Finding Seth Haines: Part III
Living in dreams.
This is Part III of Finding Seth Haines. Read Part I and Part II before proceeding. Or don’t. I’m not the boss of you.
I’m a bit clearer on where this is headed now. Enjoy the journey. And if you do enjoy it, please feel free to subscribe or show your support by buying me a coffee.
Now, to the show.
III.
At dusk, I watch an armadillo sneak from the underbrush and drink from the water. Armadillos are armored rats, which gives them a false sense of security. This explains why so many meet the Great Armadillo God while crossing State Highway 43 in the Boxley valley, the valley west of the Buffalo River.
I have come to this river because the Modern Tempest Trust has done what it always does—it made the world 1% worse this year. A box of Frosted Flakes is forty percent more expensive than last year, which has hit what the MTT calls “the working class” the hardest. There is a silver lining, though. Though their children’s bellies groan, their midsections are shrinking. Maybe it’s all part of their anti-obesity campaign. Who can say how the MTT works?
Also, there is this: America has elected a man who promises to drive down the price of Frosted Flakes. He’s also promised to deport all the illegal Mexicans or at least most of them. Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists and they’re poisoning the blood of America, he says. He’s an ass of a man, but I suppose he’s our ass of a man, and Americans have always loved their asses. Especially the young male Americans who can’t see past their unformed frontal lobes. These young men—and there are plenty of them these days—listen to podcasts and drink Monster Energy Drinks. They shoulder the majority of the blame for this politician’s election, or at least that’s what the media says. Anyway, Monster Energy Drinks are also up forty percent. Podcasts are still free. You win some and lose some, I suppose.
The MTT has created a fugue state. It is difficult to square where We The People began and how we got where we are. It’s difficult to square anything these days. This is the problem with time—it splits into a thousand competing stories told by a thousand competing voices. Which story, which timeline is true? Dreams are this way, too.
Last week, over beer and tacos, Angela told a handful of new friends about her recurring nightmare. It only happens during church, and then, only when she’s singing the old hymns. In her waking nightmare, while belting the Chorus to “How Great Thou Art,” she wonders if she is real. Maybe, she thinks, she is a dementia-ridden woman at a nursing home, and the people in the congregation are family members who have come for a visit. Her family—the congregants—aren’t singing along, but instead, they’re trying to force-feed her another spoonful of tapioca pudding. She sings anyway because singing is a sort of comfort, a recollection of the glory days of youth, and from her nursing home, she is transported through time to the present, which is really her past.
We laugh, but I consider the idea: If Angela is a projection of her memory—told from the fugue state of a dementia ward—what does that make me?
Maybe I am a writer in another lawyer’s dream. At night, after cooking supper and making love to my wife—or not, depending upon the time of the month, her headaches, or the fact that she’s wearing the old gray sweatpants—I lie in bed and lift from my body. I enter into some other reality in which I have freed myself from the shackles of law and have achieved moderate success as a neo-religious, self-help author who’s sold enough books to earn a paycheck but not enough to retire.
In that dream, here’s what I think.
I am a writer. This does not mean I am clever or brilliant or a genius. Being a writer means only this: There is a maniacal sociopath who’s taken residence in my brain. His only job is to lie. This is important work, he says, or People will go nuts over this story or This is your Magnum Opus. His entire job is to fill me with visions of grandeur or at least a sense of moderate importance. He calls these visions Legacy. He sometimes promises money or influence but he knows what I know: Everything I write will be a moderate disappointment. Most of my words will be readily forgotten.
I am a writer, or at least I say I am at the dinner parties I host in my dreams. I have published three books, I say, and the guests in their wool sweaters and baseball caps say Wow… that’s amazing while they take polite sips of beer or wine. Sometimes those dinner party guests say they’ve read one of my books, tell me how important they are. If I asked them their favorite passages, they’d just blink back at me because this is what it means to be a writer: you bleed on a page and the audience reads that blood cipher; they turn the words over in the mouths like French wine; they gush about the nuance, the flavor, the craft; then, they forget your act of self-mortification altogether and move on to someone else’s blood ciphers.
I am a writer—I dream—but not really, because I’ve never published the novel. Yes, it’s made its rounds to publishers around the country, and they’ve all taken a pass. Three non-fiction books don’t make you a writer, the sociopath says, Real writers publish fiction and sometimes poetry.
Here’s a poem, I say to him:
Tie a rock around your thin neck
find a pool that’s head-high
chase your words to the bottom of the river
don’t come up till you die.
Great poems don’t rhyme, he says.
I sit under the overhang overlooking the river, and I consider the possibility that I am a projection of my dreams. Maybe I’m bed dreaming about the three moderately decent books, the dinner parties, and the sociopath. In the morning, I’ll wake up, kiss my wife, slide on my gray wool pants and white shirt, and make my way to the office to sort out real estate leases or revocable trusts or whatever boredom awaits.
Or maybe I am a writer who dreams he is a lawyer. I dream this because, in fairness, I am an Attorney At Law.
***
I entered law school with grand dreams of arguing important cases and fighting against the Modern Tempest Trust. Butthis is what happens.
Fresh out of law school, having just passed the bar, I’m given my first case. My client—a real estate developer—has purchased a beige motel with peeling stucco where lower-income tenants pay what they can for monthly tenancy. One of those tenants ran short on cash, so she negotiated intimacy with one of the other tenants. These were the finer points of the deal: She’d give him what he wanted; he’d give her a sixer of Busch Lite and the twelve bucks she was short on rent for the month.
During the exchange of services, the man’s wife returned to the hotel and found a group of tenants staring through the plate glass of the room she shared with her husband because he’d forgotten to draw the curtains. God and everyone watched as the woman pushed through the crowd. No one was scandalized on account of the fact that they were mostly meth heads and knew that sometimes services were exchanged to make ends meet. The wife was still a wife, though, and she suffered enough for all of them. She pounded on the door and yelled I’ll kill you both over and over until the police came and the residents scattered like spooked armadillos. The officers arrested the three involved in the direct conflict at issue for a variety of crimes—the wife for disorderly conduct and possession of a small amount of meth and a syringe, the husband for soliciting, and the negotiating woman for, well, negotiating.
In court, I’m tasked with evicting the whole lot of them. The developer wants to raze the old motel and build condos there, so he’s been looking for reasons to evict folks for a few months. He calls these three stooges Low hanging fruit. Sometimes he calls them animals.
I am in court seeking an eviction order and no one shows up. At least, not at first. The judge—a man with a bleeding heart—says We’ll give them another five minutes to appear and plead their case, and wouldn’t you know the negotiating woman walks with with less than three seconds to spare. The judge asks if we’re ready to proceed, and I ask for a minute to speak with the Defendant, who is carrying three plastic Walmart bags of clothes and has no lawyer. The judge capitulates.
Will you just move out so we don’t have to go through this hearing, I ask.
She refuses.
We’re about to have this hearing, I say, and I’ll be introducing the police report.
She is a statue.
The report, I say, shows that while you were exchanging services, the wife of your… um… friend… banged on the door and said, Girl you better come on out here or I’ll drag you out by your nappy-ass weave!
She stares at me, blinks, and then says, This ain't no weave; my hair is the genuine article. Then she says she won’t fight the eviction. She’ll agree to move out voluntarily to preserve her dignity. She shouts this to the judge from the back of the courtroom and tells him her hair is real. He nods, asks me to draw up an eviction order. And just like that, the case is over. Another victory for the MTT.
Twenty years later, I sit with my back against the cliff wall overlooking the Buffalo, and this is what still bothers me: It wasn’t the exchange of services that bothered her; it was the weave. Humans are astounding animals. We have armor like armadillos, but we wear it in all the wrong places.
We can’t all be Atticus Finch, I think. Atticus was a lawyer in Harper Lee’s dreams, and he was a songbird of justice. He fought for the rights of an unjustly accused black man in a system hell-bent on dragging unjustly accused black men. Justice is also a dream.
Lord have mercy.
***
I wake to find that I have been in the hole again. Above me, a star blinks and blinks and blinks. It’s taken two thousand years for that light to reach my eyes. Two thousand years. The light I see was projected from a ball of gas during the era of my forefathers—Native Americans, ancient Scandinavians, Christ himself.
As I look at that star, my phone dings, which is odd because I’ve never gotten reception this deep in the valley. I pull it from my pocket and notice there are 300 new text messages. Some are from years ago. One from my long-passed grandmother tells me she loves me and misses me and asks me to come down to Bayou for a visit. One from a client asks when his settlement check will be ready. But there are other messages, messages with date stamps from twenty years in the future. One is a notification from my future self, the kind of reminder text I sometimes send: Visitation on November 11, 2044.
That text message—it is the light from my future star. The white text of the message is contained in a blue text bubble.
Blue is light seen through a veil.
Never stop writing. That’s all.
I enjoyed this morning’s journey down through the worm hole. Thank you.