White Rabbit Chapter 16

16.

            It was good for Delores that she fell to the Underworld and not to the plain cold plot of Earth portioned as Denmark, or else she would have splattered on the surface and been no more, at least, no more in this lifetime. Curiosity led her to her tip-toes on that broken basement chair with the peeling red paint as much as sorrow had and though she wondered frequently, nearly obsessively, of what awaits her when she at last flat-lines (as she likes to say of dying, a fair compromise of words between being too maudlin or loutish), it could wait and wasn’t an exigent matter. Life, she thought, is foreplay for death and her bucket list was comprised of doing nothing but dying tragically. Before she died she will die, is the way it goes. “Someday I will flat-line.” she said with conviction to Herman her stuffed rabbit, her mute therapist, the way some people say, “Someday I will climb the Matterhorn.” She was sure that after her death she would wake up again refreshed much the same but completely different and it would be something on the lines of a surprise birthday party for her—something that she always wanted but never got. So when her sorrow subsided and that sliver of optimism presented itself like Waldo’s face in one of those pictures her curiosity postponed its resolve and became the wishy-washy thing that it was. Instead of splattering on Denmark, Delores fell slower and slower and luckily into an awaiting grove of oak trees that caught her and cradled her to the ground. The only commotion was over which oak would catch her as they all wanted to and furiously they competed as to who would.

            “I’ve got you, girl!” the responsible oak announced bestowing honor upon himself smiling like a new father absent the cigar. Oaks don’t smoke for obvious reasons, but then again, neither do new fathers so much anymore. These weren’t the same oaks Delores had encountered previously but they were the same sort, relatives it seemed. When she awoke her head was a fuzzy sandbox and she only remembered crawling out on the airplane wing but not the quick roll and none of the falling—which is too bad because the falling was truly splendid. Turk Bishop, the sly devil, meant for the girl to bonk her head; he knew precisely what he was doing. Delores couldn’t go to the Underworld conscious. She would have simply fallen back to Denmark and landed tragically in a cow pasture where her only excitement would have been side stepping cows and cow patties back to the main road. Skydiving was like taking a piss for Turk. Strike that—had Delores not been knocked out on the airplane wing she would have certainly gone unconscious when she pulled the cord and bed sheets floated off into the distance. The shock and the speed at which her body shot like a missile to Earth would have blown her mind. There was no way possible beyond some miracle that she would have been side-stepping cow patties to any main roads so lucky for her Turk was so precise.

            “My queen.” the tallest oak said reverentially. He had a long face seemingly six feet from his eyes to his mouth and most of that space was occupied by a long dwelling nose. His gray bark groaned as he laboriously bowed and his leaves sounded like soft applause or modest sitcom laughter. “You have returned. You have restored our hope!”

            “I have?” Delores was befuddled, still groggy from her spill. Though being back in the Underworld her memory was restored and she remembered everything—the glowing spiders, the awful cat, Woodrow, The Priest, the Torgan Sea, and Hugo Finch, the boatman. She remembered the feeling of sinking like a rock to the bottom of the black abyss and the feeling of being pulled to the whale and stuffed in his mouth like laundry into a washing machine. She even remembered the threefold grunt that followed deep from the whale’s throat. She could hear the unmistakable eerie sound of the underwater still and she felt the calm feeling of being in Hugo’s hands. There wasn’t room for them both in the whale’s mouth—not like when it was bald tractor tires buried in the playground when she was young and with that nasty little boy whom she would be better to forget. And Hugo told her the words she was afraid now to even think. “Say them.” he said, “Please.” Say them once and go. White Rabbit—two simple tragedies. How could there be no room for them both inside such a large whale? The largest whale in the goddamn world...logic and reason hung from her gallows.

            She thought of that Underworld Bible written by Him. She hadn’t read it but wondered what it contained. She remembered the inside of the whale’s mouth and all that comes in nearly drowning, the familiar gag, the salty taste, the burning in her nose that feels like someone poured  peroxide in her nasal cavities. She remembered the gathering of people at the museum who made a pagan-like circle around her and everything was in black and white except for their red petticoats. They must have assumed she was a high school kid and that they were witness to a nutty prank, a ruse, and she wasn’t nearly drowning at all but merely a convincing actress—another Sarah Bernhardt desperate for attention. They went away knowing that attention-seekers are only defeated that way. Their faces, she remembered, were very scornful and cruel as they left and they couldn’t possibly conceive of such a place in their head as to where she had been for neither could she and she had been there herself just moments before when it was 6:30. 

            But now she wouldn’t have to worry anymore of the ordinary, of plain and usual minds that dull everything they see and spoil what they touch with rotten fingers. She was back in the Underworld and it was as though she never left. She was compelled to be here and felt that she belonged and would certainly stay so long as she was able, after all, he had written a place for her here. Fuck her parents, her school, those idiots up there, she thought bitterly. Wars, famine, drugs, addictions, Hollywood, what a sick and twisted seedy lot of liars to be amongst, fakes, meandering around like zombie sluts with cell phone brains, coked-out, living under banners and flags with borders and walls and diseases, pills for everything, lustful, covetous, greedy, sinful wicked plagues on legs. People are a cancer in their own rite, attacking the body of Earth, an organ, a cell in the larger cosmos of cells, she thought before she blew her own incompetent human mind like a revved engine with no oil. They do not understand what it is to love. They lie in their vows pretending they do like children pretend to be princesses and dragons in stupid little perpetuated games without the conviction or attention to follow through, with always an escape clause or plan. They claim to have souls but they murder and cheat any chance they get, rather, when it’s advantageous, and they hold on to bity good deeds as evidence they are genuine humanitarians. They run slaughterhouses because animals have no souls and God, that asshole up there on a cloud, in a Heaven with streets of gold and dispensers of virgins, gave them Dominion. “Do-min-ion.” they might say mockingly if challenged about the validity of the soul bit. It is about whom they can stick a dick in; be stuck by; how many; who they marry; how much money can they earn and keep, hoarding it in bank accounts, numbers on paper, promises, shit for bankers to blow in the pyramid scheme of capitalism. Send this to seven friends…. Status! Status! Status! As it flicked in her mind like Girls! Girls! Girls! on a strip-club neon. And their fucking cellphones and cigarettes, warped in vices and devices, any brilliance dulled, beaten out like mites from a Persian rug. They are as conditioned as mules pulling plows across bleeding broken back fields that have been plowed every generation since Adam and Eve, since Neanderthals, which are making a comeback. Her mind was made up. She couldn’t take anymore sampled music, Britney Spears or pop culture, or Walmart, or Walgreens, or fake Christmases and Easter hams or turkey dinners. “Christ was a Jew!” She once screamed at her mother when she announced, much to her mother’s displeasure, that she’d be refusing Easter dinner yet again that year because she was a vegan and hadn’t grown out of it. She may as well have said she was a child molester. “The last goddamn thing He would eat to celebrate His resurrection would be a fucking ham!”

            “Ham is a Christian meat.” He mother feebly defended.

            “Tell that to Christ…and the pig!” Delores shouted. It was clearly paganism wrapped up in a pretty religious package. Northern Europeans are so tasteless.

She didn’t fit in and she didn’t want to be one of those black-cladded raccoon-eyed dissenters who walk about with slumped shoulders miserably alone or in small clans trying desperately to be unordinary and stinking of some sort of incense. They never accepted her because she was too pretty for them; her prettiness got her booted from everything she seemed to ever fit. For example, chess club, choir, her junior high private school poetry club and newspaper staff. Fuck cheerleading. Jealousy is an ugly animal and when someone’s boyfriend wanted to stick a dick in her out she went. “Why is it that people go to therapy and pop pills for mood and behavioral disorders?” she wondered. But Delores knew it was because their environment is fucked up and isn’t conducive for anyone to be happy unless you are half-wit. So the idea is to trick the mind into believing everything is okay except for you. There seems to be a figurative billboard someone put up long ago that everyone heeds. It says: The problem is you, not everyone else! Take this…go here…do that…if you want to live. Well, no, Delores thought. No—emphatically. The problem isn’t me, it is everyone else. They are the problem. Say that and they will have you committed or in the least ostracize you.

            “You must go to him!” The oak said casually after he placed her softly on the ground onto a bed of giant crinkly leaves. He interrupted her inner social commentary.

            “Whom?” Delores asked. She knew who.

            “Him.” The tree replied plainly.

            “You mean, the boatman?” Delores inquired.

            The oak breathed a massive breath of carbon dioxide and slowly exhaled oxygen the way people do when they consider their words carefully (only vice versa). “The boatman is him, or rather, he is the boatman.”

            “How do I get to him?” Delores asked anxiously.

            “There isn’t a route.” The oak said plainly. “You must simply be. Carry on like you are and he will find you like before, only,” the oak paused, “unlikely he will be the boatman next time.”

            “Well, how will I know?”

            “He might take any form. He has waited for you for a long time. You will know. Have faith in that.” The oak replied.

            “Has he waited?” Delores smiled. Suddenly she found herself in one of those beautiful love stories, written in perfectly.

            “We all have.” Another oak added. “For at last, when you are together our world will be complete without the Torgans and all that is evil.” He wailed.

            “How can you be for sure that I am—” Delores inquired.

            “Your palm.” another oak, shorter and fatter, offered. “Just look at your palm.”

            Delores looked down to her balled fist like a Christmas present and then opened it and plainly there to see like the black mark of pirate lore, hers, a black crown, a queen’s crown that looked very familiar. Upon another look she deciphered it to be the same crown that was used to represent the black queen in chess which she remembered from junior high school chess club. The students received direction from their coach, Mr. Alvarez, who was at one time or another, allegedly the greatest amateur chess player in Spain and Portugal. Sure enough, there was the black queen crown on the pretty palm of her hand.

             “You must go to the sempstress who will make you a dress. Pay no mind to this old log who told you that he will find you, Delores. That is dreadfully old-fashioned.” A slightly shorter, thin, well-spoken oak declared. He probably would have been well-dressed, too, if he dressed. “You must find him. It is up to you to find him but first, to the sempstress with you. Beware the crows, Delores!” he said in a rush as the oaks began to argue in the background as to whether she would need to find him or he would find her. Someone said its best to remain where you are when you are lost, but that is about all that she heard of it. The younger oak shouted as she was pushed away by their argument that was turning to violent blows. “Beware the crows!”

            Delores was swept away by a wind that drove her down a twisted path like a pathetic paper doll. It wasn’t like any wind she had ever felt. It was a wind that made everything absolutely helpless but not so that it would endanger her or cause any harm. There was no violence to it. It was without the hate of a tornado; the sky remained as pretty and there wasn’t the freight train howl. It simply blew and blew. When at last she could make her own way there were no longer any trees with long faces around her. There were evergreens and shrubs which stood like corpses and the wonderful smell of pine needles and the cold shade they provided nearly overcame her. She could feel the intense cold in her lungs. She shivered even though it was warm; she was frightened. Then she heard a noise that wasn’t the dying wind, rather something else she suspected, some animal. And as she conjured the height and weight proportions of what she heard to the possible genus of a suspect, there appeared in a crude circle around her six mature bears that stood like menacing men. And the one that was gray in the face that appeared first said, “Hello, lovely.” He, too, spoke in an elderly British accent like a chap apropos to do Macbeth.