Post by Barnaby Cuthbert on May 22, 2014 15:03:12 GMT -8
December 17th, 2012
Somewhere in Seattle
Christmastime
Tom huddled around a fire barrel near a covered underpass overlooking the park, swapping stories and puff-puff passing a smoke. He stretched in the cold december rain and wrapped himself deeper inside his worn, tabby coat, nodding to his companions at the barrel.
Heading toward the park, Tom held out his hat to a pair of well-to-do passerby, and thanked them roughly but sincerely when they drop a dollar in. 'It's Christmas after all', the woman had said.
In the wintertime drizzle Tom mimed an upheld umbrella and tap danced up and down the side of the curb on his way over to Regina, 'singing in the rain' style. By way of explanation he nodded to the pair that had dropped him the dollar as they dwindled in the distance, a pair of smiles in the frosty darkness.
"See I remind them all that there is a bottom, a bottom," he repeats gruffly, lyrically, but without any particular tone, "I remind them all, that there is a bottom. Lord, oh yes, there is a bottom indeed." This said to the black-grey sky, "Yes there is a bottom," he grins behind thin, knowing lips, "...and it looks just like me.”
Regina smiled almost fondly at Mad Tom.
"Glad you came to see me." She patted the bench next to her and looked up at the cloudy sky. As he begins to sit she begins to talk, still looking up. "A man has come to find you. Someone from your past. He is going by name of 'Due' right now. But that's not his real name. He's family. He told me his real name." She glances at him. "I pulled three cards about this situation.”
Tom's eyes are hidden by the brim of his hat as he stretches out on the bench like it's a warm summer day.
"Stream from the coffee and the stirring of the cup, the spoon going round says giddyup, giddyup."
He doesn't leave, so he must be willing to hear her out, Regina decides.
"Names have power, so says the Chief,” Says Tom the last is troubled, as if he's a little worried the name of someone from his past is so easy to come by, even for an oracle like Regina. It's no longer sunny in Tom's disposition. All of the sudden he seems to feel the cold, huddling inward on the bench and rubbing his hands together in their fingerless gloves. She nods, sitting next to him.
"The first was The Profane. Someone or something was evil. An evil man. An evil deed. I don't know. The second was Industry. A job well done. A favor owed. Such hard work. The third was Marriage. A relationship, a pact, a deal made. These three combined surround you and Due... a man who says you will not recognize him now. His deformity that has happened after embrace. He is unsure and shy. But I think he lies. I think he wants something dear and is so eager for it he can't bear it. I told him I would not look for you, ask you to meet with him, until he told me his real name. And he did."
Regina shakes her head. "Too much death and more to come. The question is... this man, this pact with him, and the deeds you've done... is there more to come?”
"It's always a tale of two brothers and one Plow,” sighed Tom, "What's to come next is written and done. Blood will have blood. But there's hope," he said, picking a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it from a plain white free gas station matchbook.
"My dog stayed with me," he explained, "Even on Her streets." He took a puff and smoke blustered out of the side of his mouth briefly before being carried away by the wind. "See, Fido means faithful in Latin.”
She nodded as if Tom’s ramblings made perfect sense. Perhaps, on some level, she reasoned, it did.
"Will you meet with him on Saturday--and not alone? And, do you want to know his real name?”
"Sure," Tom says in a clear answer to both questions, and then leaning against his knees like a baseball catcher waiting for a ball he shakes his head and sighs.
"Everything is numbered," he says. "Everything."
He looks right at her then, searching her eyes for understanding.
"There is only a certain amount of everything," he explains. "Laughs, shaves," this last said rubbing his gritty cheeks before continuing, "skinned knees, babies, tears, steaks," the last said wistfully, "smokes, songs, everything."
"And our nights, too.”
She watches him. "I'll go with you unless you have someone better in mind." She pauses, watching you for your reaction. "His name is Asa Shinn Mercer…"
The cigarette, now smoked down almost to the filter falls from Tom's lips and bounces from the bench onto the sidewalk where it fizzles and the bright cherry is consumed by a puddle of oily rainwater beneath them.
"Shit."
She sighs, forcing stale air out of the bottom of her lungs.
"I was afraid you were going to say that. So... what's up?”
Tom leaned back on the bench again, his hand scratching the hair beneath his old brown bowler until the hat snuck way back on the crown of his head.
"I dunno," he said. "Not exactly. Lotta ways this could go really." he sighed. "I guess if you can't get rid of the family skeletons you might as well make 'em dance.”
Regina nodded.
"So I need to be prepared for both of you to freak out? Also... his face is deformed. I don't know why. He says you won't recognize him. Any idea what happened?”
Tom had started laughing when the first question was spoken and kept chuckling darkly through the second.
"Chances are at least one of us is crazy."
"We all have our masks," said Tom to the second.
"Okay." She shook her head and patted him on the shoulder. "Anything else I need to know before I go set up this meeting? Anything you want me to tell him?”
Tom raised an eyebrow at her, sagely, a mischievous smile forming at the corners of his lips. "I dunno," he baited, "Is'ere anything you need to know?"
Tom figured she was working awfully hard to play mediator here and Tom was angling for why, she could tell. There may also have been an element of a teacher wondering if a student were going to ask something really interesting, something really impertinent, or some combination of the two.
Not so secretly, Tom always hoped for both, particularly with Regina.
She smirked at him. "I need to know everything... because I want to know. I need to know whatever you'll tell me because, if another member of our family has to die, and I have to feel it... well, then I know who to cross of my kill list and know if..." She paused, smirk turning brittle. "It don't matter. So, tell me or not. Makes me no never mind."
Tom looked a little daunted all of the sudden.
"Everything? Hell everything is an awful lot to know, or to even wanna know."
He was thoughtful a moment.
"It's like magic tricks. You want to be fooled. As soon as somebody tells you the secret, you're like, Man I wish you hadn't told me, you blew it, but aw hell… Let’s see what I got.”
Tom pontificated on his knowledge of the universe:
"Vultures have holes in the tops of their heads," he said. "It allows them to breathe while they have their heads stuffed inside a carcass."
He paused for effect, and then seemed suddenly flummoxed again.
"These are real end-of-the-line questions: Do you want a bow tie or a neck tie? Do you want the shoes on? Because they won't show. The coffin ends right above your knees. The suit, we're gonna go with just half. I can save 60 bucks there. Doesn't your mother deserve mahogany?”
"I don't like magic tricks. I don't like ties of any kind. I like boots. As for clothes... whatever." She leans towards him. "Don't tell me everything. Just tell me about you and Mercer and this deed you did.”
Tom's eyes became unfocused as if he were far away.
"I don't know what he means. We were brothers by mortal blood. I was the elder, the 'great man', Judge and community leader. I built this city from mud, from literal mud and trees and blood and bones along with the other Founders, Yesler, Denny, Lou Grahm and Doc... in life he was in my shadow for a long time, yet he had his triumphs too. His name is in the history books too. He left Her, left Seattle for the mountains. I always felt as if he were the wisest of us. He ran. I thought he had died happy surrounded by his children..." He sighed, suddenly heavy with age. "But that is what the books say of me too, and that was a well-constructed lie... If it is Asa that is. If it's really him. But who is who they once were after a century of death? A century of your teeth growing in your mouth and the feeling of them tearing into another person's warm throat and the coppery rush of blood that fills your limbs and muscles and cock like a fucking wet balloon animal?”
Regina pondered that for a long, quiet while. She shook her head again.
"He's hurting. He's needy. He wants you. But maybe he's drawn here because of Her. And maybe She wants him. Maybe that's why She's hungry.”
Tom sighed, shrugged his shoulders. "Every now and then a melody is formed by eight random tones and a monkey at a typewriter composes a poem and a homeless man walks into a 7-11 plays his mother's birthday on the Lotto and wins a million. Every now and then the world just makes sense." He snorted, as if not really sure if he believed his own sentiment or not.
Regina nodded, acknowledging him, but didn't say anything. She sits there comfortably in his presence and listens--to him, the wind, to the Network, to the sounds of the city.
After a beat Tom broke the silence. "There's a rumor going around that there's something awful old under Her, and I can tell without asking that some of those not of the family think that it's been pretending to be Her all along. That whomever it is has been manipulating events." He didn't say 'manipulating me', but the implication, and the tiniest tinge of fear in his voice were clear.
"That's what they say. Some of them. But, me? I don't think so. The one that's asleep is up north." She frowned. "Some say that because of experiences elsewhere. I say no because them old ones are selfish assholes and Seattle is too close to Vancouver for another one to be here. Besides, another rumor is that for every life shed in the entire Pacific Northwest, the one up in Vancouver wakes up a little bit more." She looks down at him. "Besides, I heard that Ricter helped you talk to the city. I was wondering if it was the spirit of the land or the spirit of the buildings. Or if you talked to Her.”
Tom shook his head. "A spirit isn't what people, or even what occultists like Richter thinks it is. Richter is probably incapable of understanding what She is. Only we can know. She's a mesh of experiences and blood and humans and vampires and dogs who wandered too far from their homes before it started to rain and lost their way and whores and business men and cars and buildings and plumbing and wet, rotting earth on top of cobblestone teeth. Richter took me to talk to her heart. Richter took me to see her Name.”
"Who is her heart? Chief Seattle?”
Tom nodded. "Yep.”
"What was it like?" She tilted her head, curious, and not just for information. There was a hungry look, and a powerful memory behind her eyes.
Tom lowered his head, a thin smirk coloring his lips pale beneath the brim of his brown bowler. "Like finding out your long lost brother is still around and remembers you... and wants something that you know you'll have to risk your life for.”
Regina smiled. It's was a knowing, genuine smile.
"Well, that's something then.”
Tom stood abruptly and doffed his hat in hand with fingerless gloves. Somehow he managed to be both conspiratorial as well as theatrical when he said,
"Now its raining, its pouring, the old man is snoring. Now I lay me down to sleep - I hear the sirens in the street, all my dreams are made of chrome, I have no way to get back home. I always die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow..." He bowed, the perfect image of a gentleman hobo in a drizzling streetlight encircled sidewalk theatre.
"Evenin' darlin'," he said, and replaced his hat back onto his head with a flourish.
"Good night, Tom. I'll see you Saturday." She doesn't get up, but she does half salute him and his bow. She watches him skip away, whistling into the shadows, thinking about the conversation.
Somewhere in Seattle
Christmastime
Tom huddled around a fire barrel near a covered underpass overlooking the park, swapping stories and puff-puff passing a smoke. He stretched in the cold december rain and wrapped himself deeper inside his worn, tabby coat, nodding to his companions at the barrel.
Heading toward the park, Tom held out his hat to a pair of well-to-do passerby, and thanked them roughly but sincerely when they drop a dollar in. 'It's Christmas after all', the woman had said.
In the wintertime drizzle Tom mimed an upheld umbrella and tap danced up and down the side of the curb on his way over to Regina, 'singing in the rain' style. By way of explanation he nodded to the pair that had dropped him the dollar as they dwindled in the distance, a pair of smiles in the frosty darkness.
"See I remind them all that there is a bottom, a bottom," he repeats gruffly, lyrically, but without any particular tone, "I remind them all, that there is a bottom. Lord, oh yes, there is a bottom indeed." This said to the black-grey sky, "Yes there is a bottom," he grins behind thin, knowing lips, "...and it looks just like me.”
Regina smiled almost fondly at Mad Tom.
"Glad you came to see me." She patted the bench next to her and looked up at the cloudy sky. As he begins to sit she begins to talk, still looking up. "A man has come to find you. Someone from your past. He is going by name of 'Due' right now. But that's not his real name. He's family. He told me his real name." She glances at him. "I pulled three cards about this situation.”
Tom's eyes are hidden by the brim of his hat as he stretches out on the bench like it's a warm summer day.
"Stream from the coffee and the stirring of the cup, the spoon going round says giddyup, giddyup."
He doesn't leave, so he must be willing to hear her out, Regina decides.
"Names have power, so says the Chief,” Says Tom the last is troubled, as if he's a little worried the name of someone from his past is so easy to come by, even for an oracle like Regina. It's no longer sunny in Tom's disposition. All of the sudden he seems to feel the cold, huddling inward on the bench and rubbing his hands together in their fingerless gloves. She nods, sitting next to him.
"The first was The Profane. Someone or something was evil. An evil man. An evil deed. I don't know. The second was Industry. A job well done. A favor owed. Such hard work. The third was Marriage. A relationship, a pact, a deal made. These three combined surround you and Due... a man who says you will not recognize him now. His deformity that has happened after embrace. He is unsure and shy. But I think he lies. I think he wants something dear and is so eager for it he can't bear it. I told him I would not look for you, ask you to meet with him, until he told me his real name. And he did."
Regina shakes her head. "Too much death and more to come. The question is... this man, this pact with him, and the deeds you've done... is there more to come?”
"It's always a tale of two brothers and one Plow,” sighed Tom, "What's to come next is written and done. Blood will have blood. But there's hope," he said, picking a half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and lighting it from a plain white free gas station matchbook.
"My dog stayed with me," he explained, "Even on Her streets." He took a puff and smoke blustered out of the side of his mouth briefly before being carried away by the wind. "See, Fido means faithful in Latin.”
She nodded as if Tom’s ramblings made perfect sense. Perhaps, on some level, she reasoned, it did.
"Will you meet with him on Saturday--and not alone? And, do you want to know his real name?”
"Sure," Tom says in a clear answer to both questions, and then leaning against his knees like a baseball catcher waiting for a ball he shakes his head and sighs.
"Everything is numbered," he says. "Everything."
He looks right at her then, searching her eyes for understanding.
"There is only a certain amount of everything," he explains. "Laughs, shaves," this last said rubbing his gritty cheeks before continuing, "skinned knees, babies, tears, steaks," the last said wistfully, "smokes, songs, everything."
"And our nights, too.”
She watches him. "I'll go with you unless you have someone better in mind." She pauses, watching you for your reaction. "His name is Asa Shinn Mercer…"
The cigarette, now smoked down almost to the filter falls from Tom's lips and bounces from the bench onto the sidewalk where it fizzles and the bright cherry is consumed by a puddle of oily rainwater beneath them.
"Shit."
She sighs, forcing stale air out of the bottom of her lungs.
"I was afraid you were going to say that. So... what's up?”
Tom leaned back on the bench again, his hand scratching the hair beneath his old brown bowler until the hat snuck way back on the crown of his head.
"I dunno," he said. "Not exactly. Lotta ways this could go really." he sighed. "I guess if you can't get rid of the family skeletons you might as well make 'em dance.”
Regina nodded.
"So I need to be prepared for both of you to freak out? Also... his face is deformed. I don't know why. He says you won't recognize him. Any idea what happened?”
Tom had started laughing when the first question was spoken and kept chuckling darkly through the second.
"Chances are at least one of us is crazy."
"We all have our masks," said Tom to the second.
"Okay." She shook her head and patted him on the shoulder. "Anything else I need to know before I go set up this meeting? Anything you want me to tell him?”
Tom raised an eyebrow at her, sagely, a mischievous smile forming at the corners of his lips. "I dunno," he baited, "Is'ere anything you need to know?"
Tom figured she was working awfully hard to play mediator here and Tom was angling for why, she could tell. There may also have been an element of a teacher wondering if a student were going to ask something really interesting, something really impertinent, or some combination of the two.
Not so secretly, Tom always hoped for both, particularly with Regina.
She smirked at him. "I need to know everything... because I want to know. I need to know whatever you'll tell me because, if another member of our family has to die, and I have to feel it... well, then I know who to cross of my kill list and know if..." She paused, smirk turning brittle. "It don't matter. So, tell me or not. Makes me no never mind."
Tom looked a little daunted all of the sudden.
"Everything? Hell everything is an awful lot to know, or to even wanna know."
He was thoughtful a moment.
"It's like magic tricks. You want to be fooled. As soon as somebody tells you the secret, you're like, Man I wish you hadn't told me, you blew it, but aw hell… Let’s see what I got.”
Tom pontificated on his knowledge of the universe:
"Vultures have holes in the tops of their heads," he said. "It allows them to breathe while they have their heads stuffed inside a carcass."
He paused for effect, and then seemed suddenly flummoxed again.
"These are real end-of-the-line questions: Do you want a bow tie or a neck tie? Do you want the shoes on? Because they won't show. The coffin ends right above your knees. The suit, we're gonna go with just half. I can save 60 bucks there. Doesn't your mother deserve mahogany?”
"I don't like magic tricks. I don't like ties of any kind. I like boots. As for clothes... whatever." She leans towards him. "Don't tell me everything. Just tell me about you and Mercer and this deed you did.”
Tom's eyes became unfocused as if he were far away.
"I don't know what he means. We were brothers by mortal blood. I was the elder, the 'great man', Judge and community leader. I built this city from mud, from literal mud and trees and blood and bones along with the other Founders, Yesler, Denny, Lou Grahm and Doc... in life he was in my shadow for a long time, yet he had his triumphs too. His name is in the history books too. He left Her, left Seattle for the mountains. I always felt as if he were the wisest of us. He ran. I thought he had died happy surrounded by his children..." He sighed, suddenly heavy with age. "But that is what the books say of me too, and that was a well-constructed lie... If it is Asa that is. If it's really him. But who is who they once were after a century of death? A century of your teeth growing in your mouth and the feeling of them tearing into another person's warm throat and the coppery rush of blood that fills your limbs and muscles and cock like a fucking wet balloon animal?”
Regina pondered that for a long, quiet while. She shook her head again.
"He's hurting. He's needy. He wants you. But maybe he's drawn here because of Her. And maybe She wants him. Maybe that's why She's hungry.”
Tom sighed, shrugged his shoulders. "Every now and then a melody is formed by eight random tones and a monkey at a typewriter composes a poem and a homeless man walks into a 7-11 plays his mother's birthday on the Lotto and wins a million. Every now and then the world just makes sense." He snorted, as if not really sure if he believed his own sentiment or not.
Regina nodded, acknowledging him, but didn't say anything. She sits there comfortably in his presence and listens--to him, the wind, to the Network, to the sounds of the city.
After a beat Tom broke the silence. "There's a rumor going around that there's something awful old under Her, and I can tell without asking that some of those not of the family think that it's been pretending to be Her all along. That whomever it is has been manipulating events." He didn't say 'manipulating me', but the implication, and the tiniest tinge of fear in his voice were clear.
"That's what they say. Some of them. But, me? I don't think so. The one that's asleep is up north." She frowned. "Some say that because of experiences elsewhere. I say no because them old ones are selfish assholes and Seattle is too close to Vancouver for another one to be here. Besides, another rumor is that for every life shed in the entire Pacific Northwest, the one up in Vancouver wakes up a little bit more." She looks down at him. "Besides, I heard that Ricter helped you talk to the city. I was wondering if it was the spirit of the land or the spirit of the buildings. Or if you talked to Her.”
Tom shook his head. "A spirit isn't what people, or even what occultists like Richter thinks it is. Richter is probably incapable of understanding what She is. Only we can know. She's a mesh of experiences and blood and humans and vampires and dogs who wandered too far from their homes before it started to rain and lost their way and whores and business men and cars and buildings and plumbing and wet, rotting earth on top of cobblestone teeth. Richter took me to talk to her heart. Richter took me to see her Name.”
"Who is her heart? Chief Seattle?”
Tom nodded. "Yep.”
"What was it like?" She tilted her head, curious, and not just for information. There was a hungry look, and a powerful memory behind her eyes.
Tom lowered his head, a thin smirk coloring his lips pale beneath the brim of his brown bowler. "Like finding out your long lost brother is still around and remembers you... and wants something that you know you'll have to risk your life for.”
Regina smiled. It's was a knowing, genuine smile.
"Well, that's something then.”
Tom stood abruptly and doffed his hat in hand with fingerless gloves. Somehow he managed to be both conspiratorial as well as theatrical when he said,
"Now its raining, its pouring, the old man is snoring. Now I lay me down to sleep - I hear the sirens in the street, all my dreams are made of chrome, I have no way to get back home. I always die before I wake like Marilyn Monroe and throw my dreams out in the street and the rain make ‘em grow..." He bowed, the perfect image of a gentleman hobo in a drizzling streetlight encircled sidewalk theatre.
"Evenin' darlin'," he said, and replaced his hat back onto his head with a flourish.
"Good night, Tom. I'll see you Saturday." She doesn't get up, but she does half salute him and his bow. She watches him skip away, whistling into the shadows, thinking about the conversation.