Chess and Chaos

By William Hawkes

Shocked into psychic awakening, a university gardener enters a realm of subtle forces and finds himself enmeshed in a murder cover-up and a secret surveillance project on campus, while bearing the pressures of a relationship with a femme phenom who inspires and devastates him at every turn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Hawkes
• Release date: Apr 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781450713191

William Hawkes

William J. Hawkes worked in Germany for several years as a management consultant. His experience gives him particular insight into the world of international business, as well as a deeper understanding of post-unification German culture. He currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and two cats, and enjoys listening to harpsichord music and reading and translating German poetry.

Book preview

Chess and Chaos

One

Mother of a sunset. Bronze scratch to sky, blue heron over lake, trout rising for a fallen dragonfly, and tall horsehair reeds ranging the shore, slanting in wind. With two shacks, a touch of sociality versus isolated quietism, hidden in willow and ash. Or the lake’s a river spreading to open sea—I turn away from my truck bumper that bears this scene, engraved by abrasions and scrapes through tight spaces, and admit I’m avoiding my task. Seeking solace in imagined beauty. Refusing to face what’s what, and how.

No, I don’t know how.

Doctor Lux once shrugged and said Everything just happens.

I frown and fight off the sorrow that comes with thoughts of Lux, and stand ground against the pressure behind my brow and the sun that glares and does not help. Am tempted to flat-out quit.

Decide single-mindedly and the energy will be provided.

And glance again at the driver in the red Bonneville. Narrowing my eyes. August, San Diego, dog day a packed heat, this vision making me remind myself once more: intensity isn’t insanity.

Red Bonneville man has a roiling blue aura, and I feel the evil.

He’s waiting in a line of cars at the parking structure entrance, behind three others, until a blond student comes along, pony tail swinging, and the girl front of the line offers her a ride so she can have the parking space. She gets in, they go, and now he’s behind two others and his aura kicks up again.

Why notice only his light?            

This vision, its exigencies, the pressure, excruciatingly new.

A closer look.

I grab a plastic bag and step away from my university work truck to a trash can, dark archway near the car. Pull out full bag, tying a knot, slitting my eyes against rising pressure, glancing in concentrated shots until it shifts with something like an aperture click.

Samskara, thought form, holographic drama. A mental tableau of where he’s been, or going.

Like a rash in his aura, hovering in blue light, details blurred, sharp, blurred. My eyes tear up, my breath hitches, I get the empty bag into the can whispering what the hell should I do, looking once more to fathom the samskara, the holographic drama roiling in his aura.

Another student walks toward the structure, gesturing no to the next waiting car.

Lux: If I allow my neighbor to behave barbarously, I throw myself away.

Open my cell phone, then shut it, looking across the street to a pay phone by a frat house. When the campus police dispatcher answers, I watch a student get into the waiting car.

I don’t want to say my name.

Go ahead, she says.

Damn. Security cams. I scan around, none.

Listen, this’ll sound crazy, but I think a guy’s trying to get a student into his car at parking structure five. To kidnap the student.

Description? she says, taking it seriously because a student died last week. Strangled.

Old red Bonneville at the main entrance. Caucasian male, late twenties, dark buzz cut.

We’ll send a patrol.

You know this is urgent, right?

We’ll send a patrol.

Okay, good, thank you.

A silver behemoth SUV pulls in close behind the Bonneville. I start back across, thinking I can move my truck to block the car until the cops show, though I don’t want to be noticed. My head pounds behind my eyes and the image of the samskara burns with flickering liquidity, oliograph on fire, sheen of oil in rain—am I helping catch a killer? Am I deluded?

Exalt the illusion, and it’s delusion.

But Lux also said Power is simply the ability to act.

I frown again, heavy with sorrow, and almost stagger when one thought of Cee comes sliding in on the wake of the Lux grief. Throw the trash bag in truck bed and it’s seamless: arrival of one plainclothes cop, one bike cop, and a patrol unit surging from the shadows of a parking lane to shudder in front of the Bonneville. All the officers wear tight sunglasses, glowing upper edges, and within a minute the guy’s cuffed and a tow truck’s shown up. No students now, and the SUV stays still behind tinted windows. Bike cop and plainclothes move away without turning to me.

Two

Many Dents, my work truck, proceeds with caution on the esplanade, through clusters of students who don’t mind sharing the road, though faculty throw flak, a few professors frowning just short of a scowl. Break time, I park in the articulated shade of a monkey puzzle tree and get to the bench I’ve planted my ass in upwards of twenty years now. To sit, to sort things out. Bell tower tolling one.

Hummingbirds dart around Spanish velvet, stealing spider webs for their nests, and a girl yelps: a blackbird swoops to pluck her hair for its nest. I settle, outwardly calm and inwardly flailing for balance after the aura episode. And two heartrending rejections in as many nights.

Lux and Cee.

Goddamn, I rub my eyes with my fingertips.

Behold the aura, a garden of horror and delight! Bob Hop, sitting, grinning.

I stare. He knows? He pulls something from a canvas carryall and puts it on his fried egg of a head, a golden pinwheel hat, breeze spinning.

Zany phase, he says, winking theatrically, this set designer.

Stare some more, unsure how to ask about auras. A frenzied Internet search yesterday, all day, burned me out for contradictions and inconsistencies. And an hour at the mirror brought nothing but a headache and a hint of yellow. Bob Hop knows about auras?

Before I can form a question, a ripple of turbulence has us looking about a hundred feet away at the Humanities building. Some yelling. Doors fly open. Knot of people pushes out like a human tumbleweed, seven students around a professor. Emily Wicks. Recognized from her recent stint of performance art, covered in peacock feathers and ululating gibberish at the Free Speech steps. She’s screaming now and ululating again and the students are trying to chill her.

More performance art? A crowd of cell phones gathers, calling and recording.

Glance at Bob Hop, his eyes glittering like obsidian, shiny pinwheel spinning.

Emily Wicks shoves one student, kicks at another.

Fucking conspiracy of mediocrity! Banshee shrieking.

She picks up a planter rock, skull size, a whirling heave at the Humanities wall maybe two feet from an office window—corner office, great view, several instructors argued over it until the Dean gave it to a blind Classicist—and bends to grab another and the police roll up, siren whooping, out into position.

Wicks cocks her arm, wild eyed, yowling—

Taser. Juiced barb. Crackling blue light into her breasty sweater.

Bob Hop mutters Shock value but I’m focused on Wicks.

Arching back, pulling out the electrified lines. Cocks the rock again, aiming for the cop fumbling his holstered sidearm. Students hooting from an echoing stairway, phones flashing, and that plainclothes cop pushing through behind Wicks to subdue her so smoothly it’s graceful. Take down and capture, longshoreman in cargo flow, cuffed and shoved face down across the back seat, in risk of custody death.

Background, the large silver SUV.

Three

"Get out of line and the world does that—Bob Hop thrusts up a fist—and that has teeth in it."

I nod, getting it, years of Lux stressing the necessity for living strategically.

The difference between a mystic and a schizophrenic is that the mystic is functionally split

These Lux quotes are coming on their own. I seldom took notes.

Bob Hop takes off the hat and looks stone steady into my eyes: Wanna talk about it?

He’s not quite a friend but more than an acquaintance, and I don’t have a confidante. Couldn’t even tell Cee three nights ago, before she—

Lux expelled me, I say, knowing Bob Hop’s aware of Lux, taking some classes years ago.

Staccato clicks, not caws, a raven in a tall eucalyptus. I go into it one more time. Thursday night, a temple of a home, the gathering of a dozen of us who wouldn’t let Lux retire, this spirit group cultivated for more than twenty years. Lux asked me at the close to have a word with him, the others scampering to the kitchen with itching ears, hush and held breath palpable. Then Lux, this tiny dynamo sage, sat beside me on the couch—

"He said ‘It might be better for you to follow your own lights,’ and then paused and added, ‘It would be best for us to part company.’" Raw sorrow now, upwelling, and I shut my eyes.

Do you know why? Bob Hop says.

I destroyed a painting, a work in progress, yesterday. Tore it and cracked the frame and kicked it into a corner. Lux on Thursday and Cee on Friday and Saturday night this pressured overwhelming vision. Do I know why? Open eyes, and Bob Hop’s looking with the same sharp gleam I had with the blue aura man. Examining my samskaras? Takes all my grit to stay put and keep calm. Like not jumping off a bitter cold balcony—

A Krishnamurti quote, I say, we argued over a Krishnamurti quote.

Bob Hop raises eyebrows and brays a long loud laugh and I resist the urge to bolt. Or clock him.

Good, he says, chuckling, use that anger, it generates a focus.

I look away and he runs commentary on a passing girl, Hey, look, an open heart—her shirt’s cut to reveal cleavage—must have a firm mattress, such nice posture…

He’s challenging me to stay on course with what matters, and flipping absurdities at me if I don’t. I check my watch, a few more minutes, a green scarab beetle bumping into a coral tree, and I return to it.

Krishnamurti said ‘the perception is the action’ and we interpreted that differently.

So you disagreed with Doctor Lux.

"He stressed the gap between vision and practice, and I understand that, but I was emphasizing the state where they’re unified, streamlined, instantaneous. Where perception is action."

Bob Hop says nothing. I stare at the ground. My rupture with Lux and the emergence of this vision, did Lux maneuver me into it? Shock value?

What else? Bob Hop says, staring hard again.

There’s more than the intellectual aspect. Previous Thursday, I’d spoken up and raised a question on freedom and Lux pointed out the paradox that our bondage is a real illusion. I mulled on it, and next few days reached out to two women in our group to discuss it, and that was the unforgivable offense. Lux, old bull elk, was preemptively pushing me off his turf. Which threatened to negate decades of his sage tutelage, his influence, his one lesson delivered in so many ways, We’re here to learn to love.

Then Cee rejected me the very next night? I look at Bob Hop, shake my head, and say nothing.

So he sighs, puts his hand on my shoulder and says he has to get back to the Drama workshop to construct a few props. Even though the students are pushing for minimalism and nudity on stage.

Four

Ending the day on hands and knees, gone to ground, I pull dead fronds off lilies in a shrub bed.

I must bear facing what is the case

Classes let out, students chatter, a marching band tuba from Music blats in passing—aliens’ll keep you as a souvenir, pal—and that bike cop glides around a corner and tucks behind a stairway. Leaning, waiting, stepping out to stop a skateboarder’s reckless racket, with the ticket ritual quick. Kid stomps off, carrying his board, already relaying into a cell fucking this and fucking that in the mouth of youth, and someone yells the cops should catch the killer instead of this bullshit, and I realize I’m pissed for not asking Bob Hop about auras. Decide to find him after work.

Black magic is manipulative, white magic is creative

I kneel back and pull off my pigskin gloves. Close eyes and wait upon further quotes to shed light on auras, though Lux never explicitly addressed them.

The quality of my existence is determined by the inclination of my will

Does that fit? That, I think, refers to a kind of vertical alignment between spirit and matter.

Another wave of sorrow, Lux and Cee, worse than my divorce or the loss of Timberline my Maine Coon, or my parents’ deaths so long ago. Lux is why I stayed in San Diego all these years at this menial job, to focus on his teachings, and Cee is the woman I could finally consciously practice that one lesson with, learning to love. Open eyes, near tears. Push myself to breathe.

Spirit must go through what consciousness has othered to itself

This feels fitting, apropos of auras, and I slowly breathe easier.

Bell tower chimes twice and I’m done. Many Dents, a sparrow pecks at its image in the side view and jets off with a peep. I toss bag in bed, perversely interpret that, and realize am also pissed at Cee. Then

pause to breathe more deeply, this basic mindful practice, this necessity.

Yoga folks say it all starts with the breathing.

Driving across campus towards Grounds, passing orange stanchions and barricades everywhere. For demolition and construction, for a trolley project and other ambitious expansions. At the Free Speech steps Herrick shouts, red hair waving, all about the agitating, but few students stand to listen. Fucking Herrick. Bob Hop once suggested we grab him, snip off his red length, then sell bumper stickers: ‘I cut Herrick’s hair.’ Another bike cop hangs back in an alcove, sunglasses glowing.

Air of fear is strong here, for the girl strangled last week. Info posters, reward, memorial shrine of photos and flowers, stuffed bears, dead candles, the usual accoutrements. Bonneville man, no way to check on him. Maybe the campus weekly.

Coast the last downhill stretch and rev up the driveway to Grounds, a cavernous Quonset hut, and park in a far corner, rattling mourning doves in the metal rafters. Uproar in the office, hollering laughter, and am in no rush join that noise. I watch an Indian student helper, Prathap, sort tools on big pegs. After awhile I get out and step over.

Poptart, buddy, whaddya doin’?

Square brown face, burnt biscuit, raisin eyes.

Arranging these tools alphabetically.

I smile and point to a shovel, What’s that?

That is a hoe.

Point to a hoe, And this?

A weed whacker.

Smile again and pat his shoulder, Be sure to separate the wood and fiberglass handles, Poptart.

Reluctant to deal with the hoohah in there, but I have to fill my time sheet. Office door shoots open and Volker pushes past, craggy dinosaur head down, pen scribbling in notebook, and inside they’re shouting Rita, do it again! A few seconds to get it. Ed, the boss, the desk accessory, has his monitor turned to show a looping replay of the Wicks Tasing, and Rita’s acting it out. Throws the rock, shrieks, gets blasted, rips the barbs, the room hooting like the stairway students.

Dodge, the actual scuffed rock at his elbow, finishes marking a sign, ‘The Philosopher’s Stone.’

Tino and Eppy, rollicking in Tagalog, pause as Tino holds up our chess board, Tomorrow?

Shake my head, Sorry, no can do, and Tino shrugs and goes Tagalog again.

Fill in my time, nod to Ed, and walk outside to a splintered picnic table, wondering how that Wicks tape got to our shop. And how Bob Hop knew to mention auras. And about that Lux gem, Spirit must go through what consciousness has othered to itself.

I amble ten seconds before they stampede.

Five

Wisteria cascades over redwood beams, launching propagating seeds at random. Volker’s put spiny agave around an irrigation box, timing its growth to his retirement to vex his replacement. A blond girl with big sunglasses, in pink sweats, passes a blond girl in pink sweats, with big sunglasses. We’re already cloning, and I’m walking slowly, recalling different theories about auras I went through yesterday. None of them mentioned pressure.

All right, I got a C! a girl says to a girl. Fucking conspiracy of mediocrity. And…Cee. I bristle and quicken to sidestep a looming mood—

A mood is an inability to accept what is

—and then slow down, then stop beside a wide burbling fountain, another Lux echo coming.

Stare at the sun washing its gold in the water, the shining circles—

No, what you do is choose a girl in the group and totally ignore her, then by the end of the night she’s begging to go home with you! a guy says to a guy, discussing predatory tactics.

If I perceived things as they really are, I’d be so humbled I wouldn’t dare to become attached

Does that relate to auras? I frown, moving on, up against attachment. A dig detour sends me through a cool courtyard of elephant ear and plantain and it takes half a minute to register what I passed back there, getting installed: a fake palm tree cell site, an emergency phone, and a pole security cam. In response to the girl’s death last week? Shake my head, pressure tamping down.

Try delivery dock first, around back, open doors leading to Bob Hop’s Drama workshop. It’s dark and redolent of sawdust, fairly ship shape, and two objects draw attention. A black vinyl X with straps—to hold a person?—and a black vinyl chest or set of drawers, cruciform. I stare at the chest, its iron rings, estimating its stability.

Do you like that? Fluted voice, nearly savory as Cee’s.

I turn and, because I’m raw, because this only happened with Cee, I jolt back with visceral shock in the face of sheer beauty. A beauty appraising me.

Same time, the detached observer, trained for years with Lux—a relentless intuitive witness of his every move—calmly watches this shock, recognizing it as a reminder of what yoga folks call a clue to our original nature. Empty awareness. Constant astonishment.

Compose myself enough to say yes, I like that, only glancing at her. Adorned with new age flair in floral skirt and saffron scarf over a tight green thing the dancers wear. Skin the perfect cocoa tone we’ll all someday blend into. Bangles and earrings a light tinkly music as she sweeps back her black beaded hair. Ancient and futuristic, an uncommon femininity on campus where girls are lost between innocence and risk, faculty women seem to daydream of chewing dried testicles, and staff ladies go brick-faced from careers of subservience. Am still only glancing.

Until her presence commands mine and I settle into open steadiness.

He calls it ‘Cross Dresser’, she says, smiling, pointing to the chest of drawers.

I smile. And the inner witness watches desire rise. Her lips look succulent—my mind seizes on this overblown conceit—and ripe, plump as plums, and instantly I’m sifting memories of Cee’s mouth. A downtown fire escape where she squatted in a tight knit from Italy and I stroked her loose tendrils and whispered to tease her—Salacious fellatio—and then had to shut up, my breathing wracked. A Sunday done in blue and white with bay sailboats under scudding clouds, lying on her heather shawl in a graveyard by a pine whose roots pushed a tombstone askew. She mewled, going down, and I moaned. And a plaza’s chiaroscuro corridor after a charming movie, the security cam perhaps catching our illicit shadows. After a long moment I lift my eyes from this woman’s lips and know a thing. Cee did all that to keep me out of her bed.

Six

Clove?

She nods, obviously accustomed to surprise at her name.

I’m Scrimshaw, Scrims. I wait a beat, then add Is Bob here? Bob Hop?

Clove doesn’t answer, passing close to shut the door behind me, possibly playing up the spice of her name with other scents, carob, chai, earthy and ethereal. Then she says Let’s try something, again, fluted voice, heaven on ears, taking my hand and gliding to a mirror by a costume rack. Feather boas and plumes, bullet bandoleers, that golden pinwheel hat. Her hand’s warm and, alacrity of an ice cube cracking, I realize I’m not tied to Cee, she rejected me—

Let’s look, she says, stepping behind me as we face the mirror.

Lux, the thickness of existence. A tension between psychic density and the embodiment of spiritual understanding. Qualitatively heavier than thin ideation, the froth of the university atmosphere, and I’ve explored its dynamic in depth. It takes on weight here, now, Clove’s hands on my shoulders plus the avoirdupois of desire with lust’s big thumb on the scale—

Scrims, just relax and look. Trust the process.

Obedient trust. Followed that for years with Lux. Who influenced me so well I could practice his one lesson of learning to love, with Cee. Suddenly, no warning, the pressure’s on.

It’s simply the case that pressure mounts as our spiritual understanding increases, and by comparison makes climbing Mount Everest seem as easy as breathing in your sleep

Clove leans against me, a la Balinese dance teachers holding students near, breasts rising and falling with rhythm, deep breathing, and a wave of grief almost overtakes me, cresting with great pressure, then passing. And the aperture click hits, the shift, and my aura pulses into view.

It is yellow, and Clove’s is golden, and I try to find any overlapping, and am lost for some time in this extraordinary radiance until I realize—despite its appeal and for all its allure—this isn’t the focus.

Look closer, she breathes, against pain starting to beat at my brow—again tempted to flat-out quit—then narrow my eyes and find, there, in my sphere, the mottled textures of several samskaras, vague and amorphous. With a kind of throbbing combat setting up among disparate impulses. Pain urges run like hell and don’t look back, some interior force tackles the abacus of Lux quotes—a mystic is functionally split, I must bear facing what is the case—and my grasp of inwardness repeats: intensity isn’t insanity.

Then, a gleaning, anent that vertical alignment—the quality of my existence is determined by the inclination of my will—and I’m willing to obey heaven’s suasion.

Your soul is learning to use your eyes, Clove says, holding me close in full breathing.

First we wait to change, then we wait to hold

And I accept it. I hold. Not quite flailing within. Pressure harsh, but bearable. Samskaras take on depth and I focus on the largest thought form hovering in the field near my heart.

That? I need to examine that?

Seven

A sunset trick of light shows her nipples through the chiffon but I lift my eyes to her eyes as I pull open the heavy oak door and we enter and the place is ours. A riverboat restaurant. Hostess greets and leads us toward a poor choice until I ask for a booth with a bay view and Cee squeezes my hand, pleased. Hostess is also a waitress, takes our drink orders, gin and tonic for Cee and, stigma be damned, white zin for me. She offers menus but we know what we want, a shared Chilean sea bass, and then three matrons waltz in, laughing, jewelry twinkling, and I watch Cee observe them, perhaps imagining herself in such company someday. Drinks come, Cee downs a wallop and nips my ear and growls, sliding from the booth, but before she’s off I point outside to a schooner cruising past, The Prowess, and she smiles.

I resist slinging a saltshaker at the grizzled bartender staring at Cee’s ass. It’s understood I’ll finally spend the night in her downtown high rise, after these months of touching and tasting.

And here, where the memory of anticipating consummation with Cee takes shape in my aura, with Clove’s hands anchoring my shoulders as we stand at the mirror, I undergo a rippling convulsion that almost buckles my knees. Currents undulate up and down my spine and I know to the bone if I shut my eyes and quit, I’ll go mad. Mute desperate madness that only almost broke through to a new truth.

Someone in a charcoal burqa stands close holding a crystal bowl like a chalice, rubbing a mallet around its rim. The tone fills the room and moves me into meditation again. Samskara.

Elevator chimes and we stroll a hushed carpet to her door, silver knob at center, opening into a foyer jumping with African art. Shona statues, spears, drums, shields. Cee suggests the balcony while she changes and I move past a gleaming kitchen with an enormous still life for its starting point, fruits and flowers, and hanging baskets of lemons and red peppers. Everything gleams. The dining area is an old wooden table on a Persian rug and I notice photos of Cee and her soon-to-be-ex, Wynn. On garlanded juggernaut elephants in India. A bridge in Prague. San Francisco cable cars. She looks happy in some, then amused, then sad at the thought, am used. 

Balcony overlooks downtown’s gritty industrial edge and the dark sparkling bay. A train clanks through the canyons of buildings, throwing its horn forward, and a woman breaks from her knot to shatter a bottle on a boxcar. Laughter. On the water, surreal eels of neon whip in wind and the granite riprap is shadow pocked. Up here, in the shiny fairy tale castle with the princess removing her shoes, something whispers success and once more I thank Doctor Lux, teaching us the best balance of affection and attention. Learning to love.

Cee calls and I turn to find her in the hall, white bathrobe, deep cleavage, soft lights changing her from a pixie with moxie to a vulnerable woman inviting me into her bedroom.

I shudder again, convulsing in a rush of energy up and down my spine. Clove’s behind me, moving hands to the top of my head and—what the fuck?—my groin, cupping me. Hard. The crystal bowl burqa keeps rolling those tones, filling the room, and an element of madness jigs in the air,