Compromised Positions

By Steve Dreben

Compromised Positions is Steve Dreben's powerful treatise on the destruction of the soul of western civilization. Written with the finesse and sharp cathartic analysis of Upton Sinclair or J.D. Salinger, Dreben is sure to take his place amongst the American writers who pierce the side of societies soul with the spear of analogical wit. Showing the reader no mercy, the author coyly invites us along for a sojourn of literary adventure that leads us through a maze of philosophy, emotions and deviant sexual passion culminating in our own desires and fantasies being rejected or validated. Seemingly knowing no bounds, Dreben continues to push the envelope of societies supposed overt moral norms, only to expose the dark and disturbed underbelly of the shadowy beast. The author points out, that we as individuals decide what the brass ring is, and then follows a fanatical pursuit of it to our own resolution. With an apocalyptic flair of foreshadowing of the time to come, Dreben takes the reader all the way to the edge only to look down the cliff of fathomless depth, darkness and forever. Fortunately, he does not let us fall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Dreben
• Release date: Mar 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781604146615

Steve Dreben

Author Steve Dreben graduated from the University of Illinois, as well as The London International Television and Film School where he received honors and various awards during his Master’s Program.Steve majored in Logic/Philosophy/Science at the University of Illinois, and directing, editing and writing while in London, England. He has written twelve original screenplays, two teleplays, one play, two children’s books and a recently published novel, “Compromised Positions.” The author has won the International Cine Golden Eagle Award as well as the American Documentary Film New York Festival Award for Huichol: People of the Peyote.Aside from being a writer, Steve is an independent businessman and a Horticulturist. He works substantially in the financial industry and in mortgage banking.Steve’s a family man with three children, two of whom are college graduates and one is in the twelfth grade.This author has won both of his prestigious awards through practical experiences and his eyes see deeply into character shattering most of the usual screens. His personal philosophy supports a populist view and he’s proud of being a progressive environmentalist who balances ideas before he votes them. Steve works each day in a practical world while interacting with many people and making his voice heard. In a society of many ‘blind faiths,’ he tries to open the box, or separate the ‘iron vice’ of conformity in order to let truth enter when and wherever possible.

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Compromised Positions

A NOVEL BY

Steve Dreben

Smashwords ebook published by Fideli Publishing Inc.

Copyright 2013, Steve Dreben

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Fideli Publishing.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Editor: Linda Phillips

Editor-in-Chief: VicToria Freudiger

Cover Illustration: Copyright © November 2008 Steve Dreben

The characters, and the incidents in this book are entirely the product of the author’s imagination and have no relation to any person or event in real life.

ISBN: 978-1-60141-661-5

Dedication

To A Great Love

Followed By An Even Greater One ...

A Lucky Man ... A Lucky Woman.

Ann Leven, 1997

The task is to favor freedom against the fatalities that close in upon it.

Albert Camus

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Post-Notes Detective's Corner

Talk-Television Panel Show - Memoirs & Execution

CHAPTER 1

Onlooker

Every moment held a power, like a finger squeezing the blue metal curve of a fine trigger, a finger dancing across the metallic ridges of the half moon. The tip of the skin having the instant power of life and death, of darkness and light, and we are possessors of that power. To aim, to see and to squeeze so gently, so effortlessly, just the slightest pressure flows the bullet to its inevitable target, an object out there, somewhere in the half-lit dark.

I could see the shape inside the end of a long blackened chamber; a shaft hardened iron and steel chamber where this projectile pushes out at great speeds in order to tear into the soft fleshy target. As I watched the lights, I noticed shadows bound from each prism. Gloom of night descended, like a great bell ringing at the end of yet another timeless day. Figures bounced from space to space, never sure of the object filling the filaments of the dark ridden-spaces.

Vividly, I could see her walking, moving with her special motion, her gentle rhythm, and her subtle jarring night dance. Her power flowed from her joints to the warmer heaven of her moist seduction. Concentrating on every step, on every subtle move, I followed her across the concrete to the grass. It was there her feet dug in, like the claws of a cougar in the final death spring. All at once, I could see her shifting towards the door. I watched her motion; her power all through the cross hairs of the 4x something mounted sight.

What was I doing lying on the rubble, against the weeds and the stones, down on the earth with a high powered sight and a 270mm rifle? Though it was the perfect weapon to kill the hunted at great distances. What was it I wanted to kill? Was it 'H' or was it me? This question refused to leave me as I watched her enter the house.

Again, I found myself atop a roof, laying flat with my elbows set in perfect aim position setting my sights on various targets as I waited for her, waited for 'H' to come in, to fill the cross hairs. I could see my profile fall against the shadowed wall of the house next to me; it was a shaded drawing of a figure with a gun pointing at something. It pointed somewhere in the void across the street.

Who was the shadow I saw across from me? Somehow, the whole thing was like a foul dream in which I refused to awaken. There seemed to be a foulness I evaded giving up. A tear fell down the side of my nose on the upper brim. Its drop blurred my vision for a short moment.

'H' was the perfect score. I watched as she retrieved the day's mail from the box, half-hidden in the purple gray moonlight. She was innocent in her tightly fitted blouse, in her rounded figure. The woman was blameless in her tight flesh, which was tailored with the gray-black woman's suit loosely draped to her body. A long range target, a mixed object of great passion, seduction and hate, love and destruction, an unwilling dancer in the valley of elimination.

Again, I saw her plainly through the crosshairs. Through the filaments, I followed her. She was a shadow target, a remote object caught in the scope's crosshairs. The beautiful mark was and wasn't at a distance. Everything seemed easy, not compromised at a distance.

Sweat ran down the arm up to the index finger. I perspired everywhere, from every human pore imaginable. Yet, there was a focus; a stillness as I touched the instrument of death.

She had said that death always walked its way towards her. Since she was a small child, death felt its way to her soul. Sometimes, she would live between parts of life and the true longing for death's tranquility. Was I the ultimate tool of her demise? Had she planned her own execution through me? Questions, unanswered forever?

The index finger pressured the metal beneath the skin.

Every second seemed to build the tension. Suddenly, she turned and entered the house, as the door closed for another evening.

I lay there for several hours watching the house. The childlike movements inside, along with the silhouettes behind curtains seemed to me to be life behind someplace, always at a distance.

How close we attempt to be, or think we are. How persuasively we ramble with each other's emotions, with each other's substances, until we convince ourselves that we are there, below the very surface of things where love hides for those who search for it? We share secrets for short periods. Often, we take time to share spirits for shorter periods and we are convinced that we are in 'joy'.

We've loved in kindred spiritedness. We fall prey to the joy, or its idea, and each falls game prey to the compromise in the pit of our stomach, in the rapture exposing our souls. We move on to the nature of the pounding force, or that which we are doing will destroy us. Yet, we go on; don't we? We continue breaking whatever reality we have that we've developed for ourselves.

Feeling the thick metal of the trigger, curves to power, which is the only existing momentary reality, the singular reality against the wet dusky bacteria arising from the skin, the taste of brine on the upper lip, sweating truth? Waiting, waiting to release the pain, with no cure for it, nothing will release us from the depth of the pain, except the trigger, the curved metal beneath the finger, the hardened pain gripping the heart, a projectile tearing the flesh, sending the body downward towards the earth. Surely the body attracts the soil, so it melts into the soil's crust, into the hidden warmth below the surface, where blood can mix with the mother's richness.

I put the weapon away by slinging it over my back. The fog came in and again; it began to rain, as I shuffled quickly to my car. The street was extremely dark, nearly black. Few cars were parked anywhere and no one peered through the windows.

After I opened the trunk, I laid the rifle gently inside. With great care, I looked in every direction for something or someone. Yet, I saw nothing. There was nothing to see but a closed-down suburban street. The rain continued falling. As it hit my face, it washed the tears and sweat from the oily odorous pores. Somehow, the rainwater purified the surface, and still, even the rain was compromised, more or less by the spirit hovering below the tense epidermis. The sky, the clouds are compromised by the acid molecules and the mix of city pollutants. Oceanfront areas block it for a short time with its purifying winds, its twirling salts.

Soaked clouds are unable now to cleanse the poisons that fall. Therefore, they eat everything organic in the crust, all vital life in its path.

I looked down at the weapon as the drops fell. For several seconds, I stared at the case lying in the darkness below, then as suddenly as I opened the trunk, I shut it. Not knowing exactly what to do, I drive off, and then I drove back. For several weeks, I followed the same exact act that I followed that night. In fact, for weeks and then months, I followed the same routine. Repeatedly, I followed the exact routine, always ending up staring at the weapon in its case, somewhere at trunk's bottom.

'H' never actually knew I was viewing her, never truly realized that she danced between the cross-hairs. After our last meeting, I refused all contact, burned all gifts given by her, or gave the symbols away, trying to wash clean or at least attempting to rid myself of her.

As I drove through the wetted asphalt of the old coastal road, I knew there was little real forgetting, few possibilities of mind shut-down. She was an energy in my head, which could not be erased.

The same road was driven so many times, and so many times, it was followed. The road was an act replayed again and again, like a loop section of a film refusing an ending. This now familiar road contained thoughts and dreams gushing a putrid reality, which dodged erasure.

My car pedal seemed to stretch beneath my feet automatically bringing the car forward. There was a problem but one which I cared little about solving; so, instead, I pressed on, driving towards my destination. I drove the car past a restaurant that overlooked a lagoon, which overlooked a moonlight glow across the water, a glimmering, a place which 'H' described as one in which she was fed well. This was a favorite place, a place where we could relax and talk, where we found continued intimacy. That was the key to our relationship, to our sharing; it was the profound intimacy, an intimacy so special, so deep, but at what price? The cost was too high. Yet if one refuses to step forward, one can never feel whole; one would walk around in perpetual half-life. After deep intimacy, does one really know that it is or seems to be apart from the other things, which life offers us? Man and woman, and only man and woman can share in these natural laws of development. Yes, there are other forms, other possibilities but only man and woman exchange the deep rooted, deeply destructive soul-driven intertwine that makes this 'great meaning' possible.

The red lights were blurred as I approached the half-lit busy cross street. I listened to the rhythmic beating on the semi-clouded windshield distorting my view. I listened to the rain beating against the glass in absolute silence which was mine this night. Did she feel anything? Did she have one thought about me?

She once voiced the words, Yes, I've thought about you a lot. You are not easy for me, not easy at all. Still, who could believe these words and did it make any difference?

I drove on until I found the driveway, which led to the apartment. At this point, I parked automatically and wanted to remember nothing. I hedged thinking about anything, those thoughts of her that plagued every waking hour. Thoughts that pained my soul, pained my being to the core of imagination, like a goblet miniaturized, mesmerized in perpetual motion.

I stayed in the apartment, remained in the newly covered four walls, a corporate real estate partnership, run by and for the corporation of female manager-soldiers, young recruits out to pull at balls to prove successful. I was recovering from a break-up without truly knowing what the break-up was about any longer. What was it that I was rebounding from truly?

Suddenly, I began to forget all of it, all of the past. My focus was purely on the feelings, or the pain flowing through my body, different than before far more intense, gut-wrenching and effective. A thing like this couldn't be explained. Who would listen? Who would care? Who could possibly comprehend?

Simply a matter of the rifle and the prey, the weapon and the victim, so many times a target, so close to elimination, to extinction, to end. Yet, this is the part that excites. This is the part that brings people to me.

I've seen it in their eyes. They listen because it's inside them. They want the trigger in their hands, they want to be part of it, part of the power it brings, and they need that kind of raw connection.

The weapon gives a false feeling of power, an expectation of authority. It compromises you with its intimacies as deeply as love itself does. This weapon will in itself expand through you, expand to a new possibility. It will magnify your control over the uncontrollable, and this is what we all want, isn't it?

My thoughts continued, rambling through my mind; collisions of different sized thoughts colliding in the mind and with the substance of the brain to form some sort of whole. To be whole, that's been something I desire, something yearned for, a remote possibility sitting on a canary's perch to the left side of me.

When I met her, she was the possible. 'H' was the one shot a man grasps for, a lady they say is the one shot in a lifetime. I had my shot and I got mine. We were there for a time, and now, I can say that, can't I?

As I wondered up the stairs, the rain fell harder, beating its continuous drops on the concrete before me. I could see the ripples in the concrete, semi-finished, hard surface, but the rain continued falling on the stairs and on my skull. It was a relief. Yes, I was relieved for the first time, from the corner of my eye, I saw a spot of light like a pinhole reaching through the membranes of the brain, consoling me and healing me from her, from 'H'; and the continuous pain.

It was clear she was destroying me, and that her elimination would bring me absolution. I knew she would bring me closer to healing never thinking about tomorrow's consequences.

One never takes seriously any of the consequences, especially men, with torn emotions blinded with ravaging pain, with no one and nowhere to go. So deep was my compassion that madness had no place, or 'real place' but it was there haunting me at the edges, creeping in and fondling the edges.

That night, especially that night, I scratched the walls. My stomach moved up the sides of the walls all around me. Like a symphony, it played its suppressed movement for me. I held myself to try to feel a feeling, to sense the throbbing of erected blood cells, something to feel. Eventually, my eyelids dropped. Slumber came, a little at first and more so with the sound of the rain against the walls of a stark white room.

Being alone was perhaps a perfect state. It was the state I desired because I could only face myself and the pain. That pain was raw, open wounds gushing emotionally-stripping pain throughout my body. I went off into the dreams, dreams of perfect times together, times where we collectively shared each other, when I was the perfect male offspring of her flowering heart. When I was her only physical desire, there was no other. Still, I never fully believed this was true. One could never know that anything she said was true. Though I wanted her words to be truth, but I deeply understood the opposite, always the exact opposite.

Two or three more times I followed the same sequence of events with the same 270 caliber rifle and its boar scope; the exact occurrence of events, the same pattern. It usually didn't rain afterwards, but that particular night of rain pried through me. The rain was there to remember with the rest of the meaningless intrusions flowing into my life at that moment. At that instant, life itself had little expression.

Cold facts exposed themselves in front of my eyes. My children had grown up; they were on their own, involved with themselves, and had little time to think about me. Years of loving seemed to pass quickly into another form, into a clouded space, a space that seemed far clearer at one time. When children grow up, the relationship reforms automatically. We are left with a shell of what we had with them and whatever sense of family existed.

We are but a note in their lives, contacted seldom, and met sporadically. Most often that may be for the best. One seems to be locked with his mate, but rarely are we truly able to understand it or to really know it, until we are out there searching for something else. We are all beating about out there for a morsel of something more, always casting about in the wind for a living cord to suck on for sustenance.

Periodically, I would ponder and stand as a stiffened flesh statue outside of where she worked remembering the spontaneous lunches we shared at some semi-elegant restaurant. I thought I'd call for another meeting but I immediately realized that was now impossible. This was something, a face-to-face contact that even I began to find a distinct possibility.

The quiet man-image erect across the street watching movements of people in and out of her building, a position established for release, even that absolution was a distant satisfaction.

Eventually, I realized that relief would be impossible and not worth facing. It was a position never to challenge, even within myself.

I once drove the car down to where she officed and parked in the space next to her car, which was near the vehicle I helped her buy. There I sat peering at the windows above, hoping to get a glimpse of her, a glimmer of something that was somehow obtainable. Whatever it was I wanted to see had disappeared, had flowed into the illusive world of the past, the dream world of something we had, something that was tied between us for many moments. Maybe, what I thought it was had never really been obtainable in the first place, maybe it was never there, never where I wanted it to be. There was the possibility that I thought it should be obtainable. I thought it should be but wasn't there, it wasn't anywhere.

Quickly, I pulled away when I felt her coming, when the time was right, when the offices on the third story went black.

'H' was a social worker, working in a dedicated social capacity. She helped people to understand cordial communications between people. Funny how these jobs, these vocations that some of us train for in school, funny how they're really never fully understood by the social communicator, how the theories never substantially apply to the 'trained one'.

We are scribed or mapped as the 'trained ones' and they adjust us to society's ways. This is their actual job, cut out the entire disguise that is where they're pointing towards. I for one could never believe in the talking arts and what they can, or can't do, for people who attend them. In a way, believers get more out of church, because they are there usually because of where their belief is before attending the service. For the social worker, she has to train her clients to believe before they can accept the concepts. Generally, the results of the talking arts are dismal. The data is falsified by the practitioners, and it must conform to the educational faction one is trained in, or the truth-the way Jung or the other linkages prescribe.

Often, 'H' would talk of certain cases. However; not often, but on occasion, she would play with words. Miracle words she called them, words to benefit the spirit and to heal. These words were ill defined. They were lost in a tunnel of systematic jargon shoved down the throats of willing and unwilling students. On the other hand, they found their mark. Yes, they had a continued effect on all those social helpers put out on the grazing fields of the market. The social workers and their attendant kinds have a cementing affect on society, which no doubt had been a glue to hold some of the parts together with little compromise. The glue is murky and not made of chemical substance, but of mental connections, a clear murky material which binds us to a blind subconscious stickiness we are incapable of releasing.

Once she told a tale of two people, a husband and wife who enjoyed performing the sex act in front of close friends. They exhibited themselves like any popular television game show and they would invite buddies over to party while it kept going on. The couple was strange in most every way, and yet there was an odd attraction to their parlor game. Everyone watched them from different angles, and all attendees cheered them on as they reacted to the playact wishes of the audience. The show went on for years until the husband had private sex with one of the onlookers, one of the fixed viewers. The wife performer, upon learning of the betrayal, turned on the longtime viewer. She shoved her out of a ten-story window, delivering her to undignified death.

Her comment on this was simple, 'She could only act the part of the performance, beyond the act or outside of it as it was associated with reality. So, there was nothing, and death was only a logical part of it'.

'H' considered her work successful because she could explain to the husband and wife where they were, where their bounds extended. After the bounds of the couple's life together was cracked, the choices were few, she said. Therefore, the death of the woman was accepted as accidental, a product of broken social norms. In the trial, 'H' supported this theory and the judge ruled for acquittal. Naturally, the judge was affected by the performance activities, but in the context and years involved with adults attending, he had no choice but to rule for acquittal.

The death of the woman viewer was accepted through counseling by the attending performance couple. Everyone reacted to the accident calmly and with a stoic mind-set associated with five hours of extreme brain surgery; or where the surgeon has a vodka martini and the patient dies of complications.

Her understanding of the couple's sex acts should have been my first major warning about 'H' and the attendant, cold-heartedness clouding her soul. Nevertheless, I was the blinded painted bird of emotion. Since that time, I have learned that the other side of great passion in women is coldness or dispassion, which can turn on you. And, it will turn on you. It is the mind which believes that it can't. It goes deeply beyond thinking; one cannot think of a concept of dispassion clearly, it is not remotely logical.

Men believe they are in full control. It is the logic of the ego, yet they are always subservient to the rule of women. They are always an illusion of control, never the substance.

The odds of winning the game with a woman such as 'H' were illusionary. My odds were one in a million; other women lesser odds maybe, depending upon age and experience. Still, today, I'd put all my money on the female of the species.

Once one is drawn into intimacy, one is lost. Once lost, the passion becomes something real in itself. Flesh has purpose beyond itself, a fine connected realm of its own design. Women are the ringmasters of the flesh, and men who have any doubt in this are compromised fools. There is purpose in all this and the core of our beings has the answers, but we are never truly allowed to attend the show, we are always viewers. We march through eons of time mask upon mask, deeper and deeper while we continue on with perverse maturation. No one can truly know the driver but the instinct itself is infinitely more controlled by women, than it is by men. Even the most sensitive feminine man lacks the connection to this area of the emotional-chemical system.

'H' could capture a man, as would the baiting ritual of the best fly fisherman trapping a trout on his fine fly-line. With her, the seduction liturgy was always similar. Easily, I could watch her as an outsider or at least think that I was somewhere on the exterior. Her subtle skills were scalpel like; she was a performance queen and her heart lived it.

Perhaps that was the difference between 'H' and the others, and for moments, I believed I could separate from her, that I wasn't drawn into her tight web but I played the fool well. Her development as a seductress was almost mystical. It was a process of development, which overlapped itself through generations of her sort.

These investigations of mine attacked the concept of 'sort'.

She pierced it with vigor. 'H' ripped into my prejudice and left me no room to find a way out. I could only be as deep as she would allow me to be. Never was I allowed passage beyond her emotional tentacles.

Many of the questions to be discussed at this level are a physic de-willing of the male reader of this material and should be read as part of the transcript on record with my 'prosecutors'. All searching into this area produces a screen of indignity to the inquisitors who dare peek into the vales of truth, for these shrouds will never be raised to men.

Once an old man and woman who owned an Armenian restaurant, a place so earthy that the smells of sweet and garlic filled every pore, compacted every human sensitivity into mouthwatering dreams of tasting and tantalization and delights of pastry as flesh.

When 'H' moved around the room, other senses aroused in the old Armenian man were evoked by her. He was charmed by her sultry presence. She stepped rhythmically to the counter and began talking to the old man in English and French about the intricate quality of his baklava, about the fine precision folds and layers.

I watched as the old man was swayed off his feet by the movement of her mouth, her neck arch and breast placement. In fact, he was taken by her general positioning, and was absolutely dumb-struck. His wife could feel it and so could I. For a few seconds, the old man lost contact with the immediate world around him, everything my friend, including his wife. Somehow, his primitive source was switched on by 'H'. She uplifted him instantaneously right to the surface, as a large snake peers out to the side of a rock. He was grasped by her, taken in from his soul source, driven by surging near dead