Asphodel: The Second Volume of the Muse Chronicles

by David P. Jacobs

  “Well . . . I’m glad that you fired that pistol, then!” Nathaniel shouted. “Aim a little bit better because I could have sworn that the bullet abraded my ear in the trajectory!”

  Annette was unmistakably amused. “I’ve missed this – our sparring. Haven’t you?”

  Both were suddenly aware that their bickering had turned into a performance watched by a small audience. The spectators included Adam, who took a few steps from the window, while Luanne stared at the verbal brawl from the closed green trunk labeled “Phillip.” Mercifully, Phillip’s concentration was not focused on the mud-slinging. His eyes were on the glow-in-the-dark stars on the attic ceiling which plummeted to his feet as if he were amidst an up-close and personal meteor shower. Nathaniel had been too inconvenienced with the quarrel to notice but was directly attentive. They didn’t need a red-colored peg to inspire Phillip. He was already right where he needed to be, in the presence of his catalyst.

  Phillip’s life moved forward, retelling the subsequent biography from the accurate standpoint as if Jonas had not interceded.

  The life of Nathaniel’s step-grandchild, which had initially preluded with tiny inked stars on his father’s forearm, continued with the same tattooed stars as grown Phillip marked on his own arm in honor of the father who had abandoned him. Phillip rekindled his discarded love for astronomy thereby sparking a prevailing desire to find his missing parent.

  Phillip, who was two months shy of his thirty-ninth birthday, impulsively quit his poorly paying warehouse job and procured another unprofitable position as a custodian at the astronomical observatory. Phillip kept his head lowered as he swept and mopped the tiled lobby floors. He kept his attention focused on the dry-erase boards as his rag brushed unwanted notes after the professors completed nightly classes in the study rooms. He leaned in the doorframe of the building’s modest theatre projection hall where he observed one of the facilitators test out planetarium shows. In these moments, as the universe expanded on the domed ceiling, Phillip embraced the cosmos. While closing the building for the night, Phillip would empty the trash cans in the offices of graveyard-shift employees. His ears were perked for indications as to where his formerly-employed father had vanished.

  Though his meager income did not allow him to obtain financial loans for his graduate degree in the field, Phillip did not concede. He educated himself in astrophysics literature. Phillip’s genius-like comprehension of its complexities enhanced exponentially with the fervor he had excelled in during his childhood. His cosmic mastermind projected Phillip as a misunderstood mad-scientist who preferred the company of his own rented telescopes over friendships except for his mother whom he rarely visited.

  His mother, who had grown senescent during her residency at the retirement community, snatched Phillip’s wrist during one of his visits as he was unpacking the last of three paper grocery bags. It was a look of absolute consternation upon seeing the small tattooed stars on his forearm.

  “Don’t do this to us,” his mother glared. It was evident, based on her doddery beleaguered stare, she was uncertain if she was speaking to Phillip or to his father.

  “Please, tell me where he went, Ma,” Phillip pleaded with her, but to no avail. Time and emotional distance on her end had wedged the clues farther from any pending investigations.

  Phillip, eventually accepting that his mother no longer held answers to his father’s whereabouts, kissed her on the forehead, folded the paper grocery sacks and left her with an impassive blank stare she often wore.

  On a not-so-special evening, as Phillip mopped the floor tiles of the observatory’s offices, his eyes glanced to an open door. Inside was a room of electronic gadgetry associated with the observatory’s high-powered telescope. The equatorial room, as Phillip came to understand, was similarly domed akin to the planetarium to protect the equipment from the elements. Tonight, however, the dome was ajar; its largest telescope stretched into the star-sequined skies.

  Positioned in a swivel chair was an older gentleman in a pale yellow dress shirt, jeans and aged tennis shoes. From behind, the observer looked no different than the other astronomy college professors Phillip had seen in the hallways. The difference that struck Phillip’s emotions so brashly was the collection of inked stars on the observer’s forearm. Phillip swallowed. He looked at his own tattoo coming to terms that his father, whom he had been searching for, was there!

  Time raced forward showing a working friendship concerning Phillip and the tattooed observer named “Mel.” It wasn’t explained why Phillip didn’t ask if the man was his father. Nathaniel surmised that Phillip didn’t want to be wrong in assuming. After all, it had been over twenty years since he had seen his father. Without pictures to remind him of his father’s face, and the way that the observer’s face had aged making his identity indistinguishable, it was natural for Phillip to be delayed. Through a series of moments, the relationship between Phillip and the astronomer grew. The man named “Mel” came to understand how brilliant of a mind Phillip possessed and, through the course of time, he took Phillip under his wing. They would sit and study cosmic wonders. Phillip would attend lectures in night classes, or participate in the lab activities and report to Mel what he gained from the application.

  Night after night, after Phillip finished his janitorial duties, he and Mel would discuss the complexities of the universe and focus on the loftiness of space than their individual lives. When Mel handed Phillip an envelope with a heftily numbered check, their conversation turned delicate.

  “This is what’s left from my life savings,” Mel told Phillip. “It’s my gift to you.”

  Phillip looked at the draft which was sizable enough to put him through his desired continuing education. He shook his head, handing the check to Mel.

  “This is too generous,” Phillip told him. “I can’t accept it.”

  “What am I going to do with it?” Mel asked. “I’ve used enough in the account to make sure I’m well taken care of at the time of my death. I want you to have the rest.”

  When Phillip declined the gift a second time, Mel referenced their tattoos. There was a long pause before Mel said “Phillip, I had a wife, and a kid, but I didn’t value them as much as I appreciated the stars. And they were taken from me because I wasn’t there as much as I probably should’ve been. As a result she divorced me and gained full custody of my son. She even went so far as to bar me from seeing him.”

  There was an intake of breath from Phillip’s lips.

  “I fought for him, my son. Believe me, Phillip, I did! But no matter how many steps I took, my ex-wife was there forcing me to retreat. Eventually I gave up trying. My son was little when I saw him last and I knew that, even if we did reconnect, he wouldn’t remember me. He wouldn’t love me . . .”

  “That’s not true . . .” Phillip shook his head.

  Mel studied Phillip, considering his friend’s words. “I wish I could tell you that I’m your father, Phillip, but I can’t. There was another astronomer, your dad, who worked here as well, years ago. He, too, had a similar story. He too had a jealous wife. And an astute son, whom he had adored, and lost, in a divorce due to the stars. He and I were roommates in college in our younger years. Our friendship was accurately a meeting of the minds, like yours and mine. We went through four years earning our bachelor degrees and together suffered our collegiate graduate years. After we earned our doctorates, we got matching tattoos on our forearms so that we’d remember the shared brotherhood during our postdocs. We kept in close contact by regular mail and e-mail as we cultivated our own research and taught at separate universities. We wrote about our families. He wrote about how special you were to him. He acknowledged your propensity for astronomy and the sciences surrounding it. He loved you very much, Phillip, and told me how proud he was of you . . .”

  “Loved?” Phillip asked. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Mel sighed. “I applied for a research position here at his observatory but by the time I got here, he
was gone. I found a letter on my desk one afternoon. It was his final letter. I wrote to him several times and received notifications of ‘return to sender.’ There was no forwarding address. No observatories in the United States, or around the world, had information. He simply disappeared. After a while I naturally assumed that, like a dying star, he flickered out from existence.”

  Mel looked at Phillip who had tears in his eyes.

  “Though I’m not your father, Phillip, I consider the friendship that we share to be closely akin to that kind of paternal relationship. Though you aren’t my son by blood, you’re the closest that I have. That’s why I’m giving you this check. Though some stars occasionally blink out of the night sky it doesn’t mean that others can’t be born in their absence. I’ve always believed that everyone has a story to tell. That we’re connected to one another in small ways that may present themselves later. Though each of us may be considered ‘separate stars’ in the macrocosm, we collectively construct a figure in a constellation. I’ve considered life, and all of its sometimes unhappy moments, to be the dark matter sandwiched between those glowing stars. Holding us in a glorious outline that could only make sense through someone else’s eyes.”

  Time propelled forward as Phillip, in the coming year, lived those moments of “dark matter” that was his life. He forgave his mother, not necessarily by condoning her reaction to his father’s absence, but by accepting it. He released the bitterness that had accumulated in his heart due to these circumstances. Phillip and Mel built the relationship that they had so desperately craved. Phillip found a surrogate father within Mel; Mel was filled with happiness in knowing that Phillip was the son he had never cultured. Five years later Mel died peacefully in his sleep and Phillip, every Memorial Day evening, sat by Mel’s grave with a telescope and star charts.

  The story of Phillip’s life integrated with Luanne’s timeline as Phillip babysat, and put to bed, his second cousins: the twin girls that Luanne, herself, had abandoned and currently sought to reconnect with.

  Luanne, who had been sitting on Phillip’s green trunk in the attic watching this exchange, stood and tightly clutched the Christmas ornament.

  One of the girls traced the stars of Phillip’s tattoo with her fingers and asked him, “Phil, tell us a story?”

  Phillip had told his second cousins many stories in the past but mostly of made-up things. Tonight was different. Tonight Phillip looked to the bedroom wall where a message appeared that seemed to come forward from another time – a message that read “Phillip, Don’t Forget.” He smiled, looked down at the girls and told them a story.

  “Well,” Phillip started his retelling, “I suppose . . . it began with stars.”

  As Phillip said these words, he looked up from the twins to find someone standing in the bedroom door frame. Phillip invitingly nodded to the stranger, initiating that the story-time include this additional person.

  Luanne, at present in the attic, caught sight of the smiling figure in the light of the twin’s bedroom doorway. It was a figure that she recognized as her own. Tears streamed down Luanne’s eyes as she foresaw the future: in which she, and her daughters, were happily reconnected.

  These images from Phillip’s life, like the images from the previous rescues, built upon themselves simultaneously spinning in place like busy hamsters on a wheel.

  “Like a Zoopraxiscope,” Nathaniel told Annette without looking at her. When he didn’t hear a response, he sighed at her silence and explained “The Zoopraxiscope was invented by Eadweard Muybridge in 1879. He would paint single images on the outer edges of glass discs and shine them through a projector. The individual stop-motion silhouettes differed slightly and, once spinning, would give the impression of movement. Watching Phillip’s life like this reminds me of Muybridge’s invention, for some reason.”

  It pleased him to think that he and Annette had rescued Phillip and changed his life. Nathaniel couldn’t help but to be proud that he and Annette, in a way, were a part of Phillip’s “constellation.” Watching the clamor of Phillip’s life, Nathaniel felt in his pocket for the glow-in-the-dark star collected from the initial inspiration. Running his fingers along the edges, Nathaniel thought about the constellation that he and Annette shared.

  Nathaniel turned to Annette. He wanted to say, “Yes, I did enjoy our verbal sparring to some degree.” And he also wanted to tell her, “Regardless of Adam acting as Jonas’ apprentice, or whatever arguments we find ourselves, or whatever becomes of us, I hope you know I’m glad we had the opportunity to change Phillip’s life.” Oh how he badly wanted to say these things.

  But when Nathaniel faced Annette he found Jonas. A string of Christmas lights had been strung into a fitted noose around Annette’s neck who aggressively, but mutely, fought for freedom. Before Nathaniel could reach out to Annette, Jonas began to rise. His step-brother was at the rudder of a soaring evergreen that had taken root underfoot. In Jonas’ hand, and peeking from the branches, Nathaniel could see the Lite-Brite with Luanne’s peg shining on the board. He could also see Luanne desperately grasping at the bark with the smashed soda can Christmas ornament in her hand.

  An object fell from the tree’s altitude and landed on the ground with an audible gunshot. Nathaniel looked at Annette’s firearm which lay without its owner to wield it.

  From Nathaniel’s point of view, Adam also watched as Annette was lifted into the air by Jonas’ impermanent chariot.

  Nathaniel turned to the attic door which was covered in a sickening pile of rotted dandelions. He envisioned how this could have happened. Perhaps Jonas had landed onto solid ground; following that, he could have climbed up the ladder to the attic. Phillip’s life had provided the perfect distraction which had given Jonas the perfect chance to slip in undetected. Regardless of how Jonas had arrived in the attic, or how he had obtained the Lite-Brite board, it didn’t matter. Nathaniel looked to the evergreen, which was spotted with thousands of shiny glass Christmas ornaments, as it took on a more defined shape in comparison to its other surroundings.

  The inexorable darkness within Nathaniel was paralleled by the contiguous geode of blue-tinted razor-edged icicles that formed in a tight hollow cavity shaped like an underground well beyond the winding pine tree’s stalk.

  Even if Jonas did let Annette go before her last breath, the fall through the creaking ever-belligerent mangling tree trunk would be penetratingly terminal. It was also foreseeable that, if Nathaniel didn’t climb up to save Annette or her fiancé or even the last remaining client Luanne, he would be the remaining star in their collected illuminant assemblage. So, as Phillip’s story quivered with thunder, Nathaniel ascended hoping that his own personal inner star, or contribution to Management’s design, might not befittingly dwindle as an unknowable consequence.

  CHAPTER 26: TANNENBAUM

  Thick tree sap suctioned to his grasping fingertips like avaricious leeches. His clothes snagged on the contorted branches which heatedly beat down upon him. Nathaniel removed his suspenders and dress shirt, which had been his greatest drawbacks. As he ascended, Nathaniel’s skin was threadbare from prickly pine needles which drew blood from his arms and face. He winced, gritted his teeth and kept climbing regardless.

  Epic remixes of Christmas carols, some with vocals and some without, assailed Nathaniel as he tore up the tree’s rasping cortex. The twinkling ornaments, as if they were alive, sang with the voices of holiday choruses belting musical bridges that hinted to Luanne’s life. Nathaniel ascertained the following: After Luanne received the crushed soda can Santa Christmas ornament, she moonlighted a part time occupation working in a year-round Holiday atmosphere. She made mass-produced ornaments on a do-it-yourself assembly line and ultimately was employed as a side-kick elf in a shopping mall winter wonderland. Luanne met a kindred spirit on this interchange: a fellow lover of Christmas and collected ornaments who had also gone through his own familial perils resulting from a female to male transgender operation. Though the friend’s name was never stated,
Nathaniel gleaned that Luanne’s co-worker had happily reconciled with his family.

  “There’s hope for you, Luanne,” her friend told her. His voice was heard in an ornament as he explained, “The evergreen is meant to signify the eternal human spirit. We put lights, and sometimes candles, on the tree to remind us of Christ’s light and love in the world. There are dark patches in the tree so we put the ornaments to fill those additional dark spaces. The ornaments signify those closest to us, be they family or friends, who unite us and fill our soul. It’s time to find new ornaments and new connections that make your life worth experiencing.”

  The friend’s words were interrupted as Nathaniel grasped a branch and accidentally dug the palm of his hand into a hook. He shouted a curse word, inspected the abrasion, and continued to climb. There was a shattering below that brought Nathaniel to stop. The ornaments were disintegrating as if snuffing out the hymns of Luanne’s life. He surmised that Jonas was at the top of the tree telling Luanne Management-knows-what to keep her discouraged. He was thereby forcing the lights and music to waver.

  Nathaniel growled, shimmying up the tree. The ornaments above him, which were presently gleaming, told how Luanne’s hope to reconnect with her children was restored even though she harbored doubts.

  “I don’t want to hurt my children more than I already have,” Luanne told her friend in another ornament.

  “How happy do you think they are without you in their lives?” her friend asked in a neighboring ornament.

  This conversation between Luanne and her friend went on as Nathaniel clambered. The fracturing ornaments below gained speed underfoot, devouring the light. Nathaniel climbed quicker and more rapidly, ducking and dodging insistent swinging branches. Hand over hand and foot over foot, Nathaniel struggled to reach the top to save Luanne’s storyline, along with Annette and Adam, from Jonas’ grip. Through Luanne’s maddened remaining canticles, Nathaniel learned that the bowling alley attendant’s life, for all practical purposes, was about change. Luanne’s former wife, Halia, had been given a different work schedule. Halia had asked the twin’s favorite older second cousin, Phillip, to watch over the kids. Nathaniel learned that the unsuspecting Phillip, upon bringing the twin children to the winter wonderland to meet the mall-appointed Santa Claus, recognized Luanne. And that, through a series of untold circumstances including Halia’s eventual small-dosed tolerance, Luanne was able to openly face her children as her updated female self which brought Luanne’s story and Phillip’s story to a penultimate intersection . . .