Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

* * *

“Please sit down, Mrs. Moore. I called you here today because we believe we have had a confirmed sighting of your husband.”

“Where is he? Is he okay?”

“Mr. Moore was able to flee the area before an officer could apprehend him.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know how to say this. Our investigation has led to certain, shall we say, abnormal findings concerning your husband. He checked into the Rainbow Hotel, the penthouse suite to be exact and well, the staff at the Rainbow Hotel noticed some strange things. He ordered room service twice using different names and gave the same room number. The registry listed a Mr. Joseph Moore, but he claimed to be someone else. He then accosted a member of the staff with a broken mini-bar bottle and claimed that the young man was a serpent who’d been trying to sneak under his door for the last few days. Mr. Moore had only been at the hotel for an hour at this point. When the manager of the facility attempted to discuss the altercation with Mr. Moore, he was challenged to a leg-wrestling match and accused of being, I quote: ‘a scissor wielding sissy’ unquote, who had quote: ‘come to groom ear, anus, and neck hair’ unquote while Mr. Moore slept. The manager was alarmed and requested that Mr. Moore depart. At this point, Mr. Moore calmed down and agreed. The manager of the hotel allowed Mr. Moore to gather his things and meet him in the lobby. At which point, while the manager waited in a seating area, several witnesses reported seeing Mr. Moore running through the lobby with a bathmat around his neck, a dowel in his hands, and a shower curtain wrapped around his body like a toga.”

“Oh my god.”

“Yes, well, let me continue. A woman was waiting for a porter to bring her luggage up to her room and your husband apparently attacked the woman. He was able to pull a fur coat off her and remove some sandals she was wearing before the hotel staff could come to her aid. Mr. Moore struck several people with the wooden dowel and made his escape out of the front doors. An interesting note, according to the manager, was that he seemed to get trapped in the revolving door. The last confirmed quote that Mr. Moore made was: ‘Death to the doors that swing in scandalous pirouettes. They are the trenches of the revolution’ before he disappeared down the street.

“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Moore. Due to the nature of your husband’s activities, we’ve called in Section 6. They are an elite group trained in dealing with these kinds of events. We believe that Mr. Moore has been afflicted with some sort of drug overdose, or perhaps a chemical imbalance caused by misuse of his medication. Review of his medication files has led experts to speculate that this may be the cause. We do not believe Mr. Moore is behaving rationally.”

* * *

Balls out down the street, after the greatest escape of an angel since Lucifer waged a phony war, an entire bounty of paradise’s toiletries, booze, and confections, Saint Peter didn’t even know what hit him, he hasn’t been that bamboozled since Nero gave him the old piñata treatment, the keys are in the bag, baby. Time now for a quick Wrightian spirit trick so they don’t catch him, he lies flat against the wall of a building and becomes a part of its shadow, the dark chilly plain of the servants of the light. This is how we walk amongst you. He sticks to the wall, scampers across a street to a flagpole’s shadow and tightrope walks it all the way to the other side, unseen, unheard, unknown amidst the citizens. Of the four infernal gutters that disgorge into the rancid sewer, there is that of hate, sorrow, rue, and rage. Joseph stands by the whirlpool, the crossroads of the shadows and the rivers, a witness to the Baudrillardian landscape. He knows the way, he sticks to the unsunned side and crosses onto Lethe Street, a mighty thoroughfare that seems to continue on for oblivion, so long and wide he forgets his joy and grief, pleasures and pains. Luckily, a great building of cold concrete keeps some shadow and Joseph follows the signs straight inside. A major meat processing factory, it whirls with snow storms, great torrents of snapping wind and hail rain down from belching winter giants, as he traverses dunes of snow and climbs bitter icebergs to the beginning of the ancient maze, a labyrinth of icy piles housing the unthawed remains of primordial monsters, those fearful giants born in the comets and seen riding them in a great invading bombardment. Joseph does battle with many of them, still pumping their deity blood, sustaining omnipotence even in cryogenic sleep. He remembers his Saint Mike Commando School of Slaying Pagan Usurpers training and in expertly strategized maneuvers outflanks them by using his scepter as a decoy. Imagine it, monstrous cries that split open the ether of space as Joseph backsides eternal prisoners of ice and snow with their own turf, ice-balls right in the noggin, icicle swords he slices open navels with, spilling female headed gorgon armies that he traps in crevices that reach down into eternity, snowflake ninja stars he tosses like hand grenades right into their all-knowing eyes and unclean soupy noses. They fall like the Yeti that they are, the dirty pig worshippers. Now for pillaging their super powers like sea sponge on a muscle.

Joseph makes it out of Antarctica with a menagerie of new talents through a service entrance. He is now able to howl like a hound of hell, shift into the shape of any dead man (not truly Meinongian, but close), his first choice is Abraham Lincoln but he later settles on Pope Louis XVII, who he wrongly believes is the founder of the blood libel cases against Jews, having been Johnny Norwalk for awhile and realizing it was those dirty gypsies and not the children of Israel, which was right after a spooky encounter with a psychedelic Trotskyite who refused to give his name and a rather formidable few minutes as the primary financer of the Globe Theatre who murdered the mouse that was the pet of Daniel Webster, he can also speak in a thundering voice the law of the pagans, cause things to burn without catching on fire, make rivers run upstream, find a needle in a haystack, wield the sword of the dragon’s back if he ever happens upon it, rise high the roof beams, speak the tongue of prophet’s of the proto-mammals, unlock the holy garment bag of peccadillo, force snakes to do his bidding, control the north wind (partly, this is not to suggest he can order it to blow on ships and to cause storms, only that he can, should he choose to do so, request special favors, for the wild winds of the sea are like kitty cats, one does not train them, one conditions them for certain purposes, whether they agree to perform these duties is within their very free will), bring forth famine and pestilence, blow the bugle that harkens the sun, turn offenders of the faith into salt statues (again, to clarify, these are of the Panofskian ilk and will not, physically represent the former person or persons, but rather represent their emotional, psychological, and dare I say it, spiritual personalities), force mortals to fall in love, hate, and fraternity, ride the lightning stallions of the sixth dimension, borrow, loan, or otherwise rent the chariot of death, take lessons (not a two-for-one deal) from the sisters fate on weaving, needle work, embroidery, and tapestry aesthetics, request from the dwarves of the center of the earth certain metal work articles such as armor, weaponry and vehicles, plague offensive perpetrators with non-lethal but aggravating curses (these are limited to things like continuous hair growth, turning everything they touch into manure, never being able to see straight, etc.) and lastly, the ability to seek and gain an audience with the particular ruling body currently holding office in heaven.

So he does make it through his first obstacle as an escapee, but being an impatient demi-god, Joseph lands (Mercatorianly) right in a vast gulf as profound as the Serbonian bog. He grips the receding air with his angelic fingers, tearing at the clothing of time (theoretically aging), trying to pull himself back out as star clusters, quasars, quirks, googolplexies, infinets, meteors, planets, asteroid girdles, engagement rings, flying saucers, alien outposts, space debris, a vacuum cleaner, doppler effects, newtonian laws, galilean oversights, copernican apologetics, hubblian rainbows, ptolemiac chronicles, a slew of Arabian theories, besselian measurements, herschelian swatches, einsteinian twins, and hawkingish evaporations are pulled into the gaping fangs of forever more. The force is immeasurable, tightening its vacuous noose, abominable, big, grand, all those things, but Joseph and his magical winged feet cling to a non-existing molar, refusing to be swallowed and refusing to become food for the galactic juices of perpetuity’s full tummy. He finally grabs hold of a soda-pop can, then a plastic wrapper from a discarded candy bar, then a whole bag of garbage, its shudderingly horrific plastic darkness holding steady in the end, he digs his fingers into the bag, breathing in the smells of rotting produce, coffee grounds, leftovers from the last supper, and pulls with all of his might. Light! Glorious, life giving, mother of all, light! Joseph hangs over the side of the abyss, his feet still dangling into the hollow void, resting…