Tradegy Of Crows: Chapter 2 (4) “Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?” he called to him. Brian expected him to turn, to launch into a bitter, inconsistent tirade and completely embarrass himself as he had so often done in the past. Hazzard heard him, surely, but kept walking at the same pace. The next day, Hazzard said his part perfectly, without a single slip up, but when Hermione embraced him, his eyes gave her forehead an overdone gaze of grief and astonishment. Maria had too many experiences with Hazzard to count. It was hard to decide if there was a single one or two that were truly significant. She liked to remember the poetical nature of things he’d say. Once, she had asked him if he wanted to go grocery shopping. He said, “I don’t believe in discrimination,” then went on to explain how he feels for the plight of inanimate objects, birthed by the uncaring mother of industry, spewed forth for our approval, which so many never receive, thus remaining lonely upon the shelf. She remembered the gist of it, but what caught her most was when he said, “I think all cartoonists should be shot. All those cute little animals drawn on boxes of cookies and labels of canned pastas, they have real lives and real smiles, and all they want is for you to buy those cookies. And if you do, you have to tear the package, throw out the wrapper, and that cute little cartoon rabbit, the smiling bear with the open arms, the dancing penguin, the chipper tiger… they’re all rotting in a dumpster somewhere… No, I don’t want any part of it.” “Wow,” Maria said. “Write that down. Get off the phone with me now and write that down… please.” “No,” he yawned. “I don’t think so.” Of course, there were those moments that had a poetry all their own. She was coming back from the gym and the rain was falling pretty hard. Her off white shorts turned to dark gray before she could cross the parking lot. On his back staring into the deep blue clouds, Hazzard smoked a cigarette. His arms spread out across the top of a picnic table. His hair fell down from the edge, water raining through to the grass. She walked over and prepared to say hello, but he spoke first. “There’s someone in the crows. He knows our name.” Black flecks, skyward, were departing beneath the murmur of thunder. She had always loved the dark birds in every season, scattered about the hillside, squawking in the early moments of sunrise. On a Monday of that summer she had climbed to the top of campus to see the day begin. She had asked him several times if he had ever watched the sun rise. He said, “I don’t remember” or “probably”. She thought about the crows that early weekday morning, and she thought about what a nice day it would be. She listened to the commotion of the birds and wondered what the fuss was about. Then, she remembered what he had told her. She walked down the hill, noticing crows cawing as they picked at the leavings of litterbugs. Quietly, she returned to her dorm room. She swore she must have had a headache, because she didn’t remember the sunset at all. It just rose around her, inevitable, and oddly mundane. She took a Tylenol PM and tried to sleep through the bird sounds, always heavy in those earlier hours. In a few minutes, she was asleep, head snug, body in a tight ball. That was how she slept on the border of the sightless zone. Her legs and arms folded in as she lied upon her right side. Close to the edge, she slept intent upon an enlightening pool of dreams. The ridge dropped down into darkness. Was it a night sky with low clouds or a low night sky without clouds? Thinking was getting hard, sleep defeated everything with a sweet, soft suggestion in a breath of the word, “shush”. She kind of wanted to give up and write that all down, but a yawn stretched her will thin. This was all an adventure, and a sleep amidst a demanding expedition should never be wasted. So much remained in her head to decompress, to reflect upon, and to later turn into poetry. First came the dreams… slow moving waves. Brian and James didn’t feel particularly tired. Brian checked his watch again, and it was still stopped. James was reminded of his wallet, and he took out his driver’s license and began reading all the personal information back to himself. “67 Maple Street… yup,” he said handing the ID over to Brian. “In case you still thought you were dreaming…. I’ve heard that you can’t read anything in dreams.” “That’s the kind of thing you hear in comic books, though,” Brian said looking at the ID. “I’d be the first person to remain skeptical, here, I’d tell you, but I’ve always been a bit logical to start with, and well….” “It’s kind of hard to ignore the fact that we’re here, isn’t it?” James said taking a seat upon the ground. It was dusty, cold, and flat, and for some reason, it was also comfortable. Brian handed back the ID and James slipped it into his wallet. “Are you ready for tomorrow?” “How could anyone be ready for an opportunity like this?” Brian said giving a slight laugh. “It’s just a…” “I don’t know man, I don’t know… I’ve been thinking about…” James began sputtering. Brian had a point to make, and he was certain it was quite good, but he waited through James’ slow half-sentences with half a smile. “I mean, what do you ask if you could to… I mean, what do you say?” “I know, I know,” Brian said quickly. “But, enough on that, really… What the problem definitely is here, you see, is that we have be receptacles now.” “Right,” James said flatly. Brian’s half-smiled faded for a second. “All that time we’ve spent learning that mindless memorization of facts, names, and dates is just a waste time… all the times our professors have discussed the new education… don’t you find it funny that here, at the most… well, educational moment of our lives, potentially, what matters most is that we remember what is said. Not a second can be wasted with our idle thoughts, our momentary inquiry, we have to listen and by God remember,” Brian completed his speech. He hadn’t expected to say, “By God” and that brought the speech to a more abrupt end. It still sounded good, though. “Right, right,” James said, two consecutive flat notes. Brian knew what his own thoughts, though, and regretted that he’d have to empty it out in favor of thoughts to come from future conversations. He walked to the edge and stared down into the black covering. Stretching out his arms, he tried to feel something of what was beneath, like a child examining the wrapping of a Christmas present. The sooner he slept, the sooner the journey would continue. He didn’t really believe that sleep was possible under the circumstances, but he figured he’d better try. Placing his hat on his chest, his back to the ground, and his stopped-watch in his pants pocket, he closed his eyes and continued to think. Why had he been chosen… for his memory? That didn’t sound quite right. And the others; James, Jen, Scott? Memory? Surely, there was more to it, but just in case, he figured it would be a good idea to sharpen his memory. He recited some poems, “When lilacs last…” and “Tiger, Tiger…” and so forth and finally he came back to poet’s names, Allan Ginsberg, William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Edgar Allan Poe… and what about Brian Southworth… Brian Southworth slept in bed sheets stitched in memory, iambic pentameter, in and out, the rhythm of a sonnet as a lullaby. After leaning over to see if Brian was still awake, James found the ground surprisingly comfortable. He was asleep after a few minutes of replaying the day’s events in his head. Virgil stepped over his legs, making the rounds. The wise young men always went to sleep. Of course, they began with discomfort. Discomfort comes with awareness. Those quick to accept the powers behind their journey left their minds clear to apprehend all the wonders of the tour. A night was not enough to come to a decision regarding the existence of life after death, but a night was sufficient time for a mind to settle after the initial shock of something long suspected anyway. Taking some time to watch the young men sleeping, Virgil took note of the latest fashion trends, gathered a slight amusement, shook his head, and strolled toward the edge. Jen was standing there. The idea of curling up on the ground did not sit well with her. She didn’t know how the others were doing it. Of course, she did want to talk, but she didn’t have any analysis prepared. She wasn’t too much into the philosophy of religion, and she knew that’s what Brian would expect of her. Maria might say something about phosphorescence or lush sensation. James would fuel either one with attention. She wasn’t sure why she had turned suddenly critical or why she had been awake thinking about it silently for so long. Her eyes kept turning down to that black, disappointing void where tomorrow had been committed in advance. How far in advance, she wondered. These weren’t her favorite thoughts, and she wanted to abandon them in favor of something other than a sleep on the dirty ground. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep,” he asked. Recognizing his voice from the others in the group was like being able to tell she was outside as opposed to inside. He was another dimension. To understand him underneath the weight of his voice took some degree of focus. She was barely willing too commit to it. “I should, I know,” she said. “I’m just not ready, yet.” “You are troubled by what you see down there,” Virgil stated. “It’s not what it seems to be.” “Looks dark down there,” she spoke suddenly feeling dizzy. Kneeling down between Virgil and the edge, she held her head in her hands, and then pulled her fingers out through her long, blonde hair. “Great wonders await you, horrors and delights. You have the chance to ask the greatest of men, the questions of your age,” Virgil said watching her arms stretch through the length of her hair. He recalled the moon shining through rain, the pull of caught light in dazzling streams. At the end of her pale fingers’ travels, a brilliant fall signaled a return to an unchangeable beauty. She was a whole phase away, confined by latent earthly fears of death and unhappiness. He stood above her embedded in his work, being a tour guide, and he could feel the hundreds of years between them. She would have been beautiful on earth in any age. He would have noticed on earth at any age, as well, but in the beginnings of Hell, he only felt his stomach pain again. The stomach pain of not having a stomach, that is. A final set of fingertips made a last pass through her hair before finding a place on the ground. Her beauty was winding down into a further land away, where she would run through her thoughts and drop them successively until all was composed and beautiful. “I’m not ready for this,” she yawned. Virgil smiled. “This opportunity makes you special. You have been chosen. It was you, and your task is not to understand why, but to make the best of this journey,” he spoke watching her eyelids bob slowly over blue eyes. “But, I don’t know…” she sprawling on one side. “What do I say? What am I supposed to be…?” “Great powers have been employed for you,” Virgil said pointing into the abyss. “You have already been chosen. Living up to it will not be a problem. You underestimate what you are. If ever you feel insignificant, unsure, remember that there are no mistakes here. A wonderful and beautiful reason embraces you. A lifetime awaits, time enough for you to understand it. Dream well.” She was gone after humming a bit of a tune. Virgil tried to commit it to memory, but new things never stayed in the foreground for long. It took a lot of effort to recall anything learned exclusively in the afterlife. Sighing, Virgil gazed upon her, watching the rhythm of her breath, rising and falling. Something about the living always made him feel at peace. That was the main perk of the job. Experiencing life, second hand, a wise soul in Hell could not hope for anything more heavenly. To see breathing, to see nostrils open, overwhelmed. Memory was a postcard. A living soul was the ticket in hand, the gateway to remembering all the sensations of having life and being surrounded by it. He watched her like a planet in orbit. The next day, she would see his home, and her memory of him may see earthly breath. He imagined her lips parting to a lively wind to speak the sound of his name. The kiss of it would flutter from her, encircle her, and hold her, caressing a moment of her life. He hoped she would remember it all. Hazzard hoped he would remember it all. After complaining silently for an hour, he had a few great arguments built up, some truly disturbing conclusions, and some mildly repulsive notions about his journey. Charon’s boat and the idea of escape wore on his mind. A great image of the thrashing demon in a hot maroon pool kept cropping up in between visions of himself falling into the sightless zone. Somewhere in the mesh of thought, he’d come up with some great short story ideas, a premise for a commercial about for anti-bacterial soap, and few sounds he could work into a poem. Of course, that damn notebook was somewhere in the water pit at the center of the Hartwick College Environmental Campus. No one had thought about that since Hell jumped out of nowhere and swallowed them all up. He tried to remember all that was there, knowing that he couldn’t, knowing that his mind wasn’t built all that well, really. He could remember plot synopses for episodes of McGyver. He couldn’t remember the poems, the scribbles, the jagged seeds of thought, and long recorded rants jammed on those blue lined pages between scratches of the word “Fuck” and pictures of stick figure suicides. Remembering it all was the hardest thing, not what he saw, but what he made out of it. On rare occasions, sight and thought were one. He’d never committed himself as much as he should have to any of his studies. He couldn’t deny it, but a whole world could be scarified for the sake of one of those rare moments, even if far greater things surely exist, even if the world is only on paper. Hazzard looked upon Maria, arms and legs folded in and her hair fanning out upon the ground as if caught in a freeze frame of turning. He thought he might count the seconds of that sleep and predict how her morning rise might look. Her sleep was soundless. It was too long to wait. Rare moments, sticking out in the mundane day-to-day life, they might be mistaken for something else entirely. He was trying to come up with the word for what it was and why it seemed that no one was looking anymore. “You’re being too dramatic,” someone had told him once. “You’re a romantic, I see.” So many dismissals had come in the face of such terrific moments. It was all there in Maria’s eyes when an unseen force washed her eyes away from the sinking notebook as she turned toward the path of Hell. He looked down. It was everything he had ever imagined in a beautiful moment. She was still, easy to analyze, worth the effort of every second to channel into words, but he found it impossible to think about her. It was a matter of willpower. “We’re done,” he wished to whisper, but so much had been wasted already. He turned away from her trying hard to remember all the sentences in his head, while keeping an inner vigil for lost words. *** Satan refused outside council, but he was not averse to eavesdropping. For the most part, demons in Hell had sickly predictable minds. Most would replayed the Top 40 evil incantations released each year in some broken down oral tradition that spread dirty limericks and repetitious musical pollution about the damned city of Dis. No one admitted to writing them. No one really had to since the oral tradition was merely transference of grievances. A press worker would complain to the maintenance demons, the maintenance demons to the pit demons with their abundant work orders. The pit demons complained to the damned, and the damned to the damned, and the damned in a channel of moaning that spread throughout all the circles of Hell. The rhythm of complaints was almost poetry, but only just enough like it to force a distasteful memory of poetry. Of course, it was a type of prayer, “Hail Satan” this and “Hell shall rise” that, but it was only barely resembling prayer. He’d listen in on these broken songs, the un-tuned orchestra of wails and shrieks, feeling that familiar ache and the annoying burn from Heaven’s flashlight still casting a ray upon his head. He tried not to listen to them at all, but being the Lord of Darkness, he found it difficult not to simply know and hear of all things evil in his domain. If a pit demon stuck a pitchfork in middle of a fleeing soul’s thigh, he knew the shade of the glints in the weeping eyes. His crown was jeweled in it. If a fury had tossed a rock at Phlegyas causing him to fall off his little boat, Satan felt the rock swinging in his head. Sometimes, he’d focus in, watch it, hearing specific whimpers, shouts, cackles, and shrieks, until it all seemed mundane enough to almost escape notice. Satan wondered if that’s the way God felt about things. These times of deep thought, alone, were the only times he had really thought about God as an entity. Most of the time, it was a war against Heaven, one reality fighting to exist, while another reality rained down upon everything, dumping its burden of violators down, dropping its problems one by one to be managed. Satan burned them in accordance to the rules. Of course, ask any demon why they tortured the damned, they would say, “Because they are God’s children, because it amuses our Lord, and because it will make them hate and deny their savior.” Satan never recalled coming up with these reasons. He must have at one point in his career. They seemed all right, so everyone sort of went with it. If he had to come up with his own reason all over again, he’d probably have to shrug and say, “That’s the way it worked out.” He was scaring himself with that logic, though. He had been lethargic about the whole operation for so long, he barely had a hand in any of the crazy notions swarming about. Of course, all that really thrived in Hell at all were rumors. Rumors ran everything. The whole city of Dis awoke thinking the city towers would be prepared. The whole of the printing press spent an extra shift printing propaganda screaming about the glorious plans for renewal, renovation, repair, and revolution. All stories told of ‘sooner’, rather than later time, and all stories spoke the praises of the one infallible hero, Satan. Long ago, he recalled being flattered. These days, he had dreams of a fire big enough or pit low enough to make them realize how far down they truly were. After so many years, they still seemed like children. Some issues of The Burning City Times still called him “Father”. Eyes in the dark were always looking up, waiting. And dutifully, more tired than he had ever been, he climbed into solitude to devise a new plan, to give them just a little more fodder to keep the faith alive. But, it was so hard to focus with all their noise. Solitude was never really solitude. He could request it of them, but he couldn’t force it on himself. Everything was disjointed and distracting, from Dagon’s sudden raging demands for more weapons to Moloch’s bizarre, philosophical rhetoric about “honor” and “sacrifice”. Of course, they never had plans, just ideas for “types” of plans. “The living soul, that is the key, we must pollute the living soul,” one would say. “No, no, the power. A soul cannot be swayed without the promise of power. He must be the strongest.” “Strength is determined by the weakness of our opponent. We must break the ideal.” “Certainly not, we must first crush the belief in ideals.” “… and to do that we must pollute the living soul!!!” And so forth and so on. And suddenly, through the muck of it, a rhythm appeared, a chain of thought straining in a dusty underused mind…. “I cannot see him anywhere. I cannot see him anywhere. I cannot see him anywhere,” the voice murmured from the outer circle. Beezlbub popped into existence groveling below Satan’s throne. “I am here to do your bidding my master,” he spoke quietly. “The whole of Hell awaits the gift of your genius… what powers do you bestow upon…” “Yes, yes,” Satan said. “Whatever, just get up from the floor and listen to me. You have an assignment.” “Anything, anything,” he whimpered. “Anything for our king, our…” “Silence!” Satan shouted. He hated doing that. When Dis visibly shook, the commotion of disquieted demons was an unpleasant aftershock. Some loose stones dropped, too, and the repairs would take a long time as usual. “Bring me Charon!” “Yes, yes,” he replied then his eyes disappeared into the shadows. “But, I can’t… I’m sure you know that he is irreplaceable… I would never dream to correct you… the master…”
Copyright © 2001 Scott W. Hazzard |