Climbing the Spiral Mountain

Preface

TO WRITE EFFECTIVELY means that you must write what is true. Even in fiction. When you write what is true, people get confused. They are wondering what is true in the sense that it actually happened to someone, and what is true in the sense that the emotions of what occurs in the fiction are true for both the character and the reader. But it does not mean that everything written is true in the life of the author.

An author creates a fabric with threads drawn from personal experience, paying attention to the people around him, his dreams, and the simple process of trying to create the color or texture needed for the dramatic construct.

No one in this book is a real person. It is not even me. Some of them, including Wade Hudson, are spun from threads of words I had heard someone speak in the process of my own journey. Some are a blend of many people I have known. Those who are still living have had those threads confirmed and permitted me to use them. Those who have passed or are long out of my life have been fictionalized with love and respect.

The whole book is fiction, but what it talks about is not.

I began writing this book in the Spring of 1989 after a disastrous attempt at re-location from the city that had been my home for more than twenty-five years. I did not transplant well. It was not the fault of the city I had chosen.

So I was allowed to return to the place that had been my home for so long and to stay in the back room at a friend’s house. While there, I created a strange little picture in the chunky graphic style of Mac Paint®. To the painting I added a piece of doggerel to express something about what I was experiencing.

I wrote the first scene, from the diner to the dream at the reservation gas station, in one pass. I let my host read it and it had more of an effect than I had expected. It felt true, even though none of the events of that first scene were real in the historical sense. I had never lost my memory.

At the time I started the book, no one from my family lived in the North Carolina Piedmont, and my father was alive and kicking in the desert of California.

This was not an easy book to write. Realistically, it took about three years, but those three were spread out over more than twenty-five years. I outlined a grand storyline that would take my character on a voyage like Odysseus, trying to find his way home. The original outline involved twenty-three days of story. I would periodically pick up the book and start to write again but would often find that I was just spewing words to say I was working on it. I was not serving the book. Or, I would become irritated with the issues within myself that the book was raising.

I would abandon it again. For years at a time.

But something changed in 2011 when I picked it up again with a commitment to take it to the end. And the book began to wrestle with me.

It no longer felt like I was writing a novel; I was reporting on a world that only I could see. It was like peering through a knothole in a fence and trying to tell the people on my side what was happening on the other side. Characters appeared and demanded their moments. Characters I had thought would appear with their messages instead vanished to become ghosts in the narration. Events happened that I did not expect and they changed the progression of the story.

My life began to twist to match the book. Twelve years after I had started it, my sister moved to Raleigh, North Carolina. On the Piedmont. Two years later, my father followed her. And, when I was looking at making a serious change in my life, I was invited to come to Raleigh to stay with him.

I was suddenly living in the place where the backstory of the book began twelve years earlier – when no one from my family lived here. I went through many changes that had been predicted by the early chapters of the story. My father became ill and I became his responsible person - his Power of Attorney – for the last six years of his life.

His death was not the end of his story, nor mine. In the process, for the first time in my life, I discovered what it was to feel at home. And it was not because of Raleigh, but because of a change within me. I now knew how to feel ‘at home,’ and I settled into my new life with a sense of purpose and direction I had never known.

Because of the general awareness of the Twelve Step nature of the novel, I began to question whether I should publish it under my own name. I toyed with the idea of using the pseudonym of Dean Wilson out of respect for Bill Wilson. But friends, including several other writers, challenged me to claim my work with my own name.

This is my first book as Joseph Kessler Adams instead of the previous Joseph K. Adams. It is a unique name and seemed right.

I had written a fantasy novel that was sold in 1977 to DAW Books, but because I was a stereotypical drunken author, I annoyed the editor enough that he returned the book to me and told me to keep the advance. It was worth it to never hear from me again.

I wrote for years under other names. I was José Velasquez for a bi-lingual magazine in Los Angeles, and as Dakkar II, in homage to Jules Verne the godfather to us all, for some old hippy underground papers in the South Bay. When I began writing for the stage and tried to join the Writer’s Guild, they had too many Joe Adams in various configurations. So I became Joseph S. Coleman (drawn from my Grandmother’s maiden name and a new middle name. Steven, the chosen) and under that name I worked for the Cal-EPA HHAD/PETS (Health Hazard Assessment Division, Pesticides and Environmental Toxicology Section) in Berkeley, and I fell into a gig as the network tech for GBN (Global Business Network). At that point I also published in role playing games, mostly for a fantasy world called Skyrealms of Jorune. For name changes, California operated under a ‘consistent usage’ law which required no court appearance. But when I tried to reclaim my birth name in Raleigh, I had to go through the courts, with public posting and a period of review.

I was able to let my father know that I had re-taken my birth name, which made him happy for a few minutes. He became lost in his dementia based on hydrocephaly, and I became his agent with the VA, his banks, his lawyer, his doctors... in a role I never thought I would have. And when he was present, he helped me as far as he could. A role I never thought he would take.

The book progressed and progress, however glacial, is still progress. The book began to direct itself to me. I had to admit the book had better balance on itself than I had shown. I began to listen to the book’s dictation. It would not be twenty-three days, it said, it would be eleven days. Wade would discover uncomfortable, possibly evil, bits of his own history. And the book did not care if Wade was able to do everything he had set out to do. He would have to learn the best lessons he could from the actions around him and the consequences of his choices.

The book began to sharpen focus, after so many missteps along the way: he sought out his quest for his past to find his present.

The names are meaningful to me, but the people whose name my characters wear are not described. It was good to type some of those names saying and doing things that burned off my own karma. And there are very important names missing, though their words and actions appear under false tags.

The places are mine. Write what you know, I was told.

And the book’s finale was a surprise, different from the ending I had planned which would have taken Wade across the whole country to find threads and control the universe. But one night while writing my view of that universe someone told me of a car crash, which mirrored one in my own world that had not been resolved.

I was nervous about the one-page chapters, but it worked well for Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, so I risk letting them be as long, or as short, as they need to be.

The book is mine, determined in the first days of writing in 1989. The ending was what it was supposed to be, even when two phone calls change Wade Hudson’s world.

Like me, in his life the circumstances had changed in a moment.

You never know if a book is really worth the time and energy it took to write That can only be resolved in the minds of the readers.

The book did its work for me, and I hope I did my work for the book.

And so, you now hold it in your hands and have the power to judge it all.

Joseph Kessler Adams

Raleigh, North Carolina

June 2019

Acknowledgments

THERE ARE MANY PEOPLE who played a part in the writing of this book. I am grateful for their contributions, guidance, and feedback over the past two and half decades.

First, my gratitude goes out to an inspiration who is long past, Bruce John Easton, who opened my world to Pacifica Radio, Lenny Bruce, Henry Miller, H.L. Mencken, and a thousand beatnik wonders. Without him I do not think I would have survived high school.

More debt and gratitude to my friends, mentors, and sometimes landlords Rev. Jeremy McLeod of Burbank, Berkeley, Denver, Manassas, and Detroit. Thanks to Dr. James West of Denver, and now at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. Thanks to Richard Eide for steady support for over twenty years.

Thanks to my Eskimo, Chuck L. Tibbs, who broke the news to me and showed me the direction to go.

To my longtime comedy partner, Gregg A. Roebuck, who provided much of the humor found in the book and who served as a model for one key character in these pages. I still miss you, my brother from another mother.

My thanks to my long-suffering Raleigh copy editors Jim Wood and Chard Totten, who has gone through the last several drafts of the several books to hunt out the typos and homonyms no spell check could find.

And to the living guideposts along the way who wanted to remain anonymous, but whose contributions are duly noted and appreciated.

Finally, I would like to thank an old friend and an actor who has been a veteran of many of my richly typo’d scripts on stage and with radio, Gary Allan Poe. He took the book I published and provided a polish that might help a new audience see the story, instead of my spelling, tense, agreement and identification errors. He has been midwife to the delivery.

Thank you, all.

JKA

The MacPaint sketch that appeared one night to start Wade’s journey.

A Meal

I AWAKENED, SITTING by the window of a cafe, staring into the desert. I held a cup of coffee at my lips and the sting in my mouth told me I had just swallowed a sip. I guessed it was the bitter liquid that induced my unasked consciousness.

I hate coffee.

My eyes burned and my skin was clammy with the day's sweat and a much older collection of grime. I did not know when I had last bathed or from which direction I had come. Beyond the glass of the cafe window, two lanes of aging blacktop flowed between the canyons that lay to the east, illuminated by the copper light of the rising sun and snaking to the unbroken horizon in the west.

A battered brown Chevy pick-up sat under the metal overhang of the filling station next door, beside the two ancient gas pumps. A filthy International tow truck sat in the shade of the open lube bay of the rusted box of the service station. Both appeared to be veterans of decades of desert travel and if they had made it to this remote spot, both were worthy of my respect.

I patted the sides of my weathered leather jacket and heard a small metallic sound in the right pocket. I reached in and pulled out a key ring with five keys. Two were Chevy keys, so the pick-up was mine. I looked at the others and saw that one was the key to a padlock and the remaining two were standard door locks. I was unable to remember where the doors that opened to these keys were located.

A woman with an automatic smile, wearing a worn but clean pink and white uniform, set a plate before me. It was a heavy cream plate with an airbrushed maroon rim and it held a fairly normal-looking hamburger and large cut fries, with some decorative lettuce under the dome of the bun. I smiled and lifted the bun. A bacon burger.

I had done worse, but I didn't remember when.

From where I sat the sun was still hidden beyond the view of the window, but the line of the horizon's shadow crept steadily up the face of the distant canyon walls. Above the rim of the cliffs the sky was shifting from stars to cobalt and indigo and a whole spectrum of colors between that deepness and morning sky.

I should be going somewhere. The waitress gave no indication that she knew me. There didn't appear to be a motel attached to the gas station or the diner. The pick-up did not have a camper shell.

I took a bite of my burger and chewed absently. I could probably stretch this meal to twenty minutes, thirty if I had a piece of pie, but after that I would have to stand up, pay my bill and leave. I continued to eat as I shifted from cheek to cheek, reaching into my hip pockets. In the left pocket I found a black leather wallet. The hide was molded along the folds of papers inside that I had carried for years. Within the wallet I found about two hundred dollars, a collection of receipts from automotive and electronics supply houses, a bank card, and a library card, all carrying the name Wade Hudson.

There was no driver's license.

Wade I knew meant the advancer, but I did not know how I knew. Hudson means the son of the hooded one. It was a powerful name for a man fighting a powerful sire, or may have simply been my name.

It did not feel like my name, but I knew that it would serve as well as any other.

Three of the receipts carried an address on Thomas Road in Phoenix. The library card was to the Phoenix Public Library. The plates on the pick-up truck were from Arizona.

I smiled. This wasn't going to be too difficult.

There were no pictures in the wallet, so I wasn't sure what I would walk into if one of the keys on the ring happened to open one of the doors at the Thomas Road address, but I was comforted knowing I had a place to begin.

I stroked a French fry through a blood red pool of ketchup, staring into the vaguely Chinese characters left on the plate. Did I know Chinese? I looked at the near symbol for a moment and decided that it was just a swirl I had absentmindedly created in a condiment and turned my attention to the window again.

The sun had not fully risen and in the distance. I could see the clear pinpoints of moving lights near the northern horizon. There was a road in that direction, and from the speed of the moving lights it was probably a main highway. As I looked at the moving lights, I saw a movement from the corner of my eye and turned my attention to a man who was walking from the gas station to the cafe.

He walked slowly, wiping his hands with a large gray cloth. An illuminated sign must have been turned on over the cafe, because he approached the front door in a strange, pulsing red and blue light. His coveralls were spotted with dark stains that documented hours under cars from the distant highway. He had the kind of blond hair that one gets from working in the sun and his tan had gone beyond a healthy, outdoor look that was attractive, and had left the skin of his face and hands dark, red-brown and wrinkled. In the sign light I could see that he was only about thirty, but his skin and his stride spoke of a greater age.

He opened the door, smiled, nodded at me and stepped behind the counter to help himself to a cup of coffee from the glass pot on the warming plate. He called into the kitchen through the passthrough window and the woman answered. He took a seat at the counter and began to drink his coffee.

I looked at the green slip of paper, stood up, and left a dollar bill beside the plate.

How do I get back to the highway? I asked. Which way are you going? he answered. Phoenix.

He directed me along the road to a turn off a few miles toward the cliffs and asked how I liked living in Phoenix.

I don't remember living anywhere else, I answered honestly. He nodded and I left.

The desert loses heat quickly when the sun goes down. I stepped from the cafe into a cool breeze carrying the smells of desert plants and distant water. It was a familiar smell and I liked it. The chill explained why I had chosen a leather jacket.

I climbed into the truck and opened the glove box. There were maps of Arizona, California, Colorado, and Oregon, with a small book of general maps for all states. I found a flashlight that seemed to have fresh batteries and a registration card for the truck with the name Wade Hudson. There was also a proof of insurance card in that name.

On the visor over the driver's seat I found a driver's license in the same name, issued by the State of Arizona. I looked in the rearview mirror and compared my face to the tiny image on the license. I needed a shave, but the eyes were the same. Whether Wade Hudson was my name or not, I had a lot of identification if it were needed.

I put the driver's license into the wallet, and while shifting in the seat to return the wallet to my pocket I noticed the bag on the passenger floor of the cab. It was a canvas case, probably intended as a gym bag, with panels of red and white fabric and a silkscreened logo for a book club. Inside I found a few pairs of underwear and socks, a pair of jeans, a copy of Love and Will by Rollo May, an old and battered thick dark blue book with no visible lettering on the cover, a spiral bound notebook, some pens, and a watch.

The watch was a cheap sports trinket, available for less than twenty dollars at any shop along 47th Street or Hollywood Boulevard and I smiled as soon as I was aware of knowing the price of watches on two coasts. I strapped the watch to my wrist. It said WE for Wednesday, and 8-10, for August 10th. It was 8:23 PM.

There was nothing to tell me the year.

I examined the notebook and found that it was half-filled with entries, each dated like a diary. I turned to the first page and began reading in the light from the diner.

"I wonder why I continue to breathe. I have hurt so much in the past few years, and now I am going through the most boring time of my life. No conversation, no friends, no sex, just never-ending days of work and coming home alone.

"I think that if I were to die tonight, no one would know for weeks. No one would call, no one would come over, and it would not be until the landlady began to wonder why I hadn't paid the rent that they would find my body. It would be illuminated by the light of the television, the dishes would still be in the sink, the blood settled on the underside of my trunk and limbs, and the topside of my body a pale and ghastly blue white.

"This is dangerous. I know I shouldn't feel self-pity, but how can I remain honest to myself if I don't admit to myself what I am feeling. Maybe it isn't pity. I don't know the right word for what I'm feeling, but I know that I'm feeling something very deep and very dark.

"Maybe I felt it before and was too self-medicated to recognize it as a feeling, but I am feeling it now. I don't think it is pity, because with pity you have to feel some kind of superiority to the person or thing you feel superior to. How can I feel superior to myself, and how can I look down on myself if I am inside myself and limited to my one point of view.

I will go to sleep, and I will wake up, and one day my life will change again, for better or worse. I am getting tired of rolling with the punches, but I don't seem to have any choice that is healthy. No choice but to go through whatever it is, be done with it and get on to the next stage of my life.

It wasn't what I wanted to read, and I was a little frightened as I reached into the gym bag and took out one of the pens. I turned the notebook over so I was looking at the inside front cover. It was covered with doodles of eyes and boxes, and a few spirals as if someone were trying to get a clogged pen writing. I found an open space on the sheet and began writing.

I wonder who wrote these words, flowed onto the white cardboard in the clear blue ink, and I could see as the words emerged that my handwriting did not match the writing in the journal.

I sighed with relief.

I looked up and saw the man in overalls and the woman in pink staring at me through the cafe window. I was sure it was too dark in the cab of the truck for them to see me clearly, but I put one of the keys into the ignition, started the truck, switched on the lights and pulled out of the gas station.

The radio only received AM, but I found an oldies station that played a comfortable selection of rhythm and blues from the 1950s, mixed with familiar psychedelic folk rock of the 1960s, and I sang along with every song as I rolled down the road, onto the side road and then onto the highway headed west.

It seemed funny to me that I would know the lyrics to songs from over a twenty-year period, and yet I couldn't be sure if Wade Hudson was my name.

As I drove, I realized the western horizon was not as featureless as I had first thought, but was the rim of the descent into a broad plain. The license plates of the cars around me were a mix of Arizona, Colorado and some other states, but New Mexico plates seemed to dominate. The traffic flowed down the slope and sped across the floor of the valley toward a glittering point in the distance. I thought the lights could be Phoenix.

The highway curved and I passed a sign -Albuquerque-12 Miles. I was still a long way from home, if Phoenix was my home.

I drove for a few hours and just west of Gallup I pulled into a rest stop. I used the gym bag as a pillow and curled up on the seat with my legs folded under the steering wheel.

Blue Morning

I DON'T REMEMBER DREAMING, but I opened my eyes, and the eastern sky had turned a very light rose and a very cold blue light was filling the cab. I had the sensation of loss, as if my unremembered dreams had held the key to my happiness. There was a part of my soul that did not wish to be conscious, and that part was warring with an inner urgency that required I continue the journey.

I sat up, aware of a dull pain at the base of my back resulting from the cramped quarters, and opened the door. Standing beside the truck I stretched with my arms over my head and arched backwards.

I knew that I loved desert mornings.

The rest stop was a plain, brown brick building with two bathrooms and a shade cover. The open, baked earth around the building had some trash barrels and a few picnic tables. I smiled at the thought of anyone expecting a family to picnic in the desert heat.

I wanted to start again, but the notebook attracted me. I took it, tucked it under my arm, and crossed the parking lot to the men's room. The crunch of small stones felt somehow comforting beneath my boots. Three cross country semi-tractors with large trailers were parked in the lot, but I was the only person around.

In the men's room I used the urinal and washed my face in the sink. I had not found shaving gear in the bag and made a mental note to stop at the next town to buy some. Mine is not the kind of face that benefits from a beard.

I left the bathroom and took a seat on one of the tables around the building. I allowed the notebook to fall open at random and began reading the entry for February 6th.

"Someone asked me why I dwell on the bad things in my past. My first reaction was to feel very guilty, like I was wrong again for feeling the emotions that went along with living my life.

"I had to think for a moment before I realized that the good things in my past did not leave me crippled. The good things didn't scar me. The good things don't haunt me and make me deal with the people around me as though they were ghosts.

"I can remember the good things, and I treasure them, but I don't have to heal from the good things.

"Does that scare people? Is that what keeps everyone away? No one understands, it seems. I want to be careful and not get into the 'no one understands me' pit.

"But I have to do my own work, and no one would be more thankful than me if it were something I could just ignore.

"I've done so little, when I compare it to the work in front of me -reforming my whole life in one big chunk. But the little I've done has given me a real sense of accomplishment. Maybe even a little inner peace.

I won't stop for anyone.

A slam of a door from one of the big trucks caught my attention and a trucker climbed down from the cab of one of the semis and headed for the building. I closed the notebook, walked to the pickup and pulled back onto the highway.

In the rearview mirror I could see the brilliant orange disk of the sun appearing on the edge of the eastern mountains. Low hanging morning clouds were illuminated with rich golds and purples, but most of all a beautiful wash of blood and orange near the horizon. The bits of sky visible before me were still rich patches of cobalt, Prussian and aquamarine, defining delicately the gray of drifting cloud cover.

I raced across the barren landscape in the company of a few trucks through mid-morning when I noticed that the dull red needle on the fuel gauge had dipped dangerously low. I realized that I had not eaten since leaving the diner the evening before. I saw a turn off and a small cluster of red and yellow signs around a few buildings fairly close to the freeway and guided the truck from the smooth highway onto the rougher local road.

The gas station no longer carried a brand name identification. The large oval sign on a metal pole was a magnificent display of rust and ancient paint showing years of scouring by the desert winds, with fresh yellow paint on the frame of the sign. The pumps were classics of post-war functional design, with large milk-glass bowls on the tops that may have at one time carried an internal light. An old-fashioned glass oil carrier lay on its side, its worn metal spout showing both the discoloring of age and the sheen of loving attention paid to it during the passing decades. The office was built higher than the station with a few steps leading to a weathered wooden porch. Over the front window of the office was a large red sign showing a black outline of a gas nozzle and the word Gas in canary yellow.

If it were not for the Caribbean pop music from a large portable radio sitting in the office, I could have pulled into this filling station at any time during the past forty years.

A young dark-skinned man in his early twenties, possibly Mexican with Indian blood, stood from his seat and stepped down from the shaded porch that ran along the front of the station office. Four older men sat on the wooden porch of the station, studying me from beneath their black, wide-brimmed western hats. The young one stood out against the old men. His skin was slightly paler than theirs and as he approached me, I could see that, beneath the blue bandana covering his forehead, his eyes were a blue gray that spoke of some wandering European on one of the branches of his family tree.

Fill it? he asked as I stepped from the cab.

I nodded. And can you check the oil? I don't know how long it's been since anyone looked at it.

He shrugged. Sure. Tires, too.

I thanked him and looked around. To the side of the station a small open-faced shack stood with a chubby young Indian woman leaning out from the serving window. A piece of thin plywood stood vertically along the front of the stand, painted with the same cherry red as the gas station sign, and the words Food Burgers Tacos in broad yellow brushstrokes. Three little girls with square cut black hair stared at me from beneath the lip of the counter, each wearing a recently cleaned cotton dress and a fresh layer of dust from their morning playing near the stand. One of the girls was slightly lighter than the playmates, and as she looked at me I was struck by the same crystal gray blue eyes as the young man at the station.

I smiled at the children and took a seat on one of the stools facing into the open kitchen. What's good? I asked.

Fry bread taco, she answered, neither smiling nor frowning at my arrival.

How many make a meal? I asked.

She looked me over, apparently disapproving of my slender frame. For you, one.

One fry bread taco, please.

She nodded, barked an order in her native language, and the three little girls ran silently from their positions under the counter, and disappeared around the corner of the stand. The woman turned back to her kitchen and took a wet glob of masa from a bowl in the icebox beneath the counter and began slapping it from hand to hand, as if she were patting a fresh tortilla. She worked quickly and slid the soft disk of dough into the fat of the fryer beside the grill. It bubbled and popped as it cooked the patty into a thick, soft bread. While the fryer prepared the bread, the girl ran a large spoon through a cooking pot filled with rich red-brown beans. She quickly slashed a large knife through some peppers and onions, then chopped lettuce and cilantro into a small pile on her cutting board.

She fished the puffy disk from the fat with heavy tongs and slid it onto a plate, then ladled a generous portion of the beans onto the bread and covered them both with the vegetables. From a side dish she took a grainy mixture of red salsa in a wooden scoop and covered her creation with the tangy sauce.

She slid it before me with a plain metal fork and said, It's not really authentic, as she gave me some paper napkins, I just use a lot of Mexican stuff from the store - you want the genuine thing, go to the reservation...

I looked at it for a moment and realized something was missing. Could I have another? With honey? She smiled and began preparing a second dough patty while I ate.

It was good, and I knew that I had enjoyed these, or something like them, many times before. I also knew that there were few things as good as fresh Navajo bread with honey, but I could not remember ever having eaten such a thing.

After my breakfast I walked back to the truck and the young man was rewinding the water hose into the recess by the old gas pumps. You were almost out of water, man, he said as he firmly slammed the hood. Don't want to do that out here. Oil was okay. Front left tire was low—you're going to need a new one on the right rear.

You have one? I asked.

Yeah, take me about twenty minutes. Forty bucks.

I thought for a moment. That sounded like a good deal, so I fished the notebook from the gym bag and went to the station office porch. I walked to the chair the young man had vacated and sat down. Good morning, I said, and one of the men returned my greeting with an unusual inflection in his voice.

I sensed that I had interrupted something. Is it all right if I sit here while he's doing the work on my truck? I asked.

Oh, sure, the youngest of the four men responded with a smile, but we don't want you to think we're being rude.

How would you be rude?

Well, we were talking about a family problem and grandfather doesn't speak English. I don't want you to think we were talking about you. He looked at me for a moment. He didn't look as if he were apologizing or saying anything important. All four men studied me. I was struck with the way their faces had weathered to provide a strong, unique face for each man. I could not help but think of each of the wrinkles framing their eyes and mouths as anything other than collections of stories that I would never be allowed to hear, and I felt vaguely sad that I would not be able to understand what they said.

I don't speak Spanish, and I will not be offended. I appreciate the chance to sit. Please, if it would be better, I can sit at the stand to read. I don't want to interfere with your discussion.

One of the other men reached out and patted my leg. No, you sit here. The first man nodded and turned to the oldest of the men on the porch, speaking in a quick, singing Spanish. The old man looked at me, smiled and nodded his head.

I opened the notebook and the men began to speak in their language, and while I could not understand the words, I could feel a great deal of importance and passion in their discussion. The voices I could not understand became a distant and alien music to me as I began to read.

Again, I opened to a page at random.

March 13th, and I don't know how long I can wait for the doctor to call. He said he would have the results of my tests today, and I have had this growing sense of dread all weekend and into this week.

"If it is bad news, what will I do? I have rehearsed my grand scene many times, where I am told that I have X amount of time to live and I accept the news with great calm and dignity. I rehearsed the pearls of wisdom that would fall from my lips, giving courage and illumination to future generations, but as I sit here waiting for the call, I can only feel like a four year old, hiding in the back of a closet, terrified of being found in some dreaded game of hide and seek.

There is something wrong, and it is so hard to tell if it is a question of my body or my soul. One of them is sicker than the other, and either one could kill me.

The Wrestling Dream

I WAS STANDING IN ANOTHER, very different desert, surrounded by the rhythmic sound of unseen singers harmonizing in the chorus of a song I could not understand. I wore a coarse, homemade garment of wool and rough linen, dyed with deep maroon and brown juices of the native berries. A few goats and sheep wandered through the countryside, ignoring me as they fought to tear leaves from the sturdy plants around us. I stood on a low rise and could see a small river flowing less than a mile away.

It was a feeble excuse of a river, probably enough only to wet my shins, but I had a deep and powerful yearning to cross over that river. I could see no difference between the spot where I stood and any spot visible on the other shore, but my heart was swelling within me in anticipation of the crossing. It felt as if tears were about to be pushed from me by a great pressure behind my eyes, the same pressure that seemed to threaten my throat and my breathing.

I began moving from the high ground to the water, the chant of the hidden tribe pounding through me, giving a strong pace to my stride as the river grew closer. As I neared the river I became aware of a problem with keeping my eyes open, as if the light around me doubled with every step I took. Within a few yards I was in physical pain from the brilliance of the light, and in the heart of the light I saw a man with small wings exulting upwards from his shoulders. The winged man wore some fine, delicate garment that covered him but did not conceal any position of his limbs.

I looked at the face of the angel and saw not one but many faces blending and blurring to create a general impression of eyes, nose and mouth; it flowed from male to female, young to old, and around and around in an endless progression of living masks.

The mouth of the angel opened and the strange language fell toward me, like stones thrown at me by a strong arm, and I could not translate them into my own tongue. They hurt me and I fell to my knees with my hands protectively over my head. It was a warning, but I could not understand the meaning or sense of it.

I rose and began to run to the side of the form, seeking to avoid confrontation, but the celestial being slid smoothly before me to block my progress. Again it warned me, and this time the stinging foreign words only succeeded in angering me.

Crying, I lashed out, seeking to push the thing from my path. I gripped the fabric of its robes and its hands grasped my wrists, filling my arms with a numbing cold. I pulled free, began to turn away and swung violently back to drive my fists through the guardian's chest, but it was gone. As my blow reached the limit of my arm's reach, the angel appeared and wrapped its arms around me to pull me away from the river.

I struggled in its powerful grip, twisting and writhing to escape my tormenter, but it would not let go. In fury I changed my tactic and twisted to face him, throwing my arms around him. He was too large to allow my hands to meet behind him, but on each side I was able to reach up to grab the meat of his wings. My fingers clawed and I clamped down as if trying to strangle them.

We wrestled in the desert and my eyes were blinded by tears from my fury. I was angry at this wondrous creature for blocking the way to my desire, and for provoking violence within me. It twisted, trying to turn me back in the direction I had come, and I fought trying to wound it, seeking release and freedom to cross the river.

I felt my hands pull free, clutching fists full of enormous feathers and streaming red gore, and it screamed. The angelic scream sent the hair on the whole of my body standing as a new and complete fear enveloped me. The sound was without any sense of anger or outrage, but the most powerful welling of weeping that could emerge from the soul of a divine creature. It expressed the pitiful depth of disappointment and frustration, the pain of wisdom ignored and its frustrated sincere desire to prevent another living creature’s experience of pain. It was a cosmic level of heartbreak that tore at me and removed any desire to cross the river.

It released me, and a new sequence of violated and betrayed faces played on the front of its head. I was immediately filled with shame and dropped the feathers and meat from my hands, but small bits of white down and unspeakable red slime clung to my skin. I rubbed my hands frantically on my rough robe, but the evidence remained.

Forgive me, I cried, and the being wailed as though its pain would never end. I wept and begged forgiveness, but as I stepped toward him, he recoiled from me with a grossly horrified expression and began to fade out. The light dimmed and the angel became difficult to see. He did not fly away or visibly leave me, he merely faded from my sight.

I was again alone in the desert, my back to the river and my hands covered with red carnage and wet down. I knew the way across the river was open, but I would not turn to see it. I cried, wiping my eyes with my forearms and avoiding my own hands.

I opened my eyes to find I was crying, looking at the side of my truck. I did not want to wipe my eyes with my hands and instead dragged the soft cuffs of my leather jacket across my face to wipe the tears from my eyes. The young man was on the far side of the truck, his hands on the rail of the truck bed, looking at me with interest. I looked to the side and the four men were also looking at me, and the little girl with her father's eyes was standing at the edge of the porch, staring at me in amazement.

The grandfather said something and the young man who had first spoken to me translated. Grandfather says you have power dreams, he said. The old man spoke again and his interpreter said, He thinks that is good, but you must find someone to teach you to be awake in your dreams or you will never learn.

Does he know how to teach me? I asked.

He spoke to the old man and the elder answered. Before it was translated I felt a wave of disappointment sweeping over me.

He says he does not have the power, the man said with some difficulty, as though the concept could not be carried from his words into English. There are others, and you must find them.

Awake in my dreams. Yes. I knew there was someone who could teach me, but for the moment I was satisfied to be awake, to have stopped crying and to leave the station. I stood and started down the stairs to my truck.

Perhaps the heel of my boot caught on the steps, or maybe I was still not completely awake, but I pitched forward into the dust. The young man ran to help me up, and the little girl squealed and ran back to the stand, calling for her mother.

I tried to stand and a sharp pain ran from my hip to my knee in my left leg. It wasn't broken, but the pain was intense. I noticed that Grandfather was looking at me, smiling grimly and nodding. With the boy's help I made it to the cab of the truck and while I was counting the money to pay for the tire and my gas, the young man found the notebook where I had dropped it in my fall and returned it to me.

Careful, man, he said as he took the cash.

I thanked him, waved farewell to the men on the porch and in a few moments was again on the highway heading west. The sky was clearing and more cars were on the road, and my leg hurt.

The City

WHEN I ENTERED PHOENIX, I knew my way immediately. Off the freeway on the western side of the Sky Harbor airport, then north to Thomas Road. West to the address on my driver's license.

It was a cheap but clean apartment with simple concrete block walls and small windows visible from the street. A large sign out front boasted weekly and monthly rates. I pulled my truck into the parking lot and went to the apartment shown on my driver's license. I pulled the gym bag from the cab and entered the plain block building through a dark tunnel lined with mailboxes and emerged into daylight.

The building was actually a square with a bright central plaza dominated by a classic 1950s kidney-shaped pool. Three young men lounged on deck chairs by the pool while a tanned young woman in a two-piece swimsuit stroked lazily through the water. They ignored my entrance as they concentrated on their tans. Vending machines offered cold drinks and, considering the temperatures in Phoenix, that made great sense to me. Around the plaza were two levels of orange doors and door-height windows. I looked at the numbers on the doors and spotted the one I was seeking on the second level.

The door key from my ring opened the door and I walked into a small, one room apartment. Two twin beds arranged as a corner group, with half of one covered by a larger table, dominated the room, doubling as a sofa. On the table was a lamp, a few books and a clock reading 4:08. There was a dresser on which rested a television. Beside the dresser was a small, three-shelf bookcase filled with a mix of college texts, nonfiction studies in anthropology and astronomy, and a collection of paperback science fiction and fantasy novels.

There was a kitchen at the far end of the room, separated from the main area by a low, two-seat breakfast bar. A closet jutted out like a large crate to create a separate room behind it. I looked behind the closet and saw that the hidden room was a small bathroom.

The apartment was clean, with a heavy brown carpet and long-faded drapery on the single front window beside the door. There were towels in the bathroom. In the closet I found a comfortable looking terrycloth robe, two suits, several pairs of old jeans, an assortment of work shirts and a collection of shoes.

I noticed some pictures of men taped to one half of the wall over the bed – formal portraits, and I knew them better than I knew my own face. Tennessee Williams, Charles Dickens, H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick were on the kitchen wall, Robert Anton Wilson was on the front wall by the inset air conditioner, and Jack Kerouac was taped to the wall over the television. They had been torn from various magazines, and the picture of Wells was a post card.

The rest of the wall was decorated by a large green and maroon abstract painting with vague round shapes and striking cones and straight lines. The painting was signed F.C. On top of the dresser beside the television was a small stack of mail, all addressed to Occupant or Wade Hudson. I dropped the gym bag onto the floor near the television and looked through the mail.

One was from the phone company, and another from a cable company. I looked at the television and noticed for the first time a cable converter sitting on top of the set.

There was a pile of pastel colored envelopes. The postmarks on the envelopes were from other states, mostly California. None came from Arizona. I opened some of them and scanned the insides of the cards for familiar names.

I found none.

With half of the envelopes open, I had a collection of commercial, almost painfully tasteful condolence cards that were sterile and carried no real sentiment, each expressing sympathy in some verse with a faded, blurred or carefully composed image.

The names on the return addresses, other than the three Hudson’s I found, sounded alien, but I tried to remember them. I stepped back out of the door and stood on the walkway, looking down at the pool and patio.

It wasn't a bad place. The door of the apartment faced north, free of the sun's glare, into an open central courtyard dominated by a swimming pool. The Arizona sky made a spectacle of shades of blue and I felt the first peace I had known since the diner in New Mexico. The clouds had cleared and the blue sky was filled with subtle changes of color, framed by the roof of the open plaza. I could not focus on the depth of the sky and I relaxed with some serenity in the beauty of the blues.

I stood looking up for almost a half an hour before going inside and closing the door. I opened the refrigerator and saw some cans of soda on the shelf and a small mold farm of mixed decaying vegetables in the crisper, a collection of condiments, pickles and sauces, and a few eggs in the dimpled top tray on the inside of the door. There were some frozen dinners in the freezer above.

In the cabinets were canned goods, plates and boxes of cereal. Out of curiosity I opened every cabinet door, noting where each of the pots, pans, and cleaning supplies were located. I walked into the bathroom and inventoried the contents of the medicine cabinet and the lone, thin storage closet tucked into the corner. There was nothing unusual: towels, plunger, a broom, a mop, some Band-Aids, a bottle of aspirin, soaps, vitamin and mineral supplements, shaving gear and toothpaste.

I did the same with the dresser, and in addition to the expected underwear and tee-shirts, a large checkbook, more like a notebook with three check on every page, was buried under the socks in the top drawer. It was imprinted with Hudson Electric and an address on Camelback Road in Phoenix.

I found one drawer filled with manuscripts, all bearing the name Wade Hudson, and under those I discovered a large spiral-bound album with a brown and blue floral cover. I opened it to see snapshots of strangers.

I had seen my face in the mirror a few times and could recognize a younger version of myself set in poses with a world of strangers. Me as a teenager in jeans and white tee-shirt and way too much hair. Me in need of a shave in trunks with other teens at the beach. Me in need of a shave with a car, covered in grease and grinning wildly at the camera – maybe drunk. Me dressed up with a carefully trimmed goatee next to a good-looking girl in a white dress cutting a cake ... probably a wedding. The same woman with a baby girl. The baby girl with a big dalmatian dog.

Men, women, children...they could have been found in abandoned suitcases at a thrift store, and if I hadn’t recognized my own face in some of the photographs, I would have dismissed them all as strangers.

But I was with them and it must mean something, so I looked more intently at each face.

One picture caught my attention. Me sitting on the side of a hospital bed next to a frail man. I thought it might be my father, but he looked nothing like me and was probably very close to my age. Across the photograph were scrawled a few words in a shaky hand:

No Matter What and below was a single letter for a signature. L.

I strained to study the man’s face. He was a skull, his dark skin pulled tight, a dark and scraggly beard, longish hair, but bright, clear eyes. I suspected the man to be in the last stages of cancer from the wasting of muscles beneath his waxy skin. I had one arm around his ribs and his boney arm, with I.V. lines running into it, wrapped around my shoulder.

I looked cool and distant, but he looked like his smile was a natural feature of his face, and his eyes looked out of their death-mask sockets with clarity.

I turned the page.

More pictures of the woman, the man I assumed was me, the little girl, and many strangers.

Another picture caught my attention because it was so out of place. On one page, stuffed haphazardly next to another picnic picture with the woman and baby, I saw a ragged black and white snapshot of six men in uniform, or mostly in uniform. Two of them had their shirts off. Three were black, one looked darkly Latin with Indian features, and the other two were white. I did not recognize any of them, but among all the baby and young couple pictures it seemed out of place.

They were young, probably twenty or younger. They were all clearly drunk but there was no way to confirm who they were or where they were. I slipped the photo from under the clear sheet that held it in place and turned it over. There were five names; Dino, William, Chuck, Don and Smitty.

Below the names were the words, Going home.

Six men, five names and I looked closer. One of them could have been me, but I couldn’t say that I actually recognized him.

I closed the album and put it back under the manuscripts.

Another drawer was filled with soft-core pornography. The porn was surprisingly uninteresting. A few naked models with nothing left to the imagination and pages stained, worn at the edges – from reading, I hoped.

I put the manuscripts on the breakfast bar.

In the closet I found clothes and shoes, a bathrobe, a suitcase, a small video camera, an old black Super-8 movie camera, a very old projector that seemed to have been lovingly cared for, a box of small reels of audio tapes and several reels of home movies, a box of tempera paints, a plastic sleeve with colored pencils, drawing papers, and a collection of crude ink and pastel drawings.

On the table of the corner group I found a clock, and a note that said, Call Tim and signed Ed.

I ran a tub of hot water and undressed. I got the thick