This is an excerpt from the novel Zen, Mississippi. You can buy it here

Zen, Mississippi (excerpt)

PART I: Hope Road

Chapter 1

A parade of streetlights under a stale red Mississippi sky illuminates his path. Lamp posts, like the legs of incandescent insects straddled across the highway, march Patrick Alexander away from the bigger­than-it-seems little town of Lyonness, away from Ashley, away from the caterwauling of the neighborhood dogs and chickens. When a man is going crazy, an empty road can give him hope. It’s four in the morning. He hasn’t thought about where he might be going, but in his army surplus backpack he’s carrying two white t-shirts, a gray sweatshirt, an extra pair of jeans, three pairs of socks and three pairs of boxer briefs, just in case he decides not to return home.

Last night after dinner, while they were watching some crap on TV, Ashley out of the blue said that she would probably like being a tree, and this of course was damn nonsense but Patrick took the bait anyway. Trees are stagnant he said. They stand around and then they just die, wither and rot. No Ashley said. Trees stay in one spot yes but that’s exactly what allows them to grow more gigantic, not outward like towns, but upwards like cities, feeding the earth with their fingers and drinking from the earth with their toes. They’d finished a bottle of wine, and she was getting loopy.

It wasn’t the tree thing so much as what it inevitably led to--Patrick badgering her about her shallow outdated sixties idealism, in hindsight realizing he was being far too sharp with her; Ashley harping on his underachiever job slinging pies at the local pizza shop and how he spends too much of his paycheck on his motorcycle and on pot. Then the familiar cycle began--the defensiveness, more unnecessary meanness, a tightly wound ball of pride, resentment and guilt that for some reason he can’t let go. He recognizes all that of course. He’d have to be blind not to. He has flipped through the piles of self-help books that Ashley bought almost compulsively. But he feels instinctively that it will take something stronger than psychobabble to change his life.

Maybe he just can’t deal with normal life, normal "reality," whatever that turns out to be. A justification your brain creates for what your senses perceive. He muses that that sounds almost like a koan, the riddle of the Zen Buddhists. Like asking yourself what your face looked like before your parents were born. Mu.

Spontaneously, he leaves the road, entering a faint trail through the brush. When he was a boy on a bicycle, a dense thicket of woods always meant the possibility of discovering a doorway to somewhere mysterious and new. On the other side, he’d found at times the hidden neighborhoods where so many invisible people live, in countless rows of concrete houses, or there was suddenly a grocery store, a drug store, an arcade. The worlds of young boys on bicycles are constructed of a series of labyrinths, and the point is not to escape the labyrinth, but to find every possible doorway into the next one. It was also on these trails that all the neighborhood kids used to run loose, stomping out their aggressions in the trees and mud like Celtic warriors, medieval crusaders, grail-questing knights, musketeers, merry men, or whatever game they decided on that day.

Behind a dewy web of weeds and ivy, is it, yes, the old fort. Patrick and a couple of his friends had painstakingly constructed it using the plywood and chicken wire structure from an unused chicken coop in Dorian’s uncle’s backyard, though they realized later that it might have made more sense to buy new materials. But anyway, it’s still standing. That the wood hasn’t yet rotted to the point of caving in upon itself is a curious miracle.

He struggles to crawl through the tiny square opening. Hot musty smell of rotting, damp, termite-ridden wood. He wonders if he can sta- . . .

His boot snaps through the floor, slips on the wet leaves and pine straw underneath, and he lands with his ass in a pile of muck. In the corner, he notices a stash of old porn magazines, some weather-faded and forever-glued shut, but others that were fresh and new. The current occupants have cleverly figured out to put them in plastic bags. But here’s what he hoped to see; the message scratched into the wall with a pocket knife and then traced with permanent marker had not completely faded.

Bobby
10/6/1987
Dead
Bobby was a co-founder of Patrick’s childhood play world, a world Patrick called ‘Zen’ for reasons he could no longer remember. Bobby was at once a demigod, a brother, and a paragon of all things young Patrick found noble and virtuous. There were other demigods as well--Martians, monkeys and lizards--the kinds of archetypal beings that often stir a youngster’s imagination. Patrick and his friends would sit in this chicken coop, and he’d spin yarns of Bobby and these mythic characters, their adventures solving petty mysteries and fighting minor injustices, for his pals’ entertainment. Though they were fictions, at nine Patrick would have sworn up and down that they were at least as real as Jesus. He had ‘faith’ in them (as he recalls from his year and a half as a philosophy major at the University of Alabama, ‘faith’ was defined by William James as when you believe in something you know isn’t true, and though James’ intention was undoubtedly ironic, this definition seems to fit Patrick’s own view).

He thinks back to those soggy summer evenings when, even from the fort half a mile away from his house, above the adolescent yer deads and yer its, his mother, who had the loudest dinner call in the neighborhood, could be heard singing his name. Her voice would signify the end of the day.

When he stayed at his dad’s house, the rules were different. He stayed out as late as he pleased. Hardly saw him when he wasn’t passed out in front of the television, sometimes with a cigarette still smoldering in his spotty fingers. Then Bobby died. Suddenly, mysteriously. That was where Patrick’s brain took him, not to gradually grow distant from his imaginary friend, but to kill him off, and to write it down on the wall of the fort, the headquarters of that fictional world--that made it official. There was no going back after that. In this universe of the childgod, everything he ever imagined lived on infinitely in a perfect embodiment of his personal mythology.

What did it look like, his face, before his parents were born? With no small amount of labor, he frees himself from the plywood structure. One leg out, then the other, scraping his wet ass through the little door. Then, as suddenly and disjointedly as a TV dream sequence, Patrick feels himself in that parallel world of the demigods. The pigments of his surroundings become soft and translucent, as if sketched with colored pencils. He’s never thought much about the moon being present at this early hour of the morning, but he takes note of its fullness, peeking bashfully from behind the curtain of copper clouds.

"Lovely of you to visit. No flowers?" That voice, which has a faint Scottish lilt, with a sharp and tinny pitch like a slightly sped-up cassette tape, comes from a familiar green haze that’s now materialized in the moon shadow. It belongs to Zord, a commander of the Royal Martian Army, a character from Patrick’s old play world. Patrick had originally conceived of this diminutive figment (he’s waist high, although naturally, as a specific measurement, "waist high" has evolved as Patrick has aged) as a purveyor of empirical rationality to Earth’s underdeveloped civilization, someone who hoped to establish here some consistent form of thought to bring us up to date with the rest of the universe. Zord looks like a three-dimensional rendering of a sketch Patrick might have painted with watercolors when he was ten, so obviously, he’s sure this can’t really be happening. And yet, there’s no denying that he sees the Martian before him, about three feet tall with pointed ears and skin the color and texture of a ripe tomatillo. He has a face on both sides of his head, front and back. In fact, he has no back. He is front on both sides. The little green shit is right there, staring ahead and behind with that look of sage understanding that comes with otherworldliness.

In the next moment, Patrick notices that Monkeyman and Harold are there also. Monkeyman hangs from the limbs of a nearby tree--a thoroughly iconic monkey, with light brown fur, a coconut shaped head and a long tail, roughly four and a half feet tall when standing erect, which he typically doesn’t. He leans down and smacks Patrick on the back of the head with a stick. "Mu." Monkeyman giggles maniacally, like a hyperactive child.

Harold is a man-sized lizard (again, relative), his blood-red skin oozing with a translucent almost semen-like substance. At present, he doesn’t speak, but merely looks on, his facial expressions implying only mild curiosity. He snorts a terse giggle at Monkeyman’s antics and then goes back to smelling the dewy flowers.

Patrick drinks this in, does not respond to the voices that he’s not certain he just heard. The three of them appear holographic, like they could flicker and fade away at any moment. Zord says, "Aren’t you at least going to say hello?"

He isn’t. He’s consciously fighting the absurd urge to challenge the unreal phenomena to somehow prove that they are real. Monkeyman emits a series of terrible, nonsensical simian noises, which Patrick finds disturbing not least because the old Monkeyman, the one he made up, spoke like a human. His chattering is not so much monkey-like as a poor but enthusiastic monkey imitation.

Zord comes closer, looking up at Patrick with empathy. "What brings you here, lad? A new mystery for us to solve? Just feeling nostalgic?"

Harold and Monkeyman both start laughing again.

What brought him here, essentially, was again his identification with life on television, the neatly wrapped up episodes, the commercial breaks. Once in a while, he just wants to change the channel. Admittedly, he has done this a couple of times, and upon returning, Ashley always takes him back in. They each pledge their sincere love for each other, fucked up as they both are sometimes, and they promise that they will try to repair their relationship.

But here he is again.

In Patrick’s silence, Zord turns his shoulder away so that neither of his faces looks at Patrick directly. "Of course, you don’t have to answer. We all know what it is. I’m only a spectator in this situation, but it’s perfectly clear to me that it’s because, at your essence, you’re a selfish prig. You’re an adult, for the love of Pete, with a wife and rent--adult problems. And yet, here you are playing at running away like a petulant child."

Patrick just looks around in discomfort. After a moment, Zord glares at him and then delivers a lugubrious frown. "Oh, are your feelings hurt? Well, your feelings are nothing more and nothing less than a collection of chemicals swimming around in your brain, so get over it. Perhaps you are familiar with the expression ‘feelings aren’t facts.’ I certainly hope I haven’t hurt your facts, because that would be another matter . . . "

"Fuck off."

Patrick’s words echo against piles of dead wood as the ghosts disappear into the autumn leaves. A justification your mind creates for what your senses perceive. Mu.

Here is a tall magnolia tree, and it begs to be climbed. Patrick grabs the lowest limb and swings himself skyward, feeling himself gaining new strength with each level of height until he can see over the old chicken coop fort and down the trail. He tastes a teardrop off his lip. All the smiling faces of his past are lined up in a plastic procession to take a cannibalistic bite of his soul, and Ashley is first in line. He begs the wind and whatever gods may listen for some hint of just what the hell is going on.

There is suddenly a swift wind, then loud crack, and then a pulsing pain in his head. He lies on the ground weeping for all the sky to see. The sun is now on the horizon, peeking through a layer of fluffy red clouds, but in a matter of minutes, a dark wave comes tumbling into the skyscape. Guttural grunts of thunder grow into explosive crashes. Patrick lies still, his thoughts still racing too quickly to catch, his eyes still focused on the parade of cannibals. It rains.

Zen, Mississippi  

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