Worsemore, a few evenings later, two vassals had arrived at Clovis’s cottage to collect Lord Mauvoisin’s heriot—the death tax assessed on the surviving family to compensate for the value of the lost labor. The two scantily clad vassals who showed up at Clovis’s hut that evening wanted to take his only mule. Clovis—wearing only a strung-together tunic—became furious and refused. They backed down, but promised to return with reinforcements. Clovis shook his fire poker at them and said they’d better get a lot of reinforcements, because there was no way they were taking his goddamn mule. That’s what he said. He used God’s name in vain and defied God’s will, insofar as God had anything to do with divinely ordaining the social order. The vassals could see that he was serious.
Bereaved though he was, Clovis still had his wits about him, and knew that he’d best clear out before the vassals returned. He loaded some provisions onto Attila, his mule, and then, wanting to leave no scent for Lord Mauvoisin’s dogs, scooped a glowing coal from the stove and tossed it onto his bedding. There was scarcely time to mount Attila before the entire cottage was engulfed in flames.
Attila needed no spurring. She could sense something dire was afoot, and though her ears were of an ass and her legs were short and stubby, her eyes flashed with lightning as her hooves rumbled thunder, and the four horses of the apocalypse—tails and manes aflame and nostrils belching a scalding halitosis—took dreadful heed as Attila tore into the black wilderness like Satan’s own stallion, and no dark steed of the damned dared snort his disapproval.
11 IF YOU EVER have a few months to stare at a wall, you might consider pitching cards across the room an enchanting diversion. This is precisely what Diablo thought when he found himself in the clink just a couple of days after his accidental voyeurism of Bridget Snapdragon at play. The circumstances of his arrest—he had barked back at a police dog—were unrelated to that most beautiful moment of his life, but then, the circumstances of his arrest were unrelated to anything else he might have been doing as well. Like unattended baggage at an airport, he simply couldn’t remain anywhere for very long without being hauled off and searched. His hard luck was only exacerbated by the magic mushroom cap found in his pocket, and by Judge “Maximum Max” Maxwell, nicknamed for his habit of handing down stiff sentences. Maximum Max slapped him with a nine-month sentence and a severe scolding. Fortunately, Diablo procured a deck of cards early on in his confinement.
There were fifty-three cards in the deck, but Diablo never tossed the Joker. He’d shuffle it into the deck, and count the cards as he sent them spinning across the room. When the Joker came up, he’d record the number, gather the cards, shuffle them eight times (five and three from fifty-three makes eight, he reasoned), and begin again. At first, it was just something to do. But on the second day, when the Joker came up first, it seemed somehow more significant than it coming up fourth or twelfth or forty-second, and so he began to seek a pattern in the chaos.
He found nothing, although the Joker turned up on top considerably less than once every fifty-three decks. He could not account for this, and so he kept pushing, figuring that once the sample was high enough, it would even out. But it didn’t, and in fact, it became rarer still, bottoming out, it seemed, at 108 decks. Then it sank further still. This infuriated his sense of expectation, and began to persuade him that perhaps there was a reality beyond measurement, a reality so complex that intuition was the only possible door to its perception.
He wandered through this jungle of thought, the underbrush gradually thinning and the trees becoming more scattered, and he grew into an expert card slinger. He made them hover in midair, spinning for impossible seconds before dropping. He skimmed the surface of three walls with a single card. He landed them neatly on the seat of the toilet, never losing a single card to the basin. Five months into his sentence, he was working on perfecting his boomerang toss when the forest of his mind gave way to a sun-kissed clearing, and he attained a clarity of thought that those who have known will attest can never be known for more than a few hours before the world caves in once more on the spirit. Lost in such trance, he lifted the next card (the ninth, as it turned out), and sent it sailing over four surfaces in his cell before it turned a somersault and landed solidly on its edge, standing up, the Joker facing him, laughing and dancing on the back of a bee.
12 DIABLO COULD HAVE spent the rest of his life trying to duplicate that trick. He certainly spent the remainder of his nine-month sentence trying to repeat it. He failed in this endeavor, but he did not fail to grasp that intuition realizes what reason cannot, that perception without expectation can, if permitted to flow, lead one unerringly through life. He felt certain in this conviction, and resolved to test it with the chips of his own fate.
But he had no chips. So, to have any real shot at achieving his destiny, which he understood to be inviting rather than inevitable, he reckoned he’d better acquire some. Diablo could accept that the house would always win in death, but everyone has another destiny, a slot on the wheel of life, and this destiny invites all to spin. This is the real roulette, daring us to trust our instincts, to exercise our free will, to win against impossible odds.
This destiny is what Diablo had been avoiding his entire life. This was why he enlisted, why he always followed orders, why he was so depressed, and why he had become a twenty-year-old drifter. You cannot, after all, find happiness if you do not follow your bliss. Your happiness is your bliss, and your bliss leads to your destiny, and to follow it is the greatest expression of freedom. Indeed, if you ignore the call to find purpose in life, then you must accept the consequences, and Diablo had been living with the consequences of his cowardice for years.
And so, with nothing else to do, Diablo accepted the purpose of his life that day. There was no great mystery to it. As with everybody, he was born to participate in evolution, and he vowed that he would, setting the Joker spinning in midair to signify his resolve. Quite beyond his conscious awareness, however, this moment was to perpetuate itself into a momentum Diablo could never imagine as the local atmosphere stirred awake. A lazy eddy began to twirl in the wake of the Joker’s pirouette, a whirling dervish that would eventually spin its way out of the stale air of the jailhouse and escape into the upper atmosphere, where a rising wind would impel it to more properly twist and shout.
13 REMEMBER, Bridget Snapdragon is already dead. Remember too that there is nothing remotely remarkable in that fact, for an identical situation applies to each of us. As it turns out, death has already happened. If you don’t believe it, just wait a bit and see. You will one day discover that you are already dead, just the same as you will crawl into bed tonight and find this day already ended.
So, the day Bridget already died was the day Diablo was already released from jail. Diablo awoke with a gigantic smile still plastered on his face from the day before, when he’d accepted the purpose of his life. It was the sound of his cage being unlocked that roused him.
“Hey dude,” the guard, a recent college graduate who’d majored in criminology, greeted him as if they were college drinking buddies. His name was Billy, and he was gradually discovering that he wanted nothing to do with the American gulag.
“Hey,” Diablo cheerfully returned the greeting and propped himself up in his cot. “What’s up?”
Billy raised his eyebrows. “It’s your release date, man. I’m here to evict you.”
“Already?”
“Yeah, right.” Billy jangled the key out of the lock and propped the door open. “You telling me you didn’t know it was today?”
“I didn’t know it was today,” Diablo repeated. “That’s a very nice way of putting it. Yes, until yesterday, I did not know it was today. But now,” he threw back his blanket, “now I know it is today.”
Billy smirked. “You’ve been tossing those cards too long, bro.”
“I have indeed,” Diablo agreed, standing up and grabbing the deck. “But let me tell you something else. Tomorrow will become today, just as the next
few moments,” he snapped his fingers, “have suddenly become the present moment.”
Billy nodded. “You really didn’t know today was the big day?”
Diablo began pulling on his clothes and continued. “Today is the big day. The big day is today, the big day has always been today, and the big day will never be anything but today.” He was in a soaring good mood.
“Oh, I get it.” Billy nodded. “April Fool’s Day. You’re kidding, right?”
This gave Diablo abrupt pause. “Today’s April Fool’s Day?”
“Palm Sunday, too. If you hurry you might even make it to church.”
Diablo thought for a moment. “How do I know you’re not April Fooling me that today’s my release date?”
Billy laughed. “Nah, I wouldn’t mess with you like that. You’re a free man.” He studied Diablo for signs of a bluff. “But you really didn’t know you were being released today, huh?”
“I don’t know what to say.” Diablo shrugged. “I got kind of lost in here.”
“Are you still lost?”
“No, not since yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?”
“That’s what I’m saying, man. Today happened yesterday.”
Billy paused. “But today is happening today.”
“I know.” Diablo nodded. “It’s all that ever happens. The present is not a series of events. It’s one event. There is only one moment, and that moment,” Diablo patted Billy on the shoulder as he exited his cell, “is right now.”
14 BILLY QUIT HIS JOB later that day, and shortly after that Diablo bit off the top two knuckles of the middle finger on his own left hand. As with everything, these two occurrences were intimately related.
Diablo had hitched a ride back into Normal, no small task for a lone, scruffy man outside the county jail. It took a couple of hours, and indeed may have taken much longer than that if Billy hadn’t pulled up in a rattletrap pickup that looked to be held together with unwound coat hangers and duct tape. Billy told him to hop in, and offered him some corn chips once he had situated himself. Diablo accepted and munched happily as they sped into town, the invigorating air of an approaching storm front whipping through the wide-open windows. Billy occasionally shouted something at Diablo, but the wind noise prevented Diablo from hearing any details. Diablo just nodded affably, marveling at his own newfound enlightenment.
As it happened, Billy was telling Diablo how he had quit, how he dug what Diablo was saying about the present, how he was just going to chase the sunset west like he’d always wanted to. He told Diablo that he’d already come up with a road name for himself.
“Check it out!” he yelled, grinning. “Billy Pronto!”
Diablo was scraping corn-chip crud out of his teeth with his fingernail. He could hear nothing of what this exuberant guy next to him was blasting about, but could see that some sort of response other than nodding was expected. “What’s that?” he shouted back, removing his finger from his mouth only long enough to pronounce his words.
“Billy Pronto!” he yelled again.
Diablo still couldn’t entirely make out what he said. “Billy what?”
Exasperated, Billy faced Diablo and, just as the wind and its noise inexplicably vanished, hollered, “Pronto!”
15 IT IS RUMORED that the enlightened mind perceives the world with neither attachment nor expectation, that all experience is received unmitigated, unmediated, and unmuddled. Such serenity is incapable of surprise, for there can be no surprise in the absence of expectation. Thus, judging from his reaction to the circumstances at hand, there is little doubt that Diablo was still loitering quite a distance from his destination. Billy’s “Pronto!” into the auditory void had made him and Billy both jump. However surprising that may have been, the next moment hurled so many unprecedented singularities in his direction that he ceased all voluntary movement whatsoever. Diablo’s jaw dropped open in astonishment, dangling from his mouth the finger with which he’d been cleaning his teeth. Acting on nothing but the emergency information communicated by Diablo’s astonished expression, Billy slammed on the brakes. His truck swerved, tires screeched like the devil’s claws across hell’s chalkboard, the sound of a million angry bees filled the air, and somewhere in there Diablo bit down hard. Billy turned his head just in time to perceive an enormous and ethereal finger flick his truck off the road as if it were of no more consequence than an irritating crumb on a neat freak’s desktop.
Not wearing his seat belt, Billy Pronto was yanked from the cab and flung high into the sky. But shed not a tear. Though his body was never found and his fate remains uncertain, it would be most inappropriate of us to weep on his behalf. It would have been a good death, certainly better than the fate awaiting those of us who survive the swerves of the sudden, facing our death instead in a disgustingly sterile room while machines pump fluids poisoned by the bad habits of our lives. No, in this moment, Billy Pronto would have died a free spirit, and in so doing would have achieved that which the vast majority of the human species fails. Such a death deserves three cheers and a round of beers. But let us not be hasty. Let us presume for now that he lives, Billy Pronto lives, and there will be no drinking tonight.
As for Diablo, who happened to have been wearing his seat belt, when he regained consciousness he immediately suspected that a tornado had hit them. A few moments later, after observing that he was still clutching a bag of corn chips in his right hand and that his left hand was missing a finger, he decided the rogue tornado was also to blame for his apparent decision to bite off his own middle finger, which was nowhere to be seen.
He was, unfortunately, correct on both counts.
The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze
THROUGH NO LASSITUDE on the part of faithful Attila, Clovis was captured within half a fortnight. Every vassal in the lordship had been dispatched to hunt him down, and Attila was no match for Lord Mauvoisin’s horses. It was thus that Clovis found himself back in his village, and in a far worse predicament than when he’d left. Lord Mauvoisin himself had even granted an appearance to observe the death of this defiant serf who’d given him so much trouble.
Clovis didn’t care, though. He had absolutely nothing left to lose. He’d already lost his wife and child, and now he had neither mule nor hut. Clovis knew his kith would mumble to one another after they’d beaten him to death with rocks that he had brought it upon himself, and maybe they were correct. It had been impulsive, burning his hut down and taking off like that. But permitting Lord Mauvoisin to repossess Attila would have placed Clovis in the lowest order of serfs, and there was no life to be tolerated there. Serfs of higher classes, flaunting their meager wealth of a hut and two mules, would have snickered and sneered, perfectly oblivious as they complied with their own oppression. He’d seen it happen before, and he knew his patience would fail such ludicrous arrangements. Better to try his lot as an outlaw, he’d figured, maybe hook up with some minstrels.
But that gamble had obviously failed, and now Clovis was left wondering what everyone was waiting for as he stood facing them in the center of the village square. Had he been inside, Clovis would have felt much larger than usual. As he was outside, this curiously expansive sensation went largely unnoticed by him, being perceived merely as an exultant mood. In fact, it was his shining good cheer that gave the other serfs such hesitance. They scratched their heads in lice and confusion, and though they were centuries from understanding why, the supremely enlightened humanity of the twenty-first century can look upon these feudal fools and see clearly that Clovis’s good cheer was undermining the only emotion feeding their venge frenzy—namely, a bloodlust born of the fear of death. This fear would be blunted by the punishment of he who stepped outside of social boundaries, for the social order is all that separates each and every person from having to face the monstrosity of meaninglessness beyond the walls of culture. But to batter down he who ventured beyond, well, the violence would reassure them that life is dangerous and cruel, and thank heavens for th
e divinely inspired racketeering of Lord Mauvoisin.
Like vultures in hell, however, fear feeds on fear, and in Clovis there was no fear upon which to feed. He was supposed to be blubbering, begging, gracelessly cussing. But whatever had happened to Clovis in the hinterland (and nothing much had happened except that he had awakened from what seemed in retrospect to be a sort of trance), he was damn near luminous. To throw a rock at him would have been like kicking a cuddle of kittens purring in a basket of rose blossoms in the midst of a springtime wedding. It seemed uncalled for, and rude, and mortifyingly cruel.
Unmindful of the muddle of those huddling around, Clovis’s attention was instead consumed by the oaken hills in the distance. Here the entire stout forest seemed to sway impossibly in a sea of cheering treetops, as if it were all so much steam rising sultry from the reeds of Pan. And what fresh heaven is this? Clovis marveled, captivated as the full wonder of the woods revealed itself to him in the surge of a single moment. Every tree became the forest and every breeze the wind, moving as one in a rustling symphony of seduction, a dryadic dance undulating at the heavens like the lazy licks of a verdant flame, charming him into the peace that never ceased. Clovis was awestruck. The seductive dance of the virgin trees beckoned with a synchrony the likes of which he had never before witnessed, and the wind carried to within earshot what sounded to be the laughter and the frolic of faraway children. It was such a bounty of beauty that he could scarcely contain himself. It was all around and everywhere, and yet his people looked so sad, so severe. Couldn’t they see? Clovis burst out laughing, and the wind that tickled every leaf on every tree compelled him to dance to the very same draft.
Nine Kinds of Naked Page 3
