storge

Once upon a time, there was an alien that fell to earth. He didn't know he was an alien, at first, but he remembered strange things from before his birth, dark figures in odd masks in odd combinations doing furtive things in an antiseptic environment.

As he sojourned with the earth beings, he remembered flashes and glimpses of another life, and yet never remembered completely whence he had come, watching the earth creatures with a combination of fascination and repulsion, at close range, living as they do.

One day one of the earth creatures engaged him in conversation and told him he was an alien, "just passing through," a tourist on the planet, passery-by. Philosophically he couldn't disagree but did not take the supposition as his true situation.

Once upon a time there was a girl. Her name was Toni, with an I. Toni showed up one day as a guest of Eric at a place called the Swamp House, for the large old wooden structure truly was built on swampy ground, and was slowly sinking. Toni had a mohawk. Eric had rescued her from another nearby city where she had some trouble with people trying to murder her.

Once upon a time, the alien tourist had a dream set in the Swamp House. A car had arrived on the dirt and gravel road outside and angry young men with weapons had jumped out. The alien sat on the threadbare couch inside, warning the people inside of the danger, but unable to lift his arm or get up. An angry young man burst through the front door wielding a chain, ready to do violence to the seated alien. Summoning all his will, the alien slowly arose to meet the blow, but the chain flickered and faded away like dust. The alien was relieved that he and Toni were now safe.

The alien told Toni, much later, of the dream. It was much later because Toni had left the town and come back, and her departure followed immediately upon the strange dream of violence averted. Toni remembered that day and told the alien she had been sleeping alone in the house during the day, but had awoken to a noise. It came from another room upstairs, behind the door of the makeshift bedroom in a larger room. She opened the door and saw something she could scarcely credit, for there in the middle of the room spun a whirlpool of old newspapers and other debris. She watched in awe for almost a minute when it subsided, the junk dropping to the floor inanimate.

Soon after relating the weird tale, Toni again left the city and was not heard from again until reports came back she had been charged with murder in a sensational case in a city to the south. Toni had, the story went, fallen in with a group of skinheads who had decided one night to attack and murder an Ethiopian man.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Jerry. He dressed like a skinhead and wore his hair short, but only hung out with the punks. He always justified his costume, saying he wasn't a skinhead, he was into ska, and his shoelaces somehow showed he was an anti-racist.

For a time Jerry squatted in an empty house almost right next to where the alien stayed. Jerry used to come over to visit, take showers, wash clothes and so on.

After a while the alien didn't see Jerry around much anymore. The alien moved to another city, years later. For a time he worked as a handyman in that other city at a large apartment building. One day, while scraping paint at a separate section of the apartment complex across the street from the main building and abutting on other buildings, the alien heard strange music roll over the rooftop from the window of one of those other buildings. Soon heads peered out, skinheads. In the days that followed, the number of skinheads increased as did the volume of the music and voices. The alien ignored them and carried on with his scrapings. One hot morning a full can of beer struck the wall next to the head of the alien as he was using a heat gun and mask to strip paint. WIthout giving it much thought, the alien took the can of beer and threw it back into the window where it had exited. A profanity was exclaimed, the music stopped, and bodies began hurling themselves out of the window onto the rooftop where the alien stood watching. As several drunk skinheads were gaining their balance in their combat boots and more seemed to be making ready to deploy, a familiar voice called out the alien's name. Little Jerry poked his head out. He soothed the savage skins and the alien was never bothered by them again.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Bob. He had a yellow mohawk. He looked Asian, but always said his father was American and his mother had been Thai. Bob liked to drink beer and hang out with other punks, but something happened with his father, a disagreement perhaps, and Bob began to spend his nights sleeping outside around the town he haunted. Everyone seemed to like Bob, who was the Platonic ideal of a gentle soul.

Once upon a time the alien had a disturbing dream again. His spirit roamed the town. There was bloodshed. The spirit had killed someone and was fleeing with the bloody weapon from the railroad tunnel to the post office, where he hid the weapon in the mailbox. At the post office he saw his own reflection in the window. It was Jerry.

Once upon a time, the next day in fact, the alien was sitting at a cafe one evening drinking coffee. A female police officer began asking him questions, what his name was, where he lived and so on. The alien told her to go away, he was busy drinking his coffee and did not appreciate being interrogated. As the woman was finally making as if to leave, she told the alien a homeless boy named Bob had been murdered in the railroad tunnel the night before. The alien said he had known Bob, and asked how he had been murdered. The police officer said his head had been bashed in. The alien thought about this and the dream the night before, but said nothing. He went to the railroad tunnel--it was now quite dark--and looked around. He found where Bob had probably made his bed, and scattered beer cans. Someone had pulled a parking meter out of the cement on the street somewhere and pulled it here, where it lay protrate, its cement bulb giving it the appearance of a giant tulip in the dim streetlight filtering down into the tunnel.

Once upon a time the alien heard Jerry had killed Bob and then fled south in a car with several co-murderers. They had stopped at a roadside store somewhere in one of the little towns in the forest and countryside that night. A man had looked at them oddly and they shot him with a machine gun. They also shot at a sheriff or sheriff's deputy before they were captured, the alien heard.

Once upon a time the alien saw a spinning flaming swastika as clear as day manifest itself to his eyes on the winter solstice, and greatly wondered what the waking vision meant. The symbol reappeared in the following months, the spinning swastika with arms of flame, and the alien understood its portent at that time and place, but not his own significance in the ancient battle to come, the ancient contest between animal brutality and consciousness, consciousness that always appears as an outsider in the dark room of human misunderstanding, in the great loss of context known as the Fall where living breathing human bodies flail, where egos inflate to universal proportions eclipsing the true light of the sun at the apex of the mountain of the heart, where werewolves roam as lords of the manor, witches bewitch us from the sky and arch-demons cause our innermost maladies.

Jesus wept.