Days of Equal Night

Days of Equal Night

Published by Owen C. Schultz at Smashwords

Copyright 2010 Owen C. Schultz

Cover Photo: istockphoto.com/Duncan Walker

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Days of Equal Night

Chapter One

Morning at Bombay Beach

Awakening

I am Stephen Demens. My memory is a tired bird which sleeps head-under-wing for long periods of time. I am traumatized particularly in the ack-emma and usually dissociated, due to a long history of tragedies in my life. These tragedies are half Aristotelian, namely self-induced and ironically inevitable. The other half have been perpetrated upon my innocence by dung-eating social mechanisms intended to treat the mind and hearts (M & H’s) of indigent clients like me.

I have lost my parents -- one to fire and the other to flood; I have lost Doctor Ruth Mars, whom I loved more than my own bloodlines and platelets, to that slob Mr. Hennike. I have lost years of supple youth to a jail with green walls (a very short but degenerate tenure); to Prudence Hall (for the treatment of inimical malapropism in children); to the Casa de Esperanza (a facility where I played house trying to reintegrate myself into a society I had never known, no small trick) and to one and a half seasons behaving like a beatnik on the roads of NW N.A. Waking up was the hardest part of the day, a time of fugitive memories which made me tired. Many days I awoke with more forgotten than remembered, as I arose on the first day of this story about Yumama Field and Doctor Mars.

I woke up on the shores of the Salton Sea, two-hundred and thirty-five feet below the level of the Pacific Ocean. I had been walking for a long time like a prophet in the mountains with a long stick and dusty feet. Part of the Colorado, or the Colored River, ends up in this briny basin. The sun was shining past me and on to Los Angeles, one hundred and forty miles to the west, flying amber over the flat hot water.

I must have walked all through these cities without noticing what was happening: Pomona, Riverside, Banning, Palm Springs, and Indio... that is, if I had walked straight along Route 10. If I had not, if I had twisted round and followed the wind like a prophet which I looked like with my long stick for snakes and my heavy boots with aggressive tread, I might have walked through Rancho California, Sun City, or even Twentynine Palms. I don’t think so, but memory is sometimes false after a deep emotional disappointments. Unrequited love is no garden, let me tell you.

All I really knew was signified by the condition of my boots, all trone and gapey along the seams from scuffling along for quite some time, which was the condition of my heart too, trone and gapey. I might have walked a straight line away, heading directly south southeast but who knows?

I might also have walked through several reservations like the Cahulla Indian Reservation, or the Torrez Martinez Reservation, or Los Coyotes Indian Reservation, but I do not remember. It was only this morning, just after I woke up, that I remembered hitching my first ride outside of the Casa de Esperanza. I had been staying at the Casa as one of the trusted clients of Doctor Mars.

More about that later, but you should know that the Casa de Esperanza means the House of Hope. It is a facility specializing in the care of traumatized citizens of the San Gabriel Mountains where the water is very sweet to drink. That is north of the Imperial Valley and the Salton Sea where the water is like pee. The Imperial Valley is not very royal, since it’s low in a desert which is already dry and if it was not for Herbert Hoover and his dam and the sinuous American Canal it would be infrequently very wet and usually very arid. Now they grow cotton, citrus fruits like oranges, dates and winter vegetables. It is truly a wonder what the people of California can do with a landscape.

However, the water of the Salton Sea is very salty and it cannot be swallowed without nauseau. I tried a drink as soon as I woke up, since I had a cracking thirst and could not recall when I had last had a drink... but the water was disgusting. Even the plants needed a drink. They are blanched pale with all growing gone into defensive measures, well defended from invisible cattle with aggressive spikes and barbs. The saguaro cactus, for instance, is a dull green barrel covered in sharp unforgiving needles. Many of these spikes and barbs were stuck to the thick bottoms of my prophet’s boots, sticking out like the teats on deep-water sea mines used during WWII. Everyone knows that that stands for the Second World War, the first war of industrial giants. Many patriotic young traded blows on the open market, and many perished.

The most rapid technical applications of theoretical science are made while we are fighting other countries, and that is good for progress. When peace comes, of course, we have to leave behind many of the unpleasant things we learned and concentrate upon civilian applications. But new techniques die hard, and seed themselves in the minds of soldiers. War sticks to the bootsoles of returning troops like the barbs of desert plants. The soldiers walked off boats called Liberty Ships with feet sore and bleeding from fighting, and tracked the seeds of war all over the country.

Personally, I am a veteran of caring. Many persons have cared for me professionally for so long that I have neglected to care for myself (aside from the tropisms of any vertebrate like grubtropism, snoozetropism, or copulatropism). My feet are metaphorically sore and bleeding... I am wandering along by myself so that I do not spread the seeds of psychological warfare among my friends.

After WW Dos the soldiers carried the gymnospores of war with them to universities under the GI bill, which made for very pragmatic class discussion. GI also means gastro-intestinal in medical circles. Desert mornings bring thoughtful contemplation of history, and sharpen my ironic sensitivities, memory notwithstanding. it was nevertheless difficult to wake up.

There is no GI Bill for the deferred. Therefore I have come to a desert university on my own, to learn first-hand about the self and the religious life of the prophets. I have an abiding belief that there must be a message for all persons in the tragedies of my life. Many prophets have found their voices through solitude in abandoned lands. I will find my Vox in the Sonoran, and finally become a contributing member of society. You have no idea how craven and undertowed it is to be professionally cared for... my troubles were always somebody’s gross receipts. That is another burden which made it difficult to wake up.

So I lay still on the ground, remembering all I could which was not too much at that time; I also experienced my surroundings with all the senses at my command. I smelled a lot of iodine and sodium radicals and free chlorine around me, and heard tight waves slumping to the raked beach. The water was thick and turgid. The water sounded so slow I nearly became comfortable and impartial of my own history listening to it slop on the beach beside me. That was tremendously ironic considering how poorly the therapy of hydros had worked upon me in the past.

I watched the water. The Salton Sea can almost float concrete, the water is so salted with the tears collected by the Colorado. Many of those tears are cried by surprised tourists who have never seen a manifestation of nature like the Grand Canyon. They stand with their arms about their families and cry wetly into the gorge, the tears dropping along the limestone and contributing to erosion. Many of the tears roll all the way to the bottom. That is why people must use salt-proof rubber boats to tour the river far below.

It is recorded by park rangers that after each of our wars, the rocks of the canyon are worn away ever more rapidly by tourists, who are not only surprised by the majesty of the place and the implacable pissant river beneath their feet, but who also think deeply about the young people who will never see the canyon at all since they were recently and honorable passed away on the field of valor. I would not be surprised to find that the official field of valor is like Coyote Lake, a place where the water used to be but is no longer. It is only a blue dotted outline on the Texaco map.

While tears are cleansing of the spirit for awed tourists, it is also true that we are very nice to ourselves without any prompting. It is very difficult to get human beings crying over unpleasant occurrences, even unpleasantnesses of those very near and dear. Those kinds of memories disappear underneath the surface like diving birds. Memory is careful and records much unpleasantness, put away in very deep places hard to reach unless you are in the desert by yourself asking to be cleaned of confusions and mistakes you’ve made. I was in the desert for that reason, so deep memories were afloat upon my brain pan.

These are the memories which give direction to our lives, even though they are inaccessible by ordinary means. It takes a sign or a token to bring them out, providing good employment to astrologers and readers of the human palm.

For example, when I awoke I did not know which way to walk. To decide, I stood my boots in the Sea and I affirm they floated upright, drifting in the thick water by themselves. More than that, they both pointed in the same direction like a compass or lodestone. They swiveled in a westerly breeze that came out of the Chocolate Mountains, pointing their toes back at Bombay Beach, where I was, pointing beyond me toward Yumama Fields. It was a clear message for me, let me tell you, even though I’m a technophile of the first rank. But that direction was the way I headed, holding my staff rigorously outward and striking biblical poses to prove that memory, although a tough customer, was no match for Stephen Demens in his prime. Which I am, both in my prime, and Stephen Demens in the Chocolate Mountains, CA., late of the House of Hope.

Walking

I put my boots on carefully, maintaining the direction of their point, taking all things as signs. There was a pack on the Beach of Bombay that had to be mine. It was embroidered with small dolphins arching over curled waves, and had a little NASA flag sewn to the top nylon flap. I put it on and heard a gurgling inside. There was a water bottle, which was where I had been getting the stuff to drink for the time not contained in my short-term memories. It is a fact that deep memories displace current temporal hoopla, leading to apparent absence of mind. Rather, absent short-term memory is a gnomen of great and profound mental activity.

I tried the water, held tightly in a liter plastic bottle covered in loden fabric. It was warm and lumpy in my mouth, perhaps backwash from cookies floating around in the dim interior, but it tasted better than the Salton Sea and did not make me nauseous. I drank in small sips, holding still, unwilling to move my boots to the left or to the right. I strained water between my teeth. I spit the stuff from my lips like someone spitting a little piece of tobacco from a hand-rolled, pushing my tongue out and snapping it back with a ‘phutt". That was the primere sound I made that first morning. Phutt.

The lumps made me ill at ease, and I hoped that they were left over from cookies or baked goods and not something nasty like purulent chicken skin or cough-up. It was all confusing, and I am forever grateful for the oil company for their wonderful map, which allowed me to orient myself to the landscape with ease. It is a constant wonder to me when I realize that human beings have been over every square inch of our land, measuring and naming like crazy for thousands of years. Many many people and their stories are necessary to make maps, and someone had probably been right where I was before, and probably in worse straights, with no water or boots for his or her feet. I was blessed with good health and strong boots.

I thought how wonderful it would be to name things on earth: Stephen’s Rise, Stephen’s Peak, Demens’ Decline, for instance. The opportunity might never come my way, there being such good maps with many names already printed. All of the big objects in the temperate zone have nombres, but there are many touching names not yet used. I would like to name something very large Steven’s Regret. It would have to be a piece of heartbreaking territory, very difficult to travel over; and at the top, just where a weary traveler has traversed his or her last breath, I would like a small bronze circle set into the living rock which would have an uplifting inscription on it.

Bronze Marker at Stephen’s Regret

"Carrying his weakened party, S. Demens

Here crossed the backbone of America

During the fierce storm of ought-nine;

He guided lost immigrant travelers to the

Great Imperial Valley

Fording the Colorado at the future site

Of the Hoover Dam, fending

Off predators both human and animal.

His only regret, memorialized by this marker,

Was his inability to also carry his trusted

Hound Bounder on to safety during the storm.

It is said that the heart-wrenching howl

Of the exhausted Bounder can still be heard

In these hills, baying for the master who left him behind.

Two months after his heroic crossing,

Demens perished suddenly, fatigued from his labors,

While sunning on Redondo Beach.

The first immigrant people came to America on their own feet, walking across from the People’s Republic and the Union of Socialists. They were very healthy, living off the land and walking several thousand miles for political asylum. Walking would probably be very good for me as well, and allow me to recapture the higher mental facilities (HMF’s) I have clearly been lacking for the past few weeks or months.

I am being guided in an easterly fashion by signs and portents. First my pointing boots floating in the water, and now a vision of the bronze marker. Hoover Dam was well to the northeast of my position. I knew where I was, but I did not know when I was. I felt sure that the first person I met would surely be glad to tell me the day and month, since it’s common for people in the desert to loose track of time and sometimes location.

Arid regions of the world are known for their therapeutic as well as their befuddling value. Deserts are full of patients with cracked lips. That, and short rains, characterize a desert. Deserts do not have to be hot, which surprises many people who have only read the Arabian Nights. It was cold and salty by the Salton Sea west of the Chocolate Mountains, and the skin on my bare knees ached from bending in a curl all night long. Reptiles have sails of skin to catch the sun for breakfast; they sit like loadstones, pointing north, and heat their blood for the interesting day to come. All I had in the pack was the crummy water and a package of almost-empty trail mix. I counted seven almond slivers, fifteen flakes of raw oatmeal, and twenty-five pieces of sliced dates. There were too many sunflower seeds to numerate, obviously left behind since they were not my favorites, whether I was functioning properly or not.

The sun jumped over a near rock ridge like the ground was too cold, and I had a revelation. Unlike other occurrences I never forget revelations. They insinuate, from the Latin root ‘sinu’ or sinus. They sneak up in certitude like a gas along the ground, and filter up into my brain as I breathe. That is how it feels, anyway. I have developed a distrust of these revelations, but I love life deeply and foolishly. There is no test for love of life.

However, the test of a good revelation is how well it works. Very few have worked for me recently, meaning that they cause me harm and also hurt other people with backscatter. It is hard to maintain belief. As I watched the sun coming up, turning like a heliotrope, a voice spoke to me with a confident tone. It made a nasty suggestion to me, withering under the sunlight which is very strong and believing in that part of the world.

Honest persons will admit to hearing voices. Other people only become anxious about this fact of life when your Vox is given greater credence than theirs, which is another way of saying you trust yourself. Social integration has a price for everyone. Quashing the voice is one of the payments we have made. The trees have lost their tongues for us... but my Vox is strong and certain, conversing with me imperatively. It is, however, a very backward voice, and likes the rituals of dead peoples. It is hard to ignore. This was the nasty suggestion:

I had my boots on, with the sharp desert spikes sticking out. It told me to use one of the bronze spikes to demonstrate my dedication -- it wanted me to stick one of the spikes into my face to show that I still believed, but I am not sure even now what that belief was supposed to be. Whatever the belief was, it truly seemed to me that being in the desert and all, with the associated discomfort of hot and cold and drying winds which crinkle the eyes prematurely, was quite enough to show dedication. But it was obviously not enough for the Vox. All through my journey from San Gabriel and the Casa de Esperanza, I had experienced clear instructions from the unknown, asking me to do the unacceptable, to show that I was still to be counted upon for hysterical behavior. It is not difficult to be alone for long periods of time. It is hard to behave in ways that are contrary to your nature. However, during this period of pre-coitus parting from the one I loved, I was not very strong of mind and it was difficult to argue with a voice that came from the middle of the landscape.

I was told to take one of the cactus spikes and push it through the bottom of my lip, holding my lip puckered like a fish-face adults make for children. I saw a little mental picture of myself with lips sewn together, frightful drops of blood running down. I saw the permanent holes where juices leaked from my mouth throughout adulthood. Many of my friends at Prudence Hall specialized in disfigurement, but not me. I knew even then that repudiating the poor cuerpo, or body, was no way to treat the mind, that is the truth.

You’ll be happy to know that although I was willing to be directed I was unwilling to perform facial mutilation. There was no way I would stick a barb, as septic as it looked covered with little desert hairs along the chitinous shaft, in a place a sensitive as my lower lip. I did not want to permanently disfigure myself, there being a limit to anyone’s faith. But it gives you an idea about revelation and how dangerous mine could be.

I said to myself, I stick that thing in my face and bleed to death, internally and externally. The blood will exsanguinate from both sides of my cheek, filling my mouth and reddening my teeth, and also running carelessly down my neck under the desert sun where moisture is at a premium. I cannot afford to loose all that blood, and I cannot afford to look strange and disfigured, a brunt of chiding from village ne’er-do-wells who have nothing better to do than watch out for strangeness and protect their communities from change.

To remain truthful and credible, I must say that I really compressed that personal quotation for your convenience. My own voice is hesitant, and there were a great many pauses and hums and ums in what I actually thought -- please don’t get the idea that I am some sort of glibbed person travelling on his father’s money or a monstrous inheritance. On the other hand, the revelation’s Vox, if you can remember from now on as you read this account, is very bassy, impressive, unhesitatingly striking low unctuous and convincing at the diaphragm. It is the kind of voice used in the movies to show Zeus up in the clouds manipulating like mad and looking aplombed. It’s the kind of voice that is hard to ignore.

Using that basso-aplombo voice, the Vox said Not to worry, Stephie, not to be concerned, then explained that there was something about the little hairs on the barb of the saguaro or the cholla cactus that prevented bleeding. So I would be fine and dandy, not exsanguinated at all. Apparently the barb could be used as a survival tool for injured people caught in the desert regions of the world where medical attention is at a premium.

Although I was not going to test the barb, nevertheless I made a note to inform someone in authority of its potential just in case. Certainly, I had no war wound that needed stitching, but you never really know over time just which of your insights will prove ultimately the most useful. I was not even sure if I hadn’t read about barbs somewhere, in a tale of the desert Bedouins at war with Italy, or perhaps in a Red Cross survival manual. Clotting barbs could be common knowledge. This technique has probably already been long employed by the pedagogues at Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Base, just to my north.

It could be very useful.

For example, the technique might save the life of the person scheduled to halt World War Tres in the nick of time, holding the lips of an otherwise mortal wound securely together, allowing him or her to argue magnificently with the political hacks of his or her era, the desert barbs from the jumping cholla holding his or her blood at bay, and ventilating the seat of higher instincts like survival.

Chapter Two

The Hills of Cinnabar

My pack is a canvas bag with many pockets. They are all empty, but each is covered with a thick, twice-sewn flap fastened with a heavy brass snapper, which has a springing sound when it?s opened or closed. The straps for holding the bag on my shoulders are triple—thickness, and sewn in lines with stitching. They join the bag at a leathern triangle, and are punched for big brass rivets. It is a proud possession of mine now. The little NASA flag on the top flap is a copy of the wire-strutted flag used on the moon where there is no breeze to hold a flag out because there is no air. The flag glistens like the wing of a butterfly, a phenomenon of selective interference in light waves. There is very little breeze on the road away from Bombay Beach, on the route called OneEleven south to Brawley and Calipatria, which means Warmland. I threw the bag up in the air and caught it between my arms, behind my back, and spread my arms like wings. I walked away from the Salton Sea.

The Chocolate Mountains are bordered by the Sand Hills to the south, by the Chuckwalla Mountains to the north, and by the Colorado to the east. They are not really chocolate at all, but hills of cinnabar, also called HgS, or mercury sulfide, a deep red mineral. It is the primary source of the metal mercury, also known as quicksilver, or Hg. Mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures. Mariner 10 visited Mercury, the nearest planet to the sun between 1974 and 1975; Mercury was also the god of commerce and the messenger of the gods in the mythology of old Italians. Etc. Etc. But Hg’s great and secret importance is for prophets, so I have been told. The Cinnabar Hills are a winter resort and training ground for seers and prophets. It is a place of many stories, and was good for my memory even though I am not a professional prophet.

If fact, as soon as I had entered the hills, all of my memory returned at once. It was enough to knock me over. In addition to my many deep and unpleasant memories, I have many light and pleasant memories, as anyone has while living life. They all crowded my face, knocking the backs of my teeth. would have given them all the time they needed, I was so glad to have them back again, except that the Vox started again.

In truth, the Vox is my name for the whispers of deep thoughts come back unbidden. It is a Latin word for voice, but there are no straining cords or diaphragmatic spreads between the ribs. It is private as a person at a dark door who has no voicebox. Vox makes it easier to listen to messages that are hardest to tell yourself, or to the tales and whoppers unacceptable to rational entrepreneurs. The Vox told good stories, predicted the future fallibly, and chastened me for abnormality and lack of social integration. Walking between the mercury hills brought a story from the Vox in the grand tradition of the troubadours. This is how it went:

The Voice told me that long ago, each of the brown mounds of the Cinnabar Hills had begun to glow at its heart like ionized gas. Small sprites of color began to wave before everyone’s eyes. The shapes were transparent, as if the dots and cones and circles actually floated behind their fleshy lenses. Such ophthalmologic hallucinations are called floaters. A corona of whirling scintillating shapes rayed from the tops of the hills, looking like the crown of Diadem, an elderly underwater goddess of the Sumarians who saved sailors lost at sea, and who brought dawn to the Middle Ocean. Sixteen hills to the right and twenty-three hills to the left whirled with plasma crowns, piercing the clouds and flashing in the chilly morning air. It was like an early Hollywood opening with searchlights. Whereas everyone knows a star when they see one, it is only prophets who are affected by the Chocolate Mountains. So the story went.

Ordinary people like me can hike through the dry hills forever and find nothing but thirst and strain. I cannot prove that Cinnabar brought my memory back. Perhaps it returned by itself. But for a prophet? That’s supposed to be another story. Each of the stately mounds theoretically contains within its heart the knowledge of one major technique of the prophet’s art. It is