theMystery.doc
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Hazel:Its just a part of life
Are they watching us?
Sophia: Are they watching you too?
Sophia:I feel like I have fallen from heaven. And from the warmth of God’s embrace. And it’s all my fault.
Hazel:You shouldn’t blame yourself
Sophia:Really?
Hazel:All of us make mistakes, the best way to go about them is to learn a lesson from that experience and try not to repeat it again
Sophia:Hazel, how did you get so wise? Are you an old woman like me?
Hazel:Its just general observation of life :)
Hazel:Also I am sure that you aint that old!
Sophia:Aint that old!!!Oh, you! Lol!!!!!!!!!!!
Hazel:Coming bak to the business at hand though, may I please have the details of the expert/speaker you are looking for?
Hazel:back★
(whispers) What did you take?
W
hen the book begins, it’s been three years since the trip to the island, and now Ashe is a pollutionist, himself. He hasn’t had a single client in those three years and he’s being evicted from his office, which is in a boarded-up building in a rundown part of town. His life is falling apart. His wife, Suzanne, is threatening to leave him. He’s being kicked out of his apartment. He owes a lot of money. And to top it off, in the first scene of the book, when we meet Ashe, he’s sitting in church when he suddenly gets a terrible pain shooting into the back of his head. And throughout the book, it never leaves, it just gets worse. The headache gets worse and worse and never stops, not even for a second. And so throughout the entire book he has a headache. And it never goes away, not for a second. And when the book opens on the day the headache begins, he goes to his office, and a shadowy man named Brubaker comes to see him. He offers Ashe a job, an assignment.
—What’s the assignment?
—To sit in a hospital waiting room while it’s being gassed.
—Let me try something else. You go wait in the other room and I’ll try to get it going. And then I’ll call you and when you come back in, maybe it’ll work. I read about this at the library the other day. It said this is what you should do if something like this happens.
So Helen left. She went into the other room. We were in my neighbor Dave’s house; I was housesitting for him and his wife. It was probably two or three in the morning. The cocker spaniels were locked in the garage. Helen was my friend’s sister. She was fifteen, a year younger than me. Helen was her American name. She was born in Korea. I forget her real name; she only told me once; it embarrassed her. She wanted to be an American.
She’d been a very popular cheerleader in junior high, when she had dated the captain of the junior high football team. Then they broke up, and he told everyone she was a slut. And all his friends, and all of her friends, spread the rumors far and wide, and soon no one wanted to hang out with poor Helen anymore. I met her in an abandoned building on the Indian reservation one night, where a couple rock bands from our high school were playing. She’d come with her brother, because she was tired of staying in every Friday and Saturday night, sitting in her room alone or watching TV with her mom and her dad, who abused her. I gave her cigarettes, and she stood close to me as the bands played, and then we ditched her brother and drove across town to the Sound. We went out on the pier, smoked, and looked at the dark water.
—I hate all those people back there, I said.
—I do too, she said.
—They’re a bunch of goddam phonies.
—They’re totally phony. I don’t know why anyone would care what they think. They’re all a bunch of liars and backstabbers.
—Do you like poetry? I said.
—I love poetry.
—Do you ever write it?
—Sometimes, she said. But I don’t think it’s very good. She blew smoke into the lights beyond the water. Do you write poetry?
—Yeah, I said. Mine’s good.
We’d smoke pot and drive to Seattle. I’d show Helen all the places I knew from my adventures. When we got tired, we’d park somewhere—in an empty lot, or a city park—that parking lot on the east side of Green Lake—just around the corner from this house; I go running past it every day—recline the seats, kiss and fool around and fall asleep.
There are lots of other subplots, too.
—I hate my dad, she said. He’s insane.
—Mine’s amazing, I said. He’s a really great guy, I have absolutely no complaints. He just doesn’t like me much
She said
—I used to like everything.
I thought everything was great, and
I was everybody’s friend.
But now it’s like
I can’t stand anything.
I don’t like anything or anybody anymore.
Except you. Anybody but you.
I love you.
Can you believe I actually used to listen to Top 40?
—Don’t worry about it, mate. You’re just tired.
Ange was on her period 30-31 days out of the month. At 19 I didn’t know enough to recognize this as symptomatic of a serious medical problem. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. She said she hated doctors because her stepdad had been a doctor—although once she’d said he was a minister like mine—and a lawyer, a garbageman, a cop, a scientist, a top-notch pollutionist—she lied like crazy, and all the time. At any rate, in any case, she never went to the doctor; she’d just clean up the mess. She would get a towel wet before we had sex, and hang it over the chair beside the bed. When we were finished, she would tell me to look away, or to close my eyes, and she’d clean me with the wet part, dry me off with the dry part, and then do the same to herself. That way everything was fine. Plus I couldn’t get her pregnant.
Angela: Oh, I’ve missed you so.
Young people asking so much of Life... taking so much of Love!
George: Me too. Oh, I can’t tell you how much.
A Love Story Of Today’s Youth... with three magnificent young stars
—What other subplots are there?
People would leave the house all the time, and new people would come. I rode the bus to work each morning. At night, Angie would cook dinner. We’d roll joints and have fun. Soon I was living with her. Soon I was one of the old-timers. And Angie liked to say that she loved me. I wouldn’t say it back. She said, I’m going to have to start saving, so I can come to America with you when your visa runs out. Or we can go to the Continent and work the orchards, make money to keep traveling. She knew people who did this.
She had a camera
—Did you take your medication?
—Yeah, I said.
—Which one?
—All of them.
—You’re not supposed to take the red one when you drink, mate! You’re gonna put yourself into another coma! How many did you take!
—That’s an interesting question.
but never any money for film
Ashe goes to the hospital and waits there while they gas the place. And maybe this is how he gets his headache—because as the book progresses, you see that he’s having a hard time keeping track of time. He doesn’t really know what has happened when, in what order, and he starts to think that maybe some of the things he’s been telling the reader he’s just making up, without meaning to. Or maybe B may have actually happened before A, even though he told you A happened first. So maybe he act
ually ended up at that church at the End, not the Beginning, maybe the headache didn’t start then—maybe it all started when he sat there in that waiting room and they pumped the gas in. Or maybe it all started sometime else, sometime completely different. He doesn’t know. Everything is coming apart, and slipping away. There are lots of other subplots, too.
A FEW YEARS BEFORE ALL THIS
back home in kansas
a diving accident
and then a subsequent assault from which I was very fortunate to have escaped alive
a non-stop headache that would not go away no matter what I tried
neurologists, physical therapists, acupuncturists,
herbalists, chiropractors, osteopaths,
pot dealers, pharmacologists,
psychiatrists, faith healers
Nothing helped