Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg (26 page)

Who’s being dramatic now?
he thinks. He wants to laugh. Hysterically.

Then Gordon adds his own not insignificant role to the spectacle by collapsing like a gutshot Civil War soldier–dreaming even before his head hits the ground–with one foot dangling in his father’s grave.

□ □ □ □ □ □ □ □ □

So that was my debut. I wanted to make my appearance at Mal’s funeral for the sake of symmetry. You know… rub everyone’s noses in the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. It’s too bad my head was too big to fit through Cynthia’s cervix, otherwise I would’ve had her splork me out right there on the lawn next to Mal’s grave, which to my way of thinking would’ve been really spectacular–especially with Gordon passed out right next to me. Instead, I was hustled away inside Cynthia’s contracting belly. I felt like a fat man spending a really humid day in an economy car with the air bags deploying every few seconds. Being born is always a hassle.

(Later, in the hospital, when Cynthia found out she’d be having a Caesarian, she insisted that a plastic surgeon sit in on the operation and give her a tummy tuck after they fished me out of her. Her thinking was:
Now that I’m without a husband, it’s time to make myself beautiful again
. Ecclesiastes had it right about that vanity business.)

Timing is everything when it comes to being born–and not just for reasons any astrologer might give you, although those guys are definitely onto something. I could explain it all with chaos theory, but then I’d have to give you a big-ass lecture about Edward Lorenz, Benoit Mandelbrot, Hopf bifurcations, strange attractors, and nonlinear iterative equations. For now, I’ll just let it go by saying that each birth is an example of sensitive dependence on initial conditions and is subject to its own “butterfly effect.” You’ve probably heard about that one. It’s the theory that a butterfly flapping its wings over Beijing can cause a ripple in the wind that ends up as a hurricane ripping the shit out of trailer parks along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. When it comes to chaotic systems–like the weather or a human life–tiny variations at the beginning can have huge consequences over time.

Chaos theory works as an explanation for just about everything, if you really want to know. The entire universe was created from a void–or Chaos–whether you believe in Genesis or the Big Bang. Matter came into existence then, and with it, the force of attraction (Eros, or Love, if you have a mythic or spiritual view of things; Gravity for those of you inclined toward the scientific or mundane). So there’s another cosmic trinity for your consideration: the whole universe boils down to Chaos, Matter, and Attraction–Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And like fractals and holograms, the entire cosmos can be recreated from even the tiniest little part of it. It’s like William Blake seeing the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower. Or as Friedrich W.J. Schelling put it, less succinctly, perhaps (but, hey, this was forty years before Darwin): “The universe is made on the model of the human soul… the analogy of each part of the universe to the whole is such that the same idea is reflected constantly from whole to part and part to whole.”

Does that make sense, or have I lost you?

Okay, let me try to come at this from a different angle. There are two kinds of chaos in God’s universe. There’s entropic chaos, where everything spins off into sheer randomness and dissipation (“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…”), and then there’s deterministic chaos, which always contains the latent seeds of self-organization. Deterministic chaos eventually settles into–or is attracted into–complex patterns that are recognizable, but never retrace the same path. These patterns are self-similar and scale-invariant, meaning that they repeat themselves at different scales of observation (“…from whole to part and part to whole.”). They’re called strange attractors. Benoit Mandelbrot over at Bell Labs was figuring this out right around the time I was being born. He would eventually conclude that all strange attractors are fractal, which is the term he coined to denote configurations that transcend traditional numerical categories. Fractal geometry is the geometry of nature. It can mathematically describe a snowflake, a tree, or a cloud stealing past the Moon in the night.

Stay with me here…. Physicists working on chaos theory some years later hit on the discovery that when chaotic dynamics generate more than one strange attractor, the attractors can merge, resulting in greater capacities of self-organization, or “symmetry building.” In other words, a little chaos can be good for you. It can dissolve crusty old structures and evolve into bright, shiny new ones, better adapted to survival. But it’s not always easy getting there. First the original attractor is disrupted and the whole system experiences a loss of structure–a period of “transient chaos”–before the new attractor is generated. Think mid-life crisis or a forest on fire. Then there’s the chance that the transient chaos will tip over into entropic chaos, resulting in, well… death. End of story. But even entropic chaos leads to increased self-organization when you take the Other Side into consideration. You don’t think life and death and reincarnation are all utterly devoid of meaning, do you? We’re supposed to be learning things, evolving, striving toward enlightenment so we can become good pals with God, or whatever. And we can’t do that without learning to love chaos. To quote Nietzsche:

“Yea verily, I say unto you: A man must have chaos yet within him to birth a dancing star.”

In our own lives, each major transition to a new strange attractor is accompanied by changes in the quantum field (and believe me, you don’t wanna get me started on quantum field theory…). Those periods of transient chaos can stretch and fold reality so that events usually perceived as being separated in time and place become linked in a non-linear way, which–I know this sounds wacky–sometimes results in our psychic reality being mirrored by external reality through synchronicity and prophetic dreams.

If you’re looking for an example, try Gordon. Remember him, flopped down in the dirt next to his dad’s grave? There’s more than enough crap going on in Gordon’s life to knock him out of his stale old patterns: the death of a parent, his new adventures in narcolepsy, revelations about the sex life of his grandma, a little brother (yours truly) about to join the family. But with Gordon, frankly, it doesn’t take anywhere near that much to mess with his strange attractors. That asthma juice he’s always sucking on elevates his brain’s levels of noradrenaline, which increases his sensitivity to sensory input. In fact, he’s so damn sensitive that half the time he’s living right on the edge of chaos (the “homoclinic point” as chaos theorists call it–where stable dynamics become chaotic and chaotic dynamics become orderly). All it takes, potentially, is a new taste sensation or a foxy glance from a redheaded lady to trigger a massive state change–a Hopf bifurcation–in Gordon’s psyche, sending him careening off on his own butterfly effect (think about what madeleine crumbs did for Proust, or what Salome did for John the Baptist). Much as he dislikes it, chaos will be a near-constant companion throughout Gordon’s life. And when that chaos starts to settle down into new strange attractors, the first place the seeds of self-organization will usually show up are in his dreams–the dream he had at his father’s funeral being a perfect case in point.

Here’s what happened: Gordon dreamed he was playing tennis on an old clay court surrounded by a forest of pine and maples. His opponent happened to be invisible but cast a dark shadow and returned his serves and volleys perfectly. Soon the balls in play started multiplying–three, then five, then seven and nine–and Gordon broke into a sweat running after them. He stopped long enough to take off his black T-shirt and hang it on a chain-link fence. Just then a lemon-yellow biplane roared overhead and crashed into the woods on a slope below the court. Gordon grabbed his shirt and ran into the forest to see if there were any survivors. As he was jogging along a wide dirt path, a sky blue Bentley Corniche convertible appeared behind him. At the wheel was a serpentman with glistening green-black skin who intended Gordon harm. As the Bentley picked up speed to pass him, the serpentman threw a poisoned dart at Gordon’s eyes. Gordon stretched his T-shirt tight between his hands and caught the dart with it, but its tip poked through the cloth and grazed his chest. It didn’t deliver enough poison to harm him–in fact, Gordon thought it might even work as an inoculation. The Bentley tried to turn around and come after him again, but one of its wheels got stuck in a ditch and Gordon was able to run right past it. As the path narrowed, a man wearing a fancy white linen shirt stepped out from behind a tree ahead of him. It was his father, looking happier than Gordon had ever seen him. Gold Grecian chains dangled from around Mal’s neck and his hair was full and modishly styled. He looked like a jet-setting playboy, the epitome of mid-sixties cool–or at least as cool as Mal ever could be. He was carrying a bundle that turned out to be a baby. He handed it to Gordon, saying telepathically, “Here, have a look at your new little brother.” The first telepathic thought that Gordon communicated back was “What a cute baby!” even though it wasn’t. The entire right side of the baby’s face was covered with reddish-brown fur. Two gnarled horns protruded from the top of its reddened forehead. The poor little baby looked demonic, although Gordon sensed no evil in it. Then it started to cry. Gordon took his little dreambrother in his arms and the crying stopped immediately. They both felt comforted. And that’s where the dream ended.

Now here’s the kicker: Gordon’s dream had me nailed. I really
was
born with reddish-brown fur covering half of my face (no horns, though). Synchronicity, a lucky guess, or did Gordon remember a glimpse of our future? You tell me. Cynthia thought she’d given birth to a baby werewolf. She was so fucking freaked that I pretty much scared her straight. She blamed the fur on all those pills she’d been popping. She worried that they’d messed with my DNA–and hers, too, for that matter. So she went cold turkey on the painkillers and ditched her role as a suburban junky housewife to become an ardent nudist (but that’s a story for later…).

It took a few months, but eventually all the fur rubbed off me. I ended up looking fairly normal. I heard stories, though–and even saw a few pictures–so I grew up with a special fondness for that Warren Zevon song, “Werewolves of London,” which was a big radio hit right around the time I was being conceived. Gordon taught me the lyrics when I was three. He and I would sing it together
(“I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vics–and his hair was perfect…”)
whenever we wanted to drive Cynthia crazy.

Gordon was right about me: I’m not demonic (or even daimonic). But I sure as hell brought along enough chaos with me to birth one of Nietzsche’s dancing stars. I’ve turned up at this point to remind Gordon that chaos leads to creativity. If he wants to be an artist–or a Scribe, or even just a whole and healthy human being–he really needs to start embracing chaos. He has to stop running from it and learn how to stay within the seeming madness, so he can confront and then slay the Dragons of Disorder (which so often turn out to be only the Chihuahuas of Petulance). Chaos can be both creator and destroyer, like the goddess Kali. Chaos can be Satan, the Prince of Darkness, or Lucifer, the Light-Bringer. Chaos may be at the root of all evil, but without it there could be no flowering of good. Chaos can be your worst enemy and sometimes chaos can be your best friend. I mean that both as a metaphor and in its literal sense:

Chaos can be your best friend.

ROAD OF EXCESS

I
t’s a sensation like swimming, the return to consciousness from narcolepsy’s dream-paralysis, a merman’s churning through dense but limpid imagery: a red-furred baby, a hateful lizardman hurling darts from a Bentley, a game of tennis with someone else’s shadow. And his father! Gordon is sure he really saw his father, not some fading memory of him, but something more like a spirit visitation, a friendly haunting–as if Mal’s soul had passed from catastrophe to deliverance and Gordon was encountering his cheerful, loving ghost. He feels oddly euphoric as he sits up blinking, light-dazzled in the bright sunshine pouring down on the grass-flecked sleeves of his black polyester suit, on his still damp, amniotic-fluid-stained shoes, on the mound of dirt crowned with mats of green turf that will soon be covering his father’s coffin. He’s euphoric because he knows that somewhere, somehow, Mal still lives.

“Gordon, you lame-ass, I can’t believe you fainted when your mom peed on you.”

Jimmy?
Gordon peers over his shoulder and sees Jimmy Marrsden standing with his mother right beside him. “For your information, Mr. Wizard,” Janice says to her son, her face impassive behind oversized Gucci sunglasses, “she didn’t
pee
on him. Her water broke, okay?” She moves a step closer to Gordon and musses his hair. “Are you all right? We saw you fall.”

“I didn’t know you guys were here. I didn’t see you.”

“We were spying on you,” Jimmy says.

“We got here late,” Janice amends, looking in her purse for her cigarettes. “Just in time to see them haul off your mother. She asked us to look after you for the next couple of weeks.”

“It’s perfect timing!” Jimmy says with his old boyish enthusiasm, dropping the mask of teenage cool. “We’re going camping! Up at Dinkey Creek!”

Gordon thinks,
I just buried my dad, my psycho mom’s having a baby, and all you care about is roasting marshmallows.
But what he says is: “Wow! That sounds great!”

So they say goodbye to a few people–Johnny, Uncle Gerald, Wayne and Arnie, Grandma Helen–then they get into Janice’s blue Mustang and drive to Gordon’s house, where he runs inside to change into summer clothes and to pack an old suitcase as fast as he can.

The house seems weirdly malignant without his mother or father’s presence. All the curtains are drawn to block out the sun and a silence has settled over the Danish Modern furniture like a suffocating dust. Hair prickles on the back of Gordon’s neck in the still, empty gloom. He darts into his bedroom and unlocks the bottom drawer of his desk, where he keeps a roll of cash hidden behind his manuscript. Most of the bills are fives and tens. A few twenties are rolled tight toward the center. It’s about a hundred and eighty dollars in all. Pocketing it, he wonders if that will be enough for the trip. What if he decides to make a new life for himself up there in the mountains?