Every August

“Tell us a story,” said kids.

"I’ll do my best,” said a Zen monk. "I heard this story from a friend in The Windy City and it’s stranger than creative nonfiction. Somebody said August is the cruelest month. The hottest. A local 15-year old girl killed herself yesterday with a single shot to the head. Makes you wonder who, when, where, how and big WHY.

“Last August it was M in Chi town. The perfusionist. She called a wrong number out of desperation and I inherited the inevitable task of talking her through the drama of her life. I answered the phone in Tacoma and kept her on the suicide hot line. It produced basic peace of mind for her. I created poems and an intense piece entitled The Last Several Pages about a book she was reading. She said was going to join a procrastinators club but kept putting it off. She married a real estate salesman. They lived happily ever after.”

"Walking through fire," said Omar the blind author of A Century is Nothing.

"It was a tough one. All about listening, recognizing faces of fear, seeing truth. Letting go. Moving on. Finding balance.

"Another August rolled around. Out of curiosity I called one of those 900 relationship toll-free numbers and left a message: Independent orphan seeks open-minded spirituality adept woman for casual relationship and friendship.

"Did you get any response?" said Omar.

"Three. The Relationship Express hummed along tracks stopping at stations named Loneliness, Emptiness, Friendship, mid-life Crisis, Ticking Time Bombs, Endless Conversations, Rhapsody of the Disenchanted, Still Looking After All These Years, and Where’s The One? It zoomed past scenic views of Depression, Melancholy, Trust, Hope, Anxiety, Doubt, and Fear.

"I transited into the listening role with a couple of new women from Montana facing self-discovery, broken relationships and renewal. We're riding the range, mending fences, and setting up new parameters. Now I love women, yes sirree, well all right then this curious nature of heart-mind making new connections. I’m not saving anybody. All the stations have various levels of becoming. Passengers stuck on personal growth levels bang heads and hearts against illusions grasping their Gestalt, shattering mirrors and delusions. They work out in private emotional, physical, spiritual fitness centers. Levels replace levels. Each level has a center. The vortex is the equilibrium, the source."

"We are works in progress,” said Omar.

"I’m just doing my work.”

“That’s a powerful statement,” said Omar.

"Yes it is. Now I wouldn’t be the first person to say it’s healing work but I’ve learned to listen. Not all the clowns are in the circus. I make it perfectly clear to these kind ladies that I am not in the rescuing business anymore. Nope. No way. Honesty is the best policy and I’m not in the mood to waste our time and collective energies establishing a Heavy Deep & Real relationship. HDR.

"The emotional bottom line is they’re looking for a kind, sensitive man who won’t screw around and fuck up their lives. They’ve been cheated on, dumped on and left taking care of the kids. They need someone who will just listen to them without saying, ‘I can fix it.’ They know what’s what. They know how the world works, how the heart beats. They have their own toolbox. You’ve gotta have a good tool box."

"Tools. Couldn’t agree with you more, " said Omar.

"We’re all passengers on life’s train," said a Zen monk.

It’s the Circus Train!

A fall loon circles above schools of minnows. I stand in Puget Sound shallows as the Florida circus train rolls north. I yell and wave amid swirling dervishes. Rapid tides breath in and out.

“It’s the circus people. Step right up under the big Irish bog top.”

People wave from their moving life station. Tired eyed circus veterans stand next to clowns filming water lap land. They reload memories into instamatics. Midgets peer over the edge of an abyss next to sturdy muscular mustached roustabouts.

Everything they need in their magic portable city is on rolling stock - water trucks, tents, buses and animal cages. A bright red ‘For Sale,’ sign in a train window. Someone decorated a rolling window with a plant garden spilling into water vapor. Another displays a hanging toy elephant.

They live their dream life on rails. Caged people living with watered and fed animals. Routines: set it up, do the show with all the temerity of tenacious trainers, take it down, pack it up, load it up rolling miles this gleaming circus waving hello goodbye as ocean waves a silver fish and one sparkles skyward.

When they reach the Canadian border they reverse engines to roll east through Big Sky country toward winterized Florida.

Rare dawn light passes sleepy stations bathed in dew diamonds.

Riding the rails follows spirit journey.

“The simple way is to listen, detached, share and establish levels of responsibility, limitations and boundaries remaining open to the big picture,” said a monk.

A shadow carrying a candle passed them in the dark.

"Not too much wisdom and not too much compassion, whispered a wandering monk climbing a Cold Mountain toward a bamboo cabin sanctuary.

"Who are you?" said a child.

"I am a wandering monk."

"Where are you going?"

"To gather medicinal herbs for tea."

"Would you care to join us later?"

"Yes. We all have (a) ways to go."

"That’s a powerful story. Your friend is onto something there. She touches what people deal with in their daily lives formless form and emptiness. It’s not fiction. Or is it? Is it a lie layered with your imagination to make it true?”

"Good question. Omar speaks and writes from the heart-mind. There are people who don’t want to hear this stuff, but say hey kid, they can take it or leave it. I’m willing to take her at her word. It’s about the human condition."

"Well said. Life is something to be lived and not talked about. What say, shall we rest here awhile, enjoy some food, companionship and a siesta?"

Everyone gathered in a sacred circle. It was all light in their interior shamanistic landscape.

Weaving A Life, V2

A Child Named Magic

Ready! yelled a girl off stage.

Camera! said a boy.

Action! said a stunt person named Altman in the role of director.

Where are we going? asked a child named Magic.

Down a road, counseled a tribal elder. A long and dangerous road. A path filled with adventures, steps, stumbles, waterfalls, clogged rivers, blue sky, and heavily mined paths. We will face detours, tales, diversions, cliffs, fragile rope bridges, animal habitats and playful parallel narratives. We will explore rivers, valleys, mountains, passes, and edges of consciousness beyond anything we’ve known or dared to dream.

We'll learn from extraordinary people, explore distant places, smell new fragrances acknowledging our authenticity, said a woman storyteller.

Burmese writer in exile

*

We'll study 26,000 year old paintings carved on stone walls, travel into children’s voices and become old bleached bones of our ancestors, said a child. We'll live in Spanish crypts with names, dates, family histories chiseled in sharp gray mountain rocks that will cut you like a knife. Our blood will coagulate in time’s river.

You will see the word eternity scrawled with ink on a stained white napkin held up to a forty-watt light bulb in Cafe Paradiso by an old toothless man with a knit cap pulled down over his eyes. He will burn this word, said an elder.

Tribal voices spoke.

Think of it as a small sacrifice, an offering, a form of suffering.

The river of life will wake you up, said an elder. You go up river and reach pools. They are as quiet as your mind in deep meditation. No people. Nada. Zip. Zero Homo Sapiens. You are water, stones, vegetation, soft green moss, animal skulls, blue sky, nature and sound. The sound is water. It is soft. It is all you know.

You sit in the middle of everything pure and simple. It is all you will ever need. Water is the first thing an infant needs and the last thing an adult requests. To satisfy thirst for your dying father you will smash ice with tools. You will inhale his death and exhale his life. He was appointed to have you. You selected him to pay for their sins, to accept the responsibility of their life.

You will memorize every silent sound and carry it with you. It is light and very portable. It will divide and multiply its flowing vibration around rocks in the stream. You are a rock and a stream. Amplification of clear water sound is a single bird throated song. Short immediate. It is heavy deep and real. HDR baby.

It will wake you up, as I said. You pay attention. You fly away and we will never see you again. We know where you are and see you’re safe, blessed by the sound, pulse and flow being part of the river. Its magic spirit is strong. It’s flowing through civilizations, its adventure down, down, down. It’s distributing itself along the way. The stream is never ending, never beginning. As above so below.

It is the stream of life.

Listen to the energies. They will swallow you. You will be absorbed into the flow and you will be still. Stones sing with water. They sing their softness, their wildness, purity unimpeded, reflecting deep pools below open shadows. You are the flow.

We move forward. Living in the past is time consuming. Nothing behind. Everything ahead. We pay attention. The road gives us our fate. Fire begins with one ember.

Funny, said a child. Someone along the way said it wasn’t the mountain they thought was difficult but the pebble in their shoe.

True. We will meet people and establish a mutual form of simple heart-mind language.

Is it paved? asked one, this so called road of language?

With good intentions, phrasal verbs, grammar, and simple present continuous obscure contextual meaning, answered one.

I’ll believe it when I see it, said someone in shadows.

Is that a detour sign up ahead? said a forward observer. He was so far forward it scared some of the tribe. He was out there, testing frequency shifts.

They suspected he had a psychic ability to see stuff that hadn’t happened yet and they were at a loss, trying to figure it out. They had to trust him. They released their fear, healthy doubt and uncertainty. It was beyond, well beyond their comprehension. He mumbled things like, You can’t step in the same river twice, sharing stories, histories, legends myths, dreams, and illusions.

Omar, Ahmed, and tribal survivors didn’t know if he just made the stuff up out of sheer boredom or if it was the truth of history. Much to their amazement while others carried a lot of stuff like emotional baggage, fear and genetic uncertainty, he kept it simple.

His pen sketched and scribbled notes. Pencils and colors danced across Moleskine pages. They noticed in their simplicity and sympathy he carried a kid’s watercolor set. He used river streams and tributaries to mix paints. He splashed pigments left, right and center.

He loved making Fibonacci spirals. They couldn’t figure him out with their subjective abstract sense data perception tools so they relied on trust, instinct, blind faith and a crazy thing called love. Love, a blind whore with a mental disease and no sense of humor drove bus #11.

Passion created and destroyed.

They were blessed by their limitations. He used life to create art and used art to criticize life.

Many adults in the tribe being programmed and conditioned cynical skeptics didn’t get it. Indigo kids were clued in to his natural wild mind and trusted him. Implicitly. Their collective language transcended words. There were 6,912 known living languages on Earth and he spoke every one.

He was cognizant a spoken language on the planet perished every two weeks.

We have a huge responsibility here. No language no culture, whispered Ahmed. Culture is what you are and nature is what you can be.

They sang oral traditions.

They experienced seasons, celebrations, ceremonies, rites, and magic.

They created and exchanged clan and tribal myths. Children heard, memorized, chanted, and recited songs of their ancestors.

Weaving A Life, V4

Shit Detector

Lucky explored cobbled Turkmen streets alleys and dead ends. Mothers buried in headscarves observing street etiquette extended manicured necks beyond balconies. They swept, mopped, stirred apartment dust, shaking molecules over blood stained escarpments.

They married consecrated relatives during fifty-minute Encounters designed to use the target language in the context of remembering. The thrill of remembering in Technicolor imprinted new linguistic impressions on synapses watching Pay For View.

Learning is easy. Remembering is difficult. Use it or lose it.

Silent ivory piano keys waited for inspiration’s fingers. Feeling tension, point, counterpoint, hammer strings and resonance, chromatic silence whispered, do not go gentle into the good night. Rage against dying light. Solitary notes of forgotten strumpets wailed across an abyss ignoring civilization’s discontent.

Creased faces ironed red roses petals. Faces eating masks embedded themselves on blank pages in Zeynep’s black notebook. “I don’t know which of us wrote this,” she said.

Two shy Turkish women with beautiful faces and humongous rear end collisions after eating a full course meal of self-pity and loathing buried ancestors in a tomato based culture.

Water exploded off iridescent pools as happy hour birds swimming nowhere in particular heard homo-sapiens shift erotic labia gears while assembling French cars at an eco-friendly green plant in a Bursa industrial zone.

“Were you punished for being a dreamer?” said Zeynep.

Ankara

“No, I survived the tyranny. My family understood my peripatetic nature. They respected my need for solitude, creativity and independence to a point. I received sadistic whippings with a fishing pole by my polio-diseased mother trapped in her karmic wheelchair and beaten with a leather barber’s strap by father for insolvent insubordination. Welt city. He made me eat dirt when he came home from work if the floor wasn’t clean enough. Now you know why I love linguistic gardening. I shut down my feelings. Mother and father demonstrated hard love in a perverse abusive way.”

“I see,” said a blind beggar.

“Wipe your glasses with what you know,” said James Joyce, arranging seven words..

“I was born to be a poet like a bird is born to be a musician,” said Lucky.

“Sing high, sing low, sweet chariot.”

“Brilliant.”

“In finishing school we learned to say fascinating instead of bullshit,” said Zeynep.

“You have a well developed built-in shit detector.”

“That’s the fucking truth. Everyone needs a good shit detector like writers and Cambodian/Laos landmine survivors. Truth is a value-based meaning factor. Can you create believable documentary fiction from memory?”

“It appears. So.”

Lucky and Zeynep passed an imaginary double identity theory at Oz-man Homogenized Gazing Metro station.

Two gravediggers in long black overcoats carrying umbrella projectiles stepping into unknown futures stabbed cement in cadence.

Weaving A Life, V4

Taos

Other looked on with pure heart awareness. A woman named Raven (Corvus Corex) shared a talk story.

One day I returned to the Taos Pueblo. It was over 100.

Dry dusty silent heat.

“Find something that speaks to you,” said a Tiwa Native American woman.

I walked past their cemetery where 150 women and children died when the church was burned during a Hispanic and Pueblo revolt in Taos after the American occupation in 1846 by U.S. forces. Wooden crosses scarred by sun, heat and dust stood in haphazard rows on brown ground. Plastic flowers. Names of children and elders chiseled in wood. A black and white rosary draped on a small cross marked a burial ground.

“Due to shortage of space we bury the new dead on top of the old dead,” said the Tiwa woman.

Hard soil. Wooden crosses stood at angles in the heat. White black and brown crosses faded in sun. Names, ages, children, parents, flowers, and rosaries slept inside a small adobe wall. The old bell collected dust in the burned out charred remains of the church steeple.

The screams of the trapped women and children echoed as the attackers poured their modern civilization of guns and religion into the church. One moment it was quiet and then you heard children screaming and there was no place for them to go, no chance.

“We left it that way,” the Tiwa girl said to pale faced visitors standing silent seeing. She disappeared, a vapor of spirit, a reminder of where they were and how they’d come to this place in the dust below sacred mountains and sky.

Of all the pueblos in New Mexico the Taos Pueblo has the most magic, the deepest significance. Power. It sits on hundreds of thousands of acres, all sacred Indian ground, sacred forested mountains, with sacred rivers and lakes. Adobe brown buildings stand stacked on top of each other to the sky. Blue doors. Wooden ladders. Red chilies hang in the sun. It is a hieroglyphic of habitats of ancient homes, fortress and sacred living space.

A young brown eyed Tiwa woman explained their life; language, the small adobe cooking kilns for baking breads and pies, how they mixed straw and mud forming adobe buildings, maintained dwellings and the number of people living on the pueblo and those on connected reservations.

“A matriarchal society. No women sit on the fifty member tribal council. Tiwa is the language on the Pueblo and a pure oral transmission. Nothing is written down. Sacred words. Tiwa means - wee-who,” she said.

“It means when you give, expect nothing in return. When you give you open that corridor of energy for yourself and your kind or your people, your vibrations, and it is filled with goodness. Great powers or awareness are within it so that it descends upon you and places in you whatever that gift is that you’re supposed to get. That’s what giving does. It awakens placement. It brings down clarity. We are people from the Source - the center of the circle of light. The No-Form creates the form. In the Tiwa language there are no nouns or pronouns. Things have no distinct concrete existence. Everything is in motion and seen in it’s relationship to other motions.

“The power is not in words but in sounds made in saying and pronouncing words. Each of us is a ceremony, a vibration of All-That-Is. We are the vast self.”

Inside a pueblo room, a woman called Sunflower painted intricate black and white spider web designs on her pots. Her gift streamed in and out weaving geometric colors. Her brush dipped into black ink, her left hand inside the pot turned it as she etched a black line. Diamonds, circles, rectangles, a sun eye, and sun god danced black on white.

I wandered across a small stream flowing from sacred mountains. It carried water to nourish the pueblo. Healing liquid. Water flowed during the 4th year of a ten-year drought.

I visited with men and women selling turquoise, beads, arrows, water, silver bracelets, postcards, drums, pottery, sharing stories. A man and his drums made from animal skins. Beadwork. Blue sky stones.

A brown dog slept in the dust of midday sun. Crude serviceable wooden ladders extended from earth to adobe roofs to clear blue sky. Indian women sat talking under Ramada lattice poled roofs. They waited for tourists asking new questions about old things hoping to sell their work.

A tired woman from Miami and three kids passed. Blond kids wearing floppy khaki hats carried water bottles. Having the time of their lives they shuffled boots in dirt studying ants. They’d never been this far west before.

A Tiwa man told his story about hunting. Furs and pelts hung on his hitching post walls. It was cool inside his place.

He wore a t-shirt of an American flag wrapped around an Indian on horseback shooting a buffalo, “Hunting, The American Way.”

“Yes,” said his long dark face and sad eyes, “I took my boys, when they were young enough, up into the mountains, the sacred mountains here and taught them how to hunt.”

They hunted bear, cougar, rabbit, fox and elk.

“A bear. How do you kill a bear?”

“In the lung. When they charge you hold your ground. One arrow in the lung. It stops them immediately.”

“Do they fight you, do they run?”

“No, they do not fight you. They stop. They die.”

An elk head with many points looked down from his wall. Fur huge brown eyes.

“And the elk?” 

“One arrow brought him down,” he said, pointing to his kill.

“How close did you get?”

“Ten feet. We tracked him for three days. We studied him well. I taught all my boys the art, the skill of the hunt. We started early that day, it was day three, we camped we tracked him for three days. We knew where he grazed, where he went for water, where he slept.”

The elk was big and eyed silent. No startled look. Black nose for smelling down wind, up wind, all the sacred mountain winds. Ten point antlers streaked with brown maturity.

“How did your boys do?”

“They learned well. I started them young. We all do but not everyone here learns as early as my boys. I learned from my father and he learned from his father. We took our packhorses left the pueblo and moved into the mountains, high in the mountains. We camped by the rivers and tracked their prints, their habits their patterns. Three days was all it took.”

“It’s the simplicity of it all. It’s the spirit of the animal isn’t it? You know their energy.”

“You become one with the animal. You become the animal.”

His bow and arrows hung on the white wall. Rock flints. Sharpened points.

“Then what happened?”

“On the day of the kill we were up before dawn. We broke camp. We moved to the river. The elk came down to drink and didn’t smell us. We were in the rushes, hidden. We were ten feet away. One arrow,” he said, pointing to the elk on his wall, “there, in the neck. He fell fast. We used everything.”

“My boys learned well. I have three of them and now they are grown and my work here is done.”

Weaving A Life (V4)

Shanghai Interrogation

The boy soldier was silent.

“What’s that for?” said the female Public Security Bureau official pointing to the typewriter on the table. 

“It is for writing letters.”

They have reservations about letters. Letters, they wonder, looking at each other with jaundiced eyes. Black eyes streaked with exploding blood vessels full of fear and suspicion.

Letters indicate political insurrection, dissent, forced labor, mandatory abortions, propaganda, civil unrest, turmoil, revolutions, tanks in the street, torture, solitary confinement and executions.

They see party leaders wringing pale hands pacing forbidden cities past stone lions, conducting top-secret meetings trying to figure out what to do, how to put a face on all this. How to manage and manipulate dis-information rivers controlling floods.

The boy soldier and his comrade save face by maintaining blank, stoic expressions. They suspect I have connections.

Maybe I am a plant, a party member sent to check their unit. Assigned to monitor their methods, their questioning tactics, their subtle use of intimidation, their implications to control and influence people’s lives with fear for the good of the state.

For all they know I am a subversive. A word terrorist.

“Letters. We will keep an eye on this one,” she said to the soldier.

They're thinking: We have ways to make you talk. They don’t say this but I know how it works. I’ve read Tu Fu and Li Po's work. I’ve digested their bone dust history through dynasties.

“Yes, well, we’ll see,” she said. “We need to remind you to remember this very carefully.” Her voice gained an octave.

“The bent nail gets hammered down!

“Just because you speak our language doesn’t mean you are special. We can revoke your visa and force you to pay a fine. We can put you away where no one will ever find you. We will discuss your situation with our leaders. We have driven the talented people abroad. Some went into hiding but we know where they are and we find them. We always do. We find them in their homes, schools, and jobs. Some accepted positions at foreign universities where they form counter-revolutionary groups bent on overthrowing the state by writing articles, stories and books critical of their motherland.”

Her face resembled nuclear fission as she pounded the table. “They are a disgrace! They are running dogs!”

“I see,” I said, dropping my eyes saving face.

Downstairs, my warrior team armed with tools made on slave labor production lines financed with western capital, are busy. They laughed, sang and danced knocking holes in theories, lies and deceptions. They built facades, charades, fast food outlets, dream machines, and ignominious pious grandiose standards of living faster than joint venture ink dries on thin rice paper.

The authorities are momentarily appeased.     

I understand they are following orders.

To the letter.

I am well aware, remembering letters, if they execute me with a single bullet to the back of my head my family will have to pay for the ammunition. My family will be very surprised when they get a bill in a letter from kow-tow authorities for a round. They will have to buy a round and will never meet the last of the big time spenders.

To make matters worse, the authorities, after executing me, will disembowel me and recycle internal organs seeing profits to be made from a used, well traveled perfectly functioning heart, lungs, kidneys, pancreas, eyes, ears, hair, genitals, spleen and assorted by-products. It will be a beautiful fucking mess.

First, they will need impossible to find International Reply Coupons and second, the post office glue made from horses is a disaster. Gets all over the wooden counters and fingers of rude, impatient people because they are slobs. After smearing glue everywhere they push and shove toward the sullen postal clerk thrusting mail in her face.

If she didn’t have guaranteed sticky white rice three times a day my grand inquisitor would be home knitting a sweater and gossiping with neighbors. They’d be discussing vegetables, weather and roving demolition crews with bulldozers wondering when, not if, their ancient hutong neighborhood would come tumbling down and they’d be forced to move to bland housing tracts on the edge of the Gobi desert.

They will be the last to know. Earth trembled as blades sliced dwellings in half sending clouds of green tiled dust spiraling into a polluted sky.

Not only will the officials need IRC coupons to bill my next-of-kin for the bullet, they will require hand carved marble chops with ideograms and delicious red ink to verify and administer their official proclamations and imperial judgments.

They will chop and stamp my passport until it bleeds. EXPIRED. They will chop every single page.

They are important cogs in the wheel of the law grinding themselves down into the dust of ages.

Their looms spin out broken threads faster than they can weave them into their tapestry. If they make one mistake they will answer to the authorities.

They examine my passport with filthy greasy fingers. They turn pages, looking at visa stamps, examining strange forbidden exotic designs. They see rainbows and a rising phoenix. They hear drums from Amazonian rain forests while savoring fruits from lush gardens filled with crow and raven songs. Eagle feathers drift out of the pages.

On one page they explore meadows illustrated with roses. Thorns dive out of the sky piercing their hearts. A river of blood from Tibet breaks through dams flooding their ancestor’s graves. Names, histories and corpses float toward Seas of Memory.

Turning another page they scamper on frayed rope bridges above raging gorges screaming, “Help us. Save us!”

They keep going. The other side of the gorge is dark and dangerous, full of Black Mambas, vipers, pythons and fear bred demons slithering out of the ground, evaporating into rivers of sound, twisting forms dancing through their eyes, weaving into their heart.

Blind, they struggle through fog and hail storms into blizzards toward mountains. They are stranded inside the discursive circular logic drowning in a river of tears inside a river of dreams on the River of Time.

“We’ve gone too far,” the boy yells to the PSB woman. “Turn back!”

“It’s too late.” They began seeing with their ears and hearing with their eyes.

Turning a leaf they dived into the ocean of their love below the surface of appearances.

In deep turquoise waters they discovered a secret spirit cave pulsating with a heartbeat and magical sources of inspiration and beauty.

She handed the passport to the boy. “What do you make of this?”

He took off his military party hat and scratched his head.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Appears to be some fable, a fairy tale, a mysterious rambling incoherent story. Never seen anything like this before.”

His comrade grabbed it back.

“Yes, strange indeed,” she whispered. “Where did you get this?” She held up a page of a butterfly sitting on a pure white lotus flower growing from mud.     

“My girlfriend sent it to me. It’s a dream.”

“Where did she get it?”

 “Along the Tao.”

 “What Tao?”

 “She collects dreams from people along her journey.”

 “Where is she? Laos? Bhutan? Burma? Tibet?”

The interrogator is suspicious. She knows primitive mountain people are animists, superstitious types. Their Dongba ancestors in Yunnan created a written language 1,000 years ago using pictographs and worship nature of all things. They have powers like levitation, lowering their body temperature, running for miles above the ground, transcending their physical bodies.

“She is everywhere.”

“I don’t believe you."

She skipped a few pages and started reading.

“They floated through caves into Greek and Roman civilizations. Inside a huge cavern flooded with celestial starlight were halls filled with world art. It was arranged in a form of a historical magic time circle. They admired fabulous paintings of strange beauty. They cried tears of happiness. Their tears created the beginning of the ocean.”

She handed the passport back.

“It appears authentic. But, I must say, parts of it are rubbish. Pure imagination. Your girlfriend will have to account for this. She’s crazy and needs medication. She needs to be somewhere safe for the sake of her emotional health. We have ways of dealing with these people. She’s clearly a threat against state-controlled propaganda laws and social stability. We can’t allow lunatics to just go roaming around the country writing this stuff. She could be in serious danger.”

She rattled on in her well-rehearsed monotone.

“There are immediate restrictions on your travel outside Shanghai. You are required to check with the local Public Security Bureau if you want to leave yourself, if you need to transcend this impermanent state of being.”

“Yes, I know. Existence is suffering. Thank you. I am rainbow of Light. Will you have more tea?”

“Yes.” She handed me a cracked cup. I poured tea.

She doesn’t want to lose face with this foreigner. Not in front of her comrade. He might talk at headquarters. Her superiors will question him. Her comrade is young and vulnerable to new ideas. Like free will and free choice.

She’s afraid if he has the chance to escape he will visit new lands, meet people, see their art and absorb their music and stories and be free.

She finished her tea gave me a withering look and left.

Before leaving the boy soldier ripped Psyche out and put it in his pocket. He smiled.

“You have been very cooperative. We will keep an eye on you.”

Weaving A Life V4