Nine Kinds of Naked (12 page)

 

Look up, look out stand up, get out,

hurricanes and pestilence, my how we pout.

Earthquake tsunami, better call your mommy,

ice caps are melting, getting mighty balmy.

 

Ah, the end is so nigh, I've lately heard cry,

the end is so nigh, and we're all gonna die!

 

But let us hum hymns of ham,

chant the dumb, dim, and damned.

Let us kill and condemn,

in our blithering amen.

 

For the end is so nigh, our eye for our eye.

The end is so nigh, brave bullets bam bye.

 

And woe to our children, woe to our race!

Woe to our fall from this very high place!

Such wonder, such whoa, such plunder aglow,

the face of our foe at last we will know.

 

And the end is so nigh, you cannot deny,

the end is so nigh, our loud lullaby.

 

Oh, how may we sniffle so fitful with fret,

life is a gambol and death a sure bet.

No anthems nor answers will show us the light,

while headlong we hurry on into this night.

 

Ah, the end is so nigh, when all lies untie.

The end is so nigh, so why not get high?

 

And the end is so nigh, and the merry do sigh.

 

And the end is so nigh, the merry do sigh.

 

The end is so nigh,

 

the merry do sigh.

 

Barefoot Barry was no rock star; indeed, he had a voice that sounded like a barbed-wire banjo, but he sang from his heart. Besides, he was just the opening act for his personal mix of his all-time favorite rock songs blasting with as much volume as the woofers could withstand over the classroom's state-of-the-art sound system while he and several confederates with whom he'd prearranged this stunt started to dance, wild, beguiling, and barefoot, inviting everyone to bare their soles. By the end of the song, all but a handful of scowling students were dancing, goofing, celebrating, and they continued to do so for the remainder of the class session. When the early birds of the next class arrived, they were greeted with the sight of a mighty party, and by the time security showed up, well over a thousand students had congregated in the auditorium classroom for no other reason than that something was
happening
in there.

Barefoot Barry resigned his position from what he called “the Ivory Tower of Babel” shortly thereafter and migrated into the French Quarter. His decision, and his grandstanding, were hardly unique. In the French Quarter, it seemed as if
everyone
had a gigantic personality. There were exceptions, of course, but every day saw the additive madness of the world surpassing the wits of another to withstand, and they surrendered. Not to some enemy foreign or domestic, but rather to the world itself, to life and death, to illusion and confusion, to the blowing of the wind. They surrendered to the Great White Spot, to all the uncertainty, insecurity, and impermanence that it emphasized. They clicked off their teevees with a
dismissive cuss, shrugged, shook their heads, and walked away into the wilds of whatever.

But what is whatever? Whatever does it mean? According to Barefoot Barry at one of his many public lectures throughout the French Quarter, “Whatever we wish is what is whatever. Whatever is our final frontier, our shrug against the imperatives of the bossy, the declarations of the boorish, the grumbles of the fretful. Whatever is unimpressed, uninvolved, the supreme dismissal of all conflict, push leads to shrug, don't you know? Whatever you wanna believe, man, I don't really give a fuck. It ain't my trip, and it's just not that important. Whatever is the proper response to any and all nonsense, but what do we presume to answer by our utter of whatever? Whatever what? What is whatever supposed to mean?

“Hear this now, for this is the wisdom of whatever: Whatever means anything, and exactly that. Anything and whatever indicate the same concept, they are synonymous, they mean the same thing. Do whatever you want. Do anything you want. Anything.
Any thing.
Limitless possibility. This is the wisdom of whatever, and this is the wisdom you have always known. You can always say whatever. You can always walk away.

“And you can
never
lose more than you can abandon.”

 

 

 

 

The First Knot: A Gentle Breeze

 

D
ROWSING AFTER
a lunch he did not remember eating, Clovis blinked wide aware to a tickle inkling its way up the inside of his trouser leg. Jerking instinctively upright, he yanked his pants leg up to reveal a tremendous bee crawling cheerfully along his thigh. “Whoa!” His involuntary boom resounded across the clearing, and his reflexive swat propelled the chestnut-sized bee a good thirty feet before it regained control of its flight. Attila ceased nibbling at some raspberry leaves in a thicket along one side of the clearing and looked with confusion at her master and his pointless command to stop. Bewildered, she tested her master's resolve with an ambiguous snort, and when he failed to respond, she returned to her happy grazing. Noticing
the mule's perplexity, Clovis chuckled. Attila only knew a handful of words, but she never failed to catch them, however they were spoken.

Surveying his surroundings, Clovis's eyes came to rest on a carved oak bowl on the ground next to him, exuberating a bounty of fruits. At about the same time as he discovered that his lips tasted like peaches, Clovis noticed two fresh peach pits sitting neatly on the ground next to the bowl. With no memory of having eaten this mysterious fruit, Clovis was immediately given to incredulity.

Faerie folks are in old oaks.
This saying recollected itself as a possible explanation of his situation. Clovis remembered hearing stories of the Oakmen, diminutive elves who tempted intruders into their coppice with disguised food made of fungi. But a coppice was nowhere in evidence. Then again, Clovis thought, who can verify the details of a faerie tale? Looking around, he wondered further if he was not already in the land of faerie, and whether this was in fact the coppice from an elven point of view.

Clovis reassured himself by noting that the king oak was still at the center of the clearing, and at least he had object constancy. Contemplating the sprawling limbs, he soon came to marvel at the beauty of some mistletoe that had tangled its way around one of the lower boughs, extending along its full length. Indeed, it was the single lowest bough, uncommonly low for an oak of this size, and it grew directly out at him, beckoning. Though it had escaped his attention earlier, the mistletoe had the same inner luminescence as the shining leaves whose path he'd followed just the day before, its translucent white berries
dangling like the pearls of paradise or some such gosh-wow superlative. Idly, Clovis scratched the side of his nose, inadvertently triggering a memory.

“Be thee ware, weary wanderer, and touch not the bough of mistletoe.” Clovis—having no recollection of the spritely gnome who had offered him this warning—repeated the phrase aloud to himself. Increasingly curious, Clovis walked under the bough of mistletoe, marveling at its color. So brilliant were the leaves, stems, and berries that they cast everything else into shades of lackluster, as if this bough alone were illuminated by the light of the sun on an otherwise overcast day.

Come to think of it, Clovis had once heard that mistletoe was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. He didn't believe this rumor, but even if he had it had always seemed to Clovis that Adam and Eve's fall from grace had been unfairly preordained. After all, posting a
NO TRESPASSING, BY ORDER OF THE INVISIBLE KING
sign in the otherwise limitless abandon of Eden was bound to inspire an unfair curiosity. And if the Tree of Knowledge had shone anything like this bough of mistletoe, paying it no heed would have been like trying to resist a glance of sunset spectacular. And besides, Clovis reasoned, the deed's already been done. I'm an outlaw in any case. I'm just another condemned son of Adam sweating in my boots. What are they going to do, kick me out twice?

A swiftly drifting oak leaf suddenly danced in front of Clovis's attention. He instinctively reached forward and nimbly snatched it from the air, satisfied by his own dexterity. Catching an oak leaf grants good luck, and for Clovis such an omen
resolved his dilemma beyond question. Stashing the leaf under his belt, he strode over to the trunk and examined its circumference twice before an unhesitant hop hooked his fingers firmly around the bough of mistletoe. Scrambling his feet against the trunk, he pulled his calves up around the bough as well, hooked his foot around another branch, and grunted his way around to the top of the bough. “So there,” he announced loudly, surveying his achievement. It was a stout branch, as thick around as Attila's torso. The mistletoe entwined its way entirely around this bough alone and nowhere else on the tree. Looking up, he saw that he could have climbed to the distant top, if he had desired to put forth the effort. But Clovis was mainly interested in the mistletoe.

Be thee ware, weary wanderer, and touch not the bough of mistletoe.
Clovis repeated this phrase to himself. Having gotten himself into this intrigue in the first place precisely by
not
following rules, Clovis saw no reason to suddenly shift his approach. Shrugging, he reached out along the bough and grasped at the most sensational sprig of mistletoe, twisting it until he'd wrested it free.

Clovis knew better than to eat the berries. They were reputed to be highly poisonous, useful only to herbalists in thin dilutions. Being a good Christian, he'd also heard scattered talk of its ill repute—mistletoe supposedly being a favored plant of the pagan heathenry. But this was no ordinary mistletoe. Holding it at a distance, he regarded its beauty, its translucent white berries shining like a saint's own semen, an evergreen eternity beckoning within its leaves. To behold it was to behold a sight
sung by celestial eyes. Stunned, Clovis looked away, becoming so quickly lost in its sensual enchantment that he feared he might fall out of the tree and land on his head.

As fortune would have it, Clovis resisted the enchantment not a moment too late, for it gave him just the nick of an instant needed to move his legs from the slashing path of an unfriendly sword, though the sword did happen to catch unguarded his left hand grasping the tree branch. Before he had time to examine the injury and discover that his middle finger had been severed, Clovis had scrambled into a standing position. There below him snarled the most haggard human Clovis had ever seen, ferocious despite his exhaustion.

“Come on outta there, ya little maggot!” his attacker snarled. “Your ass is grass and you know it!” The assailant was a crusader, it appeared by his armor, though it looked far too small on his frame. And his speech was bizarre, utterly unfamiliar in its dialect.

“What do you mean by this interruption?” Clovis demanded angrily, stuffing his injured hand under his arm. “You nearly cut off my legs just there, and you've maimed my hand besides!”

“The mistletoe, dumb shit.” The crusader gestured with his sword. “You've touched the mistletoe. That gives you the right of combat.” He cut the air with his sword again, whipping a wind against Clovis's face.

“I have no argument with you, stranger,” Clovis replied, climbing quickly higher, though none too easily given how far apart the lower branches were. “If you desire me to leave,” he
grunted, “I will do so, but I assure you that there need be no further bloodshed today.”

The crusader sighed impatiently, sheathing his sword and pulling two small knives in its stead. “Listen to me, peasant. These are the rules. You touched the mistletoe, now you have to try to kill me. You may choose not to fight, but I promise you my blade will not hesitate.”

“You haven't any sense, good man,” Clovis countered. “Who comes to the wilderness to follow rules?”

The crusader took aim at Clovis with one of his knives. “There is only one rule, serf, and that is this: You and I are going to battle, and only one of us will survive the encounter.”