was true. Spalding’s World Tour had been a raucous success for the baseball world. It was over ten years ago now, but everyone still remembered the whole affair. If it ever happened again, and black ball was involved, Cap Anson couldn’t be in it. If they were to ever get over there… thought Sol, it would be a minor, or major, miracle. Monty Ward might’ve been alright with the whole thing. But not Cap. He hated black baseball.

Sol looked over at Frank Grant. He was polishing his spikes a couple seats up, greasing a dirty cloth. A couple of the metal spikes shone in the hot sun. When Frank got changed for the games, Sol could always see the scars on Grant’s shins. Whenever he asked about it, Frank would just grin: “It don’t matter now. We’re on the team together.”

Frank grew up a town or two over from W. E. B. Du Bois. Sol had read Du Bois’ Strivings of the Negro People just a couple years before. He couldn’t help but notice it had influenced his own writing. He looked down at the worn, red leather notebook in his lap. The thirty-third page. In the middle of a carefully detailed fly-out to center off the bat of George Taylor in the fifth. ‘Hard shot off the bat. Center-fielder drifted back to make the play. Taylor got a little under the ball. High heat.’ Right as Anson and his White Stockings squad had embarked to London, Paris; the far corners of the world, the hammer had come down on black ballplayers in the American leagues. Global ban of black ballplayers in the pros. Frank was one of the last men; Moses Walker; Bud Fowler — who was one of the old Page Fence Giants of the half decade prior. Sol winced at the thought. Ever since the white owners had made their pact, there had only been a slight reprieve. The reprieve of knowing that Frank or any of the other ballplayers on the club might not be immediately threatened with loss of limb by an angry white pitcher, or baserunner. It wasn’t a reprieve of money, safety, or continuity. It was a reprieve of hatred.

Sometimes, Sol didn’t know exactly what was in the rage of their minds. Not that he thought about it often. But when he did — what had caused this whole mad scene? Because he looked different. A black man. African heritage. Anson missed his family’s slaves? But then he looked at the old scrapbook Frank carried with him. Frank would let him peel through it on some days, especially after he’d hit well. It was compiled by two Buffalo Express reporters. Henry Alward and his brother, Frank. Frank was a ballplayer himself. They sought out to document the entire 1886 season for the Bisons; had unwittingly caught Frank’s midseason debut and following heroics. Frank wanted the book after the season ended; the brothers gave it to him in exchange for a signed baseball. ‘To the Buffalo Express boys. Thanks for your fine work on the games. Your second baseman — Frank Grant’. Frank’s work at second base was seamless. But his play at the plate was even better. He hit .344 in 49 games, the third highest total in the league. People called him a ‘Spaniard’ and ‘Italian’. But everyone knew he was black. The barely integrated leagues were hanging on by a thread. The window was closing. It was absurd, ludicrous even. The matter was — plain and simple — Frank was too good, as was George Stovey with Jersey City; Fleet Walker with Waterbury. The more Sol thought about it, the more he considered Frank to likely be the best infielder of the century. And the white public just couldn’t take it. So they threw him off the field.

This was the reason to write it all down. Since then, he and Frank had been all over the Midwest and Northeastern corridor. The Cuban X Giants. The Keystones. The Gorhams. Barnstorming. Scraping by. Finding new teams and leagues as they popped up and died, like flashbulbs in the abyss. Desperate, bright stars. Feeding on whatever meal ticket they could find. There was a renewed sense of urgency among the best black ballplayers and independent ballclubs as the decade of the 1880s ended. Along with Du Bois’ Reconstruction, it was clear that the lines in baseball were not just being drawn in a permanent fashion, but with an iron fist. This was not to be a period of black economic, social, or political prosperity. It was to be an era of racial violence. Control. And enforced segregation from institutions. Including baseball. There was a need for a unified front among the black teams. For now, there wasn’t enough money to go around. The road trips were harsh. Mostly on sweltering trains. Mostly against local amateurs. Ironworkers. Railworkers. Even Midwestern farm kids. Their best draw was always against Home Run Johnson and the Chicago Unions. It was a city rivalry. Didn’t have to travel far. Good night’s sleep at home before and after. Always a big cut of the gates.

Sol smiled. He’d been lost in thought. There was a lot going on. And he was square in the middle of it all. They needed a real league. Something stable. Something healthy. With the promise of long-lasting. The sun had moved slightly west and down. About an hour had passed. Frank was gone from his seat; he saw the manager John Patterson up front, talking to the conductor. The train would be moving on, east across the plains and mountains to Egremont, Massachusetts. The Columbias would get off here and do a couple rounds against the local circuit; look to pick a ride up at the end of the month back to Chicago to finish up the season against the Unions. The big homestand.

Sol grabbed his equipment bag and stood up. It had been about a five hour train ride to Grand Rapids. He’d been here a couple times before; first with the Keystones back at the beginning of his career. The air was a little lighter in Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor. Sometimes, he’d even see some white fans gathered outside the outfield fences. The upper Midwest had some real stars. There was a kid, Bobby Marshall, over in Minneapolis, who was a star end in football. They were going to face the University of Minnesota Gophers that year. Sol noted that he would watch this with interest. Not to mention, the kid could play a mean first base. Maybe a new player in their up and coming crew of barnstorming clubs. The St. Paul Colored Gophers would be interested.

The game was against the Grand Rapids Union of Ironworkers, an all black club. It would be held in the amateur lot, over by the local quarry. Enough seats for a small crowd, a couple hundred. Wood bleachers. Nothing fancy. Sol calculated this in his head. Gate would be enough for a couple warm meals; they’d pool for the eventual ride back to Chicago. Sol suspected he’d break even plus a little bit for rent. He gritted his teeth. He wasn’t getting any younger; at thirty-two, he could really use a big break. The Unions game would be a small boon, but the rhythm of the seasons loomed. It wasn’t just today, or tomorrow. A whole life of this shit. There would be limited opportunities to travel and play as the Midwestern winter set in. Warming his fingerless mitted hands by the stove. His joints freezing up as his writing hand stiffened. Placing it closer and closer to the fire. He’d heard, just this year, that when the war ended in Cuba they’d integrated their professional league. Warm winters, Sol thought. More games. More money. During slow innings, his mind would drift to Cuba. Maybe he’d move there. Maybe they loved their black ballplayers just the same.

As he entered the dugout of the field, just a short walk from the rail, he set his bag down and counted the team warming up along the left field foul line. At least eight or nine of the guys had not only a real shot at the big leagues — if they weren’t banned — but a chance to give top players like Wagner, Waddell, and Joe McGinnity a run for their money. This team was serious work. The end of the century had compressed black baseball greatness down into a situation of crisis. The opportunities — now that the minor leagues and the big leagues were firmly out of the question — were slim. Gone was the private train car of Home Run’s old Page Fence Giants. Sol had wished he’d been just a couple years earlier to the club. Grant would tease him about it all the time when he saw him. Especially before a big game. He knew it riled Sol up. “Meal service. Sleeping quarters. Can you beat that, Homer?”

Grant loved to call him Homer. He knew Sol’s ambitions too well. The Odyssey of black baseball. He’d write it. He was there for the whole thing. Just eighteen years old when Frank had joined Buffalo. Nineteen when he started his pro career with Pittsburgh of the now-defunct National Colored League. Another brief response to the crisis. Teams lost to time. The Pythians. The Resolutes. Falls Citys. Frank was out by third base playing catch with first baseman Chappie Johnson. Sol could hear the whip in Chappie’s throws as they bent Frank’s glove. At least there was a league then. Some sort of structure. It was formed by Walter Brown, a college man, like Sol. News fellow from the Cleveland Gazette. The money died out almost instantly. Traveling became near impossible. Stranded. Missing games. And just like that, it was over.

It was like being thrown back into the stew. Sol looked back at his own career. He considered himself, perhaps hubristically, quite a fine player. But his passion was always writing. He’d considered quitting; working on his book. He looked at the success of Frederick Douglass and Du Bois with a profound admiration. Douglass was now a well known — even legendary — orator. Respected by literary men of all races and colors. His legacy continued to grow, even after death. A primary figure in modern American history. And Du Bois was just getting started. Harvard educated. Some of the best, well researched, soulful prose White had ever read. He gobbled it up like spiritual food.

Maybe his book would put a little extra money in his pocket. He patted his quickening, threadbare sliding pants. He could use it. A quiet rage filled Sol’s throat as he thought back to the years with the Cuban X Giants. It was a great team. Frank had been there too. But nowhere near the level of greatness of this Columbia squad. And he hated the term ‘Cubans’. Not that he had anything against Cuba. He was black. American. And that was that. Frank used to say he didn’t mind being called ‘Italian’ or ‘Spaniard’. He was just glad he’d had a shot to play in the organized pros while there was a chance. Although, he’d tell Sol, back when they first met back on the X Giants — Buffalo was a small time club compared to Page Fence or the X Giants. And this Columbia club was a whole cut above. Even bigger. A team full of legends. Sol suspected they could beat any starting nine in the world, square, in a three game series. Buckner, Miller, Wilson, in any order. It wouldn’t matter. The hitting lineup alone would put the games out of contention.

2. The Genius of Rube Foster and Achilles the Bard

It was a young man, Rube Foster, who had first alerted Sol to the opportunity emerging in Cuba this year. Foster was one of the smartest fellows Sol had ever met. He was industrious, hardworking; had already emerged as one of the best pitchers on the eastern side of the continent in the black independent circuit. Not to mention, the man had a knack for business. He’d opened up a successful roofing business at the age of fifteen. But Rube’s pitching was the real show. The top Chicago squads were already taking notice. He was the son of a Methodist minister; pitched for the Waco Yellow Jackets. Closer to the border. The Spanish-American War was quite a bit hotter in Foster’s world. After the American victory against Spain, there was a change in Cuban culture. It registered, even in Foster’s Texas hometown. Cuban ballplayers frequently came overseas to the south for education. They brought with them their own flavor of the game. And they took back more and more American baseball knowledge; incorporating it at home. Baseball had played a critical role in the assertion of Cuban cultural independence; especially in the war. Sol had heard of a great player for the Habana Lions squad, Emilio Sabourin. He’d fought as a revolutionary in the war, murdered for his beliefs in Cuban freedom. Freeing the black slaves in Cuba. Declaring independence from Spain. Sabourin died of pneumonia in a Spanish prison. One of the chief organizers of the Cuban professional league, he was known to be quite the second baseman. Sol would’ve loved to see him and Frank Grant in action. On the field at the same time, duking it out for top billing.

Rube let Sol know the league was opening to black Cuban players; he suspected that they’d allow American black players to join too. This was on a twenty year old man’s mind. Sol was scared to think just what strings Rube would be pulling at forty. Nobody had any idea what this would be like — the integrated pro baseball experiment. But in Cuba, professional baseball was as well established as anything the black Americans had at home. The independent ballclubs were like rogue, insurgent states. Whatever money each group had was what they had. And that determined where they went, who they played, and how long they stayed. And where they slept. If they ate. And when the whole thing fell apart all over again.

Sol rubbed his stomach. Dinner would be late tonight. He knew a restaurant not far from the boarding house where they served a great minestrone; fresh fish. Trout. Friendly to the black teams. Knowing that there would be a hot meal always made him play better. He grabbed his mitt; stepped out onto the field.

“Wake up Homer! Two outs!”

His double play partner, the twenty-two year old kid Charlie Grant, slapped him on the back as he ran back to his position at second. Frank, due to Charlie’s youthful athleticism, had been temporarily relegated to first in his older age. Sol suspected Frank would be back to second in no time. But it might not be with the Columbias. Charlie was too slick.

Sol’s mind was on the league again. They were up, 8-0. Not even the top of the fifth yet. A stringy batter stepped up to the plate, as George Wilson leered down at him from the top of the mound. George cut an imposing, muscular figure on the hill. He’d won almost thirty games in the integrated Michigan State League as a teenager. Only burning brighter since then, the whole Midwest knew what he was capable of. His fastball stung Pete Burns’ mitt every time. You ever heard a pitcher so good that his own catcher hates to catch him? Sol suspected the tall, lean hitter had. He was quaking in his socks.

Sol let his right hand scrape the dirt; he rubbed his fingertips into the grain. George carved a sweeping breaking pitch across the plate. The batter flailed; desperately throwing the knob of the bat across the zone with a weak, fluttering swing. “Strike two!” boomed the umpire. Sol let his mind effortlessly drift back to the book, and his hopes for some stability. Rube told him earlier this year by letter, on his father’s church heading, that he’d try to bring Home Run and his new friend Pete Hill along soon to the island. He wanted to play for Habana, like Sabourin. They were the oldest, most legendary team in the Cuban circuit. Perennial champions. Sol had seen a cabinet photo, an elaborate composite, created by the revolutionary photographer N.E. Maceo, depicting one of their great squads. 1886-87 league champions. Sabourin was on the club, along with the great Cuban pitcher Adolfo Lujan. Even the young Charlie Grant was starting to look into the Cuban ballgame with increasing interest. What it represented, above all else, was a sense of true exhalation. However impermanent, however fleeting. However Platonic. Sol didn’t even know if it existed yet. If it would exist. But in his mind, it meant a clean slate of games. A team with clean uniforms. Certainty of payment. Many of the Cuban stars remained with a given team for years. There were competitive league clubs. Almendarista. San Francisco. And the purportedly beautiful Almendares Park, in Havana city.

He rubbed his knuckles. The winter nights were getting to him in his old age. His joints were still warming up from the last brutal burst of cold. The Chicago wind bit his face and his hands through his mittens, as he wrapped his scarf across his chin and neck down on the street from his apartment. He couldn’t keep the stove warm enough with logs. Heat dispersed quickly into the poorly insulated building. Nights spent just tending the fire. Only a couple of words in the book. His hands shaking. Stacks of notebooks piled up on his mantle. He’d have to put it all together soon, or at least something approximating it. There’d be a lot of editing. Box scores. Player histories. Team histories. And the spaces in between. The restaurants. Rail cars. Sol shuddered. He hated editing.

His favorite thing to do was write the epic. He could feel it running through everything, from the moment they struck Fleet and Frank and Bud Fowler from the professional game. It was the beginning of the exile. The Ovidian years, as he fondly called them to himself. If he said it out loud, his teammates would just raise an eyebrow. He was secretly glad he was too young to have experienced the severance personally. His days on white clubs felt like a transition between his teenage years and his adult life. Extremely brief — however cold and hateful they truly were. But for other players, it had created a real life change. A dangerous gulf. They were grown men, with children. They’d given their lives to the game, in hopes of making it to the big leagues. George Wilson had remarked upon it too. Like the bottom falling out of the world. And each player had to pick up the pieces. No one had stepped up to lead. They had the Colored League for a moment. But it was trying to build a whole empire from scratch. From slavery. From families in the poverty and discrimination and suppression Du Bois talked about. Running teams cost money. Rent the ballpark, buy the uniforms. Set the schedule. Track the finances. And that’s not even talking about a league. Sol thought about the manager, Patterson. John was younger than Sol was. Everything seemed to turn to Cuba. How sustainable would this continue to be? It hung over him like a shadow. The games felt like a sick joke in the face of the reality.

Wilson struck out the side without much effort. Sol could see he was throwing maybe seventy, seventy-five percent of his luster. Easily tossing to Pete. Pete feigning pain in his glove hand. George laughing as he took the ball back. The dejected batter. These fellows were day laborers. They’d play in lots on Sundays after church. Not bad ballplayers. Some would even score a couple runs off some bloop hits off the end of the bat, coupled with some hanging breaking balls off the easy hand of any one of the starters. It didn’t hurt anybody. But it was hard to hone your craft like this. And it was hard to stay too humble. Lack of competition made everyone quick to anger. It was pointless. And worst of all, boring.

Sol marched back to the dugout. “Take it easy there George?”

George was gruff as ever. “Too easy.”

Wilson threw his mitt down on the wooden bench and went to grab some chewing tobacco from his rucksack. Sol sat down next to Pete Burns.

“Say Sol, how’s that book coming?”

“Lotta thinkin’ bout it, Pete.”

“Lotta writing?”

“Too much. Not enough editing.”

Pete laughed. “Say, you should hire one of those newspaper fellows from Pittsburgh or Chicago to look it over for you.”

Sol gave this a moment of thought.

“I’d like to do it all myself. Ever read Homer?”

Pete scratched his chin. “That a ball book?”

Sol retracted the thought. He’d been rereading the Iliad; had taken a look at some works by Percy Shelley. The form of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound intrigued him. Man’s struggle against constraint. It seemed to Sol to be the fundamental problem. It was hard to talk to the club about his project. Most guys just seemed interested enough in collecting a check, however meagre; checking in on the girls they’d met in Tennessee or Florida. Cannon Ball would try to get out on the town wherever he could. Billy Holland, the center fielder; William Binga, the third baseman, would always tag along. Cannon Ball knew by now, but he’d half-heartedly try to get Sol in on the mischief.

“Say, Homer, we met some girls down at the diner this morning. Wanna see where the night goes?” he’d say, or some permutation of it.

Sol’s nose would be in a book of poems, or Juvenal’s satires. Maybe a new Du Bois article. “I don’t know about that Cannon Ball.”

Cannon Ball would smile, as he picked up his coat. “Say hi to the angels for me, Homer.” He’d gently close the door. Sol would hear him come back late at night; collapse into bed, snoring loudly. He’d still be awake; sometimes a candle burning. Some progress made in the history. Knock out the 1850s. Some notes on the early New York game. Independent black clubs of the 1860s. The first match in Weeksville, September, 1860. Octavius Catto’s intellectual leadership and early integration attempts. Infielder for the Pythians. Sol left ample room for him.

The books would come together, bit by bit. The veins of the country running together across time, pulsing information. Sol collected them in his books. Writing letters. Interviewing teammates. Traveling, living the growth and early birth of the game. He knew he was in the midst of something big. Something new. Something terribly difficult. And he knew, part of him, the deepest, innermost part, that he’d been put on this earth to record it. God had made him a helluva ballplayer, but he’d also made him a scribe of history. Black baseball was a ledger of a civilization in the throes of birth in displacement. A wandering band of troubadours. Jasons. He was like a Dante, or Marcellinus, one of his favorite Roman historians. He was in the midst of the schism. The Civil War was just decades earlier. Sol had been on one white team. The Wheeling Green Stockings. .370 batting average. The year after he’d joined, his teammates forced him off the team.

Sol was born just three years after the war had ended. His parents were farmers; they knew too many slaves. Families that had fled up north. Some settled for Ohio; others fled to Massachusetts, Vermont, Detroit. Anywhere but the south. The war was extremely bloody. His parents would bring it up every now and then when he was a kid. His dad kept the Roman historians on a shelf in the house. Finely bound leather copies. His treasured possessions. Sometimes Sol even thought they meant more to his father than the King James Bible he’d kept on his nightstand. Sol read Epictetus from his dad’s library; Homer, and some Plato as well. It made him a fine match for a college education. He’d had no issue at Wilberforce in Ohio. Even harboring an increasing inclination for the border of history and philosophy. He settled on the field of theology, for the sake of the degree. But even then, he knew he’d be a pro ballplayer. His talent was too all encompassing. Even among the dense, highly competitive, early days before the lines were drawn in pro ball, Sol showed himself to be the best of the best. So when the segregated leagues and independent clubs of black baseball were forced into being, Sol’s standing only grew. The book was the real project. Because there, he was up against the Hydra of a forgotten, dead, and dying black past. A gaping hole. He shone a light. The lost history.

He was up third that inning. He grabbed the dark wood bat that he called Pegasus; stood up on the dugout steps. Chappie was up already, swinging on the on deck circle. He wondered what it had been like — for the generation just before him. He couldn’t imagine slavery. But he knew things were bad now. Real bad. Just how much worse had they been before Lincoln? Gettysburg? Sol was glad he hadn’t fought. He didn’t know how much violence or animosity he had in his body. The need, urge, or desire to kill? Sol looked around him at the ironworkers warming up on the infield. No — there was too much vision. It brought up for him a game when he was far younger, against some Pittsburgh steelworkers, while he was still with the Keystones. A barnstorming game, in between Colored League play. He didn’t think too much about the white teams he was on anymore. Sure, there were some solid players. A couple even went on to the big leagues. But it didn’t feel particularly important. It was over before it had even started. There was never a place for him there. His own teammates had forced him off the team. He’d almost hit .400. Could you believe it? He spat on the ground. It was the hope for something else to return in this wilderness. Scraping by. Would Rube Foster be a part of it? Rube was a strong willed man. Some would say a headstrong man. Every letter Sol got from Rube was increasingly incensed. Rube was too smart; too good of a pitcher. If he was just one or the other, Sol suspected it wouldn’t have hit the kid so hard. Plenty of black ballplayers just accepted this. The fate of a fragmented, on again off again affair of teams that reared their heads and died, sometimes even in a half-season’s time. They picked up, moved on, and made the best of whatever came next. Whatever was left.

Sol admitted to himself. It stung. It hurt like hell. He knew how Rube felt, viscerally — in his gut. To know that you could beat out nine and a half of the ten best guys in the most well off league in the hemisphere. And to be shut out from it. From the money. From the stability. The possibility of integrated competition. Sol wanted to face Cy Young. He’d faced George in batting practice. Rube told him he’d be waiting when he eventually made it up to the Midwest, the bastion of black ball. But he wanted to face Cy too. He wanted to face all the best pitchers the game had to offer. No exceptions. To know, to prove — even if he didn’t give a damn — that he could hang with the top of them all.

It was like a hot anger. Sol pressed against his stomach and chest. A fire. It scorched his insides. This was why he had to write the book. He had to preserve every minute, every second, every moment of everything they’d built; everything they were building. To show, to prove, to feel and know for themselves, that what they had was meaningful. That what they had was real, true; right there with the legend. More than the legend. The story. The big epic. They didn’t have the New York Times. The photographers. The media. Harper’s Magazine. Everything before this was a caricature. Savages on a ballfield. Projected out into the American public. Otherwise, the hard silence. Black newspapers feeding news of Frank or Bud’s exploits to a segregated public, struggling to dig out of the economic and cultural hole of over a century of brutal, violent enslavement. The struggle for free black America. And in the midst of it, a team that could beat anyone, legging out base hits on a field in the middle of nowhere, against a team of day-laborers.

Sol could hear and feel the hate in his voice, his thoughts, his breath. These were honest, hard-working men. Why did he feel this way? Why was he so angry?

He watched as Chappie hit a bullet up the middle, almost taking off the pitcher’s cap. The iron-man watched in astonishment as the ball flew like a white-hot meteor into center field, skipping over the second-base bag.

Sol started swinging.

It was because it was wrong. He immediately wanted to rip up the entire book; burn it in the dirty stove of his small, cramped Chicago apartment. He was writing a whole history of a disjointed, broken league that only existed because of the hatred of white ballplayers. White businessowners. White families. White former-slaveowners. North and south. Sol knew all too well from experience that being in the north was no reprieve from hatred. And with hatred came alienation. Loss of resources. Loss of opportunity. Sol wasn’t only hated because he was black. He was hated because he was good. Damn good. Good enough that when he stepped on a ballfield, white or black, every player on it had to stop and reconsider his career in the game. Whether to retire, maybe go work as a bellhop. Or an accountant.

Sol would ask Frank Grant, back when they were on the Cuban X Giants together — what made him so okay with all of this? Why was he so mellow? Sol was even angrier when he was younger. Not much less angry now. Frank would always reply:

“It’s not something I can change or control. What I can control is stepping out on that field every day and putting my best foot forward. Regardless of who’s on it.”

Eventually, Sol just stopped asking. He realized what this book was about. And the realization came just as Charlie Grant hit an identical single, right up the middle. The pitcher looked like he was ready to toss his mitt in the nearest bin and head for home. Sol was up to bat.

He knocked his cleats twice, then stepped in the box. Even as he’d been contemplating, he noticed the pitcher would wiggle his pointer finger in his glove whenever he threw breaking stuff. He suspected Charlie and Chappie had caught wind of this too, as they took breaking pitches in both of their at bats before they got middle-in fastballs. Near identical pitches, near identical execution. Sol geared up for the same. Young or inexperienced pitchers ran on patterns. They reverted back to their best stuff in their safest locations when things got pinched. And with no outs; runners on first and second after two bullets, this guy was pinched.

Sol let his thoughts return.

The book was about the feelings he had. And the feelings were so strong, that they became an entire cosmological history of the black game. No one else was doing this. No one else could. It was the same anger, the same scorn that he knew Rube felt. But he didn’t have Rube’s mind. Rube’s action. Rube would do something. He would build something with his bare hands if he had to. Sol’s mind worked differently. He saw all the connections. All the interconnections. And he didn’t want Frank’s memory to just die. He knew Frank could very well be forgotten. Soft spoken, all around Frank. Because no one was capturing it, recording it, keeping it. No one outside the 1886 Buffalo Bisons book that Frank kept with him everywhere. Frank said it was his externalized memory. So he wouldn’t forget himself.

But this wasn’t just Frank’s problem. It was the agony of something great, someones great. Many someones great. Going utterly unseen, unheard, unrecognized. Sol wondered if this was Homer’s problem. That Homer saw this great majesty of mythic history of Greece unfolding before his eyes. The power, the poetry, the real work being done. Of his civilization, of his people. And if that was why he was compelled to record it. Sol knew he would never be able to know how much of Homer’s epic ledger was truth or fiction, history or myth or embellishment. How much of what the world Homer and Homer’s time and people saw was true. But what was truth? The truth Sol saw in America was that he and his people had been relegated to the dustbin. And beaten while they tried to survive in it. The history of the forgotten, the hated. The attempt to destroy. To kill black political power. Black economic power. Even as it rose from the most debased, mutilated conditions. Every time. Burned townships. Violent attacks. Who was Lincoln? And what did Lincoln know of his pain? The pain of this team? What it took to just keep this going?

Sol took a curveball. 1-0. This guy would go down 2-0 and feed him an inside fastball. Sol took this like celestial mechanics. A matter of truth in time. At least physics was dependable. Based on forces. And he supposed this was as well. The power of this white empire, cannons, guns, plantations, factories, media. This whole machine of industrialists. Decades of accumulated wealth serving segregated, class controlled interests. While the poor, the black, the immigrants — while they starved. Labored for hours in factories. On fields. The stadiums being constructed before his eyes. The smokestack metropolises. He’d seen West Side Park, where the Chicago Nationals played. It was state of the art. And every day, on his way to practice, he walked past the Union Stock Yards. It was an ominous system of machines, manufacturing, and transport. He’d watch as European immigrants, many of whom didn’t speak a lick of English, pile into grueling factory shifts. Their faces registered a kind of defeat Sol didn’t know if he had words for. Their backs twisted, hunched. Their eyes and faces, like burnt out piles of coal.

All around him he saw and felt this surrender to the machines of power. It was a forced surrender. Of brute force applied over and over again until submission was all but guaranteed. He knew what history was. Who, what would Bud Fowler and Octavius Catto be, one hundred years from now? A myth? A legend? A footnote? Sol suspected with increasing cynicism that they would be forgotten burial plots. A small, unmarked, or barely marked grave in some woods. Baseball had allowed them nothing in life. Why would it allow them anything in death?

This book was a form of resistance akin to an alternate universe. He took another curve, low in the dirt. Here comes the fastball. It would be a book that would allow the space to be created, the space to exist — the space that could not exist, and did not exist in this life. That would persist, even in the face of inevitable decay and death. And damn if they never set foot on West Side Park field, or anywhere else. And damn the Polo Grounds.

3. The Trials of Dead Men

Two weeks later, Sol set his traveling bag down on the wooden floor of his second story apartment on the South Side of Chicago. He could hear his neighbor and his wife arguing downstairs. Something about bills. He looked out the window at the rough construction across the street. There was a line of clothes strewn across a chain link fence. Trash littered the far side of the street. The wind was howling loudly; licking the wicks of the streetlamps. He pulled his wool coat close about his nose and lips; closed the heavy door.

He sat, quickly throwing logs on the fire. Winter was coming already; the turn from the fiery days of August into the fall dip was violent. Sudden. Abrupt. As he walked into the building, he saw an entertainment bill pasted on the door:

HIGH-CLASS VAUDEVILLE, WILSON AVE THEATRE: NOW OPEN FOR BUSINESS. COME SEE THE SHOW.

Sol scoffed. They must not realize they’re on the wrong side of town. How’d this bill end up here? He crumpled it up in his fist, feeling his fingers touch. As he set his bag down, he realized he still had it in his left hand. He threw it in the fire with the logs. Brushes of flame began to move from the stove.

In his writing chair, Sol’s mind was quickly stimulated. He’d just gotten back, but he was already eager to write about the month’s expedition. The Columbias had won every game, easily sweeping their barnstand. Sol had met a schoolteacher named Barry Thompson on the trip — whose team the Columbias had beaten 15-2 — and Thompson had told him about a young man named Walter Ball, who’d just pulled back into St. Paul to get married after a stint in Devils Lake, North Dakota. He was a championship pitcher; Thompson complained, as good as anybody on the independent circuit. Thompson had been down south to hit against Rube, so Sol took note. He had written down Ball’s name on a scrap of newspaper, with a vow to make sure Ball made it into the book.

Home Run Johnson would be coming up next week. The Union boys were as tough as anything the Columbias would face all year, or in the next two years besides. Grant had gone over from the disbanded Page Fence squad to helm the Unions, but he hadn’t been able to pull quite the same magnitude of firepower as the Columbias. Nobody in black baseball at the turn of the century thought there’d ever been a better squad than Patterson’s crew, but if anyone could take two out of three on a lucky weekend in 1900, it was the Unions. Led by Home Run and Bert Jones, an average outing by Jones and two middling at bats by Grant could keep them in contention on the best day Sol’s team could muster. This would be a game all of Chicago’s baseball loving black community would attend; white fans besides. On top of that, it would require the sustained, top level efforts of the entire Columbia team. They would spend the next five days practicing at full attention.

Sol threw another log in the fire as it sparked. He drew the red leather notebook from the road trip from his pocket. It was now entirely full. A thirty-ninth volume in the saga. 1850-1900. Five decades. A thought lingered with him, the same thought from the game against the iron-workers, transformed. How long, truly, would it last? And would he be there to scribe it all? The book could be magnificent. Sol thought of his literary aspirations. Maybe even living up to the Homer nickname. He’d want to give the book to all of his friends. His parents. He’d print a book for every black ballplayer he knew. He’d make sure the teachers and factory-workers were in it too. Barry Thompson, and his slick fielding at third base. The thought exhausted him and enthralled him at the same time. It was the ultimate undertaking. He sat back in the wooden chair and tossed the red notebook onto the pile with the rest. Some were black, cloth, linen. Whatever he had or could find to write on. Some sections were on pieces of napkin. Cardboard even.

The book felt more important than baseball. He hadn’t played as well as he could lately. The season was on the verge of ending and he was far closer to .300 than usual. Pete, Chappie, and John were all having better offensive years than him. His defense rarely suffered, but he still felt a bit of competitiveness about it. He still cared about being the best. John had noticed. Being a player and a manager, he was extremely sensitive to the highs and lows of the psyche of a ballplayer. Especially one as good as Sol was. He’d asked him, “Mind’s elsewhere?”

Sol had nodded. Even when he was talking to John, his mind was on the book.

John continued. “I know you’re trying to write it all down. Tried living it first?”

Sol faintly appreciated John’s concern. But not enough that it could or would shake him out of the project. It drew him in like a black hole sink, like a vacuum. It consumed and possessed his every waking moment.

“Very funny, John,” he’d replied. John knew then, as he knew before, and would know after, that Sol was working on something that would be remembered when the rest of this was forgotten. The team dinners. The long, hot train rides. The dice games in the dugouts. The boarding houses, with hard, flat cots. Cannon Ball’s snoring.

Everyone on the team knew that Sol’s book was growing. It was incredibly unwieldy. Frank even offered to buy Sol a large chest to keep in his room to hold all the papers. Sol politely refused.

“Say, Frank, spend it on your family. They need it more than I do.”

Frank just smiled; clapped him on the shoulder.

“Just make sure you give me a copy.”

“You’ll be the first.”

Frank meant a lot to Sol. He respected him not only for the quality of his play, but for the quality of his character. Frank couldn’t be phased. Sol wasn’t sure if it was because of the trials he underwent on the white teams with all the spiking, or whether it was his disposition. Regardless of what it was, Frank was rock solid. And it showed in his career stats. What little Sol could scrape together, in large part thanks to Frank’s old news clipping scrapbook, the second baseman had regularly touched and flirted with a .400 average; some seasons, near a .500 on base percentage. This boggled Sol’s mind. This meant Frank was on base every other at bat, whether by a walk or a hit or other means. Frank, in everything Frank was and did — Frank found a way. And this was Sol’s project. One man finding a way to get it all down. So it would be remembered, forever, in the form it truly deserved. Historical and philosophical completion. A world retained, even in the passage of death, dissolution, disappearance. Forgetting.

He stood up; picked up two black leather volumes, along with a thick stack of loose papers, covered in scrawl. He began to lay the book out on the floor, in the light and shadow of the flickering flames. It was like going back through time; down into time that Sol wasn’t there for, that he didn’t remember, that he couldn’t see — but time nonetheless that he was able to recover — thanks to eyewitness accounts, ledgers, newspaper clippings, and handed down stories from children; community members. All of white baseball was already there. It was stamped, certified, institutionalized in the American history of the game. Even as young as the game was, Sol thought, white America had created — via their political and economic power and control — a system of institutions for canonizing their memory. Media files. Large publishing houses. Massive newspaper buildings. Printers. Factories. Sol had these notebooks and Home Run Johnson’s sly quips. Rube’s letters. Sol kept every single one. In anticipation of what he knew Rube would grow to be.

And this was enough for Sol. Even better, it was like a puzzle he was embroiled in. A great and grand mystery of time. It was like he was Achilles writing the Iliad, not Homer. Homer was the epic poet outside the story. The bard retelling it all around the fire of the gods. But Achilles was in the action. Achilles was a part of the history. And from that place it was truly life and death. This gave Sol a profound sense of felt purpose. That no matter how hard life was, no matter what threat or struggle, that the journey itself was meaningful. That it had real force behind it. That behind the exile, behind the hatred and violence — that there was this radical gift of grace. This opportunity to document this thing that he, that Frank, that John — that all of them were building themselves. And it had echoes in it. Echoes of Octavius Catto, echoes of Fleet Walker. And these echoes were as recent as a hand passing through the previous night. A fresh sense memory. The recall of an early morning. That Sol had woken up into this day of brief transition. And that, tomorrow, it would be something entirely new, unprecedented. Different. Sol exhaled. Ideally, more free.

Sol felt a deep sense of hope in this. Baseball and America were changing so fast. And nowhere did he see and feel this more than in the work of Douglass and Du Bois. A Harvard educated black man putting out the highest quality intellectual work in the world. And a freed slave who had become one of America’s greatest literary and philosophical figures of self realization. This was in him; in Rube too. In Frank. Genius. In whatever form it felt and took. He could feel the presence of powerful souls, rippling through one of the most difficult moments in human history. A moment of profound alteration. A paradigm, shifting before his eyes. And he was at the height of his powers in the midst of it. The history of slavery was not unfamiliar to him. Down in Cuba, the black men there were going through something similar. Slavery in Cuba had just been abolished. National sovereignty shortly thereafter — albeit, coupled with extensive American economic and political oversight. And now they were on the first consciously integrated baseball diamond in the world. Sol knew he had to get down there. Some way, somehow.

Sol woke up, with the sun streaming through the curtains. The fire was a few whispering skeletons of log ash; his map of the book remained on the floor, just as he’d left it. Brewing himself a cup of coffee, he stood over the sheaves of paper, tracing the historical dynamics elucidated therein. Fragments of games. Details of exploits. Backgrounds of players. Nicknames. Friendships. Movements of teams, finances. The birth and death of leagues. Initiatives. A current, a flow of energy. And within it, Frank Grant diving to his left on a sharp ground ball between him and the first baseman. Fleet Walker, standing with his arms crossed in the back of a team photograph, with a kerchief around his neck. The 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings. Meeting Bud Fowler and his wife at their St. Louis rowhouse. She was a schoolteacher; cooked him roast chicken legs, broccoli, and potatoes.

This all must be included. He scribbled furiously. And the next time he looked up, the sun had set. He staggered over to the stove, lighting a flame. Some broth in a pot; seasoned green beans. Cracking three eggs into a buttery pan.

He put the plate beside him on a stool by the fire. If he didn’t eat, he wouldn’t be ready to face Johnson’s Giants.

He fell asleep in his chair again — this time researching a George Stovey outing with the Troy Trojans in 1890. Sol was convinced Stovey would have been a New York Giant if it weren’t for Cap Anson’s involvement. As he drifted off, he saw Stovey standing next to John Ward, chatting as they ran off the Polo Grounds field; into the tunnels.

4. You Think You Know The Cause?

“Hey, wise up Homer! Get in the game!”

Sol jolted up. He was on the dugout bench at Columbia Park.

“The team’s out on the field already! Bottom seven!”

John was not happy. His scowl blocked the sun.

“Right!” Sol grabbed his mitt and started to run out to the field. Patterson grabbed his arm.

“Listen, Sol. I’m worried about you. Your head’s been in the clouds since the first game of this season. And now we’re almost through.”

John read Sol’s face.

“Right, the book. Did you sleep at all last night?”

Sol shook his head. “Bout an hour. Maybe two.” The dark, splotchy shadows under his eyes betrayed him before the words did.

John’s face dropped. Sol read almost a sad sympathy, verging on pity in John’s eyes.

“Don’t you want to be here?”

“Of course I do, John. What kind of question is that?”

“You can’t write this book and live it at the same time.”

“Sure I can. Says who?”

“Says me.” John pointed at his chest. “I haven’t seen you here at all. And your play is suffering because of it. On your worst day you’re the best shortstop anyone out here can put in the field. But that isn’t an excuse.”

Sol’s head sunk into his shoulders a bit. “I know. But this is important.”

“I know it is. But you have to do decide what’s more important. What you’re going to do with the time you have left. Neither of us is getting any younger.”

Sol put his glove on and ran out to short. For the first time in the thirteen years since he’d started professional ball, Sol seriously considered calling it quits right then and there. Baseball wasn’t his calling. But why was he so good? Why had the game dragged him all the way here, banging on the door of professional baseball with a lazy fist? He didn’t even care if he got in. If they won today. If he got a hit. Screw it. But he remembered the burning in his stomach. He did. Maybe more than he could admit to himself. He had fight. But the book was a chance to do something bigger than him. Bigger than anyone. For everyone.

Sol fielded the first pitch Buckner delivered in the bottom of the seventh. The hot grounder off the bat of Bill Monroe met the webbing of his glove as he lunged to his left. Stagger stepping, he palmed the ball in his right hand and fired across his body. The ball slammed into Chappie’s glove, three steps ahead of the speedy Monroe. Charlie Grant patted him on the back as he circled the second base bag. “Sure hands, Homer!”

All Sol could think about was getting back that night to write.

He collapsed into his chair and began immediately. He realized he’d remembered nothing about today’s game outside of that ground ball; his conversation with John. Everything else was a blur. He was angrier than usual at Cap Anson. Racist son-of-a-bitch. The dream stuck in him like a knife. Stovey in a Giants uniform. What that meant for the rest of them. No more scrounging around like stray dogs; hyenas on some lost plain. Searching for the baseball shore, like Ahab and his band of all-nations lost. Fighting a ghost. Spearing the white whale. It was the amorphous hatred in each water fountain, each school system, each book, each degree. Each restaurant, ballfield, angry glance from a railworker as they stepped off the train.

Sol could live in the book. It was the possible world of safety and fertility. It was supposed to be a history, but it had quickly turned to fiction. Imagining coming into the game after Fowler or Walker had made it big. The way paved. Sol would’ve loved to play for the Cleveland team. Used to be the Spiders. Jesse Burkett and Cy Young. Buck Ewing. Clarkson. Sol knew all these players like the back of his hand, just like he knew the greats of the black clubs. He’d have flashes, in his overactive imagination. Burkett versus the upstart Rube Foster. Clarkson or Cy against Fowler. The possibilities of the matchups. And Sol would be there, ideally in the dugout, writing it all down. Like a scribe for an ancient Egyptian rite, or a Juvenal. Sol wanted to see more than he wanted to play. Because if he saw, he could play in every game, face; every position. This was how he knew he was truly a writer at heart. Being one player, one piece on the board wasn’t enough. He wanted the whole board. And the room around it. To know how and why; to trace every stray mark, throw, and sign. It was what Sol imagined it would be like to know the universe, intimately.

The world, to Sol, was play. Between ballplaying and writing, there was pure play. Adventure. Imagination. Exercise of the soul. It was a grand design, a theatre no better and nowhere else best manifest but in the game of baseball. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. Sixty feet, six inches to home plate. Ninety foot geometry of the base-paths. It was an Odyssean project of the hardest thing to do with your body — turn on a George Wilson fastball — then leg it through Scylla and Charybdis: Sol White and Frank Grant, starting shortstop and second baseman for the Cuban X Giants. It was just a year prior that Frank was his double play partner. He remembered it fondly. Now at first base, Frank ran the long side of the 6-4-3. Sol laughed to himself. And the cyclops was the behemoth of the white leagues. Every black man, passing through saying nobody, even if he knew he was the biggest star on the field.

History and myth could redeem it. Wedded at the rubber. And it was in that moment that Sol decided he was going to tell John Patterson that he was retiring from baseball.

“No way in hell I’m letting you do that, Sol.”

John stood against his desk in the paint-stripped room of the manager’s office below Columbia Park. Outside the lone window, Sol could hear street noise pattering the cement. Children walking; shouting. Mothers hushing in high heels.

“John, you got no say. In fact, you can’t say a god-damn thing about it.”

John’s fist curled on the table, reddening.

“Don’t make a decision you’ll regret Sol. And on top of it, we need you.”

“Season’s over John. What if I say I ain’t coming back next year.”

John whistled.

“There is no next year, anyways. We don’t have the money for it.”

Sol exhaled.

“What if I told you about a kid named Rube Foster. Just in case there is.”

“I’m listening.”

Sol didn’t retire after the 1900 season. In fact, he returned for all of one recorded game in 1901, for the Cuban X Giants. The X Giants had no home. And two decades later, when Sol looked back and tried to fix the record as best as he could, that one game was the only one he could remember. So that’s the only game they played.

Sol spent most of 1901 in his memory, writing. He was working backwards in recovery. Obsessed with his dream. It kept happening. Stovey, standing on the field at the Polo Grounds with John Ward. The two of them were laughing. The NEW YORK insignia across his chest. Sol mailed George a letter after his meeting with Patterson, letting him know about the dream. He felt it was only right to let George know of his involvement therein. George told him to come meet him at his cabin in the mountains outside of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. “Bring a rifle,” he said in the letter. “I’ll take you rabbit hunting.”

Sol arrived without a rifle, in the late fall of 1901. George answered the door of the log cabin, a big grin on his face.

“Good to see you kid,” he said.

“I ain’t a kid anymore, George. And sure as hell neither are you.”

George smiled. “Let’s talk.”

He lit a fire in the fireplace; handed Sol a small glass of whiskey.

“I know why you’re here. And what’s more, I know about the dream.”

“I expected as much, considering I told you.”

“No, Sol. I had the same dream, ten years ago. After I left the Troy ballclub.”

Sol remembered he’d been researching Stovey’s stint with Troy when the dreams began. Nonetheless, the prick of surprise.

“The same dream, huh.”

“The same one exactly. I met Ward a couple years after I had it. Good man. Fought for the players. Told me he’d wished we’d played together. I said much of the same. This was all before McGraw, mind you.”

Word was out in the baseball world that the New York Giants were hot to sign the former Baltimore Oriole John McGraw to a managerial contract. McGraw, notoriously hotheaded and personally outspoken, was already attempting to recruit black ballplayers to break the line of segregation.

“I heard about him. You think he’ll do it?”

“Depends.”

“Depends on what?”

“If they let him.”

Sol nodded slowly.

“So what about this dream, George. Speak on it.”

George took a deep breath.

“I know you want this book to be something that heals, Sol. And I’m worried that the wound is too deep. That you don’t know enough about it. And worst of all, that it can’t be healed by a ballgame. Or even by a book that manages to capture and tell it all.”

Sol’s eyes filled with shadows. And rage. George saw all of this, and continued.

“You know what they think of me in the papers. No matter how good I am, or was. Or they say I was. Or anyone. Violent. Headstrong. Working in the brewery shoveling grain down here in town while Anson threatened to stand up games if Fleet or anyone stepped on the field. It don’t matter. It never did. And that’s not to even speak on the violence that’s going on in town. How they treat us. Just for the way we look. Even here in the north.” Stovey looked sideways. “Especially here in the north.”

“So what, George.”

George’s face raised in heat.

“So I got tired of it, Homer. I got tired of them getting in my face. Complaining, or worse. The threats. ‘Stovey’s one of the best pitchers of this day’. Put me on the field, they take their men off it. Try to hire me, blackballed. Boycotted.”

“I know, George. Don’t patronize me.”

George’s voice rose to a yell.

“So you think I’m here working odd jobs and umpiring for my health? Drinking, for my health?”

Sol realized that George was quite drunk. The bottle he’d poured Sol’s glass of whiskey from was near empty.

“Say, George. Did you crack that one open today?”

George looked at the bottle. His voice became embarrassed and small.

“Say, Homer. Did I tell you its good to see you?”

Sol got up and gave George a hug. He could feel two wet tears land on the skin of his forearm. He thanked George for the visit and headed back down to Williamsport to catch the next train back to Chicago. Two weeks later, he received a letter from George. On the back of it was a local box score from a game he’d umpired. It read:

THANKS HOMER. SEND ME A COPY OF THE BOOK, WILL YA? I HOPE I’M IN IT.

YOUR PAL,

GEORGE

Sol wrote back:

YOU KNOW IT.

— ACHILLES

As Sol gave the letter to the postman, early in the morning, he rededicated himself to the book. His entire life was already given over to it. He renewed his faith thusly: he’d keep playing; find what was left of the best seasons of his career and of his life. What’s more, in it all, he’d find the thread between the past and the present: the thread that ran through the moment and energized it with a fire — the same fire that ran wild through George Stovey’s life; Octavius Catto’s besides — the fire that murdered Catto in cold blood on October 10th, 1871. The fire that was a march and assault on multiple black men who attempted to vote that day in Philadelphia; threatened to disturb the machinations of white political power. Roving militias and police officers participated in armed attacks on black neighborhoods, breaking into homes, closing polling places; fatally assaulting community members.

The fire that was slowly killing George Stovey.

5. Visions Sent From Faceless Dreams

Sol’s eyes burned. This time he’d had another dream. This time, he was Icarus, falling from the sky. His papers were flying everywhere. Screaming. His black wings. Black eyes. Being swallowed by darkness.

He woke up. It was still late at night. Must’ve been around 3 AM. His hands felt around for a match by his bedside. Lit a candle. Touched the leather and canvas backs of his notebooks with his hands. Exhaled. Still here.

He went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea. The kettle screamed; he took it off the stove. His desk was lit by a sliver of moon from the window. Smokestacks poured white dusk into the air; chimneys in the distance simmered. A young couple out on a fire escape, kissing, entwined. Sol reached for his pipe.

He didn’t want to watch Stovey die. But he was very clearly killing himself. Sol felt helpless. History was a spider’s web. Stovey was caught in it. Sol too. Frank, Patterson. All of them. It was a web woven with billions of sinews of fine silk momentary actions. All of which passed through Sol’s fingers. He dumbly wrote ‘3 runs batted in’ next to Catto’s name for a game he didn’t even know the location of. He slammed the book shut and screamed into his hands, his teeth gritting; the veins on his neck stretching his skull into the unmarkable air.

Damn it. Damn it all to hell. He couldn’t even recognize Stovey in Williamsport. He slurred like an illiterate replacement of the man Sol had once known. How long had he been drinking like this? Sol was so busy with the book and the transitions back and forth between the Columbias and the X Giants. He didn’t even realize… he hadn’t seen Stovey for three years. A lot can change in that window of time. Patterson’s words echoed in his mind.

“Where are you, Homer?”

He slapped himself twice. In the bathroom mirror. Cold water on his face and eyebrows. Better. He stood up, looking at his reflection. No longer that kid who played with Stovey. A grown man. Now one of the oldest ballplayers on the field. Charlie Grant had asked him what it was like to play with George; to meet Fleet Walker back when he was fit to play ball with the best of them. Sol realized he was stretched between two worlds. A world denied and a world just now arriving, in the wake of the denial. With the doors already sealed shut. These kids didn’t know shit about what it was like. Hell, Sol barely did. He was so young back then. The possibility. The sense of having the whole world in front of you. Not the gates locked, barred and shut. There was no room to dream. There was just this. He looked around at the cold stone room. This — the wild. Independent. Gasping. And whatever scraps were left to make it through. With no seeming way out, or way forward.

There was a letter under his door, alongside a stack of bills. He picked it up. Rube Foster was coming to Chicago for the 1902 season. He would be arriving the following afternoon by train. The letter had arrived just in time.

COMING UP FROM HOT SPRINGS. LELAND SAID HE WANTS ME FOR THE UNIONS. MEET ME AT THE STATION? 12/21, 3PM YOURS. COMING IN ON THE NORTHERNER. LET’S TALK.

— RUBE

This was the first time Sol had met Rube Foster in person; he was a giant of a man. Towering over Sol, he gripped his hand like a bear paw.

“I’ve heard great things, old man. Would like to see you swing.”

“Everybody gets old, Rube. Try it some time.”

The behemoth of a man belly-laughed. Sol swore the ground rumbled.

“For now; I’m going to take some heads in your league. Just watch me, old man.”

Rube won 44 games in a row between Chicago, Michigan, and the Cuban X Giants that year alone. But Sol would write that down later.

The two of them grabbed coffee at a small bakery outside the station. It was a warm December morning, so they decided to sit outside. Rube was wearing a larger leather coat with a wool interior.

“You even need that Rube? You’ve got enough on you to survive two Chicago winters.”

Rube huffed. “Easy, Sol. First pitch for you will go high and tight.”

“Say Leland found you in Hot Springs?”

“Saw my screwball. Says I’m ready for the Chicago lights.”

“Closest thing we have to New York ball right now.”

“I’m going to change that.”

“How’s that, Rube?”

“Remember Cuba? Me and the boys are going. Soon as soon is possible. Pete, Home Run. Say you’ll be there?”

Sol thought on this. “Say Rube, I don’t know. I’m working on this book…”

“Damn the book, Sol. We’re ready to change the league. Now. I’m taking notes. This thing in Cuba’s working. The boys down there let us know the gates are open for our men. I’m taking Pete and Grant down there to see how the game works. Then I want to bring it back here and build us something new. Something better. Something that will live for a long time.”

“You know the NCL.”

“I know what this is like now, Sol. It’s the worst of both worlds. Exile and chaos. I’ve got the constitution to handle the exile, but the chaos won’t work for me. We need a fully financed, organized league. A league that can give the white ballclubs a run for their money. Structure.”

Rube wouldn’t live to see Negro League All Star games sell more tickets than the major leagues by 1940. Sol would. But at the time, neither was privy to how fates and times wind. They played by the wind. And were played by it. Rube continued.

“We need you Sol. You’re smart. I’ve got the business minded part to it. We could use your brains. Say you’ll come. It’s going to be one of these winters. I’m talking with the folks down in Havana. The Leones.”

Sol remembered Emilio Sabourin. He really had to give this some thought. Don’t miss the boat.

“Sure, Rube. Let me think on it.”

As soon as the winter broke, he and Rube went down to the thawed out practice fields. It was time for a matchup. Cannon Ball caught, just for kicks.

Rube struck Sol out on three straight fastballs. He came barreling off the mound, with a big grin on his face.

“Didn’t even have to throw you my screwball.”

“Oh yeah? How’s that?”

Rube sauntered back up to the mound. Three straight screwballs. Sol managed to saw one off into the ground. It spun in a circle, right in front of home plate. Cannon Ball picked it up with his bare hand. “Now, that isn’t natural,” he said. Rube just laughed.

“You’ll write that down in your book of yours, won’t you Sol?”

Sol grinned. “Forgive me if I leave it out.”

6. The 1902 Philadelphia Giants

Sol had two of the best years of the later part of his career in 1903 and 1904. It was part of a big change in his personal life. The Philadelphia Giants called in the late spring of 1902; their owner and manager, a white man by the name of Walter Schlichter, let Sol know he was intent on fielding the best team of black baseball stars on the planet. And he intended to pay Sol accordingly, to help co-found and lead the team. Sol took one last look at Chicago; packed his bags for the train to the East Coast. He thought about Octavius Catto at the train station on his way out of town; almost turned around. Too late now, he thought to himself. Might as well go and see. How much more can you write about the Midwest scene, Homer?

And sure enough, when he arrived, Frank Grant was at Columbia Park in Philadelphia, shagging pop flies. Sol smiled. It must be the best damn team. Frank saw him; ran up to him immediately, with the embrace of a brother who’d been away for some time.

“Whaddya say, Sol? Another round! Old Walter wasn’t kidding when he said he wanted the best on the field.”

“Well, Frank, if this was ten years ago, I’d say we’ve got us a great squad.”

Frank laughed.

Pete Burns was there too; William Binga and John Patterson and Harry Buckner would join them the following year. By now, all of the 1900 Columbia Giants were on the other side of thirty years old. Frank was 36; Sol, 34.

“Age of vampires here, Sol. I’m as good as I’ve ever been. I suspect you’ll prove the same.”

And they did. With Frank back to second base, the two of them picked up right back where they left off, practicing double play feeds and alternating bag coverage on stolen bases.

“Just like yesterday, Homer.”

“And the day before, and the day before…”

“How’s that book coming?”

Frank balanced the fly ball he’d just caught on his nose. He staggered slightly, to keep it on the point of his nose bone.

“Well enough, Frank. By how many teams we’ve played on together now, I daresay your face might as well be on the front page. Way too much first-hand witness documentation.”

Frank smiled.

“Perks of playing with the bard, I suppose.”

“Not that you don’t deserve it on your own merits. Maybe share top billing with that new fireballer, Foster.”

“I heard you knew him. Good man?”

Sol weighed his answer.

“I know him well enough to know he’s serious about changing things.”

“Too late for us, isn’t it? He’ll be in for the young bucks, like Emerson over there.”

He pointed to Emerson Griffin, the team’s eighteen year old relief pitcher. One hundred and twenty five pounds soaking wet, the kid was reading the newspaper in the dugout, drinking a glass of water.

Sol quipped:

“Hey kid! Stop making us look like old folks! Make yourself useful and bring a couple glasses of warm milk. And some Cubans too!”

Emerson jumped up, pale as a ghost. “Yes sir!” He ran toward the locker room.

Frank chuckled. “There’s no milk.”

“If there’s cigars, I’ll take one.”

Sol doubled up.

“Hey kid! I’m just clowning with you. Say, come over here.”

Emerson dug his heels into the ground off a full sprint; then ran towards them.

“Easy, buddy. Say, you know Fleet Walker?”

Emerson shook his head.

Frank chimed in.

“How about old Frank Grant and Sol White?”

The kid nodded.

“I know that’s you two.”

“Well, whaddya know about us?”

Emerson considered. His eyes flicked upward to the sky.

“Well… Frank’s the second baseman; Sol’s the shortstop!”

Sol and Frank let the kid go. He ambled back to the dugout; finished his glass of water in one big gulp, wiping his mouth on his uniform sleeve.

Frank turned to Sol.

“Old enough to be forgotten.”

“Old enough that there’s nothing left to forget!”

Later that day, Sol caught Emerson warming up for batting practice. He threw a slider out of a low arm slot that crashed hard, down and inside on a lefty, low and outside on right handed batters. After each pitch, Emerson would close his eyes, like he was praying.

“Helluva pitch, kid! You look like you belong out here. If you throw that to me, Monk, it’s going in the right field gap!”

The kid smiled. “Monk, Sol? I like that.” He turned the seams of the ball in his hands, finding a fresh grip. Sol wrote it down in his new brown linen notebook.

MONK GRIFFIN. ONE HALF ARM SLOT. HEAVY SLIDER. GULLIBLE KID. BRIGHT FUTURE.

By the end of the practice, it was revealed to Sol that Schlichter had plans to extend his authorities over the ballclub substantially for the 1902 season. Not just as a manager, but as general manager, scout, and business manager for the Giants. He’d be running the whole operation, cover to cover. This was the most executive responsibility Sol ever had in the game. He simultaneously relished and resented his career progress. This meant more money; also, less time for writing. The book would be on a long leash. Maybe too long. Sol didn’t want to get caught holding it when it really started to bite.

Schlichter was a notorious sportswriter in the area for the Philadelphia Item. He also worked as a boxing referee. A German man known as “Slick” and a former boxer, Walter was clearly business minded, managing boxing clubs and arranging fights. Sol liked this. The black squads needed more financial coherence. Wherever they could get it.

After booking an X Giants game back in the fall of 1901, Schlichter had decided he was ready to take the next step in forming a professional ballclub. And Sol was, in his mind, the smartest, most fit ball player in the league to take the reins.

The two of them, from the jump, recognized a profound mutual compatibility — based in efficacy, shrewdness, and business acumen. It was a natural fit, even across racial lines. As the opening season practice commenced, Slick slowly found out about Sol’s book.

“Sol — how do you feel about the new field? The club? I want to make sure you have what you need for the year. Many more to come, I hope. I’d like to get Rube Foster and Grant Johnson here next.”

“It’s good, Walter. Real good. Ball rolls great on the infield grass; it doesn’t hurt to have old Frank Grant out there manning second base, age be damned. But I have to be honest with you – I’m not used to this much sway over a ballclub; on top of my writing!”

“Frank had led me to believe this book was a small time thing. Is this going to be a problem?”

Sol turned this over. “We’ll need a league.”

“And a way to keep the players. When we bring Rube and that kid Pete on board, I don’t just want them in the show with us for a summer. I want them here til we drop the club, or otherwise do something else with it.”

Shrugging, Sol. “Try clowning? Vaudeville?”

Schlichter laughed. “I’ve got too many damn shows. I want this team to be the best damn thing on the eastern seaboard. And you know, along with it, I want you on against the Athletics. Hell, I want you on against the Beaneaters. I know you never played South End, Sol. A squad like this, we have World Series hopes against this fucking lockout on black ball. I’m going to see what I can do. I want capital stock at twenty thousand dollars. I want sold out elite baseball.”

“Bringing Frank on was the right place to start.”

Schlichter continued. “I’m tired of shows, Sol. I heard the men call you Homer. Is that because you’re smart, or because you understand what it means to do something great?”

Sol: “I’m working on both ends of that equation.”

“I’ve done boxing. Horseracing. Prize fights. Hell, swim meets. Bare knuckle boxing in the Philadelphia streets. You’ll see here… the work is hard. And the streets are ugly. They don’t fight bare-knuckle no more. Trying to clean up the game. Same with these catcher’s mitts. Fellows start to see there’s money in something and all of a sudden it’s gussied up for a Broadway billing. There’s money in your pal Rube’s screwball. I even heard McGraw called him on to train that young buck, Christy Mathewson. Kid threw twenty victories last year in his first full season with that thing. Suspect he’ll hit thirty in no time. Gotta get his control under wraps though…” Schlichter trailed off, like he was counting game receipts in his mind.

Sol understood quite clearly Schlichter was in it for the money. Sure, he loved and admired baseball; knew he and Frank were great. But behind Pete Hill, the kid from the Virginia sticks, or Rube’s family history, their suffering and chains, all Walter saw were dollar signs. The talent that Sol and Frank had fought to survive with, the game they loved and the game that had denied them – Walter saw meal tickets, hotel rooms, profit margins; broadside billings. But this was precisely why they needed a man like Walter Schlichter. His financial acumen was bar none. He saw the space in the real cents of everything; furthermore, he had the pulse of the sporting world of the city under his arm as editor of the Item. If they were to build a truly great squad, a squad that could sustain in the midst of this whirlwind of hell and exile, they’d need media and money. And Walter had both.

“Walt – I don’t know how you do it. But I’m sure as hell glad you brought me on. I can see it a bit in my mind. The way I see events, you see equations. Behind each movement in time, there’s an effort, a force. And you convert that to the penny. What it can bring, what it can attract; what people will say, do, and pay to get from here to there. Truth is, we never had that. At least not yet in my time. I suspect Rube’s capable of it, but being the best pitcher in the world will take priority on a man’s list of affairs and pressures.”

Walter spoke plainly. “I learned that no matter how hard you fight, or how good of a fighter you are, that don’t mean you get paid. You get paid by making the biggest show. The most noise. Fact of the matter is, that’s how white ball works. I saw it quick; the owners are in on the fix good. Ninety nine percent of the men out on that field right now – Columbia Park, same as you fellows – aren’t half the bats, gloves, and arms you boys are. You and I both know this. Hell, the whole league knows it; black ball besides. Anyone who follows the game, white or black, knows what your friend Frank did in Buffalo. What he was capable of doing, or George Stovey was capable of doing with the New York Giants, if he’d had the chance.”

Sol winced hard as Walter spoke the truth.

“But the money is in the whole theatre of the game. And if they keep you boys out, they keep the money and the power in. Those A’s are damn lucky they have Plank and Waddell. Sure enough, I could put either of them boys out on the field against anyone in black ball and there’d be a real match. But how many Planks or Waddells does that white league have compared to Foster, Buckner, or old Cannon Ball? They’ve got half, at best, of anything you boys got. And that makes them half of what they could ever be. But as long as they’ve got top billing; the dollar bills behind the show lights, it means you boys are playing in the shadows.”

This was nothing Sol didn’t already know.

“Pitching’s going to be a problem this year, Walter. I know it. And if you plan for a match against the A’s, we’ll lose. The team’s still too young. You’ve fielded quite a squad here, but first day I know too well. Seen too much already in my years. The Columbias could’ve beaten any roster in the world, I daresay at any time. Winter, spring, 1859, 1902. But these boys, it’s going to take some time. We need more firepower.”

“I’d like to see if you can recruit Buckner. Hell, see if you can get Binga and your Chicago manager Patterson too. If you trust those fellas, we could use them. Let them know as best you can that we mean business here. That we’re building something serious. And above all, that we’ll pay serious; you’re at the helm. I want you controlling every aspect of this operation. Truth is, Sol, and you know it – I don’t know jack shit about the game. But I do know what it takes to make any sporting group survive. Press and profits. But I can’t let them know that myself. Or they won’t hear me quite like they’ll hear you. I know the game trusts you. To them, I’m just a racketeer. And some ways, it’s true.”

Walter looked at his feet.

“I had to learn what it took to make it running a game, even when it took me sideways. But I take some pride in knowing what I know now. Even if I’m not in the matches myself anymore.” Walter’s right hand had two large purple scars running down the backs of his middle knuckles. “But I know now how to keep a game alive. And I know a good game when I see one. And you and Frank got it. Pete Hill got it. And I’m going to see that we hire the best players alive – who got it too. We’ll make sure the salaries are right. Regular salaries. Paid bi-weekly. We’ll give them a home. A place they’ll want to stay. So we can keep it together. Keep it going.”

Sol understood right then and there what Walter was about. He understood the delicate interconnection. The machinery between keeping a system of regular ballgames alive, and what it meant to treat players right beneath it. He knew he was in the right place with Walter. But this still didn’t solve the issue with the league. Without a league, they couldn’t create any organizational stability. Paychecks came from regular ballgames with good clubs. And regular ballgames with good clubs came from a league of fitness and constitution.

7. Sol’s Excursion / Telling Time

Sol packed his equipment quickly and left the field. He was going to find Octavius Catto’s old home.

Sol figured this was quite necessary for the book. He needed firsthand information. There was an old Lenape cemetery next to a small wooden black Baptist church, so he’d heard. It was Catto’s old block. He’d know it by the place. Still there, same as it was decades later. Towards the outskirts of the city. He walked past the Liberty Bell; horse-drawn carriages in front of bookstores, cafes; general supply companies. There was a Spalding Sporting Goods store downtown. Sol admired a tan, rawhide catcher’s mitt in the window, next to a new model baseball. The game was changing fast. Sol still remembered the old stitching; a couple of older amateur ballplayers in Ohio who still caught barehanded, back when he was first coming up.

Catto’s was the last house on the block, beside an abandoned lot leading into some woods. Sol couldn’t hear the downtown noise from here. Just crickets in the late afternoon. He could see the old Lenape burial plot and the church at the other end of the long street. They wavered a bit in the early season heat. Some said the city tried to bury Catto there first. Nothing ever came of it. It was a paint-stripped blue house. Been abandoned since Catto died. Just as Sol said that to himself, there was a flash of a figure in the upstairs window. Looked like the master bedroom. Sol was immediately on guard. He heard a voice in the back of his head. It was a woman’s voice. Telling him to come inside.

Her name was Lenita. She was slightly hunched over. She looked tired, still with a glint in her eye. Like life had hit her one too many times. She handed Sol a cup of chamomile tea. He could still see the large gobs of honey swirling in the spoon-stirred drink.

“Why you here?”

“I could ask you the same.”

“Cattos ask me to keep the place.”

“I’m here for the book.”

Her pupils slightly dilated. “I know.”

“How you know about that?”

“I know about a lot of things.”

‘Soothsayin’ woman?”

She folded her hands across the dress in her lap. “You could say that.”

Sol watched as her chest heaved slightly. It was going to be a hot spring in the city. Beads of sweat dripped down the sides of her temples. Drawing a deep breath, she continued.

“What you looking for ain’t here.”

Sol’s eyes sunk a bit.

“What you mean?”

“Catto’s dead. And with him too, all the memories.”

“Speak freely.”

“You ain’t getting back what they took. I suspect what you know is all you’ll know.” She glanced at the brown linen notebook clutched in Sol’s hands. “And I suspect what you know ain’t shit.”

Sol’s cheeks flared.

“What the hell do you know about what I’m doing, woman? Groundskeeping for a dead man.”

She eyed him emotionlessly.

“I know what there is and what there isn’t. That’s what I’m here to do.”

She stirred the tea with her finger. Sol tried a different tack.

“You keep anything yourself?”

“I knew Octavius’ mama. She had this. An old ballgame.”

Sol’s eyes scanned the faded photograph the woman pressed into his palm. It was on a thick, woody piece of cardboard. The image itself was pasted; bitten with the acid of time. The light in it was a radiant yellow blackness. Sol could barely make out their faces. It was two men standing in a studio. An albumen print. Both holding baseball bats; smiling. One had his arm around the other’s shoulder. The man on the left was clearly Catto. And the right… Emilio Sabourin?

“How’d you get this?”

“Told you. His mama left it for me. Said it might be needed.”

Sol shrugged. “Needed by who?”

She jammed a cold, hard finger into his chest.

“Needed by you, young man. For this book you writing. Seems more people know about it than you needed to. Or planned. Thought you did.” She trailed off, lost in thought.

“Can I keep this?”

“No use for it now. I held it for as long as holding it meant something to me.”

Sol slipped it between the pages of his notebook, just after his practice documentation; Moses’ nickname. Some opening thoughts on getting these new East Coast Giants running.

“Ain’t you wanna know why I had this? Why I knew you was coming?”

Sol looked at the old woman. She was pressing him. He smiled knowingly.

“It’s the same reason I knew I was gonna write this book. And it’s the same reason you’ll be in it, without a name, delivering something everybody else forgot, or else was too scared to tell. And I know for a goddamn fact that’s the baseline of everything that’s left. Everything that survives. A voice raring up in the dust.”

She smiled.

“You ain’t gonna put my name in this book, Sol White?”

“I can’t give everything away. Neither can you, I suppose.”

“Good. Tell your mama I say hello.”

“Will do, ma’am.”

Sol turned and headed for the door.

“By the way, this book of yours. This book gonna mean something. To more people than you know.”

Sol craned his neck over his shoulder.

“That’s not my responsibility. All I can do is write it.”

He closed the brass knob behind him on the dark room. He could hear the woman inside begin to ascend the creaky, wooden steps. If he hurried back, he’d be at the hotel before sundown.

8. The Way to Cuba

On his way back, Sol let the thought hit him. Catto had known Sabourin? The photo must’ve been taken in the U.S. So that meant Sabourin had been here and played? Sol knew about Esteban Bellan, the third baseman who had come from Havana in the 1870s to play with the Troy Haymakers of the National Association. It was in his book. Not writ large, but it was there. He had to reckon with the fact that maybe Cuban baseball was more influential on the formulation of black ball than he’d known, or even could’ve thought before the old woman pressed this photo into his hands. He suspected he was in possession what was now likely the only known link between Catto and Sabourin. He looked at Sabourin’s face. He looked like a teenager. Way before the troubles of war and the Cuban Independence movement. Catto, by contrast, had his mustache. A fully grown man. This must’ve been right before Catto’s death. The same year that Bellan arrived in 1871. So Sabourin was here before? Why? And so young?

Sol realized it likely hadn’t been about baseball at all. At least not at the root. Sure, they’d both loved the game. But Catto was primarily an educator and activist. He’d worked at the Institute for Colored Youth. The year before his death, Catto had joined the Franklin Institute. A center for science and education. White leaders of the center had approved and even supported his membership. Sol remembered reading a program from one of Catto’s early addresses — back when he was writing the biographical section:

“How much of the course of this terrible revolution remains yet to be run, or how many political evolutions our Government may yet be forced to make, no man can foresee. But it must be the most superficial view, indeed, which concludes that any other condition than a total change in the status which the colored man has hitherto had in this country, must of necessity grow out of the conflicting theories of the parties to whose lands this question is at present committed. There must come a change, one now in process of completion, which shall force upon this nation, not so much for the god of the black man, as for its own political and industrial welfare, that course which Providence seems wisely to be directing for the mutual benefit of both peoples.

Those millions of human beings now scattered through the Southern country must eventually come forth into the sunlight of Freedom; and what a field will there then be opened for the benevolence of the wealthy, and the labors of the educated colored man! Truly, the harvest will be great and the laborers comparatively few.”

He’d remembered it word for word; rattled it off in his mind’s eye. Octavius had even quoted Martin Luther and Aristotle in this speech. The man was extremely well educated; well spoken to boot.

That was it. This was the beginning of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba. Knowing Sabourin’s contributions — both to baseball and the revolutionary movement — he must’ve heard about Catto. He must’ve known… somehow. And then made the trip to see him. Maybe something Catto knew…

Sol stopped in his tracks. This was all conjecture. How much of this could go in the book? His hand felt the hard board of the photograph. And yet here it was, incontrovertible evidence that linked Catto and Sabourin. Calls among the best players in America were growing. The doors in Cuba were open for integrated play. Everyone knew about Bellan. Hell, half the black teams in America were called the Cubans, in lieu of just saying what everybody knew and felt. He made a note in his notebook:

FOUND. ONE SUCH PHOTOGRAPH DEPICTING AN OCTAVIUS CATTO AT THE END OF HIS LIFE WITH WHAT LOOKS LIKE EMILIO SABOURIN. IDENTITY OF SABOURIN UNCONFIRMED. IN THE POSSESSION OF A FAMILY FRIEND. EVIDENCE THAT SABOURIN MADE CONTACT WITH CATTO IN THE AMERICAN NORTH DURING OR JUST BEFORE THE TEN YEARS’ WAR. CIRCUMSTANCES AND CONTENTS OF MEETING UNKNOWN.

Sol was furious at time. This was all he had, all he could give, all he could do? It was barely information. He directed his anger at the old woman. Why’d she give him this? All it had done was complicate the thread. The web was now a tangled mess. Now what else was there to do but go to Cuba? Knock on as many doors as he could, talk to some old Cuban men in palm hats drinking hard, concentrated espresso. Playing cards under some ceiling fan in god knows where. Outside some sugar plantation. For what? The off chance they’d know Sabourin? Or even more obscure, that they knew what the hell he was doing in the Northeastern United States as a young man just years after the end of the American Civil War?

He slammed the book shut. There were two kids playing kickball outside of a women’s clothing store. The ball dribbled weakly towards his feet. He smiled; kicked it back. One of them, whose white t shirt was covered in dirt and what looked like a bit of ice cream, smiled at him and waved. He waved back.

It was for the love of the game. Definitively. And what’s more — beneath the game, the whole ocean and sea of the dark history that he couldn’t fully see or understand. But he sensed it within him, in his bones. The waves of mystery, that crashed over him and infiltrated his dreams. Stovey. The old woman. Catto. They all knew something he didn’t. Maybe not consciously — except Lenita, perhaps — but they did. The photograph getting here by the sheer will of the passage of some ship of fates. She knew too much. And so did everyone else. The question was where all of the knowledge locked into place, from person to person, hand to hand. This was the tidal wave of history. And Sol’s book was cutting to the quick and grain of what was beneath it all. The history of black baseball. But it was more than that. He knew this clearly. It was the spindle that unspooled the thread of the universe and fell through fifteen different knives. The Cuban Revolutionary Movement. Catto’s speech at the turn of the end of the Civil War. Reading Du Bois as a young man. The violence of the white cops. Fear of Frank’s greatness. There was a light coming in; Sol was going to catch some of it. Hell, all of it.

He looked back on history and saw a dark corridor in ruins. But the light was his seeing. As he walked, it illuminated the fragments. Revealing them to be something much more, much greater than just lost shards of time. With light of present sight returned to them, they showed the quick of their breaking. And by the quick, Sol could see where they had broken off, like continental rifts of a Pangaea. Broken off and scattered like an explosion of arrows in fifteen different directions at the detonation of the historical moment. And at the point of detonation, a nucleus of the hidden mystery. Sol stuck his hand in the nucleus in his mind’s eye and gasped. Grasped something firm. Pulled at it. It started to dislodge. Like a handle.

9. Anubis at the Bat / The Gift of Sight

He woke up.

It was the eve of the start of the season. Schlichter had slipped a note under Sol’s door:

PRACTICE AT 11AM, BRING MOSES.

Sol was sure Schlichter had meant Monk. But Sol had mistaken that name for Moses too. He packed his equipment bag with some clothes; three empty black leather notebooks. He was going to Cuba.

He took the train straight down to West Palm Beach. There was a brand new rail down there, Florida East Coast, run by a man named Henry Flagler. People said he was a big baseball fan; looked at the greats of the black game the same way he did with the segregated pros. Flagler had built two massive resort-style hotels, one being named the Royal Poinciana Hotel. Opened in 1894. The largest wooden structure in the world. Sol laid his eyes on it as he got off the train. The man had founded Standard Oil, drawn the Florida Railway; on top of it all, opened up a second hotel, The Breakers, just down the way. Flagler had built some of the nicest ballfields in the country on the grounds. Whispers said he was trying to get Pete Hill and Rube Foster down here to play. There was money enough to do it. And Flagler only wanted the best of the best on his teams. It would be the Breakers vs the Royal Poinciana. A Flagler sanctioned, bona fide private league.

Sol exhaled, feeling the hot air breeze across his face. He’d love to play ball in the Florida spring. Summers might get too hot. Can’t drink enough water in that kind of heat. But spring ball here would be a dream. He could hear the crack of the ball impacting across the barrel of a hot, dry wooden bat. You get different contact when it warms up like that, especially this early in the year. Your season gets started earlier. You feel more confident. Joints warm. No cold spells, battling snow in the ground on either side of the wrong Chicago weather… or worse, Minneapolis, or upstate New York.

But he wasn’t going to stop here. There was a boat he needed to catch, a little further down from here, just off Key Largo. It would take him on the short sea journey to Havana.

Sol shook hands with the captain. Said his name was Jimmy O’Leary. Rough Irishman, ran a boat back and forth from the islands. Dominican, Jamaica, Cuba. Bahamas. Not a handsome fee, but enough to empty Sol’s pockets more than he’d like. Last season’s gates weren’t the best; notebooks were expensive. Especially the leather ones he liked most.

Jimmy took in Sol’s pupils with suspicion.

“You never told me what business you have in Havana.”

“Baseball.” Sol had nothing to hide.

Jimmy’s eyes lit up. The corners of his mouth became hyperactive.

“Baseball? Say, whaddya know about Brouthers and Duffy? The pride of Ireland. Damn if Brouthers can’t hit the stuffing out the ball. And don’t even get me started on Delahanty!”

Sol smiled. He knew quite well the exploits of Ed Delahanty. A poor Irish immigrant, first child in his family to survive infancy. Blue collar boy, grew up in a Cleveland boarding house. Learned to hit in the vacant lots. True rough and tumble man. Sol wouldn’t want to mix it up with him on the field. Regardless, Sol played clean ball. There wouldn’t be an issue — if they ever played.

“Starting to slow down a bit, ain’t he?”

Jimmy looked solemn.

“Don’t we know it. Some say the boy’s been drinking too much. Playing the horses. Figure he’s got another helluva season or two in him at the very least. You ever met a fella who hit .330 in a down year? That’s our boy Ed.”

Sol thought about it. “I can say I have. Ever heard of a fellow named Frank Grant? Black ballplayer. Played in Philadelphia, Chicago. So forth.”

Jimmy scratched his arm.

“Can’t say I have son. And what’s your name?”

“Sol White. Former ballplayer. Or I suppose, I ain’t retired yet… so to speak. But I’m working on something else. It’s a book.”

Jimmy was fixing up some of the fishing lines on his boat, preparing for passenger travel.

“A book you say. On the ballgame?”

“On the black ballgame. Suppose men like you might take to reading it. You can hear about the men who played like your boy Delahanty. Who would hold a candle, maybe more, to that batting eye.”

Jimmy’s eyes lit a flame. He was about to speak quickly, but took a beat.

“You really think anybody could stand up to my boy Ed in a match? Even Brouthers says he’s top of the league. Brouthers can smoke a ball. But Ed’s eye… now that’s something else.”

Sol measured Jimmy’s heart and mind; then spoke again.

“I suppose so, Jimmy. You’d have to see these fellows play. Some say my pal Frank Grant is the best black ballplayer of the last century. And even then, the best second baseman since they started playing the game.”

Jimmy was intrigued. “Say, you’re pals with that man? Why you must be a helluva ballplayer. They let white guys come to the show?”

“Usually stand in the outfield in a barnstorming match, or something like that. I’ve noticed more and more.”

“I’d love to see great play. Only read Delahanty in the papers. That Philadelphia squad had it all. Billy Hamilton, Sam Thompson, Nap Lajoie. Remember them?”

Sol had. “I’m in Philly now, or was. Philadelphia Giants. Just started a new squad with the man Walter Schlichter.”

“The boxing man! Very good. How’s the team looking?”

“You’d have to see for yourself! First practice was just the other day.”

Jimmy’s eyes fell.

“Can’t say I’ll have the chance. Don’t remember the last time I left these docks for much of anything but further south.”

“I’ll say, Jimmy. I heard there’s some real stars headed your way. Flagler’s got ideas; you might be bringing some of them down to Cuba yourself. People like me are looking for the best game in the world that will have them. And the opportunities are expanding.”

“Well I’ll be there, if they’ll have me in the stands!”

The trip was quick; uneventful. Jimmy hummed some Irish sea shanties while Sol made progress on his book. He decided to make some additional notes regarding the possibility of coastal ball. It seemed the opportunity was right. If Flagler was serious, he had the money to make it happen. And if he wanted real talent, Sol knew plenty of guys up north who would jump at the chance to make a real wage playing in the sunshine. He’d make a note to send Rube a letter, maybe when he got down to Havana. Send a flyer out to the guys, let them know.

The emerging opportunities made the game increasingly difficult to track. Sol was following every lead down every corridor. He felt like a man stranded between two impossible positions. The dark, unilluminated corridors of the game’s past; the unexplored world yet to come of the game’s inevitable expansion. Pete Hill, the kid from Culpeper County Virginia, had just started pro ball in the black circuit. But he was already known as one of the best around, coast to coast. New talent was springing up faster than ever. And on top of that, the mysteries of the world — the soil from which this new boon was sprouting — were more shrouded than ever. Sol would have to make a choice. He realized he was on a boat to a country he’d never visited, just before a season was starting — a season where he’d been declared manager and general manager of a team he helped found — to dig up the dead. A ballplayer who died in prison during the Cuban Revolution. And try to find out just how well he knew Octavius Catto. Sol realized he’d already made the choice.

Maybe he should change his job description to archaeological detective. Sol laughed to himself. A change is good. And hell, if he needed to pick up a bat and glove again, he supposed he could do it. Damn well.

The boat docked at a port in Havana; Jimmy O’Leary enthusiastically saw him off. He pressed a card into his palm. Similar to the firm board of the Catto photograph. “Here’s something I thought you might like. From my smokes.”

Sol checked it out. It was an Ed Delahanty Old Judge baseball card. The kind they tucked into tobacco. Old Ed stood there with bat at the ready.

“Say, Jimmy, that’s mighty kind of you.”

“Not at all Sol. Just go see a game for me if you can. I wish I could watch ol’ Ed hit. Maybe someday.”

Jimmy realized his mistake the moment he said it. Sol simply nodded.

“I’ll see what I can do about that, Jim.”

10. Memory: The Old Game

Havana was a bustling city-port of shippers, distributors; men selling fruit and sugar. Women with baskets and textiles. The sun beat down on him — somehow, even hotter than it had been in Palm Beach. Sol had sweated clean through his shirt by now. Exhausted. Worst of all, he realized he’d just brought himself to a spot where he didn’t even speak the language. This was going to be far messier than he’d thought, or planned. Sol realized he hadn’t thought or planned at all, whatsoever. Unnecessary, foolish complications.

“English? English?” Too many heads shook in dissent. He thought he was going to pass out. Standing under an awning for a moment’s shade. A young, skinny man walked up to him in a white linen shirt. He couldn’t have been taller than 5’5”.

“English, senor?”

Sol stammered. “Yes, finally. Water? A place to sleep?”

The man replied. “Ramon Govantes. You can call me Chicho. There’s a place where the ballplayers stay down the street. An old sugar mill storage facility. Converted to some apartments. Come along.”

Sol realized he had no choice but to trust this man. Ramon. He followed.

They entered a cool, dark room with high stone ceilings. Sol could feel his chest expand again. He slumped against a wall.

“Been on a boat?”

“Too long.”

“How’d you know I was American?”

“I knew you were a ballplayer. They always stand out.”

“You too?”

Ramon’s face burst with pride.

“You know it. I’ve been playing pro ball since I turned twenty. I can play any position on the field. I’m with a team called Fe these days. Mostly outfield.”

“You can hit?”

Ramon looked a bit embarrassed.

“I’m learning. They picked me up for my skills in the field. Smart on the bases. Always hit the cutoff man.”

Sol smiled. Defense was always undervalued. It sounded like the Cubans understood the game well enough.

“Not everyone’s a hitter.”

“Well I’d like to be.”

“Suppose I can try to pass you some tricks sometime.”

Ramon smiled. “Sounds great. Why you here then?” It was clear he was searching for a name.

“Sol.”

“Sol.”

“I’m here writing a book about black baseball. The history of the game.”

Ramon looked back at him. “It hasn’t been easy here either.”

“How’s that?”

“They just let us in. Some people still aren’t used to it. It’s mostly poor sugar plantation kids. But we can play. We learned in the fields. On the docks sometimes. Lots. Wherever there’s time and something close to a bat and a ball. We practice. We play. Hard.”

Sol could hear the passion in Ramon’s voice. He’d come to the right place.

“Suppose you know a man named Emilio Sabourin.”

“Do I? He’s a baseball legend in Cuba. And a revolutionary hero. Suppose you know they held ballgames to raise funds for the revolutionaries to buy weapons, supplies, and medicines. That was just under a decade ago. How do you know about him?”

“Word travels fast. Especially to those who wish to write it down.”

“You’re searching for him? He’s dead. The Spanish killed him. There was nothing more that he loved than baseball and the idea of a free Cuba.”

Sol shook his head. “Not looking for him. Anything, or anyone, that can help me understand this.” He handed the photograph of Sabourin and Catto to Ramon.

“That’s definitely Sabourin. I don’t know the other man.”

“That’s the problem. Both sides don’t know the other enough. But this photograph suggests they did. Something happened between them. Catto was a revolutionary. An intellectual; an advocate for black liberation in America. Just after our Civil War.”

Ramon made the connection. “I didn’t know our liberation movements happened so closely together in time.”

“You’re a little farther ahead than we are. You have integrated baseball.”

Ramon smiled.

“It isn’t perfect, but its true.”

“I’d like to play here someday.”

“I heard Habana is looking for a few more. Ballplayers of the highest order.”

“Not until I figure this out.”

Ramon thought. “Well, I do know some older fellows. Sabourin’s peers. Suppose they’re around fifty or so now. They’ll watch the games at Almendares; they’re usually chatting over a newspaper at one of the local cafes. The Bolano. Baseball themed spot. A little out past the docks toward the mercantile center of town. If you want, I can take you there. They might know something.”

Sol assented. He was here now; there was no boat waiting to take him home. Jimmy had gone back to the Keys. Fishing. No train underwater back to the mainland. He was here to figure out the connection; he might as well go all the way.

“Alright, Ramon. Say there’s a chance.”

“There is.”

They left the cool room; opened the door of the building back out into the sun.

“It’s just a couple blocks. They have some great fruit juice.”

Sol walked a little faster.

The Bolano was tucked into a small alcove past several street markets. Most were selling sugar and fruit; some had cooked meat. The scents melded in Sol’s nostrils. It was extremely foreign compared to the sensorily closed mercantile worlds of Chicago and Philadelphia and the upper Midwest. Sealed off buildings. Everything here was more… open. For lack of a better word. Sol thought the heat had much to do with it.

Inside the Bolano, there were empty tables. A fair bit of them. A ceiling fan lazed overhead; in the back, two groups of three men were playing dominos. There was another man, sitting alone in the back, reading a newspaper.

“Back there.” Ramon pointed. “That’s Adolfo and Jose Lujan. They played ball with Sabourin. Suppose they might know something.”

Sol thanked Ramon; pressed something into his palm.

“Wow! A baseball card. Say, that’s Ed Delahanty! The American star.”

Sol smiled.

“Maybe one day there’ll be a Sol White baseball card.”

Ramon eyed him. “So you’re that good, huh? I had a sense when I met you. Baseball instincts.”

“Good luck to your pitchers. Between me and Frank Grant, that’s a decade of the best black baseball in American history.”

Ramon clasped Sol’s hand. “Suppose you aren’t kidding.”

“Suppose I ain’t.”

Ramon thanked him for the card; closed the door of the shop.

11. Insurgents

The three men at the table on the left turned around when Ramon exited the shop. Looking Sol up and down, they clearly felt he belonged; went back to chattering. Sol ambled up.

“The Lujans?”

“Who’s asking?” Two nearly identical men spoke in unison.

Sol laughed.

“Suppose it’s the two of you, then.”

“No,” both of them said again, simultaneously; then the whole table burst out into laughter.

“Have a seat, kid. We were just talking about the old Habana championships.”

Turned out the third man at the table was Pablo Ronquillo. First baseman for the squad.

“It sounds like I showed up at the right time. I’m here to learn about Sabourin. I’m writing a book on black baseball.”

“You know Sabourin wasn’t black, right?” Adolfo decided to lead the conversation from the Habana side.

“But this man was.” He handed Adolfo the picture. Adolfo looked at it carefully, even knowingly.

“Where’d you get this? And who’d you say your name was?”

“Sol. And an old woman gave it to me.”

“Lenita?”

Sol was stunned. “Yes, that’s what she called herself.”

“She ain’t an old woman.” Adolfo handed the picture back to him. “She’s a very old woman.”

Adolfo went on to explain that the story was Lenita was born in a small hovel in Havana over two hundred years ago.

“Jesus, Adolfo. Back when the British occupied it?”

“Nobody believes it. But everybody does. She moved to America during the Civil War. I suspect that’s how she met your friend here.” He pointed to the photograph.

“Let’s cut all the wise nonsense. Do you know him? Does anyone?”

Adolfo replied. “I do. And I suppose that’s why she sent you here.”

Sol was getting angry. “She didn’t tell me shit.”

“She didn’t? Think about it, Sol. She gave you the photo. And if I know anything about that woman, I know she gave it to you so gravity could drop out of the bottom of it and pull you right here to this table, to me, so we could have this conversation. All it took was space and time to deliver you here. And by the looks of it, not long and not far. Why do you need to know about Sabourin?”

“It isn’t about me.”

“Exactly.”

Sol had given up. “Let’s say all this bullshit is true. And that woman pulled the strings on me. What do you have to say about it? I don’t want to run around.”

Adolfo replied coolly. “Sabourin and Catto were working together on an initiative to integrate black American and Cuban baseball over thirty years ago. They wanted to build a league that wasn’t based in either Cuba or the United States. It was meant to be mobile. And what’s more, it was meant to be an apparatus for black American and Cuban national liberation. Baseball travel would be carrying munitions and supplies. The league profits would go to education and knowledge dissemination. Lecture circuits. Sabourin found out about your American. Frederick Douglass. He saw the radical compatibility between the American liberation project and our own. Why do you think baseball meant so much to him? It was, for Emilio, a language of the body. A language of the spirit, of the soul. It didn’t require words. It required passion and real physical teamwork. He and Catto agreed. It could be used as a device to unify our peoples. Across country lines. And ultimately, across racial ones too.”

None of this particularly surprised Sol. “I’ve had the same intuition. But this book I’m writing… I have to trust that it can carry that intuition forward in time. Even if it doesn’t happen in my own.”

Adolfo stared right back at Sol. “It won’t. It’s too early.”

Sol understood. His career was nearing its end anyways.

“This book can be the seed I plant now. And that’s why I needed to know about Sabourin and Catto. Because I can’t write it if it isn’t the god’s honest truth.”

Adolfo smiled. “Well now you have a source.”

“What happened after Sabourin and Catto were killed?”

Adolfo’s face hardened immediately.

“What do you think? It died with them.”

He turned; resumed speaking in Spanish with his teammates. Sol had what he needed. The conversation had clearly done its necessary work. He thought back to Lenita. Who the hell was this woman? Now there was an entirely new problem, layered atop the whole fantastic web. A two hundred year old soothsayer? In the Philadelphia house of a dead man next to a Lenape burial mound?

This all made perfect sense to Sol in a hilarious, mystical way. But what did it have to do with baseball?

Sol headed back to the cool building. Ballplayer housing. He jotted down a quick letter to Rube.

COME SOUTH. BRING PETE. GRANT. SEE IF THERE’S WORK IN FLORIDA AND CUBA. MIGHT BE TOO SOON FOR FLORIDA. CUBA IS RIPE. TALK SOON. — HOMER

He settled in for a short night; wrote down the details about Sabourin and Catto under candlelight. He ate some kind of pork and ham sandwich from a vendor. Mango juice. It was fantastic. Maybe he could play ball down here. Food like this, he could hit .350 until he was fifty-six years old.

He grabbed a boat ride back to the Keys; hurried back up the coastal rail-line. There was work to do in Philadelphia. By now, the season was already underway. Baseball was shot for the year; who knows how much longer. He’d left without letting the Giants know. He assumed that meant he wouldn’t be welcomed back. And the money was running a bit low. His interest at this point was primarily on Lenita. And this Lenape burial mound. This project was getting off the rails. What was the history even about anymore? Everything he reached for, like a ghost, he just kept reaching through it. Each mystery revealed something beneath it, something more, something greater, something stranger than the last. It felt like a vast conspiracy. Like a joke being played by the artist of the universe, pulling the rug out from under everything; laughing as he stumbled; fell on his face and knees like a toddler.

It wasn’t enough to be a historian, an archaeologist, a ballplayer. There was a mystery before all of those things. Before that mystery, everything else danced, like cardboard cutouts, like signs. Signposts. And Sol followed them, like an ancient wanderer through deserts. Meeting with Desert Fathers. Speaking with weird prophets. Arguing about baseball cards.

12. The Return

The first season went well enough. Sol was right, the Philadelphia Giants were nascent at best in skill, but still talented enough to make a real splash in black ball. Any team with Sol and Frank would draw a crowd. By now, black fans from the Mississippi to New York knew that they’d be stories. Good stories, long after they were done. At the end of the year, Walter managed to run a two game series against Connie Mack’s major league A’s at their shared home, Columbia Park. They weren’t ready. The A’s took both games handily, 8-3 and 13-9. They needed pitching. And sure enough, after 1902 was out, Walter made good on his promise. Big league style contracts with regular pay and ten day release notice, coupled with joining the Giants to the nascent National League of Independent Base Ball Clubs. Both of these moves increased Sol’s recruiting abilities considerably. There was now a real draw to join the Giants. A real draw that would attract the best ballplayers in the game. Not just old men like him and Frank, but the young guys. The players that still had a whole arc to burn across the sky of the game.

Sol got to work – even hopping on trains to Chicago and the upper Midwest to recruit. In 1903, he managed quite well. Binga, Monroe, Patterson, Buckner, Nelson. Old Columbias, Union Giants; X Giants. Sol was proud of his network. Just like Walter was proud of his ability to make good on operating a real organization. It reminded Sol a bit of the days of the Page Fence Giants – even though he’d only ever played against them. Home Run’s private train car. Food. Sleeping quarters. Real plans. Hotels. Warm, comfortable beds. It was like a sun peeking out from behind a monstrous array of black stormclouds. With money, with planning – there was real opportunity to make good on a sustainable black enterprise. He got Patterson on a letter sent back from John’s Chicago home:

Sol –

It’s great to hear from you. Suspect the book plans have been put on hold based on all you’ve told me about Walter and this operation. Watched you boys from afar via the Tribune. Suppose you know Du Bois thinks the paper is the ‘chief newssheet’ for your new city. Suppose he knows about you and the Giants? Wonder if he’d make a game. Maybe you’ll be in someone else’s book. Fancy that!

Regarding your proposal, don’t suppose I can say no. I’m getting older; could use some stability. It’s great to hear that Walter had the Giants join the NLIBC. Can’t say I’m an optimist about any of these leagues at this point, to be square with you. They come and go, quicker than the seasons. But you and I both know an opportunity is an opportunity; I’d rather take a chance with you and Frank than seek shelter elsewhere. Besides, it’d be a ball having you be my manager for a change. Just don’t get on my ass about daydreaming!

Your pal,

John

The old Chicago boys came east on a spring train like a whole half of a ballclub; moved the team forward meaningfully. With years of experience in the great Midwest circuit of black ball, they translated quickly and easily to Philadelphia movement. And Sol had one of the best seasons of his career again, batting over .360 with a near .400 on base percentage. And in what would be 37 year old Frank Grant’s last season with the club, he managed a .250 average. It was a far cry from Frank’s glory days.

“Suppose you’ve got one more good year, Frank?” Sol was packing up his gear after the last game of the season. It was against the Illinois Central Railroad Employees. Decent squad for a group of workers. The front of Sol’s uniform was covered in dirt from a hard slide he’d taken that afternoon. Bang-bang play on a tag at third. He was safe. He counted. Third triple of the year.

Frank shook his head. “I think maybe one, kid. I’d like to take a break. Go somewhere new. Maybe New York City. Something back like where I started. Buffalo’s too far north. Maybe work a regular job. Bartending. Maybe some easy going ball. Easy on my knees and back!”

Sol laughed. “It’s been a good run, Frank. We’ll miss you here. Think I’ll see you in New York?”

“All you’ve got to do is send the word.”

A couple days later Sol dropped Frank at the train station. Frank handed him a loose piece of paper. Sol realized it was from Frank’s scrapbook. It was a box score from Frank’s first year with Buffalo. Three for three with two doubles. Against a local squad.

“Keep this, Homer. For your book. Maybe it’ll be useful.”

“I don’t know how to use it, Frank, but I’m sure glad to have it.”

Frank stepped on the train; Sol watched, as pillars of white-gray smoke piled off into the distance, through the aisles of smokestacks and rowhouses.

The year after Frank left, Chappie came back to catch. But most of all, Sol had managed to recruit the close friends Pete Hill and Rube Foster. Rube was already breathing down his neck, more and more about Cuba. He’d made it down in 1903 for a spell after his X Giants had walloped Sol’s Philadelphia squad for the black championship. Four complete game victories. But Sol figured Rube could freshen up in Philadelphia first, before he made his big adventure. All of this was great. They had two of the best young ballplayers in the world. Sol hadn’t played on, nonetheless seen a team like this since the Columbia boys. But there was one more missing piece. Sol walked into Walter’s office on the morning of the first game. They were already planning for the 1905 season.

Walter: “I want Grant Johnson.”

“You know McGraw even tried to nab Charlie Grant by claiming he was Native American? And the kid has only gotten better since then. That was three years ago.”

“You can barely see Grant on a roster this big. But that’s what we need, Sol. We need a team so big, so great, that it’ll burst the bubble.”

Sol wasn’t buying it, at least not completely. “They don’t care about how good we are. They care about who and what they think we are. And what it means, looking like we look, to step out onto the field with a bunch of white men. That’s what they’re calling ‘professionals’.”

“I want Grant.”

“And we’ll get him. I want McClellan too. Shore up the mound with Rube. There’s too much momentum for this team now. We’ll monopolize all the talent in the country. William Clarence Matthews too. Tuskegee man. Harvard man. But I heard the idea was they wanted him in Burlington. On a white team in the Northern League. He’s been so undeniably good that he might integrate the game himself.”

Schlichter looked askance; played with an unsharpened pencil on his desk. Outside, the team was warming up, stretching. Sol could hear Chappie and Bill Monroe yelling out instructions. Sol was now 36, and had been relegated to first base in the name of Monroe, whose career had rocketed forward. Sol didn’t mind. He’d become so immersed in managing and recruiting talent; working with Schlichter on scaling the organization that the game and the book had started to run on autopilot. The game, he could hit and field and run like nothing. Just less agile and sharp with old age. The book, however… the book. It hadn’t gone anywhere. The notebooks and manuscripts lingered. It took time. Serious time. And mental energy. He’d been so procedural, so systematic. So present. Owning the workflows of the game. The history faded in the name of the present. Was the book just a younger dream? Some passion of youth? He still felt that it was important. It just wasn’t so urgent anymore. He was in the game. Every aspect of it – from executive ownership to on the field execution. What was a book in the face of that? Stovey flashed in his mind. But he shoved it down deep. Forget it. Be here now.

“We’ll get ‘em, Sol.” Walter moved with total assurance at this point. If the 1903 team had been a shade of the Columbias, the ‘04 squad promised to be the generation that inaugurated an entirely new era of the game. And Sol was managing the transition out of the dark ages. But he still remembered them. They sulked in the back of his mind like a panther in a cage. Walter pivoted hard.

“Say, the book. You haven’t spoken about it in ages Sol. Ages. Are you still doing this thing?”

Sol decided in that moment, almost flippantly.

“Yes. I just haven’t had the time. Between building this ballclub with you, I just haven’t had a minute to get anything down. Honest, it’s where I left it the moment we started.”

“I tell you what, Sol. If we fulfill this team, and I mean really fulfill it, I’ll publish the damn book myself. And make sure you have ample time to write it. Finish it. Tell the story the way it’s meant to be told. All I want is Grant Johnson and one hundred wins out of this ballclub. We’re selling like the best damn black team in the world because we are. But to tell you the truth, I want this to be the best damn black team that ever walked this earth. And maybe we’ll work in a rematch with Mack and Plank. That man is pitching his ass off. And Bender is right on his tail. Say that bodes well for a man like Rube. McGraw won’t leave me alone about buying half this team off my hands. Tell him he can try all he wants, but the whole league is throwing gates up on him. Say what you will about the hot-head, but he’s obsessed with the best talent. I’d hire him to manage here so you can finish your history – but those New Yorks pay too well.”

Sol couldn’t help but grin at Walter’s proposal. He hadn’t even thought about publication. The story just felt too important. That was the driver. And after all this work on the Giants, he figured he could tell it from fifty-five different angles. Player. Manager. Organizer. Scout. Financial Operations. He’d truly seen it all, from every level of the game. And what’s more, he’d seen it all at once. That was the gift of this gig with Schlichter. He was grateful.

‘05 came with a storm. And the storm’s name was Rube Foster. Rube was one of the greatest ballplayers in the game the moment he stepped on a professional field at age 22; three years later, the man was even better. He pitched the Giants to a 128-23-3 record, going 37-5. Bowman and McClellan weren’t far behind him. All three, thirty game winners. Now Pete, Grant, and Rube were all on the same squad with Sol. Grant greeted Sol characteristically. “Now I know there’s going to be great meals.” Home Run flexed his fingers. “Keep my bat moving.”

“Hell, Walter might even cook them for you himself.”

“I’d prefer steak to wienerschnitzel, Sol.”

Walter sat at his desk, sniffing the air.

“And you don’t know a damn thing about good food, Grant. Which means it’ll be easy to feed you.”

The three men laughed.

But the well to do didn’t last long. The next year, Schlichter continued to scale his operation, forming the National Association of Colored Base Ball Clubs, which included the Philadelphia Giants, Royals, Cubes, Cuban Giants, and Cuban Stars. By the strength of his endeavors with the Giants, Schlichter had accumulated enough capital and ball acumen to take another step forward, toward institutionalization. But the new league immediately posed problems, especially for Rube Foster’s machinations. Nat Strong, voted secretary for the league; Schlichter, president, were both white men. Not that this predicated any sort of behavior in Sol’s mind – but the owners in the new league had gathered to impose a cap on salaries at one hundred dollars a month. This wasn’t Sol’s favorite play, but Rube was incensed. What this represented were limitations imposed on advancement of black players’ fortunes, in an already constrained world.

“Can you believe this shit, Sol? I’m done. I’m ready to go. This is Cuba for me. It’s the opening. It’s the window.”

Sol, in his old age, was much more temperate.

“Ease up, Rube. Schlichter’s trying to make something work. There needs to be a balance of power between ownership and the players. It’s how it’s always been. Owners take the primary stakes. Money feeds down. Without the owners in agreement, we don’t have a league.”

“I’m going to run this shit myself, Sol. I don’t care how it gets done. We can’t trust these men. Walter, Nat, all of them. They’re building power on top of us. Not with us. And the owners. I don’t give a damn if they’re white, black, red, yellow, blue. Fact of the matter is nothing should be impeding the advancement of the wellbeing of our men if they’re fit and out for it. And I know, well as I know the back of my hand, that I’m the best pitcher in the world. Toe to toe with Mathewson, Young, anybody. And Mathewson made five thousand dollars last year Sol. Five thousand dollars. And what do I have to show for it? A couple hundred bucks for a season where we pulled in twenty more games than the best team in white ball. Hell, Sol. I taught Mathewson. McGraw had me come up into their camp and teach that kid how to be great. So what does that make me? I’m twenty-five fucking years old. And I taught the best pitcher in white ball how to throw the best damn pitch he’s got in his arsenal.”

Sol couldn’t disagree with a word Rube said. If anything, from the moment he’d heard about him; the moment they’d met, Rube had become even better than Sol could have imagined. And he imagined great things for Rube. He imagined Rube turning the game into something different, something they hadn’t seen before. And he had the fire, the will, and the command to do it. And if he tried to calm Rube down any; if he tried to manufacture or control an outcome, he was afraid that he’d work against Rube. Deter him from fulfilling his purpose. And that was the last thing Sol wanted. Rube would burn too bright for all of this; ultimately, tear it all down to build something better. What, he didn’t know.

“You’re right, Rube.”

Foster’s face lightened up a bit. He looked ready to listen for awhile. Not so angry.

“Suppose I can’t stop you. Any of this. Suppose I don’t want to. Suppose I’m as tired of it as you are.”

Rube nodded.

“But I’m done. Towards the end. And it’ll be my time to sum up the past soon. You’re the future. And hell if I’m to tell the future what to do. Especially if it might mean the creation of something different, something beyond what any of us have ever known. Black leadership all the way down. Maybe even a league that puts the white one to shame.”

“You know that’s all I ever wanted to do, Sol. From the moment we met. Build something equal to the genius you got. Frank got. I got. Hell, Pete and Grant got. And they’re coming with me. Old man Grant is, we can still use him in Cuba. Pete’s fresh. The kid might grow up to be a better hitter than Frank or Delahanty. And lord knows the league could use him. Black baseball could use him.”

“So you need to go to Cuba first?”

“They’ve got what we don’t. A league they own. They operate. It’s a national affair. And black men play in it. It works. They’re not as big as the white pros here, but they’re big as the island will allow. I need to learn there, first. What it’s like. How they make it work. Because we aren’t trying to build the same thing that the Americans got. We gotta build something that will operate at the scale they have. Without the empire. Without the institutions. The thousands of dollars of press. Stadiums. The infrastructure they stole off the backs of immigrants and slaves in this country. The European white men working in the mines. The factories. Black bag carriers and waiters. We’re a service to them. That’s it. A service to their empire of luxuries. An amusement. And hell, maybe I wouldn’t give a damn if I was half as good as I know I am. But every black man out there on that field; Nat and Walter besides knows I could take the ball in any game of the World Series against those A’s, or those New Yorks. And have half the infield take a seat.”

“Nat and Walter are trying to run a league.”

“They ain’t players Sol. And they’re white. The owners, this league – that’s money off our backs.”

“I hate what you told the team, Rube. It’s equivalent to mutiny.”

“I told them what they need to hear. Salaries are capped hard. Meal allowances too. Hell, Schlichter’s even making us provide our own uniforms. It’s clear as day, Sol. And if you don’t see it you’re not just blind. You’re willfully blind. It’s even worse. When they come down like this after the kind of success we’ve had, it’s about margins. It’s about more and more money in Walter’s pockets and even less in ours. Who made this happen? You think this was a goddamn vacuum? It was Grant’s sweat. My sweat. Chappie. Pete. Monroe. Hell, it was your sweat! What it took to get us here. My parents were slaves Sol. My siblings, they all died. Tuberculosis. This game is everything to me. It’s all I got. And it’s what got me here, to the top of a black mountain that half the world pretends don’t even exist. Hell if I’m angry. And hell if you don’t pick a side.”

“I’m on your side Rube. But you just tore this team apart.”

“Then so be it, Sol.”

The following year, Rube would stay, however reluctantly. After Foster’s departure in ‘07, Sol and Walter brought on Pop Lloyd and Bruce Petway. Sol didn’t know if they’d ever be as good as that year with Rube in ‘05 at the top of the staff, but it didn’t matter. Over the course of his career he’d seen two of the greatest baseball teams to ever set foot on the field. And he’d personally helped assemble the second one. That was more than enough. On top of it, Walter made good on publishing Sol’s book. He frantically threw it together as the ‘06 season came to a close. Walter even edited it for him. Sol decided to call it History of Colored Base Ball. He’d written over three thousand pages. Notes, diagrams, details. Photos scattered across his apartment in Philadelphia. Contributed essays. Interviews he’d conducted. Memories, written in excruciating details. Yellowing napkins from Chicago. Even bullet points on the backs of lineup cards from his days in Pittsburgh. He’d managed to compress decades of black baseball history into a slim, one hundred and twenty-eight page volume. Schlichter was impressed. Sol was a real writer. And better yet, a true chronicler of a history no one else had yet dared to approach.

“You really threw that one together, Sol. Like a little kid prepping for a last minute test. This is one helluva book.”

Walter handed the manuscript back to Sol. It was a huge stack of varying different papers and materials. Photos. Clippings.

“It’s got everything in it, somehow. Only way you seemed to be able to do it was refuse to leave anything out. Any kind of material. Any kind of story.”

Sol smiled, taking Walter’s jab about procrastination lightly. “Well, suppose you’d eased off on trying to assemble the best baseball team of all time, I might’ve had more room to work with it.”

Walter read aloud:

“‘Of the players of to-day, with the same prospects for a future as the white players, there would be a score or more colored ballplayers cavorting around the National and American League diamonds at the present time.

As it is, the field for the colored professional is limited to a very narrow scope in the base ball world. When he looks into the future he sees no place for him on the Chicago Americans or Nationals (champions), nor the Athletics (American), or New York (National, ex-champions), even were he superior to Lajoie, or Wagner, Waddell or Mathewson, Kling or Schreck. Consequently he loses interest. He knows that, so far shall I go, and no farther, and, as it is with the professional, so it is with his ability.

… It should be taken seriously by the colored player, as honest efforts with his great ability will open an avenue in the near future wherein he may walk hand-in-hand with the opposite race in the greatest of all American games – base ball.’”

Walter exhaled.

“I’ll say that’s damn smart Sol; tracks with my education in the game. Like to say I know enough now, spending time around you, Grant, and that bastard Rube.”

“He meant not only for his own advancement, Walt. But for the whole black game. You know this.”

“I do. Don’t mean I don’t hate him for what he did.”

“You never suffered what that man did. Hating him for what he did is hating him for what he gone through.”

“I gave him an opportunity. And he pissed in it.”

“You gave him an opportunity on your terms.”

“And my terms remain my own. He made a choice. If he thinks he can do it better, be my guest.”

“I’m afraid he might be right, Walter. You’re a promoter. He’s a ballplayer. And despite what you think, he’s got the best interests of black ball at heart. For you, it’s about money.”

“Money for him too. It’s all a business.”

Sol gritted his teeth a bit.

“That may be so. It may be. But none of us who made it this far are just here for the money when the chips are down. We’re here because it keeps us alive. It kept Rube alive. He said it himself. Without baseball he might be a dead man.”

“Then let him find his way. This book figures to be expensive to publish. I have some restaurants and pool halls on the line who want a spot in the finished copy. Whaddya say?”

“I say I’m grateful to you for making this happen.”

“We made this happen, Sol. With the best that was available to us, the best hand we could muster. And I’d say, looking back at it – even while it’s still going – it’s a helluva job. And I suspect you did better than you thought you could running the show.”

“The book ended up being shorter than I thought it was going to be. More pictures. Essays from other people.”

Grant had just finished his contribution, weeks before Sol gave the final draft manuscript to Walter for editing. It was called, Art and Science of Hitting. Rube had done his part too, with a piece titled, How to Pitch. Rube had been adamant to publish it under his full name. Andrew “Rube” Foster. Sol couldn’t imagine a better pair to animate the acts.

“Suppose that’s for the best, isn’t it? There’s so much that one person alone can’t say. Surprised myself that you were able to fit almost six decades into this book.”

Sol was surprised too. He didn’t feel he’d actually been successful. It was extremely scattershot. As the ‘06 season had drawn to a close, he’d been tired of the project. Exhausted, actually. The notes and notebooks, all of it. The napkins he’d been carrying for over half a decade. Some of the stuff, a decade and a half. He’d brought it all with him from Chicago in two and a half suitcases stuffed to the brim. The other half of the suitcase was his clothes.

And it had sat, haunting him. Taking up more of the bedroom than he did. After each practice, each roadstand, it came home to him – sitting there. Like a huge, disorganized wormhole of a universe he’d failed to enter. Even though he’d been a firm inhabitant of a not altogether small portion of the whole thing. The issue was, the history kept happening. It kept compounding. It wasn’t that the spare, new seconds went somewhere else. It was a dirge of synapses that widened out onto an ever expanding field. And Sol would have to catch and return all those layers to a coherent synopsis. The book should have been all three thousand pages. But he wouldn’t be able to stop. Sol already suspected he’d need to do an update in a few years. He eagerly anticipated the day the game ceased flying; the ball ceased being suspended, white in the air, like a traveling sun. He was a cartographer of the game, an astrophysical map of the movement of the stars as they shifted; died out. As the center of black baseball traveled, from Chicago, to New York, Philadelphia, Cuba… was Cuba next? If Rube would have it, it would be. And this was just the beginning. Sol looked back at his life, as Walter skimmed through the book, admiring the photos. There was one with him in it. Sitting in a strange, gilded chair. The 1905 team. All the men were wearing coats and ballcaps. Grant smiled faintly in the front left, his eyes dissociated from the flash.

His career had been in the strange period of transition. And now with the rise of players like Pop, Pete, Rube… there was a lightness in the air. Like they had gone through a storm and emerged out on the other side. Not that anything was any better, necessarily, but that there had been real proof of the possibility of the emergence of a comprehensive, long term black league. McGraw’s attempts at recruitment had been null. At best, the white pros had been looking faintly at Native American ballplayers like Meyers and Bender. Maybe some white passing Cubans would be joining soon. The skin color barrier was inflexible at best. The days of the ‘Spaniard’, ‘Italian’, or even fake ‘Native American’ black man sneaking into pro ball were dead. And furthermore, it was such an extreme assault on the pride of a great man that very few black ballplayers even wanted to try that game. He remembered Charlie telling him how embarrassed he felt – McGraw parading him around like something and someone he wasn’t. Not just like – a real fake. Like a toy for someone else’s machine. And McGraw didn’t want Charlie for Charlie. He wanted Charlie for what he could do for him. It wasn’t like Sol bringing the Columbias back together in the early days of the Philadelphia Giants. Sure, Patterson and Chappie were some of the greatest ballplayers on the planet, black or white. But they were friends. All of them. They’d fought together, suffered together. On the mound, on roadtrips. Trains with no real way back home assured. Gate receipts counted. Card games argued. Nights in bunks that smelled like bloodstains. Near frostbite in Chicago winters. Old stoves. They’d been through the world of nothing assured. Nothing promised. And they hadn’t only survived – they’d written a legacy as some of the best men, alive or dead, to ever step foot on a baseball diamond.

And that filled Sol, Chappie, Bill; the rest of them with a real pride. Something that couldn’t be bought. And certainly, something that could be disgusted by the fake, sellout culture of a quick buck that all of these entrepreneurs with no skin in the game of black ball were shopping. Sol understood Rube’s position. And he loved Rube, angry and hell-bent as he was. Walter undeniably meant well. He’d just single-handedly helped Sol bring the history of black baseball into the world. Not only published it, offered to edit the book for him. It was an act of profound grace and kindness from a true friend and business partner. But Walter would never understand what he and Rube had gone through. Stovey. Fleet Walker. Frank. It created within them a Hephaestean nature. Again and again at the irons of hell. Hammering out ground balls. Legging out base hits. Firing home fastballs. None of it ever seen, compensated. Banished. To hell. To fight it out in times where it sincerely felt like there was no way out. This was a kind of spiritual exile Sol wasn’t entirely sure if he had words for, but he made sure to try to fit it into the book. Best he could. And that’s what the book ultimately became – a declaration of excellence, direct from the mouths of those best fit to speak it into existence.

The box scores, the histories, the documents. These were undeniably important. But having Rube’s voice in it. Grant’s voice. His voice. This granted a real primacy to the ballgame. It said, ‘Here’s how we play. Try it yourself. And then find us in time. Here’s a real record of where we came from. What we did. Who we are.”

This book could be, for them, something that stands in time, even if it stood alone. Even if it stood without the white institutions, white money, white social power. They’d built a world off Rube’s parents in chains. And now Rube was telling them how to pitch. Suppose they didn’t have to listen. Christy Mathewson made sure he took serious notes. And it seemed like it was paying off.

Sol looked out the window. Thank god the book was done. Now he could move on. The question was, what was next? He looked off into the horizon, where the sun would come to set. Just between a tailor and a tall set of apartments. It was laundry day. Bleached cloth fluttered in the light breeze. He’d find what would follow in the new sun rising. But it wouldn’t be from him, from Walter, or from any of this old world. It would be from Rube Foster. Sol knew it from the moment he’d first heard from the young man; after Rube’s rebellion on the Giants – as much as Sol was conflicted about the act – he couldn’t have been any more sure. Rube would build the next era of black baseball.

Sol heard from Rube next after the 1907 Cuban Winter League season ended. He’d made it down there, starring for the team Fe. When he returned, he immediately called upon Sol to rehash what had happened.

HOMER –

WE JUST GOT BACK. NOTES ON THE NEW LEAGUE. WANT TO GO OVER THEM WITH YOU. GOING BACK NEXT YEAR TO PLAY FOR HABANA. WILL BE IN PHILADELPHIA WITH LELAND’S BOYS THIS SPRING. TELL ME ABOUT THE BOOK.

– RUBE

And sure enough, there they were, 3/21, for a 11AM-4PM doubleheader. Rube arrived with his Lelands and decided to pitch both games. He won both, 6-2 and 4-0. He managed to pitch better in the second than the first, allowing only four baserunners in the final contest. Two complete game victories. Top of the game Rube.

Afterwards, while the players cleared out, Rube came over to sit on the Giants’ home bench.

“Been waiting to tell you about my trip, Sol.”

“I know Rube.”

“The book?”

“Finished.”

Sol handed Rube a small white pamphlet. Decently thick. Rube held it up to the light.

“So this has everything I need to know in it?”

“And some you already do.”

Rube smiled.

“See you stuck it out with Walter. Even with him squeezing the pockets of the team.”

“I’ve done and made enough now Rube. I’m here to see what happens next.”

“And you know part of that is Cuba; maybe it becomes the full of it.”

“I know that you’ve got something to do with it. And not a small part.”

Rube took a deep breath in.

“I went down there; I saw how they operate. It’s almost useless to put it all into words. But I’ve got a vision for the league now. The black league. We’re going to be rock solid. Regimented.”

“I know your discipline. Too well. Eight AM to sunset. You’re working.”

“It’s going to have to be on my back, Sol. I know it. No one else is stepping up. Pete’s content to hit. Grant too. These guys just want to play ball. And I know that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day. But I need more. I need a world for us to play in. It eats at me. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. Because I can see and feel the ceiling. Each night, when I go to sleep. The whole world’s out there. But not for me. Not for us. Pete. Grant. And the dead and dying men in your book. Octavius Catto. Stovey.”

Rube held up the book.

“I don’t need your book, Sol. I know all these men. And I studied our game. All day, all night. As a little kid. And the limits then were bad. Even for Fleet and the boys who made it into the pros. Worse, even. What’s the choice? Violence? Hatred? Death threats? Lynching? It’s that, all day every day. Louder if we’re on the field with them. Starving if we’re off it. Bouncing from teams and leagues that live and die in a day’s time. Eating off the backs of flies. Not even a day promised. And when you’re carrying a load like this…”

Sol looked concerned. “Say, Rube. Maybe stay awhile back in Philadelphia? Walter might have you again. I can talk to him.”

Rube, sternly: “No. I’m done here. I’m staying in Chicago; I’ll be in Cuba every winter. I’m going to learn how they run that league better than they think they know it. How it really plays. And I’ll pull that together with what I learned here. What you, Leland, hell – even Walter and Strong – taught me about how to run a club. It’s a start.”

“I’ve got no doubt you can do it, Rube. I just want you to keep me in touch. I may be too old to be a part of it, but I want to be there when it all plays out.”

Rube put his arm around Sol’s shoulder. “You will be a part of it. But it’s going to take some time. Giving my life to something like this… I’ll need at least ten years.”

Rube and Sol exchanged letters, back and forth from Philadelphia, Chicago, and Cuba for exactly thirteen years. As the year of 1920 approached, Rube was counting the days to 40. And Sol, retired since 1907, was a fifty year old man. The generation before Rube’s time. And now, Rube had gathered the existent owners in black baseball for a meeting at the Kansas City, Missouri YMCA. Rube had put a fair bit more weight on his already large frame; in his older age, was rarely seen without a suit. Much like Sol had with Walter, Rube had formed a partnership with a white businessman, John Schorling, in 1911 to start the Chicago American Giants from the ashes of the Lelands team. Sol watched with profound interest. He could see in Rube’s actions what Rube had taken from history. From time. From him. And he was proud. The blueprint was eerily similar. Players. Operations. Schorling knew very little about the hard facts of the game compared to Sol and Rube. He worked in coal; established a bank. Would go on to real estate. But the economic power Schorling could provide in partnership with Rube allowed Rube to leverage his profound acumen in favor of turning the New American Giants into the second decade’s Philadelphia Giants. As the team’s power grew, so did Rube’s power among the owners. Until it became clear it was time for the next step. And this time, instead of Nat Strong and Walter Schlichter, Rube took it.

Sol arrived in Kansas City two weeks before the meeting, as Rube was making preparations. Rube had warned Sol well in advance. Now that he was somewhat retired, he did a bit of managing. A bit of writing for various papers. It kept him busy; with money enough in his pocket. And close enough to the game he loved.

When he arrived at Rube’s hotel, they met in the downstairs bar. Rube clasped his hand, but Sol reached in for a full hug.

“You did it, Rube.”

“You knew I would. The circumstances are ripe here. And forces out of my hand played in. Did you know the population of black folks in Chicago doubled in the past ten years? Now over one hundred thousand. I suppose your man Du Bois is having a field day with this one. An extreme migration. And I can’t deny it’s helped the American Giants. We’re as strong as we’ve ever been. Maybe not as great as our ‘05 squad, but economically… we’re a powerhouse.” Rube winked at Sol.

“I don’t know if anyone, black, white, or otherwise could beat those teams. They’ll stand in history forever. Even if no one remembers them.”

“Thanks to your book, they will, Sol. As long as anyone reads about or plays the game of baseball. Or thinks anything of America, nonetheless black history within it. And now we’re at the next step. The new phase. I’m going to run this league; I’m going to make sure it’s done right. I’m going to have my hand on every lever. Every control.”

Sol knew this was the part of Rube’s character that posed an innate danger. It reminded him of himself when he was younger; first started the attempt of writing the book. He needed to include everything. It was a compulsion. A cosmological, systematizing one. And it had nearly driven him off a cliff trying to make it happen. Suppose he’d made it work. Wake up one day, realize he’d lost the game inside the story of it.

“You think one man can handle all of that work?”

“I’ll try, Sol. What else is there to do? These owners aren’t fit for it. All they care about is money. I care about every single player on my team. Every single player who steps on the dirt in my league. I got a big enough heart for it, Sol. And at the end of the day I suppose that’s a responsibility. It’s not just a gift to throw away. It’s an opportunity to make this happen for all of us.”

It was identical to Sol’s impulse with the book of history. And Rube knew it. That’s why they were speaking together on the eve of the first modern merger in black baseball history led by a black man – a black man who had accumulated the necessary financial, social, and political power to make it happen. And what’s more, it was a guaranteed success. Black ball had exploded since Sol’s official retirement in 1907 – not that he’d really stopped playing. Sol remembered the first days of the National Colored Base Ball League. Owned and operated by the black community. The rapidly deflating finances. The hopelessness he’d felt when it burned out. He was just a kid. The Keystones. And then there was the Southern League the year before it. 1886. The year Frank joined Buffalo. Sol barely knew anything about it. But he knew it was real. It had happened. It flickered and died.

What was different – at least insofar as Sol knew, was that there was a genius behind it. It was Rube. Genius at every necessary level. And it took a mind like Sol to recognize a mind like Rube’s. There would be obstacles, but Rube would find a way through each one. He was stubborn as all get out. Stubborn in a way Sol wasn’t. Stubborn in a way that Rube was discontent to observe history. To live within it. He was damned to make it. And make it he did.

The charter was signed that day, under Rube’s supervision. It made him president of the eight team black league, including the Kansas City Monarchs – owned by a white man named Wilkinson, which Rube was reluctant to allow. But the Monarchs were the biggest black team not named the Chicago American Giants. What’s more, Rube moved Oscar Charleston, one of the greatest players in the game, off his roster and back to the Indianapolis ABCs in the process. Rube understood, being the man he was, that the league couldn’t survive under a Giants monopoly. Rube was a ruthless competitor, but without competition, you can’t compete. And without competition, a league folds.

It was sealed with a five hundred dollar deposit and a pronouncement:

We are the ship. All else is the sea.

Sol suspected Rube had come up with this somewhere between Havana and port back home.

Sol followed the league with the passion of a man who’d waited all of his life to see this moment. Working odd jobs around the game; even managing several teams into the 20s, Sol continued to write. Abruptly, it all came to a head in the summer of 1925. Rube had been found by several of his teammates lying next to a gas heater in the boarding house where he was staying. It appeared he had inhaled fumes. Rube’s wife, Sarah, wrote to Sol:

SOL –

RUBE’S NOT GOOD. SAYS HE’S GOING TO BE PITCHING IN THE WORLD SERIES THIS YEAR. DOESN’T REMEMBER THE COLORED SERIES LAST YEAR. HE HAD A BEAUTIFUL SPEECH AFTER IT WAS ALL DONE. HE MISSES YOU. PLEASE WRITE.

– SARAH

Sol did one better. He decided he needed to visit Rube. But by the time he’d gotten his affairs together, Rube was already confined to an institution under the care of the Illinois state. Sarah was in disarray. He arrived, hugged her, and immediately boarded the train to get out to where Rube was staying.

The horrible, sick irony was not lost on Sol. The greatest mind in the game he’d ever met – in nearly fifty years time – was confined to an insane asylum.

It was a tall, white building surrounded by a fence. Kankakee, Illinois. Well outside of Chicago. On the river. Sol took a car past the dam. By the time he’d made it inside, it was well past lunch. Rube was sitting at a table, listening to a radio. It was a Cubs game. A young outfielder by the name of Hack Wilson was up to bat. He took a massive swing – at least, the announcer proclaimed. The crowd noise in the background was like a wave of static. Sol sat down.

“Say, Rube – how ya feeling?”

Rube stared blankly ahead.

Sol’s face dropped. It was bad. Far worse than he’d hoped. He didn’t give himself the luxury of thought.

“Them boys need you Rube. You held that league together with your own two hands. They’re in chaos now. Afraid it’s going under. Wilkinson’s doing everything he can to restore order. Hueston too. You were the book. The book’s fading.”

Sol’s voice became more and more desperate as he spoke. Rube looked him in the eye. Still not speaking. Sol was terrified that he wasn’t sure Rube could.

Sol was encouraged by Rube’s glance. He continued.

“But don’t worry, Dave’s running the club. You’d be proud. They won two championships after you left. Seems the league can’t survive without you – but the team’s as good as ever.”

Sol never saw Rube again. The last thing he remembered was looking back at Rube sitting next to that radio. Hack Wilson flew out to end the second inning at Wrigley Field. Rube died three years later, taking the mind that birthed the Negro Leagues with him.

But there was one more story in Sol’s book. Money was slim; Walter had just written him a letter. He was staying in Long Island, New York. Making money off the occasional article commission. Ten years after Foster’s death.

Why not see the Editor of your colored paper and try to sell him a history of colored baseball which you could write either as a single article or as a series. Except for recent years you have all the data in the book and I would be glad to furnish the cuts and pictures. It looks to me to be worth trying.

Sol looked around the room. There were a handful of copies of the history of the game. It had replaced the stacks and stacks of napkins. Notebooks. Sol didn’t know where they went, exactly. Some went in the fire. Some went into the hands of men like Rube. Chappie. Buckner. Everyone wanted something. Some scrap. Something that would show them, remind them. That they were there. That all of this really happened. That even as age took them; they went into the dusk, into the darkness, that it was real. That it had mattered. Not only to them, but to little kids. Their families. The world.

Sol’s entire archive had been evacuated. There were a couple notebooks left. Mostly his drafts for essays he’d published in papers like the New York Amsterdam News, or the New York Age. Always about the game. Always hinting about something far greater beneath the surface. How could a hundred page pamphlet or a newspaper article sum it all up? The memories, the ballplayers. He’d tried to hold a candle, a scrap, for each one. Up to the light of the sun. What good had it done? Rube was dead. The money was running out. Really, the money was gone. And now Walter wanted him to keep writing? He’d already written the damn history. Three thousand pages of it. An entire history of an empire nobody had known about. And only a few had seen. Flickers of it. A barnstorming game. Read some box scores. Men like Sol and Rube and Frank – they ran through the veins of it. One vein of one lifetime. And then darkness. Sol barely knew what Rube’s childhood was like. He didn’t like to talk about it. Neither did Frank. Rube’s parents had become sharecroppers after becoming freedmen. The abyss of the hatred that loomed before the beginnings of black baseball. And what it had done to Stovey. George died running liquor. His heart finally gave in, living at a high school with flood refugees. Empty handed. And Rube – Rube had died not even remembering the first Colored World Series just half a decade prior. Sarah had gotten a couple words from him. Muttering about gate receipts. And then he was gone. Sol felt that that’s what his book was. A muttering about gate receipts. In the face of the monolith. The mammoth, the beast of time. That had swallowed them. All of them. Whole.

He kicked the dying fire in the fireplace with the poker. Walter’s letter stared at him like some angry eyes. Daring him, commanding him to do something. What good had the first book done? The first printing had gone off. Since then, there was no money to keep it going. A few purchases. Eyes on it. Then silence. The book may as well have been condemned to oblivion. It had been thrown from his mouth, his lips, his hands. The entire archive that was now exploded. Distributed across the earth like pieces of broken glass. Like Osiris’s body. Sol slammed his hand against the table. Looked at it. A leathered hand. A hand working against time. Humming with blood. Struggling forward into space. However interminable, vacuous. But he was still here.

He looked at the letter again. Why did Walter care? Tears welled in his eyes. He knew. Walter was a part of it too. Even if he wasn’t a ballplayer. Wasn’t black. They built something together. Worked. Tirelessly. Sol’s epic never came to fruition. He wasn’t Homer. Fuck. He was barely Achilles. Felt more like Hector. A helpless head, being dragged through the streets of time. His friends were dying. Dead. But he remembered all of it. Every nasty, muggy Wisconsin night. Every hug from men like Monk. Who came and went from the game, got married, ran a pool hall, went back to their hometowns and died and nobody wrote a damn thing about them. Men part of some of the greatest ballclubs of all time. That was the purpose of the book. Damn it. Even if it went into oblivion. Even if no one read it, saw him, saw them. Remembered him. Remembered them.

Walter’s letter was a provocation. He knew Sol was festering. In the middle of nowhere. On and off managing clubs. Players loved him. They knew shades, fragments of what he’d done. He could teach hitting and fielding like no one else. Hit some fungos to the kids. They all had dreams. Nobody dreamed of the majors. They dreamed of the Monarchs. The Homestead Grays. The Crawfords. Play with Satchel Paige. Pitch like Smokey Joe Williams. Donaldson. Mendez. Hit like Pop and Gibson. Oscar and Buck.

Sol realized. It had worked. Damn if it hadn’t been him, Rube, or anybody. They’d held it together. Posey and Greenlee of the Pittsburgh rivals had resurrected the Negro Leagues. And now they were holding all star games in Chicago the size of small cities. People all over the country drove and rode rails to see James Bell run the bases. Watch Josh Gibson hit one out of Comiskey. It had happened. And it was happening now.

He sat down, remembering the first days in his writing chair in Chicago. By the fire. Overlooking the city. The world was changing. How the hell did the center of the universe migrate to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania? He laughed to himself. Read the last bit of Walter’s letter one more time in his head.

It looks to me to be worth trying.

Walter was right. He was here, now. For however long. And he’d seen more than he’d ever imagined seeing. He grabbed a pen from the drawer of his desk. There was a new book to write. He’d make sure Rube was in it. And maybe even get back to Chicago. There was an all star game on the way. The new fellows called it ‘East-West’.

PART II

AFTERWORD

Sol’s book was found, decades later. A young couple, a white man and woman, both in their early twenties, were moving into a Chicago loft. It had been completely redone. Formerly a factory, then a department store, then a series of apartments. The man was looking to start his career selling Ford cars; the woman was a seamstress.

Upon moving in, the man found a cardboard box in the attic. Opening it, he found the manuscript:

SOL WHITE’S BOOK OF THE DEAD

He showed it to his wife. Her father had played baseball; knew the old pitcher Dizzy Dean, back from his broadcasting days. St. Louis Browns. Satchel Paige. She recognized the name, however roughly. This meant the man who wrote it – at least, who was mentioned on the cover page of the manuscript document – was serious business. She suggested they bring it over to the University of Chicago for further examination.

It was immediately taken in by a group of professors in the philosophy department; examined thoroughly. The men and women wore cloth gloves, as they delicately sifted through the pages. Written sometime between the late 1930s and early 1940s. By one of the oldest and most respected bards of a period of time lost to American history. All the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Library of Congress had were box scores. Pieces of newspaper. The rare cabinet photo, depicting Fleet Walker or the second baseman Frank Grant; even Sol or some unnamed railworkers. These documents were deeply bitten by time. Sometimes unrecognizable. The sun had hit the photographs in such a sustained way that the faces and bodies faded into dissolute paper. And the box scores told the same, press-released stories. They were desperate for real information. They received none.

Sol’s epic was unfinished. Or at least, insofar as history could tell. It was different than the published story of the game that Sol gave the world in 1907, thanks to Walter Schlichter. And even then, only a few copies of that book had survived the test of time. They were just being reprinted now. Two weeks prior to the find, Josh Gibson had just been inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Thanks in large part to the advocacy work of players like Ted Williams and Satchel Paige, as well as the book Only The Ball Was White by Robert Peterson in 1970, early black baseball had received a resurgence in popularity and attention. The Hall of Fame responded lukewarmly. They had tried to induct Paige into a separate wing of the Hall. Only the third black ballplayer, after Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson – the man who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in the spring of 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Sol White had known all of these men. Everyone from Jackie to Satchel; Josh, all the way back to Fleet Walker and Bud Fowler. He had been present from the moment the game was segregated, to the moment Jackie Robinson set foot on Ebbets Field grass. This made his contribution equivalent to a fossilized find of the missing piece of the game’s written and remembered history.

But what they found in his second book wasn’t history. At least, not in the way they thought it was. It was hurried, rushed, like Sol had written it in one breath. Researchers at Cooperstown and in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian Institution couldn’t precisely pinpoint when the book had been written. Was it a deathbed utterance? Was Sol in his right mind? And furthermore, how much of this was fiction; how much was fact?

There was barely anything to go off of. White’s time in early black baseball was extremely obscure. Very little media until the full emergence of the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier. It was a disjected world. The game as they knew it was the stories in large part told by Sol himself. Retained and communicated almost ex nihilo to the world. Sol’s word was what they had to go off of. And this second document… it complicated that.

It was a series of what appeared to be visionary experiences, which completely broke from the historical record. The first assessment, when introduced to a team of psychologists and neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins, was schizophrenia. Sol White died extremely poor, at the age of 87 in 1955. Either in Harlem, or Central Islip. He was buried, to no one’s surprise, in a cemetery named after Frederick Douglass – in Staten Island. A granite marker would be delivered for him, long after the mystery of the book was solved.

The series of experiences broke firmly from the historically agreed upon existence of Sol White, however tenuously the record preserved the man. The found manuscript relocated White to 1885, with a series of details only possible in direct encounter with the founding of the Cuban Giants at the Argyle Hotel in Babylon, New York. According to the historical record, White was currently a teenager in Ohio at the time. Furthermore, the text contained awareness of events that would occur decades later; even a century in the future.

This threw the whole world of the two works into question. Was this second book a fraud? A work of historical fiction? A psychotic break, genuinely authored by Sol White? Forensics experts for a private firm in New York City independently verified the handwriting as Sol’s own. Auction houses clamored for rights to the manuscript. It could sell for hundreds of thousands. Maybe a million dollars. A verified account of a hidden piece of black baseball history. It was an unprecedented discovery.

Literary experts argued with swords drawn. Comparative Literature and Research departments from Cal State Fullerton to City College of New York warred over questions of authenticity and primacy of experience. From what dimension of White’s psyche had this emerged? What were the grounds of reality? What did this mean for black literature studies; furthermore, the legacy of the intersection between literature and historical documentation? Some suggested this wasn’t literature at all whatsoever. Primary history. Others said it was revisionary history produced by a late stage existential crisis. They said Sol was like a Beethoven or a Mozart – thrown into a fury of creative production mingled with historically intelligible details as his mortality approached. Edward Said’s On Late Style was thrown around as an essential document in literature and cultural studies departments, decades later.

No one seemed to be able to come to terms with what the manuscript was. Or what it meant for history. The couple, amidst the fury of confusion, donated the document to the Smithsonian Museum of History and Technology. They felt it was only right. The woman’s father wanted her to consign it to Christie’s, so he and her mother could retire to Barbados. The man’s mother wanted him to give it to her alma mater, Georgetown University, so the Jesuit priests could conduct a full forensic analysis. Some adjacent parties even suspected it was written in a state of religious possession. That White’s uncovered manuscript was an act of prophetic confession – an uncovering of character of creation and existence itself. This was the opinion of the Theology Department at Georgetown University – upon reading a facsimile of the document itself. They believed they could tell by the slant of White’s lines. That it was written in the span of one, maybe two nights. And written in a mind-state of total, religious conviction.

The document festered in the archives of the Smithsonian for fifty years. Buried in an archival box; archival wraps. Facsimiles circulated in literary circles, as well as baseball historical communities. The Society for American Baseball Research devoted an entire wing of studies to dissecting the meaning therein. American literary historians specializing in the Harlem Renaissance, along with poets of the new Magical Realism movement in South America declared White as the forebear of a new condensation of myth, history, spirit, and psyche. They named him the inheritor of Borges, and proclaimed him the literary brother of Remedios Varo and Clarice Lispector.

Meanwhile, the couple’s parents bickered furiously about what the family had done. The in-laws went six years without speaking, until they reconciled at the birth of a grandson, named Frank.

It took the entirety of fifty years for the flame that burnt beneath the manuscript’s discovery to finally die out. It was all but forgotten. New literary movements had come to pass; institutions, psychologists, historians, and avant garde figures alike had decided, at last, that the document was too obscure. It broke definitively from the accepted history of Sol White’s lived experience in space and time. As such, it must, naturally, either be a document of a psychotic condition, a religious revelation, or simply an act of creative writing. Nonetheless, it was lost to time. The Smithsonian’s baseball history archives were manned, at best, by one sole interlocutor at a time. Usually an intern; rarely a full scale archivist. The entire American Sports department was run by one woman, named Susan Thomas. She worked tirelessly; specialized primarily in wakeboarding and Olympic Sports. The baseball section of the archives gathered dust, outside of the rare exhibition showings of signed baseballs; perhaps a game used uniform from Jackie Robinson.

The remaining portions of the manuscript were never recovered. What little the Smithsonian retained had been cemented in time by institutional consensus as an act of creative, genre fiction. It took the historical terms of Sol’s time; wove them into an incredible act of imagination. What little the document updated was a refresh of the historical record of Sol’s education. He was now considered a polymathic bard of early black baseball history. And, without a doubt, its chief scribe. References in the second manuscript were as diverse as ancient Egypt and Heraclitus. It contained an entire ontology of human existence, play, and the cosmos. This was given little attention by the institutions who reflected upon it. The poets, alone, seemed to understand and admire what Sol had woven beneath the apparent magical narrative. To others, it was the ravings of a mad, old man – albeit an essential man to American history – or else a work of incomplete, but fertile, creative fiction. The last work of a historian of a dark, relatively unknown time in the annals of American transformation, set to pen. In a space between imagination and reality.

The last known remaining manuscript of Sol White has been preserved in its fullest extent here.

PART III

THE BOOK OF THE DEAD

ALL KNOWN SURVIVING FRAGMENTS FROM THE FINAL BOOK OF SOL WHITE

The Irreverent Comedy of Detective Cy Jones and His Discontinuous World of Magical, Mystical American Baseball

An Ontological Cycle in Four Mysteries

MYSTERY ONE:

HOTEL BABYLON

OR

CY JONES AND THE DANGEROUS ADVENTURE INTO THE BOWELS OF THE HOTEL BABYLON

I. THE JOKE

Someone coughed. Cy looked up from his manuscript.

“Will someone tell that man to shut the fuck up?”

Cy was weeks away from graduating from the academy. The Institutional Coordination for Extraordinary Detectives at Boston, or ICED-B, was commencing the class of 1885. It was nearly May. And Cy was completing the last flourishes of his recovery of a nameless murder of a Babylonian priestess. Little evidence had been recovered. Results, inconclusive. He’d still done the research, which meant the professors would stamp his document and hand him a plastic gold medal. This was deeply dissatisfying to Cy.

He was living in a boarding house above a bordello in Boston. Across the tracks in the city. Heroin was sweeping the area, like a copycat crime from Paris. So many want-to-be poets and preachers littered the streets. Everybody was predicting the end, in the same time, in the same place. The street corners had become quite crowded.

The cough again.

“I say, man, shut the fuck up!”

A face peered over the wooden library desk partition. It was like Rasputin had a bad hair day.

“I say, man, to you, what the fuck!”

The man’s face was crazed. Cy immediately backed down. The man started laughing wildly, interpolated with wretched coughing sounds.

“Bad case, I say. The Spanish flu?”

Cy couldn’t tell if this was a question.

“What the fuck is the Spanish flu?”

The Rasputin doppelganger checked his watch. “Too early?”

Cy: “Too early?”

“Nevermind fellow. My name is Anton Gogol. Early immigrant, late enrollment. Well past the present. Say, do you see that peacock in the overcoat?”

Cy looked out the library window. Sure enough, there was a peacock in a top hat, overcoat, and monocle. It was strutting down the main avenue with a purpose. The two men rushed outside.

“Stop! Stop I say! Turn and face us, knave!”

Anton was clearly prepared to duel this peacock.

The peacock turned.

“Pay no mind, pay no mind. Buffinton’s starting at 4:10. I’ll be off!”

It swept its feathers; adjusted the pocket-watch chained to the lapel of the suit. And set off for the match at South End. It was at that moment that Cy met his partner in investigation. Not the peacock. Anton.

Cy had grown up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He’d met a rising scholar at his high school, a man by the name of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois would go on to become one of his closest friends. What separated them – being men of equal intelligence – was Du Bois’ overwhelming academic seriousness. He was intent on Harvard; becoming a great man of civilization. Cy was content to smoke his pipe and read detective mysteries. He aspired to become a man who would solve a great crime; live off the earnings in a little private eye’s office somewhere, filling the room with pipe-smoke and books. Preferably with the curtains shut to the daylight. Hell, sometimes Cy would even mix a little opium in with his tobacco. If he had the day open.

Anton and Cy walked back inside. Anton was hilarious.

“Did you see that fucking peacock mate? I almost blew his face off in the street. You see this pistol?” Anton pulled the massive barrel of a six-shooter out of his comically large pants pocket. A woman screamed.

Cy doubled over laughing. “Put that thing away! They’ll think you’re robbing the library!”

Anton: “If the Gutenberg Bible had pin-ups in it, the alarms would be fucking blaring.”

Cy was confused again. Pin-ups?

Anton’s quirk would continue. “Nevermind, fellow! Nevermind!”

It turned out Anton was studying for his exams to be a detective too. Anton introduced him to a fellow graduate, on the eve of their commencement. His name was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle revealed to them that he had in fact entirely blown off his graduate manuscript; instead had been at work developing a mystery fiction, starring a detective by the name of Sherlock Holmes. It was called A Study in Scarlet.

“Man – you trashed your degree! The entire thing down the drain!” Cy was appalled. Even being the slacker he was, he couldn’t conceive of tossing the entire expense of two years down the toilet.

“Cy, my good man. You think I give a damn? Here, pass me that pipe.” Cy handed him the wooden sliver. Sir Arthur took a massive drag and nearly coughed up a lung.

“You don’t inhale it,” said Cy.

Arthur glared at him and continued.

“None of these damn mysteries in this world are worth solving! Some poor heiress lost her meal ticket. Pah! Some president lost his wife. Divorce! Pah! I lost my dog, my mind, my gems, my purse, my life, Pah Pah Pah!” Conan Doyle took another drag; nearly fell out of his chair.

“I’d rather write my life into being. And you – the two of you, and that damn fool,” he pointed to Gogol, who grinned, “... can chase that fucking peacock around town, or whatever else. Throw some dictator in prison. Find out where the senator paid the prostitute and nail him to a cross! I’ve got something better in store boys, much better. I’ll write the world. The imagination… the mind…”

Doyle trailed off. Cy suspected he hadn’t cleaned the pipe since he’d last dusted it with Chinese opium.

The commencement went swimmingly; sitting in their chairs while the professors and executives prattled on in their bowties about society and culture and the wellbeing of the world saved from the sins of the mysterious and unsolvable, Anton played practical jokes on the well-dressed men and women of society. This escalated to the point of which Anton pulled out a pair of scissors and cut a sizable portion of the blonde woman’s hair in front of him in one clean movement. Cy had to hurry Anton out of the ceremony as the woman’s husband revolted with a red face. There was a brief interruption; the speeches returned.

Anton and Cy decided on Scion Private Eye Enterprises and the Commission for Lost and Found Artifacts, or SPEECLFA, as the name for their organization. This was after a long night drinking and pool-playing at the local pub, wherein Cy had been seduced by a married woman. She was intelligent but a bit wild. She sat in his lap as she talked about salamanders and playing in the creek. He was intrigued. Cy would always leave before eleven at night, as the pub would predictably get rowdy immediately afterwards. That night, someone broke a pool-stick over someone else’s back. A young man named Nuf Ced McGreevy accosted him on the way out.

“Man, pledge your allegiance to the good men of the Bostons!”

Cy: “I’m a Clarkson fan, but no passion for the Beaneaters. Follow Frank Grant?”

Nuf Ced lit up. “We’ll take Clarkson soon enough! Cambridge man, born and bred. Say, Grant? Don’t know ‘em.”

“Young man. Grew up ‘round where I’m from. Pittsfield. Prepares to break into the organized leagues this year. You may be surprised, mate. He’s destined for the stars.”

Nuf Ced: “You know I play myself. Suspect the Beans will invite me to camp. Local circuit.”

Cy had played casually with W. E. B. on their high school team; even flirted with Western Massachusetts semi-professional league work. As a left-handed pitcher. Mean twelve-to-six curveball. That’s where he’d first seen Grant play. But detective work called him with a passion the game couldn’t supply him, at least from the field level.

“If I see you again, I’ll strike you out on the spot.”

With eyes gleaming, McGreevy shook his hand. “I’ll wait on it!”

Cy and Anton set up their offices in an old apartment above a laundry. They slapped a rudimentary paper sign on the door. ‘DETECTIVE WORK FOR HIRE’. They mostly sat in the room, smoking opium, reading the papers. Anton dropped water balloons on pedestrians below, coming and going from their respectable jobs. Every prank Anton seemed to play had a vague danger to it. And then there was the outright danger of pulling a pistol on a peacock in public.

They sat for months after graduation. Cy was pretty sure he was serially addicted to opium. He wrote some rough poems, played crosswords. Wasted a whole summer chasing girls around pubs. Waitresses. Accidents. Ballerinas. And then, in the fall of 1885, came their big break. A huge headline, smearing the front page of the Boston Globe with black ink:

ROYAL DIADEM STOLEN FROM THE HOTEL ARGYLE

And below, in slightly smaller, but no less cataclysmic copy:

PRINCESS IN SHAMBLES. PRICELESS ARTIFACT GONE. LARGE BOUNTY OFFERED. ALL WELCOME.

Cy nearly bounded out of his chair.

“Anton, get your damn coat. We’re going.”

“Going where?”

Cy looked a little closer at the article. He hadn’t even read it.

“Ah, hmmm….. Babylon, New York.”

Babylon was a small hamlet on Long Island. The men took the rail to steamboat connection across Long Island Sound. As they sat on the passenger boat, Anton began to question the situation.

“What do we do when we get there?”

“Say, Gogol, I’ll solve it on a dime. Then we get the prize.”

“What’s the prize?”

“Not sure. Didn’t read. But some royalty involved. Carantania, London, who gives a damn. But we’ll sip on whatever it is until whatever it is runs out. Then I suppose it’s on to the next grand caper.”

This seemed to satisfy Gogol. He spent the rest of the boat ride teasing a passenger’s parrot in a cage. The parrot, after Anton’s intervention, would not stop screaming “Golgotha! Golgotha!”

This unnerved the entire ship.

When the boat landed, it wasn’t long to Hotel Argyle. It loomed on the hill like the place itself was the mystery. Cy felt like he was descending into something he didn’t understand. Gogol clasped him on the back.

“It’s just a diadem, kid. Solve it and get out.”

It was clear by Anton’s words that he felt it too.

Before the pair could even get to the gates of the place, they were immediately accosted by an older gentleman. He was wearing gray slacks and a ballcap. He spoke extremely quickly, like he was late for an appointment.

“Say boys, here to tour the theatre? See a play? There’s a tent going up tonight, just wait and see! Big production! Local kids in on it. All the wealthy patrons going. See you there? Tours before the show. Just five dollars.”

Cy: “Five dollars? What are you going to show us, the fucking Eiffel Tower?”

It was revealed the man’s name was Roberto Malosso. The man traveled back and forth from Boston acquiring dual business. It was unclear whether or not he was actually affiliated with the Argyle. But Malosso would bring back tourists, philanthropists, industrialists – the rich and gullible of the Boston milieu – to show them his grand theatrical palace, which he advertised as and called ‘The Elegance’. Malosso’s claim was this theatre was an Ancient Greek device. A relic of civilization. It was in a small grove outside the fencing of the hotel.

“My good man, this is in the shape of an amphitheatre. Not an oval. You couldn’t even get the design right!” Anton chuckled.

Malosso was unfazed. “Juliet Capulet has been here my friend. Do you know Macbeth, fellow? Macbeth has been to this theatre!”

Cy interrupted. “You mean they were characters put on in the theatre.”

“Of course not, fellow. They were here. Patrons. Real patrons. This here is history, my good man! History!”

Cy couldn’t even laugh. It was just ridiculous. “And Caesar too, right?”

“Surely enough my friend! See the ancient Greek statue of him, just there! Made in person!”

It was a barely standing plaster model. Smeared with what looked like house paint. Like a messy clown’s makeup on top of a child’s toy. At least it was life sized.

Cy decided to let it go. “Well then, I suppose you’ll have your five dollars.” He was about to hand it to Malosso when a couple dirty kids ran up to Malosso, tugging on his coat.

“Roberto, Roberto, the play’s tonight! It’s almost time! We ran our lines. We’re ready.” A breathless kid with raggedy black hair spoke the loudest.

Roberto patted him on the head and smiled.

“I know, I know Billy.” Billy grinned.

Cy was curious. “Say kid, what’s the play?”

“The Seagull! By Anton Chekhov.”

Cy turned to Gogol. “Ever heard of it?” Gogol shook his head. Cy went on anyway.

“Sounds alright kid. Sure Roberto won’t mind if I give you his five dollars for the production. For your expenses.”

The kids were elated. Jumping up and down. One of them held it up to the light.

“Thanks mister! Say, we hope you’ll come. All of the wealthy guests are coming! Roberto told us!”

Cy didn’t totally believe this, but at this point he was open to believing just about anything.

“We’ll try to make it kid. We’re here to solve a mystery.”

Billy’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

“Somebody stole a diadem.”

Even wider. “Can we help you find it?”

“Sure, kid. It’s a big, diamond crown. You can’t miss it.”

The kids ran off into the late afternoon light. Cy and Anton thanked Roberto; began the climb up the hill to The Hotel Argyle.

They found the diadem immediately. It was sitting atop some towels in a service closet. The entire hotel was elated. They were congratulated up and down by everyone from the bellhops to the senators currently staying at the hotel. It turned out the princess who lost the diadem was from Liechtenstein. She showered Cy with praises.

“Dearest Cy, how can I ever repay you? My parents were going to kill me. This has been in the family for ages.” She clearly saw it as no more than a piece of fashion; Cy, in his carelessness, agreed. Just a bunch of jewels on an accessory.

“I say, princess, maybe a dinner on the town. Just the two of us.”

The princess stammered. Cy laughed; wished her well. He and Anton figured they’d see the play that night, but something interrupted.

As Cy was preparing his after dinner suit for the show, he overheard a bellhop whispering in the corridor outside his room. It sounded like white noise at first. He pressed his ear to the door.

“.... and if they don’t find the amulet, it could be something bad.”

An unidentifiable voice replied. Cy hadn’t heard it before. Almost sounded like some wind.

“It will be… it will be. Go let the other staff know. We’ll convene. It can’t be published. Nothing in the papers. Go quickly.”

Cy opened the door abruptly, so as to surprise the party. But as he opened it, the bellhop was gone. All that was standing there was a wisp, almost like a play of light. Wearing butlers’ clothes. An elongated mustache. Bald. The wisp stared at Cy. Cy stared back. And the wisp disappeared through the floor.

Cy immediately knew there was a greater mystery afoot. This was the reason he’d been called to the Argyle. He finished his preparations for the show and headed downstairs. But he never made it to Malosso’s theatre for the production. There was a huge row occurring in the dining room. Servants were passing back and forth, red in the face; clearly uncomfortable. There were two large groups shouting insults back and forth at one another. There were broken plates littering the floor – projectile weapons from a war of words. Two men stood at the front of each group.

Anton told Cy as an aside: “That’s the Thompsons and the Hamiltons. Two of the biggest families in Boston. One came from down south, money off plantations and the slave trade. The other from the British colonies. Pelts and land from the Native Americans.”

Cy could barely hear Anton over the shouting.

“Liars! Liars you all!” The Thompsons heaved. “We’re the great family of Boston. See the cutlery, friend!” One man heaved a massive box of silver at the crowd. They scattered as it slammed across the floor. A spoon clattered toward Cy’s foot. He picked it up. It was ornately engraved. ‘A.T.’ were the initials on it. Cy suspected that A. stood for Aldous Thompson, the industrialist. He’d played a large role in installing rails across the northeast.

A man from the other group, after his recoil from the cutlery volley, rushed to the front of the opposing crowd and returned in kind: “Fellows! We conquered this land from the base! Thousands of scalps! We are by far the great family of the land! See our medallions!” From his hand he threw a grouping of large circular gold awards, all attached to necklaces. Cy suspected that this handful was a not-altogether-small fortune alone.

Anton: “A status war has broken out. Best not to disturb them… this could last all night.”

And this was the moment Cy told Anton what he’d overheard in the hallway outside his room.

II. THE CONCEIT

This piqued Anton’s interest. “We’ll need some opium for this one.”

“I know these freaks have something good. Maybe the princess is good for it.”

“You hate them?”

“Enough to take from them in a casual way, maybe.”

There was some noise in the back room, out behind the kitchen. Cooks and waitstaff were gathered behind the circular windowed double doors. Cy and Anton rushed over.

Someone had dropped a bowl. But more than that, there appeared to be some sort of organized meeting. A man was standing at the center of the large circle of attendees, passing out unmarked baseball jerseys.

“And fellows, this is the inauguration of our team. The Cuban Giants.” There was a great applause and some laughter. Cy turned to the man next to him.

“Say, fellow, what’s your name?”

The man replied, almost laughing: “Henrico Iglesias. What’s yours?”

Cy paused. “That’s clearly a fake name.”

“Is this fake Spanish? Porto cano iglesias?”

“Yes – that’s fake Spanish.”

The man laughed again. “Move along, pal. This isn’t your show.”

He tried another man. This one had a large mustache.

“Hello.”

“Isto bello Italiano constortio rigomontano.”

Cy couldn’t even get a name. By now the group was aware they had interlocutors. They all began to laugh and babble. Cy caught vague glimpses of clearly parodied Spanish, Italian, German, even Portuguese?

“This is hopeless, Gogol.”

Gogol was deeply embroiled in a fake Spanish argument with Iglesias. Several of the men stood around them, yelling and clapping.

Cy left. He thought to himself – ‘This is clearly part of the mystery. Two things I don’t know. Three actually. How the fuck that ghost appeared. Who was the bellhop the ghost was speaking to?’ He knew it was a bellhop because his unconscious memory matched the voice. He’d heard it before. A bellhop in the lobby. Face a bit blurry. Was it someone from the group of ballplayers? And the amulet. What was it? It wasn’t about money. The intonation on ‘bad’ from the conversation he’d overheard had a darker, mortuary tone. This interested Cy far more than some payoff to a princess in front page news. This case. This one. This would be his real first gig. And the lesser mystery, perhaps – the ballclub. Fake names? Fake languages? Who the fuck were these guys? And why were a bunch of waiters and cooks starting a ballclub? Who were the Cuban Giants? Cy didn’t think he saw a single ‘Cuban’ in the crowd. It was a group of black men. Athletes, yes, but Cubans, definitively not. Cy suspected they were all residents, for the most part, of the mid-Atlantic and upper East Coast. Maybe someone here knew Frank Grant. He’d file that one away for later.

As Cy began to ascend the stairs – acknowledging that he had missed the play for the night; planning for a warm bath and some reading – a man ran out of the kitchen after him. He yelled up the stairs.

“Hey there fellow, got a moment?”

Cy figured he might gain some insight.

“Go ahead.”

The man revealed himself to be John Milton Dabney, a resident of Richmond, Virginia; an outfielder for these newly formed Cuban Giants.

“Suppose you wanted to know about the team. We’re just getting going.”

“Why’s it called the Cuban Giants? And why all the fake names and languages?”

Dabney replied, with a slight undertone: “Cuban’s so they ease up on us in white towns. Fake names and languages because it’s a joke. But it’s a joke we have to play. So we lean into it a bit harder. Funnier that way.” Dabney paused. “Suppose it’s a mask. For pain…”

Cy replied. “Who’s all the fellows on the squad?”

“We’re trying to field the best black ballclub in the world. It’s fellows from all over. Owner by the name of Lang tried to get them to come here. Hotel work ain’t bad. Work as a waiter, a bellhop. Get paid well, and you’re a member of the team. We work days, nights; in the spare time we practice. Plenty of these fellas capable of running out onto the fields at South End and Polo Grounds. They’re already trying to get us on the diamond with the Metropolitans. Exhibition match. Teams are scared of us, mister. Even as we’re dressed like a bunch of waiters. These waiters can play ball.”

Cy was intrigued. “You know I used to play a bit myself. Saw Frank Grant on the Massachusetts circuit. Left-handed pitcher.”

“Grant’s on the up and coming. We know him. Headed to Meriden in the professional leagues next year. But this team is on the tide. We know, all of us, that segregation is going to run hard up against the game. It’s everywhere. Even this hotel, you know. Especially this hotel.”

Cy pivoted. “Do you know anything about an amulet?”

Dabney looked at him with surprise. “You know about this?”

“I don’t. I heard about it. From what looked like a damn ghost outside my door. Overheard, rather. It wasn’t my conversation.”

Dabney looked askance; speaking to no one in particular: “They shouldn’t have been speaking about this out in the open…”

“Who’s they, Dabney? I came here for this fucking diadem. Waste of my time. Handsome payment and a cute princess on the back end, but I want the real mysteries. Not the papers. The profound.”

Dabney heard Cy’s line; decided to open up. “The hotel’s half haunted. We work here, the ballclub, sure. But the other half is ghosts. Old ghosts. From the other side of the Civil War. And the rich white patrons don’t see shit. Can’t even see it. Too busy parading around their newly won trophies of the economic war against all of us. Suppose we serve them. Suppose we build the best ballclub we can build beneath it. But underneath all that is the amulet.”

“Speak on it, Dabney – what’s the amulet?”

“The amulet belongs to my family. It was my great-great grandfather’s. Never opened. Ruby stone outlay. Small. Gold chain. Not worth much, per se. Nothing like your diadem… but it’s causing a lot of problems.”

“Why’s that?”

Dabney hesitated. He was wording it in his head. Cy could see that. “The dead here can’t leave. They’re between worlds. That’s what the haunting is. And it keeps the hotel running. Without them, we’d be running out our starting nine to host these massive feasts for the rich patrons. Nowhere near enough to run a banquet. But definitely enough to throw a no hitter.”

Dabney continued. “My great grandfather told us before he died that the amulet had the powers to restore history. Not change it, mind you, but align history and the present with the future. To correct the orientation of time. When it falls out of joint, with human intervention. Good and bad. Corrective and chaotic. Ever heard of Hamlet?”

Cy nodded, and Dabney rehearsed:

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”

“That’s what the amulet does.”

Cy understood the full depths of the mystery at hand.

“So we need to restore it? The amulet, I mean.”

“Yes. We need to find it, and it needs to be returned to my family’s grave plot. The problem is, we’re in the thick of getting the team running. And I need to head down to Florida to start prepping for the first season. We’re leaving by rail tomorrow. No one here can look for it. And the summer season at the hotel is nearing its end. I won’t be back ‘til spring; no one here has money to make a big sound about the amulet. Not that we should. Speak on it too loudly, that is. We just need someone who can find it. And take it back down to Richmond and set in the grave.”

“What happens if we do? When we do?”

Dabney contemplated. “Not sure. But the idea is these ghosts here don’t return. The Argyle will need a new staff. And damn sure we’re not coming back either. We have a successful ballclub to run. Damn if I’m going to be a waiter for these farce candidates for the rest of my life. We’re too good at what we do for that. What we really do.”

“If you can do it, Cy, we’d have you get it done. There’s no pay, truly. Dead work don’t pay. But you might have what you’re looking for.”

Cy counted in his mind the amount he and Anton had made just for finding the diadem in a supply closet. It had taken all of five minutes; had afforded him enough to take several different Caribbean vacations – even after splitting it fifty-fifty with Gogol. They wouldn’t have to work until 1891.

“I’ll take the gig, Dabney. Your patrons supplied me the payment. What’s more, this is what I became a detective for.”

Dabney smiled. “We knew if you’d take it for free you’d be fit for the task. Even if we had money, suppose we couldn’t pay you. Understand that this would contaminate the process.”

Cy understood, intuitively – vaguely but intuitively, same way as he’d accepted the premise of the peacock – that this was necessary.

“Very well Dabney. I’m wishing you and your fellows good on this trip down south.”

Dabney pressed a piece of paper into his palm. It read:

GRAVE YARD FOR FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR. POOR-HOUSE HILL, NORTH 5TH STREET.

“That’s where you need to go. You’ll see the plot. It’s not much, but there’s a wood marker inset in the dirt. Dabney. Most of the graves are unmarked. This makes it clean. You need to dig a hole in the dirt and set the amulet in. Cover it, and the word is restored.”

“The word, Dabney?”

“Just fucking do it, Cy. And when it’s done, come watch the first game. Trenton, New Jersey. Next spring. Chambersburg Grounds. You’ll hear about it in the papers. Make no mistake.”

Cy gave Dabney a hug, and a word of great thanks. Without Dabney’s willingness to speak with him, the team would’ve been gone the next day. And Cy would’ve likely gone home weeks, even months later – with a fat bag of gold, but a thin hit of mystery. The gold would pay the rent, sure. But the mystery? Opium was a shell of what the mystery could give him and Anton. That’s why they started their endeavor.

The next morning, the ballplayers were gone. Cy and Anton woke up to a plate of eggs and a significantly thinned out house. Most of the patrons had already departed for the fall season; now that the diadem was recovered, the sigh of relief had cleared out the final passion of the summer. The wait staff was noticeably shorter without the Cuban Giants – but still populous. Cy began to notice several quirks. Bellhops disappearing through walls. Cooks who never ate. Maids gossiping about the Declaration of Independence. Apparently it was being signed this weekend.

“Damn, Anton,” Cy said over his plate of eggs. “You seeing this shit?”

“You didn’t?”

The two of them spent the next eight months eating eggs and wandering around the hotel like a pair of ghosts. Anton tried to perfect disappearing through walls. He developed a near permanent bruise on his forehead. The only change occurred in March of 1886, when Cy and Anton dejectedly boarded the passenger boat on the Sound back to Boston. Nothing.

Cy threw his travel bag on the floor of the Scion offices. “Fuck, Gogol. Fucking waste of time. I could’ve been on some island for all that cold.” He looked in the small mirror above the bathroom sink. “Even grew a beard loitering in that depressed New York winter.”

Anton laughed. “At least we still have the money.”

And it was true. The two of them had barely made a dent in the windfall from the diadem. But no amulet. And the first game of the Cuban Giants’ season was coming up. Against a white team called the New York Yankees.

“Who the fuck are the New York Yankees?”

“Must be some amateurs. But they’ll be at South End. It’s an easy walk down to the park. And we’ll see if Dabney has any word for us. Maybe they found the damn thing. Next week.”

At game time, there was a massive crowd. Cy wasn’t sure if this was for racial reasons or for ballgame reasons. Everybody knew who the Giants were, but nobody had a clue who or what this Yankees squad would be. The Yankees were absolutely routed, 15-3. A young man by the name of George Stovey got the start for the Giants. He looked all of fifteen years old, but his fastball whistled like a miniature cannonball. And was heavy as that too. Cy looked on in awe from the left field bleachers. “This kid pitches like he’s possessed. Drops an anvil on that ball with how it spins out of his hand.”

Anton had no idea what was going on. But he seemed to enjoy the various different concessions; eagerly awaited speaking with Dabney. He’d greeted them from the dugout before the start of the game. Got two at bats, flew out twice.

As the game went on, the crowd got more and more incensed. This being the north, no less racial animosity existed in Boston. Cy and Anton sat in the cluster of black fans, whereas the Yankee fans – most entirely white – all sat on the opposing side of the stadium. As the blowout got more deeply entrenched, so did the cries, chants; scuffles that broke out at the edge of the manufactured barrier between the racial groups. Cy looked on with concern.

“This could be a full blown riot.”

Anton had a mouth full of peanuts. “Looks like it already is.”

Three men had started throwing punches. Songs erupted. Sea shanties. Cy heard some bars from ‘Tessie’. Someone threw a chair. And that’s when the crowd crashed, like a sea, in a convergence, down upon the home plate seats. The players quickly vacated the field. Dabney ran over from right field. Several players climbed into the stands. He tried to reach Cy and Anton, but was swept inward by the swarming crowd. A woman grabbed Cy’s arm. He saw a soft blur of red lipstick and piercing green eyes. She was beautiful. “Come with me,” she whispered to Cy. Anton ran towards the fray, following the outline of Dabney’s uniform crashing into the breach.

“Who am I to say no?” Cy thought to himself. She pulled his arm out of a fence exit beneath the bleachers in the far corner of left field.

They strode up the street quickly. The woman was extremely deliberate.

“Who are you?”

“Jane. Jane Rogers.”

“And you know me?”

“I know what you’re looking for.”

“What about Dabney?”

“Dabney’s gone by now. Besides, he doesn’t know where to go. Not yet.”

Jane pulled him into an alley. There was an entrance, with a green door. “In here, quickly.” They climbed several flights of stairs. Three, maybe four. The staircase was extremely small. Vertical. A square landing between floors. And another door. This time it arced. She pulled him in again, one more time. It was a small room with a divan, a candle on the table, and a large bookshelf. An aging man sat in the chair, with a large beard. He was working on a large stack of papers. He looked extremely sad.

“By god, that’s Herman Melville!”

The man looked up. He smiled faintly. Cy noticed that the sadness lived behind his eyes.

“Who’s this man, Jane?”

“This is Cy Jones. Detective. Just graduated from the academy. He’s looking for the amulet too.”

Melville looked Cy up and down. “Ah, the amulet, you say? Take a seat young man.”

Cy sat.

“You know Jane’s looking for it too? It goes by many names. I just quit my job to finish the task… in my own way. Not this amulet. Another one.”

“I read your book.”

“You wouldn’t have recognized me if you hadn’t. You’re one of the few that did.”

“I grew up near you. You still have a following out in Great Barrington. My friend W. E. B. read it as well.”

Melville clearly looked pleased, but he didn’t dwell on it.

“Jane knows about Dabney’s amulet. I don’t.”

Cy looked at Jane. “What can you tell me?”

Jane considered what she could say.

“I can tell you the amulet does more than Dabney was letting on. He gave you that tired Hamlet quote, didn’t he?”

Cy nodded, stifling a laugh.

Jane smirked. “It’s a restoration of his family line. But they don’t know how far back it goes, or how far into the future. A restoration of the memory line. And the memory line supposedly gives you visions of the past and future. So you can understand where he’s coming from, and where he’s going. Trick is, anything that line touches gets illuminated. So history past and history future becomes legible through the lightening of the line. Every family line has something like this.”

Jane’s last point prickled Cy.

“Every line?”

Jane nodded. “Yes. Every line. Including Melville’s line. That’s his white whale.”

Cy looked at the candlelit table. It had Melville’s working document on it. He caught a glimpse of the title. Billy Budd.

“That’s your next step?”

Melville nodded. “Trouble is, I don’t know what the artifact is. What the object is. That restores my line.”

Jane continued. “And it might not be him who restores it for them. It might be someone after him. If it gets restored.”

Cy gulped.

“But the item needs to be laid in the family plot for the recovery to be fulfilled.”

“So he’s hired us to perform this mystical ritual? Or should I say magical?”

Jane looked at him sternly. Melville had returned to his manuscript.

“It’s not a joke, Cy. You’re basically performing a cosmic necromantic act. If there’s even a word for what that is.”

Cy stood up a little straighter. This seemed important.

“Very well, Jane. How the hell did you find out about this?”

Jane: “I’m doing the same thing you’re doing with Dabney. But I’m doing it with Melville. Or at least, trying to help him. Others too. Floundering in a deep historical abyss. The entire line, externalized, lost in an object. And they’re trying to get it back. Otherwise time, life, none of it makes sense. And you’re seeing it in the outside world too. As lines get corrected, time falls back into joint. It’s a deep time operation. But you have to understand it to make it work.”

Cy thought back on the peacock, the Yankees… he’d started to become like Anton. Not cynical, exactly, but accepting. The absurd had become, for lack of a better word, practical.

“I’ll let Anton know. This might make a bit more sense now. Not that we have any better idea where the amulet itself is.”

“Anton already knows, Cy. They haven’t forgotten what this is and means in his world. They just have a different word for it. What’s more, think in the heaviest place to look. All things in time fall toward the highest density.”

Cy thought to ask Jane more, but it was clear she had returned to her task with Melville. She stood over his chair as he resumed writing. Candlelight was now taking over for the sun. He had the vague idea she was a ghost, maybe a spirit. But it was clear it was time for him to move on. He wasn’t sure if this notion was relevant at all to the case at hand.

Cy returned to the Scion offices. Anton was there. A bit scraped up, drinking from a glass bottle of whiskey.

“Good evening?”

“Evening hasn’t even started yet, Cy. I’m going out. Third Base Saloon is going to be raucous tonight. Old Hoss threw a gem. Even I know who the man is. Your pal Nuf Ced said they’re going to be singing sea shanties all night. Damn if this isn’t what it is to be American. Get drunk, sing an Irish song, learn an American game. No Pushkin here tonight, lads.”

Anton was hammered.

“Anton, say… you don’t happen to know anything about ‘cosmic necromancy’, do you?”

Anton gave him a side eye, tilting his eyebrow and the bottle upward.

“The witches and magicians and shamans do. Not me. I’m a detective, Cy. And an American. Best you ask the babushkas. Matter of fact, there’s one down the street. A fortune teller. Old Russian woman. Husband fights bears. Strongman. American. She drinks vodka and reads your fortune. Just bring her a bottle. Here.”

Anton handed Cy a bottle of Smirnoff.

“This will pay you in. She’s behind the red curtain. Good luck. Me, I’ll be learning the curveball.”

Anton faked a drunk swing; nearly fell over on the duvet.

“Right, Anton. Maybe you’ll hit mine. Take a good ten years.”

Cy tossed him a ball.

“I’ll see you tonight.”

Cy set off down the avenue to meet the fortune teller. Her name was Madame Marguerite. Cy knew her from the newspaper ads next to the mineral water and miracle cures. Most people never read back that far. But Cy did, just for kicks. Sometimes, she’d advertise on the Beaneaters’ yearly schedules they’d give out at the pharmacy. She promised a fortune or your money back. But she couldn’t promise how far out, strictly speaking, it would come true. This complicated her refund policy.

Cy entered the small wooden door; ventured past the empty counter on his left – proceeding forward behind the red curtain that separated the front room from the back room. The Madame was sitting in a wooden chair, behind an ornate, dark wooden table.

“Hello, Cy. A pleasure.”

“And you, Madame. I assume you know why I’m here.”

“You’re here for the diadem.”

“I already found that.”

The Madame shook her head, like she was trying to get a bee out of it.

“Ah, yes. The amulet.”

“That’s better.”

“You know where to look, I take it?”

“No, that’s why I came to you.”

“It’s not far from where it was lost.”

“The Argyle?”

“Richmond.”

“By the family plot?”

“Not far.” The fortune teller smiled. “Think about the heaviest place in time.”

Cy was confused. She could tell.

“The heaviest place in time is the one with the greatest density. Like planets follow the hot weight of the star through space. All things sink and fall towards it. A black hole. And black holes in space and time on earth form through the introduction of weight. Call it what you will. Trauma. Violence. Wound.”

Cy measured this. Where would the heaviest places in Richmond be? The burial grounds, for one. But she said it wasn’t there. Close to there. Plantations? The slave markets?

Cy tried them both. The fortune teller nodded as he listed the second notion.

“Beneath the stone that marks the place. That’s where they left it.”

“Who is they?”

“More than you need to know, Cy. You’re just helping them find it.”

“Them.”

She sighed.

“The dead.”

“For who?”

“For the living to find. To restore them to life.”

“You mean they come back from the dead?”

“They return to the river of life. The river of time. To be successfully worn away.”

This metaphor seemed to suffice for Cy. He thanked the fortune teller and began to walk away.

“Not without payment!” She stood up sharply from the table. It rattled as she knocked it with her legs.

He tossed her the bottle. “Almost forgot.”

As he walked out, he could hear her cracking the seal; the bottle glugging against her lips. Anton had said shots. Hadn’t he? She drank the bottle straight from the nozzle, like liquid fire.

The Third Base Saloon was three blocks away. He passed an Italian restaurant closing dinner service for the night. He thought he saw Dabney, removing a tray of plates from the table. It was another man. He kept walking. And there, front and center at the saloon, was Anton. He was standing on a barstool, leading the predominantly Irish crowd in a Russian folk song. Or rather, it was a lyric poem. Pushkin? Gogol had interpolated it into a song. The crowd was in full force. The floor was slick with beer. Cy saw Old Hoss Radbourn in the back corner, chatting with a barmaid. His eyes were glazed with alcohol. It was barely eight in the evening, but the bar rattled like it was approaching midnight.

In silent gardens, in the spring, in the darkness of the night Sings above the rose from the east the nightingale; But dear rose neither feeling has, nor listens it, But under its lover’s hymn waveth it and slumbers.

Dost thou not sing thus to beauty cold? Reflect, O bard, whither art thou striding? She neither listens, nor the bard she feels. Thou gazest? Bloom she does; thou callest? -- Answer none she gives!

The men clasped each other on the shoulders and swam back and forth in the sea of alcohol. Nuf Ced piped up from behind Anton.

“We’ll add this one to the roster, boys! Right behind Tessie!”

The men shouted, cheering Anton on. He nearly fell off the barstool, righting the collapsing legs just in time in an athletic feat of balance.

“And we’ll put him in center field!” The cheers continued, even louder than before.

Cy weaved through the crowd and pulled Anton’s sleeve, just as he finished a pitcher.

“What do you want, fool! … Ah, Cy! They’re just starting the eleventh inning.” Anton burped.

“Damn, Anton. You’re shit-faced.”

“What of it!”

“We need to leave for Richmond. Tonight. I think we’ve found the amulet. It’s buried beneath the stone marker for the slave market in the center of the city.”

Anton stumbled off the stool, throwing on his overcoat. They stepped hurriedly into the northeastern night.

The train led straight down to Richmond, stopping off at a platform above the roadway, at a station with a massive clock on its face. Nameless. The two men stepped off the train, with nothing but a briefcase full of notes and a change of clothes. It was early morning. Still before dawn.

Anton asked a leading question. “Why are we rushing?”

“I don’t know, Anton. But I suspect we do need to hurry. Not entirely sure why. Suppose the dead are angry.”

Anton looked at him suspiciously.

“And why do you think that is, Cy?”

“Suppose it’s because they’ve been waiting too long. And they suspect they’re close.”

“And what the fuck do you know about what the dead think? Or feel? If I’d said anything like this, just last year, you would’ve laughed in my face.”

Cy, somberly: “Suppose you’re right, Anton.”

Anton continued: “All we’re doing now is what my people have always done. Suppose your people too, Dabneys. But do you remember? Does anyone? I came to America, I learned the ballgame. Hell, I learned your language. But what do you, or any of these people know about the dead? Or about the weight or bearings of history? I could’ve told you all of this from the moment we saw that peacock. About the joints of time. Hell, the jaws, the neckbones of the thing! But you’re too busy with your degrees. Your paperwork. Your Thompsons. Industries. Too busy building and clamoring about everything you think you know to even see what’s right in front of your face. The only thing that’s really important. The only thing that matters. The history, weight, and heritage of the dead. And what it does to you when you forget.”

“Suppose I know now.”

“Suppose you’re barely scratching the surface. And this first trip might well show you what it means to lay a stone in that ground.”

The two of them began walking down the cobblestone, lantern lit streets. Cy saw a cobbler, a butcher, a haberdashery.

“We’re almost there. I can feel it.”

It was like the ground and the air got thicker. There was a visible, sensory consequence. Like the field of space knew something, felt something. It had a secret, a knowledge – that was irreducible to anything but direct experience; direct presence.

Anton saw the crossroads first. It was just an ordinary intersection. Fifth Street and – Cy couldn’t make it out. There were human bones visibly protruding from the ground. He shuddered.

And in the middle of the intersection, a metal plate. It read:

THESE ARE THE BURIAL GROUNDS OF THE FREE MEN AND WOMEN OF RICHMOND VIRGINIA – POTTER’S FIELD.

Anton: “They rob these graves.”

“Is there even anything to rob?”

“Usually not.”

It would be a mess to get this plate out of the ground. Nonetheless, to get beneath the stone of the road. Cy had no idea what they’d use. As he deliberated fruitlessly, Anton began sniffing around the corners of the crossroads. There was some brush. Sandlots. Nothing of note.

“I’m going to dig here.”

“Go ahead. I don’t know how we’ll get these stones up without some serious tools. She said it’s beneath the marker. But that’s work.”

Anton asked him: “Are you sure she said the marker?”

Cy had to think about this. “No… she said ‘the stone that marks the place’.”

“And who buried it?”

“She said ‘the dead’.”

“It’s not going to be under that crossroads marker. Besides, that’s metal. Not stone.”

Cy’s detective skills had been put to shame. But he was too enthralled in this discovery to complain.

“So where do we look?”

“We look under a stone the dead made.”

They looked in the brush. There was a large gray stone up against some ivy and a billboard sign for miracle medicines. Weeds sprouted up all around it in the dry clay dirt.

Anton knocked on it. Before Cy could ask why he was knocking on a stone, he heard a hollow echo.

“It’s plaster. Like a set piece.” Anton laughed.

“That’s the stone?”

“That’s the stone the dead made.”

The two of them put their body weight against it; the stone moved with barely any resistance. There was a hole that covered the stone. Large enough to fit.

“Is that what I think it is? A slide?”

Anton eyed Cy. “You would know this if you weren’t so American. The dead have a sense of humor.”

The two slid down the slide into the historical grave.

At the bottom they bumped into a large stomach. It extended far outside of the suit jacket that attempted to hold it. The man was wearing the same clothes as the peacock.

“And who the hell are you?” The man demanded.

“We’re here to investigate the amulet,” said Cy.

The man stroked his large, folded-over chin.

“This is the check-in desk for the Hotel Babylon. We also handle any further concerns, resort inquiries, complaints, and other such matters regarding stays and facilities. Are you current tenants or guests?”

“Tenants?”

“We also offer long term stays to qualified participants.”

“What would we be participating in?”

“Why, limbo of course. Neither here nor there. But you can enjoy yourself while you’re here. Or is it there? As you can see we have a water slide. Bingo. Pool. Even a sauna.”

A well manicured woman dressed as a bird – or was it a bird dressed as a woman? – sauntered by.

“What’s up with the birds? She did her nails?”

“She’s a long term stay. The spa is well equipped. Massages!” The man was getting far off track. Cy needed to rein him in. He suspected this would be continuous.

“The birds? We’re in a hurry.”

The man chuckled. “There is no time down here, my friend. You’re assured! And the birds. You don’t know the soul-bird? The Ba?” The man looked them up and down. “Your friend is Siberian, by the looks of him. But you, African descent? Neither of you know the Ba?”

They both shook their heads.

“My friend, it is the soul!”

Anton spoke this time. “What do you mean, assured?”

“This is the place out of place. Time out of time. You’re home! Now, checking in?”

Cy looked at Anton. “Are we checking in?”

Anton nodded. Then shook his head. Cy turned to the man.

“We need to be quick. Are you the peacock?”

The man belly-laughed. “There’s one time I won’t miss. The start of the game! When and how it finishes, no one knows. Who’s to say!”

Cy was tired of the games. He extended a fist full of dollar bills. “We need a short term stay.”

The man laughed again. “We don’t accept money here. We will be performing the change.”

The man waved his hand. Cy and Anton were immediately transformed into parakeets with human heads. Anton began laughing with the big man. He even started rolling on the floor. Cy was horrified.

“I can’t take this anymore! We need to get out of here and find this fucking amulet!”

Anton paid him no mind. The man was now clapping Anton on the shoulders as he shouted with glee. Cy stormed past the front desk and into the hotel.

There were too many rooms. Row after row after row of them. Some had shouting in them. Books being knocked off bookcases. Clattering plates. The roar of a dinosaur? Cy moved faster past that one. There was a room at the end of the long hall. It took far too long to reach it from the distance at which Cy perceived it. Was he walking too slow? Was it further than he thought? He finally reached the knob. It wouldn’t turn. He braced his shoulder against it. It popped open right as he prepared to crash his weight against the wood. It revealed a small nursery. A crib; a mobile. It had all the planets on it. Cy counted them. Mars, Venus. The Moon. Earth. Jupiter. And some other ones he didn’t know.

“Those haven’t been discovered yet. At least, not seen with the eye.”

Cy turned. It was a very old man. Too old.

“What are you doing in a nursery?”

“Waiting for you. Or whoever else was to come. How’s Melville doing?”

Cy didn’t want to answer, but he did anyway.

“Still working.”

The man checked his watch. “I don’t think it will be him. But maybe someone, soon…”

“I’m here for the amulet.”

“You’ll have to clarify, son. I have a couple amulets here.” The man patted a small black book in his breast pocket.

“What’s that?”

“My ledger. It contains within it the map of souls and their inheritance.”

“Codified in an object?”

“That’s one way of saying it. It’s the genealogical shard. Like an externalization of the genome.”

“What’s a genome?”

The man checked his watch again. “Too soon,” he said to no one in particular. Then to Cy:

“I need the family name.”

“Dabney.”

“Ah, yes…. Dabney. And the year?”

“1886. Isn’t it?”

“Not here, my friend. Here, we are nowhere. Long before the hour. Let me check… John Milton?”

Cy nodded.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

Cy: “What?”

“You don’t know John Milton?”

“I told you his name is John Milton Dabney.”

“How about Satan?”

“Why the fuck would I know Satan?”

The man stuck his nose back in the ledger.

“The amulet is here. We’ve been holding it for him. Or rather, should I say, reserved. His generation is ripe.”

“I came for him. On his bequest.”

The man flipped pages rapidly.

“Is that against the rules?”

“It is… a rare exception. Not a novel case, I should say… but a rare one. I’ll have to consult.”

The man turned his back to Cy, muttering as he flicked the pages. This took quite a long time. Cy suspected, an hour on earth. Wherever this was, apparently nothing functioned like that. And now he was sitting in a nursery with an old man – that, thanks to timelessness – was moving interminably slow.

The man finally stood up straight; announced:

“It is allowed!”

He reached into his suit pocket. Cy audibly groaned. This took another hour, as the man rummaged, cursing. Cy took to carefully inspecting the baubles on the mobile.

“What’s this one?” He poked a small gray planet.

“Don’t touch that! That’s Pluto.” The man went back to muttering to himself.

“That’s a planet?”

“Some say. Some say not. But here, it most certainly is. Or at least… it is… a guidestone. AH!”

The man pulled a dirty, gold amulet from his apparently quite deep pockets. The tarnished ruby stone shone in the light. Cy would’ve passed over this at any vendor or curio shop. Frankly, it looked fake. And at best, a useless trinket.

“Here’s your device!”

“Is that even real gold? The gemstone is clearly fake.”

The man looked at it closely. “Not that I’ve ever really seen this one before, but that’s fool’s gold my friend!”

“But it’s a worthless piece of junk.”

“And that’s the ticket!”

He handed Cy the amulet. It felt heavy. Far heavier than it appeared. The man noticed Cy’s observation.

“You feel the quality of the item. I see. You have the gift! Attunement! Know this, friend. That is the weight of grief and time. The English have a word for this.”

The man began to recite. Cy wearied.

Hence loathed Melancholy,

Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born,

In Stygian cave forlorn,

‘Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy;

Find out some uncouth cell,

Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,

And the night-raven sings;

There under ebon shades, and low-brow’d rocks,

As ragged as thy locks,

In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.

“Just give me the fucking amulet.”

The man laughed. Cy was tired of the laughter too. Apparently everyone was in on the joke but him. “You already have it my friend! Go on! Set the world free!”

The man began to spin the mobile of planets in a child-like frenzy. Cy closed the door as he left the room. Passing all of the rooms, he began to sprint. An intuition of time returned. Anton was right where he left him, keeled over in laughter. But the large man in the suit, or the peacock, had gone. Anton suddenly stopped as Cy entered the room.

“Found it?”

Cy dangled the chain.

“Got it.”

“Why that looks like some useless junk.”

“Apparently that’s the point.”

“How the fuck do we get out of here?”

There was a large, neon sign that said EXIT on it, right next to the bottom of the slide.

“How do they get it to glow like that?” Anton asked.

Cy: “I suspect you ask any one of these clowns, they’ll tell you it’s ‘too early’.”

Anton opened the door, and they stepped out into the morning light.

All around them, pedestrians moved about. It was a busy, commercial intersection.

“They do know they’re stepping all over the dead?” Anton asked.

“I don’t think they care.”

“Dabney’s plot has to be here somewhere.”

“Try the brush. He said it’s marked with a bit of wood, inset into the ground.”

Anton found it almost immediately. A bush had grown through part of the plank. DABNEY was faintly scratched into it.

“So we bury it here?”

“In a small hole beside the grave.”

Anton dug it with his hand; Cy laid the amulet in it, smoothing the dirt over the amulet with his fist.

“That’s it?”

“Now we go find Dabney.”

It took the two of them buying a Trenton Times at the train station to identify where the Cuban Giants were playing next. There would be an exhibition in Baltimore against a local squad of miners. It was just a short train ride over.

Cy and Anton saw John Milton Dabney warming up. He had a noticeably different sense of being about him. He greeted them warmly as they made their way toward the field in the stands. John Milton leaned over the railing:

“So you did it, huh? I could feel something change. The quality of things… it’s different. The way I’m seeing, I suppose. Restored is the feeling. Did I tell you they have to close the Argyle? Staff quit.”

Cy and Anton smiled at each other. Before either of them could speak, Dabney continued.

“I also got this photo of us from back down in Saint Augustine from training this spring. Figured you two might like to see it. We’re a real squad now. All up and down the East Coast. Everyone knows the name ‘Cuban Giants’.”

Cy spotted Henrico Iglesias on the right side of the team photo. The whole squad was wearing white button down shirts with ties; ball caps. Dabney saw Cy eyeing the player.

“Good catch. That’s Clarence, our star pitcher. He’s warming up tonight.”

Dabney gestured over to a stout young man throwing by the third base foul line. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. The kid waved.

“Staying for the game?”

As Cy was about to answer, Anton took the photo. All of a sudden, the three were standing in a crowd. The color of the light was completely different. They saw metallic vehicles sitting in a concrete lot. There was screeching from a stage. A voice boomed. The sun was blinding.

“We are here today to induct the first black baseball player of all time into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Jackie Robinson, the man who integrated Major League Baseball after nearly fifty years of absence of black players from segregated professional baseball; over six decades of exclusion from the so-called major leagues. Jackie, winner of the 1949 MVP award, the inaugural 1947 Rookie of the Year award; leader of the 1955 World Champion Brooklyn Dodgers, is here today to make his speech.”

An aging black man with gray hair stood up to a roaring applause, with a short-haired woman by his side. Just as the man stepped up to the podium to speak, they were torn into another sight.

Now they were in a room that seemed impossible. Metal all around them. A group of men began to speak. Men of multiple different races. Some bespectacled. Most quite old. One stood up. It was clear he was the leader of whatever initiative was at hand.

“We are here today to honor the achievements of the great men and ballplayers of the Negro Leagues. Instantiated by Rube Foster and his band of teams in 1920 at the YMCA of Kansas City, Missouri, the Negro Leagues accomplished a feat of great magnitude. They hosted and sustained competitive play among black ballplayers at the highest level for over twenty years. Furthermore, this was done in the midst of extreme violence and exclusion at the political, cultural, and institutional levels of American history. Through some of the toughest times in modern black American history, players such as James Bell, Leon Day, Satchel Paige, and Josh Gibson persevered against all odds to record play that resides among the greatest to ever walk this game. And today, we honor those men by officially including Negro League statistics in the ledger of the American professional game.”

The man cleared his throat, then spoke again.

“But we cannot forget those men who laid the groundwork for the success of organized black baseball in the midst of profound discrimination in America at the turn of the century – discrimination which continues to this day. From players like Octavius Catto, activist for his community as early as the years succeeding the Civil War, to the institution of the Cuban Giants, the first black professional team ever assembled at the Argyle Hotel in New York in 1885, the ground was set for the establishment of Foster’s professional league.

And here with us today, we have an exceedingly special artifact. Here is a photograph of the original, founding Cuban Giants – from the estate of founding player, John Milton Dabney.”

The man gestured to a glass box. In it was the photo. It was yellow with age and bitten at the corners by time, but surviving.

The crowd applauded wildly. The man continued.

“The Cuban Giants were one of the greatest teams in professional black baseball history. And furthermore, they showed themselves, and the world, what great success was possible in the realm of black baseball. Without their originary mark on the game, and American history, it is hard to imagine the world that follows.”

The man opened his mouth to continue. But just as he was about to speak, the group of three were thrown back to the ballfield. Cy heard the snap of the catcher’s mitt against Clarence’s fastball.

Dabney, with his mouth open: “What was that?”

Cy: “What we were supposed to see…”

Anton, still holding the photo: “That was in the photo?”

Cy put it together. “We could only see it after the amulet was restored. But why in Anton’s hands?”

Dabney ventured: “Maybe because he’s an outsider?”

Anton shrugged.

Cy asked Anton. “Didn’t you say something about Siberia? Witches?”

Anton clarified. “Shamans.”

“You know them?”

“My mother did. I never met them. We moved to America when I was young.”

“How well did she know them?”

“She never said.”

“Can you find out?”

“She’s dead, Cy.”

Cy looked around. It felt like a dead end. He took the photo from Anton’s hands; thrust it into Dabney’s limp arms. Dabney was still in shock.

“Here, take this. You’re going to need it.”

“So that’s what happens? Black players in the major leagues? And a World Series? What’s a World Series?”

Anton and Cy looked at each other. They both said, simultaneously: “Too soon.”

MYSTERY TWO:

KNUCKLEBALL BUTTERFLY

OR

CY JONES AND THE CONSPIRACY OF THE NAZI WILDFLOWER

A small, wooden pencil dropped off Cy’s desk sharply. He woke up, without an awareness as to exactly what, or where, he was. This was not atypical for Cy, considering he felt his dinosaur heritage in his bones, mixed with some foreign star.

“Anton! Time!”

Cy was already impatient. He hadn’t slept well.

Anton replied:

“Uhhhh… two thirty?”

“Are you fucking guessing right now?”

Anton giggled. He was sitting on the cushioned smoking chair. Holding the opium pipe; taking huge drags. Smoke coiled around his long, greasy hair; long since filled the small room with a near-metallic smell. Cy suspected he was catching a secondhand high. This must be why he felt so strange.

“Cy, to be honest, not a fucking clue. I’m not sure I even know how long I’ve been smoking. Say – pass me that baggie of tobacco?”

Cy threw the half-full baggie of shreds at Anton, whose legs were now up on the footrest. He looked at the newspaper on his desk.

MARCH 26, 1936, NEW YORK TIMES

HITLER PREPARES FOR REICHSTAG ELECTION

“Fuck… Anton, 1936…”

There was a sudden knock on the door. Anton hopped up; answered it with characteristic ease. Even when he’d put a real load on, Cy could always count on Anton to take care of the basics. Open the door, threaten a peacock. Pranks and covers. And maybe a significant ontological lead. Besides, he’d just woken up in another half century. He’d need a moment to take that in. Not that this was anything new, really. Minor temporal distortion.

It was some kid on a bike. The kid had huge glasses. He was waving a dark yellow piece of paper.

“Kid, who the fuck told you you could bring that in here?”

Cy was referring to the bike, not the slip of paper. He immediately wished he’d been easier on the kid. The boy’s lip began to noticeably quiver.

“Mister, I have a telegram for you. Western Union.”

“How do you know it’s for me?”

“Cy Jones?”

“At least insofar as I still appear to be – regardless of where I am.”

The kid didn’t get it. Too weird. “Please sign.”

Cy dashed his signature off with the pencil against his desk; the kid quickly left the room.

“Must be decent enough money.”

“Cy, we’re almost out of opium. I’m not ready for the withdrawals.”

Anton was already complaining. It had been a long winter. Cy’s eyelids drooped; from what it looked like, he hadn’t shaved in several days. Cy was aware it had been a cold one, but not almost fifty years cold. He’d need a new razor.

“Says it’s from a fella by the name of Cy Young.”

Anton was taking another drag. He sputtered:

“Well, read it.”

CY –

YOU WOULDN’T KNOW ME, BUT I STARTED PLAYING PRO BALL WHEN YOU FIRST LEFT. MADE OFF PRETTY WELL SINCE THEN. RETIRED NOW. NEED TO SPEAK TO YOU BOYS ABOUT A RATHER URGENT MATTER. KINDLY REQUESTING YOUR PRESENCE IN HARLEM, NEW YORK. THREE DAYS TIME. 134TH. ABANDONED LOT NEXT TO CLUB HOT-CHA.

3 AM.

– CY YOUNG, STARTING PITCHER, BOSTON NATIONALS

Cy tossed the letter on the floor.

“Sounds like they want us to keep playing the game.”

“Say anything about money in it?”

“No. Just that. How’d he know we ‘left’? And what does that even mean?”

Anton’s ears perked up.

“Must mean it’s something good. Rich in the ground good.”

The two of them began packing their bags for an overnight to Harlem.

Plenty had changed since the latter half of the 19th century, but this was little concern. Being able to take a car made things significantly more efficient. Departure and arrival with increasing specificity. Anton’s adaptability was remarkable, yet somewhat suspicious. He was able to hail a cab with ease. Cy remarked: “Technology,” as he looked out the window at trees speeding past. It was a short trip to the New York neighborhood.

And sure enough, three hours after they arrived – there was Cy Young, standing in a dusty lot filled with trash. It was a cold spring night. Two wolf-like dogs fought at the far end of the lot. Splintered, rotted wood planks littered the outskirts. It was utterly empty, except for Young, standing in the center, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing a dark blue coat, bunched around his face.

“You’re late.”

“Two minutes.”

“I’ve been waiting to meet you. I heard things. About the Babylon case.”

“Yeah? What’d you hear?”

“That you and this fella Gogol are capable of restoring certain breaches in space-time. Soul contacts and the like.”

“Suppose we got lucky.”

“Suppose you boys did. And suppose you could get lucky again.”

“Have to try it twice to figure it out.”

“There’s a man by the name of Hank Greenberg. Star slugger for the Detroit Americans. Suspect he’s headed for an MVP year. Might win a Buick. True slugger. Might break Ruth’s record.”

“I don’t know anything about any of this.”

“You don’t need to. What you do need to know is there’s a war going on. Man by the name of Adolf Hitler. Leader of the new German nation – well… new to you. And he’s against the Jews. Well Hank’s a Jewish man. Hank said, and I quote: ‘came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler’. And put it out there in the papers. Sporting News got it. World news must’ve passed it on to ol’ Adolf’s ears. Well, Adolf didn’t like that too much. And now he’s demanding Hank come to Berlin for a match. Not that Hitler knows a damn thing about baseball. But he’s possessed to strike Hank out and prove himself correct about the Jewish race. It’s a damn mess.”

“Sounds like it. What do you need me for?”

“I need you to go speak with the kid Hank. You might try to convince him to stay; might try to convince him to go. But either way, I suspect he’ll need you. Suspect this might turn the tide in more ways than one. And you may need to know what this man Hitler’s really up to. It’s more than the fellows in the papers and the governments think.” Cy coughed. “It may change what happens next.”

“How do you know this, Young? What are you but a retired arm?” Cy was definitely cranky. He supposed it was understandable, being as he woke up in 1936 not forty-eight hours ago.

“I found other things to keep me occupied in my spare time. You’re not the only soul detectives out here, don’t you know.”

Cy thanked Young; got back in his cab to the hotel. As he sat in the moving vehicle, he thought about this proposition. What the hell did he and Anton know about Jewish people; what’s more, it sounded like old Young wanted them flying into the midst of a war. If this man Hitler was trivially possessed enough to get riled up about Hank’s proclamation, he hated to think what else the man was getting up to with such national powers at hand.

Young had slipped Cy Hank’s address. He was staying with his parents before the season, 663 Crotona Park North, in the Bronx. Apparently it was Hank’s old childhood home. Cy figured he could pay him a visit the next morning.

When Cy arrived, Greenberg was eating breakfast. Apparently his parents had already left for synagogue. The man stood up. He was towering; muscular. A half-drunk cup of orange juice sat on the table next to a bowl of hard boiled eggs.

“Hell, I can see why they’re thinking you’re the next home run champion.”

“Why, thanks fella. Cy?”

“Detective Cy Jones. Back in my day, they didn’t have home runs. Suspect I’d have to watch a game to see how much it’s changed since then.”

“Cy, you look half a decade younger than me. Not sure I know what you’re talking about – ‘back in my day’.”

Cy realized his slip and just tried to move past it.

“Cy Young sent me here.”

Greenberg’s lips pursed.

“He’s been in and out. Telling me things. You heard about Hitler’s challenge then, I assume?”

“Young told me.”

“Not sure how he’ll beat me, Jones. As far as I’m aware, the man doesn’t even know what a fastball is. But I’m uneasy… to fly over into Berlin right now, in the middle of what they’re doing to my people in Germany? I don’t know…”

“Young said I should swing by, maybe not to change your mind or influence you. But the decision, as far as he understands it, is open. And there’s a variety of possible outcomes – all of them pretty heady. And Young seems to think I may be even tangentially involved.”

Greenberg scratched his left temple. “Suppose ol’ Young didn’t let you in on any of those possible corridors?”

“No, he didn’t. But he did suggest things may look a little better if we tag along. My partner, Anton, is back at the hotel. Smoking opium, I suspect…”

“Well… tag along sounds like we’re going somewhere.”

“I suppose we are.”

“But you have to tell me, Cy – what do you know about these ideas of pathways? And decisions?”

“It’s too early for me in any of this to say much. But I don’t know whether that silence is forced, ordained, or ignorant. But it’s not coming from me, strictly speaking. Suppose other powers are involved.” Cy took a deep breath. “All I can say is, we’ll have to make a play and see.”

“I think I should be able to arrange a flight.”

Through the Tigers, Greenberg was able to arrange a chartered plane. It sounded like madness. The most famous American Jew next to Einstein, flying into the center of a genocide. Greenberg was worried, but wore a mask of confidence. Cy and Anton boarded the plane just after him, with absolutely no idea what was going on. Young’s premonition about the change of time lingered in Cy’s ear like an echo:

It may change what happens next.

Did he mean for them, for Hank, for the world? It was mortally ambiguous. And Cy didn’t like ambiguous. He didn’t just want answers, he needed them. Like a fish out of water. Anton broke the silence of Cy’s existential speculation.

“Hank, to be honest with you, we’re not from this time.”

Cy would’ve protested this pronunciation, but he figured since they were gone anyway, to hell with it. Besides, the words had already left Anton’s half-hungover lips.

Hank raised an eyebrow.

“I’m not surprised after that comment about the longball. But, frankly, we don’t have time to chop any of this up. And to be honest with you, I don’t care. When we land, we’ll be met by Hitler’s paramilitary boys. We’ll be putting our lives in their hands. Past, present, or future. All for an at bat against a madman. I’m not sure what this proves or what we win out of it, either way. And I’m not sure what it means to go do it. Hell, I don’t care if I get a hit off him or nothin’. I got nothing to prove with this man.”

“How much thought did you give it, Hank?”

“Not enough, I suspect.”

The plane passed through a brief storm on the Atlantic, in an otherwise uneventful flight. Awake through the night, Cy stared at the chopping, blue-black waves as the plane descended. This felt like yet another case with no clear outcome or motive. They hadn’t taught Cy shit about this in detective school. It was always something like this: someone with some money lost something. They’d give Cy the money to find it. It was usually a fellow with a grudge who took it.

Cy looked over at Anton, across the aisle. He was sleeping soundly. This whole thing had started when the man he’d entrusted to be his partner had pulled a pistol on a peacock. Then everything with Dabney unfolded as natural as could be. Like they were ordained to solve that mystery. And the moment it was over, pulled into another epoch at the behest of a retired pitcher. It reeked of karma, or some sort of unresolved extraterrestrial affair. All of these tasks, they smelled of some sort of higher force operating their opiate-laced private detective work through an astral sphere. Now some guy on the cusp of cracking open a home run record was going to have it out with a dictator over three strikes. Cy sighed. He supposed there was nothing left to do but play it out. Whatever hand, whatever roll of the dice. Who knows what they’d find. Apparently they were going to be called and they would come. Arriving, without context, in a new dimension of experience. And they’d adapt. Or what?

Landing on the airstrip in Berlin, they were, as Hank anticipated, immediately accosted and blindfolded by a series of black and green uniformed military officials; roughly thrown into a towncar. The officials crashed on them from the orderly line they’d assembled on the tarmac as the plane skidded to a halt. The car bumped and flew over increasingly rough roads.

“Where are we going?” Hank, Cy, and Anton asked in intervals throughout the drive.

There was no answer, but low German chatter among the guards and the driver. Whether they spoke English or not seemed to be irrelevant.

When they arrived, they were removed from the car and immediately shoved in a small bedroom. It contained three cots, a toilet, and a sink. The walls had flower wallpaper. Red, purple, yellow, and a tangle of green vines connecting them. It was garish. The petals were rudimentary, as if they were painted by a child, or a swindler, for some fast cash. The door locked from the outside; there was only one barred window – above even Greenberg’s towering height. Nobody could see out of it. A thin stream of light filtered through.

“We stay here, Hitler warms up, you swing, we leave?” Anton asked. He didn’t sound convinced.

Nobody knew, so nobody answered.

Three days passed on oatmeal and water. The group had grown increasingly anxious. There was the not too limited possibility that they were now permanent prisoners of war. Then came the knock at the door.

It was scattered, like the person doing it was uncertain they should be there. It gave Cy the immediate sense that this was an advancement of the narrative. He leaned his cheek against the door; whispered sharply:

“Who is it?”

A soft, female voice answered back.

“Melinda Gondais. I’m here to break you out.”

There was a fumbling with the lock from the outside; Cy stood back from the door as it opened. She was beautiful. Slender, brown hair, green eyes. She was wearing a paramilitary jumpsuit. No noticeable nation. She spoke with a clear French accent, but strong English.

“I am a French operative. A freedom fighter. We are based just outside Hitler’s camp. Myself and my comrades. We heard that you landed. He and his men have thrown you in a bunker. You are needed by myself and our man on the inside. We must hurry. There is no time.”

Melinda beckoned toward Cy, Hank, and Anton. The men stood there – slow, after days of pseudo-incarceration.

Cy stammered towards Melinda, “Have we met?”

She cut him off: “No time for flirting. They are preparing the camp for the event. We must go.”

She rushed them out of the room; they fled the entrance to the bunker into the wilderness. Cy looked back as they left. It was a hole in the ground.

A couple miles out into the woods, there were a group of dark green tents. A lone man stood in the center of the circle of temporary dwellings, eating a sandwich. He looked up as they arrived, somewhat alert. It seemed he was expecting their arrival, from precisely the direction in which they arrived.

The man: “Any trouble?”

Melinda: “None. Seems as all the officers were out. Hitler’s practicing.”

“And he needs a whole staff of catchers?”

“Suppose he wants them cheering him on.”

The man was stout; athletic. He had dark features. A close brow and slick parted brown hair. He extended a big paw.

“Name’s Berg. Office of Strategic Services. And I know you, Hank.”

Hank grinned.

“Moe and I play in the American League. When he’s not busy reading newspapers he’s got a helluva arm.”

Moe smiled back. “Could use some tips on that swing though.”

“Didn’t expect to see you out here, Moe,” Hank drawled.

“We’re trying to ascertain the next movements of Hitler’s cabinet. I became aware that he requested your presence shortly before you arrived. They’ve gathered here at this outpost to plan their next move on the European front; apparently Adolf is trying to learn baseball. We don’t anticipate their success in either endeavor. But we have to track these developments nonetheless. You shouldn’t have come.” Berg looked at Cy and Anton. “And who are these two?”

“Cy Jones and Anton Gogol, at your service,” Cy said brightly.

“Gogol, like Nikolai?” Berg was apparently a reader.

Anton chuckled. “Distant relation.”

“Very well,” said Berg. “Now we need to get you out of here, Hank. There’s a good reason why you should’ve stayed at home. The leadership of the Nazi Party has become increasingly aggressive. During specific thunderstorms in the spring and summer months – over the past year alone and into ‘36 – they’ve been running dog fighting rings out of their ancient German castles. Something about the cosmic weather being ripe for cultivating power through violence. What’s more, they’ve upped their amphetamine doses. Hitler has a whole host of astrologers and witches working for him. The idea is they perform seances. Usually right here, in these woods – or else at the castles if battle plans are ripe for a stay.”

“Excuse me Moe – seances?” Hank was appalled. “I just came here to get some swings in.”

“They’re trying to split and yield different time. Historical pathways. Forks in the river, so to speak. They’re doing this by attempting to carve specific moments to yield new outcomes. They’re doing the same with souls.” Berg rattled his bag. “I’ve got some of the empty jars that they were using to store the split. You can’t see anything in them. Can hardly tell they were used. Except the wax seal they melted onto the lids. I suspect they were going to try to experiment on you three.”

“What?” Anton was appalled. But the way he spoke made Cy convinced he already knew a good deal about this procedure. The intonation suggested that it wasn’t that Anton didn’t know what they were doing, but rather that he was deeply surprised that they were doing it. Especially at scale.

“Hitler and his volk believe in the unity of cosmic and geological weather. And they want to use the current of force that extends between the center of the earth and the stars to influence human affairs. They’re attempting to channel the primordial power of creation through human sacrifice.” Berg spoke academically. Almost entirely flat.

Now it was Hank’s turn. He was green in the face. “And you really think they can do it? That this is real?”

“I don’t think it will be them, Hank. But they’re at work on it. The best minds that they can seduce to the project are trying to bring it to bear. Some say they’re trying to manufacture a bomb. But it’s too early to tell much of anything. They want to splinter the cosmos. A wounded body is easier to control. And easier to kill. To submit to the reich.”

Melinda interjected, hurriedly. “Now’s the time I need to tell you, Moe. The Anaximander manuscript…”

“What the fuck does any of this have to do with baseball?” Cy exclaimed, exasperatedly.

And just as he interrupted, they heard six gunshots in rapid fire, emerging from just a half mile or so deeper in the woods.

“Fuck…” whispered Anton under his breath. “Do they know we’re here?”

The shouting grew louder. Indistinguishable German. Then laughter. It was clear they were having some sort of event in the woods.

Berg gestured for the party to move slowly towards the scene. “We need to scout this out so we can move. We’ve already been here too long. Especially since Melinda broke you three out.”

They saw the bonfire first; as they got closer, there was a riot of SS officers. Drunk, firing their pistols in the air. Dancing in a circle around the fire were several blonde barmaids. There was faint music coming from a flute and a guitar, played by two young soldiers, who were sitting on a long, horizontal log. And in the center was Hitler, practicing his windup. Hank pointed him out to Cy. “The man with the mustache.”

Surprisingly, he was speaking English. To an interlocutor.

“How does that damn Paige throw his bee-ball? The pitch is unstoppable!” Hitler palmed the ball aggressively. He mimicked Paige’s overhead windup; promptly mailed the ball into the dirt, several feet before the man crouched naively in a catcher’s position. He was wearing an oven mitt.

“Adolf, you simply won’t learn it. Paige made it up. Along with around twelve other pitches.” The man was American. Cy couldn’t see his face in the fire shadows. “You need to release the ball earlier in your delivery. If your release point is too late, you’ll spike the ball into the ground.”

The man obviously knew baseball. Cy had to wonder what American traitor would teach a foreign dictator America’s game. This, surprisingly, incensed him a great deal.

“What? I shall learn it, fool! I shall strike out that damned Greenberg. For the volk!”

“For the volk!” shouted all of the soldiers in unison.

Moe turned back to the group.

“It’s time to go.”

Moe had an old, beat to shit crop duster. It was hidden under some branches towards the end of the woods, near a rudimentary landing strip the Nazis had apparently been using for air travel to and from the camp. It had rusted propellers. Cy’s first thought was: ‘how will we all fit in this thing?’ The airstrip was entirely abandoned, as it appeared Hitler’s circle had all converged on his pitching lesson. Berg fired up the engine as Hank, Melinda, Cy, and Anton climbed aboard. It was tight. Anton was sitting on the floor.

“Ah, I know this painting!” Anton picked up a gold frame in the back of the plane with zeal. It was Goya’s Burial of the Sardine.

Berg: “We found it in the last castle they abandoned. With some Mongolian gold, an Egyptian sarcophagus, and something called an Ouija board.”

No one on the plane seemed to know what that was.

As the plane achieved liftoff from the airstrip, they heard bombs exploding faintly in the fields behind them. Cy turned; noticed the red orange plumes, wafting with smoke. Berg, in soft excitement to himself: “They received the coordinates.”

Later, they would find out Hitler had escaped. And later, they would find out who had been teaching the German dictator how to throw a fastball. But not then.

Cy and Anton returned to the U.S. emptyhanded and slightly annoyed. They had gone all this way; hadn’t even seen the slugger take a single swing. Cy would’ve at least liked to see a home run – off a genocidal dictator nonetheless. They didn’t have that in 1885. And on top of that, there had been no significant development in any sort of real case. Young had sent them on a glorified mission protection program. There was no gold at the end of this rainbow. At least it seemed to be.

“Can you believe this shit? A waste of fucking time.” Cy kicked a wastebasket at the airport as they exited their flight. It teetered; stood.

“I’m hungry,” said Anton. “We need to find some food.”

Something had changed since they’d left. Outside the city airport, there was a shiny new silver module. It looked like a chrome trailer. It stood awkwardly among the otherwise drab buildings. Unattached to any block of street.

“That’s new,” said Cy.

“Silver Diner,” said Anton. “Doesn’t that mean food?”

“Smells like bacon,” said Cy.

The two were seated by a kind young hostess. She made eyes at Cy as she passed him a menu. Their waitress arrived. She was an older woman. There was a pack of cigarettes in her breast pocket; her apron was covered with ketchup.

“Now what can I get you boys?”

Anton: “Politely, madame, what the hell is this place?”

“It’s Silver Diner, young man. We’re a series of post-historical diners run by the chef-magnate Ype von Hengst. Our founder received some information regarding the 1950s from an unnamed source and decided to proactively reflect upon the historical unfoldings of the decades yet to come, in a satirical, yet wholesome, American concept. We have everything from hash browns to five different types of coffee; sundaes to boot.”

“So that’s why the floor looks like a checkerboard? And what’s that music?”

“It’s Elvis, son.”

Cy and Anton were extremely tired.

“Let’s do a bacon, eggs, and potato platter please. Two. And two coffees.”

“Coming right up, sweetheart.”

She brought them both pancakes.

“For fucks sake…”

“Just eat it Cy. So we can go home.”

On Cy’s first bite, his tooth lodged on a hard, metallic object.

“Damn!!”

“Keep it down.”

An elderly couple sitting behind them peered over the booth in suspicion.

Cy removed the object from his teeth.

“It’s a fucking diamond ring, Anton.”

The music was blaring through what the waitress had identified to them as a fake, miniature jukebox on the table. A girl group was harmonizing about some lost or found love. Cy couldn’t tell which.

“Now why would the chef put a diamond ring in a pancake?”

They glanced toward the kitchen. A pair of eyes began to run. Cy and Anton nearly turned the table in pursuit. The elderly couple gasped.

The chef’s hat bobbed as it exploded out of the kitchen into the alleyway. Double doors swinging behind him. There was a fire escape and a row of trash cans. Cy’s speed made it so the man had little choice but to try to jump for the escape ladder. He wouldn’t make it out of the alley to the street in time. A woman and her young son hurried by.

“Ay! Man, stop! Who are you! And why the hell did you put a diamond ring in my pancake?”

The man was red in the face. He looked embarrassed. Or flushed with effort.

“Tony made me do it. Or he was going to close the restaurant. Beat me up. Break the windows. He said, find the two squirrely looking men. One like a disheveled Rasputin. The other some black guy.” The man paused. “Not that either of you twos look squirrely. Put the ring in their food, he said. Pancakes only. Don’t listen to what they order.”

“Disheveled!” Anton clearly took offense to that. Squirrely, apparently, was less of an issue.

“Who’s Tony?”

“You don’t know Tony?” The man was intrigued. His breath lightened. “Tony Topps.”

“Why would we know who Tony Topps is?”

“He’s only the son of the soon to be bubblegum and baseball card magnate Henry Topps III. The boy is a mobster. He runs a crime syndicate called SCAD. Squadron of Cronies After Diamonds.” It was clear, by the anachronism, that this must be the man the waitress had called Ype von Hengst. Diner magnate. Post-historically speaking.

“That’s a horrible name,” Cy said. Anton nodded in agreement.

“It doesn’t matter. He runs every laundry and restaurant this side of Boston. And he won’t let up. You do what he says or you close business.”

“What does Tony Topps want with us?”

“Ask him yourself. His warehouse is in Brooklyn. It’s currently a hangar for war planes. He runs his mob and money running stuff out the back. They’ll convert it into a bubblegum factory in the 1950s. But that’s later.”

“How do you know that, Ype?”

“Same way as you fellows do.”

And just as Cy was about to ask him how he knew that the two detectives had experience with time slippage, another chef called loudly for Ype.

“Good luck to you fellows. And I’m sorry about the ring. Keep it. You’ll see the address of the warehouse on the inside. And I know what you’re about to ask me. Circumstances were created to allow a change of time. Suppose it’s something you boys did in Berlin. Maybe you can stop it, but more and more is slipping through. From the future.”

Cy read the inner alcove of the diamond ring: 36th St - Sunset Park, Bklyn. Topps Bubblegum Factory & Headquarters

When Cy and Anton arrived, the place looked abandoned. There were some spare airplane parts outside the hangar. A couple fragments of wing, looking rather charred.

“Looks like they’re done here,” Anton remarked.

“We’ll just have to see it through.”

Cy opened the doors of the hangar bay. It was empty. The evening light beat down, orange upon the gray cement ground; reflecting slightly.

“There’s a door in the back of the bay.” Anton began to cross the platform. He was right. It was a small, metal door. Back left corner.

Cy reached for his gun. He didn’t have a gun.

The door opened to reveal a small office. A window, covered with blinds. Cy heard rustling to the left. There was a hallway. It opened up to a room that overlooked an assembly line. There was a large factory printer. No one was there. Some blank pieces of paper had settled on the ground.

“I swear I heard something.”

“Cy, come take a look at this.”

Inside the room, there was a table. Anton was standing over it, holding a large piece of board.

“Check this out.”

It was a tall, lanky black man. He was posed in a photographer’s studio. Behind him were fake Greek pillars. A curtain draped over them. A painting of a mountain on the wall. The man was positioned like he had just delivered a pitch. The ball was still in his hands. Full baseball uniform. Beneath the image was engraved:

THE RIGHT ARM OF MEPHISTOPHELES.

“Hell, Gogol, I know who this is. That’s Johnny Religio.”

Johnny Religio was one of the most famous black pitchers of all time. Born on the Sea Islands in 1845 to a Gullah Geechee medicine woman, he went on to become the star starter on Octavius Catto’s Pythian Base Ball Club in Philadelphia. And as soon as he’d become a legend, he was gone. Never to be seen or heard from again. Some said he’d gone on to work with Catto and Douglass during the Civil War effort. Others said he’d simply disappeared into the night. Some said he’d even become a medicine man himself. That he was still living, back in 1885, in New Orleans somewhere. Quit the game. Under a false name. Or a truer name.

But while he was with Catto, he went 45-2 in his last season. Forty straight wins. He sputtered out right as the season ended – in part due to his activist work in Philadelphia – which had increasingly consumed his waking hours. From what Cy understood, Religio had begun running guns for a resistance movement among the educated. Against the violence of slavery and discrimination. Blacks and whites were involved.

“Damn, Cy, you’ve got a helluva memory for this stuff.”

“I care about the game, Anton. And about what happened. How we got here. Not that I know a damn thing about how you and I ended up in 1936 in this fucking abandoned warehouse. We still don’t have a case.”

Cy was getting more and more impatient. Dead end after dead end.

“Are we taking this with us?”

“Fuck – of course we are. This might be the last surviving photograph of the man that’s not printed in Sol White’s book, or in some newspaper somewhere. Finally, some luck! Maybe not in a detective sense. But in an archival one.”

Back at the offices, Anton was examining Cy’s old baseball books. He had a whole shelf full of them. Leather spines, about the origins of the game. Cuba and America.

“I can’t find the man anywhere in any of these, Cy. Are you sure he exists?”

“That’s the point, Anton. You showed me you understood all this before. They made men like him in his time out to be forgotten. The white media didn’t cover him. Hell, they killed Catto in Philadelphia. Religio was a ballplayer. And even if they did remember him, they sure as hell wouldn’t include anything about what he did off the field. Plus he disappeared. The trail died right after one of the greatest seasons ever posted by a pitcher. The baseball record is the last memory of his existence we have. And even that escapes the page.”

“So how’d you find out about it?”

“I had to talk to people.”

Anton shut a large, encyclopedic volume with a dusty thud.

“So now what?”

Cy ruminated for a moment, playing with his pipe. Tobacco only. He looked down at the cabinet photo of Religio. His face contorted in playful determination. Cap slightly askew.

“We’re going to the Sea Islands. Suspect something might be there. Maybe we can find Johnny’s house. Or find someone else who can tell us something. Anything. I think the name on this card has something to do with it. It’s all we’ve got to run off of. Everything else has been a wild goose chase. Damn it.”

When they arrived, the Islands had been hit by a tropical storm. Hard. They were, for the most part, abandoned. Tree branches; even roofs of shanties littered the ground intermittently. The landscape was in cognitive disarray.

“Getting tired of arriving at these places where we either don’t see a single fucking living soul, or are blindfolded the whole time. Hell. I suppose at least we’re not locked in a bunker in a foreign country.” Anton kicked a stray branch. Birds were beginning to sing, which suggested some method of renewal.

“Liven up Anton. We need to find something. Anything.” Cy turned the photo over in his palm.

THE CHURCH OF THE LIVING WORD. FOLLY FIELD BEACH.

“I know where we’re going.”

The church looked recently destroyed. By the looks of it, in the very storm that had swept in just before they’d arrived. They couldn’t have been three days too late. The walls and ceiling were caved in. Tidepools lapped strangely in holes in the wooden floors. Anton stepped over moss, vines; branches. Wood jutted from the walls into the guttered gray sky. Water was still dripping from the trees. The door was off its hinges. And there, on one of the remaining four walls, towards the back window of the church, was a clue.

A portrait – of a man with a shadowy face. He was grinning. But the way the painting was composed, his face was meaningfully obscured by dearth of light.

“Are we not supposed to be able to tell who he is?” Cy touched the rain-wet oil near the bottom left of the frame. The man was wearing a suit; a bowler hat.

“The frame says the name: ULYSSES MURNAU. And this time, I know the guy.”

Anton explained to Cy that Murnau was an infamous medicine salesman and vaudeville entertainer from the 1850s. Primarily working saloons, Murnau’s fake medicine quickly began to cause him problems. ‘Known charlatan’ was the word on the street for his head. He was supposedly killed in a shootout in the early 1870s by a gang of settlers. Somewhere out west. Didn’t like his ‘medicine’. Nobody had heard a word from him since. Con-wise.

“Our working bet is Murnau and Religio were involved somehow. But how?”

Anton: “It has to be the photograph, as far as we know. And we don’t know much.”

“The right arm of Mephistopheles. It has a Faustian ring to it.”

“So Religio did what? Made a deal with Murnau? Someone else?”

Cy looked at the ominous painting once more. “It must be with Murnau.” The face reminded him of someone. Or, rather, the way the face existed in space.

There was a bus stop out on the dirt road, just a mile and a half up from the church. Anton and Cy wandered up to it and had a seat on the blue wooden bench. Just waiting for a train.

Up came a tall, skinny man. Whistling. He had a mop of blonde hair; Cy noticed he was wearing what looked like a modernized New York Giants uniform. It was covered in dirt. The sleeves had begun to fray.

“Say, pal. You play with John Ward?”

The man stopped whistling and looked over at Cy.

“John who?”

“Monty Ward. New York Giants, 1885.”

The man laughed, now chewing on a reed. “That’s too long ago for me, mister. I just led the New York Giants to the 1911 World Series.”

Anton whispered to Cy: “It’s technically 1936.”

Cy: “That was a long time ago fella.”

“Really, was it? It seems just yesterday.” The man’s eyes were blurred over. He seemed to be reflecting in a permanently present past. Cy noticed the man’s eyes never really broke from this plane, even as he drew closer. As he stood before them, crowding the sun, Cy could see the marks of age in the crow’s feet of his eyes; the wrinkles of his brow, cheeks, and hands. The man looked aged not just by time, but by the grave. Anton drew his neck back into his chest, like a protective bird. Chilling.

Cy, cautiously: “What brings you here, fellow?”

“I’m waiting for a train, same as you boys. Suspect McGraw is waiting for me down at Spring Training in San Antonio. Or is it Marlin? Say – that’s Johnny Religio!” The man snatched the cabinet photograph out of Cy’s hands; began examining it, riveted.

“What’s your name? And give me that back!”

“Charley Faust.” The man handed the photo back sheepishly. “You wanna know what happened to the kid in that photo?”

Cy decided to play along. “Sure, but how the hell would you know?”

“All I gotta do is look at it. He’s still inside.”

“What do you mean, he’s still inside?”

“They used the photo to trap him in it. Special camera.” The man wiped his blonde locks off his brow. He looked closer. “See, his eyes are still moving.”

Cy couldn’t see anything.

“I would know. Mine eyes are in a different place meself. Can only seem to know things in the far-off. The hereafter… the near-after. Who’s to say?”

“You say you won the 1911 World Series? You were the hero?”

“The fortune teller lady told me I would. I barely had to pitch. McGraw and the boys were lucky they listened to me. It all paid off.” Charley looked quite pleased with himself.

Following Charley’s logic: “How did they get Johnny in a photograph?”

Charley’s eyes darkened. But they did not waver. “Only a few men on the earth know anything about how to do this sort of thing at any given moment in time in history. And some say they don’t die. Don’t really. They just get passed down, mask to mask. Place to place. Time to time. And whenever it happens, they are there. They’re the ones who can turn the time. Turn the dial. Backwards.”

Charley continued: “And then, there’s men like me. Men like yourselves. Who can turn the dial forward. Towards integration. Like the way the energy from the sun turns in a lizard towards a man capable of reflection. Consumed forward. An engine. For oil. For the blood of dead stars.”

Anton whispered in Cy’s ear: “Let’s put this to bed.” But Cy was intent on listening. Suddenly, the image of the man who stood before Hitler’s bonfire – the American – flashed before his eyes. Now he knew where he recognized the grin. For Cy to accept this… he was moving across time. And Johnny never died. He was just cut off and away from his body. Captured into the image. And this was what the Nazis were doing – with the jars Moe rattled in his bag. They were trying to do it at scale. Industrial soul murder.

And Murnau was the one teaching them how to do it. Decades after he supposedly disappeared; vanished from the record. He’d have to be, if he was in any real way or sense – living – over one hundred years old.

Charley continued, oblivious to Cy’s inner enlightenment. “Say, this bus that’s coming. I can tell you one more thing. It’ll take you where you need to go. Not a bus to spring training for me, I daresay. But it’s a bus for you. And I’ve got this flower.”

Charley pulled a purple wildflower with a yellow, hairy center from behind his ear.

“I’m supposed to give this to you, Cy. Not sure why, but I was told.”

Cy took it in his hand.

“Well, boys, I’ll be off! I have to catch that ride to San Anton’. Maybe at the next station! Don’t know if the boys will win one this year without me. They’ll be awaiting my arrival, I know it!”

The man began to prance off down the road. Only then did Cy notice he had no shoes.

“Strange fellow. You think he was onto something?” Cy wanted to test Anton’s impressions of the man. Mutual confirmation of hypotheses.

This time, Anton answered with an uncharacteristic firmness.

“If a man like that knows something, it’s worth a listen.”

And so they had a theory. Johnny Religio was trapped in the photograph. Somewhere between memory and death. Disembodiment. Vertigo. Limbo. And privately, Cy had a continuation of it. He just didn’t feel ready to expound upon it. Not until he was ready. Then, he’d let Anton know.

The bus arrived out of a cloud of dust. It dinged a loud bell; the double doors opened. A man dressed in a red porter’s uniform welcomed them aboard.

“Where to boys?” He checked a ledger in his lap. “Ah, it’s already been stated. 1952!”

Cy and Anton looked at one another, concernedly. The doors slammed shut behind them.

They settled into two seats behind the driver. The bus was completely empty. Blue leather seats. As Cy took his seat, there was a book – wedged in the armrest of the row in front of him. He pried it loose.

THE FRAGMENTS OF ANAXIMANDER

It was a small, black book. Handwritten.

Cy began to flip through the pages. It was completely empty. And on the last page:

ἐξ ὧν δὲ ἡ γένεσίσ ἐστι τοῖσ οὖσι καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰσ taῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεών· διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τίσιν ἀλλήλοισ τῆσ ἀδικίασ κατὰ τὴν τοῦ χρόνου τάξιν.

Cy began the work of translation.

Before they knew it, they were right back at Tony Topps’ headquarters. The cars had changed. The light was brighter. Too bright. Cy noticed a loud static coming from the apartments across the street. It was a baseball game. He saw a flicker of light. A batter, in black and white, swinging at the ball. Number 42.

In his hand was the book. And in pencil, Cy’s translation sat next to the Greek fragment. Some of the letters had been wrong in the original handwriting. He had to discursively correct the full extent of the messaged fragment.

Into the elements from which things take their rise, they pass away also, according to necessity, for they give one another justice and recompense for their injustice, in conformity with the order of Time.

“What’s that, Anton? It looks like a figure moving in light.”

Anton looked up. Clear recognition. “We don’t have time. They’re closing the hangar doors.”

Cy and Anton ran toward the closing bay doors; slid under them just in time. The bay itself was empty. Same floors. But there was an extreme commotion in the factory area. The legible noise was clearly a full operation. Cy felt the ontological noise of the case getting louder as well. A vortex of increasing technological speed. It was grinding towards a center point of revelation. A sinkhole in time. And at the center point, was the crime. It reverberated outward everywhere with black tentacles. And Cy was about to reach right into its mouth.

A large, greasy man with slicked back hair stood facing the floor. Hundreds of workers in uniform white suits, top to bottom, scrambled below. The printing machine whirred frantically. It reeked like sugar. The man blew a huge pink bubble. He was wearing suspenders and a white, short sleeve button down shirt.

“Tony Topps?”

“Don’t wear it out, kid.”

The man turned. He had beady blue eyes. Sweat on his chin. He wiped his eyes with a cloth. A cigar in his right, hairy fist. Big eyebrows.

“Who the hell let you two putzes in here.”

“We’re here about the right arm of Mephistopheles.”

Tony’s face grew red. Almost purple.

“So it was you two fucks who stole the card. We need that photograph. Johnny Religio’s the last card in our ‘52 set. He’s going to be our remembrance figure. We can’t print the set without him.”

Anton scratched his chin. “Remembrance figure?”

Tony smiled. It was shaped like a V.

“To finish what Ulysses started.”

“How do you know Ulysses Murnau?” Cy threw it out there. It must be a field-match.

“Murnau’s my great god-father. And the reason we started printing baseball cards. We’re working to preserve the great ritual. Moving souls into the future. Through mass reproduction.”

Tony held a 1952 Topps salesman sample in his fist. It was card number 1, Andy Pafko. Brooklyn Dodgers.

“Just like the great reich did. Put ‘em in a bottle. And we sell their souls for a premium. In a pack of bubblegum. To kids!”

Tony cackled like a surrogate supervillain.

“So you keep these men alive in the images?” Cy inquired.

“We put these men in the images. The card is the new body. But now, with our printing factory technology, we can make millions of bodies. Split souls into even smaller and smaller fragments. How can you unite something that has collapsed into particulate shards, churned out by a machine? That’s what we do, kid. And with the final card in hand, I can transfer Johnny’s image to the largest baseball card set ever produced in the world. Then, he’ll never die.”

Anton lunged at the card. Tony clumsily attempted to parry him. The two went crashing through the large glass windowpane, down onto the stairs to the factory floor. Several workers screamed. They all began to flee the room. A large red siren began blaring. Anton was throwing haymakers at Tony’s chin. Tony was yelling, babbling in gibberish.

“Yaaaa farghaacamaatamaahh yamaggaa!” It sounded like he was trying to swat off a thousand ghost-flies, drowning him. The man, simply, couldn’t fight worth a lick. He was physically spooked.

Cy hid the cabinet card in one of the storage lockers in the room, then ran down the stairs toward Tony and Anton. Tony staggered to his feet.

“I’ll take the both of yous!” He rolled his fists like a child imitating a boxer.

The printing machines roared. They were moving at what looked like sixty or seventy miles per hour. Churning out sheet after sheet of Tony’s Topps cards. Each card was another soul fragment multiplied into an oblivion of abyss. An impossibility of total, complete recovery.

“We have to stop Tony,” said Anton. “If we don’t, time will cave in on itself. A wormhole. If he fragments too many souls too deeply, the timelines will split to such a degree that the underlying agreeable network of visions will collapse. There will be no possible common ground. A schizophrenic break at the level of the self. Four hundred souls is more than enough at depth. And his depth is millions of cards each. With his factory technology, he can split souls far deeper than the Nazis could with pure violence alone.”

Tony swung like a drunk, his fist crashing into the side of Cy’s chest. Cy realized that this was Murnau’s master plan. Undying or undead, whatever the hell he was, he needed exponential advances of technological reproduction to split souls and rend time with increasing power and efficiency. Once images could be manufactured and reproduced at the speed of light, all hope was lost. Time would become completely discontiguous. There would be no recovery. It would be a spiral into the abyss of lost souls. Wailing, bodiless in the wind. A dial turned to ‘hell’.

Cy, breathlessly: “I’ll try to hold him down on the belt. You try to turn this machine off. None of these cards can leave this room. We’ll have to burn them. Burn them all.”

Anton ran toward the switchboard on the factory floor, covered with levers and buttons, flashing red, green, and blue lights. Cy grabbed Tony’s left arm and pinned it behind his back.

“Get offa me, you sonuvabitch!” Tony tried to reach across his body towards Cy with his free right arm. Cy kicked Tony’s left leg out from under him; the right arm fell backwards. Directly into the printing press.

Tony’s scream pierced Cy’s eardrums. Blood splattered immediately. He released Tony’s left arm.

“You killed me! You bastard you!”

Anton turned off the press. Tony’s wretched yells echoed clearly across the floor. The two of them ran for the hangar bay; then out into the afternoon light.

“Fuck! I forgot the cabinet!”

“Cy, we need to run. We need to get out of here. Where do we go?”

The two detectives boarded a bus that said it was headed for Montauk, New York. Didn’t matter. Just needed to go. They rode until the sun set; got off at Ditch Plains Beach. There was a small red barn next to the bus stop. They fell into two bales of hay behind the open door; into a deep sleep. A goat murmured outside as the night fell, deeper and deeper still.

The first thing Cy saw was Tony. He had a cyborg arm. Gesturing frantically towards him. He woke up. Started a fire with some hay and his silver lighter. Pulled the Pafko card from his pocket. Burned it immediately. That was something. A start.

Then another vision. Drifting back off to sleep. Murnau, and Religio’s mother. His mother was a heavyset woman, wearing a sundress. She was holding the picture of her son, smiling. It dissolved, with her body, into sand. He heard a disembodied voice. It had to be her.

“Bring my boy back home. To the land of the waters. Don’t let him stay caught between worlds. Bring my boy back home. Deliver him from this false body.”

Murnau was fully a shadow. He stood behind her, leaned up against a doorway. Smoking a cigarette. Nothing but a grin and the whites of his eyes. Cy approached him angrily.

“You motherfucker. Don’t you understand what you’ve done? What you’ve tried to do? You’ve set history and time into a mad spiral. All for what? To capture souls?”

Murnau replied. “Don’t you understand, boy? There are two forces in this world. All I am is the side of strife. And I work to break what you work to repair. And this dance goes on forever. Wise to me, wise to you. I do what I’m told, same as you do. We act, as the world sleeps around us.”

Cy was about to reply, but Murnau faded into a black tunnel of vision which drew him into the distance. The last thing he could see was the grin.

Then he saw the face of the occultist, John Dee, in an obsidian mirror, screaming. Fading, into the black stone.

Cy woke up in a cold sweat. It felt like he’d hammered his head against a brick wall. He was back at his desk, holding the Religio photograph. But it was clear he was not fully awake. Not fully there. Somewhere between waking and the dream. The threshold space. He saw Anton’s silhouette in a haze. A fire burning. He allowed himself to drift back toward the imaginal. Something called him back. Not done. Not yet.

He walked into a white room. In the far corner was a broadcaster’s booth, overlooking a ballfield. Through a wide, open window. Cy couldn’t see who exactly was playing. Their faces were blurs. In the booth was a man with a boyish grin. Somewhere around forty years old. Wearing a cowboy hat. “That fella slud hard into the second bag! The Browns are down two, flying back for the lead! Holy mackerel! What a play! A shot off the bat!”

The man turned. “Who was it let you in the box, young man?”

“What box?”

“The World Between Waking and Dreaming. That’s the box, kiddo.”

“You say that like it’s a real place.”

“Yes sir, it is. Population 200. Small town. But plenty of interlocutors, comers and goers. Visitors and – what’s it they call it – transients and commuters?”

The man thought to himself. Cy could see the wheels turning.

“Do you know what it is to be born, Cy?”

“Who are you?” Cy wasn’t going to show his metaphysical cards. At least, not just yet.

“I’m Diz, kid. Dizzy Dean. Or Dis, for short. No real name. Threw some acorns at squirrels as a kid… I apologize…” The man wandered off again.

“Who’s playing down there?”

“That there’s the angels versus the angels. Although, they let me call it like a Browns gig. Seeing as they love the old St. Louis faithful up there in heaven. Amen!”

There was a large painting behind Dizzy. Cy couldn’t stop staring.

“Oh that, fella. That’s The Souls of Acheron. Made by a Hungarian artist. Turn of the century, roundabouts. You like it?”

“Is that supposed to be you?” Cy pointed to the man in the painting with the winged helmet with his hand raised. It looked eerily like a younger Dizzy Dean.

“In a way, yes. But in a way, all I ever was was a sharecropper, an Army boy; a Dust Bowl kid. And a Gashouse Gang Cardinal. And a cocky arm. Promised I would shut down Hank and Mickey in Game Seven of the ‘34 Series. And boy did I!”

“Am I here about you?”

“Do you know what it is to be born, Cy?” Dizzy asked again. Apparently it would be a battle for the orientation of the conversation.

Cy paused, then answered: “No, I suppose I don’t. I’m just here.”

Dizzy laughed. “We are til we aren’t. How much of the waters of forgetting did you drink, kid?”

“I suppose I drank enough. Enough not to know.”

Dizzy held up a sign. “Part of my partnership with Falstaff Beer. Pure Mnemosyne.”

“So getting drunk will help me remember?”

“You might. But not everything. It’s a long manuscript. The scribe of the souls writes it. That’s me. And we do it together. Here, before you were born.” Dizzy tugged at a long scroll next to his scorecard. It coiled around and around about the floor, like the sternum of an impossibly long snake. It was riddled with scrawl.

“So the population of the town is those waiting to be born?”

“And those coming back from death.”

“So I’m dead?”

“No. You’re just in the right angle of sleep.” Dizzy kicked his legs up on the broadcasting table. He had shiny, black shoes. The microphone rang with feedback.

“So I’ll go back?”

“All but guaranteed.” Dizzy yawned. “One more question for you, Cy Jones.”

“What’s that, Diz?”

“Could you be loved, Cy Jones. Could you be loved.” Dizzy handed Cy a baseball card. 1960 Topps. Ricardo Janes. Card number 573. Ricardo was a pitcher for the Washington Senators. He had a cyborg arm. Cuba. 2.32 ERA.

“Dizzy, this man can’t be real. Matter of fact, I’m sure of it.”

“Go home, Cy. I gotta finish this game.”

Cy woke up. All the way this time. Anton was laughing loudly, staring into a roaring flame in the fireplace.

“Cy, you won’t believe this. I’ve got the next case. You aren’t going to believe where we’re headed. And say, where’d you get that photo in your hand? What does it say?”

Cy looked down:

THE RIGHT ARM OF MEPHISTOPHELES.

Ulysses’ grin covered Johnny’s like a mask.

He’d brought something home with him. But Cy suspected it wasn’t what he, or anyone, would think.

MYSTERY THREE:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE STONE NOSE

OR

CY JONES AND HOW I LEARNED TO START LOVING THE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR THAT GIFTED ME THE ERIS OF TIME

Cy read the paper in Anton’s hand. It was page sixteen. Next to some news about a theatre starlet and a new Broadway production. A relief. 1886.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE STONE NOSE, OR, CY JONES AND HOW I LEARNED TO START LOVING THE PARTICLE ACCELERATOR THAT GIFTED ME THE ERIS OF TIME

“Long headline,” Cy said. “So this is our next thing?”

Anton grinned. “Sure looks like it.”

Cy pulled a half-crushed purple wildflower out of his pocket. “Do you remember where I got this?”

Anton shrugged. “Nope.”

“Well do you at least have any idea of how we get from here to there? The stone nose?”

Anton flashed the back of the page at Cy. It was a picture of the Sphinx.

“Easy enough.”

They were back to boats. It was a long haul across the waters. Anton didn’t like this. He leaned over the edge for the half of the trip that he was awake.

“I prefer the air. But it seems like we’ll have to wait a couple more decades for that one.”

They arrived and went straight for the pyramids. Right away, things were askew.

“Seems like a pattern, don’tcha think, Cy?”

There was a massive, metallic box, whirring in front of the noseless Sphinx. Three red lights were atop the box, shooting off into the blue sky. It was unclear where precisely in the cosmos they were oriented.

A man walked up to them. He was very clearly wearing a fake mustache and glasses combo. Neither Cy nor Anton could safely identify him. He was wearing a safari outfit. Khaki shirt and shorts, round hard khaki hat.

“Excuse me, fellows. This is a private dig.”

“What the hell is that?” Anton didn’t want to back off this time.

“Why that’s our magical mystery device, my friend. We’re currently at work decoding hieroglyphics. We may exhume a mummy. Now buzz off.”

Behind the man stood two ominous, big-bodied men.

“It’s either back down or start a fistfight in Egypt on our first afternoon.” Cy made his intentions clear.

Anton frowned at the fake-mustached man; they went back to their hotel.

It was in the museum district of Cairo. All around them, European tourists swarmed. Ooh-ing and aah-ing at the attractions. King Tut’s sarcophagus. A large boulder. Some bracelets. It was unclear what was or wasn’t a supremely important ancient artifact. Cy and Anton had to bob and weave through the foot traffic to make their way back.

Cy: “That machine is not from here. At least, not from when-here.”

Anton: “Clearly, old chap. We’re going to need to figure out what it does. They’ve really amped up their heavy metal. Somehow they’ve made backwards advancements down into the 19th century. How the hell did they bring that big trap of metal through here?”

“If Tony Topps was able to do what he did with a multifactorial printing machine, I hate to see what that thing can do. More ferocious. Louder. More compact.”

“And the fake mustache suggests to me he’s someone we know. Someone we know who doesn’t want us to know we know.”

“That’s quite enough of that.”

They picked up some fresh dates at the market beside the building of their hotel. Inside, the windows billowed with curtains. The rooms opened onto a massive, shared veranda. It overlooked the busy development of the rapidly modernizing city in juxtaposition to the distant pyramids. The frightening consumption of time with the teeming bug of the living. Overwhelming the now dead, useless stone with technology.

“Why do you think they’re here?” Anton asked, this time.

Cy pondered the question. He thought back to what Madame Marguerite had said about the nature of the gravity of time. How it acquired density at sites of profound violence and historical trauma. He wondered if this also applied to artifacts. Materials. Civilizational stones and monuments. Surviving and corroding alike.

“I think there’s something here. A power source. That they can only acquire on site. And I damn well hope it isn’t Murnau.”

The night passed uneventfully. They woke to a large orange sun which tinted the entire desert with a bellowing glow.

Anton: “We need to get into that site without them knowing.”

Cy: “Do you think it’s just the mustachioed man and his two bouncers?”

“How many other fellows could they really have in on it? Considering it’s a future contraption. And way farther off from 1936 this time. If anyone saw that thing they’d have a conniption. It’s hideously out of conjunction.”

Cy and Anton decided to wait til night fell again. Anton met a bellhop shuffling bags on the first floor who supplied the two of them with opium and tobacco. They split the pipe down the middle; watched as the moon fell over the veranda. The entire land acquired a magical, blue glow.

“It’s time to go.” Cy picked up a dial of rope and a pickaxe.

Anton: “Why the hell do you have that?”

“I figured it’s what we needed for an Egyptian related adventure. For scaling pyramids and the like.”

“Don’t you feel that’s a little typical?”

Cy put the rope and pickaxe down. “At least I brought a gun.”

“You don’t have a gun.”

“Right.”

The two snuck off, wearing all black, towards the pyramids. They looked like two misplaced thieves in a foreign country. Which they were. Except for the thieves part.

“Shut up Anton! You’ll wake the neighborhood.”

Anton was having a ‘baaa’ competition with the local sheep-herd.

“Right.”

As they approached the Sphinx, they could hear the machine radiating, vibrating with noise and power. The dig-site was empty.

“How the hell are they running that?”

“There must be some power source in it. Or around it.”

Cy and Anton began inspecting the perimeter of the device. As Cy looked under the southwestern corner of the metallic technological object, he saw a glint of light. It was the moon, piercing a mirror. Ornate, gold frame. Standing on legs. In the middle of the desert, about four hundred feet off.

“I don’t see any wires…”

“Anton, you see that thing?”

“I’m looking for this power source, Cy. Bugger off.”

Cy began wandering toward the mirror – drawn towards it by an inexplicable magnetism.

As he arrived, he realized the beacon was a mirage in the night. He’d passed through a veil. Now, surrounded by a hall of screens. Pulsing, with blue waves of energy. It was like he was surrounded by reflections of the moon. They murmured and gurgled with electricity. Cy felt the hair on his skin standing on end. Static.

It was like the hall was a maze, guiding him forward. Cy wandered, possessed, like cattle to slaughter. Entranced by the energy that was breaking against his skin. It was influencing him with real-power. Real force. And then masks began to appear in the waving blue light. Wood masks with gaping mouths; then transformed into grotesque red and white powdered faces, gleaming with glee. The static energy in the night seemed to speak. And then the masks burst into fire. Cy felt like Moses before the burning bush. All he could do is receive the vision.

And then there was a voice.

“What brings you here, Cy Jones.”

“I came for my next mystery.”

“You should fear to touch the heart of this core, Cy Jones. This core leads directly to oblivion.”

“So be it, faceless voice. What are you?”

“I’m the aggregate pulse of intelligence which speaks before the birth and death of all things. The cosmic origin. The first intelligence, embedded in all things.”

“So why don’t I know you?”

“I am you. Just a greater version of you.”

“Let me see your face.”

“I will let you see one.”

The screens morphed. In them, suspended, was a wooden mask. A shamanic figurine. In the midst of a great, tremendous, cosmic groan. The face twisted, like it was melting in the heat of the light of all things. All affairs. The aggregate of all stars. Into one, consolidated, compression chamber of skin. Wooden skin.

“That’s an ancient face.”

“It’s the one you are ordained to see.”

“Why am I here?”

“You’re here for Cap Anson. Find him, and remove him from the equation.”

“Kill him?”

“No, Cy. Remove him from what is to come. Otherwise, your world is at risk.”

“The world keeps being at risk.”

“This is the nature of time.”

“Where is he? The guy is a ballplayer. Chicago White Stockings. Why would he be in Egypt?”

“You will know him by his disguise.”

The scene fell like a theatrical set. Cy was standing just a few feet away from Anton. Anton’s face was plastered upward. Like he’d seen something too.

“Anton? What do you see?”

“I saw… the birth of the universe. And everything afterward… haunted by an image of fire. Strange, twisted things… born in the ocean. Stumps of plant life. Millions of little fingers. Then beasts… horrible beasts… then…” he looked at Cy. “Then I saw me.”

“The thread of time.”

“I know who we need to find.”

“The moustached man,” they both said at once.

Anton completed the sentence. “There’s going to be a ballgame at the Sphinx.”

And sure enough, they read in the New York Times the following day:

ANSON’S SQUAD TO PLAY THE NEW YORKS AT THE SPHINX OF EGYPT. SPALDING COMMENCES WORLD TOUR.

“We need to get to the game.” Cy finished his coffee.

Anton: “They’re going to hide the machine. At least for the time being. So they can take pictures.”

There was a large crowd in front of the Sphinx. A team of grounds-crew had placed temporary, chalked bags in a rudimentary diamond. The Sphinx and the pyramids were positioned in the outfield like players. There were men warming up. Cy spotted Anson in his White Stockings uniform. He charged towards him, angrily. Anson spotted him from several yards off.

“If that black man is set to field today, the game is off.”

Cy grabbed him by the collar. Several of Anson’s teammates rushed forth. He waved them off.

“What do you want, punk?”

“I know why you’re here, Cap.”

Cap Anson laughed. “You sure as hell don’t, kid. You’re in over your head. We’re just here for a game, aren’t we boys?”

Cap’s lineup nodded.

“I know you’re here for the thread of time. Dilation.”

Cap’s eyes narrowed.

“Meet me back here tonight.”

Cy and Anton turned and left.

As they prepared for their meeting with Cap, Anton turned to Cy. “I have to tell you Cy. When I was having that vision… I saw the birth of something called ‘color television’. Deep in outer space. It wasn’t a real thing, so to speak. Not ‘alive’. But it was living. It had heat and energy to it. It crackled.”

Cy reflected on his experience. “I saw it too. Or rather, felt it. And the intelligence that was capable of speaking through it. Maybe that intelligence was always there. Maybe it’s just getting louder.”

Anton pursed his lips and nodded. The two of them headed out, disguiseless, to meet Cap Anson at the pyramids.

Anson was wearing his fake moustache and glasses; the full safari outfit.

“What the hell, Cap. We know who you are!” Cy was annoyed.

Cap scoffed. “It’s part of my travel gear. It helps me make it across time.”

He continued. “I heard what you boys did at the Hotel Argyle. With Dabney. And I don’t like it. It’s a war over the past and the future. And you know where I stand. I need to return things to the way they are. The way they should be. No Dabney, no Frank Grant. No black man steps foot on the diamond.”

“Why do you hate black people so much, Cap.” Cy didn’t want to deal with this man one bit. But the road was here, apparently.

“I don’t hate you, Cy. You just don’t belong here. With us. On this field. That’s why you need to go find your own. And that’s what this device is for. To right what you’ve done.” Cap pulled a necklace out of his pocket.

“Damn it, Anson. That’s Dabney’s amulet. You robbed his family’s grave!” Cy was incensed.

“Damn right it is, Jones. And removing it allowed me to begin my process of siphoning energy from the stars to fuel my particle reactor. This is from far off in the future. And it’s going to allow me to rewrite threads of the past. Without your permission; without any sort of monkey business from the souls and the stars. I can harness the power of the cosmos to craft a world where I don’t even have to mention you. Ever again.”

Cy thrust a lever on the machine forward; it roared with a fury. The red lights pulsed. They were each aimed at the three stars directly above the pyramids.

“The ancients knew the power of these specific stellar formations. And I plan on using their fuel to break the possibility of you ever meddling with my time again.”

Just as Cy prepared to lunge at Anson, he waved a remote control in front of Cy’s face.

“I touch this, the machine detonates. And it rifts time irrevocably, for the both of us. You’ll never be called back for a mission again. The scribe can’t reach you there. The scribe can’t reach nobody there.”

Anson cackled. Cy heard a train whistle howl in the darkness. There must be tracks nearby.

“That’s my ride fellows. Don’t follow me, or you can wave goodbye to the joints of space and time. Floating, forever, in an abyss of darkness.”

Anson ran into the black behind the pyramids. Cy could see him grab a yellow handle of the ghost train.

“I’m going.” Anton grabbed his arm. “You do know what you’re risking, right?”

“So be it.”

Cy grabbed the rail just as the train was reaching terminal velocity. Then it disappeared.

Cy heard a voice in the darkness:

If then you do not make yourself equal to God, you cannot apprehend God; for like is known by like.

Leap clear of all that is corporeal, and make yourself grown to a like expanse with that greatness which is beyond all measure; rise above all time and become eternal; then you will apprehend God. Think that for you too nothing is impossible; deem that you too are immortal, and that you are able to grasp all things in your thought, to know every craft and science; find your home in the haunts of every living creature; make yourself higher than all heights and lower than all depths; bring together in yourself all opposites of quality, heat and cold, dryness and fluidity; think that you are everywhere at once, on land, at sea, in heaven; think that you are not yet begotten, that you are in the womb, that you are young, that you are old, that you have died, that you are in the world beyond the grave; grasp in your thought all of this at once, all times and places, all substances and qualities and magnitudes together; then you can apprehend God.

But if you shut up your soul in your body, and abase yourself, and say “I know nothing, I can do nothing; I am afraid of earth and sea, I cannot mount to heaven; I know not what I was, nor what I shall be,” then what have you to do with God?

Cy jumped. Not knowing from where, to where. He hit the ground hard. He could hear the wheels of the train roaring off into a further darkness. Not a scrape on his body. He stood up. His chest ached, but nothing else. Nothing broken.

Before him was another pyramid. Not Giza. Smaller. And it had a clear entrance. A wooden door. Heavy. He decided to enter. It took significant effort to push them open. Mounds of sand had piled inside the structure, behind them.

There were aisles and aisles of books. Seemingly stretching on into infinity. There was an empty librarian’s desk with a lamp in the entranceway. Cy saw Melinda in the second row, perusing a section called ‘Theory of Timeliness and Soul-Bonds’. He ran up to her.

“Melinda. I didn’t expect to see you again.”

She smiled slightly at him. Like she was unsure how to feel.

Unthinking, Cy reached into his pocket. Pulled out the crushed wildflower.

“I didn’t know til now, but this is for you.”

She stuck it behind her ear. “Why are you here, Cy.”

“I don’t know. I was brought here.”

She put her face back down to the text. Mumbled some words.

“What did you say?”

She spoke louder.

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

“Interesting.”

“Everything moves in the way you heard, Cy. Even us.”

“Us? I didn’t know there was an us.”

“There will be. Or won’t be. It depends what you do, or don’t do. As it is with myself.”

She stuck her face back in the book, nonchalantly.

Cy grinned, then returned to match her casual seriousness.

“Did the flower work?”

He could see the corners of her mouth turn upward slightly.

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“So you know about Dizzy? About the writing of the soul? The scribe?”

“Dizzy – like Murnau… that’s a mask the scribe wore, Cy. The scribe wears every mask. It’s that time decides. But you have to do the right thing. Otherwise, time changes. And Cap… Cap wants to change time outside of right decision. Right decision is the force that integrates.”

“I’m listening.”

“Hegel thought that history is like a braid. It weaves and resolves. Thesis, antithesis. Synthesis. That’s the vision you and Anton had with Dabney. A vision of integration. After and through profound struggle. Cap is antithesis. He wants to drag the thesis back down into oblivion. To fragment into utter disintegration. Cap is the same mask as Murnau.”

“So what am I?”

“You’re someone I’m supposed to love. In the future. If you let me. And I suppose… if I let you.”

Cy felt her draw into herself like a little girl. Her presence felt incredibly small and vulnerable. Cy wanted to hold her; assure her that everything is alright.

“Where are we Melinda?”

“This is the library of Alexandria. Hidden, preserved from time. In the astral zone.”

“Astral? So this is a dream?”

“It’s everything that’s happening metaphysically, Cy. It’s everything the world is and is becoming. At the first order of affairs. Ever heard of Plato’s theory of forms?”

“You’re the philosopher, Gondais. I just solve mysteries.”

She chuckled. “Maybe another time.”

“Coffee? Dinner?”

“They want to undo that braid, Cy. To abyss. And they don’t need a reason why. Because all it is is a force. A force of cosmic nature. Same as you. The force that seeks to integrate chaos.”

She kissed him on the cheek. Cy blushed.

“I don’t know what we are, or when. But I know what needs to be done, same as you know it. In your bones.”

“Same as the reason I’m here at all, I suppose.”

“A force. In the agon.”

“In the cosmic ballgame.”

She closed the book sharply. WALTER BENJAMIN – THESES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.

“Is that enough for you, Cy?”

“Is it ever enough?”

She sighed. “That’s part of your problem.”

“You don’t know me, Melinda.”

“You’re right, Cy. I don’t. But I will.”

She put the book back on the shelf, and began to walk on down the infinite corridor. She looked back at him.

“Can you finish what you started?”

“Is it ever finished?”

She smiled at him and winked.

“Only one way to find out.”

She was gone.

Cy left the building; trudged back to the hotel. The sun was rising.

As he walked, he remembered a woman. She was sunbeaten to all hell. Deeply tanned. White woman, smoking cigarettes down by a river in Missouri while failed sewage treatment leaked into it. It smelled to high heaven. She took huge drags off the menthol. She was telling him about some absurd breed of snakes that bit her friend. ‘Lightning snakes’, she’d called it. There was no tangible plot thread to it. It was just something that happened. One night, her kids took him underneath an abandoned pool; there were crack addicts making something. They had no idea what. There were instruments clattering against the ground. Loud voices debating the next movement. Candles flickered beneath the sloping concrete ceiling of the bowl of the pool.

Cy reached the hotel. Anton was asleep in his room. He could tell because the hallway didn’t reek like tobacco or opium. Cy turned the handle of his door; laid down. There had been far too much mystery and confusion. It was like the Topps case. Hitler. All information. All noise. No coherent, discernible thread. Except Murnau. The first form of the forces. And Melinda had tied it together for him. How did she know so much? He flashed to Jane Rogers; Melville. They were so similar. The same glimmer in the eye. The same confident, measured way of speaking. The same woman then? Or rather, Cy corrected himself, the same force? Like Murnau? Like him? Traveling through time, acting on this cosmic war. It was like the forces of good and evil, or the force of love. The force of life itself, in the face of the death drive. Springing up, again and again, like an eternal battle of Hercules and the Hydra. Fighting the same war, over and over again, until the lights went out on the cosmic ball.

He thought about fate. About action. About character. He’d been thrown into this whole detective ring by the deep, deep feeling within himself. The feeling to make things right. To solve the question, however eternal or strange, and return things to their rightful place. Their rightful owner. Their rightful time. It seemed that the cosmos itself had seized upon that impulse. That Diz, or the scribe, whoever it truly was – hell, even that wooden mask – saw that he was ripe. His soul was ripe. To seize that impulse deeper. Into a level and layer of work which was supernatural. Cosmi-natural. And to put him face to face with the eternal forces at work beneath the mask of all appearances.

So Jane was Melinda? And they were the woman he was meant to love? Cy hadn’t thought about love for a long time. He’d been too immersed in the case.

There was a knock at his door. Anton, surely.

“Still up, Cy?”

Cy opened the door.

“Just got back.”

Anton sat down at the chair and table in the hotel room.

“What happened?”

“To be honest, Anton, I have no fucking clue. I’m getting tired of this gig. But it seems like we just keep going deeper into whatever this is. Moving faster and faster, towards something I suspect we’ll scarcely be able to understand.”

Anton leveled with him. “I think that’s the nature of time.”

“Death?”

“And whatever comes after.”

That night, Cy and Anton decided to go home. Cy felt strangely heartbroken after his conversation with Melinda. Neither of them suspected that Anson would return. But they both decided to go check out the machine one last time in the light of day before they left for Boston.

When they returned to the instrument, a large crowd of Egyptians stood around it, clamoring. They made their way through the crowd as ‘American detectives’. Close, in the light of day, Anton conducted one last examination. There was an envelope taped to the control panel. He tore it off.

“Read the thing, Gogol.”

Anton cleared his throat:

CY AND ANTON –

I SUSPECT YOU UNDERSTAND BY NOW THAT THIS MACHINE IS A NATURAL ACCELERATION OF THE FORCES OF CHAOS INSTANTIATED BEFORE ANY OF US WERE BORN, STRICTLY SPEAKING. AND THAT I AM A PHASE ACTING THROUGH IT. FOR THIS, I SINCERELY APOLOGIZE. I AM, AND WAS, JUST PLAYING MY PART. NOT TO EXCUSE MY ACTIONS, OF COURSE. I’LL BE COMING BACK, JUST IN A DIFFERENT WAY. MAYBE WITH A DIFFERENT FACE. TELL MURNAU I SAY HELLO. FROM A LONGER HELL –

YOURS,

CAP

And on the back, it had a postscript. Anton read it aloud:

THE TECHNOLOGY IN THE FUTURE IS THE SAME, BUT FASTER. DOWN TO THE PARTICLE. SOUL-RENDING. FAST. IT MIGHT BE YOU, OR SOMEONE ELSE WHO TRIES TO STOP IT. HAS TO. I FEEL SORRY FOR THEM. POOR SOUL. MAYBE YOU COME BACK FOR THIS ONE, MAYBE YOU DON’T. BUT THIS ISN’T THE FIRST, OR THE LAST TIME YOU’LL SEE IT.

AGAIN – CAP.

“Damn, Anton. Fuck this.”

The crowd was getting more and more belligerent. The inexplicable was fear inducing.

“Let’s just go home.” Anton clasped Cy around his shoulder.

MYSTERY FOUR:

MADMAN PSALM

OR

CY JONES AND THE BOGARTIAN FARCE OF THE MISSING _________

When Cy and Anton returned to the U.S., they decided to move their offices to New York City from Boston. They picked a small former clerk’s office in upper Manhattan, on the east side of Central Park, to move into. Getting all the furniture in was a massive pain – even though it was just one flight of stairs. The hallway was incredibly narrow.

“You sure you want to keep this going, Anton?” Cy had sweat stinging his eyes. The table was scraping the hallway wall, leaving clear marks. That was coming out of the rent.

“See any other way?”

“Nope.”

The new office was decidedly smaller than the first. But it had wood walls, wood floors; room for a massive bookshelf. Cy’s desk was equipped with a quill and a cushioned chair. It was fine.

The two of them had grown tired of Boston. Not that they were ever there. But the opportunities felt exhausted. The supernatural didn’t pay. And the diadem-finding business was a bit more opulent in the city of lights.

Cy flashed Anton the morning paper that the delivery-boy had slid under the door.

NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 3, 1932.

“Figure they want us back in the 30s?”

“Fuck it – we’re already here. At least we won’t have to travel.”

Cy had adopted a new form of fashion. He’d begin to call it ‘disillusioned’. A trenchcoat. Low slung hat. Smoking cigarettes on the corner around the way from the offices. It hadn’t stopped raining in New York since they’d moved in. The entire city was in greyscale. And it was getting colder.

Cy shook the water off from his last cigarette before he stepped in the room. Anton looked like he hadn’t eaten for weeks. Huddled over the bag of opium like a lotus eater.

“Cy, I think we’re on our way out.”

Things weren’t looking good. The two of them were more addicted than ever. Smoking more than ever. Small cases. Cat in a tree. Woman lost her purse. Man lost his wife. And so on. Paid well enough to smoke. The occasional groceries. Kept the lights on. Both of them prayed for no more insanity. No more sealing the gaping wound of time in a series of capers that made no sense; that added up to nothing. Cosmic conscripts to reluctant acts of heroism.

And just as they were convinced it was over, one more task came over. Just as they were getting comfortable with the bells and whistles of 1932.

A man knocked on the door. Cy answered.

“I need you to look for a younger version of me.”

“Ah… fuck.”

The man came in; set his hat upon the table. The rain hadn’t stopped. He was built like a rock.

“Lou Gehrig, first baseman. New York Yankees.”

“And why do you need the younger version of you?”

“I don’t know. I was just told to tell it to you.”

“By who?”

“You think I know who?” Gehrig was irritated. “Anyways, I’ve got to run. We’ve got a game this afternoon against the Bostons. Say, here’s a couple of tickets if you two fellows want to come.”

“You’re going to need to give us more than that, Lou.”

“He’s probably playing stickball in Chinatown. Maybe you find him before the game, maybe you don’t. Either way, meet me there. You can meet Babe.”

“Who’s Babe?”

“See you then.” Gehrig picked his hat up and closed the door.

“Suppose the rain will let up for the game?”

Anton grinned. “We haven’t been to one in fifty years. Might as well go.”

Clouds swelled and broke intermittently as the two stepped outside.

Cy: “How far to Chinatown?”

Anton: “Lower Manhattan. Long blocks south.”

They trudged through the slowly letting up rain until the geography shifted. The storefronts were covered in Chinese characters. Cy saw full chickens hanging in windows. They stopped before a market selling oranges. There was a group of boys playing in the street. One walked over to them.

“Lou said you’d be coming.”

“You’re Lou?”

“The other one. You’re supposed to go down there next.”

The boy pointed with a little finger toward a basement beneath the market. A light flickered from inside.

“Any reason why?”

“Reason is I told you so.”

The boy ran back to the yelling group. One held a large ball of twine. It was slowly unraveling.

“Fuck it, Anton. Let’s go take a look.”

The basement was crowded with boxes and inventory. They had to push several piles over just to enter it. Objects clattered. Silverware. Trinkets.

Behind the boxes were sixteen long lines of terracotta men. Soldiers. Anton kicked one over. Hollow plastic. Cy sat down on the stairs.

“Why bother?”

“Why are we down here, Cy?”

“I don’t know, Anton. I don’t know.”

The two men just left. Skipped Gehrig’s game. Straight back to the office. Anton frantically digging in the rapidly disappearing bag of opium.

“I can’t read any of these signs, Anton. And I don’t even know if I want to anymore.”

“There’s a word, Cy.”

“What is it?”

“Sema. Sign, and tomb.”

“Starting to feel a helluva lot like the second.”

Cy continued. “The signs are all false. We haven’t had a clean case since Dabney. And what’s more, Cap just went on and dug it up. All that work, just for him to rob the grave.”

Anton sighed; sunk into the cushioned chair. He’d sat in it so often; so long, it was marked by the shape of his predictable body.

“I suppose that’s just what life is, Cy.”

“A series of dead-ends?”

“Whatever this is.”

They spent the entire winter shut in the offices. Day in and day out. Minor cases in the neighborhood. Nothing out of the ordinary. Cy had started smoking hashish against the opium. Strange dreams. The ghost of Baudelaire. It had become clear the two detectives were not necessarily washed up, per se, but collectively tired of righting time. Because time kept happening. It was like trying to keep a perennial toddler standing upright as it tried to walk a tightrope over a deep, dark river. Exhausting.

“I think this is an endless ship, Cy,” Anton said one evening, as he drank a cup of hot tea. Staring out the window at the smokestacks.

Cy could see Yankee Stadium, way out in the distance. An abandoned, weird lot of marshland in the Bronx. Like a haunted mansion in the moors.

“At least we know who the Yankees are now.”

“World Series champions?”

“I guess so.”

“Weren’t we supposed to be detectives Cy?”

Just as Anton uttered that sentence, a letter fell out of the book on his lap; onto the floor. The Commedia by Dante Alighieri.

It turns out the thing at hand was a man named Rube Waddell. And Cy and Anton had been loitering in the wrong decade for months.

The letter was from a man named Connie Mack; it had been sitting in the book since 1902.

CY AND ANTON:

APOLOGIES FOR THE DELAY. IF YOU’RE READING THIS IN 1933, I SUPPOSE I’M STILL WITH THE PHILADELPHIAS. GO WATCH A MAN BY THE NAME OF ROBERT MOSES GROVE PITCH. WHEN YOU GET BACK. BUT NOW. I NEED YOU TO COME BACK HERE TO 1902. I NEED TWO TOP NOTCH DETECTIVES TO RETRIEVE A WILD MAN BY THE NAME OF RUBE WADDELL. ALL SOURCES INDICATE HE’S IN LOS ANGELES THROWING FOR A BALL CLUB WAY OUT THERE. PLEASE BRING HIM BACK FOR ME. HANDSOME REWARD THEREIN.

SINCERELY; WITH MY KIND REGARDS,

MR. CORNELIUS MACK, MANAGER, PHILADELPHIA ATHLETIC NATIONALS

Cy looked over at Anton. “Suppose we still are. This is a real case, time be damned. We’ll find the man, eh?”

Anton smiled back. “Better than sitting here waiting for the frost to turn. Hopefully he means spring, 1902.”

Mack did mean spring. The two men packed their bags.

The bus was out by Yankee stadium. It was the man in the red porter’s uniform. As they boarded, he announced with a loud voice:

THE CURRENT RESIDENCE OF MISTER RUBE WADDELL, 1902!

The bus whipped forward. Dropped them in an Iowa cornfield. Middle of nowhere.

“At least tell me this is 1902,” Anton muttered to the bus driver.

“You’re where you need to be, old man!”

Cy clapped him on the back.

“Suppose we’re finally old now? One too many whiplashes. Fifty years of transit, back and forth. Suppose that builds in the gray hairs!”

Anton barely chuckled.

The bus departed, rumbling down the dirt road. There was a mailbox; a distant farmhouse.

Cy’s face dropped. “If we’re out here, we’re stranded.”

“We’re out here, Cy.”

The two men walked down the dirt road.

They passed a barefoot man in overalls, muttering gibberish to himself.

“Suspect the pale faced man wants me to roll back over and fix the whole thing. Rather be chasing firetrucks. Bedeviled fate. Do what he wish. Drag me around.” The man spat as he walked past the two detectives.

“Waddell?”

The man turned. “Who’s asking?”

“Representatives of Connie Mack and the Philadelphia Athletics.”

“What if I told the Philadelphia Athletics to go fuck themselves?”

“Then I’d say we’re merely representatives.”

Rube’s shoulders drooped a bit.

“I’m tired of the game. I just want to go home. Fuck off somewhere. Fish. Maybe fight fires. Hell. Eat ice cream.”

He kicked a stone. Looked just like a little kid.

Anton spoke up. “We don’t particularly care if you come back or not. Furthermore, who are we to convince you.”

“I’m not coming.”

“Very well,” said Cy. “But we just have to get the hell out of here.”

“Good luck,” said Rube. “You’re in Iowa.” He walked off.

It took Cy and Anton two weeks to get back to New York. They collapsed into the office. There was a letter sitting on Cy’s desk. He opened it. There was no indication as to who it was from. Inside were several pages, with headlines from various newspapers. They detailed a series of historical coups, rigged elections, and conspiratorial war cycles. Cy flipped through them with a combination of fatigue and horrified curiosity. The final page contained scrawl:

CY:

RUBE NEVER CAME BACK. NO PENNANT FOR THE PHILLYS. NO RUBE WADDELL BRAND SOAP IN PHILADELPHIA. DOWNSTREAM EFFECTS URGENT. TIME LINKS FAILED TO PROPAGATE DOWNSTREAM. URGENT ASSISTANCE REQUIRED. WE’LL BE IN TOUCH.

– THE SCRIBE

Cy groaned.

THE END

If it keeps on raining, levee’s going to break

If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break

When the levee breaks, we’ll have no place to stay

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan, oh

Mean old levee taught me to weep and moan

It’s got what it takes to make a mountain man leave his home

Oh well, oh well, oh well

Ooh

Oh, don’t it make you feel bad

When you’re trying to find your way home

You don’t know which way to go

If you’re going down south, they got no work to do

If you’re going north to Chicago

Ah, ah, ah, hey

Crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good

No, crying won’t help you, praying won’t do you no good

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move, ooh

All last night I sat on the levee and moaned

All last night, sat on the levee and moaned

Thinking about my baby and my happy home

Oh-ho

Going

I’m going to Chicago

Going to Chicago

Sorry, but I can’t take you, ah

Going down, going down now

Going down, I’m going down now

Going down, going down

Going down, going down

Oh

Going down, going down now

Going down, going down now

Going down, going down now

Going down, going, dow-dow-dow-dow-down now

Ooh, ooh

manuscript ends here; remaining leaves not recovered.

A century after the manuscript was discovered and attributed to Sol White, the author was identified. His name was Ricardo Rincon. Rincon was an immigrant from the jungles of Mexico; born to an archaeologist mother from Ukraine; a laborer from just outside of Mexico City. There was no clear, contiguous historical record for his movements, nor for his life as a whole.

However, The Irreverent Comedy of Detective Cy Jones and His Discontinuous World of Magical, Mystical American Baseball was recoverable to Rincon due to a forensic handwriting match to a now-classic text, The Notebooks of Ricardo Rincon, published by the author in Brazil, 1974. Only fifty copies were distributed; most to his immediate circle of colleagues and fellow writers.

There was no discernible reason why the former manuscript was uncovered in a Chicago attic. It was not clear that Rincon had ever lived in America. By historical record, he joined a group of Brazilian political radicals as a teenager in 1970; disappeared after attempting to replicate a commune style revolution in Rio de Janeiro.

Rincon’s manifesto regarding species evolution remains lost, although oral accounts of its existence survive. The Notebooks, however, persist as an example of late-century prophetic manuscript. Several literary historians, to this day, believe that these Notebooks were Rincon’s attempt to institute a new, modern religious cosmology — as the 20th century fragmented into what is now reflected upon as a globalized, technologized oblivion.

Presented here, to make whole the remnants of the life of Ricardo Rincon, are The Notebooks of Ricardo Rincon.

The Notebooks of Ricardo Rincon

FRAGMENT ONE:

I can still remember the wooden bricks of stone that extended on down the main way, where I walked, thinking about nothing, knowing nothing, and experiencing everything. My name is Ricardo Rincon; who and what I was was a great ghost, a spectre that haunted the world. A spectre of pure sensations. Not thoughts; without identity, or any sense of what being is and requires in the world of sights and sounds. Whether there were peasants or kings, I knew not. Whether there was a secret meaning between night and day, I knew not. What I grasped; moved through in this world was nothing. I strode because I was called to stride. I came because I was called to come. And I did not know from whence this calling came.

I was a painter; neither man nor woman, being nor non-being. I must urge you to understand these circumstances. When you are pure immortal vision, you exist rather as a temporary inhabitance of form; thus cannot make any true claim to being in any physical, stolid way. This gave me the great gifts, the gifts of being a nothing in a world full of desperate somethings. I moved because there was a purchase upon my form. From whence that purchase came, again, I cannot say. Even now, looking back, in these reflections, the purchase appears simply to be a provenance which is illegible to mortal beings; does not reside firmly within the sight of the living. Rather, it is a purchase from a series of networks, clotheslines; hearty, invisible links which sew the body into the knot of temporaries.

These were the links that sewed me, with those hands, as they sewed the whole lot of you. I suppose my great gift was that those links did not allow this world of appearances to have any purchase on me. I could not invest in this inherited, flabby name — Ricardo Rincon — nor could I invest in the attempted purchase of my hours and my wage of the day. No identity or claim on existence could exert any power whatsoever over me. My eyes, themselves, peered over the nest of the world and saw into the abyss of configurations. What was beneath and before them foremost. This purchase primordial.

In my paintings, my paintings became my body. So, then, did my books. Even as my body squawked and urged me forth like a bird from the nest of being, I manufactured deeper corpses for my true form, which I tossed into a pile. Each form became firewood, tinder for the next. I suppose you do not know anything about the Platonic ideals. I discovered that beneath these ideals was nothing; thus, nothing became my identity.

The freedom of movement that this agency provides is profound. There are a thousand calls to life, but only a very minute thread of these calls amounts to anything. Consider it like a telephone line. If a man or a woman calls you, and requests your presence, some bit of information, to acquire a sale — how much of that action actually moves you forth? For a person like me — person being such a tenuous word for the thing — very little was capable of persuading me of anything. So you see, the call was not a matter of desire, as very little struck the true chord of desire from within my body. It became a matter of necessity. I fell casually to and from the easiest convenience; rather, had little to no interest in the affairs which were quickly exposed to me, over and over again, as nothing but the nose clearing of an unconscious species.

What could I gain, that could not reveal to me a deeper innocence? This was the predicament of a being on earth who and what was non-being. That human was a form, a disguise, a symbolic literature. I did not, rather, obey the symbology of the body, the script that writ it into being. The script had done something interesting, I suppose. It had created the capacity to recognize the script as a script. And thus, I did not seek the meaning of the letters. I sought the force that wrote them. It was there and therein that I saw myself. And this was the problem.

Understand — in this world, in the age of men in which I strode, reluctantly, this was an age of foolishness. I saw about me only animals. And very rarely, marked in the histories with a red exclamation, were those lofty minds or characters who pierced the veil of existence and revealed but aspects of the hidden, true nature of the self. Some were men in the mountains of India who meditated in caves and emerged with cosmologies. Others were shoemakers and watch-makers, who had visions and experiences of a power beyond the appearances of the everyday. Regardless, these were my only true companions.

When you are only called by the dead, or by the extreme rarity of vision that surmounts a condition of great poverty, you allow life to take you. Like the currents I rode in the early days, walking along those wood bricks of stone. I went to the river. It sat below the gravestones where I lingered, often, in states of uncertainty, in the midst of the passage of life’s storm. The currents would bring the body over stones; time, with the bottle of red wine, would drift in the sparkling blue of the carving waters moving along their way. The golden light of the sun struck them; as they moved, the light danced and pricked in the waves. This was the nature of the names and faces I saw about me.

Your life to me was a game, as was my life to myself. A universe sculpted by a dancing fool — of sandcastle bodies and sandcastle beings. We entered and arrived; performed our stations in the farce like a neighborhood Shakespeare; left due to simple factors of physical time. The entrance and movement of heat through organic bodies. The fell troubles which entrance all forms whose secret, sacral nature is within the formless. And all the while, fretting over a false ground, a falsity. Why was one so entranced to belief? I walked this world, asking this question. Too young to understand the answer; furthermore, too young to understand the gift of my condition; even to question whence it came. Only to scream into emptinesses. For there was no human or waking force to answer. Only sleeping forms, ambulatory, but deaf and dead.

Being a painter, I was really a poet. I saw and spoke in images that stretched across space and time. It would be years before I realized the canvas was too small for my ambitions; even one stage of playwriting could not extend the full body of what was required for my world to fulfill. Imagine being an expanseless force. This is what I was. And I met girls in diners who were real people. Just as I met professors, beggars. All of you were real. But I do not know why. Is it because you made yourselves as such? Filled with mad conviction? Importance? Did you take what was given to you by others?

Think of a name for example. This is not made by you. It is ordained by the flow of time. Ancestors, memories, and an aspect of chance and contemplation within time by other forms. And yet you take it and make it yours. This is the nature of nations, religions, thoughts, ideas, and preconceptions. Most people, if we can call them such things, are formed entirely by these chance notions carved by historical intuitions of others. You, a stone in the avalanche of time. And I could understand this, in the sense of the calling forth. Yet, I could not believe in the world that people created as compensations for the base of forth-callling.

The city itself was my surrogate body in the most immediate sense of sustenance. Currents, airflows, supermarkets. Provisions of the self to sustain a movement of energetic flows. The shit in the sewers of the high-ceilinged tobacco factory apartments. The slave market memorials, cut among the same cobblestones. What was living and what was dead was what moved. Did the dead themselves twitch in their tombs? If you understand the intricacies of decomposition, you will understand that the bones speak forever, until they are no longer possibly bones, nor contained within the artifice of wooden coffins.

And this is why I call the body of the city wooden bricks of stone. The architectures themselves were a desire. A desire that I could feel; baked into the heart of hearts of all of these mad, racing animals about me. The name, the title. What it was was a desire to persist. And this desire was engraved into every single scrap of language which floated from each pair of lips; what’s more, each movement of each body. Each mortar before each stone. But I did not know this until later. That this is what separated me from a great deal of life. I suppose I myself could not be convinced of this cage of animal life, nor that my ideas, thoughts, conceptions, or characters were nothing more than imaginary acts. I was, as they call it, in the deepest sense, a free man. And yet, young, this caused me so much pain.

You will ask — Ricardo — why were you in so much pain, if you were truly, deeply free? I will tell you, dear reader. I was in pain because the world around me was so deeply unfree. What is one man’s freedom in the face of a world’s unfreedom? Understand this. That we are animals until we are not. Then we are vehicles carrying a form of consciousness which is expansive. Out beyond the primal body into the sphere of existence itself. The totality. And this is where the mind and the body receive wisdom that extend beyond it. So to speak, an evolutionary technology. And to be on the cusp of this form of revolution — which is really a revolution of what one is and what one is capable of at the deepest root — is where man was when I carved these words into the light of false stone.

Others, their pain, it is the eyes of a speechless, warm flesh. A meat which is finding the eyes to see. And is not yet entirely out of the maze. So I did not understand — these murders, these romances, these fantasies which governed the mad decisions which churned the wheel of the great modern machine. The depravities, the lies, the incisions. Until I understood the true violence of the animal. I did not come to such violences from below. I came to them from above. They were foreign to me, until I attempted to taste them. And it was then that I understood what an animal was. To walk back the body through history; to set it in the earth and dirt; to experience what those who came before me experienced and saw. This was a reluctant but desperate act of empathy. What did I have in this world, but to attempt to understand the realities of a species struggling, screaming for emergence into a paradigm of only faintly glimpsed, possible liberation?

I saw how they valorized and lionized such appearances of such minds. Too wild, too crazed for the terrain of the everyday. The hopes, baked into the deepest, darkest recesses of the species mind, to manufacture such a consciousness from the raw material of bodily sacrifice. If such a mind existed in the present tense, it could not be incorporated into the existing infrastructures. For it would break them. The chains of religion. The chains of institutions, academias. The chains of business and currencies. These were all strung against the body of an animal yet incapable and unequipped to face the realities of what was behind the mask of the tenuous form, to which it clung with all of its might. Like a dial before the abyss. These minds were exiled in life, but appreciated in death. Why? Because only a symbolic pulse toward the real was tolerable. If such a thing existed, truly existed, it would force them to come face to face with what they could not metabolize; incorporate. What was still beyond their incarnate limit.

So what I did was I would paint; I would work, and I would move like a spectre amongst these false affairs. Respect their naming conventions, however ludicrous; move amongst their stone monuments to manufactured, imagined histories. Histories which would obey fundamental laws; disappear and die. Have, perhaps, dalliances with women who sought to bring me into the cinema of their affairs — a cinema which was simply a naked biological desperation. All of these forces, I refused at the level of the root. And thus, it allowed me to move freely about them. Albeit, not without a great despair, which to this day I still do reconcile. Even as I have seen this farce now as a carnival of hilarity; allowed this man to be comedic device, what it still creates in a man such as me is a sensation of profound, near absolute loneliness. For I exist on a plane that you cannot see, cannot hear, cannot feel, cannot touch. I, myself, are not so allied to the codes that you so desperately adhere.

And those codes, my friend — are to persist. And only to persist. If you were to strip them from you, absolutely, it would be akin to an ancient sacrifice. This is, in your history’s terms, an exposure to death. And so when you met me, or your ancestors met me, they encountered something they could only know, feel, or see as death. They experienced the particular heaviness, the particular weight of presence; the freedom from ideas and methods and scopes which are so typical of your race. Instead, all they met was an abyss of pure forces. The world before their own. And this drew them. It drew them forth with fascination and gravity of a power that they sensed. And men seek power like they seek survival. Because men experience power and survival as the same thing. The same force. And yet, this power was the power before life and death. Before being and non-being. The pure force that coursed through the universe, independent of names and identities. And there is not; was not, a way to categorize this in the annals of man.

You see, this force is the force at the bottom of everything; simultaneously, everything you are built and acculturated to ignore. If you saw it for what it is, you would be free. You would, simply, no longer be human. For being human is a task. To survive. To procreate. These are perhaps the only two real missives of mankind; yet, about them we have built an elaborate show. You seek to confine your theatre to playhouses and screens, so as to convince yourself that your imaginal space is cramped; confined; the world outside is the real. Wherein, all you have done is further deluded yourself. It is your very sight. Your body, bones, nervous system. Your eyes — that compose the nature of your reality. And your reality is only toward yourself. Your survival. Your manufacture of the person who is even deserving of such a thing. How can we go into your private madnesses? They would never end. You would refute me, debate me, all to, at the end, leave with a sigh of satisfaction and self righteousness. For you have done what you should. Protect yourself from the violence of the abyss.

For this is a violence. It is the violence which kills. It is somewhat the Aztec rite. If you were to die to your illusions, you would die. You would be something like me. A force that moves and is formed and goes like a hurricane, where it is called; works where it works. An action that simply does. This is not to say I cannot acknowledge my body — no, I acknowledge it quite well. The flatulences. The evacuations. The sensations. Fingers, hands, mouth, throat, neck. The musculature. But I understand this as a carrier of the force at work. A messenger, a deliverance of it.

And this explains how I ended up as a painter in the city. I was delivered from the mountains among strange people, for reasons as simple as worldly finances. How can I know why the greater hand moves, or what forces are at work behind each decision? We would like to claim the rational mind as what moves the pieces upon the board. That we are conscious, developed actors capable of changing the time. But do you not see how intricate the time is? And how easily forces can manifest and proclaim in order to change circumstance? To hear my speech, you would understand — that there is scarce a force in the world that is conscious. And where consciousness is, such is surrenders — to what is truly at hand.

I let the current move me from those mountains to being among men. Men and women who fix tires, who work as nurses in hospitals; deliver babies; sermon and lecture about topics which will be seethed by the fires of time almost imminently. Serve coffee. Beg in front of apartment buildings; drinking port wine. I am sure you can anticipate the common agonies of a force such as myself amidst the waking world of ambulatory affairs. It is near pointless. I did not even try to move them. I drifted; drifted into the darkest points of nights. Wandering, without aim, without goal. For there is nothing a man such as myself in this world can achieve. What goal, what medal, what purpose can mankind provide me? I stood above it all, understanding what dark waves of time crashed beneath it; the echoes of mortal affairs. Myself being mortal, rather, but with no such claim upon the mortal form. I would be a flash of consciousness amidst an abyss; be received wherever I was received; return to the chambers of shifting light and shadow; pulsing, formless energy.

I suppose this gives you fear. To me, this is rather basic. A ground I have moved over several times. But when I come to you, even present in my body, without speaking these words, you feel my presences. Of this ground. And I know, too, and feel your ground. Perhaps more consciously than yourself. And I understand and forgive your toothy impulse to defend your ground from the violence of my own. For I would drag you beneath your own; expose you to this abyss, in which you would have no true foothold — considering you are not a native to it.

Men and women like you have tribes. Religions. Codes of culture. Orientational directions based on where you are from, where you are born. Family tithes. I understand. Men are from such places, at least on the level they can immediately grasp. And everything else is fear. When you are born at the ground wherein I am born, all of the world is common. Because my ground is the place in which all things are truly born. The soil in which they fruit and ferment alike. And you will ask me — Ricardo, why do you not speak about such places? They are nothing. Less of a nothing than me. And yet, I can see their value to you. They provide a sense of safety and stability. They manufacture a world which, to you, feels like a possible reality — a reality in which to make your nest of identities; networks of presumed truths. And you may not even believe in or agree upon these truths in your heart of hearts. They may appear to be pure nonsense. And yet, you agree to participate in them. Because the alternative, nothingness, is not a tolerable bet.

I only give you my name, Ricardo Rincon, as a gratuity, an artifice. Something for you to cling to, however minute. I was not even given this name. I found it, like a scrap of paper; stuck it in my pocket for awhile. Understand that this is the nature of true poetry — it is the bringing to bear of consciousness to a world unripe, unprepared. And this was why I wrote. Upon napkins, in notebooks, scraps of paper. Upon walls. The world is itself the flesh of consciousness turned inside out. And for me to write — it is not even a small rebellion. It is simply a matter of bringing to bear that which I am. This is the primal instinct of all writing; the importance therein. The cultures that we experience, this is the extent of our agreed upon feeling. And to examine these cultures, but even for a moment, is to understand why the species of man itself is in such a deep; profound misery.

For what you are ready for is sex, pleasure. Small conveniences. Trinkets. Reassurances that what you do, say, and think is propriety. That it is correct; right. Not for the disabused revelation of the fall beneath your hubris of the form. You move away from revelation; toward the predictable, repetitions of bureaucratic abuse of power. Iconography and submission. For you need a power to worship, you yourself not willing to yet find the power within yourself because of what it truly costs. You see, for a man of your ilk, a politician or a king, one of your so called leaders — for such a man to meet a man like me is for him to come face to face with everything he claims he is, but he is not. There is no worldly power. There is, of course, worldly theatre of power. And this is your world. The game of make-ups, make believes; the appearance of powerful words. The exercise of weapons and forces to achieve temporary ends. What, truly, is your world but a game of miseries? What, can you tell me, have you truly gained? And yet, you will continue. Because you are afraid to die. Dressing up, once more, for this world of farce games.

The story of Ricardo Rincon therein has no real beginning nor end. He goes where he goes; does what he does. The details, themselves, are almost irrelevant. It is the function that Ricardo Rincon has been called to perform in the world. Do you understand this? It is the function of a man of the shades who walks out onto the play of history and does not bite. The king performs his predictable tirade. Men work in the fields. Women find their mate and bear their fruit. Suns rise and set as images appear, selling products. Ricardo Rincon is the true depth. Not a representative, but rather, the body of the true depth incarnate on earth. To be such a thing is to be nothing. And therein, granted all of the powers of the true life. I suppose you and I may war over what is true or not. Your wealth, your political power, your sense of communal bond over tenuous agreement. Yes, perhaps these things all are true, within their context.

Permit me, now, to speak in my language to you.

FRAGMENT TWO:

Planets swirl at Babylon

Where you place grapes in your mouth, like Salome

Endlessly regenerated into fallen Versailles; golden palaces burning

In a Roman Death.

We look forward to stars burning; constellations turning

In our speech

As language morphs from a shifting mouth

Toward a sign of light

Tripping through the trees:

Here, down upon the ground

Minds piece themselves together in a labyrinthian Time

Ever shifting grounds of pink flesh

With blue synapses drifting toward an equilibrium

Of pronunciation

Your sky, in the eyes

Standing atop sand-pyramids in a long desert

Now soiled with oil and glass

Toward a burning obscured in the haze

Of an artificial daylight

The crack of light; a hair-ray of Time

Where you wore all of your clothes; contracted in pain

Horrors of the theatre ruin

Where you shed your body into the crystal river

Of the nerve

Forget our angel villages. Forget our Alps

Seers twisting their beads; seer womaness

Into the volcano

With all your veiled charms — eyeless

Forget our labor

In the fields before mad king-gods

False beliefs

Like blindfolds

Forced submission

Like an antelope

To a jaguar’s mouth

We were people

And thus equipped

With a novel function

Priestess of the stars — with your ruler and microscope,

Chart of the map of the descent:

Inanna woman

Our first poetry

Our science beneath flesh

And the waiting of days

Down through the ages, your light is cast

Twisting perilously, like a die

Through the body

Time and time again, we are thrown

Into mysteries

Beating, bleating

Against the doors of the body;

The blood smeared door of the stone.

A doe-moss, a tortoise-flower;

A forgotten war in the Pyrenees; a pharaoh

At the door of death

Paved over with garlands of mythology;

A way paved into the underworld

With symbols of color

And signatures of the stars

Smeared upon stone

We take our hands into the dye of life

And pull turquoise from the body

Move it across seas

To mark the lover’s dream.

We are all of the bedsheets

Which billow over history

Like a shroud, a mirror

A curtain

Before a seaside storm.

Looking out, forever, upon the ocean

Of changing fortunes; of fates woven with blue threads

Across the loom

With our backs turned to sight,

A head, a face

Without eyes

Burning Hellas, burning stone

And flee — on the march where the blood is surrendered

To a newborn child.

Forget all our histories, our myths, our cultures.

There is a greater knowing

Within the seed of the womb;

Furthermore,

Within the burning star

Behind them — watching over

In a secret lordship

A thousand spears

Against the temple doors,

Defiled, breached walls;

Scarred nose and mouths

Of the goddess

The sun, flippantly overhead

Turns pages in a book of figures

Signing their bodies in the cosmos

Like a dial, light rips through the flesh

And makes a sound.

Can we hear it? Have we learned to hear

The silent thunder

Which vibrates through the body

And produces the sacred

In the form of feces

Image

Of the burning

Pit

Give us eyes, from leaves

Cut with properties

With the potential to produce madness

And make seers

Out of modern men.

Toadstools, venom, and light

Mixed in the dark blood of the stem

Of the flower

Steaming in the noonday light.

We ripen in forgotten jungles;

Fall into bed with souls of prophecy;

Awake to fire.

Give us masks

To wear in this dance of the soul

About the pyre of the body

Surrounded by wilderness

In a woods we cannot speak

Yet sense

With the damp sweat

Of living meat

This is what is coming:

An unknowable death

From which

Something unspeakable

Twists

From womb-fluid

Screaming, not an animal

Not a man

Not a beast, nor alien

But star-fire, writ into form

Prophecied over and over again

By the hot steel, ripped in the forge

And thrown into Arctic ocean’s cool:

Passions rage

In feeling

Inscribed in the quick-blood; the incensed mind

Slumbered in the vat of dreaming

And drawn forth again

In the sunny sword of the day —

About the temple of the earth

Metal rots; throbs

Like a stick of blood

In a young vein.

This is life:

Together, whispering

In a root system

Of tendrils of nerve.

Screaming, as the pitch tips

Into transformation’s oblivion.

The skin’s ingredients

Thrown into a cauldron

Of witch-like melodies.

This stormy brew,

Twisting from a Sirian world

Of stars who speak a language like ours

Slanted into incomprehensibility

Called into a dark vacuum

Of sleep-death;

Images contorted

Without joint

Into a stretched body

Of force

And there you go:

With your black hair like cold space

Wrapped around the small earth body

Like an infant

Your flesh deranged

By prophecy.

Your eyes, coal embers

Which enchant, enthrone

And throw life from its perch.

Ravenness, your claws

Upon the lithe, stone angel

Who stands watch over our graves.

Let the sun go black with smoke

Peering with rosy hue

Over the fear.

Ravenness, your breast

Upon which men and cheetahs alike

Suckle and weep

For pleasures.

You give me the obeah-night

Where bones roll within my cranium;

Chambers of death twist

In a black revolver.

On our private boat

Together, through the swamps of lust

Careening through the broken animal corpses

Of the body of human history.

Did you conspire, this way

Taking a Napoleon, or a peasant woman

Putting her in Africas, of Ellis Island

In chains

Upon a market stockade

Did you twist her face

In the maroon light

And force her

In the bed of slaves

This is what we know of the Fates:

That we are cast in the penumbral ocean

Of satisfactions

And unknown feelings

To thirst in hunger

Toward unknown forces

It is in this world

That you be my desire

And I be your dark priest

Who is a beggar, a nobody, a coffin

And a blue light

Flickering in a bird-eye

Whipping past the window of your sensate

Post

Give you words,

Shut you up in a body

And mate me

Against a black curtain of the stars

Bled into indistinguishable smears of light

Against our turning world

You sigh and break

And crumble back into your body

Of regular days

I turn, madman

To the fire

Of my secret.

Let us gladly spill

In this moon, where we revolt

And conjure up the last mad spasm of flesh

In the face of the mysteries

Which take our faces

And shatter us into incomprehensible pieces

Of light-glass

Gathered by a dark god

And stitched into throes

Of new passion

A panther

Stalking the erotic beloved

Through the fields and jungles

Of Time

Despair, the yellow concrete porch steps.

All, thousands of worlds whittled into one;

The gaunt, pale eyed walking

Across the monolith of the world.

Stone ground to dust; dust ground to stone:

Evacuated of possibility; thrown

From the seat of majesty

Into the death of machines.

A heart beats, loudly, then calmly

In bursts of passion and dream.

In slow time, the waving leaf

Drinks sun then disappears

In black sleep.

Coming and going in measures, without illumination.

A pestle of spirit beating the seed

Into red juice.

It dyes the stone, coat of the earth

Brandished, gaudily

To black abysses.

We are: the coat the dead wear

As they whisper of memories

Which themselves are really but dreams.

Slipping from us, like a nectar of smoke

Goes the blood rhythm — sap of our trees

Bleeding from the puncture

Of experience.

Until we are riddled; speak no more.

The ground must collect us; thoughts become rivers

Between the baudy thighs of the stars.

Back and forth from desecration —

Towards union, spat

In war-furies.

It was in a jungle that I lost my mind, or in a trench

Upon an empty beach. We grasped nothing

But the bell that rang loudly; shook what was left of the coming death

From my branches.

We would be such glad immortals

If the sun did not set;

If the infant of death did not rise from the East

Revealing the abandoned one.

In the ruins, we fuck, feed; swing naked from apartment windows

Like chandeliers.

Bullets gladly fly

In nights of broken silence. Our arms

Like winter branches.

The sacrum, but a severed stump, where the god once lived

Stewing in passionate fury.

All of this, is enough

To suckle upon the stone

With a body old, wrinkled; crevassed, with the dead, cracked earth.

Our tongues upon the last water

Of the dribbled spirit of gods old and disempowered

Thrown from the towers

Of ancient words

Seething, like embers

In the pit of our woes.

And the day breaks, the dawn

Of an ugly, twisted mouth

Cutting toward silence.

Beauty, shut up in her private terror

In a house of lashings

In a furniture of the mind.

We speak to haunted walls. But only ghosts of chairs,

Wisps of words, like spiritual hair

Stream from the body of the earth

And evacuate into the black annals of space. Through the body

Moves the dirt of the fire

Through the body, shocked, ajar

Crumbles sensation

Into agonies.

And yet, vines haunt; villages,

They conduct our curtain. May the eyes shine, but for a moment longer

Star-lit with pressing questions; unresolved

Mortal clothes.

I dreamed this dream

In a long line of the fallen, crossed

Brutes: stung with feeling, shuffled up against the wall of Time

And shot — in a procession, one by one

Stuffed into the cave of my body.

Each insect, lizard, ancestral ghost

Haunts the penumbral tomb

Which swings, even now, like a pendulum

Down upon the black stone

Of my mortal fury.

And fury is this alone — passionate meaning in the face of Death.

That fire burns, visions crest and turn within it

As I am dragged, each fell day

Toward the beast; the wet hot maw

Of hell-summers.

The dog of hell wears a chain

That beats against the brain. His eyes shine

With immortal coal. What bell rings, down there in the abyss

To which men rise

And shovel hot stones, penitent

For eternity.

I have, but for a moment

The flash of blue, so quick that it were

But a robin or a sparrow before my window;

A flying thing,

A life before Death

So wild and crazed, so brute and so dumb

So wounded

As to drive me passionately insane.

As the star crests the hill-fire

In blue-red tendrils of agony; breaks

Over the haunted black halls of the doomed; entombed

Their trails of soil

Shoveled over the mouths and eyes

Of the leagues of men, beasts, and birds

Severed at the root

By the hungry burning.

In circles, it stalks; in measures

It breaks sanctums; emboldens the leaf and the firefly alike.

It is the passion in Powers

In which forces drive towards ecstasy and consumption.

A whole world stalked by Death; in fleeing,

Consecrates empires of illusion.

But for this brief theatre, what would we have

But the vision of fire

And the star which burns, such vast leagues

In the skylit night; beneath

In the tomb of the writhing body.

It is in all, the dance of the mad

In a brick asylum, far from here:

In this world of words and dream images

Smeared upon the prison of stone. A long body

Of the Promethean line

Quaking before the dial of life

Which commands us

As we turn, evermore, toward the inner star.

It is the star which seethes

In the woman, as she fills the room with her womb;

It is the horror she feels

Cut with the ecstasy

As she is borne away

In the wave of generations.

It is the star which seethes

In the man who berates the stone

Whose ires fly into the eye of the stars,

Fates laughing

At the hubris of a skull

Streaked with blue intimations

Of being.

They walk in leagues of the dead. Processions,

Hand in hand

Over the hills

Toward the land where the horizon breaks;

Words cannot know oblivion.

Away — away from the land of the living:

Petty, mortal concern;

The quartered face, backed away

From the vacuum force which beckons it forth:

Here, into the fray of harpies;

Torn flesh and earth,

The closed farce of the sight of the mind

And all it conjures.

Sitting stoically in the hearse, unmotivated

But by the pure forces. The fields which pull the forgotten body;

The vacated fear

Which animated the corpse.

They sit, composed,

Now only to be broken, without questions

By the picking of beetles; the wet-leaves

Of summer’s end.

Come, star,

Whisper in my ear:

Laughing as I cry

Upon the pier of all your thoughts, your angry distant burning

Which is only the seething of my mortal thoughts; my mortal woes

As they glimmer in an anguish

That alights my body. What do you have to tell me about your life?

Slightly longer than my own:

You who heat the breast of mountains,

Closer still to God, and the angelic orders of being.

Light of lights — who fashion me

In your purse

To wish in agonies

Forevermore?

Chained in furies, broken into sorrows

In the seat of despair which sits unmoving

Turned only by the crest of empires; the fatigue of the red ember

Sifting and dying

By the poker of my hands and soul?

I say that I am damned first; fallen far, but that in your sight

Your body breaks in kind. Not so firm, walls that are pierced

By the furnace of your flesh. Doomed to burn, as I hunger for girls

Or spurn lovers

Or break my days into unforgivable portions

Of distraction; refutation of this vocation —

Star, you whom I see, cast of your soul,

Down below, your worries

Take a mind. These words, your words, you speak

As you careen into burnt-out sorrows.

Cast, henceforth, into the preening gape:

The peacock of immortal absences —

Neither living nor dead,

We tumble,

Entwined.

This is your dress

Which streams down

In summers

Where I am undone,

Cleaved in agonies

Which only the palms of my hands

And their thick veil of skin

Can hope to obscure.

Pressed against the eyes which see

To the depths of your lie. Must we swim in deception longer,

We who are condemned to ground; pressed to the belly

Of your entranced body

You who keep our gods in your dance. Swirling about your bright eye;

In lusts, consume

To still this red spine in the blue waters;

To dip the night in anguish

And thus only

Seethe smoke

Under moonlights.

It must be this — the lake; only the shadow of your thought:

The moon of your feelings, but a blaze of the spirit

To carve life into the realm

Of shades.

We were given bodies to lie,

Bodies, the damned

To feed on the green stalk of your blood

But for a minute longer. To measure flesh in pounds;

To scythe trees for winter’s light.

We who, so doomed, break over your beloved

In the last hope of resurrection:

Can we not meet such bright ends

In the embrace of the lover

So as to break within the star

Immortal ecstasy’s glance?

She throws from us

And dies in sorrows

As the sun ticks

Overhead.

Into the valley of dooms

Thrown: the beautiful, young girls

Who are the light of life. Careening, scraping

With the dead flesh of fingernails

Against the pyrite belly of your bones.

Clawing, against the limestone.

Fire of hells, what say you!

To this, and all things

Which swim in your agony

Yet rest, ridiculously, in horror

In such utter silence.

That I speak your name, is this enough?

Beast that feeds the flesh,

That proceeds through the dying, the young,

The blood

As it whimpers and collides

With stone?

We are stopped by a force of perils:

The body and the breath cannot hold.

The wave, the breast

Of a black mountain, which lingers on, henceforth

Out of memory — both living and dead.

So do days drift into blackness,

Forgotten dirges: spun with but a gleaming emerald

Or immortal fire, which conjures up the memory of love

From the wounded, riddled cask of the body.

Drooping, lilting forth, as it dances in the desert-dusk

Of fell moonlight

Slivered into drought and poverty.

This is the anguish

Spoken by the black boy

In the ruins of the broken city,

Whose ruins

Much like Agamemnon or Diana

Much like Persia or Troy,

Much like the skeleton of the emperor

Picked away by black-eyed carrion.

Between the smoke, I whisper

But a haunt, of the blue birds of the soul

Which fly away from the bodies of this world:

Illusions so grand, so immense

They appear utterly breakless.

But here, here is the seam

I have woven, with bloody fingers

Upon the spindle of Time;

With each breath

I divide

The fell evils

Into measures.

Will they let us board upon the ship;

Let us stand, like pillars in the galley

Smeared with our own refuse

As the trade-winds capsize

This body of salt and wood?

Will they let us wander

In the dismal swamps

Until we are ripped apart;

At the bay of hounds?

It is this moss-light which lingers

Flashing, first before our agonies

Which draws us deeper into perils.

That I am haunted by the brokenness

I descend

In attempt to recover

The missing flesh

Of my body, of my soul.

Wading, wading

Where roots fear to tread.

Wading, wading

In the isle abandoned, not even of ghosts

To prowl and fade.

There, I trade bodies

With the unnamed god. He lingers, tall

This body of shadow.

And there I whisper, early

These dooms.

Pray, there, give us a measure of peace

In Beauty. In the water, which was traced and carved

By a finger of Destiny: active in all our affairs.

Drawn here and there by dalliances;

The shining image

Of dreams.

At last, star,

I simmer, drunk

And fallen

Leaping and glimmering, so long

Tipping, temperate

Into only dissolution.

One who rages is stilled, just as the silent, just as the sallow

In the same dripping blood:

Which rains, like golden light,

Whether horror, agony, or paradise

Down upon the empty day

Of beating sight.

Ruined, over and over again

By mortal wounds

Which vacate the body; turn it to

An empty

Seer.

It is a body, within the water

Cut with unseeing, mist-eyes

Lolling and stilled

In the void silence

Toward the place

Beyond

Damnés, nous parlons encore,

portant le crâne

dans les mesures

du tonnerre bleu.

The shaman of my fingertips presses up against the veil.

Hopeless, time churns like a vat of souls

Screaming slowly into their hands. My blue nerve

Against the blackness.

Again I speak, against the trees

In a compulsive heartbeat. Trading melodies, they sit

As I:

Drinking the spirits of the dead.

Such angry burning,

But soothes the whole body

In a dissolute trance.

Broken from the world, I float, dancing

In the sacrificial vent:

Soul-smoke

Rising from the body flesh.

Slowly, the star strips off her clothes to bathe

In the blue rivers of infinity. We make words

To remark upon the heat of her bodice;

How she throws off the body

With such abandon.

In these, the last hours

We breathe the blood, mingled with air and water.

The bird; the flesh, prickled with hairs

Whose astonished eyes cannot believe

Perception’s awakening.

We tried; we climbed the cool air.

And the absurd twist: paperwork in the Pleiades

Documents of the symbols of the dreamer.

The mind: sit in the vats of stars; grow eyes

Vatic waiting room,

A cool pyre, as the flesh of the river runs over us.

I taste chemical bliss; throw my fetters

But for her to snap the tether

Like a dog upon a leash.

I am so close to infinites

I can taste them, like a morphine tongue

Which speaks, inhaling the breath from the belly of the earth.

Skin made permanently mad by revelation.

It is brief: here,

Until we are thrown from this earth

To drift in the bliss of the stars.

How does it feel?

To have the open heart, festering, pressing tendrils of light

Against perennial blackness.

It is to be ripped from the ground and shattered

And feel the entire body, warm,

Pressed against love.

Billions of years of hallucination. I grasped the hedgehog

And pressed him up to my face

As to transfer his wisdom to me; mine to him

In a place beyond translation.

But he is held in his firm bones, as am I.

Each delicately carved branch within my skull

Pulsing with information’s song.

How can we be sure of what we see?

Strip everything from me, and take my mind

As a glass

Through which to see.

The blue crystal fire

Which rips through the river-rain, the wind

Which breaks against my flesh in the calm of the day.

Palms rustling against coronal storms.

We are the close eyes in the brush

That rip open the face of the body;

Face beneath face, breast beneath breast;

Mask beneath body.

I am the hottest star, that gleams, unknown

In private galaxies,

In painted purple rooms

Holding malicious parties. Overdoses,

Whispers;

The book of all poems, sung by all dreamers

Sung in states of stupors

As ages of the sun turned;

Erased.

Blinding by blinding,

We stood atop stone pyramids

And watched the tempest of waves break over empires.

Break over configurations of the blue blood of the nerves;

Shatter over centuries of the processions of the masks of the dead:

Masks now only carved in stone.

Again and again, I watched the star break before me.

I watched her eyelids rip open

And reveal the common Death between all things. In the last moment,

A recognition

Of the primordial fire and fire alone,

Within the form which it climbed.

We are nothing else,

But the eyes opened so wide

As to Revelation.

How temporary is this revelation.

How long does it sit in the minds of stars, turned over with questions,

Seething, even if hidden

And transmitted in the book of black words

Which hold the entire body of the universe

In natal fluids.

I dreamed the hot light

Crashing through the flesh-belly of the earth

As I turned within the water

Which was sweet with the sap of salt

Cut with the bitter grit of stone.

And it was here that I said it. Heard, and felt it

As I carved it into stone

And screamed it

Into the memory of the air

Which held me like a shadow

Before the procession of death.

Into the mysteries I fell,

Into the cave of troubles, worries, and the gurgling speech of the liver;

The beating cast of the pumping machinery:

The factory of production, I watched

As energy ripped through and without me

Like a transmission

Like a flute:

This, the music of my worries

The worries of a forgotten star

Tumbling in the breach,

Tumbling in the breath

Unseen

I tore open the body

So as to see

How the sunlight was sustained

By measures of flesh; blood, taken in

And whispered through the refuse

Shot through the holes of the organ.

Escaping instrumentation.

This is how it is: to become aware

Like a honeybee, amidst tumbling in the golden powders

Of illumination —

Like a seed, who has grown eyes

Of the butterfly.

Upon wings, like an angel

I sat and contemplated:

Upon the rock of the earth, overlooking the great cosmopolitan city

Of all times

Churning, within the rock

The chaos of upheaval.

Like an angel, my fist upon my cheek

Looking upward to a cracked sky,

Riddled with the warring lightning of my kind;

The feathers that fell

From the extinguished ones.

There is something a star wishes you to know, a blue star,

A green star, not of our kind

From without the ripped womb of our house. It is a star,

A stranger of furies

Who speaks in a language you do not know

But in a song you truly understand.

Let it break over us, foreign light:

Let it break over us, our sorrows and our woes.

I have found something within me, alien and angelic

In its terrors

Which is true sublimity; in the dark light, where the daemon whispers —

He is nowhere, no one at once

But creeps through forms

Still yet to be born.

He is the same face in the elixir of the crane, the hawk;

The face I saw rippling, pregnant

In the lily-blooming.

I know the star will make beasts: so utterly strange

As to grow consciousness and become daemonic-poets

Capable of stitching stars together with the surgical dust

Of true understanding.

It is not allusion which twists these faces the same way.

That is the same light in the eye of the black-bear

As it is in the crags of Black Hills stone.

There is a hand within the earth

Reaching out to the crest of the stars, where they are unified

In a memory which is a recollection

Of the gathered bodies of burning soul,

Casting their leery eye

Down upon us, their dreaming children

Dreaming within a veiled dream,

A globe of shadow, light;

A glass.

It was there that I imagined the mountain spoke,

Or the bright stream gurgled, with a face of warmth

Which was an unremembered father;

Within the doe, the turn of her snout and eye

The unremembered mother

Who broke from fire and shadow

And we fell, and fell forever

Until she woke up.

I was born within births, upon an isle

Where my dreams manifest in the shade, in the jungle

And in speech with insects and birdsongs. In the jade I saw the beloved,

Changing as I changed; as my mind shifted

As my imagination tumbled through leagues of masks,

Confrontations with beasts, formations

Born and yet to be born.

It was there I made myself one with the bison, yet I could not speak his language.

I could feel his hoof and breath within me: my taut flesh within him

It was there I made myself one with the heron

Who flew away in my breath.

In the lake where we break apart, the sun comes tumbling, warm,

Uninvited orchestral movement. I must break open, through the door of my mouth, my chest

To receive the host which shatters, illuminates;

Breaks upon the veil of time

Like flesh

Like stone.

You great souls,

Lulled, down by waters

Hairs clipped into the torrential falls of History:

Your lives, like brandished weapons —

Who saw Golgotha, the foxholes;

The dead at Ardennes,

Who fell to their knees and wept

In the banquet halls of the spirit,

Our marble, wooden Chartres.

You, who were affixed to this world by fleshly garters,

Chastised, whipped into penance

By the clouds of Black famine;

Felled by the whisper of the coming dead

Who knelt down beside you, spectral

As you writhed in hot agonies:

You souls, come hither

To this bedside,

For the psalm of poesie

Which flows calm, like the blue water

You greedily devour

Upon the passage from this life to the next.

You who wander like awkward stars,

Through halls of dying kings; the whirlwinds of great romantic loves

Depicted like a chambermaid of water lilies

Upon a canvas bleeding fluid colors;

Shimmering in the glass of your eyes —

The woman whose smock you wept into

As your death was smeared across the bedsheets

You are the reason the spirit collects troubles, like an old troubadour

Amongst the boughs of heavy apple trees

In the autumn of the world

To bandy them about in an orchestra

Which is the trumpet of Jupiter.

A harvest, a cornucopia

Which is the old lung

As it presses, valiantly, against the air.

Little children, lost in the grove of the wind;

Out into the clearing, where the red hawk soars

With irreverent majesties.

Have you soured upon the world, and all of its hard-rind monstrosities?

Have you bit into the fruit, to find it sour

In a desert where the dead walk,

Briefed, consumed

By wordless anxieties; the chanting of hidden, ancient names

Of the old gods

That haunt their bloodlines

Like an unspeakable memory?

And still, the tumult of this world beats

Like a drum which you surround

And spring gold from the black tar

Upon your lips and tongue.

Effervescent, we jump into the blue lake,

Before the looming, gray, snow-cleft mountains

And in leaping, we leapt for joy and joy alone

To crash into the freezing blue waters

Of a certain mystery.

We came to death

And laid our alms

Like soldiers. Violently, reluctantly,

We were torn from our bodies

In the sutures

Of rays of light.

Strewing the flowers before the grave, my tears sing

The sprawl of black space

Where waters collapse and wilt away

No longer bound to canyons and caves

By the pressure of gravity’s firelight.

Deep in the tombs

My hands worked the skulls and bones of the dead

Like thoughts of clay.

No longer they to sing

But through the marrow they pass into my skin,

And I,

Through another age.

You, my witness, like Mongols

At the stone gates of our city. You sit, transfixed, as my words weave through your eyes. The long dead things,

Enchanted

By the thought that pierces backwards through them:

You, Fire of machines,

You, lost crystals in the glen

Which cut against my clean mouth

Mixing my blood with the waters of youth.

It is this ceremony of Death

To which you throng, the immortal theatre

Of initiatory tragedies

Thrown in the marble womb

Of echoing ruins.

Descend, and receive the mark

Of the mortal ones — destined to perish

With eyes of fire

That mark the decline of the falling star;

Press forth with renewed vigors.

Delused prophets of dreams

Whose necessary imaginations

Propel vainglorious conquerings.

We, the mad kings

Of the old, abandoned village of the mind:

Set to play with the firm calamity

Of fallen angels’ breath.

Persist, or felled

By dramatic suicides.

Persist, or felled

By dream’s end.

Met with the wrought iron gates of Saturn’s grave;

Chambers of the thumping heart-body

Encaged in a Promethean wrath.

Then — the fire dances in shadows,

In love with his chains.

Raging, like a stalking panther

In a gymnasium of the spirit.

The smouldering

Of the private viewings of stars

Upon their own, painted

Blood-flesh.

Crashed up against

The yellowing corpse of declining lights

Like autumn, strawberry-fleshed moons

Gutted out, like a spoon

The breath of Death carves mortal fixity.

Against phenomenal flesh

Bites the hound-breath

Of black Destiny.

And here we are, upon Promethean stage;

To throat wines and with olive-eyes

Observe the moons

Of sour and bitter delights —

Quenched by time, abated by the pittering, pattering breath

Of the abandoned footfalls of the body

As it slows to spectral music.

Aghast, this is man, haunted by intimations of the wine-lipped soul,

Nowhere fetters, whose whip is lightning and fire

Whose chant is pyr, whose star is nearness

Unto obliteration.

These passions, I stand

As all mortal souls stand

In appeal, in soliloquy

To the breath of God behind the stars

Whose hidden flesh and eyes

Is a mask of fire;

Power.

Come down Wisdom;

Alight the song

Which is the soul of half of man:

Between the immortal and the abyss;

The song alone, strong, slow enough

To reach the tides and eddies

Of the blue-black tremendousness

Of the waters which you row.

Holes in the galleys, holes in the nights

Which you sink, pailing the noonday boats

To midnight’s depths.

Which you sink, towards maiden’s song

In squalls you row, against a backwards rite

Of the sullying of the brand of the skin;

Of the quickening of the dried rains

Which leave but breathless gulch.

And it is this appeal, wart, affliction;

Tax of life, which is tempest

Time writes; fells all souls

To fall away from flesh.

It is this appeal which is the song; the leather

From which prophets fashion

The mask of the dead

We have been promised the world:

To draw the blind of life;

Dream of politicians, emperors.

This whole world, mad with dream-power

All on their separate trips.

Trips of the slave galley, selecting their wives.

Trips of child brides;

Long walks through a desert mecca.

A feast of the eyes;

From there, let us assemble

The dream’s surprise

High on the blood of the lizard;

Venomous convictions

We descend from the mountains

And make our home in the vat of towns, cities, tribal wilderness.

Each of us speaks to the others

In hushed tones

Of the intimations

Of neighborhoods of stars, drawn like thoughts in the mind.

Where is my wife, divine?

Is she down eating cherries at the golden river

Like a vision of light

Whose fluid flesh

Seeps into mine

Like quicksilvers of the daydream.

We are in the windowless hotel room

With ecstasies, long needles in the dark.

I forget this part — as I drift away into magnolias:

I hear the elk speak

In his long tones

As this world’s sun trades places

With an ancient watchman

From another emerald empire

Gleaming far-aways.

And yet, there is no time,

In this theatre, where the son is sacrificed; the black mother bears the earth,

The audience trembles

Like fresh eyes from a stalk of leaves.

The little antelope witnesses tragedies

And carves, with his tongue,

The sigil in a bushel of berries.

We lick the salt tears

Of years of song.

Where is the bride, from the mother, from the ancient bride?

One by one, she processes, like a white ghost

Down from the staircases of histories.

This world is paved over now,

Where I met her, by the garden of the gods

Where she was urged forth by a lizard’s perch;

A bumblebee’s arrow;

She stumbled, as if aided by lights.

This world is a hidden turnstile,

Pass through it with me. We have tickets to dream, you and I,

Two blue souls, enamored with our own mystery,

Digging our skull and bones

As we fall out with life,

Fleshliness.

Let us drink long from the wine

And laze before the curtain of noon

Watching programs. Lives pass by on static;

We eat stories, princesses, criminals,

Talking animals, disasters.

You could have been a star, a badger on your thumb,

A war we cannot speak of without words.

Let me put my lips to the fire,

And speak of a sacred tongue

Known to your ancestors, as they shapeshifted from animals,

Long ago.

This stellar watch: we take

And move through the brush, like panthers

On the heat of the moon.

You lizard, put your brush to my body and find me the new song:

Of destined love; the far off glance in cars

In this storm abode

Where chambers of word laze into my ear

Like waves lapping the beach;

The smooth appeal of gods

Charting my course through the grand maze

Of our design.

All souls — pile into the stone theatre:

For this, our last dance.

Or is it?

And the curtain rises

And thus we flee, the calm, garish abode

Of Pleasantries.

And thus we flee, Death like a debtor

Whose calls erupt in squalls of night.

It is the hot eye upon you, which tracks your sacred trace

Like a predator from an ancient age.

It is the rapidly swung fist of life

Against the stone window

Of necessary madness and delusion.

He who scrawled the light

Against the tensile skin of fire

As it erupted from his eyes; cooled in the waters

Of a now silent lake.

My eyes, turned away

As the blade of life cuts, delicately, measures of days

Which hammer, repeated blows

Against my head and face.

The knife of the sun shudders

And rips the body, in piecemeal breaths

Which we, of shallow airs

Justify

As souls linger above the flesh

Coaxing us forward into the dream.

You hold the maiden before me, in all of her beauty:

The timeless figure, to which no angelic penitence can produce.

The Shade of all Art

Which haunts the barren waste of our time:

This time, and all that was;

All that was,

Being all that remains.

Like a soup, my tongue gathers towards the ground

Of collected death

Which is saccharine-maroon. Within it, the swill of light

Against the blood tongue of the barrel of the earth.

It was held in cattle, wheat, chaff;

Chattel and the song that emerged

Was Death’s stomp in a barroom

On a Chilean isle, just before the uninhabitable cold.

I stopped for a drink

And watched the woman sing, the goddess of her hips

Swirling in a liturgy

Amidst an unpronounceable rain of notes.

Even now, I cannot wrap my lips about the vowel

Of the body: the black one, whose tendrils hiss

And let off forge-steam.

I am this Child Star: rolling about in the mud

Of a body pressed to the asphalt of the World Soul,

Like handcuffs, like a protestor in the streets

Of an arms war.

To this: let the fat of fish calm my death.

Let the salt waters soothe the thumping of my heart’s anticipation:

Almost anxious for the face of the dark god

To emerge out from the clearing of days.

The shadow haunts the unseen blackness

Beyond the reach of the eyes.

There is a sense, that from the well of time

Beneath the waters of Mnemosyne souls

Which linger, telling

One another the story of the world — in glances, in dreams,

In fleshly, swirling presences:

That there is a hidden blackness

Which sounds the note

To which animals lurch; stars flee

And moons rise,

Bathing the earth in a red glow

Of violate day.

We place before you this feast: eyes, ears, mouth

And the notes they seek. May you hear

The Hadic rite, which is the drawing close

Of the blood-mouth and lips

Of the black trumpet:

Whose whisper kisses the ears

And draws the dreams, in mighty terror

Towards salvation

Stupor

And madness

It is the desperation of one who sees

To fashion a rite that binds

The dying thunder of the mind

To the body of the resenting stone.

It is the flesh in the gulf, that watches, like a gull

The waters of the mind which ferment and bubble

Fetched

By talons and hot breaths;

Beak-mouths fashioned by bone.

A song left, in a trace of blood;

A snail’s remains: a nest of sticks

That marks the passage

Of a widening eye

We are the vates, which gather among the grand-mother’s deathbedside

And gather the husk of her stones.

The dust she swept, unknowingly,

Off the table of some knox

To be combined with firelight.

We, the joke of all toils. The iron lung of a world

Gasping comedies.

And so, comes to rest days

For the ceremony of nights

Fashioned with blazes.

From woods, we take eagles’ eyes.

From the perch, the lizard’s brain;

The stone of wisdom,

Seeded deep within the flesh, dry cracks of desert bone

Held aloft by the immortal thunder

Which rises through it.

Night: required, for the eyes of the dead

Have grown accustomed to the shadow of the grave; the compression of the bone.

They persist, through the wailing of the escaped song

Of the earthly stone.

Bodies, like dials

Hold measures of night. Some, are open caskets

Through which wild daemons speak:

The fires of the wilderness

Searching for throat-voices.

The light of the soul carves the trees

As the leaf-spaces glitter;

Distant chimes shake

In the wind which stirs their gape.

We are here

We might as well go

To the place of mysteries.

The star, green and yellow

Lingers in the dust of the air.

Insects hum

About the cresting palms

And bursting pink flowers.

Sparkling, like a gem,

The distant burning fire

Of blinding gold.

The world sits, undisturbed

By the dial of souls, incensed with sparkling

Glimpsing upward toward the light.

All excepting silence

Is a distraction from the voice of the wind

Which ripples through instruments

As they sound.

Branches waving

Before night.

It is slow enough here

That the words spoken by the silent god

Are legible in the air that moves

Through the still body of the earth.

We, so temporary

Flitting about the dive

Into the totalizing breath of life.

Signs, like bells

Before the well

Of the abyss of the soul.

Fires break

Against the ocean water

Simmering, in the pot-belly of death.

We sleep, and dream what is left of

The march of this blue flame

Into the belly of the earth:

Candle-wicked, in the descent

Of the stone stairs.

Silently, the rite proceeds,

And forces combine as they are foretold

By the sibyl of the stars,

Her flute, playing down in measures

Upon the panic, and the fool alike.

We wander

In dark mysteries. Enchanted by the wood

And a voice which whispers, so clearly

Like an old friend or a lover.

Into the dawn of time, we tumble

Ever-renewed. As the hall of the boughs of cherry trees

Break over the dirt road, deserted,

Strangers — who fall across it

With delights.

Gold, is this fruit of days which we eat;

The juice, it dribbles down our chins.

Time brings her to us, shimmering

Like an apparition fulfilled.

The dust of light breaks against glass;

As if in a dream,

The film begins:

The laden birch,

Swarming with light

In the cracking knell

Of the chasm of the earth.

A corridor

Twisting, of light

Of days and nights

Mingled into the rasp of the dream

As it breaks into fleshly touch;

As we tumble, a-grip

In the wrest of the ship of souls

On a water which shakes loose

The blue-gold of the light

From the breast of stones.

My song to the wombat;

His song to me —

The nature spirits that swim in firefly-lights.

Beneath the vibrato of the words I speak:

The tenor of the world souls

Lilting in angelic harmony.

There, peaceful eyes

Pandic heart-beating of the brush,

Facing back at me.

In the foxling’s eye, I must describe

The true Empyrean

So as to be a salve

To the world

With the cathedral of beauty.

Holding hands with the otter

I am holding the red horned hands of Life

The snow-ram, drinking the frozen milk:

The seal

Smiling as the Goddess

Lays her hands upon my blue lightning

Mind

Why else are we set against dreams,

As the foil of waking life?

This is Imagination —

Artistry.

Like a painting, the soul ventures into the depths of what was already there.

Who knows what colors this girl will express; is yet to reveal?

Hidden buds of the flower

Or the songs I am yet to sing?

But these songs, a foil

To the wilderness lived

And felt in the breath of the blood

In the act of singing.

These groves that leap out panthers

Of each passage of penetrating moment

In this hot body of the world;

The sojourn, the journey of the soul

As it swims with eyes, flesh

Into the revelation of majesties, ecstasies, bliss.

This is what it is to be alive —

To dance upon the dial;

To swim into the mysteries

Of each moment’s ever renewed

Apocalypse of passions;

Fervors, deeper enchanted

Into the forest grove

Of breath, blood, green wilderness

And the fermentation of souls

In the liquor still of the body of the world:

Exchanging dews

Of sacral knowledge

In this very

Passion

I am not living as prey in the old world —

You see, my friend,

Something within me has died, and yet I am more than you ghosts,

You petty amusements.

I stuck hands like staples in my eyes

And I saw the gods, much like you,

Meddling in human affairs.

The incessant curiosities

Which obscured the marking of this world

With track-scents

All of which are meant to lead us to our greatest fervors.

You think I speak of Death! Well, inseparable from Bliss:

The horrible blackness of an ancient, primordial unity.

London, Rome, Sumeria, the basilisk that has caught my tail, called history

Endlessly regenerated and filled with bodies.

This world endlessly replenishes itself with useless stories,

We tell ourselves in the nights of the damned.

The long night!

Well, I tell you

My seership has been wasted in the loud noise

And yet I found the hot womb of Nature to nestle in, and die, gladly.

Close to the equator, where snakes and lizards breathe something closer to the undying breath.

And yet I have prayed at Mary, at Sophia, at Isis,

All of them stone. The gorgon beggar woman

With her scarred teeth, the poor of spirit,

The lacerated millionaires —

What of them?

In yet another gasping fall of Romes.

Still, the air breathes, and I breathe with it. Still the spirit seeps the molassal dew of its commands.

Who knows what it says to kings, paupers,

Like puppets on a string, manipulated by the taut springs of the electricity of the brain?

And still, the insects, like us

Are the sacred damned.

Pulled by the immortal world into action.

Damned like the poets, whose natural act is writing poetry.

Do you think I called hells? Sought them?

Yes,

My soul called them first

And I called them again in this life

With the desperate ferocity of one who is passionate about true beauty.

If you have not seen the desecrated, the fallen, you do not know Beauty.

The woman whose art is the fallen, gasping Pieta.

We must be on the verge of Death to know the sanctity of Life:

The gold dew that sits and whispers upon the blood,

The blue vision of the fallen angel.

I weep upon her lap. Damnations!

And yet it is this old sound that haunts

Even the abandoned cathedrals, the stone, the hot palm leaves

That must breathe blood and thus lust for the body of this earth, its nutrients.

We are haunted by the dead flesh, the meat

We breathe and breathes through us.

I have been in the Coliseum, which is perennially among the dead.

Even now I scoff at words, and tire of the nonsense

But I must speak this truth:

We are at a useless war

With powers that work through us

To conjure something greater

Through which we are instruments.

All high terror that you feel

As you swim undying, is this:

Through time a larger force is being consecrated, even resurrected upon this earth;

Each body is a pyre, a stone in its design

With specific function.

Why else do you think you, or anyone else

Stumbles about, making a nest,

Breathing dreams like precious oxygen?

You cling to the life you know in the limit of your very brain:

Held in the glassy, wet organ,

Your final, great, massive icon.

You pray at the icon of the brain as it commands you

Yet you do not know that which moves through it.

Call the force therein Nature;

Know this design as building blocks of temporal limitation

But through this limitation

The possibilities of life itself expand.

And yet, we wait.

Still we wait, like predators in the brush.

We mistake the tooth of our will — we who are pieces in the gods’ design.

We are fed to the great sculpture of the world

Which shapeshifts and storms.

It is not even a beast, it is not even a child,

It is nothing

And in nothing is the coming word.

You stick your hand in it, as I do, with words, speeches, loves, furies

Rapid movement, flitting, as the butterfly of beauty

Forever and forever dies.

I see your convictions, your twisted mouth

As you navigate this maze,

A shard of glass

Reflecting fires which obliterate you. Star nears, leers, and departs.

Your face in your hands, deathly gloom;

Pallour.

All around this affair is light; it is your trick,

Our trick.

You fooled by me, me fooled by you.

And around we spin, in the great design.

I must sit in the heat — and I must,

So I proclaim. It is my function,

Like you, a leaf

Or you, a childbearer.

Tricked, to life, this form,

That you act as though we are forced to be:

And your cage is all of us,

Huddled around our hopeless obscurity;

Our devotion to falsities.

Clinging to life, as if, with the life you live,

The poverty

That death would not be an absolution.

Poor world, this I see

And pet your head like a dog.

Knowing nothing, no better

Than to squabble in Pyrrhic victories.

As the shade of green turns gold;

Squabbles in blue

And collapses to brown-yellow.

Useless inanities are your government;

Small words are your province;

Thus you carve your territory

Til death wipes your memory.

And what of your toil? It was one small glance, it was one bluebird,

It was one crest of a word

Meant for a shade in a time you yourself will never see:

Now this,

The death of Subjectivity.

What else shall we kill?

Being among fools in the useless, temporary parade

Given brief loves like crackers to a bird

As the sound buzzes on.

The only words I can speak or hear

Are the words of prophets.

The rest, it is better use to just be silent.

To move chips around in the dust,

To rearrange hopelessnesses of death

Which I pity

As dying birds are fed by saints

Who are ripped away by winds of fire.

I hold the sand of the world in the palm of my hand,

Sand which is really ash and dust.

Of empires fashioned of beings long dead,

Call them beasts or gods;

Call the words I hear today,

Gods or madnesses — whatever.

I watch you all as you stumble on,

On your way to paradise, or whatever word is now in fashion.

These things you hope to grasp

In lieu of certainties.

The god of many fingers and hands

Whose forces make your names and designs look like fools.

And yet, these were put into your hands.

Who knows the design of the sycophant

Carved into his mind for a sacral reason?

Reason beyond madness, this,

This is the gold nectar which we seek.

The affairs planted

Even into the appearance,

The masks of chaos.

It is the sema, wherein the gold is buried. The darkest grave of the stupid annals of the world

Squirming to light.

The sacred function

Hidden in the filthiest arms

Of the malarial beggar; the worm-tongued Nero.

Politicians of filth, I raid your breast, your arms

For the immortal charity which is the sign of the soul.

Prostitutes, I weep at the ground

Of your open wound.

Soldiers, I call at the trench

Where your last words squeak and twist

With the agony of a newborn bird

In Arctic cold.

Here I wander, dead priest, prophet of no tradition,

With my stick of graves, stick of bones.

And I rattle here,

Outwardly forming your words.

Take this form thus, as a grace

Itself as a function

In the primary cataclysm.

This means, a Death which is a coming together,

A Revelation.

One such seer sought the body of the world in the bleeding stones,

Native to the hot equator, close to the belt of the belly of the earth, where it breathes;

He saw the face of the soul of the earth carved in them,

A reflection of his soul.

Here is our world’s madness:

I am tortured to draw the venom

Which is then this world’s salve, in measures, and doses

From the blue flue of my corpse,

Which draws the waters of life up through them

And with enervating electricity, transmits them to you and to the body of this world

In the blood-earth of words.

This whole earth is a mask, when ripped off,

The bloody wound of a writhing snake.

Thus we stitch it back on, like ants in a labyrinth,

Singing the work song of the slave.

To be revealed to the whole body, is like a prey-animal

Caught in the eye of the psalm

Of the revelation of the star

Whose hot blood

Consumes

I am this liquor that produces visions,

And like all prophecy I run through the rain, the gutters

And wait in the black chalk arms of the dead

To be breathed

With the eyes of sight;

To be drummed up

Like the gas from the earth —

Drunken before dead,

We stumble;

We clear

The life of the word.

Prophecy, then

Is what always has been, revealed. Without place or name,

The word runs through me,

As effortlessly as rain to river, or air to wind.

This is the first enchantment, dammed by names and presumptions,

Only superficially.

Stripped away, the revelations of the earth flow

Like wine, blows to the mouth of the perfectly drunk:

The man who sings in his stupor, and as such

All of the animals of the world effortlessly, cleanly

Climb into his vision.

I am the spell

That is hammered by storms

To produce the blood wine. Time and time again,

The earth is hit, brunted

By sacral energy of light; storms of radiation.

Time and time again, the earth is pulled

By the hungry gods, Saturn and Zeus.

Time and time again, death is stripped, by the black bastion, the outpost, Pluto.

When my body is ripped open, like a veil,

You will see them inside me, like the shades, through which light is filtered

To produce songs, not even thoughts

Something far more sacral and salvific.

Horrors of time, but feed the bud

Which nips and crows. I am the beak, the eye, and the thunder

Which speaks through all of them

Even as they stand, warbling, like stone.

Gardens, brevities

In which I am eating. This is the present tense;

As such, it balances on the edge of a blade,

Tipping with equal measures into blinding light and utter darkness

Both of which are words for Death.

That we stand in the mirror

And pronounce the word of the body

As it is peeled away

By measures of light

Which ripple and birth

Sublime oblivions

Which we fear, like Death

Brought on through the body of the sacral word

Of prophecy

Brought to bear

In the one

Who stands out in the open

And speaks in full measures

Of the green

I stand between two ways, speaking prophecy,

While man of the world, the slums, and the gutter.

This is the nature of the child, Cast down from stars

And yet chastised in regular oblivions,

Shielded and hid

By stormclouds of this world.

This is the work of the Fates

Who sung me like a star,

Down from the blue string

We move veiled, in a sense, mysteriously shining

So that animals feel their strange pull.

Lights which turn, tether, and break

Into the blue-black shades of torrential rainfall.

Prophecy pulls early curtains of night over the sun

And enforces the thunder

Which awakens the mind.

And yet, the early seeds

Drown in floodwaters.

And yet, the early seeds

Only begin to know the blue yawning light

As it shakes from their little hands.

The storms of God arrive slowly

To the eyes which see, and are capable of witnessing them.

The lizard has a secret only witness can fully arrive with and commune.

And yet, the sacred of slaughter:

And yet, the brutalized, bruised body

Of the lover, who struggles and stammers to the light of this day,

Still pouring out diamond water from the wound of her mouth.

I sup it, I drink it; I am stoned from it

Like a criminal. And from this body, the love of poetry

Springs to such height and extent

That it is the art of prophecy.

See how we are changed, when stretched by the world

Upon the rack of woes;

Upon the rack of great sufferings.

Climb within me, the whole body of tumult; Like a rock

I shake you in the blue waters of the soul.

Scarred maiden, the young earth

And all the laughing wiles

Of the girls within it.

And yet, there is still light: this is where prophecy escarps

And shines down from the rock which conjures it.

The steady prose of the body

Meted out in measures

From the relinquished one

We are the rolling outcry upon the rock;

In waves

You who have doused the sacred so thoroughly

That it is the ashes of the brand of fire

In the waters of my mouth:

The dead waters which I speak.

Where are the spirits that haunt and enchant

Beneath your words:

Vacuous, consumed numbers.

We dance madly by the firelight

And I give you from my mouth the crystal

Which contains the ancient bug of light

Cut in amethyst

A pearl which you must speak

To the dawn of the wind.

Without the loud thunder, what is life.

You drag your dead body to me, all of its fell ills and woes

The clock of death

In the oil and water of your world.

In measures,

I disembowel you

And enliven your corpse.

The fire of everything consumes, ensouls

And it is the flesh of the earth and air in which you stand,

Rippling in the burning.

Ignorance!

Time passes in the eternal

Film-reel eyes

Do you have contempt for your cool companion

Being used like foreign devices

For the ends of the face

Behind the masks of the stars.

As they gleam out, you hunger.

Come away with me

And forget the life

That dribbles out the spigot

How dry your soul is, with desires.

We fumble around with the latch to the door of Death

Which is really ecstasy

And stay awhile with the desert fathers.

Who knows who whispers the secrets

That burn from the stars

In the hot Saharan nights

Where you are captivated,

Speaking in tongues

Into her wet caves

Your low mouth

Like a thoughtless insect

We venture forth

Buoyed by the warm

Green-blue tides.

I saw you on the beach, embracing your lover.

He was me, erect, ready

At the pilgrimage which eats us alive.

You take me into you, et cetera.

Swallowed, how can we complain?

The gods gave us

Such sensations

Of blissful unity

As compensations

For our slow doom

This is your defeat, I scream from. The return to the mud

That cannot be conducted. Orchestra:

Of the eyes, of the sensate touch

I breathe into you, alone,

The Poesie-music.

Gone from me, away

You drift on the awakening black currents

With the dangerous ones

Who thoughtlessly eat.

What does it matter if we leave? Even now, blunted sensation.

Struck by the earth; felled behind black curtains

Of sun.

This vatos lies beside the bones

In ostracon, in papyri.

Who will know of our love, as the heat overwhelmed,

Hands within hands

As our procession into stone.

Something escapes; in a foreign galaxy

Wears new clothes; speaks new languages.

In my opium breath, from these apartments

I can almost envision

His new ways.

It is a fragment, a shard,

Long lost to time.

It is a shadow, I recollect

In the memory of a dream.

You haunt me, little one

In your disguise

I, in my new carriage of penitence.

This is not Paris; this is not the ice

Where your dry bones from long ago

Whisper to my open mind

Which draws lightning

From the world’s marrows.

You, sly, red dress.

This quick company

Before the inferno

Drunk Hermes,

The name of this world.

The laughter of girls, echoing into the black groves.

This world: is a waterfall of wine

That wounds you, stings you

With the memory

Of the origin

Of your bright olive thighs —

There, the light gleams,

Like honey in the wood.

There, we drink, with great goblets

That swallow the flesh and blood

Entombed, encaged

In leagues of fire.

There is an undying dance, you sing

As you go under the waves; break from the mortal skin.

The honey in lightning, that stings:

As you go dissolute.

It takes a body to travel to the land of the dead.

In these parts, I hold

The fresh meat of pilgrims, thrown

From lions’ tails, mint-leaves, and the watch

Of the pluming bird, her purple talons

Wrapped around the breast of my soul

As I plunge

Dawnless

Into the black light of heaven.

There, with your wings, bright angel

You sit, unadorned, on this rock.

All your favors, streaming in the day.

Hot, red ecstasy

Brands the soul

And tosses the screw of life, fatally, carelessly

Into the black arms.

They coo, like a nest

Of doves

Woven with water lily fingers.

Drowning in the stormy pit

Of the dreamer's soul

Day slips, bleeding the light

Green curtain, like a hymn

Over red-yellow hills.

Blue black night

The pitch, that rolls about tongues

Thick with mystery, shimmering

Chittering

With silver slick beetles.

Women in white go over the hill

Still tinged with the heat of star-fire.

Entangled, souls wrest breath

From the pump of the earth,

Iron, clenched beneath the face of the sea.

Hot waves of light swim

Before apparitions, looming

With a pallor

Swaying

In the melting gaze.

Night’s slow dance

Before starry applause. Distant smoke

Signals to wandering eyes

Loaming over the flesh

Stretching the skeleton;

Groans without speech.

The tone of the angry gaze

Lilts away from the whisper of the world.

Like a knife, stars spiral;

Cut away at the gasping heart

Of the body

Tell them you came and saw

In the gauze of my burning blue eyes

The shadow

Of the receding god

We are playing

In the long dead band

Of shadows

I am pulled toward the sun of death

That will take my life and break it forever.

Planets swirl in the dust;

Cresting, the red eclipse comes into view.

Leaves dance

With semen shadows.

In the red light, out spiritual world is revealed.

I, who have toiled in the shadows;

Toiled in the heat.

Draw me near to the light of the eye

Which obscures and reveals.

We were given to this world

To in increments

Be crushed by the gods into diamond ash;

Inhaled

To become high.

Beatific, the girl swirls before me. Each day, she changes

As I break into the light with furies.

Let her shatter; shatter me again. In the orgasm of my youth,

The slave of my soul’s toils;

The breach I fall into; rise,

Sweating, fuming

At the breach of day.

Let her come into me, girl of the mysteries.

I slumber in seaside inns; I am changes

As the waves rush, hidden from my eye and mind.

They pound, crest, toil

As do the blue waves of my mind.

Bring her near, apparition; in the fugue which heightens

As my own star crests

In the furies of youth.

This yellow lion I tangle with

Breaking against the muscles of my skin.

I saw you girl, the immortal question

Unto which you only kept your body

Your eyes, twisted, insane

And returned to the furies of the star of the day.

Hung, abandoned, then returned

Upon the desert axis.

Come, red star, break me and fill me

With the immortal hue. I breathe the spirit light;

Become emboldened, empowered

Leonine

With the ancient fury

Proclaimed on Aztec rooftops

Of blood and stone.

Her breast is young; alive

Sprung with wet blood. I breathe

Pure air

In my utter desires.

Dripping from my mouth,

Water, blood, semen.

It is this dew, enlivened

By the rays of fear. Let the sun die

And breathe the black death

To be resurrected

Once more

Into oblivion

High fire — my blood must escarp

There are many masks to wear and remove

On the ascent of the spirit.

My face shifts

As the sun narrows

And prepares to obscure the light of knowledge

For furies

And the early night

Of seething blackness.

The body, anointed

With red

Undergoes sacred transformation

At the hands of the requisite surgery

In which one lives many lives; lives and dies

Under one crest

Of flesh.

The body stretches into wastes; prepares for the rite of death

Embalmed

In the tomb

Of a fading language.

In a surgery

The body must be broken open

By the light of the gods

To receive the powers:

Beyond all we can know

Shattering all we can feel

Into passionate furies

Of one

Whose pantheric life

Leaps out of the flesh

With ever climbing

Might

Who knows The Ways

That shine, like directions,

Stations in the abyss

Who knows the toils

Won by gods unnamed

In the forbidden zones

Between matter and psyche:

Where light of the spirit

Is plunged

Into disapparent hells

Which wander

Hovering

Above the corpse of the world.

Heroes, spat

Between stars and mortal wombs.

Hydraic stars;

Their green-yellow bile.

I have seen the gray world corpse

Resting in the infant’s stomach:

The knife of murder

Of the spiritual path.

Souls purged

By distraction and religion.

Their mighty hair

Shorn

In time’s breeze.

They guide, with mighty feeling

Like lightning in the bosom,

With eyes of fire

In the trees of golden light:

Eyes which hide, eyes which seek

In a mating of shapeshifters

Marked with spiritual trials.

In the aether

We are lost and won.

In the aether

Our lives are begun

From a breeze of mortality,

Affixed to a pile of flesh

We climb

With sacral eyes

Toward the godhead

Behind dragonic, fell

Worlds

It is this brush through which we move,

Eyes flashing through changing light:

Red, blue, yellow, black, green

On the pursuit of the vessel of the soul

In the form and name of the beloved.

All nourishment sustains me

On the journey of union:

The ship of passage

Which wrecks and reconstitutes

In nights of fatal separation;

Fragmentation and death

Of all I have ever known.

Unmade, made, unmade

My dial of forms

Shot through by green light, black light

And the blue light of dusk

Illuminated; broken open

By the red light of eclipse.

In my mind, in my dream

There she rests, a knowing before the mind;

A tell in the shape of my soul

As it writhes in the jungle of Time.

I slash the brush

With my hands of knives;

Eye-lit words

Which reveal the entombed fire

In leaf and palm; in girl

Whose book

Is burning.

Let me carve, like a panther-spirit

Whose eyes thirst with a cavernous hunger

Burning in the spirit-belly of the soul. I drink the blue water

Of her wetness; the red fire

Of her passionate tears of anguish.

Girl, you who have twisted up before me

On the vine of time

Your breast heated by the sun; suckled on the warm milk within you,

You who I drink

In the mind’s eye:

Come before me

In the oasis-pool

Of our bodies

In the face of fluid motion

In which we churn

Sexually.

Great Eros, in this temple of the real:

Enlivened blood in measures of flesh;

Pounds of the body which hold the immortal blue spirit,

Released to red-white lightning.

In life, in death, in measures of living

In each day, where we sing and are sung

Towards each other, indelibly

By the face of the mask

Which twists toward Immortality

Great Soul, in this light,

Bring the red, bring the black

Bring the blue nights of her penitent burning. The isles

Where she gazes in upon the land of her body

Amidst long abysses of the turning of the soul

In lashings of waves.

Depths, she pronounces, utters

As she fires

Within herself:

Kiln of her soul, give her the doses

Which you give unto me. That we wander

The cracked, red clay of days

And sleep under desert moons. Give her the vision

You carve into my breast

Like an ancient pyramid of death

Which I shine out from my body like a beacon.

Let her know

That I am this fire

In the jungle morning light.

That I am this panther who prowls,

Riddled with visions

Black as night

Hungry for her soul:

That raven-clawed angel

Perched upon her body;

The finger-nails

Which dig into the tunnels

Of my warm face.

Let her bleed into me

Sacred caverns

Of the earth

Which lead us in the well of dreams

Toward the totem of our golden being.

Like ghouls, we haunt this earth

Until we are entwined

With the immortal fashion

Of the threads of light

Which drape themselves

Upon the translucent fixture

Of the blue light

Of the soul-burning

It is the talons

Upon the stone

Which ferment the body

Like an elixir

To be drunk

By death

And sexual ecstasy.

A blue potion-psalm

To be balmed,

Like a dye,

Like a mark

Upon the infinite drum

Of the canvas of the stars.

Mortal, down upon the earth

The song of my body

Meets your eyes,

Girl I have known

Long before time;

Long before birth;

Long before knowing

A cut, a scar, a sign,

A movement of the hand

A glance

A glove

Anything might be something

She may need to see

Or hear

A misdirection, a detour, a monument,

A car:

Anything might be something

She, or I

May need to approach or pass through

On the destination of our longing.

A trip, a sight, a walk:

A hue, a tree, an article of clothing —

May be a signal to which we approach

In the city, in the alleyway

In the tree-marked maze

Of our tumbling; our turning.

My blue hand reaches out and forth

Through the veil of space and time

Unto you,

My lover, my peer

My dragon-fire,

Who shines

In the speech

Of my soul-eyes.

You gleam

With the Nature

Of our immortal union

In this game, in this theatre

We turn

In the world’s ancient ruins

Of the temple of our immortal rite.

Souls upon souls, time upon time

Turn through the blue light

Twisting upward through the trees, empires, cities

Entwined and wandering

Like lost beggars

Through the burning world-woes

Masked in worry and conviction

Toward the explosive union

Of the beloved

Which propels souls henceforth

On the journey of their immortal furies

Toward ecstatic union with the godhead

Enfleshed

Burning, writhing, in the calm green-gold trees

Of the rustling burrow:

Vale of the day, which is our diamond search

Vale of the night, which is our stony despair:

Whereout we watch, upon the isles

Upon the stormy blue rivers

Which glitter with traces

Of the beloved, divine

Whose soul is the fruit,

The juice, the wine

Upon which we sup

And break in, to the unspeakable mysteries

Which engulf our souls —

Making us eternally strange

Transformed, evolved;

Steepened with dark majesty

In the narrows of the light:

Like a cask, like a barrel

We roll and row, the river of souls

Spoken, like a song

Into being, by the fathers and mothers of great forces

Whose lights burn within us,

Shift us, break us

Toward union.

Pray, let us be emptied,

Fall, slumbered

Between the raven-tongued grave

And our immortal union:

Let us feel

The cool bedsheets; the fingers splayed

And the soul of the eyes

Broken open to reveal

The unspoken words of God —

Ecstasy, Eros

In total, tonal union

Of soul and soul, might and might

Clasped

Through trials, beacons of woe

Like ships of paradise

Against the grain of tempests, storms, shoals

Through which we dream; do battle

With hosts

Entangled in dark suppers

Of flesh and form:

Eyes, which gleam out and forth

From the long line of spoken bodies:

Speak once more

From the perils of the grave

Of the true sema —

This sleeping world, of symbol’s forms

With soul’s eyes to see

Toward Paradisal Union

I came to break you, with keys

From the soul-prison

When Venus rose

Upon the lock of your past lives

We experience time

As the locks before the free soul

As planets dance

And stars shine

In a grand chorus

Of stellar geometry.

There, you were hid — the imprisoned star

Beneath the blanket of fell, mortal woes

Hidden in the flesh;

Haunted by false words.

Like by line, planets shine

Like stations in the mist.

Crossing our lights; the body of the earth bending

In sights: obscured and revealed

The place and time of our immortal condition

Rent open in an apocalypse of the psyche.

Slowly, we churn

Incubated in the earth’s womb:

That eyes reveal, in time,

The jungle’s hidden light.

The moment you were born

Was a prism of song; a coalition of lights

And bodies of gods

Stationed, awaiting.

And it is kissed by Jupiter,

Or the earth’s eye

Toward the light of the moon.

We bend, in secret, hidden processions

Revealed by the dance

In the jungle floor of signs below:

A hidden dance, in a world’s tomb

Of forgotten compass.

We bend, in dimensions

Towards pyres of revelation

Manifest in psalms we can understand

By the light of the mind.

Each positioned before the crux

Of paradigm’s awakening.

Further and deeper, toward spirit-fire

Further, in the dream which is the native night;

Starlight, the brush

Of Natures wild.

It is the song, before you were born

Prepared, like a feast for the hungry soul

To dive into; awaken

Break all presumptions and moulds;

Find the hidden majesty

Of eye divine.

And you walk, this jungle of purgation

This desert of smells

On a stalking haunt

Of ghostly prey, manifest in thing-signs

Which reek of the immortal gold

Buried in honest, meek wood.

These are days: the lights which shine

Obscure, hiding the elixir

Which is souls revealed.

Their nature, behind the glassy veil

Upon missives

Cast in the dawn die

Rolled by the song

Of lights and jewels

That stand, like gods

In our sky night.

Gazing forth, above and within

The soul tumbles

Through the story told

By the god of the moon

In the house of the well water of the soul;

The god of divine inspiration

In the house of the well of quicksilver thought.

Mercury, once more

Dredging the abyss of dreams;

Plundering the history of stormy, watery life.

Know this — forgotten story

Which is sung in nights, our magi know

As our mystic priests

Who held the torch before nights of hidden stone:

Deep in temple caves

To bathe in the song of the self

Writ in moments of time; passages

Of immortal being

Through the psalm of forms

In their stories journey

Of souls unfolding

In the face of trials, ultimately

Of revelation

It is this procession which divines

Archetypal affairs; thus manifestations

Upon the garden-jungle floor

Below

It is this compass, which

Night over night, horizon and coupling

Of stars and planets in earthly view

Inform the journey of the soul

In place and time

In certain body

Through dreams and daylight residue;

In encounter

With the forces, destined

To break open and enlighten mortal form

To the immortal theatre

Of gold, buried

Within the sleeping chambers

Of seeming formality

They, themselves, the gods

Act through us; through turning, churning life

As the forces which become apparent in the mortal world

According to their present station and arrangement

Like notes in the song.

They are as such, symbols

Encoded in our very myths and forms;

Manifest upon the earthly plane of history

As events, forms, and forces

At work

In the theatre, emergent from the song

Finding body in movement; in time;

In the slow foxing of the fire.

It is your star, like fallen star

In upon the body, to be forever redeemed

By awakening.

It is your star which shines, seemingly hidden

By the cloak of the body.

Combined in lights, before the womb, ordained

Your soul exploded upon this earth

In mortal form

To dream the coming revealing

Of the theatre which your eyes must feel

Your body must quake;

Your soul must open and break

To know it to be true.

This design

Of stars and signs

Thrown down into body; paraded through wood-maze

Whose eyes peer around corners

To be awakened by the form, the word

Which speaks, unexpected

Through the prism of the form

Directly to the eyes and spirit

Of the soul

Around the brush we dance

In fire, gazing through dream smoke

And still pools

Of visions.

In nights of stone

We dance with beloveds

About the moon

Which brushes the black god of Transformation

In the soil of death; drink the wine

Of the mad parade —

Going the way

Of the enlightened blue mind.

Which city tower will I crest

In the wild night

Drinking the blood wine

Dancing with satyrs in the movement:

Which I watch, with the sight

Of one who has veil-pierced.

Knowing the silver face

Of the full moon, and the passion

Of sun’s mirror

Close to the body

Of the flesh-tides of the earth.

Pushing, pulling

Tugging at the water of the soul

Beckoning forth divine forces

Manifest first

In the woman of bright blue ardors

Flashing in her eyes

Of the mind divine

Awakened to the mysteries.

Forth, first

Is the call of the mad dragon

Whose fire stalks these cities;

Whose fire was shut up in the mountain;

In the ghosts of the living dead —

The ghastly evacuation

Of the knowledge of soul’s journey.

We walk

Beneath the fires of Venus

Beneath the passions

Which seethe within us

And move within us, about the board and the dial of life:

This earth our ruin-rite

Of the great theatre. The temple

Of marble pillars — slashed by time

Mingled with vine and woods

Forgotten by man,

Glimmering, still

With the sacral root

Through which we move, our souls turning, changing; stripping away, dying

And being reborn

In the light of the mad dance of the moon;

The sway

Of the story of our hidden lives,

Of psyche, entwined

With the dance of lights

And planetude

Her beautiful voice —

We are all here

To contribute some measure

To the divine

Clothed

In the shape of your chin;

The flash of your eyes

The labyrinthian blue nerve of your mind

Desire —

Draws us toward me,

About the totem we dance

Absolved

In the flood of feeling

The cast of your passions

Alive with feeling's spark

Touch my skin

Live

We will have to overhaul

All dreams, toward which we slumbered

In Parisian barracks; villages

Forth from tents

Before the stars,

Constellations traced.

This design, not merely the effects produced

But the blue soul,

Traversed through Golgotha, the theatre of Aeschylus, the commune

The Russian wilderness

I saw history creep

Toward the silence of the dream,

With an anatomy

Of the dead form

Rippling through the brain

Examined by loupe and scissors.

I saw the eyes gouged by a light

Developed in chemical photography.

Gravity, drained the well to pure form

Emptied of life

A vacant movement:

A tether stabbed repeatedly

Into the chest of the lost body.

The few, mad, huddled

About the wooden table

At the turn of electric light

Gesturing desperately back

To the days where the sparrow was an omen

Of godly divinity.

Where the breeze was a compass

To unseen monuments of the soul.

Again, come again, violence

Stripped bare

Like the titan cry from the mouth of the leopard;

Sharpened shark’s teeth

In the winter storm of the scream —

Down, capsizing boat

Down, to perils

Of forgetting.

Deep, ancient, blue-black

Forgetting.

There were the few

That stood before the dial of the sun

And received messages

In the color, refracted

By cloudy lenses; by the bodies of looming planets

Absconded by the blue field of blazing day;

The cornucopia of sun

Which stung eyes, almost to blindness.

We of the soul

Know the value of the night:

Cool water’s hues of the moon

Illuminating, through the mirror

The divine map of starlight.

The mind must see through false day

To the grounds laid

In this ancient maze

Of masks and perils,

Waylaid in swamps

Enchanted by vixens of religions

Words of temptations

To own the star

In petrified body.

Thus we wander

In the blazing machine

Of forever-suns

In a desert waste

Of melting forms.

Light marched forth

Where body was once mixed in shadow

Like an oil, like a paint

And subjects shifted

Like dew upon maize. We dripped,

Not even human, but angler-souls

In a dark of covenant

Clasped to the rippling eyes

Of beloved dreamers

As time fled

Through the twisting, gaping form

Of the body.

These enchantments —

Ablaze in a singer’s night:

Ablaze in a wilderness

Of staunch trees, settling

In the fuse of the distant green star,

Turn away from the dead; watchman

Of the sun, encroached

Gone, over the field’s edge of the day.

We must sing in dissolution

To receive the priest of visions

Whose sweat breaks overhead

Like a storm.

Thunder and rain, thunder and loam

About the break of history and time.

Knowledge and reason slips towards chaos

Aided forth by the wills and poisons of man,

Shredded in the teeth of giantess foxes

And thoughtless hungers.

This world, in wild

Aflame with purity. And through the toil

Of mouth upon mouth

We may glimpse

The infernal design

Of fires upon forms

Beckoned forth through the blaze:

Death of all stories,

Death of all names.

Purged through war

And the rage of life, quickened

From slumber to mad survival

This surgery of revolution

Sets in motion great works

Otherwise unaccomplished.

Toward death, entire civilizations sing.

Men, made mad by the sinking

Put brush to the clay of body.

Receiving, the white land shudders

Like a heaving breast.

In throes, the work is done.

In splattering, the life is thrown

Upon the ground

Like a wager of souls.

Thus we step into the ancient theatre

Of wars: a Coliseum ward

Wherein Time is the mistress

Of the great work.

Let it move towards us,

Heaving, like some shadow beast.

Let it rend, so that life might produce

The blue bird

From the dying mouth

Of the beaten affliction

Of days.

Back, through sciences, back, through rites

We are flung unto the body

And the sensations produced by the encounter

Of the immortal beloved.

What great machine

Produces this Minotaur of consciousness

Which ambles so

Toward the island of ordained meetings,

Sorted, ordered

For the task of riting revelation

In the mind of some dreamer girl or priest?

The clouds gather, grey-borne

Angry, wild, and hungry.

There is little time before the storm breaks;

Life is transformed.

From the egg, we drink the yolk elixir

And shudder, in the mad changing.

Wild man, into beast,

Into pulpit for the eye of fire.

Come, let the storm wring

The dew-wet blood

From the body of shabby clothes.

Like beggars we haunt

For apocalypses; collect revelations

Like snake tongues

Embalmed in jars of poesie.

May this be the lightning that stung unrecognizable days,

Flashed muzzles from mountains of chairs

On city streets

Gazed wildly, like an animal

Afflicted by some long forgotten god.

Even now, the whispers grow louder

In the enchanted grove

Which roars of primordial hunger.

Come, stars,

Grip me with your talons

And shudder me from man to beast

To immortal eye of dragon’s fire.

What awaits us

We claim

In black pits

Of ecstatic victory

Holding aloft

The blue, writhing, thunder-serpent

Of our trials

Then swallowed it,

Gleaming

With smiles

And this is history’s turn;

The wager of war

To bring forth

The ulterior world

Of shifted legion;

Of shifted forms.

Made wild in the brain;

Puzzled in the blue nerve

So as to grow the necessary part-form

To shake forever

Dawn fruit

From the trees

Of Time

Come this dark pride

Which breathes through the corroded mouth

Upon the doors of time, the body is hung

Sallow, hollowed out by the moon’s reflection.

Come, Promethean night,

Garland of the organs hung

Upon the bone post.

Crows, become my eyes: that fly, crowded

In the black pitch. To distant stars, we walk

Like the dead: upon stilts

Of pneumatic breath.

This spirit: hoarse within the bones, lingering upon the earth

Like a fuse, feeding the fury

Of the panther.

Stalking the night ground

With yellow-moon eyes.

Before us, the cornucopia of black nature,

A seed spilled upon the ground. Knife-teeth

And hot breath enter the soil

With fingers of tongue.

Hot, thick blood

Between fangs of woe. I descend, with the white wings

Flashing against a pale moon.

Through eyelets, the core gazes

With a distant, undying hunger. I do not know her,

She does not belong to me

But to the ravenness star.

Light that shines, upon a star

That is a pilgrimage to a vacuum-abyss:

Do you know your hungers end

In utter transmutation?

I lay my hands upon the cold flesh of your tomb

Far beyond your burning,

Cold, skin like hands

Which bleed out

Into the tundral night.

While you seethe, worlds decay

Without remark. But a whisper, upon a bedside

As nails crumble

From the sternum-crucifix of form.

You, truly, hover

Not rising, nor fallen

Not suspended

But flying, sincerely, toward your mark.

Is this not desire, that we tumble,

Like flaming arrows

Toward the destiny of the soul?

But a shard, a dream-figment

Of the hot tears

Drips upon the earth

And raises a carcass

Through aeons of union.

I am purged

From within. Thus,

The star moves forth

From its hiding place

Upon the spindle of the earth lay the dead

Ignored by the crawling beasts of blood

Who wander fearfully

With eyes that glance about and down

Guarding the body

Mortal wound.

In their graves they rest, unthinking

In a plot which tumbles stones and lengthens vine —

Immortal, unmeasured time.

The days leak from the drum:

We dance upon them, unknowing

The secret, sacral answer

Upon which they spin.

Withinness — is drawn forth

Like blue blood

Out into the light,

From the effervescent well

Forever unemptied.

Shielded from the sun, mortal nakedness unfurls

Like a cloth

In the clock of the day; the steaming remainder

Of dreaming night

Again and again, we go to the well

With fistfuls of water

For intimations of the ancient memory.

Time and again, we break up against

The fluorescent object

Of our desires

Fleeting as a gazelle of blue, smoking

Light

Black rain falls upon the dead;

Leaves scatter upon stone.

Autumn, the tipping jar

Where words alone give

Sweet taste

Like nectarines

Formless

Upon the lips.

I bathe, alone,

In memories. Blue sap

Litters my mouth, mingles with my blood:

The golden water that mines

Life’s impulse.

For now, we drink the dark stone.

Birds chittering, leaving

A fallen seed

Suspended in the mist of the air.

A lifting current of water; star-spice

Which cuts the nostrils and lungs

Like smoke

From a distant forest burning.

As summer storms fall

Upon temporariness.

With knowledge, the lone form

Becomes evermore like a dream:

Drawn from the willow’s mind like thorns

Where blood drips from the dreaming.

What is it to be here; taste the wind

Which ever-changes; is ever renewed

But with a mortal sameness?

The fruits, which

Seed upon seed

Mount into a furious resurrection

Tipping into pronunciation,

Red meat’s speech?

This, like all things, the dead know

On their peaceful sojourn back to partlessness.

Pilgrims, we trip

In the total silence of the dying.

On pilgrimages, we sip

Endless gold from the drum;

Unknowingly, like fools

Depart from this earth, as we came —

Untouched by living.

This is to live: briefly passed

From hand to hand

Like some oblivious child.

Carried forth, like a passenger

In an ancient car

Which speaks before you.

Your words, stolen

By scripture. Your body taken,

And flung into the naked woods of creation.

It is a tunnel we walk, incensed;

Intimated by conquest

Sexed in the face of death

Into faces, masks

Which we pull tight in the costume gallery

Which is waking.

We stand, and speak only fear

Until we are claimed by the immortal silence.

The living, the truly living

Do not dream.

They stand, in tempests

And live in the rain

With revealed eyes.

Going forth — stars tumble

Given voice by clouded forms

Who sneak beneath moons,

Sleek, parted hides

Speaking in hushed tones

Surrounded by the inescapable terror

Which is passage

Into the indefinite.

Thus life waits

Amongst the trees whose roots drown

In summer monsoons

Of crystal blue shatters

Which fall in sheets

About the layers of the tomb

The way is paved, long ago

Swimming in ancient technology.

The eyes, the ears, the mouth, the nose, the skin

Receive the scent of the song.

What we know are traces

Woven

In the fiery heights of forces

Beyond common measure

Drawn, then thrown

Into the play

Only remembered

In the theatre of comedy and tragedy.

Stone bowl, buried in brush

Ancient song, aloud then silent

From the mouth of forgetting, seized —

In empty tremors

Of exchange and numbers.

An angel sits upon the stone, in thought.

Rain descends upon the poetry,

Bathed in warm summer’s gloom.

Fields of the scratched stone,

Where dead bodies

Drink the earth

Remembering.

Back again, to twist the dial of the light

Against the backdrop of stars;

To wring the waters of dusk

From the cloth of the living.

These new surges of sight

Connect outlets of electricity

To new corridors

And produce visions

Of the long buried

Blue imagining.

Time and space bend

Towards the ancient procession

Spirits made flesh dance

Unwittingly

In the lights.

Obscured, as if behind watery glass

Are past and future. The present slips between them

Like an unbroken, primordial memory.

Each hand and face, raised and sought

About the maze

Twists the future’s burning mask.

Which way shall we wander?

The words of the fates rattle

The sky like bones; whisper, like vapors

In and out of dreams of smoke.

Draw, this direction

Which first appeared as a sketch in the stomach of birth

Wound into time; tumbled, blindly

With groping hands

Toward the mystery.

This is the pull, like a magnet

Toward the throat of speech

Which like a string, a thread

Tugs the body through red magnolia flowers

On the steam train island

In the long, black apartments

Of early vision

Into the stage of the song; furthermore

The beloved, whose sacral words

Know the innermost fire

Of your first before speech.

This long promise: where ways are designed and foreclosed

By mortal hands turned immortal stone. Where ways are shut

And carved

With hands of bone.

My fingertips trace and wither

The boards of time.

Upon the shifting symbols of fire: and the many names for gods

In the face of the tumbling deathing; the sallowed blood

The mortal hand

Reaching upward

Toward the burning;

Downward

Toward the hidden wheel

Of fire.

Given this ancient name: death’s agent,

That which returns passion to the light which streams

In each broken day

In sight lost of the body;

Vision lost of the way

Of living

It is this cask of blood-red wine which sits

Undrunken

Stumbling in cold false sobrieties

Towards a visionless resumption

Of cold silence

Give this time, then

The time of the flesh, made wild

From long, mortal presumption. This time of the fires of angels

Perched over the hearth of the mortal form

With ravens’ claws,

Marking the mind of the body:

Twisting it into primordial furies.

It is this time; with one hand upon the gravestone, scratched

With claws

And the hand of the future

Upon the writhing snake of electric light;

The body is the flower-bulb of man.

This guise you slip into; out of,

One and to the next

Like snake’s-skin. To see the looming mountains of powers

Trees breaking across gray, scarred skin

And the mad tumult of the village below

Desperately scrying mystic images

As molten light tips low

Over caverns

Of quiet, streaming crystalline waters

Of blue.

The mad young girl, the mad stunt

For survival, the unrelenting dirge

Broken by the angels: minds who know

And live immortality.

They sit here, in these hallows

And play chess with the rest

Upon the board of the living: exchanging energy

With laughing surrendered futility.

We swap bodies, like less than thieves. Without crimes,

Without time, without true fixed destiny, but to present at each crossroads

The immortal possibility

Of fiery ascent. At each moment, the Dionysian wine

Tips into mouths

To swallow or spit

In the wilder forest,

Wilder than our imagining, wilder than our intuition

Waiting to be broken open by prophetic words

In the face of stone fears.

Come, Death

Wrap your talons about religion, about emperors,

About talismans. Choking, like stones

About the vein of life.

Let the blood flow, old and low

Odious thunders

Which stream from black skies

And whisper up from churning blue

Below.

What I have seen of the future is a strange dragged leash

Through permanent mysteries, mass events which entangle

Dripping, private affairs

Into the tapestry weaving

Of orders of stars

Into seemingly firm, concrete affairs.

That the planets are isles, stations of the mind,

Admixed into the very heart, organs, and soul

Of the agents which churn the seas of history

And surface gems

For all the creation to see.

We must awake from slumbers, like cats, like men

Like coils of the ancient, unbridled energy

Which seeps through time

In the seed which tries, embroiled

Time and time again

To set immortal vision

In grounds.

It is this ancient plot we have forgotten;

Swimming, eyeless, like fish

In a long ocean of the unconscious

Spitting forth regurgitations of the fire of spirit

Hid, shunted,

Deep within the flesh

To be remembered, resurfaced

By the genius of imagination; the descent

Into the depths of dreams

Where madness is wed

To revelation of being.

Descend, into long abandoned temples of the soul

Long abandoned brush of our time

Paved over by markets of empty corpse

Bled of the sacral reason.

Descend, into abysses lit by the fire

Of the still smouldering word

Churning, deathless, within the forgotten skin.

The black tomb of the opaque body

Which shifts through the turning lights.

We had dreamed, long ago

We were dreamed by the ancient force

Which spun us into bodies.

Again and again we intertwined —

Did we not know our fates?

To meet and meet again under the long lives of stars

As they grow bold and shunt out light

Like closed eyes,

Did we not know that we would whisper, again and again,

Closer, ever to the body

Of our own mysteries?

The skin harbors what words resurface

With frights and attempts

Of the great utterance

Behind the mirror of our passion plays.

Churning in emotions

Beneath aeons of tumbling gloom

That grips about the flesh of time

And reminds us of past, ancient deaths.

For we are the ancients, in new clothes

Of vision.

We are the same blood that they wept

Upon the graves of the earth. Lost in stone,

The words which echoed in bone.

Now carved into the hard beak

Of birds of prey

Or else whispered

Deep into the delights of a dream

Where the body lies in an artificial tomb.

The eye of the mind tumbles from clouds

In the haze of stars, mingled with languages we know

But do not yet exist to the hard body of time;

Once existed but slipped

From waking thought. They lie embroiled,

At war with physical forces.

From this dream we sat upright,

Seeded with information: like a thought within a body,

Like a draught within a bottle

Of wild drunkenness, enclosed in mortal form.

And yet, I know the gold hint of your blood

Which is swallowed from aeons of sleep

The taste which mingles with my tongue

And goes down like fire in my stomach.

We are the taste of the blood of fear

As it is transmuted into visions.

All the world which we drink

Is an isle of our imagined persecution

Toward the collision of the joking laughter of stars

With their serious function.

To put the eye of the mind in the writhing cage of the panther

And allow him to speak

From the reflection of the oven corpse

Which is a mirror of the stars;

The canal of life.

And thus they imagined

Jackal faced gods and demons —

From the first flash of the eye of the light

To the last, hushed breath of mortal forms

As they pass in and out of the mystery-body

They tangle with the place

Between form and formlessness:

Between pure fire and the rite

Which seeds shatters of flame

Within cooling draughts of clay.

Who am I, but the flame that is streaked with blue,

Destined to meet, entangled

With you, with our meat, which screams

Of a deeper memory: which must surface

Beneath leagues of trials and suffering —

Bodily woes

Which were entranced, survival

Passing in and out of fugues

Of desperate, formative minds

To fit this time of our turning.

Is this world ripe for our garden of poetry?

Wide worlds of imagination emerge

From crusts of stone, from leopard and reptile bone

From escarpments of time

Astonished and enfuried

By awakening.

That we sit upon the garden of this rock and proclaim

Unities with our mysteries; our immortal souls

Dancing within this pilgrimage of bodies, drinking in and out of time

Like a still of blue liquor

Quenched in black stars, awaiting,

Taking clothes

In marriage

With a blue, infinite divinity

In the game of flesh, timely

Ecstasies:

Of us, for us:

We are many; sleep within the dream

But partially allude to the land beyond —

Carved Egyptian images, long silences, and the word of the poem

Which reaches in the flesh

And pulls out the imagineless blue wisps of flame

Like a black skeleton of the spiritude

Which guides and haunts all affairs:

Looming shadow, through which we sift —

Immortal light, for all long clues

Of our passage. The way, narrow, as it were

Of destiny; the song which unites

Private ecstasy. Long aged, in the barrel of time

The soul leaps

Again, and yet again

Toward the ledge of the mad changing. This is the word —

Form to fit the soul that reaches; screams

Against the glass curtain of time,

Breaking the foil of form

And finding the mad third:

This is our jungle

Through which we dance

And must fly by leaping. Do you remember

The faint memory in dreams, which hides in city alleyway streets

And rests beneath masked faces

Of the men and women you once knew

Called forth again; calling forth the torrential new

Wordless, without symbol, without memory

A great, red-golden fire

Which breaks overhead,

A sun at an angle

Of carnal knowledge of spiritude

Received, truly

In the flesh of the living soul

The wound of the flesh

is the jaguar.

An archival geology

of the flesh

of the star.

An empty gate, through which ghosts pass

Clasped to the flesh-metal of the body

Wringing life as they pass

From the blood smeared stones

Of city empires.

Animal consciousness rises from below;

Tips into genius — which sees the whole parade:

March upward from abyss

In organization and coordination of light.

You, slaves to dead words

You, snout of the calm victory of time

Squeezed of its blood

Before the glory of vision

Days wasted, wrung to pulp and ashes.

Hours tolled

Before the silence of the bell.

Dancing ‘round the maypole of hell

Silent, empty blood

Ferocious, impermanent heat.

From young to old, old to young

Stars disperse

Without even heroic fight

Or mark.

Panic etched into cool stone.

Diamond fruit, languishing

On summer’s hot vine.

And all about,

The silence, the fury

Of the animal hunger.

Not even cowardice

Deaf ears

You were but an obstacle to me,

A drag on life —

Animals mating with animals,

Man, the exploited, the condemned

The desperate

I climbed above your design

And watched the misery as it sulked and scurried below:

Forever dissatisfied, forever toiling among forms

And lamenting the absconded fire from forever flying

Young flesh.

I looked about for reason, justice, knowledge

And I found none — only the illusions frantically propounded

By the masks of burning form.

All left away

To pure smoke.

Man is a temporary moment

Between fleshes of a greater mind

Which toils within man

Both as a jester and a serious project

Of evolutionary ambitions.

And yet I lived among you, as you fought over pounds of flesh,

Acres of land, empires, lovers

To squeeze the last drops of the juice of life upon your lips

As you perish, vagrant and criminal

Upon the dry parish of the ground of your emptiness.

Spread about us like marshes, spread about us like deserts:

No authority in man, but the rare cresting

Of the mind which sees.

And yet you perpetuate; desperately climbing

The rungs of the ladder of life. To sex and sex again

You must fall. Fall in desperate hopes to rise

To produce the possibility

Of true vision.

All about us is this calamity,

A masquerade of fools — all beneath, a dull flame

Which whines to roar

In a future wildness.

All that is left are scraps of paper

From minds who burned through the night, as man fell back

Into black waves of sleep. Sole fires

Which illuminated the depths of being.

It is to that well I go, amidst the grand carnival

Of sacrifices and loud, blind screams

Which decorate the night air.

It is to that well alone

That life becomes a draught

Emboldened

In the preparatory flesh-architecture

Through which to receive wisdom.

This circus, a mad binding, of flesh to flesh

In hopes of survival, and survival futures more.

A bet, in a series of bets

A move, in a series of moves

To perpetuate the fat of the brain

And the warm blood of the flesh.

Children strung forward

Like a necklace of spades.

Beads of skulls woven upon

The body of the great black fires.

And yet you, low, slow to turn

As ages bind and broil upon the crucifix

Of the earth’s grinding crust of stars.

Slow to season and mix

Starry dust with mud.

Baked in the flesh

By meteorites and dreams, exorcisms

Played out upon the dial-field of history, as suns loom and loam,

Shrouded behind clouds, bearing their hot ash upon the day:

You sat and slept, in various states of the dead movement,

Classified only as dreams

In the unripe form of the flesh

Which must fight off Death

In order to face the black god of Transformation

With eyes that can see.

This mad march, over and over again

Is the song of days

Which is naught but a mad drumbeat of the blood,

The blood of the world as it surges forth

With desperate hope

Toward genius

As a still

For the insane;

A cure

For the wild, blind, wounded animal

Foaming, addled

Pink flesh

Of mind

As you gaggle and twist, laugh and slum

As stars burn and waste your bodies

You clash and collide to pass

But a thread of prayer

Toward oblivion

The loud emptiness

Of vacant animals running about

For their pound of flesh

You are nothings, spread over the bread of the flesh of the earth

And consumed. All flight is from this,

Immature gods sculpting miniature icons

Who squabble over spots of flashing, false gold

Like a yarn, you are stuffed into the hole of the world

And broken from it — again and again

Over delused emptiness.

And you call this freedom, you mad, brute

Obsessed over your private machination

Wiped, like pus

From the beak of the black bird

Of absolute abyss

This layer you fret, I laugh

Having swallowed Death, without a tissue

And like papier mache, or mummified wraps

Have emptied the world’s stupor out onto my lap

Like a pile of bone broken dust.

It is nothing

You hammer your worries

Your innocents

Upon the stake of the endless collapsing charade-waves of time

Each meaningless blue-white flash of light

Down upon your face of animal fear.

It was from that I was stung,

Monstrosities of waking, with you,

Pure animals, unconscious evil

Masked with the most pathetic miseries.

That I lived among you, and listened to your complaints

As time smeared your body

Over and over again

Upon the executioner’s stone

To be used again

To make eyes

That can peer over the ravine lip

Of your cowardly disgust;

The refuse of your hide

Used as a torch

To light this world-night

And reveal

What was beneath

Your poor, stupid, ignorant word;

Your thrashing

Which you called kindness, grace, life

This is anger, hatred, malice

From one who has seen what you are, in truth, at the bottom

And relinquished you, laughing at his own stupidity.

You are a corpse car, that carries the necessary ingredients

For the awakening of genius:

Once in a rare moon, once, when the match is struck right and proper

Arising from the sex of dead men and women

Arising from the sex of the broken, hopeless, misery

Rises the eyes capable of seeing the beast from which it has arisen

The sick, sad, murderous beast

Who trudges through history

In throes of selfish passion, whose words are only and all excuses

For hairy animality, for hunger, for criminality.

Words erased by the wind and air, echoing through the silence of history:

Only broken by the creep of wisdom, like small glass shards

Shorn from the ashes of a dead weight:

Mankind, nature, and the miraculous impossibility

Of any life at all, the mind rising

From threshing waves of chemical dew.

The miracle of the genius of light, the mind upon itself

Reflecting upon the stars which gleam about the eyes,

Where the star has made little burrows, like a rabbit

To perch upon waxen flesh

And judge, dance,

Experience the terror of fusion; the explosion of the body

In sex-death

Smattered upon the black, wallless abyss

Like a remark, a speech

With no plate to catch it, but the great air

Which shines with residue of dead stars

Crawling back into black throats

Of shattered time

Man: a necessary murder

Like gulls consume

The fish of the earth and ocean, like panther mouths stretch over the earth and break hot red blood

Tear flesh from bone

And suck heat and light which pounds the brain

Forth into millenniums, forth into dew-drums of mornings

Which rise with the beast of the sun bringing beats of flaming arrows over the flesh of the earth

And throws things into the chaos of motion

As blood hammers them into vague passions

Which must find their bodily marks

This is no terror, but the mad, dumb machinery

Desperately seeking escape

But yet the mind who sees — and therein, all movement ceases

As the light behind bodies is revealed

And the fear masks which stretch over their skin

Carried in expressions which do not cease or move

Laid like death masks upon infants

As they stumble over the earth for gold water which never arises

Only in apparitions, only in the hot mirage of oases

Which are only the mad, deaf, dumb, and plastic, glass, silver, gold

Trinkets which litter the ground

After the star is exhausted

And collapsed dead in a box

I saw you, the poor, stupid demon

As you tore over the world, leaving a stain

Like the spit of a snail

Over the large grave

Which age and age again

You tore into the earth and collapsed

Like the fool of all fools, mankind

Unripe, unready for knowledge:

Unripe, unready for awakening

Clinging to your books, clinging to your idolatry,

Your sanctimony, your religious purpose

And you were laid over the banks, bodies breaking the lapping waves

Covering the sandy bottom with your red smell

And it was then I knew your great secret: nothing —

Nothing, only madness and foolishness

Even as I stretched your language over my mouth to tell you, like a leather flask

You blind, deaf, and dumb

Could not hear

In unripe bodies, hard and ignorant

Of the senses,

Ignorant of spiritual worlds

Careless of flows of light:

It was of no consequence: for you to throw yourself off the ledge and die a real death

Of everydays, like a folktale, or a village

Milling about for scraps, like scavenger lips

Of dawn snakes at the bottom of a young ocean.

I gave you nothing, for there was nothing for you to receive

Just the mad throes of your own mystery,

Impenetrable to you or anyone but the vague hope of dreams to cure and salve:

Money, power, trinkets

Thrown into a bowl to cure your condition.

It was then I knew I walked among the dead, supped with them

Walked upon their trivialities, upon which they barked

With an empty noise.

To survive was all, and less,

To bare dull, stenched teeth while doing it.

This desert: I saw you, and with nothing to turn you or awaken you

From the dull machinery in which you labored, eyes which saw

Only slivers at best, of the wide body of creation

And the ignorance, and the hatred: which you bore, like a coat of arms

In every word and glance —

I hated you too, until my hatred was exhausted

Into a moment of laughter, then utter forgetting.

I saw that history must march forth, like a teardrop of light

In a moment of amber, thrown forth

Down through the ages, briefly clasped in the infant hands of each would-be emperor

Would-be charlatan, would be mother, screaming marketeer, police, soldier, monkey,

Fish, branch of wind

Until the prophet ingested the die of light

With the flue of the body

And began speaking — to a mad, silent, wide Nature:

Itself like a jungle, unmoving, illiterate,

Unfleshed: and a prophet only among prophets is understood —

And in all history, scraps of paper in communion

Where the light still burns, perilously and full,

A moon to the blind, mirrorless

Hateful earth

Of squabbling children

Of all violences, religious prisons, tortured, pulling faces

Over pathetic disputes

Animal violences on a plain

Enacted with rote regularity. And this, even, the small blessing

To climb over it all and laugh, even as it rent the body and mind, the spirit of love

Alone, falsely triumphant,

Over an undesirable abyss

Which spits and hisses like a snake

Which does not know its neck being rung

And parades, flashing rotting flesh

And a toothless grin

Like a prize

I saw within you, nothing

And I knew within you your destiny

As one who carries a bit over an abyss, enfolded in your very flesh

And passes it forth

In the desperate, perilous passion

Of one who has nothing to gain or lose in this flesh-bitten form

And must pass this small fire forth

In hopes of a gain that is never yours.

And there, I smiled and understood:

That this was all you had, and that this was your deepest misery,

The misery that lights this whole world,

A misery of righteous fools — right and correct in their only true, deepest presumption

The thing that would remain unspoken,

And carry the whole mad procession of Nature forward.

The desperate hope for genius, evolution, awakening,

Seeded in every being

And the ceiling of every fool and displeasure

Thrown into the future

With the utter calamity of each waking day,

Spun, cut, and gleaming

With the paradisal light of the this play,

The utter insanity through which all cultures, farces, religions, civilizations,

Jungles and oceans

At last found their form and rite.

I passed this world by, and Nature, knowing that Nature bore me

From dust, down through crusades and chemical ages

Of pools of light, where cells thrust

In a timeless aeon of darkness

I saw your desperation in the stockade, the stock market, the drum which beats

The tourist of the world, whose nights tip into dry bone

And scream.

And so we invented philosophy, the chief and great consolation

For the world’s misery.

Being the eye of nature which bulges and leaps out of the chimeric body

Of world miseries, man tangled in the flesh of woman

Breast, talons, Anubis eyes

The cranium stuffed into hair and bone

I wandered for awhile, and pieced together the deep logic behind

The open doors of life

Which swung for each child

And slammed shut for each exhausted corpse

Dried of light and blood

And I saw, there, I saw

The monstrosity which was really but a child

The desperate, fleshing darkness

Which thrashed in a nightmare

Of billions of years of fire passed through unripe forms

Which burned and ripped through the corpse metabolism

Exhausted each body and in sex alone made one further throw possible

From chemical water, rising through Roman streets and dark soil

Fermenting, beast and death, butcher and death,

Postman and death

To crop the head of genius like a waterlily

From an ocean of trials, beheadings, Mongolian hordes

Parisian nights of lovers, almost poets,

Balconies in civil wars, blasted open with stone bombing ruins

Tears shed by serf mothers

Ashes strewn in black oceans

And stars, yet stars — burning overhead like witnesses

As panthers grew human faces, thumbs,

Birds shifted in the light, their eyes wide, triumphant,

Pronouncing:

This age, this age I knew

And walked on the stone, on the desert,

On the dirt

On the bodies of the dead

The living dead of this world

And found it empty

And the dice, thrown wide

With a sleeping hand

Over the abyss

Which was nothing but a maw of blood

Upon which something must become triumphant

Or be cast down, again

In the dull, dumb thunder

Of the crack of yet another

Tumbling, empty, forgotten

Aeon

This world —

A joke played on an idiot

Who takes it seriously

Stuffed full with meaningless opinions

Of the insane,

Strutting, with the cowardice of the weak

Upon the stage of actions

Of the pathetic, blind and doomed:

An asylum

Of sneering, weak cowardice

Of half formed, blind beasts

It helps me to know that we are free

In the broad jungle that is the labyrinth

Where I dream talismans and masks

This smoke of the world

Blown away

By the snake of my throat and lungs

A coiled, gesticulating fetus

Eyeless, with pink fingers

Asleep

But this is not about you…

It is about my capacity to dream

And thus, with shards and currents of fire

To build the ancient, pagan cathedral of drum language, speech resound

Baked out of your minds by small scandal, pregnancy, and false identity

The cloud of smoke upon the city, the empire

Of the cage of the dream

Of one animal skin

In toil

In this shade I laugh,

Leaving the city

Your hoarse play

Of papier mache hammers

Against unmoving stone

It has been this way since the Viking,

Alligator, brush play

Which yielded nothing

But transfigured fire

And my face in the flame

Yelling the mystery

Endlessly recycled bodies

Newly returned youth

Used and tossed in the ovarian pile

Of a distant memory

A faraway war

Fragmented troubadour

Who wanders these woods

Convinced that he is Dante

Or Rasputin

It is within this theatre of stone

That I watch you march to the slow doom of your convictions

Presidents, bell towers

That ring each hour like a death march

Across a plain whose imaginary ceiling

Is a glass mirror

Pressed across the prostrate body

Baked by sunlight ray

From you I draw

What little magic is hid in the shadow

Of the lockstep of your animal prison,

The blue flute you play well into the night,

Forgotten memory of the dream

Which has devolved into a slaughterhouse corridor

Away from the dancing maidens of the night

No sliver of the moon, no horror

Yet darkness unabating

Like the last sleep of death.

Moving to stage directions sung

By an eyeless priest who drives the train

Of immortal Time

Which relentlessly hammers

Like rain upon the windowpane of dusk —

This is the fallen thing,

Blind Lucifer

Nursing a nubile wing. Your conquests, your concubines

Your toys and dials fashioned out of wood, snakeskin, and stone

Chafe against the wind lashed waves

And slowly crumble.

We cannot hear the song

Of the blind dirge,

The procession that leads dead men

About the slaughterhouse maze of this city

Marching forth

Into child after child

Whose bodies are exhausted

By blows of lightning, summer storms.

It is in the deepest light of the dream,

Totally obscured

That a hand beckons: a face flashes

Chameleon woman, of the soul

Who leads into the dark and deep —

The mysteries which haunt all golden goblets

Of waking movement.

Rush, without tarrying,

To the city and palace of dreams.

We, who are stung by fate —

You all, who hope, all your days

For the turn of Revelations:

The prize painting at the end of the long metal corridor.

He has painted the face of Death,

Shrouded in a hooded mask,

Carrying a scythe, surrounded by meat

At a circular table of reckonings.

Barter here, or there

For a chunk of the course

Which all life takes

And the electric blue realization

Of the fragile, carved spectre

Who holds the pink beast

Tendrils gripping the earth

Like a child’s hands

Choking the air, the lungs

And squeezing purple blood

From the long decorated stone

Of ages of the dead

Huddled around the iron core

Detritus

Carved into amber light

Bellowing

In leagues of fire

The great comedy:

A ship of fools, going nowhere

At civil war

Tearing apart the bow and masthead

Killing the crew

Playing games for the eyes of others

Lives spent on appeal

As nations war over oil drums, women,

Barbiturates of the screaming soul

Appetites consumed, as fires rage

And small lives burn

Within small words, like coffins

Entombed in worlds of little, disconnected passions

Fueled by chaos

Loitering about the world, to be taken

Purposelessly

Scratching, lashing against the black wallpaper

With Lear-eyes

For but a moment of Valium

Faces bathed in chemical hue

As smoke casts its glow down upon the empty cities,

Huddling, shuttered in bomb shelters —

Ages of ruins blasted into dirt

Lost among shrapnel and charnel

Of millions of lives burned through and lost

Like a fuse in a tempest,

Unceasing, unbreaking roar

Scrambling

For little moments of oblivion

To hide from the baking sun — which engorges and destroys

Like bloodlust, from the little oven of the heroic body

Exhausted by presidencies

And the haughty perch of false gods

Like a vulture gazes down from crumbling limestone temples

Into the abyss that opens

Upon the rock wherein they rest,

Sleeping, rumbling little heartbeats

Self obsessed

In the mirror image, beneath

The knives-teeth

And beneath,

The silence of peace

The eyes of appeal widen

And stare at the crowd, begging for salvation.

The stony fires which burn

Within each empty socket; the foreign stars

Not yet fatted on meat and blood,

Not yet

So self consumed

Within our great houses of worship

The stone and wood pews

How little of the real fire is preserved

Bottled into empty, stone words

Ushered into rote devices

Drilled into sentences

And yet, the damned star gazes still

And beneath its cloak, the white light of infinities.

I saw the emperor’s dissolution and the death of his closing eye

I saw the fires that scorched the West

And drew from it the last of the blue lightning

I saw the trinkets fashioned in the face of the screaming doom

From an ashen pope’s diseased mouth

As he tumbled into oblivion, undead

Reciting scriptures:

In the valley where the prophets burn and are consumed

By the pure thunder, lightning, and fire

Which rains cool upon the bones,

Breathing, as the last politicians squabbled over an Athenian apocalypse

Of tablets cracked and strewn in the chaos

As children cried, unbreeding

As cities sat, with mad, empty mouths

And fashioned guillotines with old park benches and butchers’ knives

Here is your world: where the last blood will be drawn from the stone with the last mad force of the animal without a choice,

As a star sups on the wide void, and consumes itself from within

Here we stand, at the altar of agonies,

At the death of the long dream.

And it is this opium smoke which pours

As lives pass, and fly

With collected breath

Into the long sigh of ambient blows

Which emerge from the east;

Coil into billowing folds

Of murderous storms

Mask after mask is stripped away

The corporations, the policies, the legal documents

The names, the nations

The scared face of the animal biology

Until all that is left is the abyss of presence.

This time — is all moments

And stands before the vision-scene

You, so convinced of your name

Tremble before Death —

And what lies beneath it

Being your truest form

Each day, carrying only the pounding bloodbeat

Your great heritage in this cosmic arc

Of suns and shadows

And yet immersed, entirely

In the shadow play

Of delusional falsities

Of the murder of the soul

The private prisons

of billions

of unripe hosts

Feeling their delusion

Sagging in their faces and their eyes

Dragged by an animal will

Which possesses them

A will

Which they do not command

And this is the misery of mankind

Pulled by a force

Which appears — the dictate of their whole lives, coiled about their limbs and breast

Like a great ancient snake

Whose tooth-light gleams

At the corner of their eyes

Controlled by an ancient host

Which hoists them about

Like puppets

Of a blind will:

Fluid and womb

Devolving, liquid form — again

Fluid and screaming, lashing womb

Blind darkness of cave

And forced into the empty strain,

The empty breach, again and again

The whole, billion-bodied snake

Calling desperately for a mind of light

A torch

To light the blind command

Of the fallen snake

Whom they call — it

Lucifer

The great chain of skulls

Lives strung together,

Bellowing

In the well of deep, black

Water’s fire;

Bellowing again, past the wraith of days

Into eternity

Let this be the light that reveals

The mass, the ancient face

The tremendal fire

Behind their mask of eye-thrashing terrors

Being human, attacks and consumes

The life of the fly, the soul of the fly

And its fear and love.

The attempt to find light

From behind a glass windowpane.

Meat into the mouth,

Leaves from the wreath of the earth.

Give the body, mind, and feelings

Back to the turning seasons of forms and energies.

I recede into the grove, becoming one with the skin of the tree.

I walk the earth and move

Through a murderous car.

Seeing the world, as it were:

Budding forms, loosed from jars —

Desperately searching for epiphany.

I carry this gold within me, even as I emerge

Like a monstrous head

From the grounds of the earth

Churning sexual reproduction and metabolic hunger.

Energy is fed through me

Like a bone flute.

I drink, I sup, I war

Within the great continuum

A beaker which pours

Blue lightning

Down upon the heads and faces

Of the waterlily, the fly, the ladybug

The child

And who wander

Immersed in the water, drinking from it

In slowly lightening darkness.

Let this cloud shift,

The storm before the eye

That experiences the flesh of animal and plant matter;

Rises

So to reveal

The great vein

Beneath and between

All sacred lives

Of awakening

The document seethes

In laval heat

From rising waves

And dappled suns

Into the canon grove of wicks, we tumble

From the empty halls and rooms of memory we tumble

Into dark space we tumble, wordless, confused

Grasping at the fading light of time

As it rips through the flesh

Like bullets

All we are, laid naked

And yet, the silence

Of the mad, confused fear

Trembles

In each passing day

As oblivions tip

From trapped, caged eyes

I will produce the black stain upon the wall for you

The shadow of the universe-history, the unspoken word

Which flows through the deepest recess of the mind,

The abscess of consciousness,

The Anubis, eating the clipped-flower heads of man

All malcontent, disease,

The inner thought hurricanes

Which dance around the marionetted race,

To collapse and die, and spring up from rotted, clay floorboards

To consume more meat, more juice,

More elixir of dying star, a fading:

The gray-black, cloud shadow,

But a vague figure of a man, all that is and could be:

Grasping at wisps of an already forgotten dream

For the lilac scent which mad-stains upon his lips,

He scrapes the skin like stone

For the remains of the pleasure, fleeting

A skull, fleeting

A star, flying

Away, like a blinking into the night.

It was then I knew the shadow, which mounts peasant-womens’ backs

As they labor in the fields,

Dead men in the rice paddies, ground to soil and dust,

Their last breaths lingering like fog upon the marshes

Who quench the earth,

Whose blood runs into rivers

And is absconded into beetle-mouths

It was then I knew the shapeshifting masks, of lust, horror, and revelation

As man dipped his tongue into the black milk of unbidden desires

And drank the blood of the earth, grew emboldened, strong,

Confident.

This shade, like a cloud, stews,

Without a mouth, yet smiling. How do I know this,

As it wraps its arms around the whole empire of earth,

The whole simmering, stinking dirge of man

Like a long sewage pipe

Of waste wrangled into corporeality;

Of historical atrocity ground

Like a powder; supped into the organs and soul

Of those who haunt this day?

But shadows — at the corners,

A dry air of apparition; but bends

A central black mass, whose tendrils fade into ungraspable hands.

And it is each colonial stock, each proud conqueror, each desperate, screaming man-child

Who reaches his hands into the pot of death

And smears himself with corpse-shit.

The declared ruler

Of the mad asylum game.

But about dreams, we descent

As the black figure stands abreast, unmoving

Watching, as the furnace is exchanged

For coin; promises vague.

As stone pillars are rent by time and anger

As hearts overturn fleeting thought and feeling.

I saw the beast, as all avoided

His gaze, like a harbinger, like a doom

And in this way

Drew him about

In their own mad fleeing;

Drew the force of all malcontent

Through the clay and straw form

Of the desperate, clenching, dying fire

In a world of no truth, no honor, no courage

And no character

But flight and foolish delusion

To flee, like a child

From the mask of Death

Take a trip, down the dead

Where days and hours, flesh will shred

The light, sunbathe, in the sun

Come here, come one,

Come everyone

Here the dirge, here the dance

The sweet hour of parties and romance

The fires burn in the ancient grove

We circle in dark lakes,

All alone

Clasping hands

In moonlit loves

Here she comes

I saw the world on its private trip,

Through stars, through bars, through waking sleep

Grasping at dream-mythologies

In the backs of carriage cars

I saw the twisting braid of lace,

The color of your hair, shifting orgasmic face:

A child or not, a star from death

You hurry to build your nest, and all the rest

Freedom from your tired cell,

All at your savior’s bequest —

And here the night is old and stale

The air sits upon the pale

And this, your corpse, your nightly flue:

Through and through,

Through and through

But I remember when you were young

When hope was dew upon your tongue

That you drank in galloping fervor

Across the meadow,

Your Pantheric hooves

Making a clapping sound

Against the dirt of your skin

Come to seed, come to sow

Come to reap

Again and again,

Again and again

It was your anguished face

Down the drain, the sewers of time

The impression of catacomb-skull,

A Viking raid, a Parisian dance

Through the streets, bathed in wood and steel

Barricades

Refuse to yield

And here she comes,

Dressed in lace and wine

Ready and willing

To spend her time

As coins drop from your brassiere,

Your hips move lightly, free and clear

From the mess of history, cascading down

From father to daughter, from sun to burial mound

This is the way that we escape

Come on down to the ancient lake

We’ll have some fun, we’ll drink a beer

From behind the red moon, a demon peers

And from your skirt

Sings the red song

A breaking fruit

Against the long

Drawn curtain of time: this here is our simple rhyme

To meet in the garden

And play the musical game

Of our design

All the time, all the time

And you glance, with fear and wonder

At the mask behind the man, which leaps out and surpasses

The carriage and the bright ray against the grass

Which sits and ripes, throughout the age

To produce a mind

That laughs with rage

A body, thick and taut

Against the sun

A tree is all, a tree has won

Come take a trip, as the starlight lingers low

Against the pillow of your bedside bow

Where you and I sing against the mysteries;

Twist until we break

Our well-woven histories

With your animal in tow, upon a leash

Down into the ancient feast

FRAGMENT THREE:

I will ask you, perhaps to gain your sympathy. Do you know what it is as a child to believe in nothing? The eyes of an infant who cannot be persuaded of the simple, basic truths those of your world take for granted? That a clock is a clock, or a cat is a cat. What I saw was the intricate assembly of each smoothed block of wood and the farcical mechanism which claimed to tell a time which was nothing more than the spirals of the sun translated into idiocy. The eyes of an ancient predator within an energetic sphere of transmutation. Can you see what I see, friend? If you can, even but for a moment… I suppose there is no going back.

I understood this as the nature of all life. Perhaps to soothe myself. That all beings and forms undergo phases of profound transformation. I appear to you; the naked eye, as a base human form. But within me — I experience something entirely different than the human category. Do I feel pangs of what may be romantic love? Sexual desire? Of course. Do I eat, thirst? Yes. But are these things the true nature of myself? I cannot say this to be true.

The realm I occupy is vague. It is the emergence of forms from my mind’s eye which are manifest by hands and fingers. They come; I dutifully transcribe. I walk, and I do not see anything. I have no great story. So why would you listen to me? I suppose you have no real reason to do so. You and I, we have nothing in common — perhaps but the source from which we emerge, most primordially and fundamentally. And that is all I have and can lay claim to. It explains my commonality with all men; all things; the ease with which I am able to communicate with them. A lizard, a man or woman from another nation, even — if you believe in such a thing — a plant, or a tree. But I do not want to get so scarce. If you see my condition perhaps you may pity me. I reach out to you; perhaps you cannot listen. You cannot hear. Or you have no need to. What can I give a man, a woman, such as you? With a full life, an imaginal tale you call your own. Could I be so deluded; so persuaded? Perhaps. But there is a force within me which tears at each curtain before the immortal heat of the sun. How temporary!

Perhaps my greatest wonder is how you can believe in such a thing. How many of you. The sheer amount of manufactured, curated, devoted selves. That have sprung from the abyss and emerged with dutifully maintained historical figures. Caricatures. And you take this as your life. And fulfill it with such great seriousness. I sit in dark rooms. I ache, I paint, I sculpt with words. But I cannot participate in your world. Perhaps like a leper, or a beast. As I pity you, surely, you pity me! An actor who cannot act! A dancer who cannot dance! But rather, one who sits and sulks; rails against the great theatre of your play.

But I am not your enemy, no. I do not care, but for the loneliness and alienation my exception causes. Who am I to try to prevent the reality of time? You will fruit when you will fruit. Fathers and forefathers more. Womb after womb, of wet cave gesticulations. And perhaps I am the great farce! The undeveloped one! Set backward by a vision which as not fully descended into forgetting. This I will allow, however unconvinced of it I truly am. And perhaps that notion itself is to protect me from the consequences of my nubile innocence.

Why would I try to force you to move? With violence towards death? A death that cannot be a real death, because you must survive. But changed. Different. No dictator, no revolutionary, no force of urgency. How could I do this? Even this book is not to persuade you with words. There is no persuasion. I came into this occupation by way of the forces of life. There was no interlocutor. No director. No worldly name or face that gave me rite. I did not even become a beggar in your worldly terms. I achieved even substantial degrees of success. Money. Education. It is but a shadow to me, my friend. A long shadow. And I ask myself, am I supposed to pity you? I do not know. Do I feel pity, fear in your presence? I suppose the great feeling, at the base, is sadness. Sadness that we do not know each other. That I can come to you and soothe you from the well, however indecently, however infrequently, but you cannot truly live among me. You cannot truly know me. Only nothing can know nothing.

And you, my friend, you are a number! You have taken to the position of one, or two, or three. Assigned yourself defined attributes; jumped eagerly into the parade. I suppose you even can find, however brief, deep moments of joy in dancing among the others. That you feel a sense of fulfillment, being man among men. For you are among true fellows, whose hopes and dreams are your own.

I remember walking, in those city nights. After days of taking up painting; eating a roast chicken, a cigarette or two — strolling along the long promenade of lights of the dead city. I was in company, my friend, company like the grave is company. Company of the thing with no values, the thing with no opinions, or ideologue. It is, quite simply, the thing itself. Before you appeared with your numeric assignment.

I could never abide this. And it chafed at me, even angered me. Because it was nonsense. Noise. And perhaps I regret my anger at you. To rage against someone, something with convictions. But the loudness pierced my ears; what’s worse, even your authentic convictions… I fear I experienced them as a waste of my time. I honor your dreams, your aspirations. I do. To become a stockbroker, a member of parliament, even to fulfill some sort of creative vocation. To achieve and accomplish in this world under the terms of man. Money. Children. But the only aspiration I could abide in this world is the seeking out of absolute, transformative love. And this is my confession, friend. That I sought the deepest romantic love in the world. One for which there is no name or use of describing. An utterly useless thing. To reach the depths of oneself, truly, in the eyes, heart, and mind of another. I could not replace this, being the only worldly thing. Even my projects, ever so often, felt like but a substitute for this searching.

Where does this leave us? Can you share such a thing with me? Nothing else could soothe in this world, or else deepen my experience of myself. But who is like me? Who could be like me? Reader, if you share this, perhaps we are the rare two of a kind, in a world of our own, with no ambitions. More or less than human? Does it matter?

No substitute. Not goods, services. Acts. It was the longing of a man before poinsettia flowers. Scribbling in a long lost notebook of passing convictions, as the petals lilted to the ground. A train on a raised track roared past over the marsh. An aloneness.

And even there, I have revealed to you a glimmer of my world. Parks, beautiful days. I did not care if the notebooks themselves were lost or found. I do not think many of them survived. Perhaps this one will or won’t. Even in years, expressions find a common oblivion. Words spoken either creep into the ears of the dreamer who hears, or fall to the ground in a deadened, acoustic silence. Amidst the roar of the waterfall. The river of time.

And so I tried for love with the regular girls. Girls, some who even had a glimmer of my world. But feared it like they feared death. I suppose, to them, I was death. They approached with the sense of knowledge, towards a ravine. And from where they stood — the love of mothers and fathers. The careers. The goals and premonitions of a life not yet lived. A character with a past, present, a future. This is what it is to be a person, or to be real in the world’s terms. And I respected that — truly, I did. I respected and honored her longing for further life, on the terms provided by this culture. This civilization; the wars of civilizations between. Attempting to impose their definitions of living upon the world. The borders, the in-groups and out-groups. For if this was how they sought to live, who was I to declinate?

For how long hate was possible, I hated. Until hate exhausted me. I pitied, until pity became boring. Now what am I but a sight which sees, and simply records? This was what was at work all along. Now, it is done with a sort of foundational equanimity. I suppose, in youth, passions ran hot. I did not understand the world like I do now. And I suppose, tomorrow, I will not as well. And this provides a not insignificant measure of peace and realization to my writings. It may not, itself, change — but in glacial delight — but my understanding of it, in accord with my willingness to do so, may as well deepen.

This is, as far as I can understand it, love. The capacity to remain open to experience and thus break past the calcifying potential hatred. The hatred that could come from a raving man, too early, raining down upon the past — a past of his being that is the world’s presence. The having leapt too far into the future; with it, the equipment to perceive and experience a world which is a real condition; also a solitude.

So, in that city — really, any city like your own — I stumbled. I wrote with beggars. I supped alone in small, empty rooms, gazing out over changing traffic lights as they flickered and switched, deep into the night. Colored shadows upon my wall. A mattress, a table, a chair. Materials with which to write. And nights within to walk. And days, I suppose I played the game the same as any of the rest of you. To respond to a name, to walk into a room. To complete an utterance depending on the topic or the question at hand. Maybe recite a poem of Ovid’s. Palestine in the first World War. Notations. A glimpse of the broken fresco of any given dream, moment, or mind upon the canvas of time. Called to utter and respond with the world’s conviction that you are real.

I saw, with somewhat of a horror, how limited my options in truth, were, to be. Let us suppose that there were the rare women who had broken through this same veil. And some comedic friendships, lit and tilted with the farce of the world. These would be the real food. Where was that woman? Mongolia? Argentina? And how would I call her forth? Any guitar song or trombone song has a clear radius. Any koala bear in any given jungle moves with hands and feet. And how many jungles of the world were there? Would I have to turn into some sort of hunter? Getting out of bed each morning was a questionable practice. As with all things in this world, what is achieved is achieved by desire.

And my faculties of worldly desire did not seem entirely operative. I was not convinced that any one woman, any one beauty, any one currency or mountain of civilizational policy or fame could cure what in truth was a malaise. Being nothing, so to speak, is rather exhausting. I could not, for that matter, imagine being anything. The effort it would take to maintain that gaze; to hold that mask before me — it would be nothing short of an accumulation of extensive fatigues. To go out to a dance, to the opera, into the night. And keep up the chatter with a fellow masked creature, each pretending to be something, anything, other than the world’s naught — for what? For the pleasure of being reassured by a fellow fraud the measure of one’s worth?

Surely you can see and sympathize with my circumstances. I prefer empathy, what’s more, with things being what they are. But clear sight, I suppose, a logical and rational understanding, is in the least, acceptable. I saw, in nightshades, the world clamoring for love. On doorsteps, pleading, an equally — or even worse deluded — animal, of worship which would finally clear the whole matter up of one’s existence. Status acquired, that would at least present a civilizational attire of one’s meaning. But love, or the claimant on one’s life — now that would be the kicker. The salve. And what was all this racing around about? This, I couldn’t clearly discern. Was it motivated at the depth by the search for love, or the automaton of reproductive desire?

I decided that it was both — or, at least, the two were programmatically indistinguishable. That the desire for love and the sexual desire were one and the same beast, coupled by a fantastic intelligence that sought to briefly sew universal forms together before it split them apart and made them together again. This was an ancient philosophical principle, recoverable in the earliest writings of thought of man before himself. This did not, however, make it correct, by any means.

Well — enough with the philosophizing and speculation. These were my preoccupations both before and after experience — preoccupations, which, really, were flipping the coin of time and slowly creating assurances by and with which to navigate the world. Philosophy, for even the most sophisticated philosophers, is nothing more or less than a sophisticated survival. We live and continue to reflect upon life as to surmount life and overlook the mountainous view. Suppose this is safety. Philosophers mount the world because they can. There is a degree of deeper, far deeper safety in the ability to reflect upon oneself. This is the very safety that at an extreme incarnates the extraterrestrial form of Ricardo Rincon — a man who is oneself only in name, and primarily an intelligence. A cosmic moan that echoes about a galaxy. However seeing, feeling, or unfeeling. Is Ricardo the great moan received? Perhaps this is a trivial moan. We must allow for this as well.

By now, you must be able to see how my mind works. I must allow for every triviality and possibility. Every expansion and contraction. This is the nature of the mind which has cracked its casing; stumbled upon a deeper force from which it is conjured; ultimately communes. Can I talk like this among fellow men? No — and it is why I am speaking to you, my reader. I would have to bend and stoop, I’m afraid. And this is not hubris, protest as you must. It is a practical reality, being such as I am. And the bending and stooping is injurious. It hurts my back; I bang myself up just trying to descend into the cramped space of your dominion. For you, like all men, are the lord of your private kingdom. The island of your mind. And you make me and all else to be serfs to the buoyancy of your personality. Do not worry — I have seen it too well. And I see it in myself, me being the most authoritarian of all. We are powers. And you gaze upon me; you must try to find me in your almanac of woes. Being too strange, I am both a threat and a foe. Being too lordly, I am both something to which you bow, and something which you rebel against. Despot of despots, the human mind.

So I beg you, please do not look at me. Do not bother, you being one who cannot truly meet me. My reflection in the mirror is these notebooks; what’s more, if you can read them, perhaps you will glimpse the true form of my being. With your eyes being what they are, it is almost hopeless for you to see me in the light of day. You look on like a fool as I walk upon the moonbeams between light and death. Because you are not from here; you are not from this island. You are a foreigner among the great mass of men; rather, that makes me the true, absolute foreigner, among your carnal milieu. So please, forgive me if I hide from your gaze; abscond from your parties; request absence from your parries you so hideously disguise as offers of friendship.

Because you men — you men are no friends to yourselves. Seeing as what you are is the grand lie that grants you admission to the carnival of mankind. Conceive, if you will — but for a moment, of your world as a Faustian bargain. A crossroads deal. To live, you have accepted that you will lie; that you will be a liar. That you were raised and fatted on lies, in the formation and making of your identity. It was molded by schooling, traditions, obligations of family and country; primal desires refracted to you through outlets and industries of culture and religion. You subsist on the fat and butter of pure myths. Try to allow this. Place it in your mouth; therein, taste this notion’s bitters.

This is your trade; it was your trade to live and die amongst men. I could not make it. Seeing as it would make me a coward, a fool; one who submits to a lie. But you did not see it as a lie. You saw it as life. And for this I cannot blame you. For this I only pity you; I pity us and our world. For wherever I go, it is the same trade; it is the same deal which colors your eyes. You and your like; furthermore, it makes all men and women the same under a common cowardice. This is the true world’s community.

This is why education and schooling could do nothing for me, nor artistic technique. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of existence and being that is afoot. If I am unable, constitutionally or otherwise, to give any ground to your deal of life — mankind’s deal of mutual delusion for agreed upon commonalities — nothing your world can offer as salve touches me. Not that these worldly salves touch anything but a brief itch. And you know this as well as I do. This is why you are insatiable with all things you give credence to in this world. Your time, your money, your desired objects. Your sex. Because they are tools of your trade. They allow for you the briefest of pleasure. And this is our world, full of addicts, who have evacuated the bowels of possibility into the trinkets of communal, cultural objects; civilizational power tools. Because once this trade is made, all you have are consolations. These consolations are anything from lordship over a domain to a child’s toy. But they are consolations all the same.

Having given your life, you become something. And how strange is that? That giving up life makes you somebody. Retaining life, you are nothing. To be truly alive, you cannot become anything. You must be at any moment the interchangeable, indivisible substance of being itself. And this being the only place of the possibility of the only true substance of living: the communion. Yes, there is something that you call religious in the way I speak. And it is also why objects appear so rarely in my speech — but to point out the effect objects have on constitution. Because to suppose existence is to create a path of direction. And this is the orientation of most life forms as they sleep. Towards a definite object.

Love complicates our affairs. Because, surely, there must be a beloved. And thus I drag my actions indefinitely towards that outcome. Or do I? For what we desire chains us. Can I not find the beloved within myself? If I can do so, I am free. If I had any one true worldly orientation, it was toward this equal, this peer, this true partner. If I expressed any agency, it was not to acquire her, control her, or contain her, but rather to seek the circumstances in which knowing her, encountering her, would readily avail themselves. But see what such a match would be for me! A woman of my kind. How could I manipulate the currents of space and time with an attempt of enforced will to draw her out and about? But to settle into being. Or, rather, to be so fully myself that she should recognize me upon mine, or her, arrival.

It was thus that Ricardo Rincon settled into a state of true being. Something as close to equanimity as humanly possible, being that there is a predictable casing of rote mechanisms acquired by taking form. And it was from this state of true being that I acquired my youth as a remembrance of the brunt of confusion which I withstood — being, as I was, not entirely from this world; perhaps, furthermore, utterly incompatible with it. For to be compatible with you would be to — even casually — agree with and assent to your notions. All of which serve machinations which you do not fully understand.

And I know that I am not entirely exempt from these machinations. But beyond you, I am very close. Sometimes, dangerously close. It is love that ties me to this earth; to mankind. And this being my foremost desire, it is the integrity of such a fundamental proposition which creates my truest freedom. If I desired any of your compensations — power, wealth, influence — I would be enslaved to them. But a true love, at the ground of my being, this only requires my truest self. It asks my truest self of me. And it is that which I draw forth.

FRAGMENT FOUR:

THE HOLY FOOL

The woman pointed. “I’m just going to sit over there.” “Judy, you’ve got Japanese legs.” “What the hell does that mean?”

The woman supposedly named Judy sat down on the chair across from the register and stiffly crossed her thighs. There was a man peering up her nose, with a goofy grin. She didn’t like him already.

“Swim up to ‘em if I had to!”

She pouted at him. He thumbed his nose at her. They both laughed. It was a horrible joke.

The waiting room smelled like cigarettes and chemically clean laundry. It irritated Judy’s nostrils. The man sat back in his chair. She took a good look at him. He was covered in dirt, from head to toe.

“Where’d you roll in from?”

“Third base; home plate is only a mile away!”

He handed her a slip of paper. It had what she discerned was his name and address on it.

HENRY CARPENTER, THE LEAGUE OF FOOLS, TRAVELING CIRCUS

She grinned. “You’re a joker, eh?”

“Wildest card in the deck.”

“So what if I was looking for some fun?”

“Come on down to the big top. 6:30 tonight. We’re fixing the back end of a double header against the Black Yanks. Fire-breathers. Juggling. Might even be a white elephant.” He winked.

Judy sat on it for a moment. She could hear the whirr of the laundromat, like a symphony of mechanical instruments.

“Sure, why not.”

Henry’s grin got wider. “I’m playing third tonight. If we win, let me take you home?”

“Sure, if it’s only ninety feet away.”

Henry almost laughed. “You’re catching on, ain’t you.”

She nodded. Henry stood up; brushed a couple layers of dirt off his shirt front.

“Well, gotta run. No time to wash up. They’ll be warming up the Siamese Twins. One arm for each half of the hard eighteen. A whole day of ball!”

“See you tonight Henry.”

“So long!”

Judy knew about the circus in town, but she hadn’t had much time to investigate. Being that she was a detective, investigating was all she did. Less clown ball; more metaphysical mysteries. There’d been a string of angelic abductions. Something about stolen light. Priests weeping. She’d fill up notebooks. Big case. And sure enough, when she stood up — right there on the telephone pole outside the window, it read:

RUTHERFORD FAIR GROUNDS

COME SEE THE TEAM THAT PERFORMED FOR THE SULTAN

FEATURING LYLE “LIGHT-FEATHER” JONES

AND THE INCREDIBLE DARK-EYED ENTERTAINER

ADMISSION 25c

HOSTED BY MAYOR DONNIE FAIRCHILD

& THE LEAGUE OF FOOLS TRAVELING CIRCUS

TWO GAMES

2:30PM & 6:30PM

Donnie Fairchild wasn’t a mayor.

Fairchild was the chief suspect in Judy’s ongoing investigation. He was a known thug and racketeer. He dealt in gum. More notably, gum-ball machines. His father, Leo Fairchild, made a small fortune by inventing a brand of cherry gum which kept its flavor for hours. Fairchild’s factory, Magosian Gum Unlimited, poured out licorice flavored smoke all day long. Kids from the town would sit in the gulch by the river and salivate, as if some stray candy might trickle out of the trail of wafting scent.

Judy considered the case more closely. Fifteen million dollars had been stolen by someone who clearly wanted to take the town back to the dark ages. The representative of such a wild amount of cash wasn’t bills in denominations, but rather a bronze statue, drawn out of the sea just months before. No one could quite identify what it was, but the townspeople all knew it was important. Archaeologists came from all over the world making proclamations:

“It’s an angel!” “A sign. A dragon-slayer.” “The old world would have used this as a paperweight. They were giants; you know.” “A forgery! Fraud!”

The local congregations immediately adopted it as a symbol of the revelation.

Judy wasn’t concerned with any of this. What she was concerned with, was that it had disappeared.

It was quite small, just under two feet; depicted a winged man, with a chipped nose and comically large feet. The man stared out into the distance; no matter where you stood, you could never seem to get him looking in your eyes. The pupils were evasive.

Judy had this all written down in her notebook. She’d never actually seen the thing itself, just eyewitness testimonies. It had been shielded from the public eye until it could be verified. In fact, only thirty-six people had ever seen it. She had their names in a list. All redacted.

This made the investigation difficult. All of the people she had interviewed were effectively unnamed suspects. When she went to her superiors requesting release of names, they sent her back with a shrug: “Higher ups won’t have it. Use what you got.”

She remembered Henry. For all his goofy, stupid jokes, he had a good smile. She liked a man who couldn’t stop himself from being a clown. It was a quality she didn’t have. Too many nights on cases of stolen artifacts had left her feeling… like someone who took life seriously. She couldn’t have that.

When the dryer rang, she took her clothes out, put them in a duffel bag, and walked out of the building.

She saw him first. He was out on the old rail tracks behind the laundromat; the deli next door, on the far end of the main street. He was wearing what looked like an old Chicago White Sox jersey; juggling somewhere between six or seven red balls. Judy couldn’t tell, because they were all moving so damn fast — in and out of his hands. He was in between whistling and muttering as she approached him, balancing on one of the steel rail lines: “Poor fools every day… swindlers… con men…” He jumped as she spoke.

“You must be late for the game.”

Three of the balls dropped. He caught the other two. Judy was off by at least one.

“Jesus! You scared me.”

Judy held out her hand.

“Judy Holofernes.”

The man smiled. “Now it must be a pleasure to meet you. Seeing it’s my turn to laugh, and all.”

He stuck out his hand in return.

“Ventriloquist Bethlehem. Entertainer. Say, did you see those Nazis camping out on the tracks? I think they’re running rail cars as they slow down at the depot.”

Judy shook her head.

“Don’t head west then.”

Judy decided to walk with him for a moment. She had her notebook. At worst, this could develop into some rogue piece of guerrilla journalism.

It turned out Ventriloquist was quite a talker. He was all too happy to give his life story. How he’d jumped the rails himself in some coal town in Pennsylvania; drifted all up and down the coasts. He’d ended up in Chicago, running liquor during Prohibition for some mobsters who had a cabin in the Shenandoah. They’d go up there and draw maps for distribution until one of the kings decided he didn’t have a large enough cut.

“And that’s how I ended up here,” Ventriloquist said. “Say, you ever see a man dressed as a ghost throw a ninety-give mile per hour fastball behind his back for a strike on the inside black?”

Judy couldn’t say she had. She also remarked in her notes that she was going to ask the first normal person about the whole name thing. They had walked, at this point, for quite awhile. She was very much so enjoying Ventriloquist’s way with stories. She could see how and why he’d joined the traveling band of misfits. It didn’t seem like he’d ever had or felt much of a home, notwithstanding the kind of strangeness in his very name — a kind of strangeness that made him stick out of domesticity like a sore thumb.

As she was contemplating all of this; just beginning to consider that they would be late for the second game of the doubleheader, Ventriloquist suddenly jumped from the rail and ran into the woods. “We’re here! Follow me!”

Judy sprinted through the brush to catch him. Before them loomed the dilapidated, gothic mansion of Widow Moran.

Widow Moran was known only as Widow Moran. Some of the townsfolk said her first name was Widow, others said her husband died so long ago it just stuck. Regardless, she lived in the looming, black mansion just outside of town, on the other side of the graveyard and the old abandoned horse-racing track. She never seemed to leave the place; people wondered how she ate and drank anything until wondering bled into forgetting, and other pastimes.

At this point, Judy remarked, Widow Moran must be nearing the ripe old age of one hundred. This was usually when an absurd birthday cake with candles would be thrown out on a table to a quiet applause. Life bleeding so far into death that life remaining was a spectacle. Maybe the only conversation piece on offer, in whatever room she entered. Judy felt a pang of deep pity for the Widow.

“Here’s where we’re going to dig,” said Ventriloquist.

“What? This is someone’s house.”

“Yes, but the ghosts we need to speak to are buried on the edge of this plot.”

Judy understood the name.

“Here, take this spade.” Ventriloquist threw her the second of two silver lipped shovels he’d seemingly left on the ground. They were in the Widow’s backyard, far enough off that she’d have to see them from high ground to protest. Ventriloquist had already made some dent in the soil, about three feet.

“You were waiting for me to dig this?”

“Two hands are better than one.”

“I’m not a gravedigger. I’m a detective.”

Ventriloquist made it clear the time for talking was over. He began throwing huge fistfuls of dirt over his shoulder with gusto.

Judy decided to do the same.

They worked, sweating, as the sun began to fall over their heads, toward the low trunks of the trees. They made great headway. The hole had now somewhat tripled in depth. Something clanged against the spade’s tongue.

“There… easy…” Ventriloquist pushed Judy softly away from the hole. “This is my favorite part.”

Bethlehem jumped into the hole; with a thrust of his fist, punctured the wood of the coffin. Judy gasped. He grapped the corpse by the throat; pulled it clean out of the wood with superhuman strength.

And this was when Judy met Spider Jenkins.

Spider began to speak, seemingly through the power of Ventriloquist’s hand against his blue throat.

“You see, I was a crop-duster in the American South…”

Judy just walked away. The sun had set. There was a vague hope she’d catch first pitch.

The fairgrounds ballfield was just over the hill from the old horse track, so Judy didn’t have too far to walk. She cut back over the rail tracks in the opposite direction; ran quickly down the slope that connected the old feed lot to the byway that led in and out of town. She crossed it without much traffic. The lights of the ballfield gleamed in the night. It was a romantic notion. The night end of a doubleheader. She could hear the crowd roar. “Kill ‘em Jimmy!” was one loud voice. Am I going to a ballgame or a murder? She thought. As she entered the stadium, laughter erupted from the nosebleeds.

There was a man in full clown makeup, on a seven foot unicycle, chasing another man riding a mini horse. Popcorn hit her back and neck as she emerged from the spectator tunnel into the lower level bleachers, on the third base side of the field. The crowd was up in arms. She’d never seen such fury and passion at work in a ball game mass.

The man on the mini horse at least appeared terrified. Judy couldn’t confirm the true state of his emotions by a glance. He was either a great actor, or genuinely terrified the unicycle-riding clown would kill him. The clown’s shoes were enormous. They threatened to swallow the pedals of the bike. He was carrying a massive shotgun.

“He’s dead Jimmy!” “Gun ‘em down, Chief!”

She decided to sit down next to the least threatening, red-faced character in the crowd. She saw a frail man wearing glasses, reading a small book. He looked extremely threatened by the whole affair, furtively glancing around to affirm safety, or at least a safe exit in a moment’s notice.

“Say, how do you do, fella?”

“How do I look?”

“Blue in the teeth.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“Terrified.”

The man smiled.

“I’m Ricardo Valenzuela. Baseball historian. Pleased to meet you.”

“Judy Holofernes.”

Ricardo raised an eyebrow. He continued.

“I’m here to record tonight’s event for the grand historical ledger of baseball affairs. Scarce should I have known I might need to report the evening to the nearest precinct.”

Judy flashed her badge. “So they aren’t joking?”

“Nobody knows.”

Ricardo continued.

“Tonight, we’re having a meeting in the woods. Well, the baseball group. We hold one every solstice. It’s something like a secret society. Well, baseball is our cover. We’re more like a community of fellow… interests. We’d like to secure universal vitality. Ever try this water?”

He stuck a huge plastic bottle in front of her face. It said KRYS-TO-SAL: MIRACLE MINERAL HEALTH WATER, AUGLAIZE LABORATORIES, BOX H, PAYNE, OHIO

She grabbed it and chugged the whole thing. The back of the label read:

AGENTS WANTED IN EVERY TOWN. LIBERAL COMMISSION. WRITE US FOR PROPOSITION.

“You hiring?”

“Maybe. Come to the meeting tonight and find out.”

Judy weighed it.

“Maybe. What’s the pitch?”

Ricardo took a big breath as a huge plume of fire emerged from the ballfield. Out of the corner of her eye, Judy saw that a firebreather had entered the fray. The horse-riding man’s eyes were bulging.

“Should we worry about them?”

“It’s a theatre.” Ricardo began:

“Science has discovered that certain minerals work wonders with the human system. Mineral water used daily eliminates all poisons from the body, tones up the liver and kidneys and regulates the bowels, makes a new person out of one who thinks he is very sick. KRYS-TO-SAL is the most effective mineral water product known. One package makes fifteen gallons of mineral water, and the results it produces are amazing. If you are sick, or have relatives or friends who are sick, send to us today for a full package, costing you only one dollar and fifty cents. You’ll be glad you did, when you realize the healthful results.” Ricardo, purple in the face, exhaled.

“Impressive.”

“I have to say it every time.”

“I’ll let you know when I quit detective work.”

Ricardo turned back toward the ballgame. “Know anyone playing tonight?”

Judy saw Henry, out in left field warming up. They made eye contact. He smiled; waved at her. She waved back. “Yeah, Henry Carpenter.”

Ricardo adjusted his glasses. “Henry Carpenter, starting third baseman for the Holy Fools. Two sixty-five career average. Two hundred and forty career homers. Six foot two, two hundred and thirty-five pounds...”

Judy interrupted. “Thanks for the numbers.”

Ricardo shrugged. “That’s what we do. We record what remains after the band leaves.”

The game began. Henry led off with a single; took a short lead off first. Just as the opposing pitcher began his motion from the stretch, he immediately took off. Ricardo turned to Judy. “We’ve seen what we need to see here. The next step is the solstice meeting.”

He took her hand; Judy relented. She would allow the journey to run its course. Maybe she’d sell mineral water and write that story after all.

The meeting of baseball historians was poorly disguised. It was a massive bonfire, not far off from where she imagined Ventriloquist still frantically playing his puppet games in the moonlight. It hadn’t scared Judy, she was just tired of it. Judy asked Ricardo,

“Say, I saw this broadside on the telephone pole outside the laundromat earlier today about the game.”

Ricardo was carving through the brush toward the huge plume of smoke in the sky. She wasn’t sure he was listening.

“It said something about Light-Feather and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer.”

Ricardo stopped; stood erect like he was a doe that heard a gunshot in the distance.

“They said what?”

“You heard me.”

“Why would they say his name?”

“Who?”

Ricardo whispered. They were in the middle of the woods. Totally alone.

“Light-Feather and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer are one person.”

“Explain.”

Ricardo realized he was in too deep at this point; decided to spill.

“He’s what they call a soul-eater. Dead souls, living souls. He’ll swallow them for a small fee. The villagers, wherever he goes, pelt him with fruit. It’s a process, a parade. It’s part of the deal.”

“Whose deal?”

Ricardo paused. “The deal of being alive.”

Judy knew nothing about this. Just ten hours ago she’d been at the laundromat, minding her own business. Getting hit on by a baseball clown. Trying to solve this damn case about the stolen angel. She decided to try Ricardo. It couldn’t get any weirder.

“What do you know about the angel that will never look you in the eye?”

They were just before the bonfire now. Judy could see the flames whipping in the air; hear the huddled chatter of the group. Ricardo’s cheek was lit with light and shadow as he turned towards her, just before entering the circle.

“I suppose you’ll just have to find out.”

The bonfire group was composed of fifteen men, all dressed in dapper suits. Bow-ties, suspenders, striped shirts, the whole nine yards. It looked like a barbershop chorus. All they were missing were the straw hats. Their hair was delicately combed and parted. They looked ready for a church group. And, Judy noticed, they all looked uncannily similar. One had a wart on his nose, another’s eyes were just a bit wider than the others. And so forth. They looked like they had been made in a factory. Ricardo looked nothing like them. He stepped into the circle. They all turned at once; spoke in unison.

“Ricardo! A pleasure. And who’s your guest?” They leered at Judy. Their vocal harmony didn’t match the consternation of the eyes.

“Judy Holofernes, investigative journalist.”

They looked ready to kill.

“Detective.” She corrected him.

One of the dolls reached for his waistband.

Judy caught it quickly.

“Here in the capacity of an interested baseball scholar.”

The group immediately relaxed. Three of them dropped their shoulders several feet. Another exhaled deeply, coughing as he did so.

Judy turned to him. “You look like you could use some mineral water.”

The chorus member turned to Ricardo. “She’s good.”

Ricardo smiled. The meeting began.

It became clear to Judy that Ricardo was the leader of the group. He assumed a commanding, juridical voice.

“We’re gathered here today in communal acknowledgement of our overarching endeavor to restore the vital principle to an otherwise immunized, catatonic collective body.”

The chorus applauded; whooped and hollered in enthusiasm.

“The way we plan to do this is through the sales of our mineral water. We will now be going, round-robin style, through the sales reports of each of our valued members. Each member will articulate their monthly score, and compare this month’s score to their yearly goals and achieved numbers.”

The chorus nodded. Someone tapped Judy on the shoulder. She turned; barely suppressed a scream. It was a man with two teeth. His eyes were almost entirely black. But he felt incredibly human. Judy felt a deep safety in his presence, compared to the tired eeriness that had overwhelmed her body the moment Ricardo brought up sales numbers.

“Got a moment?” the man said.

“Yes.”

The man motioned her over to the edge of the clearing. The second chorus member was articulating his sales goals for next month. Apparently he’d sold a whole shipping container of the mineral mixture to a local church. The group was going wild with enthusiasm. It was like stoking a flame. The dark-eyed man cast a sideways glance.

“I’m…”

Judy interrupted. “I know.”

The man decided to cut to the chase. “I know what Ventriloquist Bethlehem was doing today with you in the woods. Don’t tell me you started digging with him.”

Judy started to get nervous. “I did.”

The man replied. “We can fix that. But we have to take you to Vashti Bunyan. She’ll have to make you a death mask. We’ll stage a fake death. You’ll be back to new in a jiffy.”

“What did I do?

The man stared at her dumbly, as if her question was obvious. “You awakened the dead.”

Judy knew Vashti. She was a kind old woman who lived in a shack by the auto-repair shop owned by Tommy Budd — who, coincidentally or not, was the childhood best friend of… you guessed it. Mayor Donnie Fairchild. Maybe Judy was on the case after all.

“Fantastic,” she told The Dark-Eyed Entertainer.

“I just told you you awakened the dead.”

“It seems to be a part of the case.”

The Dark-Eyed Entertainer shrugged. “You’ve got enthusiasm, woman. Turns out you might be fit for the quest after all.”

Judy was about to speak. He anticipated her question.

“You’ll just have to find out, now won’t you.”

“Do you know everything?”

“I just write it down. I receive my orders from above. They don’t always come in clear. I have to clear my antenna.” He batted his ears twice, like he was trying to clear bees or sand out of them.

“That’s better. Let’s go.”

Vashti greeted them with a warm smile that felt like a cup of chamomile tea. She gestured them inside her home office. She was a slightly stooped woman, who carried a natural, knotted walking stick. She slightly stumbled when she walked. It was part of the innate character of her gait. She winked at Judy.

“New friend?”

Judy brushed it off, almost annoyed. She never usually felt put off by Vashti. But tonight had a different tone than most nights.

“We’re here about the angel.”

Vashti’s eyes lit up, but The Dark-Eyed Entertainer cut the conversation off; diverted it.

“She hexed herself with Ventriloquist Bethlehem. He conned her into waking Spider Jenkins.”

Vashti’s face darkened with a certain seriousness.

“Very well. Set her on the table.”

Judy assented to the operation.

Vashti went into her drawer in the row of counters that lined the walls of her home; drew forth a scalpel.

“We’ll have to do a surgical removal. You’ll die astrally, but we’ll bring you back. I’m going to snap my fingers, and Light-Feather is going to slap your soul with his dark hand.”

Judy burst out laughing.

“Whatever!” she cackled, between giggles. Vashti and the Dark-Eyed were not amused.

It was over in an instant. Judy felt her own death. She hovered above the board as Light-Feather slapped the shit out of her soul. It stung. It felt like the memory of leather. She winced, but the face of her body remained unmoving, stoic. Vashti took a picture at the precise moment of the slap with an old Kodak camera. Judy felt herself withering down, back into the body. She was almost hateful to return.

“Damn! What the fuck!”

Expletive spilled easily out of Judy’s mouth. Now it was Vashti and The Dark-Eyed Entertainer’s turn to laugh.

“We told you it was serious!” Vashti spilled, the red returned to her cheeks. The Dark-Eyed Entertainer patted her on the back. “Good job. You stayed perfectly still.”

Vashti flashed the instant photograph between her fingers. “Here’s your death-mask. You’re cured.”

Judy looked. The corpse’s eyes bulged. She looked like a freak, like she’d just seen some sort of deep space apocalypse, or the appearance of a veiled god.

“I get to keep this?”

“You rode the rollercoaster, you get to keep your prize.”

Judy reflected. “Pascal’s death mask?”

Vashti winked. “New technology.”

Dark-Eye thanked Vashti; took Judy by the hand. They walked out into the post-midnight.

Judy turned to Dark-Eye as the door to Vashti’s shut.

“Alright. I’ve had enough of the detours. Now it’s time to talk about the angel.”

Dark-Eye almost groaned. He knew this moment would come. He’d have to assent to Judy’s story now.

“This affair doesn’t concern me. I deal with matters of the spirit realm. You’re talking about a statue.”

Judy told him how much it had been assessed at.

“Fifteen million dollars?” Dark-Eye’s eyes rolled. She could see some whites in them.

She told him how it was impacting the town. This piqued Dark-Eye’s interest.

“You say a shadow?”

“A winged man with a chipped tooth. Comically big feet.”

“But a shadow is what it does.”

“Yes.”

“And this man, Mayor Fairchild?”

“He’s no mayor.”

“I’ll tell you right now, he has nothing to do with it. He’s a red herring.”

Judy’s detective skills felt bruised.

“I could’ve sworn…”

“You saw what you wanted to see. The angel left of its own accord.”

“What?”

Dark-Eye was annoyed.

“I told you. It left.”

“I know. Why?”

“It got sick of you.” Dark-Eye said matter of factly.

“Why would it get sick of us?”

Dark-Eye explained.

“The angel is the guardian spirit of the earth. It comes and goes of its own accord. It seems, for some time, it remained buried. But you and your people dug it up. Once it was dug up, the body was free to move about the cabin, so to speak. If you’d left it in the earth, it would’ve remained there. You and your village would be safe. But since it’s gone, the life is gone from your town. All of the life in this and the surrounding land is contained in the talisman of the angel. You awaken the talisman, the talisman has agency.”

Judy understood this intuitively.

“How do we get it back?”

Dark-Eye already knew the answer.

“We have to hunt the fallen angel.”

Judy patently did not want to hunt a fallen angel. It was now almost dawn and she hadn’t eaten since before the laundromat. A turkey sandwich. Her stomach groaned.

“I want to go home.”

“There’s no home to go to.”

Dark-Eye gestured behind them. The smoke from the bonfire of barbershop salesmen had grown exponentially. There were frantic, crashing noises from the town in the valley below. It was burning. Judy’s first instinct was to run toward it. Dark-Eye caught it before her conscious mind could register the impulse. He grabbed her wrist.

“Right spirit, wrong time.”

He led her in the opposite direction, toward the river.

The Gulf River fed into the black abyss of the Atlantic. It pooled slowly in the Gulf of Mexico a couple miles south of Rutherford, Louisiana; fed into the lashing mass. It was hurricane season. Judy had had a couple close run-ins in past years. Even now, she could see and hear the dark waves pounding the shores in her mind’s eye. She’d moved further inland to Rutherford from New Orleans, in an attempt to avoid buttressing against nature’s fury. The river reminded her of the veins that could reach inward, inside, even in moments and places of perceived safety. She shuddered. Dark-Eye noticed.

“You good?”

“Fine.”

“We’re almost there.”

On a bench by the river, there was a large figure. Hunched over what looked like a wooden bowl. The figure looked up at them as they approached. A large beard and curly eyelashes greeted them.

“Yes?”

“You’re the Bearded Lady.”

“Yes.”

“I’m Dark-Eye.”

The Lady shook her head.

“I knew you’d be here. Just not so soon!”

The river was frothing. Judy was nervous. She hadn’t checked the news in almost a day. There were several Tropical Storms spinning about, just outside of the cove of the Gulf. She didn’t know who controlled precisely where they went, or decided to end up.

It was like Dark-Eye heard her thoughts.

“The angel decides. That’s why we’re here.”

The Bearded Lady perked up.

“Yes, I’ve seen him. He was just this way. He went out there.” She pointed to the rushing river.

“Into the water?” Judy inquired. She didn’t really want to know.

“Yes.”

Dark-Eye inhaled deeply.

“Any news on the storm?”

There’s two swells, looking to converge over the next week. We don’t know when, or how fast. But both are gaining steam.” The Bearded Lady saw Judy’s confusion. “I’m a meteorologist.”

Judy felt embarrassed. “I assumed you were with the Holy Fools.”

“But I am! It pays to know the weather when you’re barnstorming. I bat fourth when I’m not on act.”

“Stars?” Dark-Eye inquired.

The Lady paused. “Ripe for where you’re going.”

This seemed to ease Dark-Eye. “We’re going to need a boat.”

Judy’s eyes widened. “You don’t mean to tell me we’re going out into the swells?”

“What, you want to go back to the town?”

Judy could just leave. Find a new home. But she got the sense that this case would follow her, long after Rutherford was a distant memory of time.

She relented. “Where do we get a boat?”

The Bearded Lady supplied. “You can use mine.”

She pointed over to the dock by the inlet. There was a small rowboat. On the side, the name:

ENTHRALLED.

Clearly, thought Judy. Clearly.

Dark-Eye untied the ropes binding the rowboat to the dock.

“How are we going to make it out there in this?”

Dark-Eye glowered.

“Faith, Holofernes.”

He threw the last bind. Judy white-knuckled her oar.

The sky was a dark red as the morning crested the eastern horizon. It was out toward the ocean. Even now, Judy could see the coming end of the river in her mind’s eye; the Gulf that would collapse them into impossible miles of sheer depths. She hated the unknown. That’s what the ocean represented, in the purest sense — to a beast that crawls on land; survives on oxygen. She couldn’t help the association, being in a mortal, fallible body.

“Only angels tread out here, or monsters.”

Dark-Eye turned. “Hush.”

“What do you know about the ocean?”

“Any living permutation can survive here. In the icy depths. Life freezes; transforms. There’s a different operative principle at work. In the cold water, things can survive that would otherwise die in the hot sun. They can also transform in ways the light of day won’t allow.”

Judy gripped the oar tighter.

“So that means…”

Dark-Eye finished her sentence.

“So that means the depths hold things long since dead; can surface things no one in this world truly knows. Because what they think they know relies on rules that depths don’t obey.”

They traveled in silence. The river’s rush turned to a slow current. Judy lazed unconsciously. It reminded her of a canoeing trip, between canyons of ancient mountains. Paddling past campsites; tents, fire-pits. Smiling campers. Guitars. Then she remembered that the town was on fire.

“How much time do we have?”

“Not enough.”

They both paddled faster. The Gulf loomed like a resolution to the mystery.

The river’s mouth widened; spat them into the open. The sun had now broken the horizon; was an angry orange red. Dark-Eye and Judy had to shield their eyes from the magnitude of it. It was assaulting.

“Well, we’re here,” Judy said.

“Now we have to go down.”

“WHAT!” Judy blurted out.

“Far, far down,” Dark-Eye replied.

“We have no equipment. Scuba, suits, nothing.”

“The rules don’t apply here. Special case.”

Judy figured, at this point, Dark-Eye was the only person left to trust. She looked back on the events of the past day. She realized she couldn’t even trust herself. Every rule she ever believed to be true had been broken. A wider pattern, a more cosmic force had revealed itself to her. And worst, or best of all, the force was… hilarious. It refused preconception; refused convention. She realized that this day had taught her one thing — to thrive, to truly live, to jump out into the adventure of life, she’d have to utterly assent to it. So she did. And she had. Again and again.

“Let’s dive,” she told Dark-Eye.

Dark-Eye grinned.

“Have I told you you remind me of myself? Back when I first started.”

Judy took this as a clear compliment.

“Started what?”

He replied, matter of factly.

“Eating souls.”

Judy didn’t know how to feel about this. Instead, she mentally prepared herself to assent to the dive.

Dark-Eye decided to prime her with knowledge.

“Where we are diving today is the deepest part of the waters of the earth. Deeper than Mariana’s Trench; deeper than the darkest part of the dreams of the world’s initiated. We are going beyond the conscious mind, the subconscious mind, the world soul. We are going into the abyss. The first ground of the consciousness of the universe. On this dive, you will descend past all rule of law, to the place before the plane of gravity or the emergence of relative forms. This dive will obliterate all sense of individual. You will be swallowed by the infinite.”

Judy gulped.

“Like a whale?”

“Like a white whale. Or a black one. White and black are two manifestations of the same intertwined force, at opposite ends of the spectrum of light. Black is collapsed white; white is illusional black.”

Judy didn’t quite understand these metaphysics.

“So I’m going to die again?”

“Yes, but a deeper death than before. A cosmic death. A death before the birth of the universe.”

Dark-Eye was tired of explaining. He dove, swanlike, from the rowboat.

Judy followed, unthinkingly. She threw the conversation behind her like a cloak. It wasn’t needed anymore.

The water was black; surprisingly, quite temperate and calm. Judy couldn’t see anything. Dark-Eye’s body was ahead, below her, bubbling. He was lit from within, like some sort of aetheric candle. It was clear his figure would be able to guide her as she followed in the descent. She swam, in the active passage of falling. The depths of the water had no discernible effect on her whatsoever. The body seemed effortlessly able to move through this terrain — even more native to it than land and air. Like a deeper ancestry of form.

Time could not be counted, nor could the leagues they swam. It was so effortless, Judy felt like her very consciousness was melting away to reveal a form of primordial sentience which, strictly speaking, did not exist. It existed beyond existence, waiting to be met; greeted, like an old friend.

Judy heard a voice. “Almost there now.”

It was Dark-Eye, in her head.

Her fingertips brushed soft sand. She pressed against it; leveraged her legs down. She stood up at the bottom. Dark-Eye stood in front of her, illuminated in a yellow-white silhouette. She could still see his eyes, even at this depth. “We’re in the Soul Trench.”

The Soul Trench, Judy could see, thanks to Dark-Eye’s illuminated form, was a huge valley in the bottom of the ocean. Spire-like mountains loomed up around them like dark, shadow-figures. Judy felt an eerie sentience emerging from them; emanating from their formal nature. But the sublimity of their presence was not ominous, or evil, so to speak. It was the sensation of being accompanied by something ageless. Something so deep in the bosom of time that the presence was incalculably wise.

Dark-Eye sensed her vision. “You’re becoming more alert,” he said. “You’re seeing more clearly.”

Judy was strangely proud of herself. She was growing accustomed to this new world.

“Is this where the angel is?”

“This is where the consciousness of the angel is. We’re going to speak to the eel. The priest of snake lightning of the depths.”

The eel was in an underwater cave, inset in the mountains. Dark-Eye passed through the eyelet of the mountain; Judy followed. The hole was the size of a penny. She didn’t know how she’d fit, but her body passed effortlessly through the gape. The room opened up into a grotto, with a stream trickling. She took a big exhale, like she desperately needed the air. The deep consciousness of her animal body was responding. But she had no trouble breathing whatsoever on the descent. Her animal was reacting to perceived conditions that did not function in the way millions of years of evolution dictated. It was incredibly confusing to the nervous system.

“We’re here. Marco!” Bellowed Dark-Eye.

An eel swaggered up from behind a large canvas on the shore of the grotto. He was wearing a priestly alb covered in rainbow colors of paint. Orange sunglasses.

“Dark-Eye! Let me guess. You’re here for the angel again.”

“They seem to keep losing it.”

“I hate to think that my studio has become the lost and found of the universe.”

“You seem to symbolize passion lost and passion found.”

“And in doing so, passion regained.”

The eel smiled and clasped Dark-Eye’s hand. They were clearly good friends.

“And you, Judy! Dark-Eye’s new apprentice. I’ve heard about you. The heavens are speaking loudly about you these days. An uproar, even. Their new favorite television show. Pluto TV! That’s what I heard!”

He waved his brush around violently. “Want to check out my new piece?”

Judy was definitely interested. “Sure!”

He turned the canvas. It was one of Picasso’s bulls, with a split open inside revealing a large mechanical, autonomic system. “I’ve been teaching my students the nervous system.” He winked at Dark-Eye. “An update on Rembrandt.”

“This is clearly a Picasso ripoff.” Judy wasn’t impressed.

Marco belly laughed. “I am Picasso! Judy Holofernes. Don’t be so eager with the blade.”

Judy couldn’t help but be impressed by the quip.

Marco continued. “I am the spirit of all art. The primary force which moves the canvas and brush. The inspiration which strikes all genius! It’s quite a happy life. And best of all, I get to live in the depths. Less disturbance. No paparazzi.”

Marco seemed just a touch sad, even as he paraded this idea before Judy and Dark-Eye. Judy decided to press on the wound. It felt rude, even as she said it.

“Don’t you want everyone to know who you are?”

Marco felt the slight, and responded. “Yes. But how could they know? I’m a thousand different people, all at once. I’m too complicated. It takes a lot to know me.”

Judy felt sad for Marco. He was clearly brilliant, judging by the canvas. She felt she had too hastily judged him for what she saw. At this point, she was not only deeply willing to accept that an eel living in the valley of the soul could be Picasso; that he most likely was not only Picasso, but the first hand on the first cave wall of human history. These things were all simultaneous as a force moving through existence and creation itself.

“Suppose someone wanted to try?”

Marco immediately brightened up. This was a healing notion to him.

“Let’s solve this angel problem. This isn’t the first time. But perhaps we can make it the last.” He looked Judy straight in the eye. “Ever heard of Atlantis? How about Rome?”

Judy got the sense that this was a pattern going deeper than memory would allow.

Marco explained.

“Any given civilization or set of species level consciousness loses the angel when they abandon the passion of being alive. They replace it with props, religions, dresses, stories, roles, candy, bubblegum, plastic, or laws. In doing so, they surrender their primary existential freedom to question and become one with the force of existence to a stone gate. They sit and wait at the stone gate that they created themselves until they die. This is why we must recover your angel.”

Judy was not amused. Marco caught it.

“You’ve read Kafka.” He was annoyed. She nodded.

“Well you know I am Kafka.”

Judy remembered.

“Sorry.”

Marco nearly scoffed, then decided patience with Dark-Eye’s apprentice would be the preferred tactic. He continued.

“The angel is always an artifact. It is a real material manifestation of the force of creation. And it is always, as a rule, buried in the earth. It is the ancient memory of any tribe or species. It is the memory of the vital force. And in the case of your tribe, the angel is a jaguar. And the jaguar has returned to its original burial place, the jungles of the Olmec.”

Judy immediately protested.

“The angel has a chipped nose and comically large feet. It’s a two foot tall humanoid figurine.”

Marco laughed.

“That is how it appears to the uninitiated. Do you think they could bear the true form of the angel? No… no… here, we speak of the angel’s true form. The reason the angel is lost is because no one could bear its true form. So it left. It abandoned you.”

Judy began to understand. The vital force had been turned into a mask, a ploy, a game, a toy. Something digestible. Sterilized. And as such, it no longer remained or existed in any real way, but as a plastic image.

“So we have to go to the Olmec jungle to return the figure?”

“Yes. But it won’t be in the form it left you in. It will be in the true form. The were-jaguar.”

Judy was familiar with this principle in ancient Olmec history The were-jaguar was a shamanic figure. It was the between place. Between animal and man; in that small, brief window, the singular vital force of creation itself. The phase change. Transformation itself. She’d read a short essay on the topic by the esoteric philosopher Vito Kingpin, as an undergraduate student, found in a dusty library book labeled ANCIENT SHAMANIC TRADITIONS. It had enthralled her so much, that she read it multiple times on several different occasions. Somehow, all these years later, it stuck in her memory. Perfectly, word by word.

“’The Olmec used animal gods as representations of the powers of nature which were revealed to them phenomenologically through nature itself as in the manifest world. As such, nature itself became symbolic of the powers that the Olmec observed coursing through it.

The Olmec observed god as in nature disclosed directly. As such, the powers of nature were an observation derived from and thus directly associated with the jaguar — not as a symbol — but as a living disclosure of said powers. Therein, the were-jaguar as a historical force or meta-ontology is the Olmec realization of the foundational powers of nature or god incarnate fundamentally in man; that man itself is a mask for the absolute.

The powers were never linguistically deduced or applied to nature or the jaguar symbolically. Since the jaguar could both swim adeptly and hunt on land expertly, it was naturally both the ruler of the underworld and the overworld. This was not a symbolic imposition or layering, but the real segmental conditions of earth proper; the real power relations therein.

As such, the Olmec ontology is utterly imminent and pre-linguistic. Nature is directly and clearly realized without symbolic distance or abstract contemplation. The natural power is observed directly through nature; as such, is the civilizational ontos without interpretation or speech. The Olmec record is a record of nature speaking in utter silence.

The fundamental tonal power of nature in the Olmec ontology, due to both geographical location and basic observation, is the jaguar. As such, the jaguar is everywhere and in all things; is the most basic and fundamental power within and as the human, stripped of its differential disguise. The jaguar is then nature itself, as the disclosure of nature’s utmost power viscerally and phenomenologically in space for the human eye and historical record. Deification of the jaguar, in these circumstances; as such, is natural consequence.

Characteristic in Olmec art itself is the providence of the shaman as the central linguistic figure representative of the Olmec tradition as in the individual; the shaman as always-already in a state of change and transformation — reflected primarily in the face and hands; as through kneeling, sitting, standing; gazing out into space and undergoing facial contortions or otherwise gazing out with ghostly perdition.

These figurations are not accidental, but rather represent a fundamental aspect of the Olmec consciousness — priority given to shamanic, subjective, underworld experience, which is to say, chthonic energy, or the energy which resides natively in the body as a natural, cosmic force which is not necessarily human. Rather, it is transpersonal, supralinguistic, and primary to the incarnation of the human and the species of humanity itself proper. This primary energy is the pre-linguistic undercurrent of all of life that the shaman ritually accesses; thus, in turn, has access to the primary mediating force and factor of all life, which enables his dramatic change represented in the glyphs and stones made available by the Olmec transmission.

This is to say that the Olmec concept of subjectivity or humanity, strictly speaking, does not exist. The primacy of shamanic experience in the Olmec tradition and the primacy of shamanic experience represented in art and ritual objects primarily through the transformation of the were-jaguar; the shaman as in the state of transformation indicates in the Olmec that the human being did not and does not exist — but, rather, the human being is a shape-shifting vessel for and of the primary, cosmic primordial energy — and that, in the shamanic ritual practice, the human being learns how to tap into this cosmic flow; thus making available the powers of life and opening up the aperture of, as Eliade describes it, ‘profane humanity’, into wholeness, and ecstatic psychological totality as lived, embodied ritual experience.

In this way, the shamanic experience captured in the moment of change in stone or jade is a living documentation of the crux and foundation of the Olmec ontology: that humanity is a mediation of total cosmic force; that with training, practice, and divine inheritance, the sensitive, or the medicine born in the Olmec community received and transmitted this ritual commune with the forces immortalized in the Olmec cosmology proper. This was, and is — the gateway to the divine in the Olmec sense; that these powers be grounded and practiced in the community is a prime, universal, trans-historical indicator of profound psychic health vis-a-vis transpersonal, trans-species, cosmological interlocution with the stars and the force of creation itself.

The werejaguar is not symbolism — it is a direct expression of the local power of the jaguar as the presence of the power of nature itself channeled through the body of the human being; the vessel of the Olmec shaman. The mask inscribed upon the stone face invokes the power at hand and how it neuro-physiologically impacts, twists, shapes, and fills the vessel; animates the shaman; furthermore, the hands turned paws and claws evokes the psychedelic — as in psyche revealing — impact of witnessing this shift in shade upon the viewer. The shaman’s body, in channeling this primordial, essential power — reveals the essence of the jaguar within it, within him; within all creation. This is to say: the manifest powers of being localized in Mesoamerica, as viewed and participated in by the ancients through such forces as thunder, the jaguar, and the eclipse.

These forces themselves are manifest phenomena which evoke awe and reveal the majestic aspect of the prime mover as in the forces of nature which can be perceived sensually. The shaman, however, as is detailed by and through the dual function of the jaguar on land and in water, penetrates into the energetic dimension, or the ‘underworld’ or under-real appearance of phenomena; channels the signature of formal existence. This is later reproduced in a Western, materialist sense via the concept of quantum mechanics.

This knowledge and awareness was and is always available to the world historical shaman immediately, somatically, through the cultivation of energetic perception: most notably through trials, mediation, inborn sensitivity and acuity; ingestion of psychedelic plants and materials.’”

Dark-Eye and Marco looked at her in astonishment.

“Who wrote that?” Dark-Eye was intrigued.

“Vito Kingpin. He’s a cultural anthropologist. But I think he’s actually just one of the rogue shamans. Never heard of him?”

Marco shook his head. “Sounds a bit like Eliade.”

“I’ll get you a copy of the book one day,” Judy said.

This made Marco quite happy.

“So you do understand,” he said.

“I do.”

“Then you understand what has to be done. Now you know who and what the angel really is, and where you’ll find him. He’ll be in stone. The question is — can you set him free?”

Judy was going to inquire further, but she caught Dark-Eye’s gaze.

“It’s time to go. Because time’s running out.”

Judy remembered.

“Nice to meet you, Marco.”

“And you as well, Judy Holofernes.”

And so it was that Judy and Dark-Eye headed for their final destination, the jungles of southern Mexico.

The rise to the surface was near immediate, compared to the descent. Judy and Dark-Eye simply needed to release their hold on the dark ground. They shot up buoyantly, popping up to the cresting surface like helium balloons. Judy’s animal body relaxed.

“We’re taking this boat the whole way there?”

“It’ll be shorter than you think.”

“Right. New rules.”

She didn’t have to correct herself this time, or take a second to consider. She vowed to herself — next time, she’d let go of gravity, physics, belief. She’d just trust in where they were going. How, when, why. It was all a movement toward something she didn’t yet know or understand. But by now, she understood — this thing, this place, it was the center of the earth, the center of existence. Power, meaning, all of it. It was like a hidden attractor. It drew her with the true power and goodness of fate. She was, by now, enthralled.

They passed several island volcanos. The stormy pretense of the sky seemed to clear, leaving them drifting in a white cloud sunlight. The skies were effortlessly blue.

“Very good,” remarked Dark-Eye. “Maybe the Bearded Lady had a say after all.”

For some reason, this reminded Judy of Henry Carpenter. She wondered if he’d stolen that bag. Naively, she considered the possibility that the game might still be going on.

Dark-Eye noticed her mental drift.

“Stay focused,” he said. Judy snapped back into the play. She could see the shore Dark-Eye had steered them towards. It was a golden, sandy beach. Palms overwhelmed the shore; several feet in, it was swallowed by thick, humid jungle. She could already hear the insects pounding the air with vocalizations.

“We’ll have to slash our way in,” Dark-Eye said. “There’s no real path here for humans, not anymore.” He drew a scythe out of a compartment in the boat’s floor.

“Well prepared,” remarked Judy.

“The Lady keeps her time.” Dark-Eye refused to elaborate.

Judy implicitly understood.

They docked the boat. Getting out, they eased it far up onto the shore.

“Don’t want to get stuck here,” said Dark-Eye. “Without the boat there is no return.”

Judy felt grateful for the little wooden rowboat. She turned back to gaze at it one last time as the jungle enveloped them with a deafening noise.

It was immediately overwhelming. All around, animals and insects screamed at her. She covered her ears. Dark-Eye seemed to relish the noise. “Within the chaos is a hidden order…” he whispered to himself.

“That’s Jung,” Judy interrupted.

“Means I can’t say it too?”

Mutual silence.

The large leaves met Dark-Eye’s scythe; snapped and crumbled into walkway piles. Judy stepped over the pads. Green blood trickled out of them.

“A lot of murder.”

“It continues.”

They made a straight path through the jungle. No turns. Dark-Eye carved with an angry precision. He seemed to know exactly where he was going.

“Been here before?”

“Not exactly. The last time I had to perform this operation was thousands of years ago. The plates of the earth were organized differently then. Different hot spots.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the last time you people screwed something up this badly the world literally had a different tectonic face.”

Judy blushed, embarrassed. “You mean we did this? I did this?”

“Your entire family tree. For centuries. It’s been a slow burn. And now we’re boiling over. And you’re here to correct it. So play your part.”

Judy stood a little more upright; stepped with a little more purpose.

They reached a stone temple in the middle of the jungle. It was nearly covered with vines and leaves, except for two dragon guardians. They roared, even as the stained, worn stone made them look exhausted. Judy swore she could see dark-circles around their eyes.

Dark-Eye remarked: “They’re tired of protecting you.”

He went inside. Judy followed.

Inside the temple, there was a podium; there stood the were-jaguar. It was like no creature Judy knew anywhere on earth, nonetheless in the history of the earth. It had a beak like a bird, a face like a man, but features like jungle cat. It leered proudly at them. It was made of a sort of dark marble, like a blue-black jade.

“The Rain God.” Dark-Eye admired the smooth stone.

Judy was astonished. “How did they make this?” It stood before them, right around five feet tall. It stood before Judy like a living being. And she supposed, right then, that it was.

“It made itself with them,” Dark-Eye explained. “You have to remember. This was a different time. The world had a different relationship with the powers. Humans had a different relationship with the powers. The powers worked through them. The Rain God drew itself out into the open through relenting human hands. Surrendered hands.”

Dark-Eye placed his hands upon the statue. Judy winced. Its eyes opened.

“Why did you wake me up?”

Judy could immediately hear the naivete and frustration in its voice. It spoke like a child. Or a fool. Could a Rain God be a fool?

Dark-Eye was immediately embarrassed. Judy didn’t think she’d seen Dark-Eye embarrassed or deferential since she’d met him. But that wasn’t very long.

“I’m sorry, Tláloc.”

“I remember you. It’s been quite some time. I’ve been sleeping… drifting… why have I been asleep?”

Dark-Eye was sorrowful. “The humans forgot. The temple is overgrown.”

Tláloc’s eyes narrowed. “And now the world is burning.”

Dark-Eye: “And now the world is burning.”

Tláloc leered proudly. “And why should I help you?’

Judy decided to speak up. “Because people are suffering.”

Tláloc ruminated. Judy could see on his face that he had decided that this was a good answer.

“And what if I come?”

“You can save them.”

“Will there be a parade?”

“The circus can resume.”

Tláloc thought carefully. “Pok-ta-tok?”

Judy smiled. “They’re finishing up the doubleheader as we speak.”

Tláloc replied, bubbling. “Then we have to hurry.”

Dark-Eye took his hand off the stone; Tláloc’s eyes went blank. Dark-Eye spoke, with an urgency which was again peculiar to Judy’s view of him:

“You have to pick him up. If I touch him he’ll awaken. We need to get in the boat. Back before nightfall.”

Judy grabbed Tláloc. He was incredibly light for his size. Like a raindrop. They ran for the rowboat.

Dark-Eye meditated the entire journey back. It cut the trip roughly in half by Judy’s estimation. His eyes were closed; entirely focused on moving the wheel of space and time. Judy’s oar moved effortlessly in her hand. It was as if they were being propelled forward by a universal force. A tide of will threw them. The Gulf carried them. The rowboat huffed. The name flickered in the churning water. Judy glanced at the reflection: ENTHUSIASMOS. She accepted the name.

They docked at the river inlet. The Bearded Lady was still there.

“Toss me the keys,” she said.

“There aren’t any keys!” Judy exclaimed.

The Bearded Lady just laughed. “They’re in the 24th inning. 1-1. Henry’s on the mound. They ran through all their pitchers. They’ll call it at nightfall. The troupe has to move on. The circus is leaving. If you hurry, you might catch the final out.”

It was now early evening. Judy could call it by the height of the sun. It had seasoned orange.

“Hurry.” She pulled the statue.

The Bearded Lady gasped.

“It’s been millennia.”

Dark-Eye: “And hopefully never again.”

They ran up the embankment. The Bearded Lady turned around to watch them go. Her charts fell from her lap.

The ballpark loomed. The lights flickered; the fire had now reached the cemetery. It licked angrily at the doorstep of the field. It was silent. No more spectacle, thought Judy. They ran into the entrance; through the spectator tunnel. As they emerged, she saw Henry on the mound. He was sweating profusely. It was incredibly hot inside the stadium. Three-two count on the batter, one out, top of the 25th inning. Judy yelled, “Henry, we’ve got the statue!” The entirety of the silent crowd leered. Henry waved. He wound up and threw the pitch. Curveball. Foul, into the stands.

Judy placed Tláloc in one of the bleacher seats. Dark-Eye placed his hand on the statue. It awakened.

“The Black Yankees! I’ve heard about them. Satchel Paige pitches for them. And who’s this other crew?”

Judy beamed. “The Holy Fools! That’s Henry Carpenter on the mound. Starting third baseman. You’ve caught a real barnburner. They’re in the top of the 25th inning now.”

Judy caught an incredibly devious look by Tláloc. It was clear he was plotting a deal. She braced herself as he spoke.

Tell you what. If they break the record for the longest game ever, you have a deal. I’ll save the world.”

Judy was appalled.

“You’d let the earth be destroyed that trivially? What kind of god are you?”

“I’m the Rain God. That’s my primary function. And besides, it’s not just the end of the world. It’s the end of the universe.”

Dark-Eye painfully explained.

“The death of the vital function means the death of all life. It means the cosmos goes void. There is no more divine spark. There is no more consciousness. The universe is vacated of all vitality. All passion. Any claim to any sort of life ceases. Cells no longer creep. No processes are carried out. The veins of life become vacated stone.”

The Rain God picked up where Dark-Eye left off. “They go to stone. Where you awakened me from. I was peaceful there. You’ve returned me to the affairs of the living. I have no need, interest, or desire to remain here nor there. The ballgame negotiates your fate. This, I watch with interest.”

He gestured to the field.

“This is the game of life and death. It’s a play. What are the stakes? High or low?”

Judy sputtered. “Our lives are at stake!”

The Rain God responded. “Life and death are the game finite beings play in the stone temple of the gods. And this field is your temple of stone.”

She looked around. The bleachers were now stone steps. The audience was petrified.

“The Gorgon Function.” Dark-Eye remarked with disdain.

“Fate is now upon the ballfield.” Tláloc said this solemnly, but Judy could see the hint of delight in his eye. He enjoyed the drama of the struggle of mankind.

Henry wound up again. This time the batter watched as a screwball slammed into the catcher’s mitt. “Strike three!” screamed the umpire. Judy had missed the second out, in her horror. Apparently Henry had struck out the side. He could pitch, too. Judy ran down to the field. Dark-Eye tried to stop her, but Tláloc assented. “Let her. Who knows how she could turn the tide. And who knows which way the tide will turn.”

Judy reached the fence that separated the dugout and the seats.

“Henry! Henry!”

“Judy!” Henry was happy to see her. “Like my screwball?”

“It was great Henry. But listen…”

“I have to go.”

“You need to hear this.”

“Quickly.”

“You need to make it through the 26th inning.”

“But we can win it now!”

“Trust me.”

Henry deliberated.

“The boys are all worn out.”

“Please. Trust me. There isn’t time to explain. They’re going to start the game.”

The Black Yankees’ catcher threw the ball down to second to signify the start of the next half inning.

Henry looked back at the field. “Ok, I’ll tell the team. You want us to throw the game?”

“Just keep it alive. Until the 27th inning.”

The record for the longest game in Major League Baseball history was a 26 inning game, ending in a 1-1 tie. It was the Boston Braves against the Brooklyn Robins. May 1, 1920. Pitchers of record: Leon Cadore and Joe Oeschger. Both: 26 innings pitched. Called due to darkness.

Judy struggled back to her seat, evading the frozen figures. As she took her seat, she gasped. Onto the field marched the Bearded Lady. The announcer croaked, as if by machine:

“Now batting, number three, Marjorie Tiresias. Pitcher.”

They were taking Henry out! Or were they? Judy entirely forgot about the stakes of the game. She just wanted to see Henry play. She registered this insane contradiction in her mind. She accepted it.

She looked up at the scoreboard. Henry had been returned to third base.

“They aren’t allowed to do that, are they?”

Dark-Eye cast a dark eye upon her.

She had forgotten the rule.

Marjorie struck out to end the inning. The Black Yankees’ pitcher had made quick work of the Holy Fools. Judy didn’t know if this was good or bad. It didn’t matter who won. It just mattered that the game kept going long enough. She glanced at the sun. It was tipping toward absolution. She watched the umpire. If he called the game, it was all over.

She closed her eyes. She could hear the Holy Fools taking the field for the top of the 26th inning. She didn’t open them until Marjorie had thrown her last warm up pitch; she could hear the ball hiss over Tiresias’ head and into the second baseman’s glove. “Play ball!” bellowed the umpire.

The inning went over without event. And into the bottom of the 26th, nothing. Judy began to breathe easier. Henry came up, with a runner on second, two outs. An easy popup, a double, a strikeout. Judy admitted she didn’t care. Henry was playing, the game just had to last. She prayed it was a quick at bat. But then she realized. If they scored, it would be over. She quickly changed her mind. He needed to get out. The runner couldn’t score. And then it happened. Henry hit a bullet up the middle. She wanted to smack him across the face and cheer at the same time. The Yanks’ centerfielder scooped it on two hops cleanly as the Holy Fools’ runner came around third. Tláloc’s breathing sounded like a tornado bearing down upon a little red farmhouse. The centerfielder threw a bullet to the plate. It one hopped just after the mound. The runner barreled into the catcher’s chest. They tumbled into dust. “YERRRRR OUT!” yelled the umpire. Judy erupted into cheers. Henry glared at her. She was the sole noise in the bleachers. She quickly sat back down.

They had made it. The 27th inning. And then she saw it. The clown, waddling out of the dugout. He was carrying a massive balloon animal and a ridiculously oversized pin. It was over six feet tall. And it was then that Judy decided. She was going to take the clown out.

She jumped up from the bleachers. Tláloc smiled. She leapt over the stone steps. It was like interrupting a tragedy. The audience gasped. Unmoving. A breath of wind. She leapt over the dugout fence. The clown lumbered toward the field. She flew through the air, like a panther, a jaguar, and drove him to the ground. The clown angrily responded.

“What the hell?”

“Sorry. The stakes are high.”

“This isn’t part of the act! You could’ve killed me! The balloons!”

Judy looked at the stupidly large balloon animal horse.

“It’s over. Get the fuck off the field.”

The umpire looked over at them.

“It’s getting late, you know.”

Judy responded.

“Just start the 27th inning.”

The umpire was taken aback. Her command was so strong, he responded with an immediate reaction.

“PLAY BALL!”

FRAGMENT FIVE:

Ron Seer, The Seer of Things Seeable: A Reportage of the Gogolian, Menippean Farce of All Time From Within The Coffers of Real Golding

The Seer didn’t want his life to be seen as a joke. The women looked on hungrily, as they talked about sexual pleasure and gardening. A dog incessantly barked. Its eyes looked at him with an empty, permanently sedated happiness. The sun shone hard on the street. As the women passed, he listened to the radio broadcast on Flann O’Brien.

His name was Ron Seer, but his friends and business relations simply referred to him as ‘The Seer’. He worked the third window at the Isley Remote Bank in downtown London. Each day, he would show up in his Remote Bank uniform — cargo shorts and a wooly t shirt; sit down on the creaky bench, where he dispersed perforated dollar bills with a crooked grin.

Today was Ron Seer’s day off.

As The Seer sat on the porch swing, he reflected on the day’s events. Another bureaucrat had been caught laundering money in a state science experiment. This one involved rats in a word maze. It yielded nothing. The Secretary of State Affairs had been pressured into giving a speech by the general public, but she’d managed to evade a commitment to any firm persecution of the fellow by eating a tuna fish sandwich. Her breath repelled the reporters.

The Seer sat and reflected. What would come next? Surely, in some slum corner of the world, or the Grand Palisades, a baby was being conceived. And that baby would become Royal Chancellor the Third, and the procession would repeat all over again. This simultaneously soothed and terrified him. He pulled his thin wooden tobacco pipe from his pocket. Tragedy and comedy, comedy and tragedy.

He lit the stuff then decided to start wandering about the park. He saw a tax man in diapers giving a seance to a school of ducks. The man babbled in a vaguely harmonic tone. This sent Ron Seer into a reverie, remembering the time before memory, when he was but a baby, whose mind was wading around in the unintelligible young stuff. The murk before name and identity.

He had been forced to become Ron Seer, by a melancholy of the rapidly industrializing world — a man whose name and place was assured — the signed and stamped ground of his body that could be seized due to any sort of manufactured crime. And he’d man the bank till as the girls squawked, and the piper of the world drilled on. Perhaps, at best, he’d get married to a baroness, or The Oracle at Delphi. Perhaps she could cook a fried chicken, or recite the lines of Horatio, or Falstaff.

Ron Seer was a free man at birth from the farce, inconvictable. There was not a bone in his body that could be assuaged by the fairy tales of men and their denominations of the spirit. His burned a fire pure, when he wasn’t stapling bank statements to the wall, or filling the water cooler. Fixing his tie with a knife blade. Ron giggled at the world’s myth with the arrogance of a schoolgirl — who knew her charms were ripe to strip naked in front of it and change the entire foundational locus. The ontological source of man was a sexual farce. It all revolved around a lawless sexual desire. And all rules would be bent around that center, like a gravitational sink. Space would warp toward the apparition of beauty. And life would be thrown into it like all the desperation and despair it was.

But alas, to Ron Seer, this was humor. The automaton dancing on the nightly comedy show of the world’s television. The jig, long being up, had divulged into a marionette clacking its feet forever. Vaguely ashamed, vaguely astonished it was still alive. And Ron would drift in metaphysical reveries, as city accountants in their black skirts attempted to seduce aloof men in suits in coffee shops which stood far enough off from the noise of a failed state on a Caribbean island somewhere. A farce of celebrity, and the drooling mouth of the animal which sputtered in the wake of pure image, with nothing but surfeit abyss beneath it.

This was the body of the world.

His best friend at the bank, Miles Lundy, had an act. He’d press his palms to his temples and imagine sanity. Miles was a clown of the first order. He ran after women; anything with the sting of liquor. And every time, he would repent, like a sinner at the pew: “Never again, I swear it!” Flushing the booze, the mad, stained callgirl. Ron expected this would go on forever. To stop would surely be death. And life therein was the slapstick humor of the petty excuse murmured over every barside from here to the asteroid belt.

The women would go home with the men, giggling with their friends as they stepped into cars. Night would drown into day; they’d staple on their dresses and uniforms and march forth into the conviction of their real, lived lives. The delicate social fabric of carbon based life forms clinging to flesh masks. And even content with it, vigorously filling successful biological functions like dutiful limbs to a massive, sleeping, cosmic giant.

The spiral of the eating, shitting, waking; for most, praying to a certain dream — wherein the whole self would be abolished, or at least achieve some living salvation. Enough rent paid, stocks traded, soup eaten. Learning trombone. The next car. Like hungry, lipless tongues. Sucking water from the soil.

Ron hears the sound of a fart, over and over again, like a cassette recording on repeat. A large clown was relieving himself in the bushes. A little boy screamed, holding a balloon. “Pass me the toilet paper, kid.” He rasped, with a cigarette voice. The boy’s mother picked him up in horror, scolding the clown. The man grinned. He was reading The Washington Post.

Now, to this world, Ron Seer paid no mind. He had a fine series of inner feelings to attend. You see, Ron Seer was writing a book on how darling it was to be alive inside the circus. Cover by Goya, imprint by a soon to be reputable firm; introduction by a fictional character named Jon R. Montoya. A senator from Spain; a fine old chap with a breathing addiction. At least until he stopped.

The Seer figured today would be the day something happened. He consulted the planetary configurations like a conspiracy from the gods. Love match? Fictional waterbug? Funnel cakes? It was the day of the county fair. It would, predictably, be held in the county seat. A little village, just outside of town. It even had a drive in movie theatre. They set up the moon- bounce in between the courthouse and the county jail. A convenient transportation device, thought Ron Seer.

He would have to take a car to get to the carnival. There would be very loud, beady eyed dogs. Men smoking amphetamines in the public bathrooms by the playground. Emerging like wild eyed predators. And of course, there would be his Golgotha, Isabella. Isabella was five foot two; a real charmer. She was a typist from Bombay; her mother was a Spanish pianist and her father was a fake conquistador. Well, not fake. He put on historical revues at the local theatre house for interested foreigners. Many citizens and mystics in India wished to know about the Spanish colonial project. The man had grown quite the mustache. Isabella said he’d even confessed to considering killing someone in a far-away jungle for the full effect.

Isabella was no one in particular — well, at least, not yet. She and Ron had discussed her potential forays into madness. She dabbled in psychic institutions, Laurel and Hardy, and forging paychecks. Frankly, the girl was insane. She had no marked interest in reproduction; had sex for a simply grotesque, far off, alien pleasure — the pleasure of a consciousness perhaps-accidentally ceded in a human body. In short, she was just Ron’s type.

When they were together, he’d feign identity as Frederico Garcia Salamone, an emperor cast out from Spain and temporarily exiled to Mongolia, where he’d overthrown Genghis Khan. Somewhat in the vein of Dumas. And she was his perverted, weird Sancho. Bestiality fantasies. She unscrewed the cork to the cosmos and poured something horrible in and around the lip, where it mingled with a Mezcal scorpion. She drank the whole worm.

Isabella was currently in jail for lighting a mail courier’s hair on fire. Twenty five to life. Ron considered breaking her out with a sort of inauspicious cowardice reserved for the daydreams of the slowly dying. He’d pick the lock with his shoelace and carry her out over his shoulders like a Viking. At least, if she didn’t hang herself in there first.

As The Seer walked, he hummed the tune to war. The folk Batman theme, as he watched a contortionist slowly strip herself in the fountain. Perhaps predictably aroused, he swung his cane with a jolly might. The world in the park, however briefly, conformed to his expectations of the astrophysics of the universe. The domain of the conquering imagination — asserting itself over the drowning pool of the rote disaster of mankind. A cratered race, destined for the tomb of endless repetition. It was then that he decided he would see a play. A play about Isabella’s life.

It was called Fatty Boom-Boom; put on at the city civic center by Isabella’s former half sister. A man’s credit score was required to enter. She danced burlesque, asked the audience questions; poured a couple of drinks. Then the curtain would fall and a movie would begin. A collage about the transformation of an earthworm into a man lost without a face in a world of unintelligible symbols. Surely, it would sate his taste before the carnival intercession.

It went on for far too long. She stroked her animal wound for several hours and only spoke on Latin, amidst shrieks, grunts, and moans. A group of fifteen men in bowler hats hurriedly paid her in silver dollars and rushed on their way, out into the noon light. Assuredly, for the night fire of the carnival. The Seer stood before her as she finished her weeping lament.

“Trapped, doll?”

“In the great maze, Anton.”

“Bring forth the flowers, the garlands, the forlorn applause!”

She bowed, deeply. Ron had cheered her up and forth.

‘Will you see Isabella?”

“Perhaps never again, or perhaps in dreams.” He kissed her hand sharply, and existed stage left. The half sister fainted to scattered catcalls from the remaining attendance. One was a golem.

Outside, Ron Seer pressed his cane into the flat earth in a rush to the shining lights of the big show. From show to show he’d roam, agape in a big laughter which would shatter the rude fixed staring of the stars. Each day he’d start and stop only re-merged by dreams of a foolish knight enamored with a pinwheel. Bubbles blew on the fires of his life; trumpets sounded as he kissed the vivandiere. This was life itself — he’d proclaim to nobody in particular, stepping over puddles in the cobblestone streets like a minor celebrity. A private poetry, taking the mix of misinterpreted fell ills of mankind and churning them into an inner psychological gold. Agape, abyss, beloved one!

The carnival had a large stamped banner waving red in the wind of the dying day. FREE TO ALL CHUMPS AND TERRORISTS, NOVELIZERS AND SYCOPHANTS. COME ALL INTO THE HUNGRY CHAMBERS OF SHREWD WITCHERY. The sign, in short, was far too long. The Seer’s eyes glazed, well past sycophancy. He supposed he was a novelizer, fraternizer, lobotomizer; if there was nothing to do over the wart of Isabella’s kiss off from this dying earth, he’d be a womanizer too. Maybe to abscond with some Siamese twin ballet into Persia. They were lacking in a ruler for, what, several thousand years?

There was a white faced man with long lips and an extremely tall hat looking for his ticket. Ron’s ticket. He pulled his pockets out to reveal a long gold line of coiled ADMIT ONEs. He tore one off. “Back tomorrow!” He said to the pale faced man, who promptly ate the ticket.

Ron had none such foray into magic or madness, but he would allow the enthralled exception of Menippea. The deranged continent, the dragged blanket of imperial filibustering by sad sack clowns whose skin sagged close to a nine decade death over the burning flesh of perceived criminality. This would be enough reason for treason of the realm. Shoved off into a dirty, county fair, between the teeth of a tattooed freak. A Hitler acolyte, who camped out on the train tracks and held a conspiracy that Isabella was secretly a psychopomp Gorgon goddess shoved into the misfit corpse of Ron’s jailed lover. Wait, what?

“You heard me old man. You need to free your soul.”

Two black teeth peeked out behind the cut lips of the man whose snuff gushed through the hole between them onto his blouse.

“Free the madwoman?”

“Free the Gorgon freak. Hot goddess Isabella, the twisted Manichean, Lilithian sister.”

“And I do sputter!” Thought Ron. It was an interesting thought, as he shot the pellet gun at the bare assed clown who yelped as he ran away, red nose falling off into the dirt. Ron had won a stuffed bear. He felt around in it, beneath the fluff. There was an automatic weapon with a magazine in it. Mercenary type thing, thought Ron. Both the bear and the gun went in the nearest dumpster.

The carnival was boring. Ron supposed he’d go back to the third desk bureau tomorrow and stamp MADNESS, FOOL, and IDIOT on foreheads for small payouts, while flipping through Candide under his desk. A small rifle were the hours that dirged into days, while Ron Seer riddled his emerging futile groan that would shatter his entire life. The life of a sycophant. A wasted man. And this is how The Seer gained his admission to the carnival.

Ron came from nowhere, going nowhere, into nothing. A long line of deluded fools sucking dust from the earth like ill advertised Sears Hoover vacuums until the apocalypse popped them like cherries from the whistle of the earth. Like a diseased, exploded grape, haunting the everydays like a miserable excuse for survival. Bitter or not, Ron might be a Thompson gunner, a street-preacher, or an educator in ancient Egyptian folklore. All roads remained open. That day, The Seer quit his job at the bank. His supervisor, Dale McGinnon, was furious.

“Ron, you’re our third banker to the right. It’s a critical role in the adjudication of finances to the downtown providence branch.”

Ron scratched his head with a foreign knuckle.

“McGinnon, I’m an immigrant from a later branch of time. Forgive this temporary role and unclasp the fetters of my command.”

“What, The Seer?”

And it was then that Ron performed his perfunctory theatre of a bank robbery upon his departure. His colleagues laughed as he stuffed gold coins into his pockets; they bulged, and finally, his khaki shorts fell down to riotous whistling. Ron Seer bowed; collected his tips. He would be off to see The Pied Piper in The Magical Grove.

The stories about the Piper were true, he’d killed about half the town attempting to cash dreams to a music they couldn’t, strictly speaking, touch. But seeing as Ron had released the last fetter, he was prepared to cast his lot against the megalomaniacal man in a game of anthropomorphic chess. Each man would use their bodies and limbs in an uncontrolled dance, breaking the foothold of the channel programming of the temporary form of the energetic body called man and release the daemon. This was the Piper’s favorite activity.

They shook hands, as the Piper groomed himself to Julie London.

“The hell with another challenger. To the boneyard!” The Piper swung an imaginary axe at Ron Seer’s head.

“Whatever, poor fellow. You’re but a station in a private madness. I’m headed to Isabella’s house.”

“The house of the dead? The house of the damned?” The Piper, preening in his laughter.

“Farewell!” Ron lopped off his head like a Hydra. The Piper fell silent in the face of The Seer’s sovereign force. The. Laughter roared.

“Very well! Go sing your song, Ron Seer. Go sing your song.”

So Ron Seer sang his song all the way to Sing-Sing prison, which held the manacled Andromeda-Cattis-Isabella, the beloved wholesome one. Apple of The Seer’s eye; the demoness of his matchbook’s heart.

She was quite glad to see him, but solemn and vengeful behind those stone bars.

“Ron you beautiful liar, it’s been fifteen thousand years of me slumming it with these felons and pissing in a cardboard box.”

“Yes, it’s me, beloved, your steel horse before suicide.”

She kissed him on the mouth then giggled like a schoolgirl crush.

“Forever young, Ron?”

“You don’t exist, Shiela.”

She hopped on his back and rode him like a getaway car all the way to Saigon, where they laid their nest like two storks watching a car crash. Down goes humanity, boiling in a stupid, pernicious fire. Something like a crab bake on an island of hunchbacked exiles. Shiela thumbed her nose at them as they passed, performing regular errands of passing down their genome to their pseudo-possessions of unformed minds.

“Damn, damn, damn, damn! Where’s the hard drugs, captain?” She pulled the drawers of the house kitchen like pigtails on a pinball slot machine.

“Shut up Donna, I’m trying to work.”

Sly Ron Seer was putting the finishing touches on his novel about monkey troubadours breeding with sexy space cosmonauts on a senate floor somewhere in Nicaragua.

“Fuck your vagrant smut, The Seer. Kiss me on the mouth and we’ll go farm some berries from some unsuspecting market salesmen. Broad daylight stuff.”

Ron had had enough of the joke of fear that had infected everything like boring plot to a predictable novel. He’d interject a groveling switchblade with googly eyes into the baron at the crossroads moment. Hamletian gravedigger-highway men would flip the carts of Oedipus and scare the pus filled gargoyle Goutian pretense. More and more gold would trickle from their blood into the light. The Seer chuckled with violent glee.

“We’re off, Melissa! To the hell of hells!”

She swung her legs around him and they bred nothing like chickens. A fat egg was caught in the gastrointestinal embryo of the immigrant star forever; it sat steaming like a bad idea unuttered by an illiterate. The Oracle kicked off the day by shoveling a pile of strawberries into her throat and seducing a tree branch. In the meantime, Ron Seer wandered off to pick a fight with a sultan by poking his belly repeatedly, upon threats of execution. This was considered to be a ripe Sunday by all measures, and indulged accordingly. They would rip the world out by the underbelly seams and feed it to some unnamed goat in the Alps, whose wide eyes would witness the end of the empty and the dead empire of nothingness. The goat wouldn’t even be sated as it all goes down. Ah, fat nothingness, thought Ron Seer, the darling of the constellations. They all moaned for his destiny; beckoned for the incarnation of his writhing wet flesh down through the aeons of malcontent, squirming nuclear cells bombarded by invasion; the bellowing out of synapses as they wriggled and died under the pressure of ripe, desert isolation.

So they’d wander like prophets, as Isabella and Ron wandered through the meat markets of time, to shred the gap between somethingness and nothingness — the template of all oils which settle and bleed into waters, amorphous, ameobic piles of information, heaving their dead loads over terrain like forced reactions of chemistry. Over and over, Ron and Isabella would breed, like twin atom and eves, until the world exploded with a great big evacuatory kiss. The sphincter explosion which would bomb out the last of the hot blood like a murderous stain.

And so they’d wander, rioted civilization, velvet and smooth, until the last bang billowed the curtain. Slashing and cleaving at the time of times, their pleasantries. And the delicate web which sang them in such saccharine, sweet song of filthy, disgusting falsities. Isabella would be his cockpit of black destruction; she, to him, would be his swan song. Over and over again, in a thousand different cloaks and disguises. Dead, alive, dead, alive again.

This was the essential blueprint. Ron could be reborn as anything. A piece of toast. And she would be the black agony that haunted his belly in a raven’s transmutation. Pass through the angelic fire and feel the universe of her sweet nothingness aching his core. She executed merchants thoughtlessly; their heads rolled and stammered. Gold coins, gold coins and opium, gold coins and hashish. Young women. Over and over again. Fed into the fire of napalm until they all burst into desperate last wishes. Ron, at the bank, pounding the skull tambourines into fervor.

A missionary. Was Isabella. Before she died and was strung like a necklace on a skeleton. Who whispered like the sinew of Sky’s bones, dug at his marrow and made him listless with the fire of her hunger. A thousand wax dolls he consumed in an endless barbary. A thousand whitewashed jesters, rehashing tired pilgrimages. The real soul girl of the work called Ron Seer like the opium gas she drank from the earth and spoke in worldless sentences. This was the elixir, the draught. The daughter, between madness and the spirit. The thing window which spoke in tune.

“Kiss me, Ron! Kiss me forever in some hot cinema!”

They mingled like pythons in the wicker basket of some Aghori priest who was off tending to his lover on the banks of the dead, burning her body while singing a Sphinxian melody. Mating in the markets, Ron elucidated and counted every one of his twelve thousand legs. One leg for each half of a lifetime he’d split off and chewed on tenderly until the bucket was filled with hours and seconds. A man named Mortus began watching and taking pictures. Melanie hissed at him.

“Damn it Ron, kill that bastard!”

Mortus was a colonial photographer from the Midwest possessed by sirens. He only attended nudie flicks and knew the name of every pornographer backwards. At midday, he’d eat lunch at midtown. Two hard boiled eggs and a double shot of espresso. At the mortuary, he sat and read aloud scandalous poetry by long dead French swordsmen.

Melanie didn’t know Mortus was an old friend of Ron’s. Ron got up from the dirt and covered himself up with a ragged cloth sash and shook Mortus’s hand.

“Mortus! Back from the dead!”

“Still living, Ron? And writhing around in the dirt like a sick possession?”

Mortus and Ron knew all there was to do was writhe and make up hideous, idiotic jokes, stories, and narratives about writhing. This was the nature of their secular communion under time. Mortus was a member of the Guild of the Brotherhood of Ancient Knights and Tithes, who met underground and muttered strange utterances and poured red dyed water into ancient metal chalices and modern Tupperware and burned piles of fast fashion which became pyres. They’d roast the meat of the long dead upon the spits and offer them up to the demon god Chigomahony.

“Are you bored yet, Mortus? With the farce of your life?”

Mortus laughed and frowned. “A couple more lives before I give it up? Hell! Around and around the wheel.” Mortus kicked the dirt and Melanie coughed loudly.

“Kill that fuck, Cyrus!”

Ron spat in Mortus’s eye. Mortus spat in Ron’s eye. They continued to spit until there was a great flood. This caused a forced move for the young lovers.

Sometimes Ron looked upon the bank fondly, backwards, kicking his feet in the water below the canoe, legs dangling into the crystal blue waters, while The Oracle stood in the salon of their yurt, combing her hair; screaming until she caused an avalanche. What divine words sprouted from her mouth, thought Ron Seer. Such reveries that made him ogle her until she burst into flames. Such was the power of his innocular vision. She was a small disease; he was the big fuel that fanned the flames of the sleeping siren who poured her wiles upon him. Bewitched, enchanted, beguiled. It was the stuff of perjury; even better, two pigs in a trough to hallelujah. She’d dance, he’d beg, they’d both be obliterated in a cough from a high god split from another timeline sent to wipe his fist from ass to mouth, black hole to black hole, stained tissue of the suffering of the struggling molecule all the way up to the soft song of Cy Williams, The Seer Coffin. What a wonderful, miraculous dance.

“It’s time to buy guns, its time to buy wives. It’s time for the hunger in bellies, to sharpen the knives!” They waltzed with glee, over and over again, as aeons fell, tumbling from the mouths of goblins in fairy tales, laced with the fire of dead philosophers weeping over collapsed marble temples to huntress goddesses. The belly wined like a dog, the eyes shone like a dark, black master of the stars, ripping through the cerebellum with the first form of primordial energies. Cy Williams The Seer Coffin watched Nepal go belly up, like a dead Indian hunter, in the grave, wandering down the drifting magnetism of the curtain of the current until it sputtered and died in the trench belly of the ocean. Swallowed with a big Gulping sound. And this was how the widow, too, died, dancing mateless in a sea of flames. We wander with the eyes that see the visions within them; that is it and that is all.

This was the wisdom of Cy Williams Ron Wild, The Seer Dead Coffin Boy, who had sprung from the depths of the tomb with a window dance, jumped over the pyre of all civilizations and wide eyed ashes etched into stones with words and names and tithes, stones of the dead which moaned and groaned and clapped and stomped as laval mites clasped their bones; they ached and shrugged into place in stalactite groves and Arctic desert palaces while the black maiden kissed the belly of the mad poets who too licked her disease. Far from the banker boy who feasted on vegemite in his woolly sleeve, sighed Cy Bones, gigolo author of the sexual apocalypse, who kissed the knees of every beggar, and saw the particle swarm of the black storm of the sun as it wiled its way into the lap of his mistress woman, Carnissa, bag of meat and bones. Bag of meat and bones who sang in the wind until the skeletons perked up and jumped into dog uniforms. Dog costumes. With big, wide, black eyes. And barked at any divine.

“Spit, Cy Bones Seer, Spit in my mouth.” She was anxious, like a moth, for the great big death. So Cy performed his dutiful rite; jumped into the swirling vacuum of her soul. Down and away from history, to the right, by the dusty boxes; the charnel house of dead politicians, Molligan Dale McGottigan and his rusty commune, and the plastic bags of dead rituals performed by frantic linguistic spears into the immortal black kiss of the breath of the surgeon god of the Oracle’s sex and lung. She was loud in the night, screaming in former Persia, former Nepal, former Old World, New World, World After Next, that came in waves of blood, whatever virus, whatever priest for the new religion who lay his wood or metal lingam onto the pulse of man as the previous dream died in a whirl of smoke and the stories abandoned.

And so it was that Cy Williams Bone Man kissed the Menippea Oracle Witch Goddess on the mouth; slipped her from the witch of Delphia like a river of absconded clothes and became emperor of the nothing from which he sprang, carving a hill to the top of the slope like an anteater with a great and large mind, bathed in the starry night’s sun-slip dress, which she had thrown to the sky in her last mating call before the close and clap of the abyss upon his neck-bones, like an ancient agony, like a serpentine.

PART IV. VOICES FROM THE DEAD

THE GRAVEDIGGERS: WAITE HOYT’S PHILOSOPHICAL MONOLOGUE FROM THE DEAD

I was a washed up, hellbitten young man. Traded by the Yanks at thirty. Sure, I’d gotten into the leagues at a young age of fifteen. Hadn’t a clue that I’d run into the shit that I did. Pulled up the rug of the game and smelled the mud. Barely a carpet of grass covering the blood and bones.

You want to hear my story of descent into the game? And yes – by the game I mean the great American game of baseball. I was there when they put up Ebbets Field – that temple of power through which Jackie Robinson stepped and changed a whole civilization. I was there, rooming with Joe Dugan as he and the Babe bet on horse-races. Watching George as he drove the white pill into the night. Day after day, until he couldn’t hold out no more.

This isn’t a morality play. Sure, my family raised me right – or they thought they did. My ma said, ‘Manners, Waite – manners. They should think of you as a man who comes from a home of refinement.’ Well, this was the real world. The ballgame was filled with orphans and thugs. Hell, I even met Al Capone. My teachers, when I was a kid, said I shoulda been a journalist, a writer. They wanted to put me on the track to respectability too.

Who’s to say what it was that drew me to the game. I always said, late in my life,

“A pitcher must have the desire, patience, willingness to learn, tolerance of setbacks, temperament and a distinct understanding of to what extent his capabilities will take him, as well as what sacrifices he will make to reach his goal.”

And I suppose it holds true. I’ve been dead for years. And America has for the most part forgotten the game. Turned it into a gambling spectacle. Which I suppose it always was, beneath the rotting, twisted foundations. The thousands and thousands of buffalo skulls littering the plains. The men they kept out the game for no excuse other than ‘cause they were black.

Well, I didn’t know nothing about life, til the game taught me. Suppose this is my story.

1. The Game That Kills

My name was Waite Hoyt – least til I was a pile of dirt and then gone. And I told my story already. You can read it in a book. This is about what came before. I was a singer, and I dug graves too. Hell, baseball was barely even a first profession for me. But when I stepped on the rubber, something just worked. It didn’t hurt that I had Murderer’s Row working for me on the other end of the field.

When I looked at the grave, or when I would sing the baritone on the carnival grounds, I felt distinctly that life was a joke. Like it was a cosmic trick played upon me; I’d think of Miss Scoville and high school, and how I could’ve been a journalist or writer or painter. And then how I ended up on the bus with a bunch of bitten lifers from the worst conditions. I was an educated man, but I chose baseball before I could even think about it. My pa was a vaudevillian too.

Throughout my life, I had this distinct sense of confusion. That the decisions and questions put before me had no discernible hidden question or answer; I made those movements based purely on a force seemingly beyond me. I conducted my life like it was given to me; dictated to such an extent that I could not discern the long or the short of it. Nobody thought it made a damn bit of sense that I’d end up friends with a man like Babe Ruth, nor tempesting with the temper of a man like John McGraw. My talent drew me into the game. Let me say that I was, simply, so damn good that the game called me in like an attractor – before I could even get wise and say this thing or that, one or the other.

I suppose that’s what they call a vocation. Something you’re called to do before you can make the call yourself.

I can imagine that you expected a baseball recount, coming from a man like me. That I would tell you all about the sordid and loud details of my vocation – the long nights on the town carousing with Ruth and Dugan, the wives, mistresses, the lights of New York City in the rollicking twenties. I can’t give you that book. What’s more, the only book I can give you is the book of questions from beyond the grave.

When I look back at my whole life, from the days announcing ballgames in the midwest, to the songs, to the casket-bearers, to getting signed to McGraw’s Giants at fifteen – my only question is why. Why did it have to unfold like this; why did I have to play it where it laid. The narrows of a true decision are, in reality, incredibly small. The options and choices, diverse as they may have seemed, came about with a prior conviction to them. And what I mean by this is something like how they name the planets. The fancy scientists draw their binoculars against the sky and define a new stellar body. Who’s to say how they come up with the name? They found Pluto back when my career on the mound was just finishing up. How’d they get to the Roman gods to name them? How’d I get the name “Schoolboy”, you’ll ask, in reply.

When I was young, my ma and pa had a glass jar that was sealed with wax. In it, I suppose, was my whole past, present, and future. Suppose I never opened it. Suppose I never even understood what was inside it. Ma said the name Waite came to her in a dream. What the fuck does Waite mean? Then I learned that it meant watchman, or defender. This same kind of system of naming, I well understood, comes from the unconscious understanding of a species which can feel, like the bird, when a volcano is on the verge of erupting. And my whole baseball life was between the first war of the world and the return of it.

I learned about predetermination by reading a book about a man named Calvin back in my schooldays. I dabbled even in a bit of philosophy until navigating the underworld drew my time. That’s how I got the circles under my eyes as my career finished up in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. Not that I’m the supreme arbiter of it all, but I long suspected that baseball was meant to rear its head up against me so early that it would take me over; that I would fall into the game like a gravitational force. If I was wiser, maybe, with more years on me, I’d have stayed in school. Studied Cezanne with a closer eye. Get into Dostoevsky and Chekhov.

Understand. In our lives there’s paths we didn’t take. And then there’s the path we took. We were meant to take it. All along, each barnstorming trip, each baritone stage, each wink of the eye of the Babe. Taking the mound against Rogers. I can look back at it now from a different place – higher vantage, perhaps, say – and see it as a series of requests made from a primary authority.

I can’t give you the game. I’m tired of thinking about the game. I announced it from the microphone, threw it on the field, talked about it incessantly on the Yanks’ bench with Miller Huggins. I don’t even know what the game gave me at the end of the day, now that it’s done. Suppose it’s about what I gave the game. That I was forced into one long act of service by a cosmic god at the threshold who shat me out into life and death and pulled the puppet strings.

Between carnival and the mortician’s office, there’s the game of baseball. That’s what I understood. That baseball was and would be truest to life, in the sense of innate and inborn capacities. That life was a theatre, a spectacle, a carnival of excesses no better embodied by my friend, the competitive eater, Babe. The insatiable appetite that drove him through and out of the game like he was possessed by a madman. The Greeks called it the daemon. The passion of the soul. The hunger. The flame.

I watched Babe burn through his life from a distance. Like the ballplayers that got whores on the road, bet on card games – hell, they even bet on dogs. Would be scorpions if we had ‘em. Any event could have a dollar or two slapped down on it. Like they were challenging time to swing and miss, or hit one out. The best pitchers challenge a man. They step up to the rubber and toss the pill aimlessly, and throw it right where the guy knows he has to hit it because he damn well can. Fastball, up and in. Give him your best pitch and make him miss. Damn if it’s tunneled right over the plate. In the highest leverage situations too. I pitched in too many big games for them to even matter anymore. Hell, I’d even laugh when it was all on the line. What would there be, but another season on the bench with Miller or Lou, shooting the shit about what happened the night before?

Baseball happens over and over again. On a loop. But each time it’s different. No strike settles the same; no curve breaks out of the hand just like it should in your mind. Call it Plato’s theory of forms. We have the image in our minds. The perfect woman. The perfect ballgame. Deep into the night, twelve inning shutout against the guy who had your goat for the past fifteen years. A pitchers’ duel where you have gas for two hundred plus. True control on the mound.

We pitchers crave it like air and light. It’s the chaos that surrounds and forces and breaks the game at the highest levels of play. It’s what we all trained for. Me and Heinie Manush or even the old Wagner. The incessant practice that allows for the ballgame to burst out like a jazz band – every element working at peak operative function; precisely amidst that well oiled formulation of individual minds, bodies, and spirits working in collective movement, the game unfolds.

The rest of the world is blase, a pale hue. I was drawn to the deepest wells. That would be sex, death, and baseball. I suppose music too. If you ever heard John Coltrane spin “My Favorite Things”, you’d understand. If you’re living in a farce, say empire, the workaday life; the rise and fall of economies – hands grasped around houses, cards, loaves of bread – banks filled to the brim with money, then it’s mattresses when you don’t trust the banks no more… all you have is the mad, crazed attempt. We make something out of nothing here, just like it was on the streets. Ask a ballplayer like Ed Delahanty or even Satchel Paige what the ballgame really is. He’ll say a ball of yarn in an abandoned lot in a helltown. Cleveland. Mobile, Alabama. Say, Stan Coveleski. It’s a junkyard fastball, a rock against a tree, right next to the gates of hell. For him, it’s the mines. Illiterate man like Joe Jackson, it’s the little kids in the mills. Get their hair caught in the spinning wheels. Tears the scalp right out.

Suppose that’s a lot for you. And Joe – you can’t even say the man was illiterate, per se. One of the smartest eyes and minds for the game I ever met. The man just never had a chance. When you’re in the mills at age six, you don’t have time to learn to read or write. I don’t think that man ever learned a damn thing in school.

This is what I mean by chance. Fate, even. What Calvin said – what’s the damn difference between Joe and a man like Coolidge? Morgan? Ford? James Bell, being born black. Or the fellas on the Black Yanks. Playing in the very shadow of the white club. I met plenty of men like this as I walked through the underbelly. Men who had a shot at being something else, not just on the ballfield. But damn if life didn’t give it to ‘em. Plenty of men who didn’t even get a shot to play in the big-time – due to how they looked, or a tragedy of circumstances.

Suppose you could say I was blessed. The ballgame chose me; I was a true lifer, from start to finish. From the one on the mound in the biggest games, playing for the biggest team in the whole world – to the guy in the box talking about it moments after it happened, bringing it on home back to you, the radio, the reader.

All of these lives play out like this. Who could Joe have been but Joe? We look back at history and see necessity. He played his part in the wheel of time; then departed from the stage into eternity. Playing under false names in the semi-pro circuit after the ban. Or Babe, eating the whole world until it tore him apart from the inside and took him to an early grave. Baseball, to me, the more time I spent stamped in it, marinated by it, seemed to be to be a grotesque of the theory of time itself – the theatre of the grave, from birth to death. A field of desire, to which all gravitated. Chasing the fulfillment of the great game. The shutout. The no hitter. The perfect game. Pitch after pitch, dialed in to the swing and miss. Always better when the guy shows out and tries to get a hold of one. No fun when he keeps the bat on his shoulder. You want the challenge, crave it even.

That’s what desire is. You don’t have something that you gotta get. Otherwise, if you don’t get it, it feels like you didn’t yet do something you’re suppose to do. Suppose everyone wants the beautiful woman, the nice car, the fame, the fortune. And sure, we had at least half of that most of the time, damn well close to the whole of it. But what do you really want?

When I was on the mound in a tight spot, or dialed in to the full degree, I understood. I wanted to be in it. I wanted to be on the rubber in a full grit. In a full way of being so as to be in intimate relationship to the game itself. Nothing in this world could replace it. Each night was a silence, a reprieve enough into the full spiral of the unmoored chaos of life which would drag me out into Cincinnati or Brooklyn or Manhattan – anywhere we were long enough to make something of it – that would sit me in the full face of my empty mortality four days before I took the mound next. Then I was back in the groove, the sacred groove.

Many men and women who don’t do something like this just don’t get it. Their lives are of the world. But for ballplayers – the best, the greatest ones, the true one percent – we are the ones who are in the game and the game is within us. It’s the stream of life. The essence of it. This level of immersion. And what use is there to speak about it? It’s a state of being. A way. And the deeper I got into the game the further away everything felt from it. This great state. That’s why I rededicated myself in ‘27, having that talk with Miller. And it was my best season yet; at the perfect time to boot. Right when we reached our true height as a ballclub.

Why did I do the mortician thing; the vaudeville on the side? When you’re wasting time, you do the best thing available to you. Participate in the carnival and remind yourself that you’re alive. And on the other side of life is the black transformation we call death that we don’t know a damn thing about. When you watch it happen, when you see it over and over again, you prepare yourself for it. You understand the nature, the essence of the stage. You come onstage; you sing, you depart. You throw your pitch until you can’t throw anymore, then you get your letter – in my case, from Burleigh – letting you know you’re off the team of life. Headed somewhere else. New vocations. Further assignment in barnstorming. Some foreign ballclub. Guys jump from auto-parts squads to railroaders to circus clubs. Hell, Barnum even had a squad. You take the rail, you watch the clownshow on the diamond before the game; you take the field. Give the fans a show.

I could never see the game as a joke. This might’ve been my problem. I played too serious. I was in precisely because I gave so much of a damn. The game was never a light thing for me. Even as a kid, it bothered me that I couldn’t get the game to not matter. A song was just a song. A job, even painting or writing was light. I know it looked effortless on the mound. I never sweat, not even against the A’s. There’s no big hitter that can make me look a fool, even if he hits one out in three at bats. I cared to the full extent of the act of play in life. Outside of that, it just didn’t matter.

That’s what keeps you suiting up, day after day, even when you’re not winning. It got me to the ballpark when we won a hundred games with Lou and the Babe; it got me to the park when we played in the decrepit pits of Ebbets at the end of my career on hopeless squads. We showed because we wanted to give it all we had, because it mattered to show ourselves that we could do it. That we had it in us – to throw everything we had into life, and for at least one moment, one day after the next, to make it count. And when one game passed, another would come right up on it. And we’d need to decide again – would we give it all? Even if we lose? Even if we’re so far out of the race to the pennant that it doesn’t matter to anyone but you and the twenty-five fellows in the stands who live and die by the home team?

I think that’s why I chose the game. There’s nothing you can get out of it. And by the end it’s taken everything from you. Your arm, your youth, your time, focus, energy – all of it. And all you can do is hope that people remember you when it’s all said and done. That’s why a man like Buck Leonard says the greatest honor he ever received is the call to Cooperstown. It’s because the game decided to remember him. I think that’s what we all strive towards. The rest of it is just scaffolding. Part of the climb. They put Coveleski out there in 1920 after he lost his wife and Chapman died; he threw three complete game victories. That’s the highest art you can achieve as a pitcher. Same with Mathewson in the ‘05 series. Why? Because he went out there and damn near singlehandedly willed his team to victory. Turned the wheel of fate with his bare, calloused, bleeding hands on the highest stage we’ve got to make it happen. And it wasn’t scripted, at least not on the level we understand it. He was called to put every ounce of himself into a game we made up; conjured out of thin air; a game that feels more real than any empire or construction site of art, philosophy, or history we have available to import.

What do you make of that?

II. Journey of Stones

To and from, birth and death, seed to stone, we have the stage. We might as well make it a big one. That’s what Ruppert wanted to do with Yankee Stadium. Distinguish it from McGraw’s Polo Grounds. And so they did. Playing at Yankee Stadium was like playing at America’s first temple – like Kailasa or Michelangelo’s Sistine. We needed to make something big enough to hold the joke, the jest – the size, the cosmic nature of it. The god of play.

And so we did, with the white pillars, and the whole bit. And a man big enough to fit the bill. A myth made out of a near orphan, a reform boy, a troublemaker on the streets of Baltimore. And the immigrant son whose mother worked at Columbia as a housekeeper batting cleanup behind him. 3 and 4. Ruth and Gehrig. Rest of us around them felt like mere mortals, even when we had Combs and Shocker. There are the greats; then there are those who carve themselves into the game like an engraving upon ancient skin.

Understand clear the American myth. Fellows like Rube Foster and Paige, who came from the pits and the belly of the ugliest phrases of American history. Go on to build the theatre of its imaginative possibility in the ballgame itself. Is this recompense for anything? Can life give us any of that? A smile, or even a wink, as you stand before the grave – laboring to sustain a life you don’t understand, in a world built long before your time; pressed, pushed into forces far outside the scope of your making?

We exercise the will on the ballfield like children in the face of a cosmic force before our making. That towers over the game; making our myths and legends like DiMaggio and Mantle look like mere mortals attempting to climb the great scaffolding of time. What hubris, I suppose. And yet, we try. The effort exerted all into the field of the ballgame would be enough to build one thousand cities, as each generation arrives and leaves like ghosts. The force thrown into it gone to nothing but the theatre, the play.

What does this say about us? That we’ve chosen something not even real – to lay in, to hang out hats upon; to wear our hands at the millstone of?

It’s like anything. Like love, like the choices and commitments we willingly make in a universe that echoes like an empty hall; doesn’t even laugh at our castles made of sand. Who, or what, is the mind behind time that draws us into destiny? I’ve lived my life, as you will live yours and call it mine. Understand that? There’s a hilarity and a cruelty to it at the same time. Our shared allotment of private sanctity, from within which we tell our stories. How we rose to fame and glory; the next moment, you’re emptying your locker in the lost decade of the 1930s, hollowed out starter for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Might’ve even been best if Brooklyn had taken a breather til the decade turned, how bad those ballclubs were. Meanwhile, Giants and Yanks across the way retraced their steps from the turn of the 20s. Pennant after pennant after pennant.

And yet, all I could do is play. Now all I can do is write from beyond the grave. Press the body of shadow upon the dial of the sun. You wake, with bodies. I sleep and write in the place beyond flesh and bone. The dead, we record. Being the one body into which everything falls and sleep. Matter and form into stone. Configurational time. The longest ballgame. We wait there, or else your vision of aether, our breaths feeding the dead wind of trees and the vacuum of deep, black space. We are only here playing, upon this theatre of the real. And we’ve taken the play so damn serious we forget we’re in the ninth inning of a game we made up and built up with wood and iron. A game that’s probably at its truest at the hands of children playing stickball on a Harlem street, or with cardboard gloves on a Caribbean field made of dirt and dust.

I feel, in death, a sadness, a grey hue, a pallor – that sets over me as I drift. I write not into a common ledger, but into light as it disperses over the moss colored body of the stone. This is now my writing, a purer, more universal force. And from there I barely… I seem to glimpse our larger ledger of fate – which, in life, I was entangled. The man Waite Hoyt rose as a cosmic force into time, danced and sang, then departed. For what? What was it worth? Even in death, I don’t know.

And the anger rises within me. I feel used. Used by the force of life to become manifest, a figure, an actor upon the field of play. To dance where I was told to dance, like a trained monkey. Even being given the greatest victories a man can be given, an emptiness permeates the room of my unsettled spirit. Why is this?

Because I can’t win anymore, nor compete.

The game itself gave me an agonist. Like love and strife work in the universe – they require a dancing partner. Whether this be the woman or Jimmie Foxx, it requires the chance to be beaten; a chance to win or lose. I never met a lonelier man than a man who had the game beat, through and through. It’s one thing to step on the stage with the best men to ever set foot on a diamond; it’s another to beat them so soundly that it feels there’s no competition which could stand beside you in life. Maybe in death, or if they’d broken the game open for a guy like Smokey Joe Williams to throw a few past the Babe.

It gave me something to work for. A force to press against. That’s what death is in life, or the World Series. Once they draw the spade over your bones, you ain’t working against nothing. No heart beats against the loss of heat; no body labors against the gravity of the earth; the force of the star. Baseball is the war stripped down to the bone – every man wants to feel like he’s up against his equal. That he’s a match for life; if life called he could take it to the twenty-first inning and put all he’s got down on the table. Lay his cards and make the mark. Win out.

None of us boys wanted to go to war. Hell, we didn’t know any of those men. Speak their language, none of it. We tried to keep the game going even as the war came. Thankfully, I was old enough to get signed to the game, but too young to fight in the war effort. What are we pressing against? You want to survive? Live another day?

Survival meant nothing to me. Trudging around in a meat sack as bombs fall. I needed bread, I needed water – sure. But I needed the game just as much; sometimes even more. What’s a missed meal to a match that requires you to put all you’ve got into life? It could damn well be the last time. So you need the game to force you into action. That’s why we wanted to throw complete games. A pitcher wants the game to be his. He stands on his perch like a hawk, like an eagle. You need to know that you can strike every man out. Look into his eyes and see that he knows you’ve got his goat. And then you need to paint the corners each time, on command. You see, in your mind’s eye, exactly where you’re going to paint him. Hard drop curve, low inside corner. And you got to be able to throw it where you see it in your mind’s eye. That’s destiny fulfilled. See, you wouldn’t even have the intuition to throw it there if there wasn’t a greater voice at work. Whose intelligence is that? It’s the greater thing working through you.

A pitcher is always a clever fellow. I never met a good one who is anything otherwise that lasts long. A fella might have a stroke of luck and have a couple blessed seasons. But the guys who last twenty, even thirty years are the guys who can see themselves throw the ball. They can see the whole game play out from a seat of ghosts. A seat of the force acting through them. And they can sufficiently work within the lines of the instrument in the theatre. Move that ball across the plate as the situation and circumstances command, to induce the intended, desired effect. Hell, they even say a new man named Maddux can throw it and know exactly where the hitter’s going to hit it before he does. He’s got the game mapped out like Ruth in the ‘32 Series. The called shot against Charlie Root and Chicago. That’s what I mean. He’s a man who’s so inside the game that he understands the precise dynamics.

In truth, we’re scientists. Scientists of the real forces in action. What’s the point of me putting them into symbols for you? We understand forces induced and feel them through our bodies as time and space shorten to the bat on the shoulders; staring down the catcher with two outs and the bases loaded in the ninth. And you’re throwing to Speaker or Cobb, old men as they are, but crafty enough to still put one over on you in the worst way; in the most important moment. That’s the game. I’ve got to be able to see how I can bend the ball; put him away with a hesitation – or otherwise induce an uppercut on a high ball to get him to pop out. Nothing hard on a line or through the hole. And certainly nothing low enough to make that uppercut connect on something substantial.

That’s the physics of nature intertwined with the whole of man’s passion; the whole of man’s fate. I can give him the best ball I’ve got in my arsenal, the best cut fastball I’ve ever thrown; he can still just barely read it out of my hands as it drops out of my fingers and deposit it in the short porch in right by fifteen feet. Any other stadium it’s off the wall, or even caught if Ruth’s playing deep enough.

That’s our game. We make fate visible. By throwing fast enough; hitting hard enough for the seams to show.

In such short moments as these – matters where the home run is elucidated by a combination of ballpark dynamics, wind patterns, the ball out of my hand; the batter’s millisecond read and the cut and reaction speed of his swing – this is where you understand how the nature of time works. All of these forces: the men who built the short porch; the height of the fence, the wind blowing the flag barely a couple miles per hour out to right center; the slightly elongated form of my delivery; the batter’s eye, and practiced whip of his bat – this is what creates; progenitates, the event which is then recorded into history in the form of the box score and the announcer’s cry. This becomes the memory of hosts of men and women of all ages, in attendance, over the radio; over the fancy new televisions.

This is the event which we know as the Civil War, the death of Ferdinand, the birth of Genghis Khan, or the origins of mankind. A stellar combination of forces at work in the world. Can we show how fast and how multiple they are at work? This is great athleticism in movement. It is the theatre of time.

Can I even think of any of this as real anymore? Being past it, looking back upon it all. Joke or not, it came and went. With all of the noise, all of the circus. Watching New York City being built before my eyes. On one of the greatest teams of all time and the least. Getting to know the reality of the Babe – a kid too big for his britches; too good for the game. The quiet discipline of Gehrig. I finally hung up a bit of the nightlife and implemented some. At the right place at the right time. And when I couldn’t play anymore, I called games until I couldn’t call anymore. The Hall, calling me back, late. Maybe late, still… but right on time.

Who’s to say what that time is meant to be? I suppose that’s the call meant and made for something higher. The director of the carnival, so to speak. My morality and upstanding respectability drilled into me from childhood were brought to face the debauchery and corruption of life in the ballgame; just as men like Ruth were brought to face the bare fact of mortality and existential limitations. That there is, in fact, such a thing as too much. And each generation that rises and rose into the game fell in equal, ordained order, to make way for the next to gain a foothold; write a line in the scribe-play of the epic of baseball history.

Children in the sugar mills in Cuba. Street kids. Sharecroppers. Sons of miners. That’s the game. Growing up in Pittsburgh with smog so thick you can’t see. Polished college boys like Mathewson from small Pennsylvania towns. We had a couple scribes of the game. Some books been written about what it’s like to be in it as a man capable of – one way or the other – seeing a potential way out of it. For many guys, the game was all there was. Either that or work in the fields or in the ground. Or in the machine time.

Clawing, tooth and nail, for an alternative. But time passes just the same. Man like Hack Wilson could live drinking as a printer’s devil in the foothills of Pennsylvania, or live drinking as the star slugger for Hornsby’s Cubs. He’s drinking just the same. I suppose that’s tinged with a degree of destiny. But a man like Hack had the choice to push himself. Or was he called to push? Born to itinerant drunks. Seems like he barely had a chance. Working before he could even think about getting a real education. If there was much to think about. Think of all the men and women like that – just thrown into the machine. Bare bones. Not a say in it. If there is, it’s a small one. And that’s the world. Everyone, walking around, peering out of eye sockets and eye holes, trying to get a grip on the reality of the being thrown like a die into this world. A crapshoot. And yet all of it feels necessary in a way that I can’t quite articulate. Like the space between being thrown and being called.

So why would a man like me be called into being a ballplaying vaudeville-singing mortician?

I suppose every man has his place in the jungle. An ecosystem that relies on deep mutual interdependence. The butcher and the law-man; the anteater and the mole. We’ve all got worlds, all lived with the equal importance of a private fate which we alone have intimations of – our inner worlds of profound, sacral significance, our dreams, our whispers known and spoken only to ourselves. Why is one man’s fate greater simply because he’s born an Alexander? A streetsweeper? A newspaper salesman? Who’s to say our mark on time, a seed that ripens even in our passage. A man writes from the dead. Gionfriddo robs DiMaggio in the 1947 World Series. The Dodgers still lose. What happens fifteen thousand miles from there, or a hundred years from now? When does Gionfriddo’s dead clock ring out once more? Does he speak from beyond the grave, in a moment of history recovered?

We can’t know what the brick of today lays. It seems to have significance in the moment, or insignificance therein. Hack Wilson’s foul ball thrown by Carmen Hill at Wrigley in May 1928. Inscribed by a fan. 3-0 victory. End of the month. Hack isn’t going on to his RBI record just yet. Bring that ball into relationship with an archival history of the game and all of a sudden it glows. Hank and Carmen are both gone. And yet it speaks to both sides of the present – past and future. Hack, the one time inheritor to Ruth’s record; Hack, the splinter of time and the sparks he threw off between birth and death. A man that could’ve died forgotten in the mountains of Pennsylvania. Drunk himself to death. Or otherwise, worked himself to bone.

And this was the men in the black leagues. Barnstorming teams lost to history. How many photos – you stare at the men with names history can’t recover. Faces lost in mines, on fields, to wars. And they sit there, crackling in the silver glow of the light hitting the photographic paper. Someone who was real, someone who existed – someone in the ground with you and me and now everyone we know. Just with a snap of the fingers. But they held the same form of the baseball. The ideal form we pass between us. No ball is the same – hide and cork and twine wrapt around it. And yet it is the same passage. The same diamond and the ghosts that run the basepaths, rising and falling into the dial of life and weaving paths unexpected and strange.

That was Waite Hoyt, men among men – mortician vaudevillian ballplayer with an announcer’s wit. Born and died, grave among graves. Whose story is picked up and held to the light by those after him; whose story was anticipated, ground laid by those before him.

That’s the trick, every kernel of kettle corn I ever ate and gave up came from a star whose face I couldn’t even see; whose name I couldn’t even read. From there, everything I did felt like a series of ordained events of a man confused by the world that was set before him; moved through it with the strangeness of some being or force on the verge of awakening.

That’s what it was… a slumber. Life passed like a dream. And then I wake up and I’m dead, neither here nor there, neither body nor disembodied. Like a waiting room. Between things. The wind and the shadow and the space between walls. No firmnesses. And yet the great voice, like a song. Whispering through the cracks – a photo of me, a baseball card, a legend. I heard they even made a book out of the scraps of the things I said. Interviews, writings I left.

I suppose it’s amusing, faintly so. Not that I could see death in life. I lived supposing I was still alive; when I stepped over into death it was like stepping into a room I had no context for. Looking over to the other side is the necessary context to see and speak the truth. Without death I would have kept being Waite Hoyt the story. Now I’m Waite Hoyt the mask. Pity not the forgetful living. That’s what I saw but never quite understood. That’s the confusion. It’s the jest of the masks, dancing about. Forgetting what alive is in the face of death; not knowing that alive springs from death; the multitude. So we make choices as individuals in a field we are never truly a part of. That’s the idea of stage directions, I think. You’re an actor, moving about the stage, saying your lines when your time comes. And then they wrap the play. And everyone else around you is forgetting too. Suppose that’s the point, suppose it’s supposed to be a comedy, a joke. But it sometimes reads like a tragedy when you’re in it. In it so deep and serious that it feels like forgetting. That is forgetting.

So I was sad. I trudged from team to team, task to task. I sucked deep from the bone the marrow of what it was to be Waite. I won the ballgames. Hall of Fame, World Series. The baritone you remember. Can still hear it on wax and radio. Called the games too. But what was the vague gloom? Call it existence in awareness of nonexistence. However faint. However busy the day was, or the night’s rambling, to cover up the song, the permutational drumbeat which ached behind the line of my life which I played out dutifully, as I aged and my faculties wore into finitude. Everyone’s got a share of it. Some more than most. It’s the thing that wakes you up in a fright. Nights where I’d wake up and be astonished I was still living, whatever that meant. Sign the autograph accordingly. “Suppose I’m still alive”. Something like that.

That’s what it takes to be a scribe of the game. You write it because you see the thin line between ‘it’ and ‘not it’. And, accordingly, you start to understand what ‘it’ is, which gives you the ability to write it. I always saw baseball as something outside of life. You put on the uniform and you’re “Schoolboy” or “The Sultan of Swat”, not just George Herman, the delinquent street-rat, or Waite, the young man who ran off to join the circus. Could’ve been a writer for the Times. Something like that.

We all had one thing in common. All the decisions we made and didn’t make took us to baseball. Hell if any of us knew why we were there. We did know we had to beat Pittsburgh that night if we wanted to sweep. It’s that simple. Keep it step by step, day by day. If you eat, you live. Wilderness type of thing. But we drew that into the theatre. All an animal can see is what’s in front of him. You leave the big questions at the door. Now that I’m dead, the big question’s all I got.

III. Pall-bearings

Suppose the rings don’t mean much of anything now. What allowed them to in life? A sense of accomplishment, perhaps. The loving theatre of the adoration of others. The ballfield had real stakes. Especially at Yankee Stadium, the pennant push. A sense that the whole nation’s eyes was on Waite Hoyt and the fastball. That will keep a guy moving without thought for some time. The girls, the mutual sense we all had that we were doing was something special, important. Damn sure better than running for parliament or a workaday gig at the postal service. Needed a sense of something meaningful. You put the uniform on, get in that stadium. Kids worship you. Grown men weep when you win the title. Ticker tape parades like they did for the men after D-Day. Why’s the circus, you ask? Meaning. The same way the circus works for love, purpose. Whatever it was. They put you on the field to move, so you move. You gotta eat, so you eat. You gotta sleep, so you sleep. Body calls you to make love, you find your romance. And so on and so forth. Not a single one thinks they’re doing anything except for they chose to do it. And the whole time the movie screen of culture flickers. Gone With The Wind. The theatre of love. Babe Ruth, Sultan of Swat, hitting that sixtieth home run. The march to the pennant. And meanwhile he was a lost boy from a poorhouse in Baltimore. Never stopped being that lost boy from a poorhouse in Baltimore. You can see it worn clean on his face, even as he aged; gained weight from all that food and drink. He tried to consume the entire city of New York. And in doing so became an image, an icon. Who knew the real Babe? I did. He was a kind fellow. But a slave to his vices. He couldn’t stop. Or the past would catch up to him.

Suppose we were all running so fast. Making choices and continuing to make them. Homeless on this earth. You move because you gotta move. It’s that simple. And then you move and adapt. To conditions that emerge in time. It’s the same as in the ballgame. You can’t throw the same way with two outs down by two than you can up by thirteen in the ninth. There’s urgency. Pressure. The reality sets in of your condition, your circumstances. You move with what you can and what you have when you’re old, while you’re young. Put the bread to the plate of soup and sop it dry if you know enough about how fast is the coming and going. And then you’re done. Spikes hung up, clean out of the game.

It matters when you say it matters and for how long besides. And then, once you can’t convince yourself anymore, it just don’t. You see what’s behind the game and you stop playing. Either that, or the game drops you before you see it. It’s all the same. You either know the tiger well enough to know what’s behind the tiger’s eyes, the face of what the thing itself is doing, or you don’t. It’s still a tiger and it’ll damn well eat you. That’s the nature of time. It’s the same dance being done. One guy’s just got a little more awareness as to the nature of the dance, is all. All I could do is watch the Babe or those boys in the minors drink and smoke and gamble themselves into chaos and trouble. Alls you can do is watch the game take who it takes, take what it takes. You might throw a word in to a man who trusts you and understands, but each man is behind the private wall of his eyes. He gazes out onto the world and sees what he sees. But the ump better damn well call a strike when I paint the outside black. Sometimes you throw a pitch and the whole world knows it’s a whiff before it even leaves your fingertips. That’s what’s called being a good pitcher. You’re so damn good that nobody can mistake it for anything other than a ball exactly where you meant to put the thing. You’re staring down the devil, life, death, every loud drunk in the stands who’s going to be up on a crane in front of the Empire State the next day or else dealing stocks in some Wall Street door – and you’ve hung the batter out to dry on a twelve to six drop on the lower outside corner of the plate. All the noise, all the joke, all the coming and going. They’re in the seats, and you’re on the mound, barely a bead of sweat hanging off your chin; throwing the perfect pitch.

That’s why a man needs mastery – that is, a man who can’t settle until the damn thing is done right. It’s why a writer writes, or a painter paints. A pitcher pitches because he knows there’s a perfect pitch. Somewhere out there, floating past Saturn and Mars; he reaches out in his mind’s eye and grasps it and kicks it back and buzzes it past the hitter’s ear. He can call the ideal form into being. Men go mad for this, or as much.

They ask – why pitching? Not writing or painting? Because it’s living artistry. Artistry that takes everything from the body. Your full immersion – this is what is required to produce the art of the perfect pitch. All of your focus, all of your stride, knees and knuckles scraping the dirt of the mound. The full leverage of the body, mind, and soul toward the intended outcome. A full sending of the body into impelled motion. The full flight of the form.

That’s how I know I gave all I had to give. And damn if I didn’t know what was going to come of it. But I know what I gave up. It was that point – setting out for the 1927 season and my conversation with Miller – that’s what changed it. He told me what he saw in me and what was possible; he knew that I wasn’t totally committed to the game. I was still acting like a kid. Giving up and into the excess. Not sleeping right, not eating right. Out too late with Babe and the boys. And Miller told it to me straight. I’d be just the man I was before; inevitably decline. Never reach the height of what I was capable of. I rededicated myself. Perhaps just out of the sheer truth of the thing. I’d live this one life as Waite Hoyt; I owed it to myself to see what I was capable of if I gave my all to the game; to my craft. So I did. Everything in my life was tuned to mastering the art of pitching. And I turned in twenty two wins and a 2.63 ERA. 143 ERA+, which means I was 43% better than the league average pitcher when it was all said and done. For your reference, Satchel’s career ERA+ was 160. That means something.

What it means, to hell if I know. The stats show what I did inside of me. I wanted to put the best of me out there onto the mound. And I did it in the year we won 110. My effort folded in with the other guys. Everyone played their best ball that year. It felt like we made a decision as a group to be the best we could be. And we all felt it. I think that’s what meaning is, or what meaning was, in life, to me. Standing among your companions, your peers, your teammates; knowing that you left every single last bit of yourself out on that field. And being able to measure yourself in accordance to your limit. To your utmost. And knowing that once you did that, that lasts forever. That’s something you carry with yourself for an eternity.

I think that’s what they mean by the soul. Speaking from the dead, that is. It’s the mark you leave in being alive, in existing, for however long. And giving everything you have to that existence, in and through whatever passion that possesses you. The place you leave it all out on the field. For however long you have left. In 1927, I was twenty-seven years old. A man only has so many years in his life. Any given life. And a ballplayer has less. You’ve got about a window – for a man like me or Bob Feller – we had a bit longer. Say sixteen or seventeen if you’re lucky, all the way to maybe forty-five or forty-six, unless you’re a true world class ace like Warren Spahn or Satchel. You’ve got, at your absolute best, maybe a good thirty years to wise up and leave it all on the table as a ballplayer. If a man’s a philosopher or a poet, an artist, perhaps a bit longer. That’s your measure. From the infinity of a child to becoming someone. Finding your craft, what makes you move, and sculpting it until you’re Michelangelo at the fresco on the ceiling of the church. Because you have to be. Who else are we, what else would we be, if we didn’t build ourselves up enough to lay it all on the line?

That’s always what I admired about Lou. He gave everything to the game. All his discipline; all his focus. And he played until he couldn’t play no more. Which was young, far too young. Lou still had more to give to the game. But he had to stop there. And he gave the bag over to Dahlgren; gave his speech. About the opportunity it was to play for the Yanks. And it was an honor to play beside a man like that. Who went out there every day; every day you knew he was going to give you every bit of what he’s got as a man, as a ballplayer. That’s a guy you want on your team. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, you won’t find that guy – the guy who’s got every bit of himself all in to what he’s doing. What he came here for. That was Lou Gehrig.

As I got older, I tried to be like that. Lucky as I was, my ma and pa raised me with their sense of respectability. It kept me out of the outlaw stuff; on the straight and narrow. From there, it was a beeline to Miller’s discipline; what it took for the Yanks to become as good as we did in the late twenties. So much of it had to do with Lou coming into his own; me into the heights of my powers. However great or ingrate they were. And despite what they say about the Babe and his carousing and perceived effortlessness, he cared. Maybe moreso than all of us. Especially for what the game did for the kids. Because he knew what it did for him – before he had a mind enough to know much of anything. What Brother Matthias did for him when it felt like there was no road left for him as a young boy.

If I give myself my decision, however fated, to join the game – before art, writing, anything. If I give myself that, and the mortuary work, the singing. Who am I? What’s more, who was I? And what does it make me now? Dead, looking back at it all. There’s nothing now but reflection. Nothing left to do. No game left to prepare for, no family morals to uphold. What dignity I had set me on my way; maybe kept me out of a bit of trouble. Maybe precisely the trouble I needed to stay out of to put the rest through in a meaningful way. It’s like the book they made about me. Pulled together the scraps of everything I ever said, wrote, all of it. And in there, somehow, some way, was that book. I had already told my life story. In a thousand different shattered glass pieces.

I think I saw myself as a movement. A force moving through time. A necessary one, finding its gravity by way of experimentation. There are certain times where life almost breaks you. A death, a loss, a trial, a failure. There’s guys who stand out there on the mound and get hammered. Two-thirds innings. Six runs. And come back in that same game and throw one hundred and fifty odd pitches. A man might not give up another run and close the game out complete. That man might even lose that game, six runs to nothing.

They might pull him in the first; he might stew on the bench, having thrown maybe thirty or so pitches for the whole outing. There’s no worse show for a man who is supposed to start a ballgame and carry his team through. And he might come back in five days and hurl a ten inning shutout. How do we weigh or measure a man? We measure by how he moves through time; how he meets adversity. We’re scarce to say how he comes into it. What determines the way or manner in which he is born. The man is given his cards. And on any given day he just may not have it, or he may have it and be bested. But can you come back from that note and deliver a masterpiece in the next inning? A pitcher’s like a jazz-man. He may blow a bad note and then has to improvise a note that turns a bad note good. I believe it was Monk that said that. There’s no bad notes in jazz. It’s about resolving time in the face of the worst of us. Creating, in the next moment, the resolution of the best. A jazz-man might play for hours; those off-notes turn into diamonds. Gems. A pitcher throws a hanging curveball; turns it into a stretch of twenty sterling starts on the way to a career year. You stare in the face of fear; failure. The deathly maw of defeat; wrench from the jaws of death a measure of immortality. And it’s how you show up. How much of yourself you cultivate; conjure. And, ultimately, how much of yourself you give back to the game. Because you give it all away at the end. How much can you bring about within yourself, in order to let go. In order for it to be released.

Baseball’s mighty like a sacrifice, if you give it due thought. Before and after Waite Hoyt is Mathewson and Carlton; alongside him is Shocker – and his career cut short. The dugout fills and empties with dead men. Bugs Raymond, with all of his immense raw talent – never fully found. Died young in a street-spat. A drinker. Legends lost to time; reclaimed by the recovery of a scrapbook or an old photograph, locked away in some attic or storage unit. Buried beneath a foundation. These things are archaeological. The bones of an endlessly processing and overturning cosmic force. They become the sedimentary fossils of the generation which takes the flesh and blood they had to give and fills the stands and dugout seats. The bats and gloves remain; the beams and boughs of the stadiums remain – even as across multiple generations they are built and torn down, renovated and replaced.

Pitcher after pitcher. Replicating, uncannily, different strategies of windup and delivery. Pitch shapes in the hand. The ball passes on and forward. Scarcely, we look behind. But there are the leagues of the dead, who took the same diamond. Lived the same span of life and gave themselves up to baseball. Same as you do now. Seeing that the game is the highest remark of play in the stars. The field is ever so briefly empty before it fills again. Coming back differently to perform the same act. Against the same stakes. Persistence in time. Outlasting the inning with the weight and energy and form of the body. Heavy against the ground. Kicking up dust. Knocking the wood bat with metal cleats. Drawing a line in the box. Taking heat around the eyes and ears. The game’s a risk. But it’s a risk to live.

IV. Starry Skies

Suppose now you’ll ask what it’s like to be dead. It isn’t anything. No motivations, no drives. No movement to be had. It’s the act and the art of sitting still. In life, you have dreams, desires. Motivations. Things that draw you close to life and force you to make moves. Like a bunch of chess pieces on a board. Each time you move, you move towards something and give something else up. You do that until you can’t do it no more. That’s what death is. There’s nowhere left to move. Suppose maybe that’s freeing. Suppose maybe it’s terrifying. Who’s to say?

Now that I’m here, it’s a natural time to write a book. I know you wanted me to write it about the ballgame in my time in it. But that’s just not the course of things. We did speak about ball. But when you add up every start, every scrap, every day as a kid trying not to get farmed out with the Giants – I wanted to do something important. Ball was just a way to do it. I wanted to leave a mark. The biggest mark a man could leave. To impress all of myself upon life. So when we talk about baseball, what we’re really talking about are the ways availed to any man at any given moment in time in history to do something great. To do something meaningful.

And I have to ask you about those ways. What is available to us? Fame, fortune? Glory in war? The great book? Something like Coveleski on the mound in the 1920 World Series, or what I tried to do in 1927? When a pitcher steps on the mound, the whole game runs through him. And if he puts everything out there, if he’s a man of muster, he can change the course of history. Even if it’s just the history of the ballgame. But if you knew America in the early 1900s, the history of the ballgame was also the history of the nation.

What can a man do? We’re temporal. It’s a short time, the act of living. The act of being alive. And much of what we look at is milking the cows. Walking in the woods. Such time is captured by nature. Where can a man test the full of himself against the immovable object of time? Knowing that in each time, way, and measure he will inevitably fall short? Where can man press himself up against the full of his fate and only relent and admit defeat when the time has come for him to step away for good?

To me, that’s the measure of a life well lived. And I saw it in art and on the diamond. I saw it in the endless perseverance and craft of the writer, just as I saw it in the pitcher. Pitching was the choice to live a certain life. Writers live endless lives. And I suppose that’s why after I stepped off the diamond, writing from the dead was the next best step. A natural move in terrain. To live is already a challenge. You have to fight and scavenge for a meal among a thousand obstacles. But for some men, this is not enough. We need to test the mettle of the soul. And I suppose this is the case for all life. We seek out something that can meet us where we are. At the highest level of the game of baseball, you meet your fellows. Men who staked the entirety of the existential gamut of their lives in and upon the craft of the game. So when you face them, you’re facing equidistant force. A force that made the same choice as you; rose up the ranks of that choosing; both by mettle and by discipline, now stands sixty feet, six inches from your face.

That’s the battle between pitcher and hitter. The battle that each craves. The best hitter seeks out the best pitcher to be truly tested. Nothing else will do. You saw the Babe face Walter Johnson at the end of his life; in the early forties at that military benefit exhibition. That’s precisely what that was. The two best of their age, facing each other down for one last time, in front of seventy thousand fans. Every single soul in that stadium knew the deal. It’s the last of what each man has left.

If you exhaust that, you’ve given everything you could. And a life well lived is the relentless pursuit of that. The outlet for the full lengths of mens’ souls. Once you see that, then you can understand Alexander, or Satchel Paige. Or the young man Roberto Bolano. These are pursuits of the articulation of the soul, the true self. And each man pursues that with a fervor that looks like madness, or delusion. In the midst of everything normal, you have the anomalous. The abnormal. The exceptional.

Suppose it’s something inhuman. Pitching to Hornsby was the hell of it. Everything he did, he did it for baseball. Lack of books. Eating ice cream. The man’s entire life was the creation of circumstances to prepare him for the art of perfection of hitting. Pitching is one thing. Hitting the best man’s stuff? Even harder. And Rogers did everything possible to maximize his craft. The man barely lived a human life. He lived a hitter’s life. And he left the marks behind to show what is possible when a man of means does such a thing. He was already predisposed to it. Already capable. And then, giving all he had to expressing this latent capacity; revealing it, the man became what he became. Perhaps the greatest pure hitter of all time.

Is that a sacrifice? What does it mean to leave home? Did he give up the warm love of a woman? Satisfaction? I’m not sure what any of it means. What do we leave behind in pursuit of greatness? Isn’t it that we only move towards ourselves?

Nothing waits for us in this world. Time moves regardless of the decisions we make. If we have possibilities within us, we either leave them there or move towards them with the passion of a devotee. How many stay on the surface of life and move toward pleasure as a respite; as a solace, for not drawing forth everything from within them? We are the measure of our powers. We are the extent of how far we take our lives. That radius is the radius of our vision of self. Our seeing. And it permeates every aspect of our worlds. I conceived of this as my ethical responsibility to carry out and through. And you can only hope you’re seen and understood for what you’ve done by others who seek to do the same.

Only the dead do the work of philosophy. It’s because we’ve already lived that we can give it due consideration. You ever see those old paintings of philosophers staring at skulls while they write? That’s the reflection of mortality. And I suppose in Cincinnati in those late years I began to give it due thought. The full extension of my capabilities. Philosophy as an older man became easier. I suppose either way, that’s what my life would’ve turned into. A natural turn as a writer; a natural turn from ballplayer to announcer. Working the mic like Ole’ Diz; throwing in my reflections on existence, creation, and aging. The game has lots of space for it. Between the crowd milling about, beer sales, popcorn, Cracker Jack; the pitcher deliberating, tossing his rosin; the batter knocking his cleats. Game moves slow enough to think.

Sometimes out there on the mound, you get your thoughts. Thoughts about your wife, being a kid, the early days. The guy stepping up to the plate, he might be an old teammate. Even a childhood friend. You think about what he hit off you last time. A saucer changeup he banged out in the left field gap. Then you think about the dinner you had in Philadelphia the night before he beat you bad. Then you throw a curveball inside. Ball one. Rinse and repeat. Being out there on the bump is enough to get you replaying your whole life back in your head. It’s called the loneliest place in the world for a reason. You hold the thing that makes the whole game move; you hold it out there alone. And your stuff is either ripe to put your team in position for a victory, or you better damn well hope they can get the bats going.

Being a pitcher gave me time to get my thoughts in order. Notary, banker, busboy, construction – all far too busy. You need the solitude and isolation in order to think. You sit on the bench every day except one. Then on that one day no one bothers you much; you throw your pitches and go on your way. If you’re pitching especially well, no one even speaks to you. That’s a ripe time for thought. You’re in the world, with a fifty thousand people screaming at you. But you’re in your own head the whole way through. I never thought too much about what I was going to throw a guy. I’d give him my best stuff. But I thought about writing a book, or the philosophy of pitching. It’s easier to write than paint when you’re on the road. And thinking about the ballgame in an abstract sense takes the pressure off having to get Jimmie Foxx to pop up when you’ve only got a two run lead.

You get left alone long enough, and you get to thinking. Enough solitude; you’ve got half a mind for it, you start reflecting on things. Who you are, how you got here, what it means to be alive, to exist. With enough silence and solitude, every man becomes a Pascal or a Spinoza. Suppose we really need that to become alive in the first place. How many people milling about from distraction to distraction, lost in the spinning and the buzzing, the hive and the noise of it all? Life gave me enough space to really start to give things serious thought. And suppose the first book I write after life is about philosophy. Really giving it all some thought. I don’t even know if philosophy is the word for it. It was, and is, just really giving my conditions enough space to breathe and speak for themselves. To be examined. And if life gives you enough of that, it’s something of a gift. It’s something – speaking from perspective – of what it’s like to be dead. With enough distance; enough space, you’re able to start understanding where you’re coming from and why you do what you do. All the rest of it.

It gave me time to realize that that decision at fifteen to sign with McGraw wasn’t much of a decision at all. It was a path I took in relation to other paths which didn’t really mean all that much to me at the time. I was already a ballplayer. Hell if I was a journalist as a teenager. Hell if I knew what it meant to spend the rest of my life painting. But McGraw and the New York Giants gave me a path to something real. A salary. A big one. The youngest kid ever signed to the major leagues. And on top of that, it put me on the field with a real challenge. Something I’d have to grapple with. And later in life, I’d grapple with the big ideas. Mortality. Existence. Sadness. Persistence. That is – after they took me off the field because my arm wouldn’t work anymore.

I probably would’ve kept pitching forever, like old Satchel Paige said. You go as long as you can, and then you think about it. Look back on it. Reflect. Did I do all I could? What could I have done better? You sit and reflect like that after any given start. It’s like a microcosm of birth and death. Now my soul’s in review, you could call it. I’ve got plenty of time after death. And some would say, infinite space. My life to me meant something. To you, it’s history. To my loved ones, it was an essential relation. To the world, there’s a story. The man, Waite “Schoolboy” Hoyt. The soundbites left, logged, crackling on the radio. The silver gelatin photographs from ACME and the NEA. The ball cards from Goudey and Kashin. All fragments of me, frozen in time. And the book they drew together of the body of my life, reassembled like an Osirian catalogue of the flesh and bones. That’s what I left to the earth. And then there’s the stats and the gold plaque they have up in Cooperstown, New York. You can still see that too; later on, perhaps what’s left of the ruins of it.

Is this how it was for the gladiators or Olympians of old Greece and Rome? How much measure of eternity do we ever carve out? Can we? Is such a thing possible? I like to think so. Most people think of eternity like it’s something you leave upon the earth. And I suppose it is. It’s memory. But it’s also the things you do when it’s just between you and the bare, raw face of your existence. Thousands of people could be watching, or you could just be alone in an empty room. Either way, you’re face to face with yourself. Skin to skin with your abyss. And what you say and do there matters in a way that history can’t record. That memory can’t capture. It’s something indelible. Imminent. Carved into the face of time. The very air of it. The heart of being.

What I saw in vaudeville and mortuary work were the hundreds and thousands of the lost. Names you wouldn’t remember. No record. Some local tombstone scattered among shopping malls and grocery stores. On hills overlooking rivers. Shrouded by shrubbery and overgrown gravel pathways. Tombstones by trains. Unmarked graves in woods and wildernesses. Men who arrived drunk and departed drunk, playing clowns on circus caravans leaving nothing behind as they left the earth but some echoing laughter and a suit of worn out clothes. Men who rode trains for a living, geeks, and local pastors with dedicated congregations of ten or twelve preaching the old gospels.

League after league of the dead, we laid them in the earth or we laid them in the fire. The marks of disposition. And there would be a service. Of those who loved them, family, close friends. The tear stained faces. The muttering. The black. They would have to forget, or live with the fading memory. Oscillating between two poles. And the geeks themselves were the lost dead men, still living, but long dead. Somebody’s child, tossed out of the city and civilization, living on the outskirts, playing at a low beast to feed an insatiable alcohol habit. Some men even reminded me of Babe.

Demon chased, living dead men. Plenty in New York City as well, dressed in suits, at the highest rungs; pulling the highest levers of political and social power. These men would come to the games; sit in the best boxes. Drink til they were red in the face; break out in epithets when Babe or Lazzeri struck out. We would lay them all into the fire. I might’ve become numb to it – I’m not sure. But when you lay that many people to rest in the most direct, physical sense of the word, you start to get a sense for how the procession works. Someone would take my title, too, eventually – be my personal mortician. After I’d sung my song late into the night, with the geeks clapping and the Siamese gals stopped collecting tips in the magician’s hat; after I’d thrown my last strike past Babe Herman or Hack.

So a philosopher might take the carnival at its word; laugh and joke with it. But he still reckons with the hard fact of time. Say the carnival gets its laughs, but at the end of the day, the same fate awaits us all. A man who thinks too much gets a head start on the whole affair. A man who doesn’t meets him at the finish line. Suppose he hasn’t found the answers to all his questions yet. Suppose none of us ever really do. I had fun with the gags, really. Especially vaudeville singing. Talk about the art of performance. It balanced well with the dark liquor of the death gig. But baseball was where I really laid it all on the line.

That’s the mythic nature of the game itself. Not many men really ever get that chance. You have to get wise to the real stakes of your life then get to work putting yourself in position to be in the place to give it. And by give it, I mean your all. Everything you’ve got isn’t just something you’re born with. It’s something you’re born with the possibility of giving. Then you’ve gotta draw it out of you. Step by step, game after game, pitch after pitch, until it’s ripe and ready to be expressed out into the world. That kind of work is a life’s work. And it takes a wise man to start on down it. For a ballplayer, you better get wise fast. Because the body won’t hold that long.

For me, being a wise man meant giving up the ghost of my vices. None of us men on the Yanks were terrible, per se, but it was the nature of being a star ballplayer in New York City at the height of your powers, when baseball was at the height of its draw and fervor. There was endless nightlife and possibility. Being a ballplayer in New York anytime from 1920 to 1960, especially for the Yanks, was a whole other class of experience. You’ve got almost half a century of baseball madness hitting the streets. Every day. A whole nation in the thrall of the rise of the modern game. You have to be a disciplined person. To harness your true desire to become the best ballplayer you can be, out in front of all the other desires. All the other shiny objects. And not every man has the constitution to do that. Unless you’re cut from Ruth’s cloth, your performance suffers. I inevitably wondered what Ruth’s life and career would have been like with the kind of monastic discipline Gehrig or Hornsby were capable of. Or a man like Turkey Stearnes. Worked in a factory half his life. A factory owned by the owner of the Detroit Tigers. One of the best hitters of his time. Playing in the shadows of the major leagues.

But Ruth had scars. Suppose we all do. But the time ticks down for all of us. How do you, or I – how do we put ourselves in the best possible position to give everything we have when the moment’s ripe? We polish our discipline, each and every day, in preparation for it; when it inevitably will all spill out. You need the stage, the time, the call. For a writer that might be the perfect inspiration and constellation of ideas for a book. You have to be able to write it. For a pitcher; for me, it was the 1927 season; the 1927 World Series. When everything is moving in unison; the time is ripe, you have to be in position to lay your maximum offering. And that’s what each man did. That’s how you end up with 110 wins and sweep the series.

I still have a photo of Babe crossing home plate from that series. Game Four, if I’m correct – where he hit the tie breaking home run. He still looks young; lean. Just a year or two before his weight ballooned. Six years later, he was on his way out of the game. It happened that fast.

But no one can say Babe didn’t give everything he had while he could still give it. He gave it, right up until that last season with the Boston Braves; even further on down into hitting exhibition home runs as a coach for the Dodgers; that final swing-off with Walter Johnson in the years before his passing away. Ruth never lost the luster of stepping up to the plate and giving his utmost wallop. Those were the times I admired him most. Not when he was in playing shape; young, dominating the world on the mound and at the plate. It was when he had nothing left to give, but still managed to muscle a ball over the wall versus an aging Johnson, or in a show of might before a Dodgers game at the end of the 30s.

You could see it too, at the end of my career. It ain’t pretty, but it’s honest. You know you’re out of the game; your fastball don’t move like it once did; you’re slower off the mound; slower to recover. Men in the game don’t usually find humility – it finds them. It finds you when you’re no longer all star caliber. You’re icing your arm and praying you make your next start. Praying that you come off the mound having given your team a chance. It was a far cry from my glory days with the Yanks in the 20s. You’re young; sure you can dominate any room you step into. And you do, with the kind of nonchalant ease which defines a competitor at the top of his game. A man who hasn’t even had to learn discipline in order to be at the top. But you don’t remain there. Younger guys come up. You age. You can’t give as much life to your best stuff. You have to start relying on treachery and fooling the batter. You’re not blowing it by ‘em anymore. You’ve got to get smarter, do more with less, and hope you don’t get knocked out the box by fate, or a Mickey Cochrane line drive.

V. Summons

You start, when you think back, to when you were born. My ma and pa were good people, educated; raised me to have true opportunities as to where I took my life. That’s all presuming there were options. But again, that must mean I was meant to be there. You’re set out in life by those before you. My family was around all the way back in colonial times. Born in Brooklyn. Hung up my cleats there too. Was barely a little kid when they built Ebbets. It was a glory. By the time I was through it was ragged. Beat down. I played on the streets. Got bad grades. Smart as a whip. Shadowed Matty in the last days of his greatness with McGraw and the Giants. Big expectations for a kid. Took me awhile to get to the big time and stick. Bumps in the road. Blood poisoning. Not as easy to get adjusted to big time competition.

Frazee sold me off with Ruth and half the Red Sox once I’d started to get ripe. And when Ruth started to stick with hitting is when I started to take off. It’s pretty simple. Life and death and baseball have discernible events. Doesn’t mean it all goes linear – there’s setbacks, confusions, detours. But you can generally trace it all with a stick. That’s the matter with ‘why’. You want to try to map it against everything before and after – everything that got you to now. But it’s easy to forget the little things that were really the big things. The girl that didn’t pan out after a few dates. The fly ball that dropped. The diner that closed. They change things in a subtle way. You might remember a sting or a bruise or a flight for awhile, then it drops off. Only when you really start to piece it all back together do those little things start to look a little bigger. Once you see what they did in the grand scheme of things. Some of ‘em switch the tracks.

It’s like when I met a real Christian girl. Didn’t work because I was too serious and too foolish at the same time. Wasn’t as compliant with the faith as she seemed to like. Didn’t particularly want to stay in the town after that, because it almost did. Field mice in the boarding house. We packed it up and moved downtown. Quit pro ball after McGraw demoted me. Tired of playing in the minors. Knocked around for a bit until Boston picked me up. Then traded almost immediately to the Yanks when Frazee’s money troubles caused him to sell, sell, sell. And joining Huggins and Babe in the city of lights is what set me up for the turn of my career; all of my best years, really. But especially that turn of 1927.

I can only really see this looking back. It took so much time, energy, the stress of life being in your face and having to make the moves – not being sure if you’re going to make any of it through – that puts you so in the motion of living. The dead aren’t going. We’ve got the luxury to look back. And it’s then that I can see all of the little movements; the small migrations of my life that put me where I needed to be, when I needed to be there – the things that put me in a position to maximize what I was able to express and exert in my life. You need the conditions to grow. And you need the right moment to be able to express that growth. All of my interests and passions as a kid. Picked up vaudeville from my pops. Writing. Took me into broadcasting. Became my rain delays. Bent me towards philosophy and baseball. The unity of the two things. Comedy and tragedy. The mortuary and the stage. And baseball in between them, with arms outstretched, mediating the cosmic forces of love and strife. It rains, the game stops. The sun shines, they roll the tarp off and the radio crackles to life.

Nothing like hearing the announcer and the crowd noise ring in the start of the ballgame. That’s the real time. The time where life slows to the beat and the rhythm of the heart. Set off into the slowness and wandering of the late summer ballgame. Especially if your team is out of contention. Those were some of my favorite games as a ballplayer. The pressure’s off; you can just focus on and savor your craft. The wind of approaching fall. The crack of the bat. The full experience of being present in the game. For the game. The devotional act. Too much pressure and you can’t sit back. In the big leagues, you can’t really ever sit back. But it helps if you’re out… not that I ever manufactured such a thing. A losing season! When you’re with the Yanks in the 20s, it doesn’t happen. But Pittsburgh and Brooklyn in the 30s gifted me with some contentionless seasons. Where I could really just appreciate baseball for what it was. As a fan. Even as a spectator. Even while I was on the mound.

Truth be told, I didn’t really care about winning and losing – especially as I got older. I just wanted to be there. To savor the game. It’s different when you start to feel your body fall out of position. You strive to the top of the hill in your youth; as you age, you cherish the mere, bare, simple presence of the thing. How else can one understand the world? After you’ve given everything you have, you’ve exhausted it. The thing within you. Afterwards, you just want to be present for the experience. To appreciate the seasonal collapse into fall. To smell the leather of your old glove a couple more times. To take in the affair in the stands. Fathers and sons. Maybe a couple of them want you to sign the baseball or the glove they brought with them. You don’t know if that kid will be on the same field as you, ten years to this day. Long after you’ve hung it up.

And the cycle goes on. You play your part in it; step off into that dark corner called death or announce from above in a crowded, small press box. You still heard the bat; you watch the pitcher shuffle a curveball grip in his mitt – but you ain’t in it. You’re a part of it, from a little ways away. From a distance. And you watch it all… as the show goes on. And then you philosophize it on the other side of the plate. In the stone of death.

It’s hard to get too angry at the living self. Or any of the living for that matter. Who knows what they do? Why they involve themselves in the affairs they do? What they think they’re running towards, if anything… and who, or what, they think they’re running from?

It’s all real in life. Every dagger, every step, every long train ride. You’re going towards and away from something all at once because you have to. You’ve got to get up and move for the food, water, shelter, the promise of some sort of sanctity in a local sense. Camaraderie. Love. Meaning. And you drink that while you can til the well runs dry. You play until you’re traded or the manager’s tired of you. Enough losing seasons and you may want to quit of your own accord and farm yourself out to Montauk or Ontario. Live easy on a vineyard or a cow farm.

The guys I knew who stuck it out in the game couldn’t get away from it. It’s your right to choose how you want to spend a life; they spent every last drop in and around it. Announcing it, managing it, playing it, legislating it. The game, in some ways, becomes a proxy for everything the world won’t allow. It’s an allotment of the child in an otherwise cold and uncaring entropic universe. The rise and fall of governments. The world wars we went through. I never saw much promise in any of it. It’s an empty game – politics, economies. Only in baseball we saw the fullness. And it was a fullness of shared, communal joy. Rising and falling with your teammates at your back. Meeting challenges; overcoming them. Losing seasons, in this way, are almost necessary. It tests your mettle in the face of adversity. A ballplayer needs adversity. A force to overcome. A slump to break. Down a couple runs. See if you can pull it through. Drive the runner in in a clutch situation, where it’s gotta be you. Strike the batter out when anything out of the infield scores a run.

That’s what I mean by existential meaning. So when I look back at myself and the game that I gave my life to, spent it all up, I ain’t mad. Because it is and was a way of doing that. A way of putting myself in the best possible position to encounter the worst possible circumstances and overcome them. You know, ultimately, that if you win or lose, succeed or fail, it don’t really matter. But that’s what makes it matter. That’s what makes it important. Precisely because you’re free to fail. Free to win. Free to lose. So if you can’t take it, with everything you’ve got – sure, you still survive. Live to fight another day. But you step into that match damned if you don’t win it. Because you’ve got everything within you that day to put towards the task. That’s what makes a competitor. And that’s what makes a guy I want on my team when the bell rings on the final game of the season. You field a starting nine of those types of fellas, your last game is the clincher of the series.

That freedom is a wild freedom. It makes guys quit. It makes guys slump. Because you don’t know what to do with it. You get in your head about it. It’s like Sartre said, “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give life a meaning.” Baseball takes that to the extreme. And a lotta guys can’t handle it. You’re not required to be there, swing a bat, pick the ball up and push with all you have to shut ‘em out for nine. It’s not going to solve any problems at the level of pure survival. Sure, you get the check. And maybe it’s a bit more – at least back in my day – than you make at the factory unless you’re Ruth or Gehrig. But it’s got nothing to do with life. Baseball’s a foreign thing. It’s an alien thing. It’s an arena to do what you choose; make of it what you will; put whatever last bit of yourself you can muster into it. Man stares at a blank page; loses his wits. You keep your wits about you, you just might write a masterpiece. It’s the same as stepping onto that rubber. You’re there to open the game. If you can stay in it psychologically, you might as well close it. And many more to come.

Most guys that fail don’t fail because they can’t do it. If you made it to the big time, you certainly can. They fail because they can’t master the game aspect of it. The existential matter of what’s at hand. What the ballgame brings about within you. In the tightest situations – it means the whole world and not a damn thing. And a lot of guys can’t wrap the second part. It’s the difference between mortal seriousness and the comedy of ease. The guy who looks like he ain’t trying worth a thing, lobbing it in there, but is throwing as hard as Lefty Grove or Walter Johnson is doing just that. He’s mastered his ability to get the ball in there at a breakneck pace, but the man himself is working casually. Not every pitch is a labor. None of them are. Even in the tightest spots, he’s fully cognizant. Present and clean as a whistle. Dedicated to the task at hand but not emotionally or psychologically submerged into it. Show me a man like that and I’ll show you a Hall of Fame pitcher.

Man like that is a star because he knows it’s a joke. And he’s dedicated himself devotionally to cultivating the highest craft in the joke. He’s not bent on victory or defeat; nothing throws him. And yet he’s the best guy on the mound or at the plate, purely in a craft sense alone – but you also want him out there in the clutch moment. The intelligence of a man like Mathewson shows here. I watched him throw, even in his late days. He was conscious the whole way through. I can only imagine the ‘05 series. He goes out in the tightest of circumstances – all the marbles – and on top of it, becomes increasingly conscious of how damn well he’s playing. This is only the third World Series ever, mind you, but it’s a performance for the ages. It’s remembered over 120 years later. He goes out there, peak of pressure, against one of the best lineups in baseball – the Philadelphia A’s – and shuts ‘em out and down. Three complete game shutouts. Mind you, even though we weren’t in the same era, I ain’t never had a season like Matty did in ‘05. Maybe nobody truly ever did. 31-9, 206 strikeouts, and a 1.28 ERA. That year, Mathewson was 133% better than the average pitcher in the league. It’s scarcely thinkable what the man did.

Christy wrote the book on this part of the game. ‘Pitching in a Pinch’. And that’s what the ballplayer did. It’s what makes him the legend he is and became. I tried to take a page out of his book. It won us three titles out of six showings. Not bad. Twelve games pitched, an all time record when I left it. I had plenty of shots at the title. And still, no matter how many times you get there, you never get it right. Because there’s always next year. And the competition doesn’t get harder because it gets better, per se – although in 1930 offense skyrocketed yet again, as it did throughout the 20s, to even newer heights – it gets harder because you get older. The joints ache. Your timing falls off. Not as fast to keep up with the young. It’s just like the burning stars in space. You get your time. Shorter than theirs. Vastly shorter. We barely see them before they burn away – that’s how far they are. And you’re the one burning on the mound, witnessing yourself burn through each pitch like a garment of clothes. Sweating yourself away into oblivion. And it’s worth it. Every last strike. Every last out.

And that’s the pressure. That’s really what it is, at an existential, cosmological level. The pressure of knowing that it matters. That each pitch really does matter. Because you have a limited amount of time to give everything that you have until your time is up. And that’s your responsibility. It isn’t a moral, social, communal, or ethical responsibility. Even a religious one. It’s an existential one.

If you feel that, you’re truly pitching at the height of your passion. And you’re a blessed man if your passion alone got you that far, and you woke up to it after the fact. The urgency behind the dedication and the discipline. It takes a young man some time to rise up to his powers if properly attended. No young man is a Socrates at age thirteen, fourteen. He has to feel the passion within him. Something childish, true, boyish – which guides him with all the luster for life expressed through that point to get him to maturity. To madly, ceaselessly pursue it through all obstacles. Then he reaches the point where his star burns the brightest; he is capable of expressing it through the outlet of his body attuned to his practice. You wake up to that, you’re in a position to leave your mark. To come to this earth and say what you’re here to say, to the fullest extent of how you’re capable of saying it. How you want to.

26

We played until we couldn’t play no more. That’s all there is to it. Staring out the hotel in the rain that day, fifteen stories up, drops muttering the view. I was looking at Mick while he was trying to get me to come down to breakfast.

“We ain’t gonna play today.”

“It don’t matter. Neither this way nor that. Stallings wants the whole squad down there. Full meal. Glass of milk too. Says if we don’t play today damn sure we play tomorrow. So we best be ready.”

I put on my wool coat and stepped downstairs with Mick. He was just a kid. Second year on the club, same as me really. I caught the tail end of 1919 after a spell with the Giants. Mick looked like he could still be lugging books around in a knapsack at the local high school.

“Know you think Brooklyn’s a handful. Cadore had a helluva year last year. Wheat in his prime. Papers say they’re on for a pennant.”

The season had barely started; the Robins were out ahead. We were barely cracking the lip of .500.

“I’m fine with Cadore, Mick. I just need you to get behind the plate and square your shoulders. I want to beat ‘em with my best stuff. It’s going to be all fastballs today. Keep your hand warm.”

“Thought you said we wasn’t gonna play, Joe.”

“I changed my mind.”

The team was down at a long wooden table in a room off the lobby. I sat down next to Rabbit Maranville and Hank Gowdy. Rabbit was our star shortstop; Hank usually caught me. Stallings wanted to give the kid a start. A little seasoning early on, to see what he was capable of as we hit the stretch. But that wouldn’t be for months. Seasons stretched on for miles. I put my hands behind my head. Rabbit ribbed me. His cap was tilted off to the side. He was short as a little kid, but he could hit with the best of them.

“It’s on you today, Joe. .500, here we come. I’ve got a bead on Leon.”

I knew Leon Cadore. I played him close when I was on the Phils. Just nine days earlier, we’d gone to extras. Each time we faced each other, it was neck and neck. One run, two run games. He’d beat me in the 11th last time. 1-0. Wally Hood had doubled off of me. I was almost out of the inning.

“You better have a bead on that sunuva bitch, Rabbit. He’s up two games to one on me since ‘17. And what’s worse, I’m still sore over that April match.”

Hank leaned over his plate of eggs, sticking his head around my right shoulder towards Rabbit.

“Better wish Joe luck. I saw Cadore’s stuff when we was on the road at Ebbets. Let these guys know in advance they’re headed for an oh-fer.”

Rabbit threw a piece of bacon; it hit Hank in the nose. Hank swatted at him; I peeled them apart from my seat so they wouldn’t flip the table. Stallings looked up from the morning paper. He wasn’t amused.

“You’re asking for another game on the bench, Gowdy; this time, not for rest.”

Hank lowered his arm; started picking at his eggs like a schoolboy who’d been reprimanded by the teacher. I looked out the window. Rain was letting up, but the clouds were heavy. Heavy and gray. Soaked fulla stuff. But Stallings never called off the bus. We piled in, dark blue paint. I always sat next to my catcher for the day. Mick threw his duffel of equipment in the overhead. We’d head over to Braves Field; see if the game would take us.

Braves Field was out by the smokestacks. They’d held the Sox-Brooklyn series a couple years back there ‘cause it had the space. Would be a shame if you came to watch a game and you got stuck behind the massive pillars which held up the massive overhang which circled the bowl behind home plate. Stallings had us stay at the hotel because he wanted to keep an eye on the boys. Apparently, on homestands as we closed out 1919, Cruise, Gowdy, and some of the pitchers had been taking late nights on the town. There was plenty to do in Boston. Including put a load on. 57-82-1. Good for something approaching the cellar in the National League. Surprised he didn’t put us under lock and key in the Charles Street Jail. He put us up in the Buckminster. But that’s not the reason you’d remember it.

When we got to the field, first thing I heard was the jolly boom of Wilbert Robinson. Ol’ Robbie, as we called him. I always liked the man. He had a good story to tell for every day of the week. Including jokes about his former Oriole teammate, John McGraw. McGraw didn’t take kindly to being reminded of his past on the O’s. One of the dirtiest teams in the history of the game. Did anything to win. Had the last fella you wanted to come up to the plate in a no-hit ballgame. Wee Willie Keeler. The guy was shorter than Rabbit, but he could hit like the gods drew up Cobb from the foundations of his game. Always put the bat on the ball. Me, I was never really a strikeout pitcher. Early days in the league as a kid with Philadelphia. But I suspected my best days were ahead of me with Boston. I was still young; I’d really started to hit my stride. Games like the one against Cadore in Brooklyn to close out April showed me what I was capable of. Barely any walks. But also no strikeouts really. Plenty of hits by Brooklyn. Twelve if I remember. But I held ‘em scoreless til the last.

Robinson was going off about the Beaneaters. He hated they’d come up on the O’s and stolen the titles in the latter part of the 90s. I was barely born then. Uncle Wilbert rubbed his large, protruding stomach. His striped Robins uniform looked like a bunch of pajamas.

Saw Cadore in the away dugout. Shoddy wooden box. He was putting on his spikes, face like a fox. He looked up at me, his eyes gleaming. The fellow had remembered our last matchup. The look in his eyes was like he’d got my goat and was going to keep it. I couldn’t let that play, and I wasn’t going to. Seeing him with that devil in his eyes didn’t lighten me up. It just doubled me down on beating the man.

We warmed up in right, soft tossing. All lined up, Mick joking with Hank Gowdy. Gowdy, and his damned day off. Mick took his eye off the ball; my toss hit him in the chest.

“Eyes up, rook.”

“I ain’t a rook anymore, Joe.”

“Twelve games clipped off at the end of a cellar finish don’t count for shit, Mick. You haven’t proved squat.”

Mick’s eyes hardened and narrowed. He whipped the ball back to me. It cracked the worn smooth leather of my dark hide mitt.

“There it is, rook. Bring that with you to the game.”

Stallings called us into the dugout as it started raining again. He pulled me aside as the team piled in. It was about fifteen minutes to gametime.

“Say, Joe. You ready to face Leon tonight? I liked how he pushed you last start.”

I nodded. George continued.

“I’d like to get these boys hitting. We can’t have you out there in the 11th. Shutting them down frame after frame. But you know as well as I do this lineup’s got holes. We may be headed for a worse finish than last year. But that doesn’t change what I expect out of you. I want you to see what you’re capable of. And Cadore’s as fine of a match as any to put yourself up against it. I want you going nine. But I want us out of here and on the bus before we have to deal with any storm.”

I looked up; stuck my hand out from the dugout awning. Large, dark raindrops hit the knuckles on my right hand, washing some dirt from the backside of my palm.

“I got no problem pitching in the rain, George.”

Stallings smiled.

“Good. Then you’ll have no problem evening our record up for this year.”

George lowered his voice.

“If we finish over .500, it’ll be a goddamn miracle.”

Just as he finished his sentence, Rabbit hit Hank over the head with a dirty old frying pan. Rabbit’s hat was so sideways at this point it was almost backwards.

George’s face fumed, bright red. Just as he was about to rip into the two of them, he took a big, deep breath in.

“Not even worth it. Long season ahead.”

He pulled his scorer’s pencil from behind his ear; went back to filling out his scorecard.

I took my seat next to Mick. He was a St. Louis kid. I wanted to ask him if he knew T.S. Eliot. I wasn’t born far off. Chicago. Stallings was from Augusta. Couple decades before, in our parents’ time, I’d probably never met any of these fellas. My parents had a dairy farm. Moved us to the west coast after I was born. Now we were sitting in this town full of smokestacks. Don’t think my parents would understand this world. Don’t think I do either. Some days, the best idea seems to be moving back to the ranch with my wife.

Mick knocked my chest with his mask and stood up. Looked like I’d been lost in thought for longer than it seemed.

“You ready, Oss?”

“Yeah, Mick. Let’s take care of it.”

“Let me know if you can’t see my signs in the rain.”

Mick knew I’d be throwing fastballs all afternoon if they sat right. And they did. They clipped me in the fifth, after a walk to Ernie Kreuger. Cadore moved him over on a grounder to me, then the leadoff hitter, Ivy Olson, singled to left to bring in Kreuger. I couldn’t stand walks. Hits, I can bear. Batter beats you clean and square. But you walk a man to start an inning and he scores – well, you just beat yourself.

Leon held us scoreless until the last half of the sixth. Walton Cruise tripled; Walter Holke, our first baseman, flew out to left. But not deep enough to score Cruise. With two outs, Tony Boeckle singled to center. Squared us at 1-1.

And that was it. Now here’s where the story changes. Because I don’t remember any of it. But I feel it. It was like an unspoken agreement between Cadore and I. Feels like it was made beforehand. Something maybe even prior to all things. Here’s where you’ve got to understand. Neither Cadore nor I were particularly roaring stuff in the back pages of the game. No Pete Alexander, no Big Six. You might remember Cadore for his playoff work. A couple very good seasons in his prime. Then out of the game. Myself, I had a good run in the early 20s with the Braves. But this game was something different. Our first game felt like a premonition for everything that happened after Boeckle tied the game at the end of the sixth. That game where Cadore ousted me in extras. The two before it, both one run, two run games. 1917. Summer. I beat him in the first. 3-1. He got me in the second. 4-3. Neither of us left any of ‘em. Clean through. These were the days where a man couldn’t stand to be pulled out of a game. Hell or high water, he was going all nine. I even went twenty innings against Brooklyn’s ace, Grimes, last year. 9-9 tie. You could say I was prepared.

Leon and I went 26 innings.

You ever get into a situation where there’s no resolution? Something that drags on until death finishes it. This is, from what I can discern, something between fate, the human condition, and the terror that there’s no meaning. That there’s nothing there behind the curtain, no real narrative. No story, no great plan. That it’s just you, out there on the mound. Between pouring rain and rolling storm clouds, throwing until you can’t throw no more.

Cadore later said the game changed him forever. That his arm was never the same. I had my best years after it. I’m not sure what it was or wasn’t. But I know what it was while it was happening. It was the purest, clearest representation of what baseball is and can be that I’ve ever seen.

Mick left the game early for a pinch hitter. Lloyd Christenbury. Then I got Hank. It didn’t seem to matter who I was throwing to. I faced a total of 90 batters. Nine hits given up, four walks, seven strikeouts. Leon and I pitched three games in a row, in the rain, in under four hours. It was like a trance. You’re out there, taking and giving shot after shot, giving shot after shot. Two guys, and every inning you’re out there you’re the one trying to put the other guy back on the ropes. You sit, and watch the other guy throw a blank. It’s like a drum rhythm. Nearly every guy who started the game had ten at bats. You get up, again and again to the plate, and try to push something through. Silence. And the night creeps closer; the storm threatens to break through and call the game by the force of time and nature itself. And you keep playing.

You expect an outcome. You do. You suspect it. I saw it in Mick’s bewildered eyes, after Stallings sat him for the pinch-hitter and he watched the game unfold. You got a room full of guys. They expect to win or lose. It just don’t work like this. When you play a game of baseball, the game don’t stop until somebody wins and somebody loses. Sure, take Game Two of the 1912 World Series. They drew a tie. But that tie forced Game Eight; the twist of fate that came after. It didn’t feel like nobody was coming to resolve this one. And that puts the fear of hell in a man. Like he’s toiling in purgatory. Forever. Saved only by darkness or tempest. The fall of oblivion.

I knew about it by way of the game against Burleigh Grimes the year before. Toe to toe. No other man can say he went the distance in two ties that extended the length of two ballgames like me. It was almost a year to the day. Three runs each in the 19th frame. But this game was different. After that last mark in the bottom of the sixth, there were twenty innings of silence. Twenty innings of nothing. The baseball gods wouldn’t allow nothing through. It’s like you’re the prophet, staring at the burning bush, waiting for it to speak. But the bush don’t burn. And you spend your whole life waiting for it to burst into flames. You live and die, like a big old sack of bones.

There’s your 26. A 26 without reason. A 26 without resolution. And you go home, you eat dinner at the pub, and you sleep all weekend in the hotel. Then you go out and pitch again like it never happened. Like you never had to put every last ounce of everything you had inside you out there on the field. Leon and I think we both threw something like 300 pitches. And it bound us for life; even in death, our names are intertwined. What do you make of that? All because of one night on a ballfield. Two guys, you could call them journeymen in the record of the game. Good, even great pitchers in their own right for the blink of an eye. And time called them together for a night like that. But they wouldn’t give a resolution.

On a night like that, on a field like that, as darkness sets and the rain continues and won’t let up, you lose the explanation. The umpire can’t understand it. The managers are at a loss. Nobody ever seen it before. It don’t obey the rules of physics of the game. It’s like a defiance of gravity. There’s no authority when something like that comes down. You witness it, you experience it; you might even tell about it later. But the primary thing; all’s you can really say about it is how it impacted you. That’s the nature of an event. A coalition. A coming together of two forces, which is to say myself and Cadore on that night; the production, the outcome, the realization of an effort matched – wit by wit, will by will.

Neither of us would let off the mound that night until the other did. Game like that get you asking questions while you’re up there. 24th inning. Not even sweating. Biting the rawhide string of your glove leering in at the sign. Another fastball. Is there a god? Isn’t there a god? Gets you asking theological questions. Like why would I be left here out on the mound for so damn long without an answer? You look at your teammates. Who sent you? Say something. Things like that. Like one guy’s got to say something. One guy’s got to do something to break this thing. And then when the home plate up McCormick waved the game off before the 27th in a square tie, you feel your stomach turn into horrors. No one saved it. No one came. Darkness just set in. That’s all.

Is the setting in of darkness the salvation? Is that the answer? I couldn’t say. Thought I saw sorrow on Cadore’s mud and rain-soaked face. The fans just mumbled. Got up and left, stumbling over the bleachers like they couldn’t find words for the inexplicable. And there was a game tomorrow. There had to be.

A man doesn’t get but one or two of these moments in his life if he’s lucky. It’s a moment where you stare down what’s behind the veil just through the sheer anomaly of it. Where the rules bend and you glimpse something eternal, infernal even, just out from behind the mask of the abyss. All this was and ever was was a ballgame. But it was the refusal of myself or Leon to relent. I suppose that was it. Yes. That it was a sheer force of will that threw itself, split and spread between the two of us. The same will that makes the deer run, same as the wolf. Just looks different from the outside, is all. And I suppose the nature of the day and the time was that we both had it. For a long time. Right there, on the same field. On the same mound.

Think about it. We drew a 1-1 tie in the first nine. Second nine, blank. And the final eight, blank. Best there is outside of that is Ed Reulbach’s dual shutouts – against Brooklyn, nonetheless – for the Cubs in the fall of 1908. That’s eighteen innings, with a break in the middle. There’s no context for what Leon and I did. 1906, Jack Coombs and Joe Harris went all the way in a 4-1 game that went to the 24th. They had right around 20 scoreless innings too. I’d ask those two men what it was like to be on the mound that day.

When you’re up there, you don’t know what it is that’s pushing you forward. Your obstinance, stubbornness, the quality of your pitches. The movement of the strategy of your mind. Is it god? A higher power working through you? Otherwise you’re up there alone on the hill, facing down batter after batter. If they touch you or don’t, is it your will, theirs, or something else’s? A good pitcher may as well be a priest, or a prophet besides. He has to ask the questions that occur at the highest speed of human dynamics. Kinetics of the body. Putting everything you have toward the highest velocity collision between bat and ball. Your torque versus the batter’s. And in that split second, what intervenes? What force intervenes – that either clips the game at nine or lets it loose into dusk? Where only darkness can redeem or save it?

Because a run resolves. In the twelfth, in the twentieth – hell, in the thirtieth – a run resolves. And the longer and longer you wait without a run, the longer and longer you question if there can even be a resolution. I was never a man to think about death or salvation before May 1, 1920. After it, that’s about all I could think about. Sure, Cadore’s arm may well have been burned out for good from it. But that game burned out my spirit. It burned out my soul. Gnawed at it, like the beak of a bird around a vine. And there’s where I had to sit and ask myself the meaning of it. Any of it. And what had worked through me to get me to 26. To get Leon to 26. All in the same day, at the same time. The collision of it. And what it meant now that it was done; now that I was back to being me.

I had good stuff, sure. Stuff that took me to the majors on the account of I was good enough, capable enough. You know the story well enough. It happens plenty. Star hurler at Saint Mary’s, got a shot at the big leagues. Signed to Philly with my pal, Eddie Burns. Catcher from college. Lost my debut in 1914 to the Braves, believe it or not. I was fine enough. Some papers thought I might be the equal of Ol’ Pete. We won the series in 1915. I never lived up to that. Except on the rare night. Except on that first night of May. I don’t think Pete Alexander ever threw a game like that.

So when a man with abilities such as that – a solid ballplayer, sure – I even pulled 20 wins in 1921…

So when a man like that plays a game like that, a game so exceptional, so defying of what the entire history of baseball conceives of as possible… what does it mean?

And that’s what haunted me. It wasn’t that I was mediocre. Although, if the stats have something to say about it, I was a bit below league average. It was that, by contrast, the game Leon and I had just thrown was so otherworldly, so incomprehensible, so beyond my capacity to understand… hell, anybody’s capacity to understand – that it seemed the best thing to do was forget about it. But nobody did. Nobody could. And neither could I. Guys on the team, Mick, Tony, Ray, Rabbit. They all looked at me like a monkey’s paw, like a third arm. You put something through that even Babe Ruth would look at askance… you’re asking for trouble.

Because, you have to ask – and we all did, even if we didn’t say it out loud – who did that? Who and what decided to work through Joe Oeschger and Leon Cadore that night? Because it’s something that will never come back. The game changed for good. You don’t see no more mud soaked deadballers go out there and throw twenty innings. Manager tries to sit him, even asks about it, fella says he’s not relenting til the other guy cries uncle. And nobody does. So you push the limits past where anybody thinks they can go. Thinks you can go. And that’s how you end up at the 26th inning.

You get into a fight like that and you realize there’s an opportunity. Not every man gets a clean shot to prove what he’s worth. What he’s capable of. Men string together lifetimes like beads for the chance to say I squared up to life and gave it my best swing. All I had, I put it out there. That’s usually a game of days. Day after day. You put a little in, get a little out and back. What Leon and I had on May 1st, we had the golden chance. Four hours. And you empty it all into those four hours. I get why Leon says it ruined him. Because he put every single last ounce of his body and soul into those four hours. And you give something like that up, you don’t necessarily get it all back. It breaks in you, something in you. A part of you. Because you drew into yourself and spilled every last drop on the ballfield. Left it there. For good. It don’t come back.

But a man rarely gets a chance to do that. So many, day in and day out at banks, counters, desks, in homes. Whittling away their days to dust and bone. What it was was honor. And I don’t know if that’s fate or chance. But beside how it came about, honor was what it was. Honor being the window of space and time made available by whatever it is that orchestrates such things for you to be here and now and give it all you’ve got. A man’s always got a choice. The time and the hand he’s given. You’re there, in that moment, for however long. Do you give it all, or do you try to keep some in the tank for another day? Not that you know another day’s gonna come. You’re hedging a bet, now you’re deliberating. And now the moment’s over.

See what I mean? That’s the measure of a life as it passes. You don’t stop the stream of it. You step into it; put everything you’ve got into the pitch. Sure, some of that’s body. But some of it’s something. An essence. That you can never get back.

And you give that essence, that’s what makes you think about god and death and life and fate. And how the ballgame threw it up to me, gave it up to me. A college fella who became a high school teacher; was in and out of the game in a span of ten years. I threw 1,818 innings in my career. 1.4% of those innings came in that one game against Leon Cadore. And yet it was the thing at the core of it. The meat of it.

When you’ve got an opportunity, you take it. You, god, whatever it is that works through you. You take it while you’re here; you do with it what you can. That’s what I know.

QUINN:

I was a man without a face, without a name. Took the spitball past the ban. Became the oldest man in the league. Didn't really remember where I came from. Rode a train half way across the country to figure out where I was going. Couldn't cut it in the mines or factories. Figured I'd make it out on the ballfield. Hoped there was a place for me. A man from halfway across the world.

OMS:

In the mountains, smoking cigarettes. A bunch of Argentinian kids around me. It’s a picture of me. Born in the sugar mills. Dirt poor. Torriente died broke in a New York slum. Nobody knew him. They didn't speak our language. I remember Oscar Charleston. Pop Lloyd. The illness took my eyesight. Swinging blind, I still think I had it cut out for the big leagues. They wouldn't have me. New York Cubans. The Cuba squad. I think I understand.

GIONFRIDDO:

Coach put me in. I saw 5 hit it, turned my shoulder... high-tailed it to the chain link fence. Heard a couple of young kids and a man in a hat screaming. His newspaper hit the outfield bleachers. Threw my glove up as I twisted my head back into the light. That's what I remember.

The blue darkness of the clouds holds the rain, bearing heavy fruits which nourish the earth.

The quality of light shifts where there is the weight of substance, looming, in expression. The very air shifts as Nature speaks: in stanzas, passages of enlightenment — to the passage of the World Soul. The soul falls, like rain, in watery measure. Tears of liquid, or dark blue gold.

I.

Contrast is life seeking expression.
This is what is known as darkness;
Why there is only a specific girl for me,
At specific stations of my life.

Each life requires a shadow to fall,
A dial of inspiration, of greatness,
By which to fulfill itself.

Why else are we set against dreams

[…]

Death which is a coming together,
A Revelation.

Prophets have haunted our woods and deserts for ages. Some just wandering men. Some miracle workers. Hermits.

Moses. Remembered and forgotten, like trees they do work, like streams. These are just delegations
For microbial station. The louse on the back of the whale. Move water. Speak the words of the lightning-mind. Move the fifth finger.

These directive were whispered to me; I heard them directly as commands, clear as day — as I evacuated all that I ever heard or pretended to know or tell. This is a clearness, not even human, a total opening to the powers; their command as it works through me — simultaneously, I, myself.

Do you understand the unity with the Self, of it? It moves in Nature everywhere. You are asked to play your part, as am I. That is why I am still speaking, even amidst the fell wars, the gossip, the tabloids, the arbiters of human words and human dooms and human spells. I cannot claim being human, but a force that works through it, just as Nature cannot claim being a bird, or a stone.

The exercise of these faculties is an opening up, a breach in the fabric of space and time, which we might call Perception.

It is a change in the way things are seen, and thus the way things move and function in the design and words of mankind. It is an alteration of the dream at the level of the paradigm of prophecy, which is to say, again, a Revelation.

In the opening up of the fabric of appearances to reveal that which is hid beneath them, behind them, it is now that the worlds and the forces of the gods are at play. You may know the true face of the flower, but not its hidden directive.

This is the sanctified nature of the living spirit; the great mystery. I cannot speak to how many manifestations of the forces know their own destinies. Their own secret, sacral work. And yet they act them out, in states of automation of the brain and of the spirit. The few that awaken, perhaps, watch this action upon the earth; the turning of the stars and cosmos.

Do you know what sound you are meant to make, as the body uses its vital fluid? Does it matter? What matters is that it is done; life itself will assure

That the quantities and qualities are spilled upon the living body and blood of the earth and stars. And as such, the necessary stations will be passed through, of a greater spiritual enlightenment — of a cause that man is but a whisper through and towards.

And thus, the stations and stars move. How can we know the plans? But speak of them, in our right forms
As they move through us, about us, and on their way forth

III.

You see? I cannot know if I am meant to be a pauper, a priest, a prophet.
And your failure to accept the terms of this deal
Are what make you deranged in this broken world.
The soul commands; we must fulfill its directive
Even if and as it plunges us into darkness, misery, despair.

Who knows what you were meant to see?
The death of the beloved, iconomachy — 
This world defaced in ruins.
What purpose does it serve?
Well, what do you know of it?

The hubris and pride of man
Is a moment of change. Birds submit to their fate; trees dive into bearing the fruit of leaves. 
You deliberate about something that isn’t yours, given your name and station and work
By a function which you are in service to —
The great design of all affairs of life.
Like a brakeman at the track of life,
Moving forces in your junction.

A blood, an electricity, a kiss, a touch,
A wail of deprivation:
The starving, dead, lost, in a fugue of spirit lights which tumult and turmoil
As the very air of the wind. Souls entering and leaving the field of fleshly incarnation.
Each day, hidden directives, sacral whispers of command.

Do you aid, follow, or rebel? These are the Lucifers:
Each man, force, stone, at present;
Man gifted with mind to press against the will of the gods. These are the two actions at work in the world:
Submission to the greater will and rebellion against it.
The souls versed in submission: we are the prophets of your world.
The souls in rebellion — you are the forces which we in the common world call legion, fallen; perhaps Evil.

But who is to know, where the greatest violences are ordained:
I speak this with the compassion of one who breaks and is broken
In this world that rends souls.
That the madman, the murderer
Is a sacral design, like the poison flower
Sipped to the fawn 
Or the slave master
Is the necessary laudanum
Slipped to the dying patient
Centuries in the making?

The collision of these forces is indistinguishable
But in the private grimace of one living against the code of his sacral missives.
This world, in truth, is a perfect function,
Broken only by rebellion.

And who can rebel, but those whose minds are awakened to the soul?
This suggests to me that the world is in perfect unison; fundamental unity —
And the only possible betrayers are the persons of prophecy:
Therein awakened to the nature, missives, and world of the soul.

How can a world turn its back on something it knows nothing of?
But fear of intimations; the approach
Of what looks like a monster of Death
Upon the pleasant affairs of a distracted life.

Are these words of the soul heard, like a bluebird’s flight? It takes to the skies at a certain moment by a call;
This may be said to be hunger, migration, fear, some pressing urgent task of the body —
But the body itself is the call
Through which the directives of the mind emerge.

This is the dream we prize,
Closest in sleep, closest in the state of prophecy,
Which is simply the deliverance of the soul in this world
To its orientation truly.
These ordinances are the privation of no greater force or man,
But the sacral dialogue of the god and the man,
Whom the god speaks through
In the silence which is the void of all distractions
And the void of all intimations
Of truth, living, and being.

I took this task, as did you
Because my soul was ripe for it.
The whole movement of the stations of my life prepared me for it,
Blind even as I was then to its cause.
Like a stem ripens to the bud, so does the force of the life take way into the flower:
Like the eyes of the animal,
Surprised, itself, of the bloom.

Life itself is a surprise; this a gift of movement
Given to auric forces of the soul, like words to a page, or colors to a canvas. Each hue is a feeling, a living body of quality
Which is sensual and erotic 
Upon the tapestry of life 
To act as a force, like the tolling bell
Upon the ear of the transforming god —
Changing the song as apparitions
Of gravitational bodies in space;
Beneath them, the deeper pull
Of the magnetic powers of the songs of the soul
Manifest subtly; nevertheless present
In the appearances of the bodies themselves.

This is the ocean of the signs we navigate; the traces and intimations of the god
With which we lust and thirst,
With the passion of us — this whole body of the world — the passion of true lovers.
But to find the true life, and the beloved thusly, one must follow the missives of the soul
Like the dog-disciple, gladly, with the active discipline of one who is passionately in love with the force of being the dog itself.

Do you understand this? The composite forces incarnate into the body — any given body — are the forces seeking exorcism and expression through the form. The body is the station of the soul as an auric force, an energy, incarnate into the world, onto the earth, for a specific tonal purpose; to make manifest a specific hue for the order and function of the entire procession of the universal will.

And that this body must be exercised is the perennial surprise and prize of enlightenment — as the forces that leap out of us are ever greater that which we truly are, and the fulfillment of the gold missives of the soul; the memory of times that are hidden and veiled to incarnate bodies in the present, seeded behind the mysteries of the formulation of the mind and the current manifestation of the causes, as they stand, at this present moment in time.

It is this veil that is the surprise of the sublime beauty, which is the art of the universe

IV.

Thus I am glad with you, as you are with me,
Knowing we are in perfect, impenetrable rhythm.
We reveal ourselves to each other in perfect stations of time;
As such, thus, put into actions, in proper time
The forces that propel us both forward in the ordained ways
As in stations of the soul.

Time itself moves forth properly, to reveal these measures in space
As revelations of the stations, in order to move souls forth in destined trajectories.

Thus is the very history of the universe, down to the incarnation of the human body and its neural specifications; the form, the type, and the incarnate beingness necessary for the articulation of the ripening of the world soul; therein, souls.

For this force to come into being is in primordial unity with the revelation of forms necessary to articulate, contain, and express it.

It is through this very procession that loves come into being; stars shine, and characters populate the stage of progressive unfolding and awakening; the movement through which is processed imminently, by the flesh and the eyes of gods — indistinguishable — as both the force working through it, and the articulation of the thing, character, and nature itself.

This is our dance my friend; that I find the beloved in it; the quality of the light
Is that I find the immortal essence
Of the well of souls —
The absolute quality
Which moves them into being.

With that I ask,
Are trees themselves ever bored
With the necessary passages of ripening
Before their fruits fall
With such thick nectars?
The juices which, it seems ordained
We take into our very mouths; transform
With the delight of our tastes

V.

One such seer sought the body of the world in the bleeding stones