The Book of Changes

The Book of Changes

Book Three of the California Quartet

by

Jack Remick

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Coffeetown Press on Smashwords

Coffeetown Press

PO Box 70515

Seattle, WA 98127

For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

www.jackremick.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

Cover design by M. Anne Sweet

Cover photograph by Jack Remick

Back cover design by Sabrina Sun

THE BOOK OF CHANGES

Copyright © 2013 by Jack Remick

ISBN: 978-1-60381-186-6 (Trade Paper)

ISBN: 978-1-60381-187-3 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013943624

Produced in the United States of America

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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Dedicated to those who survived the chaos.

Written in memory of those who didn’t.

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* * *

Dedicated to those who survived the chaos.

Written in memory of those who didn’t.

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Acknowledgments

To: M. Anne Sweet, (Sophie-Anne), my agent, friend, confidante, and literary conscience. Without you this novel would not exist.

To: Helen Remick, who guides and supports me more than I deserve. Without you, there is only darkness. You are my anchor, the love of my life, the light that shines on me every day.

To: Frank Araujo, my life-long friend who read this novel and who, knowing the keys, still talks to me.

To: Catherine Treadgold, publisher, editor, artist in her own right. Thank you for your soft touch and brutal truth-speaking.

One

REVOLUTION

The White Wings of Death

Butterflies. White butterflies. Just after 8 a.m., thousands of white butterflies. Tim and I were riding our bikes on Highway 33 heading to Gustine when we hit thick clouds of them. At 65 miles per hour, you feel them ding your cheeks like fierce hot BBs so I geared down to 50. They splattered against my goggles. I geared down again. At 40, they still snapped into my leather jacket. Tim, ahead of me, pulled his BSA over. I nosed the K-Model up beside him and wiped away the blood of dead insects. A white swirling cloud of butterflies swarmed over Tim, turning him half-insect, half-human.

The cloud thickened into a storm like the plagues of locusts from the Bible, the plagues of dust from my mother’s stories of the wind, the plagues from the Middle Ages. I remembered a line from a book I’d been reading—In the course of the Middle Ages, all the towns and villages of France were destroyed…

Then, the scythe of death—an eighteen wheeler, its double gondolas full up with ripe tomatoes—knifed through the sheets of insects. They swarmed and dipped, danced and fluttered, the wind twisting them into eddies of pebbles and bodies that stung the eyes and rocked the K-Model until I anchored her, straddled her, steadied her.

For the space of a moment, there was only the clatter of twisting insects on the blacktop, now shimmering with wings. Down the highway, the white clouds had swallowed the eighteen wheeler. Tim lit a Herbert Tareyton and when he had it going, pulled down his goggles and cranked on the BSA and headed back into the swarm. I stroked the K-Model and followed in his white wake.

I was going to Berkeley.

I was going to be a poet and major in the Middle Ages.

I didn’t care who knew it.

City of Light

At two in the afternoon on a cool August day, we came through the Caldecott Tunnel and crested the hills. For the first time, I looked down on Berkeley and the Bay. A city of the plain, Berkeley spreads out from the hills on the east to the North Bay and south to Oakland before running west to the mudflats, where the bridges spun their steel webs across the water. From high up in the hills rose the Campanile—the lone spire of the Church of Learning—the bell tower, crowned with four gargoyles and a spire with a yellow jewel of a light in it.

We swept down out of the hills, like an army, our bike exhaust a howl of rage. We swooped into the city and into the sound of bells and a breeze blew through the arches of the bell tower carrying the scent of horses, and from the fields the smell of decaying flesh and in the sixtieth day of the siege the Duke ordered a counter-attack and fire scarred the walls of the keep, stone discolored from oil and Greek fire we poured on the enemy—and the bells—I heard howls of pain, saw flesh boil off bone, saw eyes burned out from flaming sulfur and they breached the parapets but we held, held and turned them back in rivers of blood—Bells—the Duke called me, Beast, we’re counting on you to deliver us from these eaters of dog-flesh—Bells—he handed me his damask blade brought back from the Holy land, the hilt—Bells—rubies, two cloisonné crosses in turquoise, Jerusalem! Saracen blood!—Bells, bells.

At the intersection of College and Bancroft, in a loading zone, Tim pulled up, unzipped his jacket, and brushed away the last of the insect corpses. He rocked back and forth, legs planted, a black-gloved hand beating a rhythm like a conductor leading a metallic chorus in the Ode to Joy. Bells. Slamming like hammers into my ears. And then they stopped Tim grinning, said,

Every day at 2:15 they play the carillon. You like it?

Jesus Christ. I like it. We could be in Chartres.

I don’t get you and your Middle Ages, Beast.

My heart was pounding as I reached for a Camel in the inside pocket of my jacket and I smoked my first cigarette in the shadow of the Cathedral of Knowledge.

No Room at the Inn

We rode down College Way to the corner of Claremont, where Tim set the BSA on its kickstand, peeled off his gloves and climbed the steps to 6208 College across the street from the White Horse Liquor store.

I followed.

At the door to Apartment 6, he stopped. Lights. Music. The Beatles. Magical Mystery Tour. He tried the knob. The door was locked.

What the hell? Tim said.

He knocked. A girl in jeans and a red sweatshirt opened. Red hair, ringlets. Glasses with swoopy pink frames. She was smoking a cigarillo.

Yeah?

Who are you? Tim said. And what’re you doing in our apartment?

Shit, she said. You’re the guy. My aunt says if you give us any crap she’ll kick your hippie ass. You want her number?

I’m not a hippie and you better clear out ’cause I paid for this place.

The grinning redhead with the swoopy pink glasses went away and came back and handed Tim a piece of paper; then she slammed the door, leaving us shipwrecked on the landing. Tim glanced at the paper.

Well blind me with a stick, Tim said. I paid down on this place. Now we don’t have a bed to sleep in.

Can she do that?

This is Berkeley. They can do anything they want.

Across the street, in a phone booth in front of the White Horse Liquor Store, Tim called the aunt. He talked. He made faces. He said,

You took my check. You didn’t cash it? What the hell am I supposed to do? Well you degenerate bourgeois cow.

He rammed the receiver into its cradle.

Jeez, I said. What’ll I do with my books when they get here?

***

Tim bought the Berkeley Barb and started circling ads in ballpoint.

We rode.

We made phone calls.

We saw places that cost four or five times what we could pay. We saw places wanting one roommate—no room for two. Everything in our price range within walking distance of campus was already gone.

We were archaeologists riding through the ruins of medieval cities. I saw places where all of history combined in one building. I saw a Greek temple built on top of a Victorian-Gothic cathedral. I saw a medieval house with Roman triumphal arches. I saw fake Byzantine domes and I saw a Romanesque church posing as an apartment house with root cellar rooms still moldy and wet.

At 62nd Street, where College Avenue butts into Claremont, Tim stopped like he’d hit a stone wall.

See that? He said. That’s Oakland. Oakland’s a foreign country. If you live in Oakland you have to get a visa to go to Berkeley. I can’t live in Oakland.

What about our stuff? I said. Call Pete. We can stay with him.

Forget Pete, Tim said.

How do I forget Pete?

You can’t trust Pete.

Come on, man, we’ve known Pete since before we could walk.

Okay, look. Pete’s Prime Directive is to get laid. He’s up to his shoulders in women. I work my tail off to nail Phi Beta Kappa and he nails women at parties. I bust my butt aiming for the Schiffman and he hits summer school to make up grade points. I can’t live with that kind of chaos so if you room with me, you get serious. You choose—broads or books.

We could call him, I said.

We call Francesca Lynn. If anyone in Berkeley knows where there’s an empty pad it’s Francesca Lynn.

We hauled up to a phone booth in the parking lot of a Safeway store on College. Tim dialed a number. He said,

Francesca Lynn, it’s me. Tim. Yeah. No. He’s with me. They stole our place. Uh … Okay … Tim snapped his fingers at me. Your pen …

I slipped him my ballpoint. He wrote an address on his hand. He hung up. He pulled the last Herbert Tareyton from his pack, lit it, crushed the pack, flicked it on the curb.

What? I said.

Now you get to meet a Berkeley landlady, he said.

***

The landlady lived on Channing Way below Shattuck in a row of East Bay Historical relics in a four-story Maybeck house with trellises weighed down by wisteria. From the street, stained glass the color of sunsets akin to the rose window of a cathedral.

Wow, I said. This looks like a medieval village at sundown.

How do you know that?

I got a poster of Mont Saint-Michel.

The Gorgon

Her name was Adele Grunig. She was built like a stevedore and she wore a blue and gray plaid shirt. She wore knee-patched jeans stained with yellow paint and black engineer boots with brass buckles.

The place is on Dwight Way, she said. If you want it you have to come down right here with first and last and deposit.

We want it, Tim said.

He pulled his check book from an inside pocket and I followed suit. Using a walnut end table to write on, I wrote my first check and handed it to Tim, who handed it to the landlady who snapped the checks up in a broken-nailed left hand, squinted at them, tucked them into a shirt pocket.

One thing, boys—no smoking, no cats, no booze, no parties, no women in my apartments.

Sure, Tim said. We just graduated from seminary so alls we wanna do is read Leviticus and contemplate Jesus.

Funny, she said. I mean it. Those motorcycles? You’re not Hells Angels are you?

No, ma’am.

No overhauls in the living room and no parking in the driveway.

She handed him two keys.

If there’s any more trouble with the next door neighbor, don’t call me.

What kind of trouble?

You’ll know, she said. Rent’s due the first of the month.

Back on the street, I said to Tim, No smoking? No women? This is Berkeley?

Don’t listen to that gorgon. Berkeley landlords are all crazy. You rent the place and then you do what you want. You won’t get your deposit back anyway, so you might as well trash the place.

We pulled into 2314 Dwight Way about six p.m.

2314

Well, Tim said, this ought to satisfy your medieval soul.

Fate had determined that I would live in this castle with its tower. It was that simple—I was going to live in a keep.

If you looked down Dwight Way, you saw the Bay and the Bridge and the sunlight shooting under the bridge, flowing like liquid gold up the street. The house was brown with a gray slate roof. Bay windows hung from the turret. It was an ancient walled city and Tim and I were soldiers in an army setting up a siege and in the sunset, the high crenellated walls glowed red with sun-fire, the stone hard, impenetrable. I checked my sword, felt it hang heavy off my hip and then I heard a voice. A chatelaine singing? Oh. Oh. Oh! At the window gazing over distant fields before she ducked back inside...

Sun danced off the street, reflected off glass. Mounting the steps to the third floor I was a knight mounting the victor’s dais to receive the gold key and Tim, ahead of me, a conqueror, measuring each riser with the firm step of El Cid meeting the Moors face to face. Using the key like a spear, Tim unlocked the door to a narrow hallway.

The smell of mold, of decay, of dying and dead things and …I smelled death, the dank odor of the monastery, dungeons and wooden doors, cells, stone floors, unforgiving walls and I was ready to dedicate my life to Christ—to leave my worldly possessions, to relinquish it all—and then, two monks, cowls darkening their faces, walked by with the flagellant wearing a crown of thorns, scourging his back with an iron-spiked flail and blood flew and he groaned the language of the undying soul … Son of a bitch. A living room the size of a banquet hall. Curtains drawn. Tim yanked the curtains back. A blazing bath of sunlight burst into the room with a blue velour sofa, two red ratty easy chairs, and a low-slung coffee table furbished with a shiny new Pontiac hubcap ashtray. A worn carpet covered the floor from the twin bay windows to the center of the room. A Murphy bed opened out from the east wall.

To the left, the kitchen. A white porcelain sink in a long countertop buttressed with a huge white humming refrigerator—coil on top like a relic from a ’30s movie. An electric range with four burners. The floor was black-and-white tiles like those I’d seen in Vermeer paintings but feet had worn a path through the tile leaving a gray streak from kitchen to living room. Bay windows looked straight into the apartment next door, where the curtains opened and a guy appeared at the window. He was bare-chested, long hair, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He glared at me then snapped the curtains shut.

Two large bedrooms branched off the hallway, each with twin beds. The bathroom was set at the end of the hallway. Off to the right of the bathroom there was a smaller bedroom with twin bunk beds. Wooden desks, chairs, curtains made of red burlap.

Tim flopped down on one of the beds. He bounced, folded his hands behind his head and lay staring at the ceiling. Then he looked at me and grinned.

Blind me with a hammer. We stumbled into a real, honest-to-Jesus Berkeley pad.

It’s huge, I said.

Too huge for us. We’ll need roommates. But right now I’m hungry. Let’s go up to Telegraph.

As we stepped into the hallway the door to apartment 302 opened and a wave of perfume and cigarette smoke rolled out into the corridor. A barefoot woman emerged, walking on tiptoes. Her long black hair hung like lace over her face. She wore a black smock with red hibiscus flowers. It was cut to mid-thigh, opening onto a swatch of black pubic hair. The dim light masked her features. She started to turn back, but then pressed her face against the wall, brushed past, slid into the bathroom.

Passing the half-open door to the apartment, I looked in. A mattress lay skewed in the middle of the floor where a pair of feet protruded toward the door. A man, face down on a pillow, bare butt, bare shoulders. A bottle of wine beside the body’s left hand. Another bottle with a lighted candle in it.

Berkeley, Tim said.

He led. I followed. Down on the front porch, Tim took his time scanning the mailboxes with names on them. One by one, he gave me a report—

We live in an international zoo. In apartments one, two and three on the first floor you’ve got three women—Judy, Carolyn, and Claudia. On the fourth floor you’ve got Ian Mitroff, Electrical Engineer, in apartment 401 and Francisco Diaz in 402. In apartment four on the first floor, you’ve got Guy DeBoischaut. Sounds froggish to me. We’re on three along with Corva Nekros the Black Magnolia who obviously shares the bathroom with 303.

How do you know all this, Tim?

You been in Berkeley as long as I have, you get a nose for it. Gimme a dime.

I handed him a dime. He flipped the coin, caught it, slapped it on the back of his hand.

He said, Heads or tails?

Heads.

She’s yours.

What do you mean, she’s mine?

Black Magnolia. Corva Nekros, Our Lady of the Dark Hair. 302. Your first apartment in Berkeley and you win the woman.

You can’t win a woman with a toss of a coin.

This is Berkeley, Tim said. Oppenheimer was here. Teller was here. Chamberlain was here. Huxley was here. This is where you change the world.

But she had a guy in there.

That will be you in a week.

She’s a woman, I said. Books or broads, right?

Tim pointed his finger at me, made with the trigger finger and clicked his tongue.

We’re on the same page, my man. We’re on the same page.

In the driveway I mounted up, kicked the K-Model over to a low soft purr. I followed Tim up Dwight Way. As we turned left onto Telegraph, the sun, washing the street in an ocean of light, disappeared, and we entered the dark canyons of Telegraph Avenue.

The K-Model howled in concrete counterpoint to the BSA, engines screaming at the shadows of primitive beasts on the prowl. Rumbling—the beat, the rhythm of horses and side by side we owned the town, triumph, steel, horses hot, sweaty, the smell of blood and leather filled my nostrils, the last vestiges of battle swallowed like mouthfuls of mead, trampling banners strewn on the ground and in the distance the trails of dust from a retreating, defeated, decimated, disbanded army. My shoulder ached, stiff from the lance, heavy, tip drooping to earth; it had done a terrible day’s work. James, arms caked with blood, visor raised, sword in his right hand so much a part of him he had forgotten to sheath it, his shield with his lion and black Eagle still high, we rode, death twins, sweeping into the village and at the corner of Haste and Telegraph, Tim pulled up at the stoplight and said,

You go to the Mediterraneum if you want espresso and Creed’s Bookstore for old tomes, but if you want newborns, you shop at Cody’s Books and you go to foreign films at the Cinema and Guild because they’re art houses.

The light changed. Tim goosed the BSA. In his sunglasses, black jacket and boots, he was the angel of death and I was his demigod washed in the blood of white insects, anointed by the hand of a Berkeley landlady, baptized by sun setting over the Golden Gate.

At Telegraph and Bancroft, another light stopped us and Tim, idling the BSA, said,

Robbie’s is Home of the Charbroiled Hamburger but if you want scrambled eggs and bacon and toast, you sit down in Jules, and there, that’s the Smoke Shop, the best, the most perfect tobacco store in the universe and that’s where you buy Danish Whiffs and Philippine Tabalaceras and Gitanes and Gauloises—the best tobacco France has to sell.

I was living in the hour of Revelation and Apotheosis. Nothing that had gone before mattered. My rebirth had begun.

A Meditative Moment

Berkeley … the next day I bought the General Catalogue of the University because Tim told me to buy it and figure out my class schedule. I read it while sitting on the lip of Ludwig’s Fountain watching a German Shorthair play fetch with a tennis ball.

THE general catalogue of THE university—not just a university but THE UNIVERSITY. I thumbed the pages and the butterflies of knowledge flew out of it. I wanted to take every course offered at the university but I scanned the history department offerings and narrowed it down to Medieval Philosophy, the History of Ideas in the Middle Ages, Iconographic Art in the High Gothic Middle Ages, the Break-Up of Feudalism, The Manor House on the Feudal Estate, and Daily Life of Peasants in Medieval France. I settled on Iconographic Art in the High Gothic Middle Ages and the History of Ideas in the Middle Ages.

I was surrounded by people who knew the past. In the General Catalogue, I felt liberation. It was all right to think about the Middle Ages here. Medieval thinking, medieval art, medieval poetry. I wasn’t alone.

The air was charged. When I breathed, it transformed me the way purity transformed Perceval.

I left Ludwig’s Fountain then, and—plowing my way through the dense, excited and expectant atmosphere, a fresh fish swimming in fresh water—I felt myself getting smarter, wiser, and much, much more intelligent just by breathing Berkeley air. Oppenheimer had breathed Berkeley air. Aldous Huxley and Glenn Gould had breathed Berkeley air. By breathing Berkeley air, I became something I hadn’t been the day before. And then I looked up. Head bent back, jaw slack—I let my eyes slide up the sides of the Campanile.

The Lady in Black

I caught the last elevator to the observation deck. The Bay spread out and the sun shone on it, the reflection boiling like a cauldron of gold.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

A woman wearing a black veil that masked her face, hands in black lace gloves that hid her skin, handed me a marigold.

Wow, I said. Are you the official greeter?

Am I what?

You know—greeter. Greet.

I come here to rise above the squalor of the world. Up here the entire Bay Area shrinks down to nothing. From here, the entire human race looks tiny and insignificant, and everything we do seems pitiable and so utterly selfish. Isn’t that interesting? All motion ceases except the movement of the clouds and the churning of the sea. The elements remain, we come and go. It’s all so meaningless. Nothing but death down there, nothing at all. And I love it.

I’ve been in Berkeley for two days, I said. And already I think I’m smarter.

Are you a taker or a giver?

I’m going to take some medieval courses.

I like the taste of the Middle Ages, she said. So much death.

Yeah, the plague and everything…

We are alone, she said, waiting desperately for an angel to change our lives.

Hey. Maybe we can get together and, you know, get to know each other.

Do you have any acid? she said.

No.

Smack?

No.

Coke?

We could go get a cup of coffee, I said.

She took a black notebook from a black cloth pouch slung on her shoulder and wrote, using a black fountain pen with a silver nib.

So you are a student, she said.

From the Valley, but I’m interested in the Middle Ages—art and history.

San Fernando Valley Hell On Earth.

No. Central Valley. Down there they grow grapes.

She said, You are one of those idiot students who run through civilization at full gallop, dashing off cliffs and blundering into swamps before occasionally snagging something of value on his horns.

Are there swamps here? I said.

She snapped the notebook closed. Her hair hung in spiral curls down to shoulders covered by a lacy jacket that let pale white skin peek through the webbing. A thin waist, wide hips. A run in her left stocking started at the ankle and disappeared under the black dress that opened at the throat, revealing half-moons of pale breasts—feverish like a red-hot nun with cleavage who liked to screw.

I said, What I mean is, do you like to scr—

All these people down there, she said. Takers, every one. Givers know what is good and right and virtuous. Do you believe in God?

Uh, well, I don’t know. In the Middle Ages it was the law—

I know God doesn’t exist.

How can you be sure of something like that?

Vietnam. Kent State. Death. If God existed, do you think he would let them build this tower on this spot? Of course not. God doesn’t exist. The dying flesh. People’s Park.

She pulled out her notebook again and jotted something down.

What are you writing? I said.

My brilliance. When I get brilliant I write because truth is fleeting.

She snapped the notebook closed, capped the fountain pen.

And because God doesn’t exist, we are alone, each and every one of us—takers, givers, students, mothers, fathers, professors, poets. We’re all alone and nothing we say or do will change that. I love the draft. It feeds the Southeast Asian quagmire.

I’m 4-F, I said. Why do you wear the veil?

I am death, she said. Do you have a rope?

Why do you want a rope?

I wear the veil because no one really dies. We are born, we live, we die, we give our bodies back to nature and she rebirths us as a flower or an insect.

Do you give your body just to nature? I said.

What are you saying?

You’re the first woman I’ve talked to in Berkeley and I’d like to get to know you better. What’s your number?

You think I’m just for boinking? she said.

I’m not…really…I’m uh…Boinking?

You don’t have a rope and you are a fool. In the jungles of Vietnam, men are killing those beautiful innocent lovely kind wonderful people but you don’t have a rope. What do you want?

Your number? I’ll call you. We’ll get together and listen to Gregorian chants.

The elevator opened. A tall man with gray hair and wearing a blue suit got out, unlocked a door, went inside.

The carillon, she said. The bells toll. I have work to do.

She stowed her notebook in the black pouch. Thin fingers in lacy black gloves. She walked away. I watched her hips sway. Her black slippers were silent as she headed for