In Their Own Likeness

By Mike Kennedy

A romantic comedy moving Heaven and Earth begins in Carmel, Indiana precious preppy city of spinning roundabouts and the meddling of gods. Just ahead of the financial crisis, the housing bubble pops first in Pebblebrook, where the gods have created man in their own likeness. As if going into another great depression was not enough, the gods still consider us their comedy channel. Hermes the Messenger is the narrator of a salacious Olympian tell-all. The women of Pebblebrook have put him in mind of the pampered girls of ancient Mycenae. There is something about being kept in luxury that forces a woman into bloom.

Cloud Shrouded Olympus is in an uproar. Tische, Giver of Luck, is streaking toward the house of Zeus Thundercloud to ask permission to live among the mortals yet again.

Zeus is resentful. He suspects that Lovely Tische has slept with Far Seeing Anthony on her last visit. Hera, Wife of Thundercloud, has left in a jealous rage to fetch The Owl-Eyed Athena and her bow.

Those who love the authentic feel of the Lombardo translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey will find this novel a kindred spirit.

It is eight days before Thanksgiving 2008. The financial crisis is roaring. The Too-Clever Bernie Madoff has not been stopped. Nine-Eleven remains an open wound. Perched high above the Hudson, at the edge of the continent, the vice-president of news, Anthony Ficocelli, determined to save his network, looks west. He broods in a dimly lit control room, many stories above the busy street that glitters noiselessly below with headlights. Soundproofing contains the voices of many people, some here in the control room, others from beyond the glass and still others from time zones so far away that it isn’t even today any longer. Here he feels his mind reach around the world. He, in his evening, watches one person in their morning, another in their afternoon, talking with both, and yet, they only hear Anthony. In this way, he is like the conscience of each.

Toni is a statue come alive, alabaster in cashmere, as graceful as a thought. The repeating video in the network control room shows a burning duplex absorbing the strong streams of water, which the firemen play upon it. Anthony watches her pick her way across the hoses and through the debris. Against this backdrop of chaos and danger moves Toni Monroe, as calm and gracious as the hostess of a cocktail party. She is shadowed by her news crew who jump like nervous hounds at the end of her tether.

Terry LeBlanc is a glib young sahib of the political donor class. He has been groomed. He is expected to make his mark, to help keep sharp the boundaries, the lines that the internet and the avalanche of cable channels now abrade like the sandstorms that wore down desert cartouches, ancient logos and the forgotten titles of the powerful.

His father, Doctor LeBlanc calls it “the divorce tax worked backward.” During the Great Recession, while others dig their heels in against the skid of the housing bust, he burns his crops in the field.

There exists a legion of ever-receding figures sent to mortals by the Fates. By means of a thousand coincidences and inspirations that go unrecognized, they steer you toward your destiny.

They enter streets marching from out of shadows, or condense within revolving doors to come spinning out. They appear rounding corners except the people around the corner never saw them. They merge with the crowd between fast blinks, or pass staring at you from out of autos that appeared the moment you looked away. They never reach a destination because they haven’t any. They are the wallpaper of daily life, and yet they are as necessary to you as the oxygen in the air that they can never breathe. They are the flats and props of the stage on which you strut and fret your giddy hour.

No heavy morals in this story, just a lot of fun amid the chaos down on Earth, as The Great Recession is getting started.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Kennedy
• Release date: Oct 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311735829

Mike Kennedy

A note to Kennedy's readers: "Like many of you, in former times I thought of myself as not merely awake, but vibrantly awake. I was wrong. Beginning in 2019 and connecting the dots as consciousness is wont to do, I began my Red-Pill experience. Recently, and to my amazement, I see that the writing of three of my novels was channeled experience. 'Mali' turns out to be a story of the Deep State. It was always, from the start, a story of the illusion of free will. 'Taggart' turns out to be a story of Trans-Humanism. And 'All Our Yesterdays' turns out to have been an unconscious metaphor of the inner sanctum of the Cabal and its malign design upon mankind. I have long known that my stories find me (and not the other way around). Two attempts at designing a story have both resulted in ten-thousand-word dead ends. I quote from Aeschylus (his work 'Agamemnon'): 'Pain, which cannot forget, even in our sleep, falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our despair, and against our will, comes wisdom by the awful grace of God.' And we remember that 'grace' is an unmerited consolation. Finally, I see that my 'message to the publishing world' (final paragraph below) recognized the sad fact that agents & editors have betrayed their intrinsic debt to western civilization and consciously work in thrall to the dark side. One should keep in mind that the root word for 'inspiration' is 'spirit' and so must ever remain experience beyond the five senses. I have always written about those things that you know, but do not know you know."On a lighter note: "It is not too late to fall in love with language. You've just needed characters you wish you knew. I wish there were drawings, pictures, and maps in novels and short stories. Don't you? In the novel 'Mali,' a picture begins every chapter. So also, in these two anthologies. All in support of the magical movie in your mind. Go ahead and venture, 'It's showtime!'"Indianapolis author Mike Kennedy described by Trident Media Group, saying: "Kennedy has a way with words. Readers attracted to Hemingway and Mailer will love Season of Many Thirsts [A novel brought to E-Books under the original title: REPORT FROM MALI]." Publisher Alfred A. Knopf says of the manuscript: "This is a potentially important and significant novel on many levels, including formally." Little, Brown says of the novel: "Our admiration for its ambition and the energy and high-octane force it applies toward these engrossing geopolitical events. Chance and his team are memorable characters." Random House says: "Kennedy captures the strange, and intriguing world of Mali." Playwright Arthur Miller said of Kennedy: "Marilyn and I used to think there was something funny about Mike, and then we realized that he was simply hilarious."Kennedy's message to the publishing world, "I have read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness from time to time across fifty years. During this, my most recent reading, it occurs to me that I am Kurtz and that all of you are Marlow. Kurtz lay dying in the pilot house of the river steamer. Marlow, the company agent, has found him and returns with him. Kurtz has spent years in the jungle pulling out ivory and sending it downstream. Finally, Kurtz agrees to return down river to civilization because he realizes that he has something to say, something with a value beyond his ton of treasure. Kurtz realizes that he has achieved a synthesis from out of his brutish experience. Kurtz imagines being met by representatives at each one of the string of railway stations during his return to civilization. He tells Marlow, 'You show them you have in you something that is really profitable, and then there will be no limits to the recognition of your ability.' And then, sounding as though he steps into our own millennium, Kurtz adds, 'Of course you must take care of the motives—right motives—always.' Now I see that Kurtz is Conrad. Kurtz is not unique. He is every writer. It is only Marlow, the agent, who is unique, unique in his fidelity, not just to the job, nor only to the company, but to the civilization that sent him."Listen to the video essays of WrongWayCorrigan on Rumble. https://rumble.com/c/WrongWayCorriganCJ

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Other Fiction By This Author

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Report From Mali

Lady of the Yellowstone

Bare Branches

Leda and the Swan and Other Stories

The Prince of Staten Island and Other Stories

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Chapter One

CLOUD SHROUDED OLYMPUS

"Slutty Nymph!"

Strong-Armed Hera storms down from Olympus seeking Zeus’ daughter, The Owl-Eyed Athena. Something must be done about this.

Now!

Zeus Thundercloud had, moments before, braced for trouble when he realized that Tische, Bestower of Favors, was streaking toward the house of the God of Lightning. His wife’s jealousy has the Aegean Sea beneath them roiling with ten-foot waves.

Zeus knows that Tische is a step up from Aphrodite, Goddess of Love. Yet, Tische can never be violated unless she gives in. This is because it is she who controls all chance.

It is well known both on Olympus, as well as down in the world below, that to be successful in love, one must be lucky. It is not enough to be beautiful, like his son Apollo Strongbow, nor all powerful like the Thrower of Lightning himself, nor shrewd like the man Odysseus, the Sacker of Cities, now reclining next to the river Styx in Hades these thirty centuries past.

That one was a mortal that Zeus never forgets. Odysseus, Master of Wiles! Now there was a man who should have been a god. No, no perhaps not, Zeus often reconsiders. He would have my job eventually. Better to leave him with Pluto for safekeeping.

Zeus feels the pull of jealousy. He foresees the errand that Tische now wishes to run. Once again, it is about that mortal in New York City, the blasphemer who works the miracle of television that seeks to make all men all seeing and all knowing.

Zeus The Orderer reflects that they will have as much luck with the miracle of television as has poor Tantalus, still standing in the pool where Zeus left him ages ago. Even so, you cannot blame mortals for trying. They are a scrappy bunch. Not like the Greeks of old, but close enough. Even gods cannot have it all.

Helios The Sun has seen the Earth swing past nineteen times since first Tische had come to Zeus to ask about The Far-Seeing Anthony.

On that first occasion, Tische explained to Zeus that she wanted to help Anthony break into television. It would take one year, she explained to the Father of Thunder.

But Zeus did not buy into that for a second.

"You’re not fooling me, you imp! You’re going to take over the body of some poor mortal woman and seduce the man, like when Calypso seduced God-Like Odysseus after Troy fell. She made love to him for seven years! Yes, he was a survivor, that one!"

"But Father of Thunder, the Fates have told me that the destiny of all mankind will suffer if I do not step in to bring luck to Far Seeing Anthony."

"But a year! That is a lot of love-making!"

Tische pushes her luck, dropping all pretence with a girlish sing-song verse of truth, He prayeth best who loveth best.

"Yes, yes, I know. Catchy saying." Preoccupied as he was, the silver-tongued confession of her intention zoomed over the head of Thundercloud.

Nineteen years ago, Zeus had sent along Xarpho The Withering as chaperone. Then as now, Zeus wanted Tische all to himself. But during these nineteen years, Zeus has wondered if Tische had outwitted Xarpho. Her infinite supply of luck makes Tische a very slippery character.

This time Zeus The Contriver would use two chaperones.

A whirling translucence twinkles into view and the seductive Goddess of Luck appears in the splendor of all of her erotic charms. Zeus Thundercloud, the Advent is here. This is the long awaited awakening of America, the last best hope of Earth. I must go to them. The Fates wish it.

"Just who does the Goddess of Luck think is in charge around here? The Fates work for me, along with all the rest of you."

With chin down and lips pouting, the shapely body of Tische coyly pivots back and forth on her slender ankles, admitting, Yes, Father Zeus. I know.

The God of Lightning, always in command, speaks, "Now if I let you go, this time there will be no showing off, no fancy god-like displays. Man is never going anywhere if we keep revealing ourselves to him. He has to think he is on his own. You cannot give the truth to mortals. They must earn it for themselves.

"As the poet Aeschylus put it, ‘He who learns must suffer and even in our sleep, pain, which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until at last comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God’. And that means me!

"So use the usual indirect means." Now he thunders, Do not reveal yourself! And then, he cleverly remembers to add the crucial proviso, And do not assume a mortal shape.

Aeschylus lounges these past twenty-five centuries by the River Styx in the company of the heroes he wrote about—a fate that suits him.

Tische feels that the men of Pebblebrook are now making the same mistake as had the heroes of Homer’s Iliad. May I also remind Great Thundercloud of another line of Aeschylus, ‘Oh world of men, what is your happiness? A painted show.’

Zeus shrugs his indifference to Tische’s melodrama. Men have become keepers of cold altars. He watches, but not with the keenness of two or three thousand years ago.

The Father of Lightning is always jealous when it comes to Tische, and so he tries to spoil her fun this time, and by the same method as he tried to spoil it the last time. He will try to fix things so that she can almost have the man, but never quite.

Zeus assumed that during the first trip down to New York City, Tische had remained chaste—but since when has Tische the Giver of Chances ever refrained from taking any pleasure once she has fastened her eyes upon it?

Once again, the Father of Storms thinks he is so clever. And take Xarpho, The Withering with you. He will balance you because no man’s luck can be all good, or else he would be a god and sitting here with us. He is down there now. Pick him up on your way.

Tische recoils. She knows from experience. No! Take that old bag of rags! He will be spying on me, every moment. I will never have any peace to do my work.

Warlike Zeus thunders. Take it or leave it!

She pleads, Then I must take along Floating Sappho and her 7-stringed lyre to give me the gift of sleep since I cannot have the gift of love.

Zeus looks over his shoulder. Yes, yes, take Sappho along if it will make you happy. You did that the last time, too, as I recall. Now, listen you sprite. You had better clear out fast unless you want a feathered shaft up your lovely rear-end.

"Owl-Eyed Athena?"

"The one and only, and she is headed here now. Hera fetched her when she heard you were coming."

"She gives you little peace, Father of Storms."

"Yes, but when she does, it is very good."

"Better than me?"

"Don’t play coy with me, you imp! I will have you again before all is said and done. I will have my brother, the Earth-Shaker Poseidon, raise his son Procrustes from Hades, and bring him to Olympus. He will build his famous Procrustean Bed and we will spread-eagle you on it and then I will take you."

"Tie me down as you will, Giver of Storms. No god or man ever had love without luck."

"Away with you, imp! I hear their chariots! And take Hermes with you! Tell that fly-by-night that I want a full report."

I was way ahead of them.

Tische darted along a vanishing gauzy trace, missing by an instant the fearful wife of Zeus and his mighty daughter, The Warlike Athena. Tische had fooled the Father of Storms that first time, too.

Tische knows that Floating Sappho, her robes a-glow in pink light, will distract Xarpho and that he would sleep under the spell of her 7-stringed lyre. Tische believes that this is when she will again take The Far Seeing Anthony to her bed. Thus, it happened the last time, night after night for one year, to the day.

Good luck cannot last forever around Xarpho. It happened during that year—and after much trickery by Tische—that Xarpho, Bringer of Frost, caught her in the act.

One of Sappho’s seven strings had broken, waking Xarpho.

He had threatened to complain to Father Zeus. This had forced Tische into a bargain with Xarpho. She could have the man, but for one year only. And then afterward, never again. No matter how much she wanted him.

But this time Tische, giver of luck, still holds out hope for the powers of the Strumming Sappho’s 7-strings. Xarpho will be hard to fool this second time around. He will be alert to quick thinking. Be that as it may, Tische has work to do down there. The Far-Seeing Anthony needs her, and his plans are very complicated.

Calypso once called us all celestial lay-abouts and said that we were the most jealous bastards in the Universe. I was too ashamed to report her, knowing that she was right.

I generally stay out of the office as much as possible. I prefer the company of mortals to the company of gods, although there are a few expatriates like myself that I get along with very well, like Calypso and Thetis. The Fates and Tische are always down there. Chief among The Fates is The Withering, whose main job it is to balance out Tische. Sort of like Kim Kardashian teamed up with Jack Nicholson.

So, mainly I carry messages for those gods that think they are too important to do it for themselves. Sometimes, I deliver it in person, assuming a mortal shape or maybe temporarily taking over a mortal. Other times, I simply put whatever idea that whatever god thought was so important into the mind of the intended mortal. This is what mortals call a light bulb going off over their head. Mortals tend to like ideas that they think are their own. This is not particularly demanding work and nothing you need a college degree for—and like I say, it keeps me off Olympus.

I used to help out Pluto in taking souls down to Hades, but as a favor to me, Zeus took me off that job. I had rescued one of the old man’s floozies from Hera and so I cashed in the favor with pops while it was still warm.

The gods will jump just about any piece of tail they can get their celestial loins against and the goddesses are only somewhat less randy. This is neither moral nor immoral. I mean, who am I to point my finger?

It is mortals who are the inventors of morality and the breakers of it. Morality is rather like the net in tennis or like the bounds in golf or as in any of the other games that mortals play.

In this, the thirtieth century marked since the fall of Troy, mortals beam their spirits across the planet and zip from location to location to location in horseless chariots and fixed wing birds. A few even leave their world to look down on Olympus itself!

Like Zeus says, they are a scrappy bunch. This is big screen entertainment, and as far as twisty plots go, you could not write this stuff.

And now, with a muse of fire and invention, I tell the story of a man and a woman drawn to each other for the ancient reasons, seeking a truth made pure by heat.  Like all mortals, they are obsessed with ephemera and illusion.  He is fleeing his, while she is chasing hers—two sides of the same coin tossed in the air by the cloud-shrouded referee.

Chapter Two

PEBBLEBROOK

Doctor Rathbone’s eyes snapped open. He rolled on his side to look at the alarm clock and noted with satisfaction that the alarm would not ring for another two minutes. It was 4:43 a.m., Wednesday morning, an hour before Rosy-Fingered Dawn will tincture the eastern edge of sky.

He reached over to flick on what he called his night light. The room was instantly suffused in the gray half-light coming from the picture of a skull. It was an X-ray. It was Doctor Rathbone’s own skull emanating from an X-ray light attractively framed in walnut to match the bedroom suite. Mrs. Rathbone hated the light, saying that it was gruesome and should be brought out only on Halloween, if even then.

Doctor Rathbone would leave it on, even after he had left for work. He was proud of it. After all, he would say, Who else could have such a night light?

Who else would want one? she would sigh.

As he rises, he sees that his wife is uncovered. Her rounded and perfect backside burns its image into his retinas like the dazzle of a camera flash. His reaction to her is as ready as his urge to breathe. He knows that he must get through the day to reach the next bedtime and it is far away.

He will leave her that way. If she is cold, he thinks, she may wake up, but he knows that he cannot wake her; their arrangement is too perfect to spoil.

It was still warm enough in this week before Thanksgiving for Doctor Rathbone to walk in his bathrobe to the mailbox for the paper. As he stepped down from a side door to the driveway, he searched for lights throughout the neighborhood and smirked when he was sure that all was dark. Halfway down the short driveway he frowned as he saw a light click on in the upstairs of a house down the street.

The driveways in Pebblebrook are short. The huge houses crowd the street. Not too many years before, men with money would site the biggest house they could afford on as much land as was available. They avoided the shock of contact.

But that has changed. The new money has made men tribal once again.

Doctor Rathbone reached up to pull down the mailbox lid. It was conveniently planted head high. He liked the idea of picturing the mailman straining to reach up through his truck window or, better yet, having to get out.

Doctor Rathbone paused at the mailbox to read the headlines. He held the paper up to catch the porch light.

Before the encroaching cold closed in upon him and hurried him indoors, he noticed a dark shape in the middle of the front yard across the street. He would look again as he drove out to work.

As he began his walk back up the drive, he noted that it was time to call the Christmas decorating service to put up the lights and displays. Some years his was the first and largest display. He liked that part of Christmas and the big check, the optional check, he was able to write.

Much of what went on in Pebblebrook Estates was optional, as he would tend to say. And yet, he felt, it was those optional things, which a man could afford to do, that spoke his story to the world. None of these houses needed to be so big, he knew. Even though he lived comfortably as a child, his father’s house would have fit inside any of the one’s on his street.

These houses were public buildings, like the Federal Building 20 miles away in downtown Capitol City or like the municipal building here in Homeplace. These had been built to make a point.

The nonworking mothers in the neighborhood were used in this display. Although Doctor Rathbone held in quiet contempt anyone who did not have a job, he valued the arrangement.

Mrs. Rathbone picked up the children from school each day in the van packed with equipment bags and book bags and ferried them from lesson to lesson, from practice to recital, to the Friday night game. All the while, her supple movements telegraphed the outline of her pretty shape through the expensive fabrics he draped her in.

The kids had a part in this display as well. Their grades and achievements were the stuffing in all of his neighbor’s conversations.

Bragging rights are everything. Love in Pebblebrook, even self-love, is not unconditional.

He resolved that this Christmas his annual display would be very large, very public. He liked seeing what he felt was his reflection in the faces of others. He was a very public man.

Doctor Rathbone walked back up his driveway, unattended, like Ramses walking the empty plazas of Thebes. The future gleamed with visions.

The Withering has preceded the Giver of Luck down to Homeplace. Here, he is drawn to the only movement and he now pulls Doctor Rathbone back from the future and into the emptiness of the moment. Doctor Rathbone has been his special project for several months. Xarpho does a lot of advance work versus Tische who always puts things off to the last minute. But what else is luck for?

The stillness of these moments slows the steps of Doctor Rathbone. Overtaken by the current of a waking dream, the unnatural quiet begins to shriek at him.

The insects of summer had weeks before been bitten by the first hard frost and so now they are silent. Their dry, cold husks lay concealed, lifeless, at the bases of grasses across the lawn. There are no stones on his smooth and uncracked concrete driveway for his slippers to slide across or to kick, skipping, back toward his great house. The silks of his bathrobe silently conformed to his strides.

Doctor Rathbone cries out with a loud stupid, to surprise himself with a noise that seems pointless. With this, he wakens. He shivers and quickens his steps, pushing back stillborn anxieties. He pushes open the side door and feels relief as the babble from CNN rushes through the doorway like a cheerful nurse who brings an end to a long night.

As Doctor Rathbone shaved, he heard the television downstairs in the kitchen. It was not loud, but it could be heard, like a conversation that you were not a part of. It warned that the bad economic news in this last quarter of 2008 was getting worse.

Across America, the achievements of a great people stood revealed as a cheap medicine show. Loose, unmortared walls toppled by their own weight. Cloud-built visions pulled apart. Idiots explained with tales full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Which do you blame, the dream, or the sleepwalker?

Dr. Rathbone wished that his wife would wake up.

After seeing her husband upstairs for his early bedtime, she would return downstairs for the rest of her evening and so now, she slept. It was the perfect arrangement.

Rathbone Radiology had four locations. Today, they were expecting him at the Southside office, but he would show up, unexpectedly, at one of the others. He had not caught them off-guard for several months. He smiled as he wondered how many he would find coming in late. If he parked next door, they would not see his car and that would deepen the surprise that he would see in their faces. Doctor Rathbone paid close attention to faces.

He resolved to start at the Eastside office. He would sit in the lobby, pretending to read the paper. They always seemed most flustered if he caught them still in their coats.

He always made his best plans while shaving.

While all of these things of great moment were happening inside the mind of Doctor Rathbone, the sun warmed the eastern sky while leaving dark that to the west. As yet, it cast no shadows.

There was still only the promise of a luminous day as the earth rolled on its axis and sped about the sun. Theirs was a galaxy flung outward, apart from the others. It was on a lonely course into the deepest of the dark and cold. Within it, was a modest system with a durable little star, making its own light and heat.

He paused at the key rack on the garage wall to ponder his choice of car. He grabbed the Lexus keys because his wife was complaining that the new car sticker needed to come off the window. He enjoyed watching people see it. She thought that she attracted enough attention as it was.

He turned the key, thrilling to the rumble, wondering what it sounded like driving past. As he backed down the driveway, an unfamiliar shape moved into the rear view mirror, interrupting his reveries. He stopped the car abruptly. It was a Jeep. That was bad enough, he thought, but it was parked in the middle of the front yard across the street.

"In the yard, in the yard" was all that he could say as he got out and walked into the street. He stood there motionless except for his eyes, which panned back and forth across the great, blank, brick elevation of the house. His mind swirled in disgust as he stared at the bare windows, stripped of their draperies, always shimmering with a Babel of reflections, and at the tall grass standing like a failed crop from last summer, and at the insult of the Jeep, forty feet past the driveway, in the middle of the yard, and pointed right at him.

The jeep was parked there by Terry LeBlanc, ninety minutes before Doctor Rathbone woke up. Terry had driven home along the back way, swerving through the neighborhoods. He had staggered out of the Jeep to confront the spinning turf of his own front yard and to aim his shoulders resolutely at the old and familiar front door, now a moving target.

Terry’s summer and fall had been spent abandoning, one by one, the observances of the world. Those observances were his part of an unspoken bargain now broken. He stayed alone in the big house, listening to the sounds from a storm that would not come.

His two sisters were in college, out of state. His father had insisted they go straight through school with no summers off. He said that there was no longer anything for them here. Everyone was so preoccupied with themselves that they never noticed the urgency with which he spoke and never suspected that some plan unfolded. He had been in a hurry to get them out, and as far away as possible.

Delores LeBlanc moved out soon after the last one left home.

Terry had been the first to graduate the previous May and came back to his boyhood home, now empty, save for the contents of the children’s bedrooms, and a single great couch downstairs, the size of monuments.

It had been his mother’s inspiration that the commission to build this couch included the shrewd specific that it be constructed in the living room as the house was building. It was made larger than the front door so that it could never leave. The great couch would yield to nothing. It could not be moved, only destroyed. So much for a young wife’s ideas of permanence.

Apart from this ton of couch, Delores LeBlanc had been the single great adornment around which the vast house had been built. Its tons of brick were meant to hold her. Yet, it was not a maze. There were several ways out and they all were plain. Finally, she took one of them, as her husband had assumed she would when the last child left for college.

The heartbreak of a labyrinth is that you forget you are inside. All the while, you steadily move forward. Until, at the end, your heart breaks when you discover that you have gone no farther than back to your beginnings.

A cruel irony separates a labyrinth from a maze. A maze will seem hard, but it is kinder. The maze is a branching puzzle. It is a tour. It has an honest ending. Unlike a labyrinth, a person can lose the way, but a way once lost is nearly always quickly found.

The tragedy of the labyrinth is that it ends next to where it began, accomplishing nothing. In between the entrance and the exit—when you are inside—it gives the illusion of unbroken forward progress. You never know that you have made the decisive turn and it is at that point that you are betrayed. The great disappointment of going no farther than where you started tells you that the destiny meant for you was lost.

Delores’ husband, also a doctor, was determined that she would leave their 23 year marriage with little more than she had begun it with. It was to this end that he halted the mortgage payments on the big house, and on the six rental houses that they owned.

The bank, patient with a purpose, allowed interest and late fees to consume all of the equity before they had moved to foreclose. It was, as he would put it, the divorce tax worked backward. Doctor LeBlanc was burning his own crops in the field.

Terry’s mother had a bachelor’s degree in nursing. It had lain nearly unused since college. Now she had been forced, finally, to get a job in a hospital in Capitol City. There she realized, in growing alarm, that she had always been disgusted with bodily fluids, despite the truth that all of the beautiful people are mostly water.

The sheriff’s sale sign had been taped to the front door until Terry ripped it off and had vigorously torn the cardboard into the smallest pieces that he could manage, so strong was the embarrassment. Terry took each successive realtor’s sign out of the front yard at night and threw it into the dumpster behind his gym. These were like public notices that everything had been a lie.

It had been last Saturday about noon that Terry had been awakened by voices as he slept one off on the single couch in the otherwise nearly bare living room. He had raised himself up to peer over the back of the couch to see Doctor and Mrs. Rathbone shading their eyes and pressing the glass to see through the bare windows.

Scowling, he cursed the Doctor before slipping back into boozy sleep. I’ll catch that creep out on the ice someday.

Terry had learned to nurse a grudge during his varsity hockey career in college. On the ice, he could make the world yield. He had been the enforcer, the player that took the pressure off his team’s two star players.

This morning Terry’s jeep was parked in the front yard, pointing defiantly in the direction of the imperious Doctor Rathbone. From his perfect home, in the midst of his perfect life, he had contemptuously watched the disintegration of Terry’s world.

Doctor Rathbone considered going up to the house to have it out, but he thought better of confronting the tough looking kid. Besides, he needed to get to work ahead of his employees. He loved savoring their shocked expressions to the accompaniment of stuttering excuses. He drove off and into a destiny beyond any capacity of prediction.

Chapter Three

CAPITOL CITY

There exists a legion of ever-receding figures. By means of a thousand influences and distractions that go unrecognized, they steer you toward your destiny.

The Fates send them. They enter streets, marching from out of shadows, or condense within revolving doors to come spinning out. They appear rounding corners, except the people around the corner never saw them. They merge with the crowd between fast blinks, or pass staring at you from out of autos that appeared the moment you looked away. They never reach a destination because they haven’t any.

They are the background and the wallpaper of daily life, and yet they are as necessary to you as the oxygen in the air that they can never breathe.

They are to the sidewalks’ tramping, dodging and uproar the same thing that movie sets are to Hollywood. They stand like the fronts of buildings, propped and braced behind with lumber.

They are the flats and props of stages on which you strut and fret your giddy hour.

Miles to the south, near the center of the city about which Homeplace hovered like a distant moon, a small boy sat in a darkened closet with a book of matches. The school bus had already picked up his older sisters. He knew they were always happy to be leaving. He longed to leave too, in the other school bus, which always drove past the duplex a few minutes later.

He had heard the rpm of its whooshing engine that morning. He had run to the window to fling aside the gauzy curtains to see it zoom past.

That fall he had asked numerous times and each time his mother wearily replied. Yes, that one would be his school bus next year, the second one, the one with the whooshing engine.

His mother would sleep until lunchtime. He had not seen his father for a few days. He was always glad to see him go, no matter how it was that he left. He always began to worry the following day about what would happen when his father returned.

Four-year-old Norman Dorfman would remember much of his preschool years, and, even in his old age, the memory of his burning house, of trying to rouse his sleeping mother, of her shrieks, of the busy fireman, of the neighbor lady who held him, would send a jolt through him.

Sitting cozy amid the litter of the dark closet, Norman’s young eyes were dazzled by a spontaneous titillation of the optic nerve, a spritely whirligig of luminous motion, some retinal randomness of imagined flashes. It left him groping. He struck a match to see, but, distracted, he held it too long, and, dropping it, he burned his house down.

Time would kaleidoscope for the rest of