April 5, 2010
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Chapter 2.001
If dead, need he worry about nutrition again? Was he to suffer a living purgatory? He prayed that somebody got to him istantly or not at all. Probably he was at the bottom Jorden River, still strapped, frantically burbling.
‘The Jorden River is chilly and cold,
Chills the body but not the soul.’
He remembered more of what happened the night before.”A mere fantasy.” Kerry said. “Uncle Samuel ain’t s’posed to be alive and even more, in a gerontocracy, electable.” Bruce’s Eclesasitiacl Employers felt it important for there to be a vital but subtile Mormon showing at public affairs such as Bruce would face that day–bodies not mouths. Sammy had promised to bring duct tape for Brucy Bud’s.
Uncle Sam would flash his his fruit salad, all his fancy medals. Even Livvy understood, Great Uncle Sam. The centennial, aerobatic performer, was good to have at a meeting about whether Uncle Sam could never got older again or for Mommy to have to have no more babies with face’s like her dead sister Alaya’s. Then they wouldn’t have to cheat on the cheap, ie. with Daddy Caleb and the turkey baster like the secret about she and Ri Ri. Caleb gave them curly hair.
Daddy Bruce joked that he supposed they ought to say, when he went to work, ‘My, well, if you aren’t looking far too well today.’ Nobody laughed and Livvy made the “gross me out” look she picked up from Kerry her brother the goth. Daddy was a good person for the big meeting, but that didn’t mean he and Sammy could go out of town on their birthday. Some of the brethren had refused the Ponce De Leon shots and cocktail.
That’s all Daddy Bruce Bunny could remember floating up the Victorian heating ducts before he went to sleep the night before. He had forgotten the list of things Uncle Sam had delegated for him to do on the morrow. Bruce could not imagine Sam, despite his nanobiotic vigor, doing, for even one anomalous day, half of what he delegated to Bruce. We’ll, they’d have to blame Karina today. Karinna’s Bunny suit outer pj casing had been made with no pockets–it was just so she wouldn’t be picking up goose-feathers all day. And they’d have to blame her for taking off the snow tires too early. Bruce liked to leave his on all year. It was a bone of contention between them.
2.0002
Bruce lazily noticed a string of bubbles rise to the surface. Truth was, Bruce liked to pull over and nap at the River bend when he’d made a false start and was too tired to drive. Nothing but two skid marks through pocked grit and muck where the kids had got stuck and their tires had spun would remain. Klary kept a bag of rocks in her car in the spring when the weather was right for watching water sports, but muddy. Actually they added to their pile of rocks regularly, yet no matter how much they added, they still got stuck. Some day they would have it cobbled.
Bruce hoped he hadn’t completely drowned. He practised his lines: ‘Where am I?’.
Bruce sang:
“The river Jorden is chilly and cold, chills the body not the soul.”
Bruce favored that now sleety mudpuddle by the Lehi River bridge where at sunset, teens and tweens, conversed together until a parental carlight flashed, turning onto the river road, coming to retreive the tweens. Karina’s Clary, feeling herself an old maid at 17, could usually be found there of an evening. Bruce felt Karina too mellow to yield strict authority over her teen-aged children or her obviously pregnant daughter and daughter in law, though she was close to them. She considered it a trade-off, and the closeness might last a lifetime, while absolute control ended at 18.
At the tawdy evening’s conclusion, the senior Teens broke into couples to do the ”Nothing, the ”Now, where were we before we were so rudely interrupted.” As their parents and grandparents had done before them, but without the water, except during an occasional flood.
When he wanted to convey authotity, Bruce would sing songs still around when he was in high school, pounding on the hoods of the kid’s cars–
‘Bye-bye miz American Pie, Took the Chevy to the levee
but the levee was dry. And good old boys were drinkin’
whiskey and rye and sayin ’This’ll be the day that I die’,
this’ll be the day that I die.”
Coming home late from SLC one night. Bruce saw Klary’s boy’s car down at the river stop at 3am. He’d ordered Clary into his car. He didn’t know the lad who she was with, Karina did. But more than a few of the boys nearby were certified members of the Future Poligamists of America. He and Karina were nostalgic about the days when there was usually nothing more to but to fear but a messy pregnancy.
Self-restraint, heavily preached from the pulpit, was more of a roulette wheel, round and round and round we go and where we stop nobody knows. Kids would disapear, some pregnant, some with AIDES.The conference with the ward bishop down to the Church House, the examination of the boy at the STD clinic up to SLC where boys got in free. The Relief Society’s teary quilt was replaced, all too often with a prom formal. There had been a heavy international campaign. The doctors in the corrupt first world were getting richer and richer and everyone else poorer and poorer.
Bruce wondered, had his car failed to make the river bend curve. Folks said a big yellow bumper would ruin the view. The road veered to the left in a way that made it easy for a sleepy commuter to mistake the muddy turn out for a puddle in the road. Next came an icy swim in the Jordan. And thusly Bruce Bunny presumed himself dead, he didn’t know how he felt about it.
Bruce imagined long procession, an aquatic version of Pilgrims’ progress. Or perhaps something like Dante’s accession to paradise, though Karina made an unlikely Beactriche.
The Prophet Joseph had left the world with 40 pistol balls in him. Mormon life. Carying on would surely be easier if he had lived to be an old codger–he and his Cherokee Scouts and body guards. Time to be think things over,vtime to leave more than the model to his people, time like now to inventory the relavent, glaring facts.
Bruce braced himself: A) Daddy Bruce Bunny had lost his bunny jammies, presumably while procreating in the romper room or an SLCI virtual reality pod in the buff. The details were unclear, but the patterns remained. Embarrassingly Bruce was now was robed in the Edenic trend that long ago gave Father Adam the blush. Yes, in righteousness alone was Bruce Bunny robed. Bruce looked at his feet. They were developing fur. Where he wasn’t furry was pruney.
”Little seed inside the pru-en,” Bruce incanted, ”Wat you see and wat you doin’? Wat you see and wat you doin…” A treble voice joined him,
“is it night or is it Noo-en? Little seed inside the pru-en?
The children liked to pull the blankets over their heads while Karina pulled the blankets back a little at a time, singing the prune song. If they didn’t come out she’d start again–or she’d open the shades and say “Awake and rejoice, for today is a day that God has made,” or “Good morning merry sunshine how are you today.” This morning’s plans were complicated and she was probably feeding her sister Lorena’s Horses, finishing just in time to get to work where she would find her children. She liked to take her kids to her K-8.
Little seed inside zie pruen. Don’t mind, Daddy, a voice twittered, very near. I been dead a long time. Here is fun.
Bruce found himself sightless. enveloped in red tubules. They held Bruce tenderly in place by what looked to be jointed licorice ropes, slimey snorkels, and there did not seem to be any maritime Lilipution with whom he might converse or negotiate.
“Gosh darn it,” Bruce bubbled. “Take me to your leader, how may I help you, anyway?” Bruce worried if he was alive on the bank of the Jorden, but simply asleep. “Daddy, we dont need anything an we aren’t afraid in Dreamland and where the Dead people go, but the live people, they need lots of things, like my family needs me still.”
Chapter 2.004
The long worms felt Bruces face and sholders, while some snapped out to inhale minnows or up to bring back bubbles of what appeared to be atmosphere. a few snorkels took long, long sips of air. The tubules retracted to the sides of adead girls ugly head.
Bruce‘s heart harkened back to his lost infant Alaya. His sweet dead Alaya, who died a nursling, never to go with unwholesome boys–if Dead could he find her he must tswim to land, to make reasonable inquiries. Instead a strangechead emerged from the large and noodely red dust mop. Most of the RED liqourish elephantine tubules lost diameter until they were hard as horsehair.
Then Alaya, he was sure it was Alayain some guise, appearing now in the body of some extinct Pacadermal water species He had seen analysis of crossection of bone. The reasearcher first thought he had encountered a human like land animal but there were no bone stress patterns to indicate an upright stance.
A few large and reclusive subspecites might have survived at freshwater river mouths. They lived in dreams and Si-fi. Ugly as a stranded infant dugong, had been his Alaya, something off a X-file worst case scenario. He felt some despair still at having to release his baby into a unknown scarcely fitted to even empirical adequacy.
Bruce examined the base of Alaya’s coils and the two digits at the snorkeling end of each tubule. Alaya laughed-–No one touches there Daddy, not with fingers, its private.” She sighed. ‘’My daddy, I am not your Alaya now. I’m Belly big and will calve soon. When I calve, the peoples will sing my new name, the name of the people in oneness–Sirenia, Sirenia, We name our calves, but adults surrender their names to the people, minds too. I may even forget my Daddy because then we sing the thoughts of our people.’
‘’The men?’’ Bruce asked.
‘We are friends with them sometimes.’ ‘Lya said coyly. Bruces mind crowded with possibilities.
He was not thinking out of the box–he was out of the box bodily and possibly dead as well.“The floundered dead sing no name
where kelped reeds line the shore,
“Deep, in hoards the sea dead sing
from Froth to froth they wail and
cry, tossed by fear, lost.”It sounded like Aunt Kathleen. Bruce and his dowager had been reading her together at bedtime lately.
‘’I know our Daddy,” the creature said, OURS Daddy, ”And Daddy’s Aunt Kathleen. I know Rigel, Livvy and CeCe. and my mommy Karina–sometimes Mommy cries and sometimes I do because Grammy might die. Grammy didnt ever know Kathleen, but we have such a big family that she thinks its a shame her dying away off somewhere, but it’s a shame only on the polyg side.’’‘’Sometimes your Mommy cries because her sister is dead. If she had been alive she would have put her sister in a ghetto for sick people when she got old and never thought one more word about it.’’
‘’She is like your Aunt Kathleen.The professor says they, Aunt Kathleen too, are atavistic, they are chimera. Ladd’s professor too, He was the one who helped your Aunt when she died. He felt her dying.” The he swam to where his dreams were. He finished your Aunt Kathleen’s Round House. He helped her when she threw up and taught her things.’’
“Daddy, Uncle Samuel says Aunt Kathleen is haunting her Yurt. Ladd and Paul want to move it. Where ever, just closer to people she loved. It is pretty as a flower and Grandpa What’s his name always remembers with Flowers. Professors Philosophers and Poets they were and friends in hundreds of lives. Bad happened to her and Kathleen isnt going back however the professor coaxes her. He even offered to be her mother.
When she died he first thing she asked for was for me, then Paul. it will be a long time before he dies. He found the secret Methusala brought from the stars. He had to swim a long way to bring it here.’’
Bruce was an adept at changing one general topic, that of his Banished Aunt’s Hogon. “Your Daddy named you once. Now A new name for my grown up girl instead of Sirenia. Millagros? It means miracle and you are my miracle’’.
‘’You named me Alaya.’’ Alaya charged. vehemenantly.
‘’You didnt like Alaya?’’‘I remember, but my Daddy, you wan’t me to keep it and be your little beehive forever. First calving is a very happy time, The professor says that all the people go into couvade . . . The land peoples,” ‘Laya shuddered, “their eyes.”
They said poor Alaya, pity Alaya. Bruce stroked his fishy’s downy head and Alaya began to purr. Bruce felt despair, rembering his release of his baby girl into what? Fear washed over him and faith failed him, swallowed in his greif.
With that came a hatred of which no one spoke. The AEC and NTS, the Manhatten and Nutmeg projects. Isotopic ticking of the Maternal clock. Two of Karina’s cousins had born babies the same day, all had similar deformaties. Alaya’s exaggerated congenital facial anomalies seemed more comely underwater.
The cleft that had split her to her nose, cleaving her upper palate, was packed with gills. Alaya/Sirenia’s, prominent split lips had elongated into a long cocks comb. her upper lips fluttered just back of Alaya’s shoulders as she swam.There was swift commotion as the girl, as he supposed, mounted, he supposed, not the Professor, but her friend. He bolted along the human seawall and then stitched the waves as it/he/she/they took in long draughts of air.
Alaya and Posiden vented the air which noisily bubbled. Their jointed snorkel tubes obscured his view of them. “The Human people see us riding our friends they think we are dead people. We are safer when they are afraid. That’s what the Professor says.’’
Sirenia laughed. “We are the Dolphin’s pets, Daddy. And sometimes we are borned as Dolphins, but when you are a Dolphin, well most of us in Sirenia are young.
The young eat and calve and are never separated from Sirenia. Those who are borned as people, well, they stay part people and some are so people that we are just dreams to them.
”A baby is borned to us and we sing. The people think we are lost from wracked boats. someimes, Sirenia said, she and Poseiden would go down deep and would use her air when she vented.
Bruce wanted to man handle Alaya forward into his time–but the bill, just for carp alone . . . there was the pool, of course, he was too old to make new pools up to the watergates like the kids did.”
Snorkeling quietly now, her tubules retracted into her head in tight coils, fluttering spirals where tiny babies bubbled. The tiny trunks rose to the surface , sipp, sipping. Bruce, ignoring her protests, examined her gravely deformed upper palate. She found gills inside, a cavity for them at the centrum of her shrunken coils.”Are there others with coils like fingers even Daddies can’t touch?” Sirenia giggled, ”We don’t have Daddys in our pod.” Alaya sported huffily in the water at the very notion, then paddled off.
Alaya’s underwater world reminded Bruce of swimming at the packed county pool–life everywhere, and bubbles. He thought, he with an industrial time machine, could transport ancient Bonneville fish for profit. He’d float the suggestion at family night.
”We eat only the Little swimmers where the Dolphins say we can graze. Yep, Only where our dolphins say because they know when their gardens need culling. The dolpins like everything to be in balance but the little scuttler with the hurty hands–they eat my hair when I fish here. Poseiden says that’s why we have too many… how do you say in people?
”Well, …hmmm…””Our professor is human now and he knows Latin. We tell him what things do and draw them to his mind. The never borned shows him in dreams too and then draws him to the teachings. The Professor writes down everything he remembers and then if he forgets, the never borned remind him and he puts their names in his big book.
He doesn’t think, really. that we are real, He says we are interesting and that’s enough. Sirenia and her sullen male swam up tothe surface and raced. then swan leisurly back. ”We got extincted so we borned ourselves with the fishes. We build up our pods, first. The never borned help us. You still be my Daddy and talk to me?”
”Yes,” Bruce said, “You are my girl.”
”I be. Some of us spoke people for a long time and know where our peoples are, like the Professor and Alaya. He knows languages and teaches me so I can greet humans –I came from them so now I will know them.”
”You speak well, better than when we last spoke.” Bruce observed.
”I am grown now Daddy. Sometimes I know how to talk, how to find my Daddy and visit Ladd. Ladd is my friend, he is a sea person and my Kathleen’s Brother, whatever people think. They play with me and talk to me. Ladd in dreams, but maybe not for always.
I creep around and Kathleen plays with me all day sometimes and with her long river fishes. They are trained to help swimmers and save them from the destroyers with with the long teeth. The big river fish, well he can sting hard. A dolphin comes to fight and bite the big teeth fish.
‘’Peoples could drowned while the dolphins fougt the big teeth biter–we have to stand way back. The river fish are better for this. They just sting the big teeth hard and the big teeth remember and don’t like to come back.’’
”I come to visit Celeste and Livvy. They made a picture, of me. I tell you, my Daddy’, so you will believe that we are all friends. I don’t want to be borned as a people ever again, so I keep my family.”
”Daddy, now you come to my house and we be friends? I missed you my Daddy. You do not like my Poseidon?”‘I’d hoped to avoid him,” Bruce said, eyeing the overmuscled, big, bisexual male.
”Poseiden is a good swimmer Daddy, and he helps the Dolphins when the sharks come. We stolDed a spear from the humans. At night we creep, creep and creep and we watch what the people do.””Swim to my House Daddy, there are ten in my pod and in Poseiden’s there are fifteen. We will have eleven in my pod when I calve.”
” ‘Laily, you’re too young to go with boys, REALLY, even very brave ones, not to mention cute too.” Bruce employed his fingers for the math, ”How old are these people, this Poseiden–is he…your–Friend?” Bruce asked scepticly.”
”I will answer because I love you and you are ours Daddy.’’ Lylee hesitated. “My Posiden has been born seven times.”
”No more, no less, And you?” Bruce asked. ”I just remember my friends. I don’t study different lives and Earth history, It is better to be educated by the peoples than to die too soon, as a baby.”
”The Professor,” Bruce hesitated.”Laily, first, am I dead?” His adolescent, big bellied daughter regarded him, amused.”You don’t know?” She asked. Bruce wondered what he had been doing just before he died. Greif would not spare him this query. Karen something. there had been a woman, a mother to Alaya. “When human peoples die other people come to help them. You are only dreaming, my Daddy–peoples dream and come here. When they feel better they swim home.”
”I be getting big. Soon I bring my calf to visit Mommy Karina.”
Karinna stretched. She loved her Alpine House which was of the traditional design, side by side living areas, a big divided loft for the boys and girls. The play and time out room. alternatly called ‘lya’s room, was back of the West kitchen. They had put a big 2 inch latex mat there and padded the walls with colored latex so the kids could rough-house without boinking their heads.
Karinna had been cramming in the old nursery for a 7:30 AM on-campus exam in the Custom Careers Extention Center’s Office at the Pleasant Valley Y. Bruce generally fell asleep wherever Karinna plied the keyboard and strains of Celeste’s moonlight Sonata beset him. He curled more around her and dreaming, asked a drifter he met possibly a jellyfish if it/they knew where the human infants were kept.
Karinna made the playmat up with linen when Bruce was home. Celeste thier their tween, made the room up when she had friends over, mostly cousins. It was a puzzlement to Karinna and Celeste how quickly the room could be torn to shreds. She wondered how any of them could tell if the ghost was doing something or not, one way or another–though the spook doctors said there was more paranormal activity when th children were active. The kids had quite a collection of ghost buster DVD’s and movies. If it got cold in the old nursery, once the kitchen of an Anders 3rd wife, they put on sweaters. The ghost liked old movies. “Movies about people,” she would suggest, the Goth said, in his ear.
Thier Goth’s girlfriend was going to pasture that Summer with Annie, their dad’s second and Moe, his third wife, to help with the squirts. The Goth’s girlfriend was going to also take over the books for Kerry’s tin can satillite dishes and radio repair shack. Karinna’s Dad wanted to bring the project to the States. Los dos, the soon to breed couple, liked to hang out at Karinna’s school.
Alaya’s Haunted TV, as it was called, lived in the old nursery . The shrinks at the Center puzzled. One, the Goth’s and Bruce’s shrink, a 2nd cousin on Karinna’s mother’s side, and had heard that the children believed it to be thier lost Alaya, his own cousin as well. He thus asked if he could watch movies with the kids.
The Scouts from the ward helped Kerry set up expensive looking equipment from the Utah Paranormal Society in the old nursery.
Kerry was taking a door-open nap with his girlfriend in the old nursery. This followed a door closed nap that had gone critical on them. Kerry’s girl had gotten herself pregnant, just like Karinna had before
Klary was born.The goth caught thier ‘Lylie just as the kids burst in from a trip to Reams, but missed what Alaya said. Grammy Lebaron rolled out the feeding trough at six. His blessed Gothness employed to drive the rug rats out to Grammy LeBaron’s to Grammy and thier Aunts and Uncles and cousins in time for the little kids to ride her ponies while the biggers and grups hoed one row before dinner. The day the Goth got his driver’s licence was celebrated, with a pinata. Good news for all, la dia de l’Mama’s liberation, Mother’s Day en realidad.
“La Revolution Dentro la Casa,” the Goth proclaimed when his Ma first handed him the keys. The biggers, as Livvy called them, released the Ghost Bed Room to Karinna’s rabble at 7 PM, then romped in with their hair dripping. The girls (for the most part, iust the girls) had their hair braided or tied into ringlets with ragstrips. Prayers ensued, then the current book, the scripture verse they were memorizing that week. The big kids came in for peayer and song, then went back to the table to study.
Singing emitted from a pile of bunny tangled legs and arms ‘till the younger nidgets were carried heavily to thier beds. This week to earn snack, they were memorizing the scripture: “Ye are the salt of the earth, without which it would not be leavened.” Karinna made salt rising bread for them, so Klary Anne, made a crumbly loaf for bible supper from some recipes she found on Aisch.com.
