Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

“Elisa, I’m serious.”

“When my boss chases me around the office, I walk.”

“Stop it, listen. I’m trying to be serious with you. We’ve all noticed it. We don’t know why you’re tormenting yourself; you seem to enjoy your own sadness. We want you to be happy. Are you taking your meds?”

“Yes, I am taking them. No one said in what order, though.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, Graham, why don’t you toddle off now. You’ve done your job, you’ve expressed your concern, you look courageous and caring, you can go now.”

“Why won’t you let yourself be happy?”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might be happy, that maybe I like my life just the way it is? Why do I need a husband and some meaningless hobbies to be happy? Why do you all think your way is the only way?” Elisa required Descartesly.

“So, you’re right and everyone else in the entire world is wrong.”

“Happiness is not an ideal of reason but of imagination.”

“I don’t know what that means. Listen, we’re a very public family. People look to us for right and wrong. You need to remember that, you can’t be selfish about this, you have to think of what is good for the whole, not just for yourself.”

“I know, Graham, I know it so well every time I look at myself in the mirror I feel a sudden urge to bow.”

“Would you take this seriously, I’m here to tell you that people are talking about you and they’re not saying positive things.”

“I’ll give this topic the respect it deserves, I know happiness is no laughing matter. You people don’t believe everything you hear, but it doesn’t stop you from repeating it.”

“We’re not saying anything that isn’t true, Elisa. Your lifestyle, this whole career of yours, it doesn’t make sense to anyone. I mean, you live by yourself, you don’t have any friends, you don’t talk to anyone without saying something nasty, you don’t have a boyfriend. You used to be so popular; I always figured you’d be married before you were twenty. What is it exactly that you’re doing? I don’t understand it, no one does.”

“Graham, brother, you have a narrow mind and a wide mouth. One would expect very little things from a man like you and gratefully, you haven’t disappointed anyone.”

“Okay, fine. Go ahead and sit on your high horse, go ahead and offend the person who’s here to try and help you. But at least listen to one thing, if you don’t want to be happy, that’s fine, whatever. But think of mom, think of how your actions make her feel, how she has to deal with it. At least try and make her happy.”

“I’m not one to waste my time shooting arrows at the moon.”

“So you won’t even try for her sake? Why don’t you speak English, for god’s sake?”

“I pay attention to the words I use for one thing. Secondly, I don’t worship her like you.”

“What does that mean?”

“Graham, if you were any smarter we’d have to remove ‘savant’ from your title. Did you read any of those books you were assigned in college?”

“Don’t try to make me feel stupid, Elisa. I’m not one of your dutiful flunkies you run around with, I was world champion two years longer than you, and you were never even on Rob Them Blind .”

“Just because you can remember the date of the French Revolution doesn’t mean you understand what it meant, dear brother. I have no doubt you read all the books required of you, you’re problem is that you didn’t comprehend them.”

“What year was the French Revolution?”

“That’s my point, all that matters to you is that you know. I’ll answer your question if you’ll answer mine,” Elisa challenged.

“Fine. What is it?”

“Why does it matter when it occurred?” she Collingwoodly proposed.

“You don’t make sense. I realize that is the point, you’ve successfully changed the subject, but I’m not going to fall for it. We’re talking about you, nothing else.”

“I don’t send our parents a congratulations letter on my birthday like you but I do love to talk about myself.”

“All right, Elisa, enough with this. Here’s why I came. I will be moving into a new flat after I get married, the place I’m in now will be ready by the end of the month. We feel it would best for you to move into the city. So, I will give you my place. This house is going up for sale.”

“Why is it that I always feel like Jesus getting a kiss from one of his friends when you offer me something, Graham?”

“I don’t know. Probably because you’re incapable of accepting help.”

* * *

The machine swallows blues, pinks, all the whites, which there are hundreds of, purples, red and yellows, blue and whites, red and blue stripes, ovals, spheres, triangles, squares, rectangles, tubes, hexagons, pentagrams, tablets, capsules, pills, lacugens, gelatin caplets, ambules, and spews them out in their proper packages. This one will cure your heartburn, but you may experience nosebleeds, gastric discomfort, bloody urine, and cardiac murmurs. This small pill represses anti-social urges, this pill can knock out a heifer, this one’ll wake him back up instantly. These little blue one’s grow hair back from dead follicles, the red and whites induce blood flow to the brain and manage migraines. This one is called in the vernacular a calorie-eater, take one every two hours and eat whatever you want. You won’t gain a single pound.

Joseph was standing beside the conveyor belt, watching as a children cereal of colored shapes rolled down towards the sorting machine. He was holding a variety of them already. But he wanted to be sure. He picked up another six when the quality assurance/quality controller turned away to itch his ankle. Joseph decided he might have enough, just a few more. He got eight in one swipe, his children playing jacks.

In his cubicle, Joseph took out a bottle of mountain spring water that was tapped from a village’s faucet and took a long swig. Then, he stuffed the first handful of pills in his mouth and started chewing. More fresh water over boulders, a couple picnicking beside it, the woman’s slender fingers cupped as her wrinkled lips lap up a few drops, water from his jug (reverting to a Jamesian depiction). The second and third handfuls don’t taste as putrid and Joseph takes only a few sips from the bottle.

This is the story of an orphan. No, no, please do not feel pity, he asks only for your ears, not your heart, although if you’d like to express a few kind words of sympathy, why then, he might prolong the beginning so that you might share your thoughts, this is, after all, a democratic republic of some consequence, like flying aeroplanes dropping from the sky, their passengers are all shitting themselves, knowing that they are going to smash into a million pieces and be televised on the evening news and their Andy Warhol destinies were fulfilled only in their deaths, but of course he knows that Flower is one of these kind of prophets, the after-life nightgown sages of the religion of the kamikaze, who were also democrats, in that they voluntarily were chosen by the population for death against a giant battleship, that may or may not go down into the deep depths of Poseidon’s navel, which is a large trench that covers the entire Atlantis continent, which is currently submersed in legend and folklore so that certain sites can fill hours of programming with monsters chased from lakes by saints, hairy Lucy husbands who roam the dark forests of puritanical consciousness, as witnessed in Hawthorne’s deconstructed thoughts, mysterious alien visitors who construct pyramids on certain continents by employing ethnic slaves and teleporting brick and mortar higher and higher, so that they can generate a few shafts within the antennae that will point future generations towards where they may or may not have come from, because how would the aliens really know, since they’ve never actually stood on the planet before and don’t know any constellations, or that Galileo was ruined for what he saw in the sky, or that maybe their star burned out millions of years ago and is just now getting to the earth, and even worse than that it is shifting away from them infinitively as they sit there and try to explain to the dumb Egyptians why they’re constructing a big pile of stones in the middle of the desert, or the ghostly stories of sightings by housewives and curators of old, long forgotten, never visited national landmarks, where screens spin for no reason, but why don’t they make themselves known and why do they speak in one letter clues, are they just fucking with us, okay medium, tell her it’s her dead husband, only don’t tell her you know what my name is, ask her if the letter ‘s’ means anything to her, good, now don’t tell her that I died in bed, ask her if I died in our house, but I didn’t so ask her about forty questions in one minute, I guarantee one of them of them of them will be right, now I’m going to scare the Dickens’ out of her, but I won’t let anything that could prove my existence see me, so I’ll have to wait for this display news crew to leave, but just so they don’t think I’m totally full of shit, I’ll let the psychic they’ve brought with them feel my presence, which I think I’ll have be a cold spot…