The Man From Nowhere

Pray begin.

“Ten days ago, a plane crashed landed in a nondescript location in Nigeria. One of our delta forces planted out there found your dead body. There were no known survivors. All 421 passengers are presumed to be dead.”

So it was all a CIA stunt? I tried to put the missing logical pieces together.

“That’s fantastic.”

“That’s not the fun part.”

“Then?”

“Tell me Mr. Post, during your so called hiatus have you encountered any alien race?”

“Well it’s Africa.”

“Please cut down the fancy part,” the CIA agent warned. “You know what I mean.”

“No. What do you mean?”

“In your trance state after we brought you here, you bespoke many strange words of a foreign language and kept saying ‘Dogon!’ ‘Dogon!’ and ‘Don’t leave me here….”

“I do not know what you speak of.”

“Mr Post this is of most national urgency.”

“And why is that?”

“You don’t understand do you?” the man took Post to an adjacent room and turned on a big screen: “Just like Facebook algorithm we have a software.”

Facebook! Does it mean I am back in current century? At least close by. I wondered. “The software allows us to view your entire biography. It spiders, siphons and sluices for information out there distilling from Youtube, hacking VHS uploads, configuring social security and ..” as he noted these I saw my entire life flash before my eyes. There I was smoking in parking lot in surveillance video, cat-calling a hooker, almost running through speedlight. Entire life has been documented in a pregenerated video.

“Do you recognize yourself?”

Then I looked at myself. My tanned looks, my strange hirsute organs, my tilted accent. “The flight that was derailed seemed to gone missing,” the CIA agent went on: “But we have a different theory.” Then he leaned forward: “We have a reason to believe it was hijacked and blown off.”

“What?” I was genuinely surprised.

“Perhaps, this man on screen may shed some light.” The light flashed a middle-eastern man with moustache and stubs, and scruffy hair.

“So?”

“Mr. Post,” the agent was silent for a while. “Does this look familiar to you?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Would you perhaps be shanghaied into ponying up now?”

“What do you mean?”
“Don’t fuck with me. You know it damned well what I mean.” Then he spoke slowly: “Did you have any alien encounter?”

“No,” I flatly denied.

“Oh well. Take some rest then,” he left.

I stumbled across the room, and balanced myself on a nearby basin. There was a miniature tooth-paste, hotel-stolen shampoos, and a small toothbrush. No razor. I reached for the tube and calmly put a little dab on the brush. I looked at the mirror and got shock of my life.

 

Three days later

Mr. Post came to a bus-stop calmly sat down and nudged his head in a newspaper. He paid no attention to nearby and was highly aware when the bum with the shopping cart trundled pass him.

He stopped and sipped a brown-wrapped bottle. Her girlfriend, another lady with crazy demeanor and cantankerous mood started arguing with the man.

“Shut up,” he yelled raising a few looks from nearby wait-stands. “Bitch shut the fuck up, you don’t know Dan could’ve raised the rate, so why borrow her the book then bitch? You on meth on sumthin’, you fuckin dyke.”

“Shut up John. Just fuckin shut up.”

“No why don’t you shut your horny little mouths and those pussy lips of your yu fuckin scraggy whore…fuckin winch…”

“Shut up John, just don’t make a scene here.”

I paid no attention to the scene. Tried my best to avoid eye-contacts but the situation was getting tense.

The man kept arguing back and forth with the woman with increasing sip. “You gave the corndog to the fuckin mezzo [inaudible] phone croon, you fuckin kyke…you fuckin cunt faced dipshit. Even after I repeatedly told you not to trust that fuckin [inaudible] cocksuckin stool faced stooge you had to give him that, dinch you?”

“John you know it was a mistake. I didn’t know you would keep it there.”

“Shut up. Shut up!!” People around me got increasingly uncomfortable.

“Hey you two cut it out!” Said a college student, a boy of 22 of Latino descent with a Maori tribal band tattoo on his arm. He was wearing thin-rimmed glass and was a bit chubby with double-chin and a bit of flub around his  belly.

“Fuckin you whore, you cunthole, I am gonna cut you in half. I am gonna slit your eyes out and throw the fuckin titties in Missippi river you bitch. You don’t know me. You fuckin whore, you don’t know a thang about me. Fuckin you see these? You see these…” he raised his shirt leaving some biker tattoo next to an overshadowed Virgin Mary mandorla: “These are fuckin legit penitentiary work. You know how I got’em? Ha you fuckin gutterhole.”

“John you are drunk.”

“Dude. Just stop,” another man broke in.

The man pulled out a blade and floundering and torpor walked ahead with dead-beat glance and made a Psycho-mudra to stab her to thrust her down.

“Stop!” I raised myself from the Register and motioned him with hand.

The entire scene froze. The bus came to a halt. The cars stopped dead in the tracks. The men who were walking paused to a stand still.

Despite my earlier false starts, I started getting hang of the power. Now I became adept on how to control it. Rational explanation of this seemingly dramatic countenance would be it was a typical scene in Israel where people pay homage by standing still on a give time-stamp. Logical-intuition however had different plans.

I looked up, up the shelf on which stood tube on top of taps, and looked at the mirror. The man before me was not Samuel Post. It matched the image of the terrorist on screen.

If it was my other-life I would have been guilty of this strange divine dividends. I mean I lost almost every hard-earned penny to a therapist only to have a psychedelic trip to come back as a doom-forsaken, god-muffin, fucking curse of a terrorist. But, after the initial shock and jolt, I started playing it cool.

The entire scene froze. The bus came to a halt. The cars stopped dead in the tracks. The men who were walking paused to a stand still. When you are the world’s most wanted deadliest terrorist, when the most recognized trending face looks at you who is guilty of a cold-blooded murder and linked to numerous plane hijacks and bomb explosions you are bound to stop.

But I was on a different zone. I knew precisely now how to control my affairs. The scene froze, but also on the other side of reality, it paused because I made it pause. I slowly walked up to the frozen man and unpacked him of the knife.

And then the scene melted. I stepped back in this reality as people started moving helter-skelter:

“It’s him! It’s him!”

“It’s Mohammad bin Zdane. Its fuckin him.”

“Fuckin run.”

Or another logical explanation could be someone called the police and the firemen brought the scene to a stand still. Whatever reason you choose to adopt is entirely you, but what stunned me the most was my memory lapse on how I escaped from the safehouse and why the following is about to take place:

A man in his thirties, well-dressed in Hawaiian shorts, and wearing a Panama hat came forward. “Okay that’s fine. That will do.” I looked around. There were camera crews everywhere.

            “Zeeshan stop. That’s enough. It’s a wrap.” I looked around and quite as obviously along with firebrigade came the CARE ambulance and along with them the newscrew and cameras. But next a man came and put a powder-brush on my face.

            I was in a Hollywood film.

 

Reality, What Is Reality

The universe is said to be a doughnut. You walk on one side towards another and you come back exactly at the same spot sooner or later if you walk long enough.

Shell-shocked after shell-shocked it needed an extra push to completely obliterate my belief systems and shake up my foundational axioms of epistemological outlook.

A pale man appeared out of nowhere. He looked normal enough to be, not dead or alive, but the sudden appearance took Post by surprise.

“Can I help you?” said the sudden man.

“Wait..erm…what? Huh….wait who are you?”

“I am an alien,” came the benign reply.

“You are nothing of that sorts.”

The man wore a silky-smooth long flowing robe, a toga of some sort, and he spoke near-perfect English. Can teleportation happen? Is time travel really possible? I asked myself these. And sure enough, the man replied me telepathically:

“You have seen nothing yet. All these are just parlor tricks, just chump change for a civilization of our caliber.”

“Yeah yeah… this is all show. Where’s Mark? Mark!!!” I barked to nothingness. “I know you are behind this.”

“I am from the far distant planet of Sirius.”

“Yeah, yeah sure….” Then it dawned on me how Sirius people have often maintained contact with Dogon. Then I played my card right: “I don’t believe you. If you are really of alien race, you should be able to take me back.”

“Back? As in where?”

“Back home,” then I waved him off: “See you are stalling. You are nothing of that kind.”

“You mean you expected something like this:” saying the man shape-shifted into a familiar version of an almond-shaped face on a bony attire from which hung the alb.

I fought back in strange expression. “You have seen nothing. You see in the real universe back-and-forth, back-and-forth games, front-and-back – they don’t exist. Whether universe is torus shaped or if the earth is round or flat is moot and meaningless. It is all an existential plane. So going by that logic, universe might as well be flag a fortiori earth.”

“But logic dictates…!!!” I thundered.

“Yes?” he spoke calmly.

“Science disagrees. I disagree!!” I thundered.

“Why?”

“This is all a fare. A show. I am still dreaming. I am still in stupor. I am still in drugged?”

“You mean you believe that you fell in 15^th century Africa and you are still drugged by bioka?” replied Ogume. The entire reality became a gridline of construction in neon lights, as it blinding magnesium flashed briefly, and then all of sudden I found myself back in the village hut with my old friends.

“No, it can’t be,”

Ogume was still wearing the robe, and this time he snapped his fingers and the reality transformed into my condo back in Minnesota. “You mean this?” said my house-maid Milena.

“I am back? Wait…wait…” I questioned my sanity. The scene turned back to the matrix of blankness. It was Void. Laban space. Hypercube. Chamber of God.

“Or this?”

“This is not possible. None of this is possible,” I decried.

“Why not?” Then the alien-priest stepped back and teased me: “Why not Samuel?”

“Where am I?”

“Once you figure out how the dimensions collapse into one, you realize the farcity of all. So…” he paused theatrically: “In a sense you are right. You are correct. All of this is a show.”

“Am I… I…” I stammered.

“No you are not growning insane,” came the intentional false note. “No that’s not what I meant. I meant am I …

….no, you are not dead.”

It seemed his thoughts and mine all merged into one. We are no longer communicating at a distance but in a mindshere.

“Or,” again he paused for dramatic effect: “may be you are.”

“Huh…what? What? What!!”

“Question is not what you are but what you’d like to believe,” said the alien-being to Post.

“What do you mean?”
“You are a lawyer,” he started to explain as the scene started turning into a slithery forest. “So obviously you studied logic.”

“Yes.”

“So tell me when you say you believe that it is written in scientific tablet and logic books that these things are not possible, what do you exactly mean?”

“Well if these things happened, they would happen… but they never do,” I fought back.

“Unless Mr. Post convinces himself that whenever reality shifts then it must be either hallucination or drug-atmosphere.”

“No,” – I said – “Yes.”

“Which one is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are aware of Łukasiewicz?”

“He postulated many valued logic.”

“That’s only in maths.”

“Who is to say reality doesn’t accord to her own laws?”

“It is not relevant.”

“Relevant logic on the other hand presupposes law of contradiction and makes special room for it,” once again our scenario turned seamlessly into brougham and four-in-hand of a Caillebotte painting. “Nagarjuna thousands of years ago even made room for tetralemma.”

“These are myths. These are all fairy tales.” Post protested.

“So you will deny the presence in front of you?” and the priest snapped his figure as an alien ship landed in a Western town somewhere in Nebraska with men and women with but- and-bens in the distant valleys.

“I don’t know.” Post said: “I need rest. I need sleep. I am possibly still sleeping.” Suddenly I lunged and tugged his head assuming the mask will come off only to reach empty space.

“I am here,” the man took off his mask to reveal my father.

“So,” I gathered my thoughts somehow. “Everything is an illusion? Everything is non-reality? Even my own family. Even YOU?”

As my thoughts flickered, so did the scene outside changing like a toddler sitting on a sofa remote control.

“Maya.”

“Maya.” I repeated back.

“Maya.”

“So can I go back? Surely if you can transform reality at will you can arrange my home back.”

“Not exactly everything is an illusion. This,” he came to me and touched my heart: “This is real. This,” He meant spirit as his arm went straight through my chest which became an infused orb of divine: “this is real. Your family is real. Your compassion. Your hurt-beings. Your deception. Your soul. Your faith. Your intuition. All of it are real. When you leave out the logical possibilities, however improbable what remains, is real. Miracles are nothing, as some saint once said, not contrary to nature but contrary to what we know of nature. The real miracle is to have compassion for the man whom you turned down because he stank in subway; the real miracle is to be caring to Sandra whom you can’t stand as soon as you got the superpower finding her below your standard in a stench of hubris; the real miracle is not to judge the incestuous relationship of Ogume; the real miracle is to listen to faith and the silent voice when the airport authorities held you back; the real miracle is paying your estrange father and mother a visit to the senior center you long relinquished; the real miracle is self-belief when everything else to our outside is to the contrary.

“All these just icing on the cake. All these are really a show. The real miracle is kindness, generosity and compassion. And.. self-love.”

“So,” it was if someone stunned me with a stun-gun: “Is Post dead? Am I in heaven?”

“Define death.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you assume will happen after you die?”

“I don’t know.”

“You think existence will vanish forever?”

“I don’t know.”

“If existence vanished forever, then so will the conception of existence, no?”

“I don’t know.”

“In a sense you are dead,” the priest replied. “Should you choose to go back you will find newspapers will headline “No survivors found, deadly plane crash in Nigeria”.

“I don’t get it.”

“Allow me to demonstrate. Tell me what do you want to see? Ask me anything?”

“Did Moses part the Red Sea?”

“See, there’s the problem. Whether he did it or not doesn’t matter. Question is, real question is, what do you choose to believe? Do you believe this…” he raised his hand and we found ourselves in Biblical age with a man in beard and staff commanding the sea to separate: “Or this…” the scene immediately turned to a small bank of earth that ran through the river. “Question is my dear Post is what you, YOU, choose to believe?”

“Okay fine, Fontana di Trevi, Michaelangelo.”

“Sure,” and sure enough we found ourselves in amidst din and bustle of a Renaissance Rome.

“Babylon.”

To this Post saw himself the ziggurat and the priest who anointed him and urged him vim.

“Ok fine, I want to go back.”

“Fine.”

The alien summoned a spaceship and ascended to a heavenly atmosphere, and Post found himself tied to ward-chain cuffed in an empty room that slowly and slowly started to bloom, to sprout furniture each by each, one at a time until the empty room had sparse accommodation. “Wait. Wait!!” I yelled. “Where am I? Where am I?”

“You are here Mr. Post,” boomed a friendly voice as my echoes boomeranged back.

“Wait, where? Where am I?”

“Remain calm,” Post looked around. The entire room came alive and reverberated with Godly sound. “Where am I?”

“Remain calm,” said the voice on the microphone. But there was no microphone in the room.

Suddenly the door flung open and a middle-aged man in Versace suit who looked like a government man calmly entered. “You are safe Mr. Post.”

“Where am I?” Post thundered.

“You are in a safe house. I believe you could of enormous use to us,” the man wearing a derby hat in thin-rimmed glasses carrying an umbrella crook put his arms around me and said: “Mr Post….” He looked at me. “Welcome to CIA.”

The Strange Tale of the Wailing Baobab Trees

I mean I have heard of Philadelphia experiment and everything, but I never believed in these looney conspiracy theories. Lest readers start to question my sanity I must say my legal profession was pretty boring and left room for little imagination except when it came to soaring off to uncharted territories in algebraic topology when it came to number crunching. But a background is needed before Post reveals what solidified his beliefs.

It is perhaps of muted resonance that I fractured my glasses back in the plane and I left it there. But curious as it may seem, then again not curioser enough, my vision started improving day by day gradually. With my vision so did insight. I started getting accustomed to the their customs, faux-pas and blueprints. I made friends, friend amongst who my best was Ogume. Ogume showed compassion and my tattoo of Libra scales which I imprinted on my beck after passing the bar exam spared my life for I became ‘Jonu ba wa’ or ‘The Anointed One’. Along Jonu ba wa I picked up ‘misi’ which means fish, ‘dikba’ which would, I presume be ‘dik-dik’, ‘kekune’ was snake and it was easy for me to remember due to the chemist, ‘tokun tokun’ was bird, ‘poowa’ was water.

The word for ‘trees’ was ‘boons’a’ but more specifically ‘boons’a’ means ‘forest’. And on this note I must relate the tale of the strange ‘wailing Baobab Forest’.

Our village lay about 20 kwa from that place. ‘Kwa’ means ‘time it takes a gazelle to run without fetching water’. Roughly it would be about a nights walk. Although I was chummy with my newfound friends, I always wanted to escape them. Anointed one as I was I was forbidden to talk about the forest lest even reach her near.

Her is not an accidental, prosaic choice by the author. For Post was told that at night spirits come alive in the forest. They said when one walks by the forest at night, they could hear the trees scream and wail.

Cosmogony went that Crow-god Buska got very mad when a rain-dance was skipped after the crops failed. He spat his tongue out, which fell on the trees like a blue-velvet thunder imbuing one with life. Every year for hundred years, he would curse one tree each year and slowly and slowly the entire area became haunted with unforeseen spirits.

It was all fine and showy, but a doubt remained in my mind. I was simply not convinced. As days followed, I was more entranced with the enchantment of what followed suit. I mean even 24 hours ago, I would be in the guest lodge in London, not knowing what would happen. Along with wishes of being a UFC fighter, shed my eye-glasses, gaining supreme knowledge… I mean out of bemusement I wished to test my faith with intention to embark on a fifteenth-century Burkina Faso odyssey. And sure enough, lo and behold! It did happen.

But Reality sure wouldn’t shift the boundaries just to satisfy me. First I was convinced it would play act by referring me to the Shakespearean play, but then when I landed at no-man’s land it went a step or two further.

The ceremonial drink was ‘bioka’ which was part-hallucinogenic in nature and tasted bitter like Vodka. In the plane I remember I asking for sleeping meds, and I had one of the two left. One day on a festivity of revelry I excused myself to the bushes, crushed the tablet into powder and put in a pouch.

I could be a clumsy one and sleight-of-hand was never my forte. But desperate accounts have a strange way of confronting your fears and challenging your courage head on. I was desperate, desperate to walk, climb, swim or run – do anything- to get out of here. I was missing Sandra. And most importantly I wanted some answers from Mark.

Mark, couldn’t have set this up. This was far-fetched beyond his limits. If that was the case, you would expect cables and camera-flash lying somewhere near however careful they may be to cover it up.

I climbed back to the party. It was indeed a special occasion for it was ‘Festival of Di’ , the day corn-god blessed the crew for their good deeds and a gazelle was celebrated.

Stoned on the gazelle-steak, the blood sugars must have risen and they were already drowsy. Here is the thing, they pass the ‘muuke’ or a the ‘pitcher-plant vessel’ ceremoniously from left-to-right clockwise and I needed to drug the whole crew. So I couldn’t possibly be in th middle.

‘I am pleased by the compassion of corn-god Di,’ I spoke in their fluent tongue. ‘I want to offer my life with the gazelle.’

‘Shut up, you drunk,’ cried Bon-ma, wife of an elder chief.

‘I want to give put my neck for sacrifice’

‘Shut up, sit down.’ Just because I was the anointed one doesn’t mean I would be exempt from drunk-insults.

‘Give him the drink. Let him go first today. He needs it,’ cried Ogume.

I leaped to the chieftain, fell before his knees, and burst into sobs: ‘Allow me to grant my life for the greater-good, O Benevolent One’.

The chief gently caressed my hair, and then helped me stand up. ‘We are moved by your courage, Jonu ba wa. It is now we realize our mistake. We should have always started our ceremony with you, the Courageous Gnat-Devil’. Not sure how I got the nickname ‘gnat’ which was my nickname, but it must have started upon chancing my tattoo from day one.

He took out an urn and poured some liquid in the pitcher-plant. Wasting no time, I immediately raised high facing the full moon and prayed the incantations I took deep pains to memorize: ‘Maaa wakeel walla go ka du ba kare wa naaaa, eh wa naaa pi ma kaa walla go ha akka ni ba. Ha akka nib a, jaly e wala.’

The deed was done. Pleased with my effort, he poured in some pour and I drank it with no hesitation.

I wasn’t sure if the small dosage worked, for after two or three hours, entire village was sound sleep. The meds didn’t affect me, as I had a beetroot juice made before which the village only drinks in the morning before going out for harpooning which acts more like a coffee. The coffee must have countered the effect, but Post was worried about the lack of dosage.

Post consoled himself into thinking that they weren’t used to it, so it should work. It must have worked.

By owls’-hoot, the entire village was sound sleep. Even Ogume my dear friend who always kept me under his shadows would go away to fuck one of his wife’s sister.

I made no pretense of guilt. Every man for himself, I thought. They saved my life, fed me, clothed me and I could care less if I drugged them to get out of the fraternity.

Treading welwitschia and bruising my feet to shreds from stepping cacti I tip-toed, then walked, and then ran. Ran as hard as I could. When Post made sure that he was safely out of the periphery, he made an internal navigation judging the stars and heavens.

It wasn’t long before I made it to the Wailing Baobab Forest. No creepy sound came, but by now I figured out why it was a restricted area. It was no secret they would shun the unwanted ones, pariahs and other deformities of grave crime into the tree-trunk and seal them shut. They just didn’t want me to me to find their dirty secrets.

I made my way to a tree, and took out a flint-shaped tool which I carved sitting there and slashed open a small crevice. It was small enough for me to reach my arm through and feel if there was anything. Anything.

Nothing. There was absolutely nothing. But then I espied a dead wolf, and I yanked out fang and started digging another nearby tree. Slowly and slowly the opening gave away to a hole and then a doorway.

Yahtzee. I reached my arm and did indeed feel something. The pattern of the outline felt like a human form. I pulled him out, and as much strange happenings happened, even I wasn’t ready for the shock.

I hurried to another, and dug furiously. The moonlight shone in and I could make out the inside. I ran to another and then another and the same thing came up again and again.

Sure they were all dead bodies, but that wasn’t the dirty secrets they were hiding.

The entire forest was a living graveyard which bespoke a most eerie and chilling reception.

For they weren’t just ordinary men who were imprisoned and suffocated to death. The man whom I dug out at first was wearing a dusty, faded doublet and breeches. And one of his pair of boots had a strange script in English that could only be medieval.

A galleon of entire ship hostage from England has been imprisoned in this baobab forest. And yes, I was in fifteenth century Africa.

1500s, Burkina Faso

Chekov’s gun will insist I pace forth. So I shall duly oblige.

Allow me to get into my character. Post was sipping coffee, combing his onyx brown hair and slowly getting into his dramatis personae. The night was still cold. Cold and young. It was 1 am. And he had a nasty hangover although his movie-mind was calculating moves at knots like a quipu gone berserk. Interior, the reality deconstructed into atoms of Galatea, with which danced a Vedic dance of Laplanian determinism of Humic billiard balls. “Once you figure out the connexion,” he mutter’d as he slowly took the cab ride around London night: “….verything makes sense. And what is left over is left over for transcendence.”

Let’s put it to test. He thought. What if I would like to go to 15^th century Burkina Faso? Will that be pushing it too much? Will tugging Lady Luck’s skirt a little too mischievous? Farthingale, however must marilyn monroe. “And-“, He closed his eyes for two seconds: “Let it be.”

“Sir,” the cab driver hailed forward: “Traffic jam ahead,” indeed London taxi drivers are endowed with especially bright hippocampus thanks to regurgititant  exercise of  ‘well-trodden paths’, paths that deer carves, carves through emerald thickets by jaded rivers.

“Do you have a map?” the bourgeoisie mocked-a-British.

“Oui, bien sûr, monsieur,” it was almost Post upped a switch and forced him to speak in French. Or possibly he was hearing his answer in French. It is just that translation happened too fast.

He expected a mercurial filling of paths in red glows to topologically connect cities that will aid him to travel from point A to point B. No, nothing sorts of Hollywood happened. But I understood. It doesn’t work if you force it or try to dovetail it with preconceived notions of what it means to attain siddhis.

Siddhi consciousness. He let his intuition flow. However skeptical he was. But he was pyrrhonistically  skeptical of his skepticism. And his intelligence soaring at knots perfectly understood that once I leave it to doubt, it shall never carry out its executions.

So I got out of the cab. And I started to walk. Forty paces, exactly forty paces, and it seemed like I covered forty feet distance, doing the maths, I was at the mouth of a den that led downwards to subway.

Mark. It flashed it my mind. The staircase jolted my near catatonia to a voltage like Pinnochio totem-spirit being animystically raised. Could it be he contrived this happenstance too? Could it? Could it be entirety is a show? It could. I mean in the theatrical hyper-level of theta reality everything is a farce and this entire London subway could be part of a Shakespearean caricature. Modern day that is.

On my way, I brushed past a hurrying belle and the bump caused her coffee lid to fly spilling a good dosage on my blazer-jacket. I kept quiet. I knew it was part of the process. The purpose. And sure.

“Oh so sorry. I am sorry.” Synesthesia kicked in and her tone felt like mawkish sentiment of a long-drawn Modigliani mannerism.

I didn’t reply. She almost paused and non-flirtingly dabbed the tissue paper she wrapped her cup with on my coat while doing so spilled over her purse.

What a clumsy little cunt. I did not. I reigned my thoughts, my judgments and like adding an imaginary silencer to a Czechoslovakian rifle, I shut down my inner critic.

“Sorry. I am just in a hurry. Having a terribly bad day. I am so sorry.”

It’s just an act. Let it flow. Let it roll.

And sure enough the embarrassed lady clutched her affairs and left the show. What silently however lay on the ground was the sole prop of her forgotten ticket.

“Bloody hell,” Post thought. “I have no wallet on me,” dawned the sudden realization like Joshu’s satori.

I picked up the ticket stub and being not cognizant of London affairs discovered I could still reuse it. But in my hintergedanken I knew there could be no deception. Or even if deception exists, there should be absolutely no internal resistance.

You must never hesitate. Words of Sean Connery/Mason in The Rock flashed in my mind. Why did it do so that I know not? But it did. Best is to allow everything to happen. Zen master is he, who is prepared for the reality to burst asunder and not shake an inch. Seismic activity aside, sure enough I saw a hobo who looked abikal like Connery. Abikal? What does that mean? An Indian looking boy in half-pants with forehead long hair was rocking his legs. Is that an Indian word?

Do I speak a different language now? Train trundled along as I gently rocked in the flickering lights of subway taking me unknown of destination.

When the mouth opened, I found myself embarking upon a new vista. A vista which moved automatically almost. “Taxi sir?”

“Yes.”

Rational mind would say police station, to report a pick-pocketing incident, but I was buzzed on entirely something else. Drug that I was high on was confidence. Absolute, unshakable self-belief. “To Heathrow.”

“Heathrow it is sir,” his mouth moved almost as if in script with God the divine ventriloquist. Through Nyquist tunnel of information bombardment the 22^nd century dos-a-dos sailed through.

In airport I met a straight straight xeroxed out of Wole Soyinka. Conversation moved fluidly. Here now I, as an author, must interject to slam down some knowledge: At advaita-taoism level there is no right or wrong, good or bad, white or black, yes or no. There is nothing bad, but if you feel guilty about feeling bad, then that is bad. Back..

“Where are you going?”

“Oh back to Minnesota,” I lied.

“That is fantastic,” answered the elder.

“Yes. How about you?”

“Oh to France?”

“Really.”

“Yes.”

“Business or pleasure,” my old-impish self would have put cringeworthy air quotes to force a joke but this newself of mine was of a more mature and calm composure.

“A martini vodka.”

“Mixologist?”

“There will be a Macbeth’s African rendition. In Theater of the Absurd. It will be entire in an obscure dialect?”

Before the man could crash me with a reverberating reply, I dimmed his wit with a diffusing reply: “Fon gbè?”

He started at Post as if Bodhidharma burned through wall with piercing eyes. “How did you know that?”

“I am racist,” I laughed it off, can’t believing my jovial arrogance in a biting cant.

“Yeah, yes. Judge not, unless you judge well. The poet said right?”

“Intuition actually,” came the honest reply, still not knowing how I pulled it out of bunny’s hat.

I played it cool. I lied to maintain order. This is happening fast. This is just happening too fast. “I heard in radio.”

The man seemed to sigh a relief. So it turns out he is an author. But what followed next, no psychic card reader could buy.

“You know Fon?”

“I know Fon.”

“You interested in job.”

“What kind?” I squinted my brows.

“There is a need of a side-character. The play is entirely in Fon. There is a part still needed and I like the way you carry yourself. But-“

“Yes?”

“You must decide now.”

“I will cancel Minnesota.”

“Cancel Minnesota.”

“Here,” he handed me some papers. “Here is the boarding pass straight to Paris.”

“You are not going?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because that was my main purpose. I had to hurry to find the x-man.”

“But now?”

“Now I will focus on a more important affairs of a future programme in Dubai. I must hurry to Dubai.”

“But you are the playright.”

“Eh, I will quarterback it from Skype.”

“So these are the tickets?”

“Yes. Where is your passport?”

“I am an American citizen. My driver’s license will suffice.”

But driver’s license did not suffice. Because simply I didn’t have one. It was in my wallet. And I felt like a yogi in suits. Penniless, worthless, apparently-worthless only to be pushed forth and moved like a zule castled dramatically from one position to another solely from grace of God’s divine piston.

 

When an event proceeds too smoothly, it seems it is bound to be stalled henceforth.

Or so my belief went as I understood later. It was all part of a plan, the part that for the next four hours, due to a computer glitch, entire scheduling theory would be thrown haywire and scratching attendants would rake and be at loss as to the next move.

For me it was to be a noble zugzwang. This I did not however understand at first. If it was my old self, Post would have already cursed his fate and may have almost resigned. But this was to be my newme.

Instead of being on self-destructive mode, I tried to put my patient time into constructive usage. Job I was and if I were to commit to my newly recruited job I might as well learn my part. I envisioned my ragged, yellow-torn folios of Shakespeare from before, and tried to rake my brain for Macbeth. Besides, my mind wandered. I don’t have license yet. Might as well put this into with gusto full-faith.

And just when I thought this, the world miraculously opened her heavenly gates. The lines started moving faster. I was at boarding gate 8, and the people were so frustrated that I felt the rush brute-forced the authorities to skip my identity in the helter-skelter.

Just when I was about to board, two uniformed men came up and calmly questioned me: “Sir, do you have your passport?”

The panic set in. “No. No I lost it.”

“Sorry, Sir. We cannot let you board then.”

“But, but I have my boarding pass.”

“Sorry, Sir.”

“Wait, wait,” then I remembered I still have my phone with me, and my phone has a snapshot of my license. But.

“I have my phone with me,” I decided to play on all-knowing the double-bind that the names won’t match. “My phone has my license photoed…”

People were going crazy. I was caught like frozen deer.

“Sorry, Sir, that won’t do.”

“Jeesus Christ. Just fuckin’ go,” an American arrogance shone in from the back. A man in Angels’ t-shirt with a hat, and in shorts and as impatient as self-imposed sober breaking his beer-fast.

“Please.”

“You are Mr. Licounay Doherty?” the man eyed the boarding pass.

And then the divine intervention. The radio came to life: 39, do you copy?…. There is an elderly woman at Gate 23 who fell off her wheel-chair….She might need assistance.

            The other officer in charge of airport security looked dead in my eyes and in a steely, gruff voice that is used to giving specific instructions spoke: “Go. But don’t pull this bloody prank again.”

 

The plane nosedove. And just before the crash, Post’s penultimate memory was that of doubt. Was he doing the right thing?

I do not know how long I lay unconscious, but when I finally regained my consciousness the darkness was there. It was pitch-dark and I had no faintest idea where I was or where and how the plane landed. In fact I didn’t even know if I was anatomically intact.

Ghostly bodies surrounded me. I was still fastened and strapped. That saved me. That was without a shadow of doubt.

Things followed even more swiftly. I wanted to be in Burkina Faso in fifteenth century. And the man said it was to be a medieval play in Fon. So it clicked. I was about to be immersed in an artificial simulation of 15^th century jungle affairs.

But the idea was even far from distant. Flashes, sconces and torches all of a sudden surrounded Post. Post now still frightened lost his cool: “Help. I am here.”

But the giveaway only brought attentions from feathery headdresses and animal-skull totems that hung from wrestler-sized bodies like Flava Flav. Only these were of more ominous forbearance.

Ululations in foreign tongue aired. I knew Fon but I could hardly make head-or-tails. Where was I? Last I remember we were flying over Atlantic Ocean. Yes, the flight from England to France rerouted to take us to Portugal and Spain..

Wait. Could it be?

And then memory surfaced. This is your captain speaking. We are encountering a small turbulence…

            The plane has been swept aside? The plane as been swept aside!

Could it be?

Yes.

Could it be that I landed in..

Yes.

And thus was set-forth in stone. Judging by the presence, I must have landed somewhere near in Africa.

And I also put 2 and 2 and figured out why the guards, who and from whom I seemed to take mutual umbrage, was so forcible in delaying me.

The jarring accident shook my spirit but I knew best would be to cooperate. I went on with the flow. What seemed like canoe trips, assegais through plantations, and roaring species and susurrus critters and endless hours and oscillations of night-and-day, I was being taken to an unknown location. I could hear them alright, as I was being taken on a stretcher made of sticks and knots, and as days progressed I could finally understand a smattering or two.

This was not Fon. This was a strange dialect. And it increasingly became clear to me they weren’t used to this appearance. Wait. Does it mean I landed in a civilization untouched and unheard of? Something like Yanomami or something?

Something.

It would be days before I would figure out that I was being taken to a locale with populace who could very well be ancestors of modern day Bobo populace.

But that wasn’t the most jarring part. The part that grabbed the bullish nature of mine by the horns, wasn’t not the fact that I could very well be their last meal or that some ill-natured, god-cursed creature will devour me alive, or that I would no longer would be able to swim or walk and escape the wretched place.

The fact that I, Samuel Post, began to realize was that I may very well have been transported back to 15^th century Burkina Faso.

The Priest

Zoroastrian priest rotated the pyx mechanically from one corner of the shelf to another as the lost article fell below.

He removed his sash, tied one corner of filigree to ceiling through an oarlock and hoisted a Damocles scimitar. He ushered the voice; the bourgeoisie obliged-a-marionette and hypnotically towards the strange abattoir.  Another Hamiltonian half-spin ensued, and the man with the white-headdress poured two droplets of Albanian double eagle, summoned Anubis and weighed ka by the scales.

Next, next the man unraveled a fletcher’s red oakwood’s poisoned-tip arrows’ potion and the venom alit in firing blaze was to be swallowed upon placement on the tongue. The young man shuddered, felt hallucinogenic murmurs as the rotisserie violations boomed him into an untouchable vortex. Untouched as the soaring eagle above ziggurat’s stratosphere. Untouched as the left glove of Brahmin. Untouched as the baron who coils a handkerchief around wrist and punches the nigger. Untouched like vestal virgins with augurs’ caduceus. Untouched as the psyche of Nazareth who just died in sin recently. Untouched as gallowglass who fought at Phrygia. Untouched.

Scared and scarred unbetrothed haggardly silhouette sip-a-took from the container that carried the desired potion. Channeling a spirit, yoking to an ethereal Light from beyond and having gained the pick to the akashic chambers’ records, and imbued with ashur’s vim suddenly after violent and vigorous violations, the body numbed below like a lifeless dog post-coital.

“In the name of Ashuribanpal. By command of Nimduk and by the thunder of Gilgameshian doctrine, I hereby declare you impossible!” cried afoul a Zoroastrian authority ex cathedra.

“The damned be damned, the least be lest, the knowledge, the wisdom, the strength of ten-thousand ox I summon, to infuse and incarnate an autocratic spirit newfangled with fangs of asp and to assume an Asperger’s role mal-face.

“I hereby exorcise the kundalini cobra to sahasra chakra exploding into voltage of brilliance of ten-thousand suns and hereby grant the authority to connect with will at will and no storm, thunder or flood may tear ye asunder as the violent concoctions contorts thy body to afuel you to the upper spheres of Valhalla.

“I hereby grant Post post-mortem navel tearing orgasm qi to resonate through the gates of eons and thus fruition peace and harmony upon Ragnarok return.”

And at the count of one you will awake….ten…nine…eight…

Post had no idea where he was. For it took a while to get used to the upper storey of this London apartment. Flue-flaker was below, as bellows of smoke rose in the distant.

Sandra taught her this address. She gave him the phone number of Mark. And Mark was an assured hypnotherapist. He felt the dreamy vibrations still effecting his sappy corps.

Despite notoriety Mark had no license. He had no practice. No home. No chamber. No school. No mortgage-lent house, and all that mattered was his strategies worked. Simply he did not exist.

He was best of the best at what he did. He could take the most mangled, the most wrangled of all victims and after a resounding ten thousand dollar an hour session, he could make him an ultimate robot cum absolute beast.

Mark was master at subconscious programming. It is said, well actually Sandra informed the author, how after an ayahuasca ceremony all Mark gave command to his brain was: “Optimize” and having trust and faith as moving mountains, he would find his own life metamorphose.

Now Post, who by the way can be deemed as author’s alter-ego was apparently named after Emil Post, who was sculpted by parents like Polgar-Sidis-Mill to evolve into a mathematical machine to find the solution to correspondence problem.

As a result, Asperger’s resulted.

He was diabolically destroyed and disbarred from his post for all the gaucheries and workplace sexual harassment lawsuit, until, until Sandra took kind. She was in love at first sight at coffee bar and after tumultuous romance, Guanyin would offer him help.

“Sqrt of 987389243203032320.”

And so I called. I called Mark. And Mark agreed to help. Proviso being this encounter won’t exist. I wrote him a- ‘that-better-not-bounce’- check and climbed up the cobweb filled dark staircase drenched with urine.

I never smoked hashish or such in my life let alone nootropic, psychobabble pills, yet I felt I experienced a most profound induction guiding me a spiritual epiphany.

At the stair well I met a London thug and his cockney temper flaringly spat at me. As if that wasn’t enough a prematurely pregnant girl of early 20s would have her other toddler spew a stew-filled lentil vomit on my face.

I bitterly endured this. But Mark’s behavior was the most egregious. “Can I freshen up a bit?” I mocked an accent in lilting tone.

“Later. Hurry. We have no time to waste.”

“But look at me!” I cried.

“Yes?” came the polite acknowledgement of Hakuin.

“I feel disgusted. Just look at me,” and then just as suddenly the bulbs burst and fused as electricity went off as if by poltergeist provocation.

“Oh well,” said Mark most assuredly, “At least, I don’t have to get up to turn off the light.”

“Yeah,” I tried to gather myself.

“I hear in 1884 a lady hung herself after lighting herself in fire. Poor lady had to commit suicide because Lord Bumberlough couldn’t help his itchy dick.”

“Yes,” needless to say I found none of this amusing.

“So let’s get started shall we?” the dimly lit room was receiving lunar light of the city. “How do you feel?”

“Insulted,” came the bland reply.

“Why is that Mr. Post? I read your file. Do you realize how many will die to get into your spot? You have a Guinness Record hold-like prodigious capability of mental manipulation, yet you bicker and bark?—“

“Tut, tut,” I cut him off.

“Actually, frankly, with your leftsided lop-brain, nothing will get through thick skull, not even a mightier trepanation.”

“We can do without the mud.”

“Most assuredly so Mr Post, most assuredly. Let us begin.”

There was great stench in the room. It was an eerie atmosphere and Post couldn’t stand it, no, not one bit.

His head started getting dizzy. And at to this cadaverous atmosphere a siren light wailed outside of a bulging fire-brigade outside through the city-light.

Something was very wrong. I yelled and uttered under my breath. Post felt dizzy as sounds around subsided and the stench, not an incense or an abattoir drench, enveloped his body gradually. Mark came and with comfort of a mother-hen covered me with a blanket. I never felt so much compassion in my life and I hardly know this fuck.

Austria won….In a nil-to-two-down match, after a trailblazing comeback… Austrian opener Matthew Vyn Wyck and….pastor Ostop Newman would pile on …. four hundred run world record partnership as Austria….. beat New Zealand by 43… runs bowling them out for 85. Last man Noruway… a Maori Yorker specialist… would play a riveting cameo of 12-ball 50 but… but damage has already been done. Austria now takes the title… of…

The words in the radiowave faded away. Does Austria play cricket? Or I lost it already? It was most surreal…

If you were to spend 10g to turn your life around in a much assuring volte-face of pyramidal pinnacle drive would you do so, dear-reader?

It takes no deer-reader’s tracking hindsight to realize what has happened from the entrails of lentils leftover and vomit-urine residue, the one that alpha-silver gorillas leave behind on branch-leaves.

Post and I came back home just few hours ago and paid off the cab. And having signed the non-disclosure form and not to utter a breath to a soul, I immediately went to my washroom to get fresh and take a shower.

I turned on the water and briefly miffed at not having the optimal temperature, I had to adjust the left-right combination.

As the stream poured in and washed me anew with my mouth already salivating for a New England clam chowder at this dusky, downtrodden milieu, the lightbulb went on as I instantly understood what had happened.

“Genius! Son-of-a-bitch! Motherfucker is a genius!”

It didn’t take seconds for glossolalia to hit. I wasn’t thinking in English anymore, yet I was teleported to a primordial, ur-nous state where I could easily step from one side of reality to another like flip-flopping a necker cube. I thougth and I did not thought. I understood and did not understood. It was a binary relationship of on-and-off, blinking eye light switch event.

The next paragraph I thought through, I found, entirely in Fon:

Dogfaced baboon! I hope he fuckin rots in hell. Entire stream of accidents from the Welsh-Cockney bully to spit on my face, to the strange Oliver Twist etching pregnant maid’s vomit, to the seemingly innocuous light bulb exploding as power meltdown happened to the unbearable stench to the fear inducing story of wench who committed suicide to the surreal story of Austria beating New Zealand piling on juggernautian monolith, to the flashing of the fire brigade for hallucinatory effects and down to the last detail of climbing up a rustic staircase was nothing but carefully contrive to mimic the subconscious.

            I hope kiss-teeth locusts come out of his bellybutton. I exclaimed! The induction was just an icing on cake.