Prologue
The sound of steel typewriter keys pounding away at a scroll of teletype paper, the ink is so wet that the letters turn out as dark as the total solar eclipse of 1955. He is churning away through the night, the sound of an Eastern-Screech-Owl outside is faint. An adolescent obsessive-compulsive male; sitting at a 1963 Remington Monarch typewriter. A porcelain cup of steaming hot tea next to him and a cut-out 8x10 glossy picture of a girl with auburn hair. Inside his brain there’s some violent neural activity. . . his two consciences bantering back and forth. In the “seat” of his brain, there’s a constant battle over who gets to take charge; there is one obvious winner, but the other contender will not give up.
His fingers are floating above the keys. . . moving like fireflies in a spastic fight. He is typing;
'A sky full of marbles; expanding into the lost meridian.'
The boy tears the piece of paper, and tries again;
'Centuries ago; humanoid emotions were recorded on a clay tablet, documenting a conversation between a bird and a fish.'
The man-child tears another length of paper, scrunches it into a ball and throws it in the garbage, and tries again;
'Blanketed fears, seeking morality. On high-octave circuited ele-'
[Clunk]
Near the borderline of Tennessee and Kentucky, on Screaming Eagle BLVD. there is a small forgotten bunker hidden outside the R.F. Sink Memorial Library. This underground bunker is shaded by a large Fagus Gradifolia (or American Beech) tree with dark green leaves. The tree is protecting the bunker entrance which is covered by a net of leaves. The bunker is made of concrete and its door has a fourteen-bolt locking system. The door is made of concrete and is at a 45-degree angle, hidden in-between two large tree roots. The effort used to get into this bunker is so immense that this adolescent boy only goes out about once every six months, for gallon jugs of water, tea leaves, blocks of cheese and bread.
There is a faint smell in the atmosphere of tea and sweat.
This bunker is where this small-minded dreamer dwells, down in captivity crowded with massive mahogany bookshelves, sketches, and storyboards, trash cans filled to the brim with teabags. There, a small-town boy sitting with his feet up on the brown wooden desk rubbing his big toe against his tall toe and cracking his neck - hoping that that will give him an idea. Just a day previous he was standing at the bottom of a school stoop drumming his fingertips across the banister waiting for his infatuation to appear, so he could embarrass himself with muttering spit-laden nervous talk. He had a plan and a list of topics which he was fiddling around within his pants pocket and will soon find that the ink is still wet and staining his fingers. He is outside Lewis and Clark High School of Clarksville, Tennessee. The clouds in the sky are silver and puffy, and the ground is a constant shadow. He cannot tell if the school bell is ringing or if it is just his head ringing from nervousness. Outside Lewis and Clark High School there is a tall red phone box which he stands in and grinds his teeth. He has no idea what he’s doing there, on the list he has written:
·Hurricane Beulah’s rain accumulation
·Houston Oilers vs. Los Angeles Chargers, 1960
·Northern white-cheeked Gibbons and their sexual dimorphism
·Sympathetic views on Robert Ford
·The Black Death of 1347-1350
·Shakespeare in Sneakers
·Hopscotch (or in German, “Himmel und Holle”)
·The Catherine Wheel
·Secrets of Andrea Amati (c. 1511-1577) (Violin Inventor)
While he stands there drumming his fingertips and pondering these queries of life, here she comes flowing down the staircase in radiance, her hair softly bouncing over her eyes, she is smiling. The boy goes stiff, he is frozen and mute and dumbfounded, as the girl carries on oblivious to him, he tries to speak, but nothing comes out, his mouth is open, but he is not breathing. He tries to swallow, but his mouth is so dry that he cannot swallow. As the girl gets away from him, he starts to follow. She is walking in a group of girls all with colorful small backpacks hanging off of one shoulder; they are talking: “Like, I understand that Mrs. Hungerfield is like, a professor and all but like that doesn’t give her the right to be so arrogant and undermining to me, cause like...” The one blonde girl was saying. “Yes, but you see Savannah. She is only doing it through technique. It is a strategy to make us feel dominated” one of two brunette girls said.
“Yeah, like, imagine if Hitler came out to make a speech and he’s like in his pajamas holding his teddy bear, with his Elmo slippers on and he’s saying, ‘Ja, Ja, why luuuk at all yooou pretty gerrrmans.’ With a cute smile, and then; ‘Moving on; you must submit to the overwheelming need to obey! success!’ or whatever blah blah, and behind the iron curtain he’s like, ‘Ja, ja, mien fraulein cum huur my sweet little buttercup.’ To his little deputante. You would be like ‘okaaaaay mien furor. . . ya nutbar.’ And he would never have successfully convinced anyone of anything. . . But then, like, look at Mrs. Hungerfield; Dean of Hitler studies; she’s always wearing a plain solid-colored button-down shirt, like, that god damn one she was wearing today! It’s always either beige or dark blue, and those khaki’s my god! Naturally, you feel undermined.” The girl with the auburn hair was saying, this is the one which the boy is infatuated with. And the boy, ten-feet away, walking in the same direction, was giggling insatiably like a little girl. The girls turned around and looked at him disgustingly. “Are you following us! Weirdo?” They yelled at him.
“Uhh, no no no! I’m, umm, I want to talk to you,” he said and pointed to the girl with Auburn hair. “What about?” They all asked in tune with each other.
“Umm...” He muttered and pulled out his list from his pocket and looked at it and tried to make out what he could. “Uhh, Shakespeare? Or Monkeys? Or Pneumonia? Anything really. . .”
“Pneumonia! Do you want to talk to us about pneumonia? You weird sick fuck!” The blonde girl said and launched her foot up and stabbed the boy in the gut with her one-inch heels. The boy went down and kneeled and looked up at the auburn girl.
“I also like to imagine Hitler in Elmo slippers,” he said. The girls laughed and walked away whispering, “What a loser. . .” to each other. The auburn girl turned back and looked at him with a look that illuminated attraction and curiosity. Actually, that’s not what the look was; the look said, ‘I think you belong in some kind of institution. . . and I like it.’
Deep his bunker, this boy, to which we will call “Vera Historicus” searches his shelves. He searches his shelves in a panic; he is desperate to find something of significance, something that can describe the shame he is feeling or can answer his calling. Those shelves are there to save him, he says, but they cannot save him all the time, his social interactions are replaced with fear and anxiety, and not literary conclusions. This boy must realize that for him to be saved he must know that it is not knowledge that saves us but Imagination and Innovation. It’s the “I,” “I can,” “I will,” “I ‘magine so, ma’ boy.” Etc...
His three qualities worth mentioning; an imagination, a resourceful library, and a typewriter. Also, perhaps you could say he has an extreme desire and an obsessive amount of shameless will. In these small towns, one can only really have desire and yearning with intense anxiety. There is a Buddhist story that Vera read about a frog who lived his whole life in a lagoon trapped in solitude – one day the frog stumbled upon a passage out, and in escaping witnessed the whole big vast world, which he didn’t believe existed, it was so much for the frog to process that his head exploded. Vera has always been afraid of escaping, except in fiction. Now all he needs is motivation. So, let me point out the last thing that happened after the auburn girl gave him that nasty look; she spat on him. The boy was covered in bubblegum flavored saliva from his forehead to his chin so that when he breathed in through his nose, he made a gurgling sound. There was also a story he heard in passing about a man who lived his total life in a state of ecstasy. . . he was considered by his peers as insane.
He sits in this small dust-ridden, rustic, cold bunker with handwritten quotes on the wall:
”Strangeness is a natural ingredient in beauty" – Charles Baudelaire
”Knowledge is Limited. Imagination encircles the world.” -Albert Einstein
”All that David Copperfield kind of crap" – J.D. Salinger
”A man must not be without shame, for the shame of being without shame is shamelessness indeed.” - Mencius
”You are a genius all the time" – Jack Kerouac
”The world is lyrical" – Lorenz Hart
“Since man cannot live without miracles, he will provide himself with miracles of his own making. His will believe in witchcraft and sorcery, even though he may otherwise be a heretic, an atheist, and a rebel.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
and other stock phrases he’s heard in passing. This little concrete mess is where he lusts for ideas. It’s just him and his friends; these little rectangular blocks of passed trees turned into magic. On the shelves, you will find the heart of the road, the jazz, and the fire. You’ll find D-Day survivors, drunken Irish prophets and bearded satirists, unknown whale hunters of ambitious virtue. These are our trusty narrator’s friends. His only way of communication is from them to him and from him to the paper from the paper hopefully to someone who will find those selected words useful and encouraging.
Our narrator was brought up isolated. Not literally but mentally. If a beast is raised by wolves, our narrator is a Milquetoast spawn raised in silent lucid nothingness. He imitates empty-headedness; however, he is quite the opposite. Perhaps he was born in the wrong century, perhaps he should’ve been born at a time when silence was a unique tool. Silence was a way of survival, silence was a weapon, or perhaps he just shouldn’t have been born at all.
But in the time our narrator was born silence was a symbol of emptiness and thoughtlessness and inactivity. A time when people thought that your level of speech is equal to your level of IQ. Our trustworthy narrator is honest when he looks around at the drooling derelicts and the moaning mongoloids and the human-formats, which he calls them, for he feels he doesn’t belong to this race, he feels this race is one built off of malicious hunger. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to play along, he will play along but in fiction; because fiction is an honest lie.
The Phantom Engineer, that’s what we will call him; he is a ghost, nobody knows him, he is a mute, he is transparent, and he remains unseen. He loves the fictitious world. And Jazz; The music with a mind of its own, the music with no limits, the limitless, sporadic, eccentric voice of mother earth. The sound of the wind coming from an arrow shooting aimlessly through the sky. Our Narrator, The Phantom, grew to like the unpredictable, he grew to like to be surprised for he always had a premonition with everything except jazz and literary fiction. So now here he is, here I am, here I sit trapped, I have come to lock myself in this ghastly room with this stale smell of an old cuckoo clock, and oh hey there one is, every hour I shall be reminded that reality is out there with its feathers and its beak and its high-pitched C sharp squeal. The cold stone floor against his feet, his eyes jittering and bouncing side to side across the paper. His hands are floating above those keys, moving rapidly fast, like the sound of a saxophone piercing through the thin atmosphere of an oceanside city where the morning fog rolls in and rolls out to the sound of jazz. He types;
