The Apex of Time

By Richard Clough

The novel that couldn’t be written in the way that most novels of the past gave hints of what life would be like in the future. Inadvertent strikes on some behemoth that would become so powerful that it defied expression except by this one so-called time traveler who knotted together the bits and pieces, forming some mammoth interpretation that could never fully expose the great breadth of the apex of time. Yet its essence, despite great impediments, was exposed somewhat by something that seemingly came at the speed of light after nearly sixty years of its experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543432145

Book preview

PART ONE

THE SPEED OF LIGHT

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I t’s horrible that people die, but it’s reconciled as one of God’s facts of life. I haven’t died in the last sixty years, but I came close numerous times. What protects me, I guess, is more than God’s message but the scientific insight that created me for answering the purpose that the higher powers declared as the apex of time from 1955 to 2016. The apex of time was important in determining the fate of the human race, and the fact that it passed along with my five books that detailed my Speed of Light existence says a lot of the secret government’s ability to dupe them from knowing it happened.

Now I want to delve into some of my accoutrements. When I saw Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan wrestling with a man on TV, I proceeded to do likewise with my pillow. My dry ejaculation at age five started me on the path of hiding impulsivity plus beating opponents steeped in hate. This was necessary because in the galactic scheme of things, there were predatory dark stars that fed on a man’s righteous strength, which I prophetically called, in a surly way, escape from the fat people. It was due to these stars that my lives were left with a sparse field to cultivate, thus forcing me to be the way I was—an asshole to some but, to my mind, a juggernaut by my perceptions of the unfolding apex that saw people degenerating.

The pillow fucking imbued me with strength and intelligence, but I had to hide it for fear of the dark stars.

Because of this secret agenda, I had my grandparents waiting for me on Maryland’s eastern rustic shore. They enabled me to grow while building insights into how my grandfather might have once been president but was destroyed by the powers of this black hole I was postulating through my good schooling. My schooling was in the higher degree to which I labeled my fellows as highbrow. My milieu in Santa Monica was also so diverse that I doubted any other part of the world could duplicate it.

My course in life wasn’t to be recognized in sports or thought, but I intended, through my sojourn, to unravel truths from my birthplace in Price Bethany Church. This was by the divine providence that demanded this above greatness.

I discovered that God was both lesser and greater, because one God, the lesser, was all-powerful while the greater God was the free will overriding the lesser God. I proved it a lot in my life.

Life was like the rising of the sun. It was bright in the early stages then dull in the later stages. When I thought I was fucking girls early in life, it started to dawn on me that it was a great frustration for me while in Vegas or running the whole length of the beach in the sand without a girl. It wasn’t until at the apex that it dawned on me that the great Russian gymnast Olga Korbut of the 1976 Olympics, the year I eluded the lagoon full of predators, was my girlfriend attracted to my fanatic lineage. So I was now satiated by this resolution. It just left it for me to develop some more of what the apex had deposited from its penetration.

My first childhood sweetheart was Norma Smith. During bongo drumming class, her splayed legs intimidated and inspired me. She was in the high school marching band marching beside the gymnasium when I was running five miles before class and during lunch. My activity was so strenuous that when I got nervous in class, I sweated profusely. Or it could have been my brain damage from junior high.

My high school and the trip to the observatory and beau were just like Rebel without a Cause.

I showed my early aptitude for running when my mother’s car broke down in the garage and I ran all the way to school.

I was no longer a boy from a rich family who distained the kind of sinewy activity displayed at present by Schwarzenegger. Like him, I returned to my prowess, but in a kind of retarded way that balked at exerting myself to its fullest capabilities. Nevertheless, I was like a boy possessed playing basketball or whatever, never knowing that it was going to end. I was like the Beach Boys, who represented the endless summer.

Because of my retardation, I think my mother hired a hit man named Karl, who visited us on Marine Street overlooking the Venice basin. He was just waiting for his opportunity, but I kept throwing him off until he challenged me to fight him at the beach in Venice just before I went into the air force in ’76. It so happened that after I entered, he might have been killed. It was a mysterious issue for Karl because he told me how an old lady on Marine Street threatened my mother. That kind of ameliorated my suspicions.

I had a friend named David Weisbart, who was the son of a famed 1950s movie producer, and it seemed my life was like those movies before David was replaced by Peter.

Glory began in Sparta, and the Parthenon began to shine again after my sweaty sexual alliance with Sheila. It was noted by seeing a vision in the clouds that reflected the glassy ancient Aegean.

Unlike UCLA, eastern colleges would have educated me. This I found out while playing tennis during the summer at Cornell with Aunt Doris and buying from its bookstore books that, unlike UCLA’s, I understood.

Aunt Doris, my mother’s sister, was dubbed Miss Sunshine at the 4-H club in Maryland as a teenager; and she was a keen competitor with my mother, who earned a business scholarship at Beacon by politics, as my grandma said. Anyway, her parents belittled her health, which drove her to Phoenix, Arizona, where she met my father, who was already teetering on the abyss of crime that showed in his frown while holding me above the rim of the world as a baby. It was a place down below where I’d be for the rest of my life while writing the story. The behemoth of the hills was beckoning.

My erudite Uncle Glenn once taught me gymnastics in Maryland, which might have explained my connection with Olga. He didn’t teach me this time, although he did headstands and cartwheels that intimidated me. Uncle Glenn was my world, and when he said he was going to take me to the store at the beginning of town, I ended up hitting my cousin Donnie over the head with a baseball bat for saying that they already went and asking if I wanted some candy like he was going to screw me. He always got boners in the basement shower. It was where I should have been having sex with Lynette and my other cousin after high school graduation.

My grandmother had me feeling like a celebrity as all these countryfolks—including the reputedly smelly taxidermist William, who later dated my grandma as a world traveler—would see me sitting in that rustic post office with its eerie wanted pictures.

I was staring at a black cloud over LA, wondering why life seemed to be absolute when it’s known or thought to be finite. The answer was that it’s always been this way.

I had my grandpa’s genes. Grandpa was one of those legends of the corn-and-bean fields of the thirties where he could have played as Cas with the Philadelphia Athletics but was supposedly too homesick to do so. My grandpa never talked of his feats, although he won the state trap shoot. I took it like everything in stride until, thirty years later, I called myself Mr. Clough, alias Lou Gehrig, for killing a boy with a fastball. Whether Grandpa knew, I’ll never know, except for that last Delaware fishing trip where I thought he wanted to throw me overboard. No one really talked about it, but that was when the temptations came up with cloud nine.

There were a lot of songs that I related to, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon or Mötley Crüe’s Public Enemy # 1, to name some that weren’t mentioned herein.

I was a hidden star of those corn-and-bean fields as I labored next to the blacks at the cannery the summer after my graduation of ’73. That was where I fell in love with Dale, who worked there.

I added a mystique to my persona by attending Ohio State’s undefeated team’s loss to UCLA at the Rose Bowl around 1975. It was ironic because if it wasn’t for my baseball mishap, I might have been their quarterback. Then again, they might have all died from my murderer’s curse.

When I thought my cousin got laid by the horse-riding Mary, I felt he inherited my grandfather’s power and set me on some infernal course, as mentioned by Grandma on the phone: Ricky’s not a real Clough. Of course, I think I’m real, so I set my course to help the black hole president as I cried at age thirteen at his funeral.

Then there was the black hole agent I created by breaking the laws governing the black hole president by surviving and then screwing the fold-up bed in the old Southern house. It would take thirty years, but she would both inspire and make me feel unrequited desire. The scenario was more believable than the movie The Mummy. Instead of a priest, the Egyptian princess was being escorted by a long-haired, muscular Roman gladiator.

I was locked up for so long that I conceived of there being assassins who responded to the slights done to the light by the sordid justice system.

I even wrote a poem about Hitler, who’d be told of the traitorous Japanese and dead German soldiers fighting against some of those yellow-skinned men in Vietnam.

What I conceived as Philosophers and Murderers was Natalie’s greatest movie because it was real with her disguised as Ezravita.

Now we conclude with a sonnet:

Over time the legions of God

Jousted with the Grand Inquisitor’s law

That which was lesser

Than what the greater foresaw

So I intuitively wrote

Of flowers heralding the valley of death’s maw

That was really the arising soldiers

Of the once-vanquished armies of God

This is how freedom grows

From the author who travels at 186,000 miles per second

In winning their release from this predicament

The same as I did in the rocket

To survive the dreaded prospect

Beyond yonder ridge lightning flew

Never-never land’s red hills

Where dwelled the behemoth

Overshadowing Pompeii’s mammoth

Tragedy this writer described honestly

Like the last battle of Rome

Where in the sky appeared a flaming sword

That marked the advent of Christianity

Whose religion taught we’d be reborn

The way I’d always be a fighter

If one doubted the present pyre

This was an expansion of the initial poetic and prophetic line ending with poetic dearness.

The nature of the world is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so I’d become Dr. No and Mr. Gold Bond, who could both be made to be considered good the way it might be for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

I had a series of therapists in the last survivor’s facility called Foothill whenever I wasn’t in never-never land, and they all led me after around twenty years to the twin towers’ jail both before and after 9/11, which proved that it was founded on an inherent faultiness.

The apex of time is repeated over and over again, and the results can sometimes be different, like the Cathedral of God at the end of this book, condensing the original Speed of Light and the Maryland Prize.

After I escaped Foothill in 1989 just months before the Berlin Wall fell, I was repeatedly overdosed and was given more time for nearly thirty years until I surpassed the apex.

Isn’t it nice to see the men working? was a remark behind a window in Price. If I heard it, it would make me feel strange.

True justice is the known that is unknown.

Metallica’s lyrics Off to never-never land aligned itself with both the beast in my head as a boy and the area so named. The clouds appeared strange outside my window in SM, and the scroll I received at a special school made me tear it up in rage for reminding me of my unending perdition, which would have my visions make me a pauper.

My minimum wage saga began right after high school where I worked in Westwood with a pretty lady who might have been my first undercover FBI agent. I then worked at Rivera Golf Club during the tournament selling hot dogs that gave me a taste of richness reminiscent of my mother’s glitzy company Christmas parties where I was uncomfortable around the boss’s ravishing daughter, Janet Thomas.

I was visibly shaken in the west LA eatery after my graduation because Carrie, who used to be with me, wasn’t there by order of the higher powers that knew her dead half opposed me, which sent me to Maryland to recreate her.

I had a pretty teacher who lived next to me in SM that hinted at the classic story of romance and tragedy.

I also had a French girlfriend on Berkeley named Pat who got me off to my magical start. She left me by myself at the SM promenade one night, and my mother had to pick me up.

Good-looking women possessed an illusory power that often made them obstinate until they physically deteriorated. It was this fact I both loved and abhorred.

What follows are more complex depictions of events or impressions, either in prose or poetry, surrounding Clough at the apex of time.

THE WOODS

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Sturdily they stand sentinel

Guardians of the sentimental

Including even venal acts that weren’t incidental

Their stoic postures are like a prism

Refracting light in different quantities

Making them appear light or darkly

Depending on one’s