Message-ID: <40366asstr$1042114213@assm.asstr-mirror.org> Return-Path: From: "Sean Farragher" X-Original-Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1106 Importance: Normal X-ASSTR-Original-Date: Wed, 8 Jan 2003 21:32:39 -0500 Subject: {ASSM} TxM6: The Genesis Murders: Chapters I to III Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 07:10:13 -0500 Path: assm.asstr-mirror.org!not-for-mail Approved: Newsgroups: alt.sex.stories.moderated,alt.sex.stories Followup-To: alt.sex.stories.d X-Archived-At: X-Moderator-Contact: ASSTR ASSM moderation X-Story-Submission: X-Moderator-ID: gill-bates, IceAltar (c) 2003 Sean Farragher sfarragher@nj.rr.com File Name: 00010txm6 The Genesis Murders Chapters I-III TxM6 Taxi Murders Hyperfiction: Sexual Oceans Angela Leven: Diary Notes from August 22, 1991 http://www.seanfarragher.com http://www.seanfarragher.com/hyperfiction http://www.seanfarragher.com/txm6 http://www.seanfarragher.com/poetry http://www.seanfarragher.com/Joss Synopsis [FORWARD: In 1992, Vietnam Vet Henry Whitman, 49, relives two tours in Vietnam when his lover the pregnant 26-year-old Laurie Fallon is kidnapped and held captive by the Genesis Killers, Abel and Lilith.] TxM6: The Genesis Murders Chapter One SCREAM: Laurie Fallon raised the intelligent alarm. Her whole being bore down double sharp notes, peeling glass with her shriek. * * * TxM6 is just like the movies. Bet you don't remember how Peter Lorre's character murdered Myrna Loy in the never finished 1932 movie Taxi Murders Express. The director Josef Von Sternberg finally stopped production when Myrna Loy's stand-in stunt double was strangled on the movie set. No one was ever charged with the crime although some suspected Lorre. It was a murder that would leave scars for sixty years. The Gables Pub 1090 River Road Edgewater, NJ 11:20 PM -- Friday, April 10, 1992 Outside the Gables bar, set almost on the curb the music blasted along River Road almost to the Hudson River edge. It was an old, not too fancy but popular bar that featured live rock music and Wednesday through Saturday night female and once a month Friday night male strippers. It was a pick up joint and a place for lovers. Six foot tall, seven months pregnant, twenty-six year old Laurie Fallon walked slowly from the bar to her car swinging the keys. A one-time exotic dancer and barmaid at the Gables, she often returned to chat with the affable owner, Lilly, and several of the regulars. Laurie was sad that night. Having fought with her boy friend, Henry, who was now out of town, she didn't want to return to their empty apartment. Not even the swagger of the male strippers lifted her spirits. Standing with one foot on the curb, she looked back at the Gables as if she might return. Laurie hated being indecisive. Staring into the headlights, she pinned her natural red hair up off her face. Reflected against the red and ochre neon lights of the bar, she waited for a lone truck to pass, and then stepped slowly between the parked cars to cross. Suddenly a strong young man wearing a black ski mask grabbed her neck and mouth from behind. Stalking her from the damp spaces between his van and the cab of a truck, he had missed her mouth with his gag. She screamed and bit his fingers. He pulled back, almost frightened. Laurie caught his face with her nails driving furrows from cheek to chest. His scream was pity by comparison. Laurie grabbed the man's ski mask, pulling it quickly over his head while suffering his kicks and shrieking curses. Falling down against the curb between the street and the parked cars she scraped knees and elbows; twisted by her legs, her easy dress split wide, riding up to expose her neatly trimmed pubic hair. Laurie pushed the wool mask between her legs. As the short but solid man beat and kicked her with his boot, she refused to release it. Turning her back to the man, she twisted her body, leaning into the curb, protecting the child she carried from the blows. Laurie drove the disguise deeply against her skin. As the earthquake continued inside, outside the man had stopped, wondering what he could do next now that the gag and ether were discarded. In that second pause, Laurie reached for his balls. Holding them in her palm, she squeezed. He caught her mouth square with his boot. Laurie let go. He kicked her endlessly in the back. Grit under her nails, the man's blood on her mouth, Laurie realized how much she wanted to live to save her child; she fell back short of victory, breathless, sabotaged by instinct. At that turn in the battle she submitted, wondering why no one had helped her. Quickly taping arms, legs and mouth, he gathered the almost unconscious woman into his dirty white van. The man, later identified as one of the infamous, "Genesis Killers" did not notice that his ski mask had dropped from between Laurie's legs to the street. THE DIRTY WHITE VAN Inside the van, bound and gagged, Laurie could not watch the neon lights of the Gables exotic dance club shimmer in yellow and red slivers against the cloud of the river and New York City's skyline. Just before the man pulled out into the traffic, a dazzled movie clouded her eyes. Captured by rough tape, she refused to concede and her arms pushed and pulled, almost throwing the man off balance. Laurie did remember that she had screamed silently "No" as he shot her full of shit to make her ass collapse. He didn't hear, "don't hurt the baby." Laurie would be held captive for the next ten months. She would suspend her life within an odd assortment of dreams and fixations conjured to keep her sane. Later, when she replayed her two-minute skirmish, Laurie marveled at the failed strength she had struck. No Joan of Arc burned at the stake. She might survive. NEXT MORNING: Missing Person At 0932, Edgewater police reported that an eyewitness, known only as Rose, had come forward to describe a crime outside the Gables the previous night. Without this witness no one would have immediately known Laurie was missing. TxM6 Chapter Two My name is Laurie Fallon. Someday, I will meet you on the Internet in some cyber sex chat room. Maybe it will be AOL or ICQ. Maybe we don't meet online. I could have been walking without looking, like I usually do, half assed, and you bumped into me, just to say, fuck me. Of course I kicked your ass. Don't worry, I won't tell your wife that you got laid. I won't tell the bitch that I, not her, reminded you of that 13 year old auburn haired babe at the Paramus Roller rink that Friday night when you were 17 and such a big deal. You know the old rink that was at Midland and Rt. #17 for fifty years. Yes, that's the one where my mother got fucked in the washroom. Rink's not there any more, I heard. FRIDAY, APRIL 10, 1992: Laurie Fallon One question you could ask right up front. Am I am alive? I know you read how I was kidnapped and raped. Shit, no way I make that shit sound sexy. I get it. You think I am full of shit. Haven't you heard of a séance? Why not? I could be my own medium. Why should I give the fucken plot away before some sad cocksucker pays me for my bleeding story? Yeah, I like the Brits too. Ever see that fox, Chili Bouchier? She could have fucked Hollywood all up if given the chance. Oh, you think I am fucking with your head now, diverting you from the real fucken story. What the fuck? You telling me not to curse. I'm a fucken college student and I can talk like a Lady if I want to give it up for nothing. Yeah, I do know what the fuck "divert" means. You're a real fucken shit. Why you always cut me off. LAURIE FALLON DOB: October 20, 1965 Today is January 8, 2003. My crime story began eleven years ago. That longer time-maze, my life, began when a married PA State cop named Malachi Mac Donagh fucked my fifteen-year-old mother, Helene. They had a child, named Sheila. She's the famous novelist, Sheela-na-gig you've read about. Sheila's seven years older than me -- and thinks she has known everything. Malachi and his wife adopted her and she attended the best schools. She even graduated from the U of Pennsylvania. I grew up with Helene first in Gainesville and then in Ridgefield, NJ USA. I gave my first professional blowjob when I was ten, and they say I set a fire that killed two of my brothers and a sister when I was eleven. Was Sheila lucky? I know her. She's a stuck up so what? Mother loved Malachi all his life. He was a good man. At least he never sexually abused me like my step- fathers Billy and Huw. Mama lied. First, she told me Huw was the one who knocked her up. Another night, drunk on her ass, she whispered, Billy's the one. The night she retched in my ear, I had Billy's come inside. Later, I learned she had fucked all three men the same night. How the fuck did she know? Shit, I've done worse. DNA tells the truth. I had it done twice. Malachi was the one. For once I got lucky. Mack turned out to be a righteous man. On April 10, 1992, I was kidnapped and held captive for eleven months by a man and woman, half brother and sister, the self-named Able and Lilith. You will never guess what the shits had me do to stay alive. I had to fuck them of course, but get this, I had to use a computer and write about my sex life, and how I was abused as a kid. In 1992, my word processor had a screen with a sick green color. It made me think of puke. It was not this fancy piece of shit with fifty million stars and bars and the new Jet Ski operating system. Watching letters pour over the screen with your life in some code is like watching Picasso porn. You know the scrambled pay TV loops where the guys and gals suck cock, get fucked, raped, and beaten every hour of the day. Yeah, I've done porn. Billy sold my ass into it when I was twelve. Some newspapers call me the star struck murderer because I love Myrna Loy. They claim I was guilty of the same crimes that Abel and Lilith did. There is no defense for murder when the murderer enjoys the crime. That is what the prosecutor said, citing Patty Hearst and war crime tribunals like he was before the fucken Supreme Court. I didn't murder those freaking geeks. I executed them. When I cursed the judge, she sentenced me to five to ten years of sucking prison pussy. Sure Able and Lilith were brother and sister. Sure I had sex with both of them and after I gave birth to Molly had a kid with Abel. Lilith also had Abel's kid for Christ sake. That's when I murdered her. Incest didn't bother me. I don't care if Abel always said it was his half-fucken sister. Can you believe that shit? I acted in self- defense. My mistake was to give a news conference that told the truth. "When I murdered that freak and his pimp of a sister, I loved it. I'd do it again. It felt wonderful to live. Abel killed my father. Why lie? I'm just another sister made notorious by some funky murders. Big deal. They say when I get that pardon I will make ten million from this. Later, you will read more about Myrna and Peter Lorre and how that sub plot grew like a boil. Daily News is publishing her story in seven parts. They say I am just worth two. I don't care. I love Myrna. She could stare down any man before sucking him up and spitting him up. She didn't even have to sex with them. In those days America believed everyone slept in twin beds. I loved Myrna more than a sister. I have seen all her films many times. When Myrna died in 1992 I was being held captive. I couldn't pay my last respects. You know what I loved best? When it came to men, she was always in control. FIVE YEARS EARLIER: Chapter Three Walkabouts: Herrig Estate, Friday April 17, 1987 HENRY WHITMAN Henry Ezra Whitman, forty-five years old, bespectacled with an easy smile and cleft chin labored 70 hours a week driving a taxi for Hudson Street Cab Fleets. In the remainder of his daily life he wrote poetry, loved his many children, and madly drove his life beyond even the memory of limitations. TAXI YARD 6:00 AM: Before Henry left the taxi yard, he clipped his watch to the sun visor, stepped back out of the cab, and inspected it for spare, jack, tire-iron, dents, and any dings. Climbing in the back seat, he examined the back seats for semen stains. Pulling the back seat out he checked for change and bills or anything else that might have fallen through the seat. He once found five hundred dollars in twenties neatly folded with a rubber band. There was no ID so he kept it. While Henry ran his mental checklist, he added another item: get some fresh coffee to kill the taste of last nights burnt coffee and the fermented OK he drank by accident. God, the air smells of shit today. Not much I can do about that except get the fuck out of here. Before Henry left, he adjusted the mirrors, and then looked back at the rows of yellow and beige cabs lined up as if a ruler had been used on both sides of the narrow parking spaces. Henry pulled straight back, breaking clear twirling in half circles before a clean exit out. Riding the ovals of the steering wheel, he began his day with change box, maps and one stale buttered roll. On the floor in a cloth bag, Henry carried a camera, tape recorder, two books of poetry, a novel and a notebook for those scribbled images digested on the taxi stand. At 6:04 am Henry passed the taxi stand on his way to the time call. Smiling at the long faces of the drivers, he passed them, knowing he could be there on the stand tomorrow bullshitting with them how much the driver had paid off the dispatcher for the long time call. Don't have to be there until 8:00. Take the easy way to make sure. Morristown is about an hour from Fort Lee. Anything can happen on Friday. Henry decided not to stop at the diner for an egg and bacon sandwich. Driving one handed, he wolfed the stale buttered roll that tasted like taxi, throwing half of it out the window when the traffic stalled. Henry usually rode the back roads to avoid the terror of morning traffic around the GW Bridge. Falling down Central in Palisade Park, he turned left on Broad and right at Route 46. He was not surprised that broken-down Route #46 already had construction crews lined up on both sides of the road. One old timer told Henry that he remembered when Route 46 had opened. "I was a boy," he said, "in 1931. Same year the bridge opened. It was just the same then. It had those same bumps and the worst accidents. No one knew how to drive then." Looking at his watch and forward at the merging traffic, Henry relaxed. Congestion wasn't that bad. Maybe I will have some time to really look at this place all the drivers claim is fancy. Like Joe said, a piece of fucking work. Henry intended to get off route 80 and back on 46 before I-287 traffic stopped up like traffic outside the Meadowlands complex after any sports event. Forty minutes early, Henry pulled up to the gate of the Herrig Estate. One solitary guard, dressed in what appeared to be a historic Nazi uniform, stopped him at the checkpoint. Raising his hands in that grand gesture of STOP, the guard frowned when Henry ran his cab to one inch of the white wooded halt sign. It actually said HALT, with the rest written in German. It looked as if it was a prop for a Nazi movie. Henry laughed. What if I had just ran this son of a bitch mother fucking Nazi border guard down. Should have done it to Adolf Shickelgruber in 1923. Henry was irritated and his mind leaped to other violence. I hate fascists. They made the world more horrible than it really is. Maybe they didn't. Who the fuck knows? I hate what I think when I meet them. Fucken Nam. Sometimes, when driving in New York City, Henry imagined losing the brakes and plowing into fifty pedestrians at the cross walk. Henry was never fully reasonable or predictable. He was, however, peaceful. Worn down from Nam, he did think the unthinkable and he wondered why, when it was over and the outburst done, did he feel uncomfortable with himself. Many taxi drivers hoard mysteries. One of Henry's was public. In 1986, just a year earlier, Henry had been caught fucking an eighteen-year-old college freshman. She had been a student in one of Henry's creative writing classes at City. She claimed when caught (got pregnant) that although she loved him, she had fucked him for good grades. Henry simply said she had earned it by her writing and he paid for the abortion. "I can't help it," Henry told his best friend Aaron about that time. "She refused the money and had the kid. She claims she never told the school. She said they found out from another student. She called the kid Henry. Wrote me that she wanted to always remember what I had added to her life besides the child. It was a gracious letter, but I didn't answer it. I figured she would line up for her support payments like everyone else. She didn't, but then her family lives in the Hamptons and she drove a vintage Thunderbird." No one really cared why Henry had fucked her. Henry accepted responsibility and didn't argue or whine about it. "I was stupid for getting caught," he told Aaron. Despite the lunacy of sex, war and the failure of profit in a cab, Hudson Street taxi drivers liked and respected Henry. Henry was a down to earth man with brains, Frank had told him. The guys like you because you don't make them feel like shit. They just don't understand why you are a cab driver. Elected President of the union one year, Henry lost it the next when he won the union-held grand lottery and kept the prize. Some members claimed he had fixed it. The charge was never proven. Henry was a war hero. Served in Nam as a combat medic for fourteen months. Volunteered to train "cherries" for two extra months to get out of the Army early. Local VFW and Legion hated that he turned the medals back to the grunts who had earned them with their lives. They also hated that he refused to participate in the marches and the benefits. He told them, I go to East Orange on Vet days. I am there once a month. Send your boys down there with me, and I will show them the heroes. " Vets like Henry made the pilgrimage to the wall to leave the medals there. Henry rarely talked about Nam, but when one asshole questioned his service there, Henry grabbed the fuck by the neck and screamed in his face, "I know fucken death. I stuck it, I cleaned it, and I bagged death almost every day. Get the fuck out of here before I forget I can go to jail for blowing your brains out!" Looking at the Gestapo guard talking on the phone, presumably to the fare, Henry hoped he had not made this fucked-up trip for nothing. Using the double speak lingo of cab drivers, Henry thought, Shit I will wait. I don't really care how long it takes. I am here on time. Even if they cancelled, I would get paid. At the same time he was pissed and complained every few minutes, hitting the steering wheel but not the horn. Henry often made it through his driving shift balancing patience with irritation. Driving himself out of madness, he would punch the dark period at the end of a softer line as he rolled within his taxi toward his own mind. These odd thoughts he called walkabouts after the tennis player Yvonne Goolagong. Using this blank time Henry filled himself with these flights of insanity. As they were sometimes self destructive, Henry wrote them in the margins of his poems as lonely images forlorn and graphically violent. They give tension to the poem or story, he once told a student. Why do I find it hard to lie and stay insane? Why can I not lie like anyone else? What's kept me sane? Certainly not this fucked up job. Perhaps it's my equal desire to be left alone and to be involved. Stalled, almost at zero time, the gatekeeper leaned too far into Henry's driver side window and said. "About two miles as the crow flies." "Get the fuck out of here, your breath stinks." Henry rolled up the window. The rent a Nazi cop had no sense of humor. Mumbling through the closed window he told Henry the obvious; he would have to wait but the family wanted him to wait up by the house. "No shit." Henry laughed. Hitting the gas too hard, Henry raced through the gate but not before the wooden barrier slammed down into the rear deck of the taxi, just missing the rear window. THE PROMISED LAND Carefully, Henry drove down through the walls of trees that formed the hallway to the sacristy of the Herrig palace. From the outside, the mansion resembled successive tree lines held abstractly one after another with only the crimson sky of morning or night to intervene. Henry drove even slower now. At one point he saw the ledge of a bare road next to a deep crevice. A fucken moat, Henry realized. These folks are more paranoid than I am. I can't believe there is no fence --nothing to prevent you from tumbling into the bloody pit. Henry rode slowly into questionable domains. His natural caution was rewarded. Captured by the juxtaposed planned and natural foliage, Henry smiled at that improbable irony. Imagine living in a world both peaceful and violent. Don't have to go far, he thought. This call is just like some secret ops mission deep in Laos. The landscape there made me think of the Garden of Eden. Here I will reach Nirvana. Like Laos or Cambodia, you knew you were in shit before you knew if you had actually crossed the line. Could great beauty ever become ordinary? Answering: It is good that we have hundred million year islands to set us apart from the tedium of watching the folding and revival of the earth. Someday god will present evolution and historical geology as a musical theme to accompany death. THE TEXTURE OF REPEATING CURVES As Henry rode deeper into the rings of the driveway (finding layer upon layer) the splendor silenced him. Almost too perfect, he thought. Something's dead inside. Not flesh that is dead, but an age and its mind. All the details of some theme or era were duplicated. I could imagine Victorian house parties and the sexual games folks played. This is a perfect place for an orgy. Henry had always respected the dark side of the Victorian landscape. Imagine that difficult but proper duality: innocent sexuality and licentious modesty gathered in one woman, man or threesome. Pushing at the walls, Henry assumed the point. The roadway wound in concentric collapsing ovals towards and inside a maze. To reach the center you had to know the mansion was there. Why would anyone continue after so many layers? Perhaps that is the point. No one except the welcome would know there is a destination here. Who would continue after so many firefights or rescues from LZ red? Entering the estate by the nose of his cab, Henry crept along the road as a peaceful horse and rider searching for easy ground and a safe entry. He had heard about the Herrig mansion from other drivers and had anticipated the expanse of its landscape. This was larger, more formidable. Like walking inside Louis XIV's private garden. It was the forest primeval. Imagine what you would encounter, if a man had transported plants and buildings whole from his past in Germany. Advance driver gossip as usual had underestimated the place. If it didn't have tits and ass, most of the drivers were not interested. They might even think you were queer if you collected wild flowers and read philosophy and poetry while in the holding pen called the taxi stand. Living within the plastic taxi, pines crossed and the images flickered. Henry marched back to the late 1940s English movies of Alfred Hitchcock. Rebecca and Notorious were the fare that made you think and want to fuck almost at once. These movies, unlike the Herrig mansion, seemed a misplaced metaphor. Imagine walking into a stranger's sexual obsession. What might you discover about yourself. If I walked inside too long, Henry laughed, I might discover the year 1887. It could just as easily been 2088. Inside anything, you never seem to understand all of it at once. What did I expect? Should I have imagined foxes running after hounds? Might be wonderful if I could make what I do in these next few moments last longer than good sex or a bad movie. Why does this place remind me of death? Why do I think of myself falling under the thunder of horses? There is that gasp of fraud I felt in Nam. Something here is also a lie. When I jumped off the transport plane, dropping easily onto the tarmac, I thought I was already dead. Knowing that heat Henry felt the rot within death before dying. Perhaps if I die, I will not die, he told one Sergeant who laughed at the medic philosopher, as Henry was called. Opposite I know, but that could be the way out of becoming another blind statistic. Some wag started calling Henry Plato until Henry smacked the fuck alongside the head and they rumbled in the usual fist up your ass army kick him in the balls street fight. Fear never stopped Henry. He stepped into it. Death is that moment when you have no thought. You are there pissing and moaning and in the next breath you are spit stains and a hand full of paperwork sent back to headquarters. I do not want to leave, Henry thought. Gathered it all in breathing the scent of rare flowers and happy insects, he knew he must walk in this garden and possess at least a moment at its center. Turing progressively inward, Henry felt the pull of circle and its gravity. He wondered if the turning would end. Or was this a romantic heaven and a hell around the corner. Where is perfection? She was magnificent. Henry intentionally used the female pronoun to describe the Herrig place. Just like a great showgirl: this place is just too fucken beautiful for any ordinary man. How can you imagine fucking her? Yes, at that moment she going down on you and your fingers are milking all parts of her at once. Imagine a remote wilderness just off a major interstate highway. Also imagine that every square foot had been planned. Each tree, shrub and weed had been bought, nurtured and backed up, replicated hundreds if not thousands of times. What a marvelous obsession, Henry thought. How many beautiful details can one person know? Stopping the cab again, he leaned outside and upward looking at the sky. Hearing a small plane, Henry imagined flying over the place in a Cessna. Yeah, he thought, like bloody Alice in Wonderland. What if magical fountains, sprites, and fairies emerged from beneath the grass carpet? Alice would be tame. This place, like Through the Looking Glass, was not of this world. I do not feel invited and yet I have absolute privacy. Why am I not lonely here? "Will the center hold?" whispered aloud. Shit, I'm becoming a vast cliché . Better lock my head up this time. His circle decomposed, Henry rode the peaceful loops inside the vestibule of the flower to the main house. Henry was a captured serpent thrown into a large fish tank. He felt every hidden eye record his position. He played each step stage by stage. Drunk on multiple colors of green and red, umber and sienna, Henry stopped for a second time along the side of the road to ride himself backward out of the quagmire. Far beyond the gate now, Henry rode for what seemed like miles without change or any sense of destination. Turning around, he backtracked. Everything old inside the foliage seemed new. Lost in green texture, he stepped out of the cab, amazed that he could be lost on a road without turns. He took five, military style. Squatting by the front tire, he sucked on long grass and watched two rabbits fucking. Who will believe that? Who ever notices when rabbits fuck? Am I dead? Could this be nightmare heaven? Looking up at the gray, thick April sky, Henry shrugged his shoulders as if to ask for directions or more of anything, but his request didn't include the rain that had started. It was a cold shower. February's still here. He turned lights and windshield wipers on at once. Driving again, pumping his foot from gas to brake, Henry turned at the sign he had missed the first time. GARGOYLES Driving up to the stables set back from the road, Henry memorized the carved wood gargoyles that decorated the window frames. He would transform them later into magical characters with their own language and original vocabulary. Henry took it all in, saving it as he did images written in notebooks. If I didn't drive a cab, Henry mused, I wouldn't know, would I? Poetry had odd sources. Henry saved the images for other reasons. He wanted those subtle textures that make light into film and words for display. (Henry shivered). Death lurks out about that tree line there. In this place of mind, Henry accepted that he might never know more about it what he would experience in the next few minutes. I don't want to leave before I have one chance to at least know it from the inside. I don't want to be a cab driver here. I don't want to serve these folks and their palace guard. I want to live here and keep it all. The year is 1887, not 1987. I can't write this down. I would have to stop the cab and turn on the tape recorder. I might reverse the spell if I stopped even for a moment. Henry feared that he would never understand this place from the outside. Taking a chance on changing the present, Henry pulled his tape recorder out. Marking his life there, he replayed it, laughing and tense when he heard his past speak, carefully and with precise diction, his wonderful off center lecture. Something important would happen. Later, when that turned out to be true, he realized while listening to the tape that he predicted it. Yes, I want a cascade of trumpets and a flourish of drums as I enter. Henry loved grand entrances. At that moment, he smiled and started to sing the Stars Spangled Banner in full voice, laughing at the way the ground and horizon waved him unsteady. Stopping the song before the finish, he realized if somebody saw him now they might think him drunk. Under his breath, Henry said without bravado to himself, please sacred father, let me live again what I feel right now. Just like Vietnam, I want to be lost and found in the same instant. Suddenly jerking the cab easily around three- construction backhoes directly in his path, Henry saw a sick headline: TAXI DRIVER ARRESTED FOR DRUNKEN DRIVING ON HERRIG ESTATE. I never step in shit like this. Henry laughed at his good fortune. He saw the spectacle of this call in all its parts at once. Yes, I know I was fucken lucky. I'd tell anyone that. This is how I get through life. Turning away to run home to the winding stairs of Coole and Yeats, driving his mind deeper into the Herrig maze, he would rediscover with his Darwinian and pagan architect not the origin of the species but rather a future tense -- imperfect passion -- for indescribable disorder, incest and abuse. How did Henry know any of this before it happened? Good question. He did. What is anyone's origin after all, Henry mused. How is this seemingly perfect order, disorder or stew for robins and rodents? What the fuck do drivers know about the delicacy of paranoia mixed with art. Edvard Munch. That fucken scream and then he was back feeling his hands while he screwed himself into the final assault on the Herrig driveway. Lingering in that space, the present, he quickly leaped forward to Nam again and back to NYC and that last drug run, and the need to know that all are the enemy especially the asshole woman he took there for drugs who knew more bullshit than any cabbie. Henry loved people who accepted risk. Every time I drive this fucken cab, I am at risk. Not like Nam of course, but sometimes when I am doing a drug run with some asshole over the bridge in Washington Heights at 3AM. It feels like Nam again. I assume the same positions; stand guard over the perimeter and follow the receding lines into an away from the objective, rushing the hidden corners only when about to be overrun. When dark approached, using a night scope watch the rear, pretending that the gooks are there, waiting to cut your fucken throat. We are always cock-sucking racists, Henry mocked himself. Just like Nam, there are the cops, the ARVN, the fake Republic of Nam, the chicken gooks, cowards. Yes, you know them. They are the fucks who throw their enemy from slicks and count the seconds laughing outline while the sad fucks fall. The body dies in flight they say, disappearing into the canopy in the orgasmic after shock. Yes, just like cops and the spooks, Henry was getting a head of steam up. When he reached what was obviously the front of the mansion, he stopped thinking of the absurd and waited for impatience to tempt him again. Jumping back and forth, Henry realized. Yeah, I hate cops. They either are on the take or too used to the routine. They just pass by the white cab driver with NJ plates sitting on a street corner at 149 and St. Nicholas Ave. Waiting for an executive to go to the airport, one cop told him once. Get the fuck out of here the cop had said. "We're waiting for your fucken airport call. Hope you got paid up front." "Of course I did," Henry said. What else? Who the fuck wouldn't" Cops sometimes waste more words than the ARVN captain did who liked to pull the fingernails from VC. He did it even after they talked. He did it before he blew his brains out. Once, Henry remembered, I made him stop and he grabbed my throat in a chokehold. He wouldn't let go. My squad leader told him to fucken stop. Second time he told him to stop he put his weapon to the officer's head and when the ARVN captain cursed us out he put a round across his forehead, cutting a scar that would last for life. I should have killed the fuck, Sgt Bushnell said, I tried to. He was a fast motherfucker. Moved just at the right moment to save his sorry life. "Fuck," the Sgt said, "I hated his gook ass. Would have been worth a court-martial." "No," I said to him. "Who the fuck would have turned your ass in? Me? You fucking kidding." Driving slowly down the back of the circular driveway, Henry remembered that joking, feeling the suspense, not as the danger of a hot LZ but in the anticipation. FRONT DOOR No one saw the Herrig place as a whole. Henry flashed back to his driving and the present. I will write about it. Make it into a corrupt movie about porn stars and political tricksters. Perhaps I can find a unique president to be the principal John. No, wait. Why do I want to turn the classic into the prurient? Henry gripped the steering wheel and expertly turned the paths as they closed. Nothing will change here no matter what I write. Beauty is as innocence corrupted. This place is more than a collection of living objects. Nothing I do will alter the sequence of their incorporation. Yes, I can say that. It is more than any illusion or trick. Just like the paintings my friend Aaron paints. He created grand abstractions based on natural forms. He sometimes used a model, but never painted her surface, but rather the interior. He said he saw it as a contrast of forces. Making these floor to ceiling fifteen foot long constructs and larger, he bound his models inside the case of paint and paper. They were there, but not there. I caught their eclipse, he said. The Herrig place reminded me of how and not just what he painted. I loved watching Aaron create the first steps, Henry thought as he watched the falling maple pods litter the lawn. First he coated the stretched canvas and then, marking the rectangular border with black and white papers, he decorated the wet plaster paint like footsteps caught in the middle of a sudden volcanic eruption. Aaron said about his painting: I am the recording engineer. He happened fifty million years ago. APRIL 17, 1987 Stopping the cab fifty feet from the main gate, Henry took one look back to watch for magical tree lines and claymores in the boughs of maples and oaks. If the fare had noticed him lurking, they might think he was having trouble with the cab and call the company. Henry moved forward and lurked closer to the LZ. Henry always said he never cared what people thought. He realized that was a lie. Just before pulling up to the front door of the main house he decided that he liked being there and didn't want to fuck up the possibility of future calls. He knew he was a taxi driver. That was his obvious role. He knew he had little control over when he could leave and where and how far he could travel. Finally, when he moved up, took his place at the front door, he saw that the Herrig place was uncorrupted and authentic. How could such a man love the Third Reich? It did not fit any model of the world outside. Yes, it is not a collection of objects but form and force compressed into one scheme with multiple plots and infinite varieties of color and value. Like Matisse, Henry recalled, the impossible in art is before and after the mark on the margin to note accident. Is any great art without accident? Am I always at creation, Henry asked? I know how death tastes. Copper blood and iron masks wrapped around my forearm while I fought death in every firefight at every LZ. I lost too many rounds by default, but I survived somehow. The man was already dead but I was too stupid to know. There are steps in death. Knowing them as absolutes is too difficult for one person to decipher. Sometimes, it takes two or more. Then there are arguments, and no one knows any answer. HENRY WHITMAN Taxi drivers are great with the canned lines. Yes, sir. Henry laughed as he continued to drive down the rich man's driveway expecting to find some old couple arguing about a diseased heart monitor that needed its batteries changed. Pulling into another circle, Henry settles down for the millennium wait. Any yesterday, Henry was alone and mad. April 17, 1987 might change that, but then again perhaps not. Being fulfilled would certainly not corrupt his cynicism. His questions made for his answers. Henry would not accept that extension and not limitation for five years. It would take love to excite that capacity. Love would start today. The journey from gate to house might be considered his first test. Why is art important and questions about art more significant? Henry believed that the visual mind knew more than the verbal. That transformation from object to thought was the one act of genius. Genius may be the chance recognition of any accident. When we select a word or a hue and place it in a frame and note its combinations and layers, perhaps that is like the selection of people in our lives. We never know what we will find inside where we complete the puzzle. How it will be later is always the last question. Henry did not know today he would meet Laurie Fallon. She had requested him when she called for a cab. She knew that he thought she was much too young and had avoided her. She also knew from Angela that Henry had no idea that her family was rich and decadent. She didn't care about that except as a mental aside. Laurie was depressed, strung out on cocaine and H, uppers and downers, acid and relaxants, lying and fucking. She wanted death as she wanted a new coat. Make my life whole, she thought. How did Laurie know that Henry would save her life? Henry was startled when he saw her walk down the steps of the Herrig estate. No one was with her. No one helped with the bags. The land had bewitched him. That was it. Laurie lost no time and gathered him into her pocket. Five years later the man called Abel and woman called Lilith would kidnap her. During that time, Henry taught Laurie poetry. He called her God: said she spoke in tongues. He taught what all the others had missed. At the beginning and the end he loved her poetry. He called her poem, Camera of Myself, the perfect poem. He knew because he was jealous of it. He often had said in the past that he could only be in love with a woman if he loved her poetry more than his. Henry loved Laurie. When they were stoned he would call out to Laurie, insist that her name was Christ Tina or Saint Chrissy or Spirit Faith. He said that she was the fourth daughter of God. He would refuse to name the other three when Laurie challenged him. You're all four, he would answer. Five years later, Henry's hand reached up for Laurie. This time, she was not there. Abel held her captive. for more TxM6 Hyperfiction http://www.seanfarragher.com XXX -- Pursuant to the Berne Convention, this work is copyright with all rights reserved by its author unless explicitly indicated. +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | alt.sex.stories.moderated ----- send stories to: | | FAQ: Moderator: | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Discuss this story and others in alt.sex.stories.d, look for subject {ASSD}| |Archive at Hosted by | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+