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Here’s the situation: I’m fucked and stuck two stories up over Southside Terminus on a stalled Northbound trapped just out of the West End Station. Thirty minutes stalled now with the power dead and the vents silent. A steady recycling of our collective sighs have rendered the cab with an atmosphere registering somewhere between a three day whiskey haze and a subterranean lizard aquarium. Reek of cheap perfume, sweat stains and stale desperation. The crowd’s getting restless. Angry restless. Jail break restless. Human sacrifice restless. We’re roughly five minutes away from the Social Contract being torn up into toilet paper. That and to top it all off - I’m sitting with a ground zero view of a psychic astral brawl between Brother Mystery and these three Mormon Missionaries.
Let’s rewind back a bit.
Brother Mystery is standing a few feet to my left at the Oakland City Station platform. He’s an ancient looking black man, bone thin with a bowtie version of a Reservoir Dogs suit sagging off a stick-brittle frame. The right lapel of his jacket decorated with two pins. One a button proclaiming in bold, white letters – “BLACK MAN! ORIGINAL MAN!” The other a Masonic square and compass deal. A skull cap the crimson of a Moroccan dusk was screwed on to hover over a pair of smoke white brows raised in perpetual apprehension. He gave off a vague scent of sandalwood and his gaunt chiseled expression seemed constantly on the precipice of cracking into a smile.
My guess: He was either a retired mystical detective or dressed so to strike that very impression on a casual glance.
A few yards away, over by the stairway to the platform leading up from the bus terminal below, huddled the three Mormon Missionaries. They had the whole routine down pat: Short sleeved white button shirts – starched sharp with creases you could cut your finger off of. Black ties that seemed to suck the color out of the air around them and drained it down into matching black slacks. White boys all; each wearing the identical glazed over ghoul gaze of a Lovecraftian cultist or hardcore gamer geek. They couldn’t have added up to more than three hundred pounds together, not counting the twenty pounds worth of haircut vibing pedo creepy even at this modest distance. A smug murk lingered around them and a stack of narcotic grade white Indian angel propaganda was tucked under their arms.
One look and you could see they were selling wolf tickets Brother Mystery’s way. They giggled openly with coy pointed fingers. They whispered schoolyard shit talk and puffed up with third grade bravado whenever they thought they had a chance audience off a passing commuter.
Brother Mystery, however, didn’t seem to take no notice of the boys. He just stared down the empty tracks before us with the detached patience of a mountain; until the train pulled six minutes ahead of schedule and five seconds after the muttered prayer he offered in a language I’d never heard before.
When we all finally boarded the early Northbound and took our seats, the Missionaries made sure they hovered by the doors just a sneer’s distance from Brother Mystery, who sat directly in the seat across from me.
We rolled along in silence to West End. After the passengers boarded and exited in a somnambulant trickle, one of the Missionaries, looking to me like some reject from God’s-own IT department, read aloud the button on Brother Mystery’s lapel. The result predictably sent the three boys into a cackle of raw guffaws.
Brother Mystery snorted and looked up at the boys. He uttered a word softer than an atheist’s prayer and the train immediately ground to a halt. The interior lights of the cab flickered and died. The mounted TV monitors burst into static before fading to blank. The windows fogged up within seconds to obscure the sprawling warehouse view outside. Everyone groaned and slumped into their seats with defeated acceptance.
Now maybe it was on account of me being as high as a Georgia Pine at the time, but suddenly I began seeing two scenes at once.
One scene - normal. A moderately packed cab on a stalled train. Passengers buried in private reflections, drifting across textual distraction or with attention mediated by handheld screens.
The other scene – ??? . The interior of the cab had been stretched out and pinched off by two opposing fractal worm holes into the dimensions of a tunnel. The walls of the tube I sat within swirled and bled into competing shades of ultraviolet and infrared. Lava lamp Rorschach patterns melted and shifted with sentient silver and golden amoebic blobs. Around me everyone was reduced to dull orange silhouettes with faint chakra orbs hovering in the psycho pollution of their lives.
Everyone except Brother Mystery and the now theriomorphic Mormon Missionaries. The one in the middle now had the head of a rabid jackal. The one on the right the head of a neck puffing frog. The one on the left bore the indifferent gaze of an Abyssinian cat. Somehow though, even here on one of the astral planes, they couldn’t shake off those horrible haircuts.
The three demon missionaries spread out and ambled gunfighter slow towards the sitting patiently Brother Mystery. The jackal headed one reached up to the knot of his tie and snatched it off his chest. The tie changed within his fist to a sword of tangible shadow energy that crackled steadily with the drone of a dying star. Frog Face and the Abyssinian follow suit.
And the whole time they’re approaching I do my best to look away, to close my eyes, to dry gulp some air down a throat constricted with terror. But sweet Mama Buddha I just can’t for the life of me. I’m transfixed and held rapt. Whatever they are, they are of the genus of the rush hour car wreck, possessing the same blood as the dead body waiting patiently in the evening news, and as such one cannot help but to not look away.
Jackal Head speaks with words that sizzle and hiss within my thoughts: “You’ve had a good run, old man… longer than most. But nobody escapes forever and we will have our due.”
Brother Mystery, who I clock off the periphery of my third eye, remains seated and when the three stand hovering menacingly around him, it is only then that he unleashes the onslaught of his smile.
The smile is faint, the condensation of a lover’s breath across the morning air and the memory flicker of a distant childhood summer. The smile though charges him with an air of preternatural dignity. At his neck, the bowtie glows with the brilliance of an August afternoon sun. Above the bowtie’s knot a golden loop appears and below it a shimmering base spreads out to a base hovering just over his sternum. The tie now ankh burns with eldritch energy of god’s lost but not forgotten.
The three demon missionaries recoil back, shielding their eyes with their shadow swords from the illumination of the ankh. One growls, one hisses, one ribbits. Brother Mystery remains seated. Hands resting in lap and body straightened in relaxed attention. His features shift. The hands become paws. A lion’s torso grows out of his back even as his lap vanishes under a sand swept dune. His visage becomes consumed within a shell of dusty stone until a skull-capped sphinx remains in his place, sitting regally before the demons.
The sphinx rose up on its hind legs and the dimensions of the tunnel rumbled and expanded around his suddenly towering height. The sphinx roared – a blast of Handel rapture and thunderous glory. The three demon missionaries slinked back. Jackal Head telepathically shouted over the din… splashing my skull with sinister hieroglyphic graffiti that burned and vanished across my thoughts.
Everything goes white… and when I open my eyes the train’s moving again and rattling its way on to Garnett Station. I blink my eyes into focus and everything is back regular old mono reality. Brother Mystery remains seated across the aisle from me, while the Moroni Geek Squad were nowhere to be found.
Brother Mystery got off at the next station and stood there patiently at the platform for the next southbound, which I did not doubt would arrive whenever he damn well pleased. The doors shut on the train, outside of my window view, the passengers on the receding platform parted around Brother Mystery…
… who looked up over at me and winked before the train pulled me into the darkness of the tunnel.
Let’s rewind back a bit.
Brother Mystery is standing a few feet to my left at the Oakland City Station platform. He’s an ancient looking black man, bone thin with a bowtie version of a Reservoir Dogs suit sagging off a stick-brittle frame. The right lapel of his jacket decorated with two pins. One a button proclaiming in bold, white letters – “BLACK MAN! ORIGINAL MAN!” The other a Masonic square and compass deal. A skull cap the crimson of a Moroccan dusk was screwed on to hover over a pair of smoke white brows raised in perpetual apprehension. He gave off a vague scent of sandalwood and his gaunt chiseled expression seemed constantly on the precipice of cracking into a smile.
My guess: He was either a retired mystical detective or dressed so to strike that very impression on a casual glance.
A few yards away, over by the stairway to the platform leading up from the bus terminal below, huddled the three Mormon Missionaries. They had the whole routine down pat: Short sleeved white button shirts – starched sharp with creases you could cut your finger off of. Black ties that seemed to suck the color out of the air around them and drained it down into matching black slacks. White boys all; each wearing the identical glazed over ghoul gaze of a Lovecraftian cultist or hardcore gamer geek. They couldn’t have added up to more than three hundred pounds together, not counting the twenty pounds worth of haircut vibing pedo creepy even at this modest distance. A smug murk lingered around them and a stack of narcotic grade white Indian angel propaganda was tucked under their arms.
One look and you could see they were selling wolf tickets Brother Mystery’s way. They giggled openly with coy pointed fingers. They whispered schoolyard shit talk and puffed up with third grade bravado whenever they thought they had a chance audience off a passing commuter.
Brother Mystery, however, didn’t seem to take no notice of the boys. He just stared down the empty tracks before us with the detached patience of a mountain; until the train pulled six minutes ahead of schedule and five seconds after the muttered prayer he offered in a language I’d never heard before.
When we all finally boarded the early Northbound and took our seats, the Missionaries made sure they hovered by the doors just a sneer’s distance from Brother Mystery, who sat directly in the seat across from me.
We rolled along in silence to West End. After the passengers boarded and exited in a somnambulant trickle, one of the Missionaries, looking to me like some reject from God’s-own IT department, read aloud the button on Brother Mystery’s lapel. The result predictably sent the three boys into a cackle of raw guffaws.
Brother Mystery snorted and looked up at the boys. He uttered a word softer than an atheist’s prayer and the train immediately ground to a halt. The interior lights of the cab flickered and died. The mounted TV monitors burst into static before fading to blank. The windows fogged up within seconds to obscure the sprawling warehouse view outside. Everyone groaned and slumped into their seats with defeated acceptance.
Now maybe it was on account of me being as high as a Georgia Pine at the time, but suddenly I began seeing two scenes at once.
One scene - normal. A moderately packed cab on a stalled train. Passengers buried in private reflections, drifting across textual distraction or with attention mediated by handheld screens.
The other scene – ??? . The interior of the cab had been stretched out and pinched off by two opposing fractal worm holes into the dimensions of a tunnel. The walls of the tube I sat within swirled and bled into competing shades of ultraviolet and infrared. Lava lamp Rorschach patterns melted and shifted with sentient silver and golden amoebic blobs. Around me everyone was reduced to dull orange silhouettes with faint chakra orbs hovering in the psycho pollution of their lives.
Everyone except Brother Mystery and the now theriomorphic Mormon Missionaries. The one in the middle now had the head of a rabid jackal. The one on the right the head of a neck puffing frog. The one on the left bore the indifferent gaze of an Abyssinian cat. Somehow though, even here on one of the astral planes, they couldn’t shake off those horrible haircuts.
The three demon missionaries spread out and ambled gunfighter slow towards the sitting patiently Brother Mystery. The jackal headed one reached up to the knot of his tie and snatched it off his chest. The tie changed within his fist to a sword of tangible shadow energy that crackled steadily with the drone of a dying star. Frog Face and the Abyssinian follow suit.
And the whole time they’re approaching I do my best to look away, to close my eyes, to dry gulp some air down a throat constricted with terror. But sweet Mama Buddha I just can’t for the life of me. I’m transfixed and held rapt. Whatever they are, they are of the genus of the rush hour car wreck, possessing the same blood as the dead body waiting patiently in the evening news, and as such one cannot help but to not look away.
Jackal Head speaks with words that sizzle and hiss within my thoughts: “You’ve had a good run, old man… longer than most. But nobody escapes forever and we will have our due.”
Brother Mystery, who I clock off the periphery of my third eye, remains seated and when the three stand hovering menacingly around him, it is only then that he unleashes the onslaught of his smile.
The smile is faint, the condensation of a lover’s breath across the morning air and the memory flicker of a distant childhood summer. The smile though charges him with an air of preternatural dignity. At his neck, the bowtie glows with the brilliance of an August afternoon sun. Above the bowtie’s knot a golden loop appears and below it a shimmering base spreads out to a base hovering just over his sternum. The tie now ankh burns with eldritch energy of god’s lost but not forgotten.
The three demon missionaries recoil back, shielding their eyes with their shadow swords from the illumination of the ankh. One growls, one hisses, one ribbits. Brother Mystery remains seated. Hands resting in lap and body straightened in relaxed attention. His features shift. The hands become paws. A lion’s torso grows out of his back even as his lap vanishes under a sand swept dune. His visage becomes consumed within a shell of dusty stone until a skull-capped sphinx remains in his place, sitting regally before the demons.
The sphinx rose up on its hind legs and the dimensions of the tunnel rumbled and expanded around his suddenly towering height. The sphinx roared – a blast of Handel rapture and thunderous glory. The three demon missionaries slinked back. Jackal Head telepathically shouted over the din… splashing my skull with sinister hieroglyphic graffiti that burned and vanished across my thoughts.
Everything goes white… and when I open my eyes the train’s moving again and rattling its way on to Garnett Station. I blink my eyes into focus and everything is back regular old mono reality. Brother Mystery remains seated across the aisle from me, while the Moroni Geek Squad were nowhere to be found.
Brother Mystery got off at the next station and stood there patiently at the platform for the next southbound, which I did not doubt would arrive whenever he damn well pleased. The doors shut on the train, outside of my window view, the passengers on the receding platform parted around Brother Mystery…
… who looked up over at me and winked before the train pulled me into the darkness of the tunnel.
