The Annals

by Petronius Jablonski

  Brooding, I paced the edge of the cliff until Reason surrendered to the outrageous demands of my senses. In such a position a man may either fret over what he cannot control and torment himself with frivolous regrets, or he can embrace and affirm the unexpected (but, as per my wondrous Shovel, not strange) turn of events.

  “The confetti of fugitive passions cannot influence the purchase of a car,” said Reason. “To select the proper chariot your will must have the strength of Hercules, your mind the clarity of vodka. You must prepare, cleansing your heart of every iniquity, your armor of every tarnish. In solitude, digest the implications of the past and nourish your spirit for the journey ahead. Become a thread woven into the lush tapestry of nature, away from all remnants of civilized life and the illusions of security they bring. Like a general camped out before a battle, listen to your soul and organize the scattered notes of your thoughts into a cohesive plan.”

  When my spiritual mentor, Marcus Aurelius, defended the Roman Empire against barbarian hordes, he often sought solitude in his encampment to fortify himself with Stoic philosophy. As a testament to this practice, the fruit of his reflections represents, beyond certainty, the greatest gift ever bequeathed to mankind: his Meditations. Surely my situation demanded the same approach.

  Submerged in the living waters of nature, I could check the compass of my heart and trust its reading. In a city, the shacks and shanties and all the abscesses of humanity distort the guiding forces of Beauty and Truth, pummeling the sensitive needle. But in the woods, the maternity ward of life, when a man sits beneath tall trees like a child in his mother’s lap, it does not waver. He can listen to the sad song of his soul and comfort it by wading through a virgin stream. The fragments of his thoughts become sonnets and the gentle forest breeze blows away the dust accumulated on the mirror of his mind. As the sunlight speckles the ground beneath the trees his troubles become a comedy, and the sparks from his campfire kindle the flames of long-forgotten dreams.

  • • •

  Upon returning home I awakened Zeus from a nap and removed my family’s six-man tent from the attic. An extended porch with mosquito netting made it ideal for quiet meditations. Deprived of any prolonged access to a car, I pitched it in the backyard between our two pines. Unfortunately, I had to position it facing the house for the extension chord to reach my stereo. While I assessed my progress, Zeus frolicked through the remaining piles of snow, covering his black and gold coat with slush. A recent haircut revealed the unmistakable carriage of a tiny yak. (Though the popular legend contends that Shi Tzu were bred by Tibetan Buddhists to resemble lions, they in fact resemble yaks. This matter, including an innovatory thesis explaining it, will be addressed later at some length when it will not disrupt the euphony of my narrative.)

  Wearing only a housecoat and slippers, my mother walked across the yard and stood beside me. “What are you doing?”

  “I am becoming a thread woven into the lush tapestry of nature.”

  “Sandy’s not talking to you again, is she? Now what have you done? This is no way to —”

  “This has nothing to do with her. I am faced with a decision that will have consequences of epic proportions and I must be secluded while I prepare myself to make it.”

  I hoped she would hear the pathos in my voice and leave me to my solitude to check the compass of my heart. My bearing was stern but respectful. The decision to remain at home was entirely a function of her culinary genius. While my “peers” subsisted on scraps the Donner Party would have refused, I dined on masterpieces that could drive any chef mad with envy.

  “What’s going on?” she said, fixing me with a frightened stare.

  Obviously I could not share all of the proceedings. “I am poised to purchase a car, a Cadillac,” I announced, revealing a glimpse of my inner turbulence. “My Bonneville has already changed hands.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to check the classifieds in tonight’s paper? If you’re looking for a car that’s the best —”

  “I am familiar with the broad outlines of the procedure,” I said, brushing the snow off of Zeus. “But I need to steady myself before I check them. I do not wish to peruse them until I am on the porch of my tent, woven into the lush blanket of —”

  “Okay, okay,” she sang, heading back to the house. She paused. “Are you sure this has nothing to do with Sandy?”

  “Yes,” I gasped, my composure forsaking me.

  “I think it will be too cold for Zeus to spend the night out here.”

  “I will check the globe in my study, but as I recall Tibet is not a tropical region.”

  “Look at little Zeus. He’s shivering now.”

  I rubbed his giraffe-spotted belly. “Though his rugged constitution is more than a match for this weather, the task at hand demands solitude.”

  “Dinner will be ready in an hour. Two of Hieronymus’ friends will be joining us.”

  I winced at the thought of my obstreperous brother and his oafish cronies. “I shall have my dinner here.”

  Zeus followed my mother inside and I finished stocking the tent with supplies.

  • • •

  Giant pines swayed beside me, bedposts supporting a speckled canopy. Atop my stereo, a kerosene lantern shed its humble light. Beside my adjustable lawn chair, the warmth from a propane heater rose to my hands. In my mouth, a big black cigar from the Dominican Republic supplied incense for my meditations while a sad, sad opera by Puccini filled the darkness with the sorrow inside me. The paper was crumpled up in a corner. Nada Fleetwood, nada Sedan DeVille. The classifieds were a nothing and a man in a tent was too and all he needed was a canteen full of bourbon and a porch with mosquito netting.

  The opera’s peak loomed, a mountain of woe so harrowing the night itself seemed to weep. A raccoon lumbered toward the tent, eclipsing the house and stopping no more than three feet from the unzipped flap. He looked into my eyes; I into his. I saw, not some wild garden-raiding beast, but a fellow traveler on the anfractuous road of life.

  Madame Butterfly’s voice climbed the jagged peaks of despair and the raccoon, as if to surmount the anguish flooding the forest, stood upon its hind legs. The light next door came on and the door flew open. Mr. Burzinski stuck his brutish head out.

  “Jablonski! You turn that damn opera-shit down or I’m calling the cops,” he hollered, rupturing the delicate veil of tragedy.

  I struggled to remember that the insolence of fools is the wise man’s burden. “On what possible pretext will you seek an intercession from your infernal god, the State?” He predicated the last totalitarian atrocity upon an absurd and wicked law which arbitrarily restricts the hours when a man may play Frisbee with his own dog on a public street.

  “It’s three o’clock in the morning,” he said, jowls flapping. “I’m not gonna tell you again.”

  “And I shall not tell you again. Each time you invoke your dark lord as a mercenary you diminish the liberty of all free men. Your supplications nourish this Moloch, this Baal, this —”

  He slammed the door. The climax ceased. The raccoon had vanished, absorbed by whatever dense thickets could contain it. My faithful canteen provided little comfort, its contents bitter in the wake of Mr. Burzinski’s savage penetration of the operatic hymen.

  • • •

  I awoke early the next afternoon and sought sustenance, hunting and gathering some leftover casserole. I spent the rest of the day in meditation, nourishing the dauntlessness needed to select the chariot, suspended in the crystal aether of Bruckner’s symphonies, freed from the isolation cell of Time. When darkness tinged the forest, the stealth Burmese cat stalked the encampment, carrying the evening paper.

  “This is necessary before buying a car?” Sandy said, entering the flap to my porch, her feral eyes illuminating the shaded enclave.

  “It is different from ordering a pizza. I suppose I could stumble onto a used-car lot plastered with twenty-dollar bills, trusting in the inherent mercy of vultures.”

  “
Your mom sounded surprised to hear from me,” she said. By default, she seated herself Indian-style and began wrapping a strand of her long hair around a finger. “We can’t believe you sold the blue bomber.”

  I groaned at the epithet. “You had the finest moments of your life in that blue bomber. Maslow would have characterized them as peak experiences. You should be wailing in torment.”

  Predictably, she giggled and offered a revisionist account. “Getting laid in a backseat listening to Mozart is not what he had in mind.”

  “Beethoven. And if those were not peak experiences then that concept has no meaning. Your derogation of those transcendent encounters is understandable. When man encounters the eternal he is humbled. The cheap comfort of denial is more tolerable than the anguish of uncertainty.”

  “So who’d you sell it to?” she asked, studying my encampment: cats’ eyes widening with perplexity on the emanation from my speakers; cats’ eyes narrowing on my canteen, detecting the forbidden liquid within.

  “Mr. Horn is an upstanding but somewhat eccentric acquaintance from work. His generous offer was clearly the child of impulse. Consequently, I had no time for lengthy deliberations.”

  “Cash on the spot?”

  “Something not unlike that. But more interesting is how his offer was part of an extraordinary coincidence. At exactly the same time I arrived at the conclusion that a car superior to my Bonneville existed.”

  “Your mom’s concerned about the price of a Cadillac. She thinks you should wait until you graduate before rewarding yourself with anything extravagant.”

  “Rewarding myself? This car is my inalienable birthright. Does she think I am contemplating the acquisition of a new Cadillac? I would crawl through broken glass before driving any of the abominations excreted from Detroit after 1977. Is she equating perfection with extravagance?”

  Zeus scampered through the porch flap onto Sandy’s lap and displayed his exquisite belly for rubbing. “Puppy Zeus, how do you run so fast with those little mushroom stumps?”

  “He could just as well ask how you can walk at all on those ungainly celery stalks. If Mother Nature has ever graced creation with a more harmoniously designed creature, I have yet to see it.”

  Before inflicting a veritable fit of baby talk on him, Sandy told me to look at the paper. One ad in particular had fetched her eye. The heading read, “Huey Tozotli’s Smoking Mirror Special. We’ve got the Boats. Cadillacs & Lincolns. Huey’s got the Wind. The Sale is up to You.”

  Like something from a dream, one of the models advertised was from the mid-seventies. I would not be able to afford a full load the following semester, but I reasoned that possession of the greatest wisdom possible for a mortal mitigated the urgency of such hoop-jumping. (In candor, dismay characterized my impressions of university. Home-schooled by my father, his exemplar cultivation my beacon, I had acclimatized to excellence in all things. The question I struggled with daily: What had everyone else been doing for the past twenty years? Was I the sole survivor of a generation of feral children?)

  “After I acquire my car, we shall make an excursion to facilitate the bonding process.”

  “I pretty much assumed we’d be doing little else for the next few years.”

  Though she did not understand the meaning of cars (hers, stitched together in some back alley of the world, contained only two doors and could have fit in the trunk of my Bonneville), Sandy lacked the tabula rasa quality I sought when selecting a concubine. I often marveled at how she took for granted precious gems of wisdom that I had only procured after grueling episodes of cogitation. Given her gender’s feeble deliberative faculty, this could only be explained by the indulgence of Fate.

  “Well yes, but those will be normal trips. I am speaking about a special excursion. With the thoughtfulness that often accompanies eccentricity, Mr. Horn spoke favorably of a destination of interest. The Point of Percipience, as I recall.”

  “What is it?”

  “He was vague, but it sounds akin to the Cadillac Ranch, or at least not completely unlike it.”

  “Cool. Where is it?”

  “He promised to send me a map.”

  Per my instinctive disdain for dramatics, I severed the ostentatious dross from my explanation. One can scarcely be faulted for such a beneficent trait. Before her inquiry gained momentum or specificity, I led her into the tent and zipped it shut. Zeus stood solemn guard.

  “Your mom’s home,” she said, displaying a rare moment of disinterest, which passed quickly.

  • • •

  “So how much were you lookin’ to spend?” Huey asked while I analyzed the rectangularity of my betrothed. The problem was twofold: it was green and priced over twice what I could afford.

  I turned to inspect the ground behind me. “Do you see a placenta? Did the nurse not remove it when I emerged this morning? Why else would you ask such a question?”

  “Gross,” said Sandy.

  The human wall of flesh, unimpressed by my jest, continued his estimations of me, not yet certain if Barnum had prophesized my arrival. “I’m firm on this one,” he said, slapping a doughy mitt onto the hood. “This car is like brand new.”

  “The only tiny, insignificant difference is that it was made in 1976. But aside from that irrelevant consideration, brand new. Has it been traveling at the speed of light?”

  “Odometer ain’t even been turned over.”

  “Is this a car dealership or a revival? Is there a tent where your customers gather to further demonstrate their faith by dancing with rattlesnakes? What flavor is your Kool-Aid? I hereby offer you twenty-five. Reject it at your peril.”

  At a third the asking price, this constituted a major lowball: tactically bold but strategically reckless. If wise, Huey would have spit on the ground and returned to his office, forcing me to grovel with a more generous offer and establishing his regnant role in the interrelation of salesman and buyer, a position best likened to the alpha male in a pack of dogs.

  He blundered thus: “Hell, I got a fella comin’ this afternoon with five in cash.”

  “Ah yes, the Man with Cash,” I said triumphantly. “I shall finally meet this legend. Clad in black with a stovepipe hat and waxed mustache, he roams the earth with a suitcase of bills, eternally in transit to close deals at just below the sticker price, making intermittent stops to tie damsels to train tracks. Sandy, remember when this villain almost bought your car out from under you? He has returned to —”

  “Forty-five” Huey grunted, finally recognizing that I was not among Barnum’s majority.

  “Am I covered with bruises? Does it look as though I recently fell from a turnip truck? My terminating, unappeasable offer is thirty-five.”

  “Mine’s forty. Take it or leave it.”

  “Like Caligula, I pride myself on my inflexibility. Come along Sandy. That dealership down the street had a newer Fleetwood that caught my eye.” My historical reference was based on the celebrated Madman Theory. In any dispute, it profits one if his adversary thinks him less than fully stable. Sandy watched in adoration as I took her hand and led us away.

  “Alright, alright,” Huey called.

  With the pride of the victor I turned to Sandy and put my hand on her forearm. “You do know that you are the luckiest girl in the world?”

  • • •

  At the body shop, I based my decision on solar considerations. “The sun is more orange than gold, is it not?” I asked the technician. After a long pause, he looked into my eyes and nodded in silent agreement.

  Part II:

  Addendum

  If the Reader’s understanding of the occurrences and ideas in Part II are in any way imperfect we have reached an impasse. Like an injured hiker attempting a perilous passage, he will struggle to remain abreast of me. Soon he will hobble behind, calling for clarifications with each painful step, begging me to lessen my pace. Inevitably, he will collapse and watch in despair as I vanish beyond the horizon. For a corrective we must turn to an old Rus
sian proverb: repetition is the mother of learning. Solicitous of his welfare, I beseech him to return to the beginning of Part II.

  Ideally, the second reading should be performed aloud. Of necessity, it must be performed at the time of day when the Reader’s mind is at its zenith. I fear we have grown accustomed to collocate reading with the basest means of relaxation. No doubt other books he whores around with are tantamount to sedatives and television, but make no mistake: the reading of Part II is neither. Like a swim upstream in a cold river, it demands strength, precision, courage, cunning, and endurance.

  Dear Reader, if you do not feel invigorated and stronger, how will you bear the weight of what is to come? As a historian and philosopher my role is not to carry the load, but, like a trainer in a gymnasium, to ensure that your muscles are capable of sustaining it. After you re-read Part II, I will perfect your physique by addressing the obvious questions sparked by a fastidious reading.

  • • •

  At this point the student must be aflame with one primary question and at least one auxiliary question.

  “Scholar, regarding the first breathtaking appearance of your mighty tool and your subsequent handling of it: there exists a discrepancy, possibly a logical contradiction. When you introduced your Shovel, you demonstrated how it penetrates the illusory surface and digs straight to the root of Reality to reveal the primordial strangeness of all things. This was not given as an example of a particular act, but as a general antecedent of all penetrations performed by your invincible tool. Yet posterior to your demonstration, you cite several examples of particular penetrations, one which occurred anterior to your demonstration. Have you not blurred the critical line betwixt a general anterior and a particular posterior?”

  The student was not sent to forage through Part II like a ravening bear, but to perfect his comprehension of its essential concepts and occurrences. Nonetheless, a fair point is raised. Aristotle first warned of the hazards inherent in confounding these concepts, and if I have done so I am guilty of nothing less than a logical felony. My defense will consist of two parts. First, a brief comment on the possibility that a misperception of ambiguity occurred — understandable given the enthralling nature of the text.