Richard Levitt’s Blog

[0007 Richard]

 

I gazed out toward the window of the greasy little diner where we were eating, just as a big, fat cockroach skittled across the windowsill. He (it) stopped for a beat and sort of looked my way. I felt a wave of dizziness and shook my head. Jeremy was transfixed by his hamburger, disassembling it and rearranging the condiments. I looked back up and the cockroach had taken a step closer, as if he was goading me. The threadbare vinyl of the booth squeaked a little as I shifted my weight. My elbow knocked into the ridged aluminum trim of the table, and the water glasses rattled a bit. Jeremy didn’t notice, his burger demanded complete attention.

 

I squinted and craned my neck to see the insect more closely without actually moving. Fuck me silly if the little bastard didn’t hunker down, then break into a big, toothy Cheshire Cat grin. His long antenna plied the air. He raised one of his spindly little legs and shot me the bird. Then he bolted through a tiny gap between the window and frame and was gone.

 

“What the …”

 

“What the what,” Jeremy said, “it’s my burger … I like a pickle in every bite, so what …”

 

“I, uh …”

 

The world sort of skipped a beat and my sense of vertigo became stronger, like I was being spun by my feet while being ground between a cosmic mortar and pestle. Everything shimmered around me; the air became opaque and pieces of the restaurant became unhinged from everything else. The long lunch counter, the little padded stools, the display case of pies (and their reflection in the angled mirror) all shifted a bit. Not to the left or right, but inward and outward. Through me and away from me.

 

“Oh God,” I thought. “Here I go …”

 

The universe pressed into a single dimension, and I felt like I was being squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. I threw my head back to scream, tried to stand or flail, but couldn’t move. I was a photograph, an etching on paper, a shadow.

 

A hundred million miles away, Jeremy proudly looked up and displayed his custom-crafted burger. Through infinite filters I heard him shout something and hurl his burger aside; through a tunnel of smoky glass I saw him bolt of out his seat and dive across the table. He was more like a sheet, pinned to a line and rippling in a gentle breeze.

 

The cockroach was standing on my sneaker. He ran up my leg—stopping to quickly inspect a bit of food on my jeans—then scurried up to my shoulder.

 

I looked over, which took effort, and saw him sitting, cross-legged, and smiling at me.

 

“Dude, where you been?” he asked.

 

There was no restaurant, no Jeremy or re-architected burger. No world, no trees or sidewalks, no jet planes or iPods. I was enveloped in a diaphanous womb of lavender light. It was weird, but I was safe. The “air” tasted sweet. My hunger, which had persisted for weeks was abated. I felt no fatigue. I spread my arms like wings and arched backwards. Since my feet weren’t grounded, it wasn’t as if I left the safety of the ground. I simply shifted in space.

 

I looked over to the cockroach, who was sitting happily on my shoulder, reading the collected works of Billy Collins.

 

I asked him, “Is this heaven?”

 

He put the book down and smiled that weird smile.

 

“No dude,” he said. “Better …”

 

[0008 Gary]

 

“Am I dead?” I pondered, squinting into the lavender, trying to get my bearings.

 

“Don’t be so melodramatic, dude. You ask the same stupid question every time we do this. Welcome back to the Ether!”

 

He cocked his head and wagged fingers on three of his legs and added in a singsong falsetto, “Someone has been avoiding me!”

 

I sat silent for a moment and wondered why a cockroach would wear leather suspenders and a propeller beanie. Then the clouds started to clear inside my head and I asked, “Who the fuck are you?”

 

The disgusting little bug laughed. It was a creepy laugh, like you might suspect would come from a cockroach. Evil but still strangely endearing, like my old girlfriend Tracy when she wanted something that she knew I didn’t want to give. Very creepy indeed.

 

“How soon they forget. I still have no name, unless you want to conjure one out of your shallow, stagnant pond of memories. Call me Jiminy Cricket if you’d like. Or Tinker Bell. Certainly this could be Never-Never-Land or Wonderland depending upon how we take the session this time. Last time it was Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, if I remember correctly. Though only Anya is at that particular depth right now, isn’t she?

 

“Who would you like to sink this time, big fella? Got another close friend or family member you can’t bear to lose? How about this knucklehead here in the diner with you? Looks like your world wouldn’t miss him very much at all.”

 

He sat and crossed each of his pairs of legs into a Lotus position. Creepier by the minute.

 

“Don’t you understand that you can’t stay away from the Ether for too long? You pathetic hairless monkeys aren’t capable of depriving yourself of sleep for more than half a day. Slothful, lazy, boring nitwits. Fun toys for us, but not very interesting most of the time.

 

“So who will it be this time, Thibodeaux? Ever meet any famous people I can cast in our mini-series of dramatic tragedies?”

 

I swallowed hard and broke into a sweat as my thoughts went immediately to my Uncle Jack. Instinctively I knew that I should try to hide my thoughts from this bug-eyed devil, just as quickly as I realized that it was of no use.

 

“Jack, is it? Fascinating. This should be fun,” he cackled as each pair of legs clapped gleefully.

 

 

[0009 Richard]

 

“Throughout history, pretty much every culture has named their agents of death.

 

“Greeks sang of the fates, who wove the fabric of existence with the threads of our lives. Knit-one—you’re born; pearl-two—you live. Snip one … you die. Their weaving, under and over, through and along other threads was the stuff of life.

 

“But they never sang—they rarely even mentioned—Thanatos, the god of death, and the inevitable meeting every human must face. (Imagine family dinners, with Thanatos and his siblings Keres, violent death; Geras; old age; Oizys, suffering; Moros, doom; Apate, deception; Momos, blame; Eris, strife; Nemesis, retribution; and Charon, the black-hooded boatman who, for the last precious coins carried by the deceased, paddled them across the river Styx to Hades.)

 

“Nobody wanted to even think about Thanatos, much less sing about him. And he was considered a good guy, a benevolent god, the harbinger of a peaceful passing.

 

“There are South Pacific islanders who believe Hina, a female guardian sits before the entrance to the land of death, and challenged their right to enter. The Luiseno Indians believed Chinigchinix separated the cowards and bullies from the good and righteous. Some native Americans believe death is a prank played on mankind by the trickster Coyote.

 

“Of course, Christians believe that Gabriel calls for the dead while St. Peter waits at the gates of heaven to pass judgment on their lives. The Jews call her Malach-Adonai ha-Mashchit, the Angel of Death. Malak Almawt, the Islamic angel of death, gently separates the righteous soul from the body, and cruelly, painfully tears away evil souls.

 

“All in all, there are well over 200 ethereal beings responsible for harvesting, escorting or otherwise managing the souls of the dead. They are named, recognized, respected and feared, appeased. And that’s just on Earth …”

 

The cockroach stopped his monologue and looked over at me impatiently.

 

I’d found a binary star and began doing lazy figure-eights around the two poles, watching highly-charged particles flash and hiss as they bounced off my sneakers and belt buckle. Planets swirled in a gazillion clockwork ovals which looked to me like the universe was rolling its eyes.

 

One particularly juicy planet caught my attention and I dove toward—and through—it. As I intersected the particulate mass, I suddenly and completely understood the entirety of the little world. Its biology and history, its beings, its secrets. We were one … really one. One big one. As I passed through, the intensity vanished, the way the shock of an icy-cold lake diminishes after a while. Yet part of it stayed with me, as if we’d merged at a meta-physical level.

 

“Ahem …” the cockroach tried to get my attention, diverting me from the handful of misty asteroids I’d started flicking around with my forefinger.

 

“Can you pay attention for a sec’?” it asked.

 

I drifted back toward it, using a few large galaxies like hoops. I passed through them, occasionally knocking a star system off into the infinite.

 

The cockroach looked at me disapprovingly. “That cost a few hundreds of billions of lives …”

 

“Wha …” I was feeling a little giddy.

 

“Throughout all those eons,” the cockroach continued, “in histories of civilizations in every corner of the universe, there has been a specter of death so terrible, so hideous, so impossible to face, that not one people had the courage to give a name.

 

“Hindus tried ‘Shiva,’ god of destruction. But they were thinking small, like, ‘Oh no! What if our harvest is small? What if there’s a war or natural disaster? Pray to Shiva!’

 

“But they couldn’t possibly put a name to the ultimate force of destruction … even they didn’t have the scope of imagination, or capacity to feel that kind of terror …”

 

Feeling smart-alecky, I asked, “Can you name that name?”

 

“Why yes, you asshole,” said the cockroach, “I can.”

 

A drifting planetoid knocked me in the forehead as I looked up. And I got a sick feeling in what was now the pit of an infinite stomach. Through the sparkling stars and misty stuff I looked over at the cockroach, now splaying its six hairy legs into the void, doing little circles with each. Its antenna reached across space, grabbed me by the sideburns and pulled me close. Nose to … uh, nose.

 

“Yeah, you arrogant, ignorant, supercilious little fuck,” the cockroach ground his teeth. “I know his name.”

 

Its eyes narrowed and it looked right at me. Into me. Through me.

 

[0010 Gary]

 

“Welcome back,” sighed Jeremy through a fuzzy, Vaseline-smeared lens. As my vision cleared, I sensed his blocky mass rise from a chair and move towards me.

 

I was in a bed in a gray room, with only the glow from a small lamp and a television screen for illumination. Slowly, I realized that the screen was some sort of medical monitor and started to hear the faint beeping and whirring of the machinery at the bedside.

 

My mouth felt like a cat had taken a dump in it and then pawed over the feces with a half-pound of kitty litter.

 

“Water,” I croaked. Again with the water. My own personal year-long drought. No wonder my head hurt all the time.

 

“Was that one of the episodes you were talking about?” asked Jeremy. His face was absent the usual ironic grin and instead filled with fear and confusion. He also looked (and smelled) like he hadn’t seen a bed or shower in a week.

 

“Yep.” My voice returned to its usual monotone mellifluousness as the water sank in to the bedrock that was my tongue. “How long?”

 

“You’ve been out for about two days. The doctor’s been grilling me about your drug usage, but only because they couldn’t find any evidence of toxins in your bloodstream. They called it a ‘semi-coma’, but that’s obviously a non-medical term that they’re using instead of having any clue what’s up with your brain.” Jeremy smiled, but it was totally devoid of humor.

 

“No drugs stronger than tequila.” I blinked hard and strained to clear my head.

 

“What the fuck is up with you, Thib? And why were you humming ‘La Cucaracha’ in your sleep, if that’s what it was?” Now his usual grin was back and I finally started to breathe easier.

 

“I tried to go without sleep as long as I could, but I guess my body took over and shut me down. And whenever I do that, I have the most bizarre dreams. What do you know about sleep deprivation?”

 

“That it can kill you.” The grin vanished.

 

“Thib, I think it’s time you met my faculty advisor at the university. Maybe she can make some sense of your situation, ‘cause I have no freakin’ idea what is going through your skull.”

 

“Is this the one you’ve been not-so-secretly carrying a torch for these past few years?” Now I grinned.

 

“No, absolutely not!” Jeremy’s head snapped back in defense, then he chuckled and slowly softened. “Well, yeah. Okay. Maybe a little. But she’s brilliant and might be able to shed some light on this nonsense you’re going through.”

 

“What’s her name again?”

 

“She’s Greek from way back – first generation in America. You’re gonna love her. Dr. Apollonia Thanatos.”

 

My entire body convulsed when I heard the name and Jeremy recoiled at my violence. That’s when I discovered that my hands and feet were strapped to the hospital bed, and the pain as the restraints cut into my wrists was sharp.

 

“Why the hell am I tied down!” I yelled in sudden confusion.

 

“Dude, the doctor says you’ve got to get more sleep.”