# [D12:8M] Vision: [[The Empty House is Standing Still]] Hexagram: [[Twelfth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Twelfth Trial]] Symbols: #six #seven #eight #dad #bear #fourty-four #four #mom #phantom #mushroom #mountain #car #road #forest #night #six #one #child #door #bed #eye #cigarette #sun #legs #mouth #head #floor #belly #candy #fountain #house #ship-sunk #bubble #ladder #cloud #solitary #dreamer #wave #twin #sea May 11th, 1961, 2018 I. That boy you was wondering about in the picture, the one working the filling station, was named Steve and was from the high school and got persuaded by his buddy Dick to cash some kind of check whunt real.  This would of been something like nineteen sixty-five, sixty-six.   Story is, after he lost that job, Steve, he cut out of Kansas City, not his first time, even so young, but the last.  So sudden it was he up and left, that the girl—not a girlfriend, but a girl from a time on his brother’s wife’s mother’s couch—didn’t even know he was gone.  And who knows how long it was fore she even knew she was pregnant. That boy Dick, I heard, made something like seven, eight hunnerd bucks putting the fix on folks who’d actually liked him, them cashing his false checks and junk like that.  Never did find out what happened to him neither, just gone.  Thought you might of wondered.   But Steve, he grew up and was my uncle, you probably know that, my favorite one matter of fact, til he died.  Dad’s younger brother.  I doubt Dad’ll be alive much longer hisself, got to be honest with you, pancreatic cancer and that, but he’s still fighting like a bear.  Steve, though, he died in his sleep at forty-four, heart attack, a year younger than me now.  Then, you know, his wife, my Aunt Eileen, I sured liked her too, killed herself about four years after he gone.  She was going pretty crazy in those days and I hate to tell you Mom reminds me of her something awful nowadays.  I don’t know, I hate to say it.    Yat. Anyway.  Anyway, that’d been Grandma’s house Steve knocked that girl up in, not _his_ mom’s mom, but _my_ mom’s, which just makes the whole thing dumber and odder, you ask me.  God knows how nobody even knew them kids was in there, how or why.  He’d of been just about sixteen at most, Steve would, and the girl I guess about the same.  Doubt he could of been over at Grandma’s more than three, four times his whole life.  Certainly never when I was a kid, or I don’t remember if he was. Thought to tell you this because of that email I got a couple years back, the one I told you about.  Email from that guy out of Independence, Scott Somebody I’d said, claiming to be my cousin. Steve’s phantom bastard is how Scott himself put it.  Course this was already long after Steve died.  Steve never did have no kids he or nobody knew about.  Truly, he never knew about Scott his whole life, and, deep down, I believe he’d of wanted to know a thing like that.  He’d of liked being a dad, I just got a sense somehow. But Independence’s not too far from Kansas City and that’s the first thing that made me think maybe it whun no scam or what-have-you, family being from Kansas City and that.  So I got kind of like a secret correspondence going with Scott, a few times back and forth, and he asked me not to tell the family he even existed, and I didn’t.  And I never did tell you this, but I drove out there, out to Independence to meet the guy and, no bullshit, the moment I saw him I knew he wasn’t no liar.  Far as I was concerned, I was looking clear as day at Steve leaning, the way Steve used to lean, over a kitchen counter, but this time it was Scott telling his little ones to start getting their jams on and brush their teeth and that.  Seen him then and there, Steve, alive as he ever been, and I knew Scott and me was gonna be friends, how much he seemed like Steve. II. Now all the rest of this, you know, is kinda like a dream, what I’m fixing to tell you, and it was  about a year after I met Scott when he came out here to New Mexico and we got us into some shrooms.  Couple of forty-year-old dads eating magic mushrooms out here in the Sandia Mountains.  Reckon I couldn’t say now what got into us.  They were his and he brought em and I just thought, well, shit, why the hell not?  Wife and me and the kids been living out here maybe three years by that time. But after about a half mile into the woods, walking straight off the road, no trail or nothing—and this was real what I’m saying, we hadn’t taken them mushrooms more than five minutes back—we about near tripped over a smashed-up Sixty-One DeSoto, all burnt black and picked apart but with them old-fashion Kansas plates still on, just black on white, nothing to em, how they used to be.  You’ll get to asking, if it was all smashed up, how can I be sure what year it was, and if it’s burnt too, how could I known the model.  But first of all, I swear to fucking god, the damn car was surrounded by nothing but ponderosas almost tall as skyscrapers, older’n the car by far.  Couldn’t find a trace of overgrown road leading up to it and the damn thing wasn’t nowhere near the forest road besides.  You start out asking questions about the car and the road and the trees and so on and pretty soon you’re asking questions about your own damn mind.  I think we was looking at each other like, it can’t be the shrooms, can it?  But I still don’t believe either of us felt a damn thing for another half hour at least.  This old dilapidated DeSoto with them Kansas plates, fuck, I shit you not, it was sitting there plain as a dog turd in a sandbox.  Real as you or me.  I mean, me, I was puzzling and puzzling over the dang thing because I still couldn’t grasp it.  Yes I did know the year and model of that car, and it might seem hard to believe, but, truly, I didn’t know why I knew it.  But Scott, actually, he didn’t say hardly a word that whole time.  He just stood there and stared at it and, to be honest, he looked near like he was about to lose his shit or cry or something.  Now I don’t know about the rest of this story, I really don’t, but all’s I can do is tell you and tell you what he told me, and that’s it. III. What Scott told me was that when he was sixteen he wrecked his mom’s eighty-something Firebird.  Rammed it hard into a tree passed out drunk at four in the morning and came out with nothing but a busted shoulder and a missing shoe no one ever found.  Walked out of the wreck, sat down in some weeds or something, and fell asleep waiting for someone to show up.  Cops finally brought him home minus a shoe to his mother, her running out into the cold night worried he’d been arrested or something.  The way he tells it, upon finding out he just destroyed the one thing in the world she’d actually owned, instead of kicking his ass up and down the street, she grabbed him and kissed him all over his pimply face just happy as shit he didn’t get himself killed.  I got to meet her myself and you can tell she’s just one of them sweet type of ladies you always wished was your mom.  Steve or not, I think Scott was pretty lucky growing up with her.  The only problem was, up to that night, he’d grown up believing his dad was his real dad, and never heard a word about Steve from his mom or dad or no one.  Why his mom told him the truth the next day, she explained, was because a boy she knew in high school, you can guess, named Steve, wrecked his own daddy’s car same age Scott wrecked hers, selfsame shitty way too, drunk himself asleep to do it.  She even kept a picture of Steve with that car, him filling it up at the station for his old man.  And that’s the one you seen.  But, yeah, I already known what car it was. cause it was Grandpa’s car and I grew up with the story of Steve wrecking it.  Sixty-one DeSoto, the old timers always said.  Last model year. IV.  I wasn’t no kind of weirdo before this, mind you, and I ent never had time for the kinda thing the fundamentalists and hippies and them types always go on about.  And, sure, yeah, maybe it was just the mushrooms making all this whacky shit happen, fuck if I know, but I’m telling you, ever since this, I just keep seeing all kinds a shit I never used to.  Like, how I can’t help but notice a 61 DeSoto is the reverse number of Scott’s and Steve’s age both, 16, when they wrecked them cars.  How a six and a one together seems like it means the end of something.  Probably doesn’t mean a goddamn thing, I know that, but I notice it is all.  I don’t know what noticing dumb shit like that can possibly do to help anything, but it’s all the goddamn fucking time now. Anyway, yes, the shrooms most definitely did kick in after a little while so that everything got pretty colorful, how the edges of shadows might start to glowing yellow and race across the forest floor, or orange or magenta, and all that mutton grass and chokecherry just gets to wiggling like, shooting up all long and whispy and like it’s all beckoning at you or some shit. But the craziest parts was when we’d get to seeing the same damn thing, like a dirt road all the sudden snaking its way out from under that wreckage, right under our own feet, and we could feel it too, not just watch, as it shot out into the dark part of the woods.  This is just me jabbering all I can remember at you, darlin, whether it makes a damn bit of sense or not. V. Next thing I can remember is Scott and me are walking down a hallway, like you would in any kind a house.  We’d set off to follow that road, and I don’t know when it happen, but at some point we got inside a hallway in a house.  I know he felt it as much as I did, that the whole thing was like something from childhood, a memory or what have you, though if it was one neither of us could say.   First thing he says to me there in that hallway is, “I gotta find a bathroom.” And I told him be careful you don’t touch nothing.  Stuff we might say if we knew where the fuck we even was, which we most definitely did not, but I guess, in a way, we maybe kinda did.  Does that make a lick of sense?  I just remember thinking, you know, something about this place could really swallow you whole.  I said that exact thing to Scott and, when I didn’t hear nothing back, I said it again.  “There’s something about this place that could swallow you whole,” I said.   And, still, nothing.  Wherever he’d gone, off to the bathroom or wherever, I couldn’t find it nowhere, and I got pretty nervous then.  I couldn’t think of nothing else to do but wander around this house I’s caught inside of.  I picked a random door in the hall and went into a mostly empty bedroom.  There was pictures of people on the wall, like old black-and-white ones, no one I ever seen before.  There was a high school year book—now see, I bet you can guess from what year—on a nightstand.  61, sure enough.  Bunch of kids in it would of been just about our folks’ age.   Along with the yearbook was a diary on that little table, but this thing had mom’s name on it.  Just her first name, Gina, so there’s no way of saying rightly if it was truly hers.  I mean, of course it whunt hers, but it’s spooky, you know, when you’re baked out of your gourd and you find your mom’s record of secrets next to an empty bed.  What kind of fucking bullshit is that anyway?  But, yeah, sure enough, this Gina so-and-so, she’s writing she’s pregnant, and mom woulda been too, pregnant with me.  Her and dad already fixing to get married when she was only seventeen.  I’m looking in this Diary-by-Gina at a list of baby names she’s written in nice neat little columns, but none of them is mine, so I’m like, well, fuck then, I don’t know.   VI. Now, it’s about here that I catch something from the corner of my eye, which turns out to be a pile of just all kinds of junk against a far wall.  It’s, like, artist stuff and a canvas with a painting on it is in there too, and packs of cigarettes and what seem like random-ass tools, you know, just piles and piles of junk that whunt there before.  When I think about it now, I gotta wonder if that weren’t just how the car wreck looked to me in my own little druggy buggy shithaze.  Like, maybe I hardly took any steps away from there since the whole song and dance got itself up and running.  But now I remember that the painting was of a sunrise, or it could of been a sunset I suppose, and then, fucking Christ, a man’s hairy-ass legs sticking stright on up from all that pile of stuff, I’m telling you like an actual pair of a man’s fucking legs, all knobby-kneed and wiggly-toed and that.  But there it was, just like I thought, how the whole place could just swallow you up!  You might of thought I found Scott, but it weren’t  him.  I mean, I don’t remember really what happened, but not a soul on the other end of them legs ever did come up out of the garbage to say hello.   So now I’m thinking, them legs was so damn long, sticking way up like that, they was probably my trippin-out version of ponderosas or some such.  And that whole house feeling like one big old mouth just eating me up.  I remember now how I thought to look up but was too afraid to.  Don’t look up, I said to myself.  You don’t want to see what’s up there, guaranteed.  Felt like a goddamn communion wafer in the mouth of God.  Or a plucked fuckin chicken getting choked on.   I don’t know.  I wish I didn’t have to keep on leaving messages. VII. I keep getting hung up on, so I’m a just skip ahead to something that stuck with me during all that nonsense I don’t want to forget, and I want you to know it and always remember.  Now, nothing nor nobody real or imaginary came up, me tripping balls and all that, to tell me this.  It just swam itself into my head and I thought, dude, if you can remember this shit, remember it. And I did, so I’ll tell you: Heaven is real.  It’s real.  But Hell?  Honey, it ain’t.  It’s nothing but what we make up while we’re still living.  We make it up and put ourselves and each other in our horrifying little pit of make-believe.  Heaven—it told me this, whatever it was—Heaven is all of what there is.  It’s all Heaven.  All this.  Right here where you can touch it.  And it’s perfect just like it is.  Hell ain’t nothing but a refusal to see what’s already there, refusing to put our ear to the floor and listen.  It ain’t real, Hell.  I’m telling you, we can step out any old time we like.  We just get used to it, that’s the worst part, it’s something we get used to, and that’s why we go around all fucked up all the goddamn time.  We think it’s normal to be so fucked, but it ain’t. It told me another thing: The problem is we’re like a buncha little dummy kids in a candy store who ate too much of it.  The candy makes us miserable, but it’s all we think there is to do here, eat candy.  We get to having us some awful little belly aches.  And we’re so uncomfortable and so frustrated we can’t sit up straight without wanting to barf all over the damn floor an it’s all we can do to try and hold it back in our throats.  Like, if we should see any other oblivious little fool walking by looking just prim and jolly with hisself, we want to ruin it for him, how bad we have to puke.  Here’s some candy, we say.  Have some of ours.  We’re nice folks.  We just love sharing.  Don’t it look good?  Goddamn do we want to get that fancy free fucker sick as a dog so’s none of us  have to look at that silly little bitch grin on his face another goddamn second.  That’s Hell.  That’s what hell is.  We think it’s that one little fancy fella, but it’s actually the whole stinking lot of us. Heaven is everything sitting there, wild colors reflected in the glass, the sparkling goddamn fountains, old romantic songs and bird chirp in the air.  Everything there is.  Everything there is before we start shoving it all in our miserable little mouths. VIII. Darlin, this is my last message, and then I’m a cut outta here.  After I tell you this, there won’t be no one else to remember it.  Prolly not a lot of it’s too important in the scheme of things, but I can tell you this: toward the end, I was standing on the roof of this shroom house, looking out at an endless ocean while a ship, like an old time Titanic type thing, was sinking out in the middle of it.  Then, as the ship sunk and the water bubbled and that, a ladder inched its way out of it, little by little, until I lost sight of the top of it in the clouds overhead.   Then I saw Scott climbing it.  I think he might of been a solitary survivor.  Ladder was the only thing for him to grab onto and I suppose he thought where else was he going to go?  At one point, he stopped and looked out toward me.  Then he just waved and kept on going up, like some kind of dreamer seeking his dreams.  I waved back but he didn’t seem to notice or maybe just didn’t care all that much.  I couldn’t help feeling a little down about that, a little betrayed somehow.  Dude didn’t owe me shit, but still, I thought we should be traveling this world together, man, the two of us.  It was like having a twin take off without you, and suddenly one of you is missing.  Or, now that I think about it in that way, maybe you both gone missing. It wasn’t long before he was out of sight and the ladder fell back into the sea.  Didn’t know what to do so I just went back in the house.  There wasn’t nothing in there at all now.  An empty house standing silent and still.  That’s what it was.   But although it’s still, I feel the world outside moving through it.  The trees and grasses, birds and squirrels and that.  There’s nothing here, but I feel it all.  Moving through the house.  Through me.  All that movement in the stillness.