Our idols are all dead, and we live in perpetual twilight in the glow of the new technology.  Prepare yourself to be heartless, soulless, quick to lose interest and quick to sting.  If you linger for a deep thought, they are already upon you, tearing out your innards.  You must be just as vain, and just as facile; you must be another buzzing drone, flicking from screen to screen to screen.

That's the world we live in now.

A Divot on the Fairway, Chapter 1: The Bogey

I've always hated golf.  Thought it was boring.  That was before my best friend showed up dead on the 7th hole green, flag through his heart.

Later, I sat in the clubhouse bar, face in a warm beer.  I couldn't stand the police presence.  The clubhouse was at least deserted, or almost.  There was a ratty-looking old gent in the back, smoking a pipe and dressed like the 1800s.  I scowled privately, feeling his eyes on me.

"She's back, eh."

I fumed for a moment, then swung around to face him, ready for bullshit.

"What?"

Thoughtfully he inhaled, and exhaled.  This only infuriated me more.  I kept down my wrath in a herculean effort.

"Young chap like you, wouldn't remember," he murmured.  "Young chaps think they have the course all to themselves!  But no."

"Ok," I growled through clenched teeth, rising abruptly to my feet and striding over, beer flowing freely over my shirt and pants.  "Listen, buddy.  My best friend just bit it on his favorite golf course, and nobody can figure out how or why.  So, if what you're talking about is as irrelevant as I think, I'd prefer if you kept quiet and left me alone.  All right?  ALL RIGHT?  ALL RIGHT?!"

"Well, if you're gonna cry about it...sissy."

I did sort of start to cry.  But from, you know, anger.

"Now listen," said the old man patiently.  He removed a dusty cap, crossed his legs, and with a gesture invited me to sit.  "Just sit, and I'll tell you what it's all about."

"You've got to be kidding."

"Life's too short for kidding."

I sat down.  I don't know why.  Years later it would continue to baffle me.

"Now I told you," he went on in the creaky voice, like a '20s radio broadcast, "all this can only mean one thing.  SHE is back."

"Ok," I said, defeatedly.

"They used to call her the Bogey."  He leaned back and the lights dimmed.  In the sudden gloom, the embers of the pipe lit the ancient face in a mysterious glow.  "Nobody knew what she looked like, where she came from, or what her motives are.  But believe you me, she's caused more havoc on this old course over the past century than you can imagine.  The most cruel and unusual deeds of bloodshed and murder!  All hidden from the public eye -- until now."

I blinked in disbelief.  "Are you serious?"

"I've never been more serious."

You could tell he meant it.

Brushing the dust off his knickers, he gazed reflectively into the smoky air.  "Now it began just after the Great War, when we were all on what appeared to be a grand holiday . . . "


[to be continued]

When I met him he was already a haggard old man, carrying his body like a shell.  The body also would gradually diminish beneath those colorless robes, leaving finally nothing at all.  But his presence was not tied to his body; it was its own substance and it welled around him like a thick, massive light, projecting with force from his eyes.  I remember those eyes with great fascination and shuddering.  They were lit like lanterns, and they did not belong to the body they inhabited.

I have read histories of this man during my long sojourn in this dream world, the desert.  They tell of him as a young man.  I can hardly imagine that.  The soul was never young in that material vessel; it was ageless and it desired only release.

Release, not death.  Death did not appear relevant.  What the Nameless wanted was vastly different.

I will explain further.  Death was not relevant because life, in its physical sense, was not relevant.  So he called himself the Nameless.  Only the interior of the soul was made of divine substance, everything else was dead matter.  Upon release, the spark would rejoin the fire.

The Nameless strove ceaselessly for this release during life.  He turned his powers inward, peeling back layer after layer of clouded contaminate from his mind the way one washes the day's sweat from the body.  This introspection had a strange, emaciating effect upon him.  It was as if by distancing himself from the world, he became purer, but of thinner substance -- delicate and anxious.

I had the opportunity of speaking with him as I passed him in the cloisters one evening.  My own robes were heavy on me with the heat, for it was the dying of the day and all the hours of sun had baked into them.  I remember how he stopped and we faced each other, two black pillars standing like chess pieces on a floor of sunset gold.

"Brother Forlos."

I bowed deeply.

"You are tired."

"The heat weighs on me, Nameless."

The eyes stared unblinking from the shadows of the cowl.  "The earthly weighs on all of us."

I inclined my head to cede the point.  He stepped closer, then faltered.  At last he drew confidentially into whispering range.

"Forlos," he hissed, "beware the others -- all of the others.  They are the ballast that pulls the ship into the abyss.  You must fear them."

The old man clutched my arm, and I started.  This was not the great seer that I knew.  A dread began to well up deep in my gut; I wiped stray beads of sweat from my brow, and listened.

"Fear everything, Forlos.  I have seen the truth, and you should fear.  Do you feel the slow inexorable pressure of the world around you?  It has the great mass of dead matter, and it presses upon you like lead.  Everywhere you turn, is the reminder of decay -- our fate.  Fight it, and it will press harder.  A strangle-hold, ever tightening, around your throat."

The Nameless wrenched away suddenly, and leaned against a stone pillar.  Facing away from me, with that hypnotic gaze shuttered, I saw with some shock how wasted and feeble his form had become.  But surely the mind...

He groaned and the words were something unintelligible, no longer authoritarian, rising muffled from the arm of his robe where his face was buried.

"Father Nameless!"  I rushed to support him as he crumpled to the floor.  "Help!"

But no one was nearby.  I held the Nameless and he was light as dust.  The eyes flickered, and for a moment the awful lantern light left them, and they were just the eyes of an old man, broken and tired.

"Total death," he murmured.  "No spark, no fire.  The end of the Nameless."  A dry laugh.

A creeping horror seized me.  "But -- "

He shook his head.  "Flee this void," he whispered urgently.  "While you have time -- "

There is never any time, for any of us.  We live in a void and we must name ourselves from it, arbitrarily if necessary, or go into slow madness.  This was my lesson from the old man.  I pace the stone walkways of an empty monastery, and bite my nails, and see fleeting shapes in the darkness.  Examine your own mind before you judge mine -- or his.

Thanatos

In three month's time, the harvest goes.
The sun's aged gold heats the stone,
Radiating memory.

A canyon where I wheeled and soared
So long ago, in evening dreams,
Borne high aloft amidst the green,
With effortless ability.

Now comes great Death,
The sage.  He faces me
Beyond the blurred veil of my daily ease.
I see him on occasion, through the corner of my eye,
But walk past hurriedly.

Yet in the subterranean chambers, something rustles
Something restless.
Perhaps it will be stillborn in its shell.
Or perhaps it will rise up and destroy all:
The world, you, me, and our insipid hell.

Threotralagus monthremolistes ber liminus praelthraxis enel khretolos, en laratus morames precramen.