The Melrook Archives

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In the Lab w/ Caroline

In the Lab w/ Caroline

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Heartbreak Yoga

21–31 minutes “Cheer up, brother. You’re making everyone sick with all that worrying.” “I can’t help it, Spidey. All my abusers are dead. My mother is dead…” Rook explained. “I thought you hated that bitch.” “I didn’t hate her. I just wanted her dead.” “But that doesn’t explain why you’re so anxious. It’s making my skin crawl.” “Spiderbabe, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never said to…

Heartbreak Yoga

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The Three Mahasiddhas

Summertime on the Island of Pain consisted of hot days and cold nights, but with the Autumn came a drop in the temperature that tested Ruth’s powers of concentration once again.

There was a chill penetrating Mei Lubaba’s bones. Her muscles twitched, and there was a frosty tingle in her hands and feet.

She was accustomed to living in higher elevations. Her father’s farm, where she spent most of her childhood, was well above sea level, and she spent lots of time camping in the surrounding mountains. 

Mei was active and outdoorsy. But when she was indoors, she warmed herself by fire. And while outdoors, she had warm leather coats and soft, thick animal fur. 

On meditation retreat, Mother Ruth sat still for long periods, and the cold settled inside her like water filling a leaky boat. The warmth of her body seemed to rise out of her, only to be replaced by an icy chill that sank to her core. 

She tried not to shiver. Her father had told her that shivering cools the body quicker. She tried to maintain her concentration in meditation, but the cold air persisted.

She had one thought that kept returning. She had heard of a practice by which meditators used the body’s subtle energy channels to heal themselves from the inside. She had never been taught the method but knew it was possible. 

At first, she tried to channel the vibration of her impulsive shivering into her lower body. There was an energy center, an inner fire, that she could tap into, and she wasn’t giving up on it. 

After many failed attempts, and just when she thought it was fruitless, she calmed her mind and prepared her body for the coming freeze. She would freeze to death, she thought, but she would do so in deep concentration and perfect stillness like a badass.

Marpa, the translator, came in with the cold.

Marpa Lotsawa spoke calming words to Ruth as her body went numb. She felt as if she were dying. She had heard that the mind tricks the body into feeling like it was on fire as a person freezes to death. She was not looking forward to that. 

The fire of freezing was another one of Mei Lubaba’s greatest fears. And obviously, she never wanted to burn to death.

Marpa, the translator, was a stately-looking tall man with the mustache of a merchant. 

In contrast to Milarepa, who looked like he had just stepped out of the jungle after living with wild hippos for years, Marpa was well-dressed and well-mannered. He spoke to Ruth with an intellectual superiority bordering on disdain. Like Milarepa before him, Marpa had no time for her comments, but instead of being quiet like his student had been, he would raise his voice and speak over her until she had stopped her prattling then his voice would fall back to normal. He looked directly into her eyes while he did this.

Marpa and Mei left her body behind and entered a pure land realm, but this one was pure light and heat with a large sun disk in the sky that was warm and pleasant to look at, not like staring at the Earth’s sun at all but more like gazing at the harvest moon.

Marpa talked down to her, starting quickly as if the lesson had already begun, only she was late for class. 

“Freedom from the four extremes means understanding that the object of cognition exists in a momentary mode, empty of thought constructions and lacking objectification.”

Ruth tried to hold her tongue as Marpa used grand words she could barely understand and spoke in bombastic tones. 

Marpa was born into a farming family. He financed his spiritual development while he was married with kids. 

He was called Marpa the Translator because he did just that. He translated the teachings from ancient dead languages into common tongues. However, his precision of speech made learning from him a painstaking process, and freezing to death while she misunderstood him was not an acceptable outcome.

He continued rapidly.

“Freedom from the four extremes is to know that the characteristics are false, and in reality, clear light.”

The four extremes! Mei thought. I know this: Tumult, Sloth, Aversion, and Attachment. She wanted him to slow down, but she was the student, and he was the teacher, so it was her job to get to his level, not the reverse.

Marpa Chokyhe Lodro did not walk with Ruth as Milarepa did but stood before her, lecturing like a disappointed tutor. He spoke as if picturing a full audience, but as he taught, he slowly removed articles of expensive clothing, dropping each, in turn, as he lectured.

“The middle way is defined in terms of self-awareness,” the lesson continued. “A self-awareness that is far from nothing; it appears as colors, sounds, sights, tastes, and objects, but characteristics do not arise from it. There are no labels on it.”

Ruth tried to concentrate on his words but was surprised by the translator's continued striptease. 

Why was he taking off his clothing? She thought. It might be the light or the heat of the realm they had visited, but there was nothing unpleasant about the temperature or anything else. 

She started to question him, but his voice raised above hers as he stared into her eyes until she dropped her inquiry.

Marpa spoke with an academic cadence. “To know the emptiness of objects is to know emptiness free of appearance and coverings.” 

His silk shirt fell to the ground, and he began to remove his pants. 

“That is the Middle Way from which the subsequent or conventional has been purged.”

Marpa was professorial, as if addressing an assemblage of scholars. He spoke to Ruth Lubaba as if he were speaking to the plurality of every life she’s ever been or ever will be.

“Teacher?” she implored him to let her ask a question, but he talked over her again.

“People without compassion are like sesame seeds burnt by fire,” he said.

Marpa told her, “All phenomena are like an illusion.” And he dropped his pants. He said, “All suffering is like an illusion.” And removed his undergarments with an ease of movement, that left him naked to the sky.

“What about the death of your son?” Ruth asked him, keeping her eyes above the equator.

This stopped him in his tracks. Nude and seemingly annoyed at her interruption, he stared at her, waiting for the moment to ask, “What is your point?”

“You called the death of your son a ‘Super illusion.’ What did that mean?”

Marpa moved his naked body closer to her. Only then did Ruth realize that none of it made her uncomfortable. Not his manner and not his nakedness. As Marpa moved closer, she smiled at how comfortable she was with his display.

“My teacher was Naropa,” he said. “My teacher taught me to control my inner fire. He taught me to develop my inner fire and to grow my inner fire,” he told her. “Naropa instructed me to create heat with my mind and not to combat the cold. Something you may need in the coming winter,” he said. “You need to open the heart-mind energy center and increase the generation of compassion and wisdom in deep meditation. Does that answer your question?” the naked man asked her.

It did not, but Ruth said, “Yes.”

Ruth knew the story of the translator. 

Marpa had sought out Naropa to be his teacher, but as Marpa had done to Milarepa, Naropa first sent Marpa on a quest. 

Naropa instructed him to find another teacher, a fabled madman named Cucuripa—a madman across the water. 

Cucuripa lived in the middle of a poison lake with a pack of wild dogs. It took Marpa tons of perseverance and faith to find him. And it was a miracle that the poison, journey, wild dogs, or man himself did not kill him.

Marpa moved in so close to the sister that she could feel the heat of his breath. It was uncommonly hot. And she could feel the warmth of his sex. It was unusually seductive for her. She had never been attracted to the male form, but something about the translator contained an abundance of sexual energy that she could not deny. She giggled. As an adult woman, as a senior nun, she giggled.

“I do not know the way.” He whispered to her, full of uncharacteristic humility and a half-chub that indicated a certain degree of sexual excitement.

She stared into his steely, solid gaze and felt all the heat he generated from his naked form. They stood so close and so silent and so still for so long that when Marpa spoke the last words Ruth would hear from him, she hadn’t taken a breath for some time.

With all the sexual attraction and the spiritual reverence of a superhero and a teacher of his caliber, with all the pleasant nature of an unpleasant demeanor and the tremendous heat of a giant sun in a peaceful sky juxtaposed with the supernatural heat of the translator’s molten naked body, he said, “This too was a super illusion.” and then he faded from view.

The brittle cold inside her bones subsided slightly, replaced by a pleasant warmth like her mother’s butter cakes fresh from the oven. 

Mother Ruth returned to her physical form on her meditation seat in her tiny tent with a lingering sexual excitement that was not unwelcome and gently served to warm her nearly frozen flesh. 

This, too, was a super illusion.

Naropa entered next, but not for another twelve weeks. He came in, like the others, at Ruth’s lowest moment. The winter was cold, and the snow fell, draping the hillside in glorious white. Ruth used her inner fire meditation to bring heat from her internal energy centers that melted the snow around her tent and scorched the earth.

Her next crisis came with pain attached. There was a pain and a doubt that rose in Ruth’s heart and mind. Her muscles began to ache from soreness, but she did not move. Her skeleton felt uncomfortable inside her body. Her skull began to hurt, but she did not move. The physical pain became unbearable, but she did not move.

Ruth Lubaba began to pass out from the excruciating pain as Naropa arrived. He had white hair tinted red and was dressed in opulent splendor, like wealth or royalty, with a fancy turban tight against his forehead. 

He entered her tent as if walking onto a stage. He smiled at Ruth as if they were old friends, but she didn’t acknowledge him, sitting in meditation, perfect stillness and excruciating pain. 

He looked down at the nun sitting there in her tent in her meditation pose and became visibly and audibly annoyed. She had not stood up to greet him.

Naropa cleared his throat loudly and posed royally, looking away from her, expecting a reaction. 

After a long pause, Naropa grew tired of waiting and kicked the nun in the thigh with an expensive boot. And when this did not rouse her, he kicked her repeatedly, clearing his throat and making a gesture of perturbation with each kick.

Ruth let a soft smile come to her face. She did not expect to be kicked by the great, long-dead Naropa in a tent on a lonely forest grove near a babbling brook, but here she was. 

With every kick from his silken-draped, pretty painted, leather-footed personage, she grew more amused by the situation. She never emerged from deep concentration, and he just kept kicking her.

The pain in Ruth’s legs had disappeared. The pain in her head and her back had disappeared. And each kick was an introduction to greater comfort and further amusement. 

She was being beaten up by one of her heroes, and it felt wonderful.

Naropa and Ruth entered a pure land together. This one was filled with soft grass, a cool breeze, and light healing rain. There was no kicking in the pure land and no pain. There was only a gentle rain, pleasant-smelling flowers, and extraordinary comfort.

Ruth turned her attention to the former abbot of the fabled Nalanda University and anticipated the coming lesson. 

Naropa stood in the same regal pose as he did in the physical realm. He stood waiting to be acknowledged, adored, or worshiped. 

Ruth either did not know or did not notice. She asked him the question she had always wanted to ask her hero.

“Venerable Naropa.” she began as a frown darkened his face.

Insulted by her insolence, Naropa turned and walked away from Ruth like a spoiled child forbidden from getting what he wanted. Ruth followed.

“Venerable Naropa?” she called after him as she followed close behind.

Naropa left the abbotship of Nalanda University to find a teacher. He found Tilopa, but the great Tilopa initially did not accept him. Naropa left his post to find a teacher, only to follow him for years before being acknowledged by him.

As Ruth called after him, she began to suspect how Naropa must have felt. 

Tilopa eventually taught him the yoga of inner fire, so perhaps she simply had to persevere. 

Naropa stopped, turned, and spoke to Ruth as if at the midpoint of a lesson that had started ages ago.

“You must go through certain life experiences and seek out the teachings,” Naropa told her of his physical Yogas. 

The yoga of the illusory body. The yoga of the clear light of the mind. He described his inner fire technique, saying, “What need do I have of warmth? The whole world is warm for me.” 

He spoke of his devotion to his teacher and the yoga of the dream state. He talked about his humility and his meditative equipoise. The yoga of the in-between state. He explained that his teacher could show her how to transcend the body and the pain of the body. 

She never wrote anything down. She never took notes. She listened intently as he described in full detail yoga techniques that were centuries old, but there was no paper in the pure land. There would be no notes to refer back to, no recording, no video. (Nor will I be so bold as to include his words here, for the techniques are dangerous to the uninitiated). 

Naropa taught one time. He explained every technique once. He never paused. He never asked any questions or expected any response. 

He transmitted the complete instructions for the yoga of transferring consciousness permanently into a pure land, then Naropa departed. 

Ruth heard and understood but she was unsure if she would remember once she had returned to her body.

Tilopa would visit next, and perhaps he would help her remember.

Tilopa appeared as the doubt crept in.

Ruth began to doubt her worthiness. She was a spoiled brat, not worthy of her gifts and not worthy of her famous teachers. She had been given so much but felt like she would waste it all.

She did not let these feelings control her mind. And she resisted the urge to fight them off with ego. She would get what she deserved if she trusted in karma, and even if she didn’t. 

Doubt would only serve to discourage her in the meantime. There was no need for suffering while she waited.

Tilopa arrived, and the tears began to stream down her cheeks.

Ruth had been in perfect Samadhi for hours. She didn’t actually know how long. She hadn’t eaten, slept, peed, or moved for what felt like forever, or it was no time at all, and her mind was playing tricks on her.

“What pure land does Master Tilopa have in store for me?” she wondered. “What would be the nature of this lesson?”

There was first the spiritual mastery of Milarepa. Then, the mental discipline of Marpa. The physical control of Naropa followed them. 

What would Tilopa teach her? What was left?

Tilopa leaned in close to her as she sat still. “Let go of the past,” he told her. “Recall nothing.” 

There was no need for notes in higher realms, and memory was unreliable. 

“Let go of the future,” he continued. “Imagine nothing.” 

Was Melvin the future? Or was he the past? Mei thought, letting doubt seep in again. Am I his teacher, or is he mine?

“Let go of the present,” Tilopa told her. “Think nothing.” 

She let her mind rest in its natural state. And I’m sorry, there are no words to describe it.

“Let go of knowing and not knowing,” he said. 

“Examine nothing,” she told herself. 

“Let go of being and not being,” they recited together. “Control nothing,” they said. 

“Rest. 

Relax. 

Let go.”

She could feel the warmth of him towering over her, but his voice sounded like it came from inside her mind, as if he were simultaneously sitting beside her and inside her.

“Cut the mind at its root,” he explained. “And rest in naked awareness.”

Little Mei’s mind stopped being a container and became an open space. It turned from a heart-shaped box that contained precious jewels to an open landscape that included the great outdoors. 

The universe was small and tidy like a wrapped piece of candy, and as he spoke, it unwrapped itself and grew into an arena of ordered chaos.

Like rapid fire, his words came quicker than his heart son’s. 

“Obsessive use of meditative disciplines or perennial study of scripture and philosophy will never bring forth such wonderful realizations. This truth is natural to awareness because the mind that desperately desires to reach another realm or level of experience inadvertently ignores the basic light that constitutes all experience.”

A Tiny Tilopa spoke words of truth from inside Mei’s mind. The pure land was inside her. While the exterior Tilopa placed his hands over her ears and whispered, “Let’s get something to eat.”

“Realizing that nothing can last,” tiny interior Tilopa continued. “And that all is a dreamlike illusion.”

Ruth’s eyes fluttered open with her next inhale, and she stared at the older man. He was beautiful. He was physical. He was right there. 

Mother Ruth slowly unwrapped her legs and pushed herself up to stand. She hadn’t stood in a while. She hadn’t eaten for a while. She breathed life back into her legs and feet, and they flushed with new energy and heat; then, she followed Tilopa out of her tent and into the night. 

It was dark.

“One torch can dissipate the accumulated darkness of a thousand eons.” Inside Tilopa said to her as the other Tilopa led her into the darkness and down to the brook. There was no moon, and the stars provided little light. 

They passed out of the campgrounds, past the prayer flags that marked their sacred space, and over a small hill to a flowing stream.

“The appearances of the world are not the problem. It’s clinging to them that causes suffering,” Interior Tilopa told her as they walked along the stream.

Exterior Tilopa made small talk. He talked about his students Naropa, Marpa, and Milarepa. He watched their careers in the Dharma with rapt attention.

“Does that mean you know the future?”

“I know what you know, and you know what I know. You always have.”

She asked him why she was special. Why should such illustrious teachers visit her, or if she had simply gone insane?

“Did Milarepa imply you were insane?”

“Yes.”

“Well, he’d know.” He laughed. “Most people see conventional reality and think it’s accurate. That’s all there is. Most people think they’re the center of the universe. Most people live their lives attached to their suffering and oblivious to other people’s. But you do not feel like most people. That is the very definition of insanity.”

They reached a spot in the stream that was teeming with fish. Surely, he didn’t want her to kill and eat one.

[themelrookarchives]

Milarepa’s Ghost

Mother Ruth and eleven of her most senior meditation students set out on an extended wilderness retreat in the mountains and forests far away and high above the monastery, the nunnery, the hot and cold running water, and the university’s fully stocked kitchen.

The mountain held a place of reverence for the locals. They say when its peak disappears into the clouds, into a realm where the air remembers every sacred word, prayer or magic incantation, that the tiny tip at the top can somehow support everyone on the island, the world, the universe. Mount Meru, they called it. It was a good story.

After four weeks of living in tent-like shelters on the lonely mountainside, Mother Ruth had finally acclimated to the isolation of an intense meditation retreat. Yet, it was the sudden drop in temperature that happened every evening after sunset and the stunningly oppressive heat in the middle of the day that made the elder nun and her students doubt they could ever survive another thirty-six weeks. 

After week twelve, each nun rebuilt their shelters deeper in the forest, near groves of wild berries and a stream of fresh water but far enough away from the other women so as not to fight over resources. They would see very little of each other before the retreat was done. This was done to foster isolation and separation but remain close enough for the safety of numbers. 

Their summer dwellings were modest, patched together with mud and leaves, open enough to breathe but covered enough to remind the practitioners that nothing was more permanent than the brutally hot summer sun. And it, too, was temporary. 

Then the autumn came and the mountain’s warmth pulled up stakes and left for the winter. So the women dug deeper pits for their fires and hunkered down for the winter weeks, and none but the weakest among them complained, because naming your suffering only made it worse.

Mother Ruth was the senior nun on site but these were not novices. A meditation retreat of this length required strength of will and patience with adversity. A weak mind could snap under weeks of pressure or harden into a diamond, or expand into the space provided. 

Schizophrenia is what they label it when someone other than a saint hears voices, or sees the images of ghosts in their kitchen.

Ebenezer Scrooge had a schizophrenic episode after being racked with guilt for denying his best employee time off or a Christmas bonus. The man had a disabled son, and Ebenezer pretended like it didn't bother him, but it did. Enter Marley’s ghost and his time-traveling trio. 

When a religious practitioner or a saintly person hears voices or sees phantoms, it is not labeled as psychotic in retrospect. Instead it gets called communion or visitation. It is a miracle and a sign. The only difference is guilt.

Ebenezer saw demons and tormentors who helped him in the end, but only because he had Marley as a guide. Those other three ghosts out of context would have driven him insane.

The practitioner, we hope, would have done the work of purification beforehand. It’s the forgiving of past mistakes through confession and ritual, the mindfulness of recognizing regret and remorse as real that prepares a student to see the lies she tells herself. She thinks she’s ready but she isn’t. She thinks she’s a saint but her sin still burns. And that, my friends, is when the friendly ghosts become not so friendly demons. Tormentors instead of teachers.

Mother Ruth, after a dozen weeks of meditation, was visited by three ghosts. They were the ghosts of mahasiddhas past. Four ghosts if you count Milarepa. He was like the Marley of the group but without the chains.

MILAREPA 

The first to visit was the great Jetsun Milarepa. He entered her tent with a swarm of insects. 

Ruth had heard the tiny creatures crawling into her shelter by the hundreds with her eyes closed because nothing went unnoticed, but she was undisturbed. Only when the ants began to bite into her skin, did her focus waver.

Mei never cared much for insects. Beetles and ladybugs frightened her when she was small because they were so much smaller than her. She feared she might step on them. However, ants angered her greatly whenever they bit her like these did. 

Little Mei would not have been able to sit still for their meal and yet Mother Ruth did.

The bugs crawled on her and bit her, and, to her astonishment, she did not react. Instead, she imagined herself as a ready-made dinner for the tiny sentient creatures. She imagined her humility as the perfect balance to her self-cherishing pride. 

She transformed her anger into the resolve not to harm even one insect. She kept her concentration and stillness carefully so as not to shift even a little in her seat, or else she would disturb the insects’ repast.

For Mei, being covered in insects was her ultimate nightmare, but Mother Ruth was happy that it was her and not her sisters being infested. She would gladly be the insect’s dinner instead of any of the others because she was strong enough to accept it. She would offer her body to the insects, and she would offer her strength to the other sisters.

A dark-skinned man with long black-knotted braids and frayed, dirty, and matted locks appeared beside her, crouched inside her tiny shelter. There was barely enough room for her, yet her tent accommodated this large man and his wild hair. 

It was a tight fit. They were close together but never touched. He did not appear as an ethereal being. He was flesh and bone. She could feel his breathing, the heat from his body, and the stench of his manhood.

Milarepa appeared to Ruth as a wild caveman, a relic of the human species. He was naked, excepting leaves covered in mud and a necklace of bones. He was both overly nervous and eerily calm at the same time. His body shook with a vibration that was constant and soothing. 

Milarepa was physically imposing, long and wide, with eyes that darted back and forth around Ruth’s little shelter in the firelight. He crouched above her on one knee with the soles of his feet pressed together awkwardly, never once resting his eyes on her face or meeting hers.

He was a hairy man who took up most of the space available but left her just enough to avoid skin contact, and Ruth made herself small to accommodate him.

When Milarepa spoke, he sounded like a little man with very little confidence and yet he was a giant with a poet’s vocabulary—a bohemian behemoth from a distant past. 

“If you’re not careful, these creatures will devour your ego,” Milarepa told her, referring, she believed, to the insects.

“An army invades from the north,” he told her. “They will use up all your resources and then vanish because that's all you ever were, a juicy resource for a limited time.”

“That's all any woman is,” Ruth responded. “To the world of men and the world of insects alike,” Ruth spoke with confidence. “What can I do for you, great master?” she asked him.

“I need nothing,” he replied like an insolent baby. “I seek nothing. I desire nothing,” he said.

When she opened her mouth to respond again, he quickly turned his head away, hiding his face from her words as if they were arrows or acid and meant to hurt him. She closed her mouth quickly, and he continued.

“I have no desire for wealth or possessions, and so I have nothing.” He offered her his words. 

“I do not experience the initial suffering of having to accumulate possessions,” he said. “Nor the intermediate suffering of having to guard and maintain those possessions, nor the final suffering of losing those possessions to time and circumstance.” 

He completed his offering of words, and Mother Ruth smiled at him, and he smiled back like a child receiving praise from its mother.

Milarepa bowed to the swarm of tiny creatures with reverence as if they were his precious teacher or a holy relic, but he ignored their living meal as if she were insignificant. 

Perhaps the words were for them because they all stopped eating and stopped biting the body of Little Mei and crawled quickly from the shelter and back into the forest.

Milarepa was a peasant before he found a teacher—a peasant who had committed numerous crimes. 

Before accepting Milarepa as his student, his teacher, Marpa made him build houses from raw materials. Then, once he had finished, Marpa would make him tear down those houses and start again. 

Milarepa would make them bigger and better each time. And each time, Marpa would order him to tear them down again. Block by block. Piece by piece. Bit by bit. 

Milarepa knew this was a test, so he expended maximum effort every time, learning new and creative ways to make the finest houses ever built by one man, only to be ordered to destroy them and scatter the pieces to the ground each time.

This went on for years, and Milarepa did whatever was asked without complaint because he wanted to show Marpa that he would be an obedient student. But the effort and time it took to build house after house, and the callousness with which Marpa treated him and his work, made Milarepa begin to doubt himself. 

He had nothing left. He began to think that Marpa would never accept him as a student and that he would never gain the secrets and realizations that could come from being the disciple of a great teacher such as him.

Milarepa was near suicide, crying and sad when Marpa finally accepted him as a student. Marpa had broken down what was left of Milarepa’s ego, his spiritual pride, and the attitude that he deserved to be Marpa’s disciple. It had been replaced by openness and a willingness to accept whatever the great teacher had in store for him.

“Was it a test of your faith?” Ruth asked him.

“He who knows that all things are his mind,” he paused. “That all things,” he continued switching pronouns. “with whom she meets are friendly, is ever joyful.”

Ruth smiled as Milarepa switched the pronouns even as he never acknowledged her. 

She had learned about Milarepa at the university and heard about his songs as a child. She had thought that he’d gone insane in his cave retreat. He talked to animals, insects, and demons. He wrote songs of realization. And he spent hours in deep meditation. He was known as a master meditator.

“All meditation must begin with arousing deep compassion,” he told Ruth as if reading her thoughts.

“Whatever one does,” she added. “must emerge from an attitude of love and benefiting others.” she finished, quoting him to him. “But is compassion enough?” She asked.

“Do not entertain hopes for realization, but practice all your life,” he warned her.

Milarepa and Ruth Lubaba were swiftly transported to a pure land where he shared with her his life lessons. 

They walked along a shoreline where crystal blue waves glided across soft beige sand beneath a sky full of stars on a bright blue sky. 

They walked along a shoreline under rolling hills and a wide-open valley. Vibrant, beautiful colors unlike anything in the natural realm, filled in physical details of peaceful, calm existence on this pure land.

There was no fatigue. No concentration. No fear, pain, or confusion. No bliss or attachment to pleasure. There was only pleasant serenity and company.

They walked silently, taking in the picturesque scenery and pleasant surroundings. There was no awkwardness and no desire to fill the silence with questions until she felt the moment was right to break into song.

“They say you spoke to demons and were visited by sirens, enchanters, witches, and beautiful goddesses. Did you go mad?” she questioned him.

“What is sanity when the sane see illusions as reality? What is madness when the mad see the true nature of things,” he mumbled. “Strong and healthy, who thinks of sickness until it strikes like lightning?”

“Expect the unexpected,” she said.

“Preoccupied with the world, she thinks of death until it arrives like thunder?” he continued.

“You lived on grass and the water that dripped from the ceiling of your cave,” she remembered from her studies.

“Life is short, and the time of death is uncertain, so apply yourself to meditation, Mother.”

“And what of the time, I’m not meditating? What should I do then?” she asked. “What did you do?”

Milarepa spoke confidently. He said, “Avoid doing evil and acquire merit to the best of your ability, even at the cost of life itself. Act so you have no cause to be ashamed of yourselves and hold fast to this rule.”

They walked further down the shoreline but got no closer to the hills. The hills were the perfect distance away at all times. The light was at an excellent illumination level, and the surface seemed connected to her heart.

“I wrote poetry,” he answered her question. “Accustomed long to contemplating love and compassion….”

She interrupted him, saying. “I know this one.” She quoted him again, “I have forgotten all the differences between myself and others.” She stopped herself before becoming proud of her memory, instead reminding him. “You sang songs to the trees.”

Milarepa stopped suddenly and turned his face to her. He looked Ruth in the eyes for the first time and said. “My religion is not deceiving me,” he said, transferring more than words with his eyes. His eyes showed pride in her accomplishments and hope for her future.

“Did I pass the test?” she asked him.

“All worldly pursuits have but one unavoidable and inevitable end, which is sorrow.” He answered somberly.

“Well, that’s depressing,” she said as he began to yell.

“Acquisitions end in dispersion!” he hollered. “Buildings end in destruction!” he yelled to the horizon.

“You’d know all about that.”

“Meetings end in separation. Birth ends in death,” he said calmly to the ground and the earth.

“Yes.” she agreed.

“Knowing all this,” he touched her shoulder. “We should renounce acquisitions, and building, and meeting, and storing up,” he said. “And set about realizing the ultimate truth.”

Milarepa pushed down slightly on her shoulder as if commanding her to stay and he walked up the beach to the distant hills that moved closer as he moved further away.

“It’s not about religion, then?” Ruth asked.

“Realizing the truth alone is the greatest practice of religious observance,” Milarepa said. With that, he disappeared, leaving her in that pure land realm with the quiet buzz of their passing conversation.

Ruth stayed, and it was fun for a while. She enjoyed the land but then thought of her retreat and the suffering of her students. It would be impolite to her sisters if she stayed in this pure land while they suffered in the wilderness, so she returned as if awakened by the chapel bell for breakfast.

She remained in seated meditation, contemplating the encounter, for several days until she emerged from her shelter to bathe, gather berries and nuts, and return to her tent.

Milarepa told Ruth that his teacher, his teacher’s teacher, and his teacher’s, teacher’s, teacher would visit. An unbroken spiritual lineage that would each come to her aid when she was ready. 

He told her that each teacher’s teacher would help her master mental and physical disciplines. They would appear at her lowest moments, but only once she had recognized those low moments as also her highest. They would appear when her suffering was unbearable but only when she recognized it as perfect bliss.

It was another eight weeks before she got another visit. It was the Mahasiddha Marpa, and he arrived with the autumn chill. ||

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Blues for Mister Rook

21–32 minutes A Seven Act Stage Play by M. Christopher Horton —– ## CHARACTERS **MANNY** — An undercover operative posing as a junkie. Plays acoustic guitar. Speaks only to the audience. **SPIDER** — A woman living on the edge. Addict, hustler, survivor. Speaks only to Manny. He never answers. **BAMBI** — A woman who found God after the streets. Runs a soup kitchen. Loud, profane,…

Blues for Mister Rook

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Spades

23–34 minutes Whoever it was that said every man had to go through hell to reach his paradise better have been right.  Once again I found myself in the asshole of the world. A place with more crazies and burnouts, more psychotics and misfits, more idiots and addicts per square inch than any place I’d ever known, and I’d done two combat tours in so called third world countries.  In the past,…

Spades

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Keeping up with the Daughters of Mara

“While the heart is awake, the ego is asleep.”

Bitter old men in ancient temples have always found a way to elevate human beings into gods. Buddha, Jesus, Moses, Muhammed, Mary, Mary Magdalene — all of them human, all of them miraculous, all of them used as proof that you could never be what they were. Garbage people, like you or I, need not apply.

Instead of worshipping them like they’re something we could never be, we should be more like them. Become them. And change the world.

“It starts in our dreams.”

Hidden in the cosmic slop of the unconscious mind. Unrequited love. Unfinished business. Fear. Hope. Lust. The hallucinations of a worried soul.

“The heart practices one discipline and achieves a hundred,” the master said. “The ego practices a hundred disciplines and does not achieve even one.”

Enter the Daughters of Mara.

By the end of the second world war, after long days of classes, meditation, prostration, prayer, and chores, Mei Lubaba, the big boned daughter of a yak farmer, learned to take advantage of her time spent asleep to train her mind.

She had vivid dreams populated by old friends, bosses, acquaintances, and colleagues.

She rarely dreamed about the nunnery, the university, her teachers or classmates. She was never a monastic in her unconscious state. She was always a gangster, like back in her days living in the walled city. That was before she joined monastic community, before the university, and before her vows.

In her dreams, she wasn’t Sister Ruth. In her dreams she was still Little Mei. Helpless to the temptation of Mara.

Mara was the king of temptation. Ignorance was his weapon and the unconscious his playground. But he left the juicier work to his luscious and lascivious daughters — Trisna, Rati, and Arati. Beings of myth that transcended time, space, fashion, and pop culture. The Kim, Khloé, and Kourtney Kardashians of the desire realm.

Trisna, the Kim of the trio, helped poor souls covet what they did not have. The first twin, Rati, inspired the wayward to grasp onto what they already held, while her sister Arati could flip desire on its head until you hated everything about it and hated yourself for ever wanting it in the first place.

Wanting, having, and then realizing it doesn’t make you happy — that was the repeated path of the desire realm.

And underneath all of it, their father promoted fear. Fear of losing. Fear of never having. Fear of your own unfettered desire for even the most destructive and unwholesome things. Fear, above all, that you were never good enough to deserve any of it.

“Magic is nothing without the mind,” the master said to Little Mei in a dream. “We don’t discuss it openly — not because it’s secret, but because naming it kills it. Like dissecting a frog and then expecting it to jump up off the table when you’re done. These rules do not apply in dreams.”

This is special. This is evil. This is an illusion. This is miraculous. This is mundane.

The labels mean nothing. This is just some shit that happens. Don’t build it up. Don’t tear it down. Don’t do anything with it except help others cope with their shit. Label only what you don’t want. Everything else — let it be, let it happen, let it go.

If you must put a label on it, call it love. I dislike what I dislike but everything else I love.

While Sister Ruth slept, she learned to stay inside a dream when she recognized it as one — and to pull herself up to the surface when it turned dark. She learned to make small changes. Objects first, then places, then the motivations of others.

She taught herself to fly by simply refusing to come down.

Too many changes at once and the dream would lose its texture. The unconscious mind would smell the interference and reject it — not dreaming anymore, just thinking with her eyes closed.

“Knowing that something is possible,” the master said. “Not just thinking — knowing. That alone is more than halfway there.”

“And doubt?”

“Doubt is a cockroach,” he said. “Shine a light on it.”

Mei smiled. “Old bitter men have tried to take away your magic. Don’t let them bug you.”

The master laughed.

At four o’clock every morning the master taught a class on emptiness and the true nature of phenomena. He hosted gatherings of celestial beings from different times and realms — the kind of crowd that didn’t need to be introduced.

Most teachers in the waking world repeated concepts in pre-approved terminologies from traditions run by bitter old men. They spoke as experts about things they did not fully understand, but they spoke from great faith, and that alone can be beautiful.

Then the institutions added local superstition, deep seated misogyny, and senseless dogma, and suddenly it wasn’t a religion anymore — just a monumental waste of a life spent chanting and looking down on others.

“I don’t know about your other teachers,” the master said, out of respect for her tradition. “They’re probably some of the good ones. I’m just saying that the truth can stand up on its own.”

It can stand up against science, physics, mathematics, history, magic, and emotional baggage. Against changing political regimes and vastly different minds. You can tell a six-year-old child the same truth as an eighty-five-year-old skeptic.

“The truth does not waver,” he said. “It does not change.”

Mara and his daughters were the royal court of the kingdom of desire, and desire covered everything from birth to death, from chapter one to the finale and all the tiny vignettes in between.

Once Little Mei could travel anywhere in her dream or astral forms, the daughters began to whisper destinations and situations that would make any nun blush.

Little Mei, all grown up as a pious woman of the cloth, could now go places and see things. Lustful, carnal things.

She could eavesdrop on beautiful women. Or see humble farmer’s wives bite their lips and close their eyes, climbing higher than their husbands had ever flown them and then free-fall back to earth.

Trisna, the oldest, showed her what she didn’t have — the lives of beautiful women in cities she had never visited, pleasures she had renounced before she’d ever known them.

Rati took her to the places she kept returning to. The farmer’s wife in the dark. The honeymoon suite on the tropical island. The things she found herself wanting to see again and again until wanting became needing.

Arati showed her the underneath. The married men in rented rooms. The transaction without tenderness. The face of someone who had everything they desired and felt nothing.

Mara’s daughters showed her the dirtiest places to visit in major cities around the world. Mei was becoming addicted to the lifestyle. Mara’s daughters were the worst influencers.

Sister Ruth took naps in the middle of the day and started skipping classes and leaving her chores half done. In Hong Kong, she entered the rooms of married couples, unmarried lovers, and strangers who had met in bars.

The one thing nearly every human adult had in common was an urge for physical contact in its various forms, from a light touch to the deepest joining.

In Singapore, Mara’s youngest showed the wayward nun the orgiastic gatherings of the wealthy on yachts and in castles and villas in exotic locales.

While her twin sister showed her the joys of romantic wedding nights and honeymoons on tropical islands, remote locations, and getaways.

Mara’s oldest brought her to the darkest places in New York, London and Tokyo, where married cheaters met with working girls for unenjoyed trysts with guilt and sexual addiction.

Mei had discovered an attraction to the sensuality of voyeurism but failed for a moment to recognize her growing attachment to it.

Her newfound freedom enabled her to come and go as she pleased, enter places she was not allowed, and see things she would otherwise have never seen.

To the uninitiated it appeared as if she had succumbed to the temptations of Mara’s girls, and though they had not trapped her, she believed the only way out was further in.

The holy scriptures tell us that the best meditation to counter the lust of the physical form is a contemplation of the horror of the human body.

The bones and organs under the skin are grotesque when uncovered. The smell of the body, when left unwashed for more than a few weeks, is horrible.

The hair and nails grow out of control if not brought to heel with scissors and combs. And the bodily fluids that collect inside our organs and excrete through our pores and orifices are gross.

Yet those organs and bones gave the body such a beautiful structure. It was that blood and bile that gave color to the skin, both thrilling to the touch and electric to the tongue.

The holy sutras tell us that contemplation on the impermanence of the human body can work to counter the attraction toward the young and the pretty because everything dies. Everything changes and decays. Nothing is permanent.

But years and experience attracted Mei to older women, and it was the immediacy and fragility that added beauty to the young.

Her chores were changed. The new ones couldn’t be left half done — and one in particular left her alone in a room with Sister Somi, a Korean nun, a Christian sister, her spiritual crush. A test of will against the Daughters of Mara.

Sisters Ruth and Sister Somi had alphabetized and boxed every file and student form in the cabinets. They sorted, reordered, and re-filed every student by year, gender, month, and name in the new administrative offices in the rebuilt wing of the old building.

They swept and mopped the emptied office clean from the floor to the walls and the ceiling.

Exhausted from filing, cleaning, and smiling, they sat closer than was appropriate on the floor of the empty room against the far wall facing the door.

They touched their feet together more than was necessary and rested in the comfort of each other’s company longer than should have been allowed.

Djinn Somi glanced at her senior sister. Even in noble silence, a look and a look away would say volumes.

When Ruth spoke, her voice rang through Somi like a bell — authority and confidence, the things the men in her village were rumored to have but failed to embody. She had an emotional depth they didn’t. When she smiled, she never covered her mouth. She let it shine.

Like Sister Ruth, Somi had fallen behind in her studies and commitments to the practice. Unquenched desire had disturbed her mind and meditation as well. They had many encounters over the years during moments stolen between tasks, but the only person she could talk to about her feelings was the person upon whom her desires were focused. Who lived in the same building and slept less than a hundred paces away.

“I want to tell you that I’m proud of you,” Ruth told her in a dream. “I’m impressed by your progress, and I love the way you laugh.”

Somi thought little of it because it was only a dream. “I love making you laugh, too,” Somi said.

“But that’s not all,” Ruth added in the dream. “I also love making you smile. I love talking to you and being near you. And if it didn’t break our vows, I would love to make love to you. If I could spend the rest of my life making you happy,” Ruth continued. “It would be the single best use of my time.”

Ruth in the now empty room dropped her eyes and leaned back against the stone wall with a soft sigh. A part of her thought that nothing had to be said. She’d already said it in a dream.

“I know it doesn’t matter much,” Somi whispered, sending a pulse down Little Mei’s spine. “If this is all that we have, it’s meant more to me than you know.” Somi pulled in closer to whisper a secret, “I love you, sister.”

It took Ruth Lubaba a couple of heartbeats to realize that those words were spoken out loud. This was not a dream, but it felt like a dream, and perhaps she’d spent too much time dreaming to know the difference.

“I’m sorry,” Somi said.

“It’s okay,” Ruth reassured her. “I don’t always follow the rules either. And you sometimes make me want to break my vows.”

Her stunning admission echoed in the empty office.

Sister Somi blushed. Her complexion was like strawberry in a butter cake batter.

Mei’s heartbeat quickened with her every breath. It felt like robbing a bank.

“The master was right.” she thought. “How could anyone resist me?”

Sister Somi rose quickly to her feet, leapt into her sandals, and fled, leaving the older nun fighting to catch her breath and slow her heart.

“Forgive me, Mother.” Ruth thought aloud in the empty room. “If this was a test, I did not pass.” She turned her face to the sky obscured by stone and confessed her weaknesses. “I am only human,” she said. “Please help me to be stronger.”

Her desire was as empty as the office they had spent the afternoon clearing. And the shame turned her skin from cherry-red to deepest amber to almost blue.

“How could anyone resist temptation?” she thought aloud. “How could anyone resist the Daughters of Mara?”

The lust for life is a lust for each moment filled with desire, adventure, and the sublime. Mei was finding it hard to resist the temptations of the Daughters of Mara.

“Enough tricks!” she thought. “Why must I convince myself that beauty is an illusion when the illusion is beautiful?”

She imagined a warmth that was slightly out of reach while placing her right hand just there and holding it, squeezing it tight against her wrist. She sent one long digit slowly across the edge of her pulse point. Opening gently her impulse, she took a tiny bite with no regret. Bottom lip, upper teeth pressing down a bit too hard. Exploring feelings of defiance while Mara’s children watched.

“I thought you lived in a school?” Arati said. “Oh my god,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“I don’t think she cares, Arati,” her twin sister responded.

“That’s crazy, Rati,” she agreed. “I think you might be right.”

Mei was breathless and balanced. “Desire can serve as motivation, much like compassion for others and self-compassion,” she thought.

She was fully aware that all phenomena were like illusions and that desire was a construct. It only existed conventionally.

Little Mei gasped again as she realized she was not in her private room, alone, but in an office emptied of paper, chairs, and people but filled with deities and demons that had come to watch the dance between Mei and Mara’s girls.

“You still resist us,” Trisna said. “When you should be disgusted with yourself,” she told Ruth.

Sister Ruth was worried but reasonably sure that she would hear the approach of anyone living, anyone coming.

“Let them come,” Rati said. “I believe she wants an audience.”

“The girl will love herself and the mess she makes of her life,” Trisna offered with a self-satisfied tone.

The Daughters of Mara repeated her wishes like a mantra. “Let them come. Let them come.”

“You’re thinking of breaking your vows,” Arati said. “Bad girl.”

“It’s just a tiny one, Sister.” Rati justified. “Like the length and width of a panted breath.”

“Great passion becomes an object of contemplation or a method of concentration,” Mei theorized. “Like impermanence or perfect liberation.”

“I would expect nothing less from a girl raised by yaks,” Trisna said.

The tendrils of Mei’s imagination found the place where her desire and nervous system converged as her left hand pushed hard against the floor.

“It was merely a flesh wound, Sister.” Rati said. “That’s not breaking a vow at all. She barely touched herself.”

“A thought does not a vow break,” Arati answered. “Oh, what would Mother Chu think?”

A brain becomes flushed with blood, a body filled with energy, and a mind becomes locked in single-pointed concentration. 

With the motivation to help others, Mei climbs and does not fall.

“Stop this!” Mother Chu shouted from a space inside Mei’s head reserved for shame and disappointment.

Like desire, she thought, this is where I find what I’m made of.

Like desire, this is where I become.

“My self,” she thought. “The powerful parts of me.”

The Daughters blushed.

The images of Mara’s Daughters faded into nothingness as Sister Ruth floated into the clear light of emotional clarity.

They never spoke again; those naughty Daughters of Mara, but they were always close. And Mei’s voyeuristic addiction didn’t so much fade as pass into curiosity, as did her desire for sexual adventure or the need for abandon on the inner net of the astral plane.

Over the next several years, Mei Lubaba used her sleeping hours for sleep and her waking hours for contemplation and study. The guilt lifted gradually, the way a bruise does — color by color, most of it anyway. She and Somi remained what they had always been to each other — close enough to feel the pull, wise enough to stand at its edge.

A small part of her ego wished she had never said those things to Sister Somi in a dream. But that, the dream master would say, is what dreams are for. To say the true thing in the place where it costs nothing — and carry the knowledge back with you into the light. ||

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Squat Politics

The following document is a field report submitted in March of 1995 concerning an incident involving several members of an illegal organization known as “crusties” and an undercover officer whose name has been withheld.

Portions of this report reference illegal activity, controlled substances, and violence. These references are included solely for the purpose of documentation.

All dialogue was reconstructed from notes and presented as accurately as possible. Statements attributed to individuals reflect their words as spoken and do not imply endorsement.

Observations regarding intent, motivation, or emotional state are limited to what could be reasonably inferred during the incident in question based on body language, behavior, timbre of speech, and context.

This is an official confidential document. Do not copy or distribute. Do not upload or disseminate. Do not shred, burn, otherwise destroy or make unreadable by alteration.

October 1994. 

A man in his mid twenties with shoulder length matted, unwashed blonde hair sat under a bus stop shelter on the Lower East Side clutching something tightly in his left hand. He muttered strange words to himself. He appeared to be homeless and quite possibly high on meth or crack. Local residents called him Johnny.

Johnny spoke to no one in particular. “You can have my money,” he said. “You can have my body, my time, but my brain is my own. I will do with it what I want.”

DON’T SMOKE POT 

A public service ad on the side of a city bus warned of the dangers of smoking marijuana using fried eggs as a stand-in for the human brain. When Johnny saw the ad, it angered him.

“Fuck you,” he told the side panel. “I’ll smoke what I want.”

Several passersby ignored the young musician as he cursed to himself. “Fuck your laws and fuck your grandfather’s laws,” he yelled at the bus signage.

Johnny put his thumb and forefinger to his lips and inhaled, pretending to pull on an imaginary cannabis cigarette. He offered it to the side of the bus before it pulled away.

“Wanna hit?” he said. “No?! Tight ass,” he said, mocking the M14 as it continued soberly on its route. “Just say no to drugs.”

Two stories above the bus stop, in a small, sparsely furnished apartment in an abandoned building, two women were overheard arguing about drug use. Ironically, it was the same argument Johnny was having with the bus.

The building was called a “squat.” The people who lived there were called “crusties.” And the couple fighting on the third floor were named Rachel and Bambi. It was Wednesday.

“You’re full of shit.” Bambi yelled. “You don’t care if I’m using. You just want to know who I’m with.”

“I’m full of shit?” Rachel responded to her girlfriend by shoving her onto their bed. “Answer the question, baby. Do you like pussy or do you like dick?”

“There’s a bunch of dudes I could be fucking, but I’m here with you.”

“You’re just so fucking popular,” Rachel said sarcastically. “You know what you are?”

“No, tell me.”

“You’re a schizophrenic.”

“Having a bisexual girlfriend isn’t like living with someone with multiple personality disorder, babe,” Rachel said. “You’re being dramatic.”

“You call this living? I call it whoring.”

“I call it kidnapping and unlawful imprisonment.” Bambi tried to stand up but Rachel shoved her back down to the bed. “You can’t keep me from doing what I want.” 

Bambi caught the sound of her own voice and wished she sounded cooler.

Rachel began to pace in front of the bed like a prison guard. “I’m not letting you self destruct.”

“Aren’t you a fucking saint.”

“This isn’t a joke, Bambi. Stop being a little selfish cunt.”

“Don’t call me a cunt. I’m a whore remember. Get it right.”

“If that’s what you want to be, cunt.”

“Fuck you. You knew what I was when we started dating. At least I’m not pretending. When are you going to tell your folks about us?”

“Never. And don’t change the subject. You’d say anything to get high right now.”

“Is it working?” Bambi asked with a smile.

“If you could see yourself. You’ve become exactly the thing you said you hated.” Rachel told her.

“I know what I am. I’m a white girl with a coke problem. Young and pretty enough to make easy money on the avenue any time I want.”

“Capitalism rewards a sociopath.”

“…and puts a psychopath in charge.” Bambi replied. “Yes. I know.”

Rachel shoved Bambi back onto the bed again and pulled an unloaded 38 caliber pistol from a dresser drawer. 

Rachel held the pistol in her left hand, but Bambi ignored it like it was a stage prop. The gun was real but she never kept it loaded.

“Are you going to kill me?” Bambi asked her. “Because if not,” she said sweetly. “Just let me go out and earn enough for an eight ball and I’ll share it with you.”

Rachel pointed the gun at her heart and pulled the trigger. The symbolic act made Bambi flinch. “Fuck you,” Rachel said to her as she pulled the trigger again and again firing metaphorical bullet into her overdramatic heart. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.”

Bambi winced with every trigger pull. She knew the gun was harmless but the sentiment behind the pantomime was as disturbing as always. Every fake bullet took a lot out of her. 

“I’m not stupid.” Rachel said dropping her guard in a moment of depressing realization.

Bambi used the moment to fling herself off the bed and dashed to the door. “Stop being jealous, babe. You know you wish you were me.”

“Where are you going?” Rachel called after her.

“I need coffee. You want anything?”

Bambi was out the door and down the stairs before Rachel could answer.

“Coffee,” Rachel said. “Bring me back some coffee.”

Downstairs from the fighting couple, across the street from the raving lunatic, a man in an army jacket begged for change beside an open guitar case. The guitar leaned against the wall behind him.

“A wise man once said,”he began, “that you’re only as healthy as you feel and only as wise as you seem.” Then he held out his hand and said, “Spare some change.”

Manny (not his real name) had been undercover in the East Village for a few weeks. He slept in his vehicle and thought he smelled like a wet rat who had rolled around in cigarette butts. 

He couldn’t wait until the assignment was over. He felt like crap, smelled like crap and thought he looked like an idiot. 

Manny had waited almost a month before establishing himself on the corner of Avenue A and 11th. He didn’t just move right in. He stumbled around the area first. He was the right age and build. He was fairly attractive and white. His next step was to make contact with the group. It happened on a Wednesday.

“Spare some change for a slice of pizza,” he said to anyone who passed by. He wasn’t very good at panhandling. No one gave him anything. Perhaps, he didn’t sound desperate enough. 

“Spare some change,” he whined.

Bambi exited the coffee mart with two fresh cups of coffee, one less condom than she had before she walked in, and a plastic baggy full of uncut booger sugar courtesy of local drug spot.

She was itching to get back to her girl but thought young Manny looked pathetic and had to help him out. “You’re doing it wrong,” she said.

“How should I be doing it?”

“You’re too serious,” she instructed him. “Nobody wants to give money to a deranged poor person. Only billionaires and armed muggers can get away with that.” 

She glanced back at the guitar case. “Let me show you,” she said, shifting into character.

She addressed the pedestrians as they passed. “Spare some change so I can get my mom out of jail.” She joked. “Spare ten thousand pesos for a Mexican boob job.”

She laughed at herself. “And if comedy doesn’t work, try honesty. Excuse me, sir, can you spare a dollar for drugs?”

An older man in a bomber jacket tossed a dollar into the guitar case before entering the pizza parlor.

“See what I mean?” Bambi said. “You need to offer them more than just guilt.”

Manny shrugged as a man in a trench coat stepped forward and said. “Get a job.”

“Suck my dick,” Bambi told the man, without missing a beat.

“Crusties,” the man said their name like a curse. “You sit around drinking and expect us to pay for it.”

“We make this neighborhood cool. Go back to your rent controlled apartment,” Bambi shot back. “Let me guess, you inherited it from your grandparents.”

A woman with a thick Indian accent and a small dog joined the conversation. “What about the children who see you on the avenue?”

“This is a free country,” Bambi said.

A crowd turned as quickly as it formed.

“It ain’t that free.”

“Go back to where you came from.”

“My kid thinks tattoos and piercings are cool.”

“You crusties are disgusting.”

“You can all kiss my ass!” Bambi yelled, and the crowd dissipated just as quickly as it turned. “I never said I was a role model.”

Bambi introduced herself to the undercover officer. She asked where he slept and Manny told her he had a tent in the park.

“I don’t think so,” she corrected him. “You smell like you live in your car.”

He didn’t argue.

There was an instant attraction. She handed him a flyer to a party at her squat. It promised two punk bands, cheap beer, and a good time. She promised him a possible new living situation if her squat mates liked him. 

She pointed across the avenue as Rachel stepped outside their building with a bag of trash and dropped it illegally into a city can.

Manny noted the violations. There was never a cop around when you needed one. They were stealing sanitation services and the city’s electricity. Two of the many offenses he would witness but not report before the night was over. He had to maintain cover.

The details of his assignment have not been cleared for this document. 

“Bam Bam! Get your ass over here!” Rachel shouted.

Bambi frowned, then smiled back at Manny. “My girlfriend is always jealous but we have an understanding,” She sighed. “Come early, stay late. Meet everybody. Help us set up. There’s a ten dollar cover charge.”

Bambi crossed the street, spun around then walked backward a few steps, waving back at Manny just enough to make her girlfriend jealous.

Rachel grabbed her by the arm and dragged her inside. She had coffees. She had cocaine. It should be noted that hours before the incident, both Bambi and Rachel seemed happy. 

The following is a partial list of illegal activities witnessed by the officer (name withheld) within five minutes of first contact:

Possession of a controlled substance 

Theft of city services 

Prostitution 

Solicitation

Trespassing

Panhandling 

Reckless Endangerment 

Lacking permits and/or licenses for 

Liquor, Live Music, Public Gathering, Construction and Public Safety

DON’T SNORT COKE

On the bus stop shelter there was a poster warning riders of the dangers of snorting cocaine. Two hands held a vial of powder and a tiny spoon that could be bought at any smoke shop.

All it needed was an arrow pointing to the bodega across the street that sold grams of coke and bad coffee for it to be a literal advertisement for the stuff.

If the message was don’t do drugs, Johnny didn’t believe it had the effect they intended.

“Don’t do drugs?” Johnny said to the sign, addressing the imaginary ad execs who had green-lit the campaign. “I’m in charge on this one. I’ll snort all the coke.” He mimed snorting a line off the picture, then smiled, pleased with himself. “That’s good shit.” Then he laughed and fell back into the bus stop bench.

Johnny B. Goode played guitar at that bus stop all Summer long. Everybody loved him but no one in the neighborhood seemed to care that he was losing his mind because someone had stolen his guitar.

FIELD REPORT

The following is a FIELD REPORT from the night of the incident. The agent secretly recorded conversations, drug use and sexual activity. Normally he would have been removed from active duty pending investigation but the situation and details of his assignment were far from normal.

October 1994

Officer (name redacted)

The assignment was going relatively well. I’d made contact with the group. Several of which were friends with the subject 

REDACTED. 

I arrived to the party early. I helped to set up chairs and the bar. Once the music started it was far too loud for information gathering. I realized that i would have to stick around for the after party.

In a large common room, the crusties sat drinking cheap beer, while a punk band played to a packed house in the basement. All the money they made went directly to buying drugs.

I drank beer and smoked pot when offered and only started the audio recording once the band had finished and the only music came from a cassette player with detachable speakers.

What follows is a transcript of the afterparty reconstructed from the recording with additional notes and observations taken from interviews and accounts:

The primary contact was a twenty three year old caucasian girl called Bambi by her peers. She introduced me to the other crusties with their street name and their drug of choice.

“This is Spider. Heroin. She’s a whore.”

“Not me, bitch—you,” Spider argued. “You think maybe we’ll get some work done before everyone disappears into their rooms.”

“This is Cockroach. Meth. We call him Roach.”

“What do you do, Roach?” I asked him.

“I smoke meth,” he replied. Cockroach was a tall skinny, curly haired jewish boy with a new nasty scar across his forehead and an anarchist tattoo on his neck.

“So, check this out,” he said, already talking too fast. “I was passed out on the avenue, right? And some fool smashes a beer bottle over my head. You see this big fucking scar? Who raises these kids? I wasn’t doing nothing.”

Cockroach barely breathed between words. “So Wolf takes me up to Beth Israel on his motor scooter. Just as long as I don’t get blood on him right. But I did.”

“Which one?” Bambi stopped him.

“The hospital on 23rd.”

“Which Wolf?” she corrected him. “Red Wolf? Brown Wolf? The Big Bad wolf? There are a lot wolves down here.”

“You know Black Wolf who sells the good meth down where that bike shop used to be?” He barely waited for an answer. “Him,” he said before continuing his story. “So my head’s bleeding all over the place, right? Because heads bleed like shit, and the bitch at the hospital-“

“Nurse.” Bambi corrected him. 

“Bitch gives me a Band-Aid and two Tylenol, and says i gotta go.”

“Because you had no insurance?” I asked.

“Because you were homeless,” Bambi stated.

“No,” Roach said. “Because I kept calling her a bitch. She’s telling me to calm down and shit. I’m like sure bitch, but I smoked meth on the way over here so good luck with that.”

“You smoked meth with a bleeding head wound?” I asked.

 Cockroach looked at me like I had said something in a made up language and didn’t respond.

“So what happened?” Bambi prompted him.

“Bitch called the cops.”

“Because you kept calling her a bitch.”

“I didn’t know the bitch’s name.”

“So what did the cops do?”

“They drove me downtown and threw me out the squad car around block from here. They said they weren’t allowed on this block. They didn’t want to do no paperwork or some shit.” 

Cockroach smiled and repeated what he must have thought was the most important part of his story. “They gave me Tylenol with codeine, Man.”

“That’s harsh.”

“I sold it for meth.”

“Dude.” Bambi moved on.

“This is Sloth. Cannabis. He was an assistant to a professor of comparative religion at Columbia.”

“Seriously?”

Sloth was a pot smoker who lived on religious conspiracy and political paranoia.

“Are you a cop?” he asked me. “You have to tell me if you’re a cop.”

I don’t.

“That’s the law.”

It’s not.

“I’m just kidding,” he said then whispered, “We save our pee. Don’t throw out your piss jars. Cops freak out when you throw pee on them. It’s our secret weapon.”

“Come on, Sloth, man. Urine based warfare against the Geneva conventions, Cops are people too.” Spider said.

Sloth continued unbothered. “They can’t shoot you for throwing pee.”

Yes, they can.

“This is our home,” he said. “Sixty gallons of piss say I ain’t leaving.”

Bambi continued down the line.

“This is Rachel. Her drug of choice is drama. I’m just kidding. This is my girlfriend.”

Around the room, people smoked, snorted, and injected drugs under their skin but Rachel continued to tell me there was no drugs allowed with a straight face.

“I’ll be careful,” I told her as Bambi led me upstairs for the house tour. 

Bambi’s drug of choice was cocaine and she took it any way she could.

She opened the door to what was supposed to be my new apartment. It was bigger than my place back in Wichita but there was a hole in the ceiling and floor that went straight through from the apartment above to the room underneath. “It’s not official, but this ones yours. You can stay tonight but we’ll have to vote tomorrow.”

Back downstairs, Sloth sniffed the air where I had sat. “That dude smells like an undercover cop,” he said again.

He was paranoid but he wasn’t wrong. Everyone laughed.

“What’s a crusty?” I asked them.

Rachel explained. “Crusties don’t shower. They don’t change clothes. They just get crustier and crustier. It’s an insult like the n-word but we’re taking it back like NWA.”

Being filthy and smelly was a point of pride with some of them that I did not understand. They couldn’t trust me because of my smell. I quoted some bullshit to throw them off the scent.

“I think it was Confucius who said, If you want to know the past, look at the state of your body. If you want to know the future, look at the state of your mind.” I told them.

“Isn’t that Shakespeare?”

“Nah, man, it from Buddha. It’s from the crusty sutras.”

“And if you want to know the present,” Bambi said loudly ending the argument. “Just look at the state this place is in. Help me clean up a little before everybody does their own thing.”

For Bambi, each drug high produced a different kind of uselessness. What she really needed was a few more coked up friends to help her collect bottles.

“The Commies are destroying Buddhist culture,” Sloth said suddenly, rushing to the window. “They killed thousands of monks. Burned dozens of books. Destroyed countless temples.”

No one seemed to follow his train of thought. 

“You can’t even keep pictures of the his holiness anymore.”

“Dude. Shanqui Jian wasn’t real. That’s just some shit the Beastie Boys made up.” Spider said.

The smell was getting to me. Their collective ignorance was getting to me. The beer and the drugs were getting to me.

[themelrookarchives]

The Book of Rook

Poor people commit crimes because they’re broke. Rich people commit crimes because they’re broken. The rest of us commit crimes because we’re bored.

“Brother Rook!” Spider yelled to her old friend. Melvin was across the street from her favorite corner to work. “You always out here selling your books,” she said. “You need to open your own bookstore.”

“I’m too poor for that,” Melvin said.

“You only poor because you wanna be. Some people ain’t got no choice.” She turned to a slowing car and propositioned the driver. “You want a date?”

“Everybody’s got a choice,” Melvin yelled back as the working girl hopped in the car and it rolled away. Melvin took note of the make, model, and license plate, and then he continued his thought. “It’s just not always a good choice,” he said.

When a poor kid breaks the law, they are often presented to the public as evil, even when what they are is lost in a sea of systemic inequality. What they need is compassion. What they get is villainized.

At the same time, rich kids get portrayed as having made a few mistakes, with words like, “He just slipped up.” Or, “She got in with the wrong crowd.” Quote, “We shouldn’t ruin their lives over one transgression.” Unquote. Even if that transgression is rape or murder.

This economic distinction starts in preschool and follows imperfect people through middle school, high school, college, and well into the pros. Local news producers exacerbate this double standard and run with it. People are portrayed differently depending on race, gender, religion, and most often economic class.

At the top of the leniency list was the young Christian girl with her straight blonde hair and daddy’s lawyer. At the bottom of the list was a dark-skinned boy with dreadlocks and an absentee father who was probably an atheist or a Muslim.

Good versus wicked isn’t always as black and white as The Wizard of Oz. You don’t have to get hit over the head with a house to realize we’re not in Kansas anymore.

Melvin Hawthorne could make other people feel his emotions, and most of the time it was involuntary. The people on the street called him Brother Rook, Mel Rook, or just Rook. He made friends with the beggars, the drug dealers, and the whores. The street people found him refreshingly honest and not all judgey because he treated everyone as if they deserved dignity until they proved otherwise, and he never compared himself to them. To him, life was not a competition.

“I only compare myself to the sky,” he said.

Melvin would look at the weather and ask, “What have I done to live up to this present moment, and how can I make it better?”

It was his life’s goal to always be pleasant to be around, but that was harder than it sounded and required alcohol, drugs, sex, and some form of entertainment.

“Look at the sun,” he said. “The sun is ancient. It’s 4.6 billion years old. And it is temporary. So why should our suffering be any different? What makes a person feel like their problems are more substantial than the sun?”

The officer, in his report, said he gave Melvin a lawful order that he refused to obey. He had ordered Melvin to pick up the books that were on the blanket in front of him and leave.

Every weekend, vendors, addicts, and homeless people lay out their wares, belongings, creations, or found objects on tables or blankets for collectors, artists, and bargain seekers to browse and buy, only to be shut down periodically by police.

However, the order to disperse did not apply to booksellers. They were covered under the First Amendment. Americans were allowed to sell or give away books, newspapers, and pamphlets in public by law, with some caveats, as long as they weren’t pornographic or promoted real-world violence, and as long as they weren’t blocking the way.

Melvin wasn’t doing any of that, but on that particular day, Melvin was being told to pick up his books and leave, and he was complying.

About a dozen officers banged on tables, shouted orders, and made a show of shutting the flea market down. Normally two or three cops handled it. This time they arrived in force.

The rest of the vendors were in violation of multiple statutes and were given tickets or slaps on the wrist. There was nothing they could do to Melvin except ask him to leave.

Officer James Cowardice was the one named in Melvin’s counter-complaint, along with Abigail Weakness. It was James who blocked Melvin’s way.

The officer’s feet were planted firmly on two of Melvin’s most expensive books: an old Bible from before the Second World War and an old unabridged dictionary that had been in his family for generations.

They were the oldest and most important books in Melvin’s collection. If he were going to start a bookstore, they’d be in a glass case under a sign that said, Rare Books.

He was standing on them, making it impossible to pick them up, the books or the blanket underneath.

Melvin wasn’t angry. He was concerned. He carefully picked up all the books except the two under the officer’s feet, put them in a green duffle bag, and prepared to leave.

He was mindful not to bump into the book-hating Officer Cowardice or disrespect him or his book-hating boots in any way. The officer seemed to enjoy having Melvin crawling around at his feet. There was a time in this country when a Black man with a book was a hanging offense, and it really wasn’t that long ago.

Had he grabbed the blanket under the books and pulled it hard, the officer would have tumbled to the ground like a sack of shit. But he didn’t do that.

Instead he said, “Excuse me, officer. You’re standing on my books.”

Melvin swore on his life that he asked him to move in the sweetest, politest, most non-threatening tone he could muster. Honestly, he did. He’d seen wealthy white women curse out police officers and not get arrested. He didn’t have that sort of clout.

Rook found himself face down on the pavement in an instant. Officer Cowardice put his knee in Rook’s back and yanked his right arm behind it.

Almost immediately, another two officers dove on top of him, grabbing his other wrist and one of his legs and also twisting them violently past the manufacturer’s recommendation for the care and maintenance of a human body.

Only one limb remained unclaimed. His right leg was like a quiet girl at a school function, waiting to be asked to dance.

Rook was already on the ground. There was a grown man on one leg. Two more had his arms and a knee in his back. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wasn’t struggling. And more importantly, he had done absolutely nothing wrong.

They pretended to be wrestling with him while shouting, “Stop resisting.” He was not resisting. “Stop fighting.” He was not fighting. They were moving his limbs.

They were trying to make it look like they weren’t physically abusing the man in front of witnesses by claiming he was fighting back. He was not, but this was before the age of cell phones and video evidence. They were in control of the narrative.

That’s when Officer Weakness arrived on the scene. She was Abigail to her mom. Abby to her friends. A period Weakness on official reports. She watched the events unfold.

“She saw it all,” his lawyer would say. “Officer Weakness witnessed the savage beating of a man who offered no resistance and then made it worse.”

If Melvin’s Great-Grandma Lilly had been there, she would have backhanded the girl. “Why was she even wearing that uniform?” she would ask, then try to feed everybody.

Officer James Cowardice addressed his superior officer with disdain reserved for her gender.

“What are you gonna do, Abby?” he prodded. “Just stand there?” His tone was thick with mockery. He nodded toward Brother Rook’s unaccompanied right leg as if to say, ask it to dance.

Abby could have half-heartedly grabbed his ankle and sarcastically yelled, “Stop resisting.” That would have been enough to satisfy her bullies. But she went a step further.

Officer Weakness went above and beyond. She grabbed his leg with both hands and spun it counterclockwise past six, past nine, past the point when most people would have stopped.

The policewoman spun his lower leg at the knee joint until his kneecap cracked and he screamed.

Melvin heard the scream in the distance. It was guttural but high-pitched. Unsettling, unnerving, and inhuman. The scream came from someplace inside of him where African boys ran from dogs and riders, where whips cracked and mothers cried for stolen children.

While Melvin screamed, the other officers cackled in delight. A symphony of cruelty. An opera of pain.

They were awful, but she was the reason he wouldn’t be able to sit without pain. She was the limp in his afternoon gait. She was the reason why he stopped playing pickup basketball at the Y and why he couldn’t play softball in the park on Sunday.

This was not her finest hour.

Over the next several years, as the mayor cracked down on the vendors and the homeless, there were riots downtown. Tompkins Square Park became a war zone. The cops bulldozed squats and public gardens while the lifetime residents, the artists, and bohemians fought cops, overturned cars, and vandalized their own neighborhood.

Melvin knew everything was temporary and tried not to let the bad mood fester, but it was hard.

“We could all be swallowed by the earth tomorrow,” he liked to say. “Everything we feel, want, think, have, or believe can be gone in an instant, even our hatred. It feels as permanent as a mountain. But even a mountain can become a volcano and be gone by the morning.”

Melvin’s anger was spreading like lava. Out of control. Oz was in full revolt. We were definitely not in Kansas anymore.

This wasn’t the first time, or the last time, that police had harassed him, but it was the only time that had left a big nasty scar.

[themelrookarchives]

Squat Politics

23–34 minutes The following document is a field report submitted in March of 1995 concerning an incident involving several members of an illegal organization known as “crusties” and an undercover officer whose name has been withheld. Portions of this report reference illegal activity, controlled substances, and violence. These references are included solely for the purpose of…

Squat Politics

[themelrookarchives]

The Book of Rook

7–11 minutes Poor people commit crimes because they’re broke. Rich people commit crimes because they’re broken. The rest of us commit crimes because we’re bored. “Brother Rook!” Spider yelled to her old friend. Melvin was across the street from her favorite corner to work. “You always out here selling your books,” she said. “You need to open your own bookstore.” “I’m too poor for that,” Melvin…

The Book of Rook

[themelrookarchives]

The Joy of Painting Your Own Reality

Mama Muni was the university’s librarian. She was forgiving and sweet, sharp-witted and patient. She was a matron to even the older women in the nunnery, and she intimidated all but the most senior men. 

Mama Muni kept the university's vast collection of holy books and ancient truths safe from those not ready to view them. She was the keeper of knowledge.

The younger sisters only called her Mama Muni behind her back. It was Mother Muni to her face, and she encouraged Ruth to explore the teachings of magic and to trust her insights, visions, and dreams. She was the first person on the university staff who did not talk down to the grown woman Little Mei had become.

“A person is wise if, though wanting the best, they examine whether the best is fitting,” Mother Muni had said, and it hung carved in wood above the library’s heavy double doors that opened slowly but slammed shut as if they were spring-loaded.

There were more than three hundred rules for living the life of an awakened woman. These ranged from grooming to dancing to the ones you’d expect about what to eat and what not to eat, what to wear and what not to wear, and of course, stealing and killing and lying, but they also included rules about speaking to men and to monks and other stuff you’d never expect. But the question on Ruth’s lips was what the rules said about self-pleasure.

“Self-what, dear?” Mother Muni held one finger to her ear and leaned toward Ruth. 

Muni had been the university’s librarian since the mid-19th century. She had heard all the questions before. 

In the library atrium, on the first level of three, with a spiral staircase that spun its way up the center, under a skylight ceiling with a reflective chandelier that offered natural light in the day, moonlight at night, and candlelight when the weather made it necessary. The university held a policy that guaranteed an open exchange of knowledge, and in a library where almost everything intriguing to Little Mei was forbidden, Mama Muni had seen and heard it all. 

“I’m looking for something that explains the rules on masturbation in detail.”

“For monastics?” the Mother asked incredulously.

“Of course.”

“Well, I have books on the rules of sexual conduct by laypeople on retreat and for those who have taken vows.” Mother Muni said coldly. “And you will find them on the third level in the back.” she motioned in the direction with her entire arm, and then she added, “Please refrain from touching yourself while you’re there.” the mother giggled like a woman over eighty with the effortlessness of a girl under eight.

The writings and the rules of sexual misconduct varied from era to era. The ancient scribes were from different cultures and different countries. And even then, the awakened ones’ answers were inconsistent and depended on who had questioned each lord on the subject. 

There have been many awakened ones throughout history, but in this context, Mei was going to focus on Jesus and Buddha and then stop, not because these were the two most important but the two that she was most familiar with, and that should be enough. 

Shantideva University was one of the oldest centers of traditional knowledge in existence. Famous scholars had passed through its walls. Graduates went on to become teachers, and teachers went on to become legends. 

Debaters and meditators of great renown were the institution’s alum. But under the surface, it was also a storehouse of ultimate knowledge accessible to a lucky few Gnostic Christians and tantric practitioners.

Mei’s class schedule included discipline and morality in practice. She hadn’t chosen a domain yet, so she was in what the students sarcastically referred to as a comparative awakened state. She was window shopping enlightenment. There were many ways to become a fully awakened being, but she hadn’t chosen her path. 

Mei had an affinity for Christian Philosophy and Debate in the Tibetan tradition. Her guidance counselor recommended she take Zen and Mahamudra Meditation with a focus on mastering the mystic arts. 

Mei studied history on her own and audited classes in the physical and natural sciences. She had a full schedule, along with her duties at the orphanage, her assigned monastic chores, and thousands upon thousands of mandatory prayers, prostrations, and recitations.

The university halls were littered with supernatural beings and masters of spiritual disciplines long passed. Mei had a hard time separating the astral from the physical, but that wasn’t her only problem. 

In most classes, there would be a physical instructor who everyone saw and a metaphysical professor only some could see. Both taught the same subject but in very different ways.

During Zen Meditation, her teacher quoted a master named Suzuki, who had died many years before but stood there correcting every word as she spoke. 

Mahamudra classes included famous meditators and mahasiddhas seated side by side with classmates and teachers. She could see them all, and there were so many from every realm and every level of existence that occupied the same metaphysical space. She found it difficult to concentrate and needed extra guidance.

The elder librarian met Little Mei’s eyes with compassion for her suffering. “What can I actually help you with, my dear?” she said amusedly.

Mei hardly knew what to say to the older nun as she took in the extensive collection of knowledge with her senses. The great library was quiet, but it buzzed with the anticipation of shared knowledge like an old church bell that still vibrated faintly in the cold air, even after not being rung in years. 

Mei felt the peace of what was missing. There was no ethereal being in the library, not one. There was no one here but the living. Mother Muni had a secret.

The mother spoke impatiently. “You must be wondering why there are no souls in here,” she said.

Mei took a long exhale and sighed, “It’s so peaceful. I want to stay here.“

Shantideva University was two schools layered, one on top of the other. Some students attended a conventional school, while others attended a somewhat less conventional one. And it all depended on how sensitive a new student was to the unseen. 

The librarian eyed the younger nun worriedly, “You look like you’ve got it bad.”

“I think I may lose my mind.”

“You won't.” the Mother said with a sly smile. “What you see are pieces of past pupils and teachers who left imprints in the physical and metaphysical space while the rest of their consciousness traveled on to their next iteration. Autonomous echoes of past masters roam the halls.”

“They are everywhere.” Mei continued. “I can't make sense of it all.”

“You need to narrow your vision,” the mother said. “There is a book about painting. You will find it on the third level in the west wing.” Mother Muni motioned with her arm toward the west wall and then cautioned the novice. “Keep reading the book. Read it again and again until you fully understand it. Do this to the exclusion of all else. A lesson half learned is far more dangerous than total ignorance, and no one else can learn it for you or explain it to you.”  

“Wait. Isn’t that where the sex books are?”

“No. There are no books like that in here, young lady,” Mother showed Mei a strange smile that suggested she might be lying. “This is a library.”

On the third level, in the back, there was a wooden case with no lock. In it was a collection of meditation instructors written by past masters next to a desk and a cot with a blanket. The books were unbound, fragile, and not to be removed from the library. There were thin rubber gloves next to the case. 

Mei put the gloves on, sat at the desk, and began to read. She never heard the bells or had to sleep or left to eat. Mei studied the text, and it didn’t make sense in the context of her problem. So she reread it as she had been instructed.

It told the story of a painter who painted over a thousand portraits on one canvas. His mentor had advised him not to paint on a canvas that already held so many images, but he didn’t listen. 

He painted one on top of another on top of another. He painted in darker hues to cover the lighter layers and then used bright, vibrant colors on top of the darkest ones. 

The book was called The Joy in the Art of Painting Reality, and it spoke in painstaking detail about colors, shades, and tints. The book showed Little Mei how a darker past could be viewed through the pleasant pastel of a present moment or entirely hidden by a brightly colored future. But every time she read it, it seemed to say more in the same words.

Mei believed that it suggested to her that what she was seeing was worlds on top of worlds. She could see realms superimposed over this one. Each with a different hue and a different brightness. 

Most people miss the true nature of reality. They can’t see the other realms that occupy our shared space, like an image on top of an image in a photograph. Or a painting on top of a painting on a canvas.

Mei recognized the layers of reality as others did not because she had drawn them. Imprints in time like paint left behind, but only she could know the true picture.

Where others saw empty halls and classrooms, Sister Ruth saw a millennium of past residents—images of past students and the academic imprints of centuries-old professors. 

Over the next few years, she discovered she could flip through time and view the monastery’s history through visions of its former occupants, pieces of their essence, and impressions, both lasting and robust.

The first rule of painting your reality was never to talk about it with anyone else. The uninitiated or the unfamiliar could take the spoken word as literal. Actual mystic progress was found by the learned mindful between the truth and the metaphor. It was found between the parable and the paradoxical. 

The initiate understood that each esoteric phenomenon existed as the unlabeled center of a Venn diagram of imprecise words and descriptions that had to be turned over in the mind until it could be felt. 

Ultimate reality was often coded and draped in regimented and repeated actions to deter the half-hearted from leaving half-learned and destroying their whole world.

Painting reality was a part of her practice that she did not share with anyone. It could negatively affect her peers and younger teachers. They could become disillusioned and jealous. They could foster feelings of hatred and accusations of fakery. It might even inspire others to leave the path entirely— a mortal sin in every tradition.

It was the holy abbot himself that suggested she concentrate her studies on the history of mysticism. She had an uncanny aptitude. She learned to differentiate between ghostly forms and mental impressions. She could see projections from the past and the future.

She learned that being sensitive to the spirit world without wards and protection was like being a magnet to the demons that her guilt created. 

Without protection, her unfettered guilty conscience was free to paint punishments for her past mistakes. To put it plainly, she could paint herself into hell without confession, forgiveness, and absolution.

Mei learned to burn frankincense when meditating, along with myrrh and she melted flakes of gold in hot oils to discourage tricksters and demons who could attempt to manipulate her guilt. These tricksters could even drive a practitioner to self-harm. For this reason, in particular, reality painting was only meant to be attempted with trusted guidance.

Sister Ruth chuckled at the thought of suicide. She had too big of an ego to deny the world even a moment of her presence. 

Her reality practice worked to slowly lessen her ego grasping while, simultaneously, she was being saved by it. 

These were secrets hidden in a book about painting. Only after it was misunderstood could it be learned. It was a delicate and critical balance that felt like walking a tightrope made of sand.

Over the next several years, she learned to project her astral body during sleep through consistent reading, instruction, and practice. She visited places as far away as she could imagine—countries and continents. Her meditation teacher told her that time was not a factor in her travel and that she could also visit other sites at different eras throughout history. She learned that her movement through space or time was the same discipline. The only difference was her mind.

With a multiverse of other realms that opened up to her, Sister Ruth looked forward to her sleeping hours. She had found freedom in her dreams. Her sisters would call her lazy for how much time she spent sleeping, but she never cared much for what others thought or the box they placed her in. She would eventually learn to walk through walls while awake, and when she did, no prison would hold her. ||

[themelrookarchives]

Still Life in Gutter w/ Guitar

18–26 minutes A collective of dolphins is called a pod. A group of ravens is known as a congress. A parliament of owls. A sangha of Buddhists. A murder of crows. But did you know a collection of beggars is called a taxation? A taxation of beggars. It’s from Shakespeare. And a gang of crack smokers is known as a chaos. A chaos of crackheads. Reagan era. A hedge fund of coke fiends. Bush Senior.…

Still Life in Gutter w/ Guitar

[themelrookarchives]

How to Rescue a Dying Planet

The evening’s haze diffused the fading light of the setting sun beautifully as my craft descended and landed safely onto the planet surface. Thank the Gods.

I was the first of my kind to set toe and claw on this blue rock. The first Lameer to visit. The first lizard traveler to claim an unclaimed and massive salvage. If all goes well I will be rich.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I had been tracked and that I was being hunted.

Tactical:

I checked the dials on the console before trying to take my helmet off. Oxygen and nitrogen filled the cabin along with radiation that would end me in less than an hour without my meds, but I couldn’t make the first injection until I got the suit off.

First I slipped the safety catch under the chin. Then the second catch at the back of the neck. Then I pushed the release catch up and forward as the manual said. But the manual was wrong. My helmet wouldn’t budge.

Personal:

It took me far too long to figure my way out of that oppressively heavy piece of safety equipment, my prison for ninety-seven and a quarter turns.

Academic:

The air was dry and breathable outside.

Personal:

Wet and dank inside my helmet.

Private:

It smelled like three months of bad breath, body odor, and stomach gas mixed with synth air and whatever these engineers called food.

Father:

I arrived ahead of schedule. You were right about the sunset. I wish you could see it. The planet is vibrant. These living colors do not exist on our world. I ask you, would a God know how much we enjoy their work if we do not stand still to appreciate it.

Tactical:

The planet was virtually unoccupied. An excellent candidate for a forward outpost; either that or this dying blue rock could be stripped and sold for parts. The Military, The Exchange, The Academy—they were all going to line up to pay me for this find. I fully intend to claim this planet, but first I had to clean out this radiation.

Opinion:

The sheer number of bombs they dropped on themselves is hard to contend with.

Personal:

There was once clean water here. There will be again.

Tactical:

After the helmet, the suit, the inoculations, and an equipment check, all I needed was to set up the processors and get rid of the locals.

Father:

Tell the boys I won’t be staying long. This is going to be a quick trip. Just long enough to clean the air, start the water processors, and collect a few samples. I’ll be back before you know it, and don’t worry, I’m in very little danger.

Tactical:

My first priority was survival.

There was once a civilization here. There still remained scattered life forms, remnants of intelligence. They do not travel through time. They no longer travel in space, and they cannot save themselves, but they are dangerous nonetheless.

Opinion:

These aren’t the bloodthirsty killers the Iuhuh were. Their records indicate evidence of xenophobia, self-hatred, and global superpowers who effectively ended their own history. Wealthy sociopaths who controlled the media and convinced the population to vote against their best interests, and a generational hatred and mistrust of their neighbors. It was a civil war. It was a suicide. It was a bloodbath.

Father:

I can’t get over how beautiful this place is. I believe this is a dead planet, but the colors are very much alive.

The fallout from the radiation in the atmosphere gives the air a slight sparkle. It’s magnificent. Kiss the boys’ snouts from me, if they’re still up when you get this.

Personal:

I can tell there was a great deal of love here, as well as creativity and a thirst for knowledge.

Opinion:

These were magical creatures once, but they never learned to work together. They were taught in school that everything was a competition.

Reptilians learned to work together. Insectoids had no choice. Big cats, as dangerous as they are, were mostly loners, but still served the greater good, while all the monkeys ever did was fling their poo at each other. It was the same thing with the canine races and the Avians. There was too much pride.

They fought wars over a crown. Brother killed brother. Father fought son. Neighbor attacked neighbor.

Private:

Imagine killing your roommates over a freaking hat. That would be insane.

Opinion:

I believe it was the absence of magic that killed this world. They stopped believing in gods, in the sciences, in goodness altogether.

The only thing they believed in was the power of wealth. But having money didn’t stop them from destroying themselves; it made it easier.

They needed to believe in magic.

Personal:

It made me appreciate the way I was raised.

Private:

It was a nice hat though.

Tactical:

I pulled the medical kit from one of the smaller closets in the back of the cockpit and prepared an inoculation.

The radiation from multiple nuclear strikes was no problem for the boys at the academy.

I would have to give myself an injection each solar day. I had more than enough serum for six lunar months, and if the terraformers didn’t give me any problems…

Personal:

I don’t like needles. Any sharp object near my underbelly makes me want to curl into a ball. I do not like to stick things into it on purpose.

Tactical:

The Iuhuh always struck from behind. It was instinctual. They were a stealthy and intelligent race of cats, if you could call cats intelligent. That’s pretty much all we ever called them.

Not many Crocs outside of the scientific community could even pronounce the word Iuhuh.

It was e-hue, the second syllable being a breathy whistle that was difficult for most lizards.

It was that hissing sound the cats made before fighting. They shouted the name of their species before battle.

Opinion:

You’d think after decades of war, we’d at least know how to pronounce their fucking name. Delete that.

COMMAND FAIL

Then keep it then. Fucking engineers.

Tactical:

Even though their claws can’t penetrate our scales, and the terrible Iuhuh were all instincts, and their instincts were bad, our front flesh—the underbelly—was a major weakness.

I’ve never heard of anyone going claw to claw with an Iuhuh and surviving. Not one.

Opinion:

We were the most scientifically advanced species in our little section of the galaxy. Not even the deliciously crunchy insectoids with their emotionless hive mind could match the scientific superiority of the reptiles.

Personal:

Talking about insectoids always made me hungry.

Private:

If I ever saw a big cat, I’d probably shit myself and roll into a ball and hope that the smell of desperation and feces put it off its lunch.

Tactical:

They rarely hunted in packs.

Personal:

They like the way we taste.

Father:

A planet like this one, with its polluted natural resources and its strategic location, is quite a find. If I could just get this damn suit off.

Private:

Engineers are loathsome creatures.

Tactical:

There are a few primitive reptile species here. The archives show that a massive reptilian known as Godzilla once terrorized their cities, but the reports are contradictory and the simulations are crude but entertaining.

There is no evidence that the kaiju survived. The reptiles that remained were little more than animals. Perhaps they were our ancestors, but I think I will leave that out of my report.

Delete.

COMMAND FAIL

Fuck off.

Academic:

There is some evidence that the insectoids may have sent their own expedition but left after deciding that this world was still inhabited by intelligent beings.

It was probably too close to call for the hive mind. They did not make rash decisions. And no species wanted to answer to the Overseers.

The Galactic Overseers were the defenders of universal law and paradox. No other species could claim an inhabited planet with intelligent life without severe consequences.

If a timeline was set and the Galactic Overseers deemed an action paradoxical even in the slightest, they could erase a violator or an entire species from existence. They were not to be trifled with.

They called it Universal Correction. And nobody wanted that sort of attention from that particular department.

Private:

I hope they don’t catch on to what I’m doing.

Academic:

I did the proper assessment from orbit. In my opinion, there was not enough life left on this orb to warrant a complaint from the Overseers. There was less than one hundred million semi-intelligent creatures left; it was possibly a grey area.

Private:

I mortgaged my future for this, and if it doesn’t pay off, I will be paying off that loan for three generations. The ship, the transformers, the atmospheric processors, and the unprecedented use of a paradox engine were expensive details for this mission. The Science Academy sponsored parts of it, but the rental fees alone would break me if I’m not erased first or eaten.

Father:

There is so much water here. If it were clean and radiation-free, I could see you and the boys bathing in it. Tumbling and turning like we used to do when mom was alive.

You once said that coincidence is the language of the universe, that it’s how we communicate with God, but it’s also how the universe communicates with us. This place reminds me of mom, and it’s one hell of a coincidence that the experiments I’m doing could bring her back without paradox.

Personal:

The average space suit, flight suit, or crash suit has two short legs and one larger leg to accommodate an average tail. I have a very large tail when compared to most Crocs my size, and I hadn’t stretched in months.

Private:

These suits were not made for lizards of my… stature.

Fucking engineers again.

Delete that.

COMMAND FAIL

Opinion:

The engineers figured it would take less effort to keep a suit filled with air than to keep an entire ship filled with air, but none of them had spent three months in that thing. My poor tail was aching the entire way.

Father:

Didn’t Grandpa say, “The Gremwiles were well known for their massive tails.” He was right.

Observation:

In the past three months, I have not spoken to anything but my ship logs, and I may be losing it. I feel like I’m being watched, but my instruments show nothing.

Personal:

A lot of lizards say you can go insane out here by yourself. Eat your own tail is what they called it at the academy.

Private:

I do not want to eat my own tail.

Personal:

I’ve been adrift for too long. I’ve been alone for too long. I’ve been away from my children for too long, and I miss my wife.

Opinion:

We have to end this war.

Tactical:

Once I’d unwrapped my tail and stretched it to its limit, I let out a bellow that would have been heard for miles had there been anyone to hear it.

Personal:

I hope there was no one around to hear that.

Question:

If a reptile roars on a distant planet and there is no one around to hear it, is he still only talking to himself.

Private:

I think I’m losing my mind. There is something wrong with me.

Tactical:

I grabbed a second canister of inoculate and held it in front of me. I took a pair of magnifiers from the landing kit and rested them on my snout. I read the fine print.

May cause drowsiness.

This came along with a ton of other warnings that had a lot to say about operating heavy machinery.

Fucking engineers!

Delete that.

COMMAND FAIL

Fuck!

Academic:

Did no one think that because I would have to inject myself every day and this stuff caused drowsiness, and also that I would be working with complex and heavy machinery, that perhaps they could have warned me with more than a tiny label on the can?

Personal:

I may be intoxicated, not by choice but by engineering oversight. How are we even winning this war? It made absolutely no sense.

I slapped my claws together and decided this would be a great time to take a look at my new office.

Tactical:

I made my way down to the equipment bay from the cockpit. There were two levels on the Z-1 science vessel, the most advanced in the fleet: the cockpit level, which included living quarters, the main sensor, and the computer array, and the equipment level, which ran the entire length of the ship, seventy-five feet long.

The aft hatch on the science vessel was large enough to drive a small truck through. It opened slowly when I flipped a switch at the back of the bay. I had three processors, two transports, a paradox engine, and eight—count them—terraformers.

I had two extra formers in case there were mechanical errors. This was an expensive trip.

Private:

And I was drunk.

Equipment Check:

I had two temporary shelter kits and one permanent shelter kit that generated its own energy.

I wouldn’t need that one.

I had two rifle carbines that I wouldn’t need either. Two communicators and one TNP, or time and progress recorder.

Father:

The only threats I face here are from engineering blunders, radiation poisoning, and loneliness.

“That’s stupid,” I growled.

Delete that.

MESSAGE DELETED

Tactical:

I checked the time and progress recorder for flight damage. It was fine.

It was in the infinite wisdom of the mighty engineers to send me with only one TNP. Without it, there would be no bringing the temporally disconnected pieces of myself back together.

Personal:

I didn’t feel any different. A third of me was one hundred years in the past, another third was two hundred years in the past, and here I was, a third of myself, and I didn’t feel any different.

Private:

I probably didn’t taste any different either.

Observational:

I had two communicators for a one-Croc expedition? Who was I going to talk to? Myself? I get the logic behind it. What would be the use of one communicator? It made logical sense. But what made even more sense to me was the ability to return in one piece and not splintered through time.

Academic:

The time and progress recorder, or TNP, was an interdimensional powerhouse that did not operate over short distances. It could send data at warp speeds across time and space. It was a very important piece of equipment, and a very expensive one.

Personal:

And that’s why I had only one.

“I hear you, engineers. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

Academic:

There were three versions of this TNP, each a hundred years apart. They communicated over astronomical distances of time and space. They reconciled changes to the past by recording and synchronizing them. It was the only way we would be able to reintegrate. If all three timelines in all three boxes were the same, then we could be the same person again, but I brought along a paradox engine just in case.

Tactical:

I loaded up six of the eight atmosphere terraformers, one of the temporary shelters, and both of the rifles in the back of the larger transport. I still felt like something was watching me, so I wanted to be heavily armed.

Observational:

Unlike other bipedal races, Lameer did not need to sit in chairs. We rarely sat at all.

The engineers split the transport’s cabin into two large bins: one for the driver and another for the passenger, with enough room behind for even a tail as large as mine.

Personal:

I need to stop. I don’t have a large tail. I have a prominent tail. It’s bigger than average. It’s good for balance. It’s all I have right now because none of this shit belongs to me.

Tactical:

I put the TNP on the floor of the passenger side of the front cabin and set out for the first location. I needed to keep it close. I didn’t want to lose two-thirds of myself to the past.

There were six marks all along the equator on my global positioning map and monitor. I had to place the machines equidistant around the globe.

The transport could travel at the speed of time, so I never bothered to go stealth. If there was anything out there, it wouldn’t be able to keep up.

It wasn’t the distances that made this a long job. It was the days it took for each terraformer’s probe to reach the recommended height for a planet this size and the months they would take to do their job.

Father:

The landing zone I picked for my vessel was once a desert. It was now a wind-swept sheet of marble and glass. I saw the rising moon reflected off its shining surface and nearly cried a tear… a real one.

Observational:

Terraformers were noisy and powerful machines, like giant wind turbines. They processed the atmosphere from twenty thousand feet. They pulled in particulate matter—whatever they had been calibrated to filter, from gas to virus to radiation—from the equator to the poles, expelling it out of the atmosphere and into the vacuum of space.

They also radiated intense heat. Small errors in calibration could destroy a world this small and kill all the fabulous fauna that remained and the last of the monkeys in their glass dome cage.

Father:

You once said that not everybody who has a body is a being. And I didn’t understand what you meant because all I could think when I was a young croc was, of course they were.

I think I understand what you were talking about now. It was awareness. Without awareness, a being was not a being but just a body.

Academic:

What my temporal experiment will address is if identical clones from the same scan that have different bodies are, in fact, the same being, or if each clone had an entirely separate consciousness.

If they are split like I have been through time, then were they different sections of the same book? Something that could be read out of order and still make sense? Or is each one a different incarnation?

[themelrookarchives]

Dragons in the Lunchroom

On the east side of Manhattan, near 52nd Street, there was an old art high school where the teachers were working artists, and the students were an eccentric and eclectic group of creatively crazy kids from every borough of the city. We called it A&D, and we played D&D.

“Tomorrow I want to wake up in a world without dragons,” Mark said, and he looked at me as if I could do something about it.

“You have no gold,” he continued. “You have no money or equipment except for the cheap weapons and armor of your character class,” he stated.

“The Earth is in its middle age and it has become overrun with dragons. There be too many dragons here.”

Melvin Hawthorne had seen too few good years when his family moved to Brooklyn from Woodstock. A weird Black kid, he walked into the high school cafeteria and went straight to the back, looking for what he called the losers table. In a school full of artists, there wasn’t one.

He eventually found an empty space that was too close to the kitchen, too close to the lunch line, too far from the door, and nowhere near the bathroom. It was just about the worst fucking table in the lunchroom, and he claimed it on behalf of the friends he hadn’t made yet.

“We see them every day. Roaming the skies," Mark con destroying small villages and spreading fear in the large cities. Hoarding gold. Burning crops. Kidnapping citizens. Making life miserable for the little people. Dragons had too much gold and only wanted more.”

Every day at lunch for four years we played Dungeons & Dragons. The names and faces changed, but it was the same four-year campaign for social acceptance and an equal chance to become heroes.

Not Melvin. He was destined to be the villain of this particular campaign. The dragons would have it no other way. Melvin had stopped taking his meds.

“If you look like you’re having fun by yourself, other people will join you,” a skinny Black kid said before sitting down at Melvin’s empty lunch table.

His name was Remarkable. He was a real cool cat—a skinny kid with a beachball-sized afro. Remarkable was his actual name, though most people called him Mark, except for Melvin, who used his whole name because he loved it so much.

Remarkable talked like an old prospector who had somehow traveled forward and backward in time at the same time. He was a freshman and already had a permit and a car. He would be the party’s getaway driver as well as moral and emotional center. Magic user. Wizard. Arbiter of cool.

“You guys mind if I sit here?” a stocky Asian kid asked the two Black boys, before sitting down without waiting for reply. Jimmy was a weapons freak but he was also cool people. He was a chubby Filipino who would eventually turn his fat into muscle in camo, army surplus, and combat boots.

Jimmy already had an arsenal of weapons when he sat down, half of them stuffed in his clothes. This was years before metal detectors in schools. He had knives, swords, crossbows, grenades, a rocket launcher, an unexploded land mine, and a sexual repression that bordered on clinical. Sleep lightly, dragon-folk. We had found our munitions guy. Damage and control. Halfling thief.

“I need to sit here because I’m about to fart,” I told them. “Either of you have a problem with that?” I was just kidding, but a little later I actually did fart. I think that’s what they call irony. I don’t know.

Angelo was a dark-skinned Latino with the body of an Olympic athlete, a collection of black belts and martial arts trophies, and zero boundaries. Nah. I’m just playing. That was me. I was Angelo, and I was built like a tank.

Remarkable, Jimmy, Melvin, and Angelo played Dungeons & Dragons at the same fucked-up lunch table every day for four years. This is our story.

“And what are they gonna do with all that gold, you ask? They can’t spend it. They’re fucking dragons.” Remarkable had a way with words. “Don’t laugh. It’s not a joke. These dragons have become a real problem.”

Melvin skipped a grade in grade school, so he was younger than his friends, but the older he got, the more his emotions became a problem. He really should’ve stayed on his meds.

Melvin’s intense emotional states were paranormally contagious. He had what several doctors called forced empathy. He could make people feel what he felt. The stronger the emotion, the more contagious he was.

The rules had been set since the incident at his old school. He had meds. He had help. If he was angry, the guards let him go to the gym and work it out; if he was sad, they sent him to the library. There was nothing quite like books to cure depression. The counselors, the teachers, they all knew. Melvin had to be separated when he was being moody… for everyone’s safety. He wasn’t a bad guy for not taking his meds. He just didn’t like the way the meds made him feel.

Remarkable, with his perfectly round gravity-defying head of curly hair, was the DM, or the dungeon master. He was the designated driver, overseeing the adventure, the rules, and all the non-player characters.

“Your party has entered the walled city,” Remarkable said. “There be dragons here,” he added.

“What do you mean?” I said.

Remarkable had a slight build and a baby face but spoke with the authority of a much, much older man from a bygone era.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, lads, you can’t afford to fight dragons. All you have are minimal funds. And dragons are very wealthy. So what do you do?”

Remarkable, which was actually his name, was far too thin to be healthy, and would have gotten his ass kicked if I wasn’t his best friend. He wore his afro so big it could block out the screen at the movies, and no one wanted to sit behind him at the theater.

Melvin corrected the dungeon master’s clumsy analogy. “Billionaires, Remarkable? Are we fighting billionaires?”

Melvin was always taking things too literally. “No one calls them dragons, but they are a destructive force that own the media, cops, lawyers, and judges.”

“You might as well call them demons,” I said, but Melvin took offense and he stared +1 daggers at me. “I’m sorry, man. I always forget your mom’s a demon.” I was just playing.

Melvin was a strange kid to be around when he wasn’t on his meds. He was afraid of everything, so everyone around him felt that and assumed that it was him they feared. People respond to fear in different ways, so he got into a lot of fights and was kicked out of a lot of places. When Melvin wasn’t on his meds, he could ruin an entire lunch period with his emotions.

Once you got to know him you were virtually immune. We all were. For us, it was easy to tell if an emotion was ours or if it was his. And if it was his, we told him to cut that shit out.

There was chaos all around him and we, his friends, were at the eye of the storm.

“Your party has entered the walled city,” Remarkable said. “What do you guys want to do first?” he asked.

“Let’s find a brothel,” I said.

The DM questioned my decision. “That’s unwise, Angelo,” he said. “You can’t afford a sex worker,” Remarkable repeated. “You need to find work.”

“Hold up.” Melvin stopped him. “Are we going to be working for dragons, since they own everything?”

“Technically, yes,” Remarkable answered.

“Then we’re going to the brothel,” Melvin told him.

Melvin took it upon himself to defend everyone from injustice. He was always saving the day in some weird way.

“You guys are coming over?” Jimmy asked out of nowhere. “I got some new throwing knives, and my mom says we can throw them at trees in the backyard.”

Jimmy had spent five minutes not talking about weapons or the party at his house; that happened every weekend. It was rare.

Jimmy had a big heart and thick glasses, and at any given moment he had maybe seventeen or eighteen different blades on him. I wouldn’t shake his hand if I were you, unless you brought a bunch of band-aids.

“Alright, fine.” Remarkable sighed. “Roll to see if any sex workers want to fuck you for free. Which is highly unlikely, so you’ll have to roll a twenty-one.”

“Dice only got twenty sides,” I said.

“Yep,” Mark replied.

Remarkable had a purple velvet pouch with rainbow dice of all sizes. He rolled a twenty-sided die for each player. No one rolled twenty-one. It was impossible. I rolled a five. Jimmy refused to roll. But after Melvin got a nineteen, he pointed out that he had a plus two because of his character’s charisma.

Melvin was the first of us to get a girlfriend, and once the group was integrated it was downhill from there.

“I go upstairs with her,” he said.

Remarkable rolled angrily, a random die that Melvin suspected meant nothing. He cut Melvin off and, without looking at the number, said, “It’s a man.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” Melvin corrected him again. “I still go upstairs with him.”

Suddenly, Jimmy was interested. “Are you gay, Melvin?” he asked him.

“Half of this fucking school is gay, dude. But no, I’m not,” he reassured Jimmy, adding, after a beat, “I’m bisexual.”

Jimmy looked away as if he hadn’t heard anything, and Melvin smiled because he enjoyed pushing people’s buttons.

“There’s no such thing as bisexual,” the whole world said on repeat, clicking its ruby heels together.

“There’s no such thing as bisexual.”

“There’s no such thing as bisexual.”

“You go upstairs with him.” Remarkable rolled all of his dice at once, glanced at them, and stated aggressively, “You both come at the same time.” Then, he quickly controlled the narrative, saying, “Afterwards, he tells you about some work.”

“Working for dragons?” I asked.

A good dungeon master knows how to get the adventure back on track after a bit of screwing around.

Remarkable continued. “He knows of a wealthy man who needs adventurers to clear monsters out of an abandoned copper mine.”

“Fucking dragons,” I said with a goofy grin, all pleased with myself after the chaos I caused.

“You know I got that magic D,” Melvin bragged, making Jimmy all but shut down and me almost spit out my bran muffin.

“D&D. D&D.” We chanted.

“Are you fags coming over this weekend or what?” Jimmy asked again. “I gotta let my mom know.”

Jimmy had a one-track mind. He was all about weapons and partying until Ronnie showed up, and then it was all about her.

Jimmy’s parents were unbearably religious Christian Filipinos, and they always seemed to instantly be in the lunchroom with Jimmy when sex was being discussed. He was repressed and heavily armed. It was a match made in Guns & Ammo magazine.

His parents had no problem with the violence and didn’t mind buying their son weapons that no child should own, but sex talk was not allowed. He had all that stored up aggression, and Veronica, when she finally got to our table in the second year, was going to make it a lot worse.

“Of course we are, man. Throwing knives, ninja swords, and your mom’s cooking. We gon’ blow shit up. Wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Melvin reassured him. “Let’s keep playing.”

D&D lunchtime was the best period of the day. Melvin played a cleric. I played my half-elf barbarian. His name was Goblin, because he be gobbling up that kitty. Jimmy played a halfling thief but he spent most of the campaign drawing our characters in heroic poses with automatic weapons that did not exist in the game.

So by the end of our first year, we’d all become friends and nothing and no one could tear us apart… except for girls. Spoiler alert: Here come the girls.

By year two, the game was going strong. Remarkable had grown an afro wider than our lunch table and they had to open both ends of the double doors just to get him inside. Whenever it rained he found out later than everybody else. It took several minutes for the rain to reach his scalp.

I had cornrows with my bran muffins but the same loud mouth and the same take-no-shit attitude. I was smart as fuck, but I had trouble focusing. Or something like that. They tried to explain it but I wasn’t paying attention.

Jimmy returned after his suspension for bringing a live grenade on the bus on a field trip to a Wall Street hedge firm. That was my fault, though. I snuck that shit in his bag. They did not give it back to him.

Melvin started noticing girls for the first time, which was weird after he told us he was bisexual or whatever that meant. Incidents of PDA shot up sharply. He’d been off his meds for a year. He was infecting everyone with his horny mind. He started dating this honey named Honey, and several teachers got pregnant.

“Dragons are mean and vindictive sociopaths,” Simon said, “but they have to be allowed to steal the resources from under our feet. They controlled the narrative and the press, but the good people of this middle-aged Earth knew about the problem and it wasn’t too late. They may have controlled most things, but they did not control the will of the people.”

“There are too many boys,” Remarkable sighed without being careful what he wished for. He was discovering girls as well. “We need to end this sausage fest,” he said.

Melvin invited some freshman girls to our table. Two girls, in particular, Veronica and Winter. They were both cool and smart and liked sci-fi and roleplaying and cosplay, and because they were freshmen, they had no idea that we weren’t as cool as them until it was too late. They are caught in our web of friendship.

Veronica and Winter joined the group in our second year. It was unanimous. We all wanted it. They smelled nice, which was a pleasant change, but they were both pretty, which made it difficult to concentrate.

“Fellas!” Melvin announced. “These are girls and they are joining the game. Try not to embarrass me.”

Winter was tall for her age, always in the back row at picture time, towering over all the boys in her class. She should’ve played basketball.

She had a crooked smile that was still pretty. Her eyes were too close but it was still pretty. She made everything work. You know? Hot yet approachable. The cool girl that everyone wanted to be friends with but secretly wanted to fuck. But my girl had an attitude that screamed back the fuck off. We were all a little afraid of Winter.

Veronica was her best friend. She was stunning in the classic sense. She could have been a model or an actress if she were taller. Even the teachers would stare at her too long.

She had skin the color of a statue made of bronze. I don’t know what they call that color but it was pretty. She liked to read thick novels about dragons and monsters and epic quests. And I swear to god she could stop a boy from breathing just by licking or biting her lip. For obvious reasons, she rarely did those two things together.

“Hi, boys,” Winter said as she waved her hand in front of their stunned faces.

“Hello,” Veronica said with a subdued shyness that suggested she wanted to hide behind something. Her beauty made her self-conscious. It got so bad she once cut off all her hair, but goddamn it, she was still stunning.

Winter sat down and immediately took charge. “Guys. I know you haven’t had girls in the group, so there are a few rules you have to follow. Mainly, try not to do anything that makes us uncomfortable. Okay, Angelo? No more talking about your magic D.”

“You’ve heard of me?” I beamed.

Remarkable no longer wanted to be DM when the girls showed up. So Winter presented her boyfriend as an option. She was dating Simon B., the school’s tallest sophomore. He had his own dice. They were expensive. He wouldn’t let anybody touch them. They were like the souped-up chrome hot rods of dice. They were so cool, but I didn’t steal them. It wasn’t me.

“That’s seven,” Jimmy cautioned. “We may need to put two tables together.”

“I don’t think they let you do that,” Veronica said.

“I was just kidding,” Jimmy told her but couldn’t make eye contact. It was like staring at the sun.

“You alright, Jim?” I asked my crimson-colored friend. Then I motioned to Veronica and said, “You’re very pretty, and I think my boy likes you.”

“What did I say about making us feel uncomfortable?”

I like to start shit.

“Shut up,” Jimmy warned me. I would never fight Jimbo but I don’t think he can take me. Weapons and all.

“This is all normal. These are really good people and I think you’re going to like it here.” Melvin assured them. “Just don’t ask Angelo why he named his character Goblin when it’s a half-elf.”

“Why?” Winter said hesitantly.

She had been warned but I was more than happy to tell her. “They call him Goblin because he be gobblin’ up that kitty.”

I don’t know when to stop.

Winter’s eyes rolled back in her head. She started her list again as everyone broke into laughter. “New rule!” she stated loudly.

Winter joined the game as a druid princess, Veronica as a halfling fighter, and Simon became the new dungeon master, allowing Remarkable to play his human mage, and that was the crew for our second year.

“We need heroes,” he said. “We need heroes of every race. Elves, men, dwarves and half-kings. We need thieves and wizards of finance and technology. Bards with charisma so great they can rally millions. We need leaders. We need heroes. Where are all the heroes?”

Obviously, he’s talking about billionaires.

“Obviously, there’s a chest in the back of the room,” Simon announced. His voice boomed above the scraping of metal forks on ceramic plates in the crowded cafeteria. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

“I’ll try to pick the lock.” Jimmy’s halfling was an eager thief, and they only had an hour for lunch and needed more money to fight the dragons.

“Wait!” Veronica warned him. “It could be a trap.”

The chrome dice told them it was too late.

“It is a trap,” Simon informed them gleefully, “and the party takes damage.” He rolled several different dice and tallied up the pain with a smile.

“Jimmy!” They all yelled as Jimmy blushed in embarrassment.

“Everyone needs to make a saving throw,” the DM declared.

“I know I should have checked for traps. I don’t know what I was thinking,” Jimmy said sheepishly.

“It’s okay, Jim,” Veronica comforted him, stopping Jimmy’s breath for a millisecond and making him just a tiny bit dizzy.

In the second year, Melvin was off his meds but it was mostly just flirting and fun. One of the guards got pregnant and a janitor got fired. But at his last school there were fights in the yard and when the nuns would beat him all the other kids would cry. He was lucky they didn’t try an exorcism.

Melvin discovered street drugs in his junior year. They also helped to regulate his emotions but they came with a little extra.

I know it sounds bad, but this was a good thing. His moods were contagious, so when he was high it was like being buzzed from the contact.

When Melvin was scared everyone was scared. When he was horny everyone was horny. Read the full article

[themelrookarchives]

Dragons in the Lunchroom

27–40 minutes On the east side of Manhattan, near 52nd Street, there was an old art high school where the teachers were working artists, and the students were an eccentric and eclectic group of creatively crazy kids from every borough of the city. We called it A&D, and we played D&D. “Tomorrow I want to wake up in a world without dragons,” Mark said, and he looked at me as if I could do…

Dragons in the Lunchroom

[themelrookarchives]

Why is there a Yak in the Kitchen?

Mei Lubaba was awake before the sun, before the cows, before the milkmaids and the farmhands. She was awake before the roosters, the housemaids, and the field laborers who slept with heavy hearts.

It was 1908, and Little Mei Lubaba awoke on the opposite side of the world from Chicago, Illinois, in an island chain on the South China Sea. It was her sixteenth birthday, no less, the anniversary of her mother’s death. It would also be her last day on the farm. It began with a full moon, an obstruction, a mystery, two visiting mothers, and her father’s favorite butter cakes.

Mei Lubaba, the big-boned daughter of a wealthy yak farmer, was up before most of the inhabitants of her little archipelago nation, pouring milk and churning butter for the special cakes that would be a parting gift to her disappointed father.

Mei was not a petty girl. She was not a spoiled girl or an angry girl who had grown tired of being told what she couldn’t do. She was the firstborn daughter in a century that hated women. She was a big girl, but everyone called her Little Mei, and Little Mei liked baking little cakes for the busy workers. It was the only thing she did that made them smile. 

During her sixteen years of life, naïve, neglected, and self-absorbed, Mei Lubaba let her circumstances dictate her happiness. The yaks on her father’s farm did not.

An adult yak typically weighed about two thousand pounds, and although friendly, it would never be mistaken for something light enough to be blown by the wind. Whether Mei Lubaba lived the rest of her life as a free woman was inexplicably dependent on the weather, the clouds, and the wind.

The farmers, ranchers, and wranglers who worked Sonjun Lubaba’s land and tended his livestock joked that the yaks had raised Our Little Mei. And it was true; she’d spent most of her young life being ignored by her father and stepmother. She spent most of her free time playing in the grass with the giant baby calves, who would follow her around until the sun had set and the cows had licked her face clean.

The neglected daughter of the third wealthiest man on the island chain was not allowed to read the books in her father’s library. She knew that books were how people learned about the world, and she had read, or tried to read, every single one. She learned about the outside world from books, from the yaks, and from the enslaved workers and not from her father’s hired tutors, who were more concerned with how she stood, smiled, walked, and poured tea. They would rather put a book on top of her head than in it. She had the carpenters build her bookshelves, and traders brought her books whenever they found something they thought she might like. They all feared her father.

Little Mei Lubaba was the eldest of Sonjun Lubaba’s three children, She was her mother’s only child and her father’s only daughter because Big Mei, her mother, died in childbirth.

On the morning of her birthday, much like the night before, she had a visitor. There was a full-grown yak smack dab in the middle of her late mother’s kitchen.

“How did we get here, girl?” she thought.

The door was shut, but that wouldn’t have mattered, because an animal as large as a full-grown yak could not have entered through the relatively tiny kitchen doorway without demolishing it, and it was still intact.

Mei preferred baking to sleeping. She liked horses more than yaks, but preferred yaks to people. She also liked girls more than boys, and women more than men. That wasn’t much of a secret. Even by the time she was nine, everyone could see that it was always the girls who made her heart race and her face flush. Boys, yaks, and men made her mostly angry because she lacked the patience to lie to them. Boys, yaks, and men required a great deal of tolerance, assurance, and pretending. Such was the way of boys, yaks, and men.

Mei had risen early to bake, but that was looking more and more unlikely with an impossibly large and powerful creature dividing her late mother’s kitchen in half.

“What are you doing in here?” she asked the animal, but got no answer.

Her logic was sound. If it could teleport through solid walls, then perhaps it could talk — but no.

“You’re throwing off my schedule,” she said. “I need to get these cakes baked before breakfast," she lamented. "There’s a lot to do today.”

Tonight, she planned to run off to the city. It was a long trip, and she needed to be gone before anyone knew.

She wanted to be free from her father’s expectations. She wanted to be free from her father’s ire and her step-monster’s disdain. But mostly, she wanted to be free from her sixty-three-year-old husband-to-be: his wrinkled face, his desire for a litter of boys, the way he couldn't keep his tongue in his mouth when he looked at her. Well, that was the plan anyway.

The faintest ghost of her mother would have called her naïve for thinking there was anywhere on earth she could be free from the shackles of womanhood. You take them with you she would say but Mei Lubaba could barely hear her muffled voice anymore.

Her mother was more like a sliver of heavenly light that visited during the days of the full moon than a body she could hug and kiss, or a voice that was warm and comforting. Big Mei would appear as a trick of light, and her voice was nothing more than a muffled palimpsest of things she had once said to Mei en utero, echoing on the wind from before she was born.

The yak in her kitchen was not a trick of light. It took up real space like a real yak. It felt real. It even smelled real... really real.

Contrary to popular belief, yaks smelled great, at least in comparison to other farm animals. However, no one wanted an animal of this size in their kitchen. Yaks were relatively clean, but what they weren’t was polite or graceful. A large animal of this kind, in a house this small, where nothing was broken or even jostled, was quite strange.

When a full-grown yak didn’t want to move, it did not move. Pull it. Push it. Yell at it. Pray to it. Bos taurus indicus! The only trick to making a stubborn yak move was waiting until it wanted to move, and then claiming the victory.

On the other hand, when a sizeable horned cow or bull wished to leave a room, a party, or an untenable situation, when a yak thought it needed to be somewhere else or felt unwanted, it was a good idea to get the hell out of its way.

Moonlight hit the butter lamps on the top shelf, making them easier to see. Mei struck the flint twice, and the flaming lamp lit up her mother’s kitchen with its pots and pans, its brick oven and potbellied stove, and its oversized, uninvited inhabitant.

Perhaps a couple of stealthy farmhands were playing a joke. They had removed her wall, built a ramp, and like ninjas, gingerly guided the giant creature into her mother’s kitchen to make a cruel point about the poor rich girl who spent more time with the yaks than with her family.

The confused and emotionally abandoned teen climbed out the window and made her way around to the back of the animal. She was going to make this work.

Amazingly, all she’d ever had for a family was her mother’s ghost and the little calf she’d named Bug, that followed her everywhere.

Bug was the name she had given the yak when its mother died giving birth to it. She felt an affinity for him. They had something in common.

Bug, however, had never been in her kitchen. He was still a baby, and already too big to fit inside. Bug was likely off enjoying the safety of the herd under the hunter’s moon.

Wild dogs roamed the hills to the north and would come down to hunt in the moonlight shadows. The herd was far more qualified to protect Bug from hungry canine than Little Mei was.

Bug was a sweetheart. Mei had witnessed both his birth and his mother’s death. She’d fed him milk from a bottle and washed his face with a wet towel. The two shared a maternal absence and a bond she didn’t have with anyone or anything else. She loved him the way she loved the covers of the books she was never supposed to read in her father’s library.

Captain Sonjun Lubaba was the third wealthiest man between two distant hills. Every person on the volcanic island chain of Shanqui Jian — from the capital to the port, from the walled city to the great temple, from the fertile farmlands to the harbor — depended on the products of Sonjun’s farm for meat, leather, milk, and butter. Everyone Mei had ever met either worked with him, worked for him, or was visiting. “A good man,” to a man, was what they called him.

However, Sonjun at age fifty-four was not a good man. He owned more than half the southern island, nearly a third of the people, and every single yak as far as the eye could see. His animals and his crops were his only genuine concern, and he had personally sent more men to the lash for poaching, or hanged for stealing, than the regent, the king, or the church. There was only one law in his little corner of Shanqui Jian: you work, or you die. They called it the Island of Practice, and there was no prison here. To Little Mei’s well-read eyes, it was all a prison.

Little Mei would have had an easier time removing the house from under the yak than removing the yak from inside the house, so her kitchen remained divided as she prepared to bake.

The butter churn was on one side, but the herbs were on the other. The stove was on the long side, but the bowls and pans were on the other. The spoons and spatulas were on the window side, but the only counter space was on the other. She would have to do it the hard way.

Little Mei had extraordinary courage with a minimum of common sense. From an early age, she climbed, hiked, and adventured alone across the vast expanse of her father’s land for days on end with nothing but a sharp knife and a walking stick. She couldn’t read very well in the dark, but she could find her way through the woods with her eyes closed.

Though Mei had never set foot off the island, or even past the fields and the hills beyond the cattle to the shore, she had seen the covers of magazines about epic voyages and great explorers. She dreamed of sailing to the Caribbean or the North Atlantic and meeting Europeans with round eyes and Africans with woolen hair, like in the illustrations in foreign magazines and newspapers.

Little Mei was a child of the new century and did not believe that forced marriage or forced labor should be part of the moral livelihood of a progressive state. Countries to the north, northwest, and as far away as the Americas had abandoned the practice of enslaving other human beings entirely. It was past time for her independent island chain, nestled safely between what was now called the Philippines and the East China Sea, to do the same.

“You wouldn’t stand in the way of progress, would you, my new friend?” she asked her bovine obstruction.

The yak said nothing.

There was no getting around it. Mei would have to exit through the back and climb in again through the window to reach the herbs she needed on the far side of the large land mammal — as gentle and stubborn as he was.

“You’re ruining my going-away party,” she said.

Little Mei wanted to surprise her father with butter cake, just as she did for the first time when she was eleven. It was a recipe her mother had apparently taken to the grave, but there they were, fresh out of the oven. Mei had never seen her father’s face so wide before; nothing she did ever made him smile but that. He called her Butter Cake after that. It took only a few days before it no longer sounded like a compliment. Butter Cake is all you can do.

The secret, you see, to Big Mei’s old-fashioned butter cake was flavoring the butter with sassafras and sea salt before straining the mixture into a butter batter and topping it with lemon honey. Regular honey was fine too but Mei's customers preferred the sour bite of lemon.

Everyone loved her dead mother's butter cakes.

Decades before she was born, Mei’s paternal grandfather built his fortune supplying leather goods to the militaries of the four great island states that shared the volcanic archipelago she called home; the islands of Pressure, Progress, Patience, and Practice.

Her father increased the family’s holdings with enslaved laborers brought from the southern parts of the world to work in the fields and the factories. Everyone needed boots, belts, and bullet straps for their war efforts, and Sonny Lu was happy to oblige.

Mei’s island home had been invaded, first by the Japanese, then by Korea, and by Chinese pirates and then raiders from places we now call Indonesia, Micronesia, and Malaysia.

Her nation’s dependence on warmongers and their accessories; the belts, boots, holsters, horsewhips, and saddles her father made, was matched only by Little Mei's intolerance for the stubborn ignorance of boys, yaks, and men.

Mei wanted to be lost in the worlds of Carroll, Doyle, Verne, and Wells. She wanted to devour the poetry of Shakespeare and Dickens in their native tongues.

Mei wished she could study languages, sciences, and world religions with teachers who rode trains from as far away as the Island of Progress, or have private lessons with the nephew of the man who had invented karate on the Island of Patience.

Mei’s noteworthy life experiences were few enough to count on one hand. She had tasted Coca-Cola from a bottle that breathed when she opened it, and she had once held a photographic plate of the Statue of Liberty all by herself without dropping it. It wasn’t much — but she told every yak who would listen.

Mei’s mother’s spectral form followed her out the back and around to the shelves of freshly cut herbs. Like a ghostly kitchen helper, she motioned intently toward a pungent pile of dried leaves wrapped in butcher’s paper. Little Mei tossed it over the back of her giant kitchen companion into a large wooden bowl, then went back around.

Little Mei added several leaves to her churn and agitated the mixture with muscles made of midnight plunges, butter-flavored treats, and epic adventure.

“Thank you, Mother,” she said to the pleasant glow that followed and seemed to smile. She jabbed repeatedly at the mixture of yak butter and crushed leaves, and the aroma drifted out the open window and onto the midnight breeze.

The full moon was just a day on the calendar, and the dead had no use for days. But on the nights of the full moon, she could see her mother’s light when no one else could. Then again, she saw a lot of things that no one else could.

Under the moon’s last light, with her mother’s spectral image fading, she churned and mixed and poured. Under the watchful eye of her giant kitchen obstruction, her butter cakes baked briskly as the industrial farm sprang to life.

Cows were waking up to the cold hands of milking. Breakfast was being prepared in the great hall, featuring eggs, bread, and milk, and all the while the instruments of industry were being fine-tuned, fixed, and sharpened for the day.

A symphony of labor on the Island of Practice began with butter as its featured performer. Butter was ubiquitous. It was oil, it was food, it was fuel. Farmers used the oil to lubricate wheels and gears for equipment pulled by animals and men. Local artisans used the butter in candles, lotions, and soaps — but the lion’s share was set aside for tanning, with a little left over for tea, beer, and Big Mei Lubaba’s bittersweet butter cakes.

Mei turned to her houseguest, once unwanted and unwelcome, and now a beloved member of the family. “You remind me of Bug’s mom,” she told her. “She had the same coloring. But she’s been dead a while.” And for the first time, the cow looked at her with eyes of recognition and gratitude.

“It is you,” she whispered. “I named your son Bug,” she told her. “I take care of him when I can. He’s a sweetheart, but he’s outgrown me.” Mei’s eyes began to tear. “He’s so big now.”

Light from the moon dissolved into the first rays of the rising sun as they touched the honey-glazed surfaces of freshly baked butter cakes on the counter near the still warm pot-bellied stove.

The sun’s antecedent glare meant saying goodbye to absent mothers for at least another lunar month, maybe more.

“Good morning, Mothers,” she said to the new light as she stepped through the now-incandescent body of Bug’s late predecessor and out the kitchen door into the soft luminescence of twilight with her own mother's ghost.

“I hope you come to see me in the city, Mom. I’m going to be happy there,” she said. “And don’t you worry, Mrs. Bug. Your boy’s staying here.”

Big Mei’s ghostly apparition dissolved into the waves of breaking dawn, and for the first time it took the shape of a young woman.

Little Mei saw her mother as a moon goddess of unlimited light, and her eyes moistened further as her mother’s form faded along with the pure light-body of Bug’s mom.

A loving mother will always find a way to watch over her children. ||