Nathaniel turned away from the white light, considering his punishment.
Fiona added, “Management has told me that if you stay here and do your regular term as a muse, they can ignore the upset you’ve caused. If you choose to reincarnate, Management will have no choice but to serve your sentence. The choice is yours.”
“Is it? The upset I’ve caused? It’s because of those Dandelion Sisters I’ve been put into this situation. For all I know, you might even be working this operation alongside them!”
“The question you have to ask yourself, Mr. Cauliflower, is how much heartache your love for Evangeline is worth?”
“My love for Evangeline runs deeper than any love I’ve felt,” Nathaniel told Fiona. “I’m willing to suffer whatever punishment the ‘Sisters’ or ‘Management’ gives me to be with her.” Nathaniel then said “When I return, if you and Management know what’s good for you . . .” He stared into Fiona’s eyes, “Don’t call me ‘Cauliflower’ again.”
Nathaniel crossed through the swirling illumination, disappearing from the hereafter. Only the dim light of the chandeliers remained.
Fiona carefully picked up the broken record and piled the pieces.
“That didn’t go as well as you’d expected, I can imagine,” Fiona told Management. “Perhaps instead of records, we need an instrument of transport that is a bit more durable?”
*
Retirements in the department were fantastical affairs that occurred at the end of a muse’s employment. Parties consisted of the basics: cherry blossom in mid-morning sunlight, closely passing meteor showers, orbiting planets, undulating oceans with tidal waves, expansive fields of wildflowers, mismatched tables and chairs for a dinner party of a thousand dishes, a colossal Ferris wheel and catalogued moments that gave vision to a muses’ unrealized hopes and dreams. Public speakers gave words of wisdom in a made-up auditorium. Cakes were wheeled out at the celebrations. The retiring muse had to make a choice as to where they would visit: to reincarnate or to reside in Heaven. With the decision having been made by whomever the wish was granted, a swirling white light would erupt in the waiting room at the end of the hall. Stepping through the swirling light the retiring muse was taken wherever they had decided to depart.
The retirement party for the department’s Greatest Muses required equal deliberation and care. Fiona and Nathaniel tirelessly negotiated formulated designs for the festivity.
“. . . and we’ve reached the dessert portion of our planning,” Fiona pleasantly told Nathaniel as they sat in his office under a beam of sunlight entering the oculus.
“Perchance we might switch the cakes for pies?” Nathaniel offered.
“Pies?” Fiona asked.
“We have an aspiring pie-maker in our company. In my opinion, it would be advantageous to offer her a temporary position of appropriately dabbling in an art she’s fantasized.”
“You are speaking of Miss Redmond?”
Nathaniel nodded. “We can take surveys of which pie the muses would like to wish from?”
“You’re hoping that this will trigger something, aren’t you, Mr. Cauliflower?” Fiona spoke earnestly. “That if she speckles herself with flour and sniffs the aromas of the baked pies she’ll want to explore that side of herself after she leaves?”
“Isn’t that what this place is known for, Fiona?” Nathaniel asked. “Having them arrive one way and depart enlightened?”
Fiona smiled proudly.
Nathaniel cleared the strewn paperwork.
“You and I have been here the longest,” Fiona told him. “It makes me sad that we’ll soon be taking divergent paths. For many generations, I’ve found myself watching muses retire through the waiting room door, venturing off on escapades. I wonder what will become of me once I blow out my candle at the end of this retirement party.”
Nathaniel sat on the edge of the desk listening respectively.
Fiona sifted through the paperwork, airing a concise list for her own personal adjournment. Her retirement party was believed to be the biggest celebration that the department had ever seen.
She asked him, “Where will I go? What will I do?”
“Rest, most likely,” Nathaniel accepted the list.
“Well, yes. But after that?” She sighed. “I’ve spent almost my entire existence catering to inspirational needs. When it comes to focusing attention to myself, I’m at a loss. Who will I become?”
“You’ll find your direction,” Nathaniel reassured. “You need to have faith that Management will be with you.”
“What is it like walking through the waiting room door into the unknown?”
Nathaniel sighed deeply, searching for the words. He flipped through her requests. One word came to his mind, and that was: “Exhilarating.”
Thinking back on all the times that he had passed through the light in search of Evangeline, Nathaniel supposed the word “exhilarating” was the closest. His memories settled upon his journey into the nameless mist, into the outer crest of his second life, having worn a foreign skin surrounded by an absorbingly surreal storyline. It had unfolded on a gray, murky summer afternoon in 1921, as a lone immigrant ship had drifted by the gargantuan Statue of Liberty, completing its destination to the promising shores of a culturally flourishing America.
*
Yuri Abramovich was eighteen years old when he set eyes on the Statue of Liberty. He sported short-cropped, messy brown hair, intense deep-set brown eyes, distinctly toned nostrils, narrow lips and angular jaw. His exposed ears were perceivably a size too large for his boyish face, which glistened with moisture as he stared into the thin sheet of falling rain. Having lost his family in the disastrously altering communist government at the end of the recent Russian Revolution, Yuri had found that his hatred of the new Bolshevik regime ran so deep that he abandoned his demarcated heritages in search of a new option. He took roots on an aspiring continent guarded by an oversized symbol of a woman clad in robes holding a torch heavenward who embodied a better, and more conducive, administration.
America was not without its own setbacks. It had been a few short years since the end of World War I. The country had undergone a severe recession. Thankfully, several austere titans were there to restore the vast country: President Warren G. Harding, automobile expert Henry Ford, oil enthusiast John D. Rockefeller, financial philanthropist J.P. Morgan, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, electric intellect Thomas Edison, government secretary Herbert Hoover, Hollywood’s originator D.W. Griffin, America’s most profound ballplayer Babe Ruth and many others who assisted in the nation’s rebirth. Even if it meant living in a cramped, poorly lit brick tenement building with other immigrants, America was on the rise once again, and Yuri had come to reside within its pervasive opulence.
In his first month, a full moon hovered symmetrically above an alley between his tenement building and the one beside it. There were several laundry lines connecting the two buildings; taut string bridges enswathed in shirts, pants, dresses and under-things. Yuri exited his building for a nightly stroll in the city, hoping for a bit of fresh air before bed. He didn’t give the alley a second thought until a sound forced his skin to shiver.
“Yuri…” called a voice from the shadowed corridor.
He took a few steps back, inspecting the alley. The moon acted as a light bulb igniting the stacked, wooden pallets on the ground. The crates were made of thick planks spaced far enough apart so he could see straight through. There was no one in the alley that could have called his name. He started to leave, thinking it a trick in the wind.
“Yuri…” the voice spoke.
Yuri spun and stepped in front of the alley. His eyes scaled the walls, wondering if someone were calling to him from an open window. He spied the laundry several floors above. The fabric fluttered slightly, teased by the balmy summer breeze. Yuri witnessed as a stray, loosely draped white cotton shirt tumbled to the ground. He stepped into the alley catching the shirt with his hands. Though it was still dam
p, it smelled clean with a hint of soap.
As Yuri stood in the alley, taking in the smell of the newly laundered shirt, other fabric descended. He tried to recoup as many as he could from the dirt and grime of the alley floor but the clothes fell in such abundance, and so fast, that Yuri possessed little luck. As the clothing piled around him, they churned into a shape that towered quickly. Afraid he found himself in the heart of a growing dust devil, Yuri scrambled toward the alley’s entrance.
Rushing to the street, he turned to find that the shape had built upon itself but not in the form of a funnel. The clothing, which was made of individual pieces before, was hurriedly stitched by dark, phantom-like thread. The shape was distinctly a staked circus tent. As the last of the clothing fit into place on the improvised tent’s rooftop, a front flap opened revealing a pitch-black core. Coming from inside was the voice that had whispered his name: “Yuri…”
There was an erected plank of wood by the opening which read:
Dandelion Sisters
Admission: Three Dandelions
Yuri checked beneath his feet finding a patch of dandelion weeds which tried to reclaim the paved street. He picked three dandelions by hand.
Yuri then spotted two men, and a leashed greyhound, exiting the tent. One man was dressed in a green three-piece suit, cufflinks, and brandished a walking stick with a silver tip in the shape of a brain. The second gentleman was much taller than his predecessor, bulkier in muscle mass. From Yuri’s perspective, the more brutish looking fellow was perhaps the other gentleman’s bodyguard or strongman. The greyhound was attached to the taller man by a black leather leash. The greyhound spotted Yuri and whimpered at the sight of him. The leash was yanked hard and the dog snapped to attention.
The man in the three piece suit studied Yuri. Yuri was taken aback by the man’s eyes. They startlingly resembled the shining blue eyes of a wolf. The stranger nodded to Yuri for him to enter the tent. Seconds after this brief interaction, the two men, and the greyhound, circled around to the back of the tent, disappearing into the opposite end of the alley. Yuri and the Dandelion Sisters were alone in the constrained lane.
He stepped inside the tent. There was a kerosene lamp lit before his arrival which brought the room to a warm, orange glow. Yuri found a lectern with carved dandelions on its wooden base. On the desktop was a quill, bottle of ink and an open ledger. Also on the lectern’s surface was a ring of hardened wax which Yuri assumed had been left from the previous visitor.
He lifted the quill, dipped the tip into the ink and signed his Russian name below the present name of “Nathaniel J. Cauliflower.” Following suit from the previous entry, he filled in the year and his age. When Yuri set the quill onto the desk, a voice spoke.
“You’ve come,” said a young female voice from beyond the shadows of the kerosene lamp’s illuminated range. “At last, you’ve come.”
“Have you been expecting me?” Yuri asked, his voice rich with his homeland accent.
“Oh, we have, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower.”
Yuri looked behind him expecting to see the “Cauliflower” to whom they referred.
“It is you, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower, though you may not realize it. But you will. Oh, you will remember who you were, I can assure you.”
“I can’t see you in this darkness,” Yuri asked the voice. “Won’t you come into the light?”
There was a stirring in the shadows. The vision of a young blond girl who had been no more than ten appeared. She was barefoot and in a donned white cotton dress. Having crossed into the light to be seen, she didn’t approach further.
“You have the dandelions?” the girl asked. Her voice was young and pure.
Yuri held out the dandelions but she didn’t approach to claim them. He instinctively placed them on the floor. He stepped back to allow her access.
The young girl timidly stepped forward, scooping the dandelions, returning to the dark.
“Wait!” Yuri pleaded. “Tell me more about being this Nathaniel J. Cauliflower of whom you speak. Who is he and why do you think I am him?”
The young girl stepped into the light holding one of the yellow dandelions. “You are the reincarnation of yourself, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower. You’ve been given a different name, identity, and alternate set of memories which cloud you from the truth of your true purpose.”
“What purpose?”
“To find her again.”
“To find who?”
“To find the woman whom you’ve dreamed of every single night since living as Yuri Abramovich,” the girl had explained. “The woman in the petticoats and the corsets? The woman who haunts your dreams? Your own succubus: the woman named Evangeline.”
The name stirred something within Yuri.
The young girl receded and was replaced by a middle-aged woman in the same cotton dress as her forerunner. The middle-aged woman, too, was blonde; an older version of her younger self. She carried in her hands a yellow dandelion with exposed, gangly roots.
The middle-aged woman told him, “After much searching, you will find Evangeline again. The number to remember is two thousand, three hundred and seven.”
“Two thousand, three hundred and seven?”
“Yes, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower. On that day, you’ll see Evangeline. You’ll recognize her. She’ll recognize you. But there is a caution to these words.” The woman ducked out of the light.
“Caution?” Yuri asked. “What caution? Where are you going?”
An old, haggard crone stepped into the light. Her frail, bruised skin had grown thick with veins. She had lost her eyes many years prior, leaving empty sockets. A few of her yellowed, crooked teeth had remained. She resembled nothing more flattering than a walking, talking corpse. She held in her claws a dying dandelion thick with white, wispy seeds on the verge of floating away. Her voice was coated in rotting mucus.
“Evangeline will not be the only one who will recognize you, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower. For with rediscovering your old love comes rediscovering your murderer! You’ll see and recognize him! He’ll see and recognize you!”
“Leave me alone!” Yuri shouted. “I don’t want to hear any more of this! I’m not Nathaniel J. Cauliflower! I’m Yuri Abramovich!” He grabbed the ledger to show the old woman proof. He gaped at the page in front of him. Where he had previously written his Russian name the name “Nathaniel J. Cauliflower” appeared in its place. “What witchcraft is this? How did you change what I’d written?”
The hag started to approach him.
Yuri stumbled to escape her grasp, scrambling backwards to the tent’s entrance.
“I wish to take back my dandelions!” he ordered.
“That’s not possible, Nathaniel J. Cauliflower. Once the payment has been made, and once the name, date and year have been scribed in the ledger, there’s no turning back to what you were before.”
Yuri ran through the open flap back to the city street in front of his tenement building. Once he made it safely outside, he looked over his shoulder to the alley, finding the exposed pallets on the ground. The tent had vanished. The separate articles of clothing had returned to their line. There were no dandelions beneath him.
Yuri stared at the moon which looked at him. It was then that Yuri noticed a trace of the Sisters’ existence, which came in the form of the number “2,307” burned into his retinas, in the same lasting impression of blinding sunlit metal might linger for a moment or two. But the number didn’t fade. The digits were still there like a sucking leech. Little did Yuri know that the numbers had a far more baleful arrangement for him than he could ever expect.
CHAPTER 13: HOW THE KEROSENE LAMPS CAME INTO PLAY
“And then what happened?” The question was asked by Lucas as he lay on the department’s fabricated Grecian beach. He was being held from behind in Icarus’ arms. They were in this affectionate position for some time while staring into the horizon sharing the details of their own lives before they had become muses. Icarus had been telling Luca
s of the Bronze Age and his fall from grace to the churning waters when the wax on his wings had melted.
“I woke up in the spirit world,” Icarus explained.
“Here?” Lucas wanted to know. “In the waiting room?”
“No. In the Underworld. A place filled with rusted metal lintels, chipped paint, grinding gears and atonal melodies. There was a boatman: an animatronic gondolier whose half-rotted painted face disclosed a brittle human skull underneath. He was motionless and possessed a tiny slot which required a form of payment to start him moving. I opened my clinched right fist and found two Grecian coins which I fit into the slot. The boatman sprang to life, jiving with rickety motions. He motioned to a wide canoe on a river’s edge which bobbed on currents of putrid sewage. I climbed into the boat. The mechanical captain boarded with me. As the boat rode along a bumpy track through a series of tunnels, the creature talked mainly to himself reciting the things that had been, and of all the souls that had once shared the sojourn.”
“It sounds so strange.”
“A name was welded into his forehead: ‘Charon.’ A titled subway sign named the flowing sewage beneath the boat: ‘The River Styx.’ I recognized these titles from the Grecian belief of the afterlife. They confirmed that my motorized chauffeur was delivering me to the gates of the Underworld. The longer that we travelled, I slowly accepted the fact that I was dead.”
A warm waft of air caught the fabric of Icarus’ black hoodie. Icarus’ curls also shifted in the fluctuating wind. The Grecian Adonis soaked in the comfort of having Lucas in his arms.
“We passed through various corridors of other animatronics which sparked and fizzled at the slightest movement. I observed that the rooms in which we floated were, at one time, filled with some sort of colorful amusement; a history of vibrant colors, fresh paint, regularly replaced light bulbs, of joyous chanting songs of glee. Those days had ended, leaving behind a contrasting version, almost monstrously malformed. We entered the final room and approached a wide set of closed double-doors, on which was painted a cheerful yellow sun with a slashed and morbidly scarred grimace. There were two groups of statues poised on jutting platforms beside the doors. The group to the right was made of two motionless, lifeless, mannequin men and a wax dog on a leash: one man wore a green three-piece suit and held a cane. The other mannequin was taller and muscular. The man with the cane had a pair of eyes that were almost canine. They seemed to stare as the boat glided by.”
Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles Page 18
