I thought I would never see Lawrence Severest again after what I considered the lowest point of the Exile stage . . . I mean, here I was, at the very crossroads. On one side was the absolute bland and empty exile that I was in for the better part of a year now. Behind it was the world I lived in, which had moved on without me, and rightfully so. Others had picked up where I left off on certain aspects of keeping the right elements together and flowing in a way that was perpetuating the trends I started in certain areas. At the crossroads was a vision of what lie ahead: the amplification of everything that was and was to be for the future of a being and his entities that had no other intentions to do anything in life other than to pursue creative endeavors. A bright future that was the antipode of the Docile Exile in every way shape and form. I was approaching that crossroad and it was starting to become daylight again.
As the night clouds dissipated and the sun began to break over the purple horizon, I could see a figure sitting on the ground leaning up against the road sign's post. From the distance I was at, it was hard to make out who it was, for all I could see was the silhouette. The morning doves were chirping one note in four to the steady rhythm of the other birds that were making their spring mating calls. There was a slight mist in the air, and dew covered the grass on the side of the road in tiny droplets. There was also a sound - that of a flute, yes, a flute . . . the figure lying against the roadsign post was playing a flute. And it had this way of blending in with the song of the morning doves and other birds. The sun seemed to be blinking on and off behind the clouds in a strange unisonic manor that coincided with the natural song going on around me. Even stranger was the way in which I kept the pace of my footsteps in that beat. That was the loudest sound to me. The way my boots made a crunching sound on the gravel road as I took each step. It was a thing that might had made me think that there was a limit to the number of steps I could take before falling out of step with things, which might lead me to running out of steps, or energy, or just dying.
The sound of the flute was soothing, but not in a pleasant way. It was the kind of sound that made me thing of thoughts that contradicted the positive anticipations of the future that I had been fostering for so long. These were never healthy thoughts to be considering, but they had to coexist with the positive thoughts generated by the positive things that were eminent. I thought that it had to be an elderly gentleman playing that eerily peaceful but woefully depressing sound on that steel instrument. As I got closer, I could smell something familiar, although I wasn't able to place it at first. I do remember smelling it before knowing what it was that I was smelling.
Crunch crunch crunch crunch . . . my heel and toe my heal and toe, the gravel gravel grav ul. I lit up a cigarette, having to stop to do so because of the slight northerly breeze. I caught the light just right at just the right moment - for all sounds had ceased for just that precise moment . . . all the birds, all the gravel, all the heals, all the toes, and the iridescent flute.
"Good Morning Braden," a familiar voice called out over the silence.
It was the same kind of familiar that the stench was - like, I didn't place it at first, but when I matched it with a face, there was a feeling of knowing it all along. And then I turned my head to look at the figure under the crossroad sign, and sure enough, that was the feeling I got. Just as I looked, there was a considerably large break in cloud cover, and the sun aided me in identifying the individual. It was Lawrence Severest, the corpse I had drank bourbon with a couple nights before on the banks of the River.
"You better look a little closer . . . "
I didn't get it.
"You better look inside yourself . . ." he said as he lowered his flute and then bowed his head down to reveal a pealed back scalp with no bone tissue covering his brain from exposure. I was getting real close now. There were all sorts of maggots, spiders, and other creatures crawling around in the bowl of his skull. In fact, there wasn't any brain matter in there at all, it was all creepy crawly things with hairy tentacles and slimy outer layers, leaving a trail of slime behind them as they crawled across his dry gray wrinkled skin. Things started falling out of the bowl that was his skull in large fist sized chunks. He was giving out this crazy sounding laugh that was making me feel kind of freaked out.
"What are you talking about you crazy dead fucker!"
"The crossroad . . . just because you are at the crossroad doesn't mean you are no longer in Exile. You are no where near out of Exile yet, so watch yourself. There are people and forces that be that will try to cut you down in ways you never thought of to turn you back from that crossroad. There are women and men alike who might never do anything other than go through life and be normal human beings - whose soul purpose in life was to stand between you and your destination. There are forces put there by powers higher than anything you ever did or didn't believe in that will bury you in Exile if they get even a slight chance, for no other reason than just to fucking do it. What did you think? you would reach the final stretch and just float to a new plateau of creativity and pleasure that would just erase the Exile and eliminate that suffering that you are sentenced to?"
"Man, Mr. Severest, I never thought that . . ." I tried to explain.
"What are you trying to do? Lie to me! Ha! Boy, I am not some old fucker that you are trying to impress with your youthful knowledge of a bleak world! I am death. I am dying. I am the short period of time between life and death when you feel one hundred percent unity between the conscious and the subconscious, between the physical, emotional, and mental being. There is nothing you can hide from someone who has had eternity after eternity to think of everything and all the possibilities and all the superlatives, and all the what ifs, and all the who could haves. I am the fruit of the trees of knowledge that you are a mere drop of sunlight nurturing one leaf of. There are blades of grass on my meadows that are more significant to the overall perplexities I could dream of in a blink of an eye to me - which would equal three or four of your so called lifetimes. I am, of course, dead. Now, let's try this one more time. I'll act like you just noticed me. 'Hi Braden, tis I, Lawrence Severest, the rotted out two hundred thousand year old corpse you were getting drunk with on the side of the River the other day . . . how are you?'"
He was smiling, but there were no teeth. His hair was just a handful of strings spread out in a crazy looking pattern that somehow made sense. He had sunken in eye sockets, and his eyeballs were empty of fluid, flat because of that, and a pale milky yellow color. I lit up another cigarette. "Mr. Severest, I really didn't think anything of merely stumbling finally along this beaten up path, and ending up here, at the so called crossroads."
"Liar. Fuckin liar! Damn kid, if I only had one one thousandth of your young flesh and your vigorous ear that only hears what is needed, your strength and creative drive! I would take those elements and combine them with my knowledge of this shitty world, so as to help guide you through some of the things that might not seem like walls, but after you pass them, you would have regretted the way that these obstacles obscured your vision."
"But I know what you are talking about, and I am stepping with caution . . ."
"No you are not! There is never a way in which a person steps with caution as he is making a narrow escape from Exile. Anyone that tells you different is lying, and if you tell yourself that, it means you are lying to yourself. Let me tell you a story, come over here and light this cigarette up while I tell you a story . . ."
He handed me a joint about the size of a fat cigar. "This isn't another crazy ass freak story about a chick getting brutally raped by her brothers and dad again is it?"
"No, that was just a story I told because I was drunk and I had this crazy feeling that people weren't taking the reality of people's animal instinct seriously enough while they read your excerpts from the MegaScript . . . "
"So you know about the MegaScript?"
"For all you know, I might be the very force that guides your pen while you write it . . ."
I pondered on this for a moment. "But I never claimed to be a writer of it, nor have I ever said to myself that I was writing this or any other story for the purpose of contributing to the MegaScript . . . "
"Okay boy, you just keep thinking like that, and it'll happen the way it was meant to be. Even though there seems to be one incoherency flowing into another, and there never seems to be anything that ties it all together into one plot, you sit back on a rock and toss an empty bottle into the River with a message to no one in it, and you feel your spine tingle a little bit - you begin to see how it all falls into place, and how it all fits together into one gigantic Subscript that is really nothing more than an excerpt from the MegaScript itself, but to not know that is the way the Authoritators meant for it to happen. I won't say, 'yeah, Braden, what you are doing here is writing a chapter for the MegaScript,' and I won't ever try to convince you of that. Believe what you want, and just keep the emotions pouring onto paper in a steady waterfall like fashion. There are people in the underworld rooting and cheering for you to complete the texts of Docile Exile before your Exile is over. In fact, they sent me to knock some fuckin sense into you . . . seems some of them don't believe you have your head on straight right now - thinking that being at the crossroads is close to the mission at hand."
No matter what it seemed, I was looking back at everything like it was already gone and forgotten, like the Bar, the Girl, the Soul Mountain, the Antipode of Half Full, the entire landscape, and once in a while, even the Rock - looking at these chapters in the Exile as if they were all over and done with, knowing in the back of my mind that they lived on with me every day, and I knew I couldn't live and spite these era's and act as though there was no real lesson to be learned, or no mechanical divination that would have to come through in the form of performing counter actions to these actions as to begin the process of un-perpetuating the epitome of them.
"There is a song that the Dead play and only certain living beings, not necessarily humans, have the kind of acute third ear - so to speak - that allows them to hear it. Then there are those that hear it repeat itself over and over again, until it drives them mad, and they are found masturbating over the corpse of one of their own. They call this The Song of the Dead in some circles. It is the most depressing song some people ever heard, and to others, it is the most beautiful sound they ever sensed, while still others are maddened by the song because it means nothing to them and gives them no special appreciation for its influence, which is time not to end, something they couldn't comprehend anyway. I know you hear the song, and I know what the song means to you. Because of this, I can judge you and know that you are worthy of the next level for which you are about to seek. But to open that doorway, and to begin to walk down the next corridor, you must realize that there are many many doors in that corridor. So many, in fact, that each one will look more promising than the next, while some will look obviously unimportant or undesirable. Be forewarned that these doors are like books in which you cannot judge them by their covers. You have to try every door, and if the door happens to be unlocked, you have to peak your head inside and test the waters of what lies beyond it. In deep frustration, you will come to find out that some doors just lead to other corridors, and they will appear equally confused and laid out with an infinite number of their own doors, windows, and other passage ways. In essence, the crossroads is just a simple rest point where you have a moment of total mindlessness to both look back at the past and hopefully learn from it, and look ahead to the future, where you will have the opportunity to examine the procedures you will participate in in order to unlock the mysteries of the many doors and corridors."
I was beginning to kind of see what the corpse was getting at, but at the same time, I was more occupied with the idea that everything in the Exile was somehow actually just elements that combined to one big thing - be it a lesson that should have been learned or just a documentation of a lifetime gone by in less than a year. Either way, I now felt certain that everything I was writing was actually part of the MegaScript. In fact, there was little doubt of that. With that realization came a strange fear that being a pawn in THAT game could have implications that could have devastating effects on the goals and plans I had for the rest of my life, which in effect, could be a very short period of time. I mean, when you are bound to the Land of the Dead in some unwritten contract that was essentially signed in blood, you begin to wonder a few things. One thing I did from that point on is to beg the unforeseen forces that they pay me properly for my sold soul. It was a madman's request and to most sane people it would have appeared as though I was just talking to a caterpillar marching across the many leaves of the plant that was next to me in the cafe. And before I could catch myself, others did catch me, and were looking at me like I might have been talking to them. When they realized I was talking to myself, they gave me even stranger glances, and I could hear them talking about me under their breath. I had a lot to think about, and I had a lot to do . . . life is too short to care what people you won't ever see again are thinking about you. I left and as I walked out, I realized that I had left my composition book behind. I gave it a second thought, and decided to just leave it there, hoping to perhaps reach at least one more soul with the few but bold exerts from the MegaScript.
