March 22nd, 2002

The patient, Mr. J, appears to be stupid. After our first session, he claimed that he was primarily here to discuss his “depression,” which he describes as manifesting itself in various poor habits, among which are slovenliness, slothfulness, and a general disregard for maintaining relationships. He described having difficulty finding interest in any subject and when asked about previous subjects that he previously found interest in, he described several peculiar studies that mostly took the form of a large amount of reading. In my view, he somewhat deflected my question by listing titles in an attempt to impress me with the “depth” of his interests, rather than make any attempt to synthesize the works in question. He likely lacks the intellectual skills necessary to generate such a coherent synthesis. The subject matters were eccentric, to say the least, mostly dealing with matters of pseudoscience. More on this fact later.

I believe his symptoms primarily arise from a sense of ennui that would be difficult for him to elucidate due to his clear lack of vocabulary. I would guess he reads at an eighth grade level. What might appear to him as a lack of drive to increase his knowledge likely has more to do with basic limits to his capacity to think. And while he may ascribe other behaviors such as “being very messy” and “not cleaning the bathroom often” and “not ever making the bed” to depression, I would not jump to such a conclusion since he is so clearly a slob. I should note at this point that patient J wore a t-shirt with mustard stains and jeans with holes in them to the session. He also did not sit up straight. When I inquired about his preference for wearing a beard, he replied that his father had worn a beard and that perhaps there was something in that. While I would generally prefer to avoid basic Jungian archetypes in my therapeutic practices, thus ignoring this patient’s observations on matters psychological, on this point he is likely right; he is used to men with beards. Big deal.

Read the whole story so far: Odd Cog: Journal of a Terrible Therapist

Characters and Places: Ray James, Ulser Neisser

Crumpled helplessly on the floor of the chamber, Joe stares at the little metal box, closed now, wondering at the meaning of anything that has happened in the last who-knows-how-many hours or days. “I’ve lost my mind,” he says to the little black box. Looking up from the circle of light that the lantern provides, he stares at the darkness that rises above him, tear tracks on his face illuminated. “None of this can be real.” He sits up, some trickle of resolve running into his veins. He crosses his legs and again, focuses on the box, takes a deep breath and, “Beatrice.” Some errant memory from his childhood intercedes and Joe is forced to smile at the remembrance of a movie. “Beatrice! Beatrice! Beatrice!” He chuckles when nothing happens. “Figures.”

“Talking to your little box?” says Ghede, entering the chamber. He looks around the room, trying to sense where Joe is.

“Over hear. I’m over hear… she was speaking to me.”

“She speaks to you through the box, eh?”

“Sometimes… it seems like it. I think she used to speak to me through a backhoe, though.”

“Backhoe? What’s that?”

Ghede makes his way toward him. He is hauling a large canvas bag, draped over his shoulder and trailing behind his lithe frame. Joe looks up, Ghede standing over him. “It’s uh… a tractor.”

Ghede mouths the word slowly, turning it over, “Trak-tor.”

Cocking his head Joe replies, “You don’t know what that is?”

“No, can’t say I do. But…” Ghede looks around the chamber, sniffing, “Listen closely. She speaks through quite a lot of things.”

“What you’re look for is over there though. Go past me; in the corner of the room between the pipes.”

“Ah. A surrender.” Ghede begins to make his way to the corner where the corpse is. “What did she say to you?”

“She asked me who I am.” Joe gets up off the floor and follows after Ghede to the corner.

“Huh. Trick question.”

“Oh? So then, what’s the answer?”

Ghede feels around for the pipes and then Lays the canvas bag out in front of the gap between the pipes, “What do you think the answer is.”

“Well, I’m Joe. Joe Takanara. I’m a construction worker—kind of a demolitions expert.”

“No. Your not any of those things. Your certainly not a construction worker now, or demolishing anything for that matter.” Ghede reaches in between the pipes and tugs on the legs of the corpse. “Until a few moments ago, you weren’t Joe Takanara; just Joe to me.”

“Well, I’m also American… and Japanese…”

“Oh, so you’re a nip?” Ghede turns to ask.

“Excuse me?”

“What?”

“Just—just don’t say that. It’s rude.”

“Is it?” Ghede feels one of the legs break free. “Damn it.” He pulls the leg out and throws it on to the canvas sack. “Well, at any rate, if you think on it, you aren’t any of those things—those are empires and countries—you’re not an empire or a country are you?”

Joe bends down to help Ghede with the body, “I suppose not. What about you? You have a funny accent.”

“Do I now?”

“Yes. So who are you, where are you from?”

“Two very different questions. Who I am is simple: I’m the undertaker.” Ghede pauses and looks wistful. “Where I’m from?… It’s hard to remember. I used to live in the city, New York. I remember that much—not much else. There was this street corner, I can still see it. The micks used to scuttle about there looking for work. There was a fruit stand. I remember… it’s silly. It’s mostly gone now—memory.”

The pair manage to haul most of the corpse out by the second leg, the hips still attached, the rib cage, all loosely covered in ragged clothing. “Who do you suppose he—she?—was?”

“Whoever he was, he didn’t know.” There is a clunk as the skull rolls off the body and back into the corner behind the pipes. “It’s why most of them give up. They go on for so long until they forget everything and the question is the only thing they can remember. They keep thinking the answer is in the details they don’t know anymore. Then they just huddle up somewhere and rot.”

“God, how sad.”

“God’s got nothing to do with it.”

Joe gets down on all four and reaches behind the pipes, blindly patting the floor until he locates the skull. He pulls it out and holds it in front of his face. “He or she… is just a thing now.”

“Mostly. We’ll throw ’em in the furnace.”

Joe helps Ghede arrange the corpse in the canvas and then Ghede ties it up with straps.

“So, Beatrice…er… the Painted Lady… she asked you the question?”

“She did, and she gave me the answer. To put it mildly, she helped me to see it very clearly,” and for emphasis, Ghede pulls his sunglasses down, revealing nothing but skin.

Joe gasps, but just then, a loud scraping sound comes from another part of the room and Joe and Ghede turn towards it. Where there is an expanse of and sand dust covering the floor, a circle appears and then twists and lifts until Joe can see a manhole arise and then two hands shove it aside. From up out of the hole, the head of Walt appears. He throws his arms up over the floor and pauses to catch his breath. “Good Lord, I hate it down there.” He wrinkles his nose. “Smells like sulfur.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Ghede, Joe Takanara

And just as the glow from the fungus in the chamber crept into his senses, a smell beyond the mildew and moisture comes to him. Like Ghede, he sniffs the air quickly. He breathes in quick through his nose in short pulses, like a dog, and the smell is unmistakable: rot. Standing from the floor, the paper in hand, he begins to move to one side of the chamber and sniff, and then moves to the opposite side and smells the air; the smell less strong now. He moves back to where the smell was stronger and repeats the steps of moving away from the smell in two directions and returning to where it is strongest. Slowly, he is lead by the scent to a corner of the chamber where the glow is cut off between two pipes two feet in diameter, standing side-by-side in the corner. Gingerly, he places his head in the gap between the pipes, the metal hot by his cheeks, sniffs, and the smell hits him hard and he recoils. Returning to the lunch box and the lantern, he fetches his zippo and re-lights the lantern.

The glow dissipates and Joe can clearly see the corner of the chamber where the smell had emanated from, the pipes standing erect together like guards. He approaches the dark gap between them, the lights playing off the water gathered on the pipes but refusing to illuminate the gap. Again, the heat from the pipes washing over him, he stands close to the gap and then turns sideways in order to slide his arm and the lantern between the pipes.

At first he sees nothing but a corner where two walls of the chamber meet, but the smell is strong and unfortunately obvious in name now. Lowering the lantern, the light reaches out to reveal a skull with wet, leathery skin, hollowed out eyes and wisps of frizzy gray hair. The lips are rotted back from the teeth so that it smiles unwillingly down toward the ground. Huddled in the corner, the corpse is seated on the floor, clothed in what are now just rags, arms wrapped around its legs as thought it were waiting for something. Then, right in his ear, right next to him, “Is that you, Joseph?”

“No!” Joe steps back from the gap in the pipes, turns toward the lunch box. “No, no, no.” He starts towards the little metal box, but just as he does, a massive, hot gust of wind blows in from the archway to his right. Dust and small particles of God-knows-what pummel him and he holds his arm up before his face to protect his eyes. Then answer this question, Joseph: Who are you?” Joe squints and looks in the direction of the gust, the wind giving no sign of weakening, and his heart skips a beat as the wind curls into his ears and the sound from the air dancing along the pipes, playing them like some whispering flute, “Whoooooo aaaaaare yoooooooou?” He moves into the wind, toward the archway, but can see nothing as the air seems to circle about him in the chamber, “It doesn’t matter who the hell I am! I’m getting the hell out of here!” And just like that, the wind dies and is gone.

Joe falls to the ground, kneeling, letting the lantern fall to the floor, and the shadows excitedly climb down the walls and pipes from the ceiling, watching Joe as his face falls into his hands and he cries, “Oh God… oh God…” He looks up for a moment and sitting just inside the open lunch box, the letter. He cries again, “Bridge! Oh god bridge! Help me!”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, The Engine

Joe kneels down and puts his hand to the floor; the stone is warm to the touch. In a junction of sorts, Joe looks around at the pipes, many of them larger than before, and criss-crossing the room all around and over him, they are now covered in condensation. The cobwebs and dust have been replaced with glistening. Perhaps a half an hour before, upon entering the intersection, Ghede had put his nose up to the air and sniffed carefully for several moments. Then, without explanation, Ghede had asked him to wait in the chamber while he “fetched” something. So Joe waited, is waiting, listening to new noises, knocks and clangs in the pipe works. As they had approached the chamber, he had noticed the change in temperature as the pipes grew in diameter and became alive with activity.

He detaches his lunchbox from his belt, seats himself on the warm stone floor, and sets the little black metal box in front of him and stares at it. Removing the letter and the map from the box, he goes over both once again. For the first time, he notices some faded symbols behind the letters of the poem that Walt had given him; faint sketches. He turns the old, rumpled paper one way and another and without knowing why, turns the lantern off once again. As before, a darkness comes over the chamber and as his eyes adjust, the room begins to glow, this time even more ghostly, the fungus appearing to thrive in the hot moisture of the room. More and more, the green glow seems to crawl out from thick patches in various places along the pipes and then merge until outlines of most of the room, arches leading to other corridors, even more pipes, creases in the stonework of the floor, all come to life before him. The glow becomes so luminescent, he can make out virtually the whole of the chamber around him. And like before, it seems he can see further up and out than what the lantern revealed.

Looking down to the piece of paper in his hand, he sees that the poem is entirely gone, now replaced by strange green icons and symbols. He holds it close to his face and squints, but it is hard to make anything out in the faint light. He looks to the little lunchbox and he is standing in a field with someone, a faint glow still surrounding him, but now white, from a full moon. He feels young again and looks to his side to see a figure, an arm and a hand covered in dirt and grease. Looking up, the moonlight falls on the calm smile and eyes like windows—nearly white in the moonlight—of Beatrice. She looks down at him and smiles. “Sometimes it’s easy to see the stars when you don’t look directly at them.” She stoops down next to him, puts her hand on his shoulder and then points skyward. “Pick a dark spot in the sky, Joseph, and then you will see that the stars in your periphery appear that much brighter.” He does as he is told and sees that she is right. Looking to the lunchbox, the paper just beneath his fovea gleams with sigils and he can almost recognize them—Kanji. He recognizes some of them: Cycle… repeat… fire… one… no, not one, but whole.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, The Engine

After having an unfruitful discussion about how exactly Ghede had come to be an undertaker in this underground labyrinth—a place Ghede refers to as “the inverted city”—Joe and Ghede make their way through the corridor of pipes, Joe discovering that many smaller corridors, also filled to the brim with pipes, branch off from the main one they currently moved through, although Ghede assures him that there are larger tunnels. The only thing of note that Ghede had mentioned about his “position” was that he collected bodies to be incinerated, and that somewhere in this dark maze was a furnace. That Joe had asked to be shown, and Ghede complied mentioning that the furnace is always on his way, since they would likely find some poor soul to be disposed of as they went.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Ghede, Joe Takanara, The Inverted City

Joe awakens with a start—not entirely realizing he had fallen asleep—and before him, across the fire, squats a small, thin man with ghostly pale skin, garbed in a shabby suit and coat, wearing small black circular sunglasses and a top hat. The fire is reflected in his glasses and he takes a sip from a bottle in his hand before looking absently around the alcove and sniffing the air. “Are you awake, then?”

Gathering in his surroundings, Joe notices that the man has put more wood on the fire. Then, Joe spots his lunchbox sitting next to him and contemplates going for his knife, but then, he pauses and watches as the little man still turns his head about looking at seemingly nothing in particular. Suspicious, he waves at the man, who appears to pay no mind. “I’m awake, yeah.”

The man looks toward Joe now and smiles; a rotten smile at that. “Good sleep?”

“I guess.” Joe rubs his neck and sits up.

“Name’s Ghede.” The man waves, “Hello.”

“Uh, my name’s Joe.”

“Ah, Joe. Joseph Takanara.”

Joe, agape, “How…”

“Walt told me. He was blathering on about it quite a bit. Considering no one else comes around these parts, when I felt the fire, I assumed you had built it.”

“Where’s Walt now?”

“Don’t know. Hadn’t seen him for a few days—that was when he was heading down to look for you.”

“You mean when he’d found me.”

“No. I think he was still looking for you.”

Joe sits and contemplates this for a moment. Then, without segue, “Are you blind?”

“Yup.”

“Is this your bed, because I—“

“Don’t worry. There’s not much point in being down here and being blind and then thinking there’s such a thing as a possession.”

“I’d really meant to pay you—whoever—back in some way.”

“Well, your money’s no good here.”

“It must be really difficult… uh… navigating around down hear without being able to see.”

“I make due.”

“Do you stay down here, or… maybe you would like some help. I’m trying to get out of here.”

“Oh. Well, that’s interesting, but no, I don’t really want to leave. I’ve got a nice job down here.”

“What do you do?”

“I’m the undertaker.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Ghede, Joe Takanara

Entering the room, zippo lit and in hand, Joe peers around and can see little beyond him besides old floorboards and the occasional pipe rising from out of the floor and traveling up into darkness. The pipes are large and varied in width—between one half foot to three feet wide in diameter—and Joe hears the sound of rushing liquid in most of them. Beneath the rushing though, coming from above, he also hears a low pitched—almost inaudible—percussive thump every few minutes or so. He shuffles along the left side of the wall, following it along, pipe after pipe looming in front of him, until he reaches a small alcove, two large pipes bending toward one another before continuing upward, standing like an archway to the entrance of the little space. He leans in and sees a defunct mattress amongst piles of rags as well as a tall pole leaning in a corner and beneath the pole, a lantern. “Ah!” he exclaims and speaking to no one, he says, “That should come in handy.” He squats down next to the lantern and goes about lighting it while suspiciously looking around his surroundings. “Hope whoever’s bed this is doesn’t mind terribly.” As the lantern comes to life, illuminating the alcove, he says, “I’ll be sure to pay them back for the lantern… somehow.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara

This time Joe can distinctly tell that the passage is graded, slightly, upward. He begins to feel relief as he shuffles to keep from catching his shoes on the slope. The passageway moves upward and then levels off, then upward again for a space, then flat again. It gradually worms it way upward likes this for another half an hour until it ends in a chamber that Joe is all too glad to see. The passageway opens up into a room, perhaps twelve to fifteen feet square. But what Joe is truly glad to see, sits in the center of the far wall of the room: a portal opening to a staircase. Joe walks to the base of the stairs and hold his torch aloft, looking up. The stairs disappear into black. “Well, I guess we go up.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Beatrice, Joe Takanara, The Engine, Walt Whitman

The river must have been about fifty yards wide and gradually they come up on the other side. Unlike the other side though, the stone close to the water has been chiseled into three wide stairs. Ahead of him he can see Walt holding his lamp up to a wooden door held together with bolted iron bars. Joe sloshes up out of the cold river, the air no colder than before. He mounts the stairs and then sets his torch down on the floor, which he notes is made of granite stones set together nearly perfectly. There is no mortar that he can see. The masonry is exquisite. He stands up and claps his shoulders and his sides to get blood flowing, while he watches Walt set down his light. He turns to Joe and says, “Let me see that torch, man.”

“Sure,” and Joe lifts the torch and hands it off.

Walt looks wearily at the flame and then, holding the steel rod near the flaming end, he jams the other into the gap between the door and the door frame (also beautifully laid stone). The damp wood groans and gradually gives way to the steel lever. When it finally bursts open, a rush of air goes past Joe and Walt sucking the flame into the revealed corridor behind the door, the flame catching Walt’s sleeve on fire. “Shit! Shit!” Walt drops the torch on the ground and bats at his arm until the little flame goes out. He observes his arm for a moment and then smiles at Joe, “No air. Ain’t been this way in a looong time.”

Joe reaches down and picks up the torch, Walt his lamp, and the two make their way in to the corridor which is no wider or taller than the door itself. It is cramped, rectangular, straight, and completely smooth. As they enter, Joe runs his hand along the wall and tiny particles of rock trickle to the floor. “This was carved,” Joe observes.

Walt laughs. “Yeah it was!”

“What? Did you carve it?”

Walt pauses to turn back to Joe, his eyes widening in the flickering shadows. “Through the dark I came to the water / the Hustle feared to follow the fording / And the passage I found, I made / The end was meant for me!” He laughs again and begins moving down the passage.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, The Inverted City, Walt Whitman

In the corner of the cavern where Beatrice—where the backhoe, rather—sat, Walt had led Joe to a small opening that they crawled through. The tunnel walls were smooth and Joe had to lay his torch out in front of him crawling on the knuckles of his right hand as he clung to his source of light. Walt made no effort to wait for him and was twenty feet ahead or so, a mere silhouette behind his shimmering lamp. Joe had slid the lunchbox handle through his belt on his backside and now and again when the ceiling of the tunnel got low, the metal box would thunk against the rock. The sound seemed to carry forward and backward a vast distance and Joe would bend down closer to the floor. There really was no one to disturb with the sound; Walt certainly didn’t seem to notice. But the noise unnerved Joe as it made the walls seem to close in.

Read the whole story so far: The Hunger Engine

Characters and Places: Joe Takanara, Walt Whitman