this twilight garden; alternate. the bamboo garden, alternate. the alice garden, alternate. part two. the bikini park atoll. the end of the world. love is blue. [i'll buy a cheaper ticket next time]

Michael Knight, a young loner on a crusade to champion the cause of the innocent, the helpless, the powerless in a world of criminals who operate above the law. One man can make a difference, Michael.

~author photograph gratefully credited to the poet Arden Levine.

                                  ***this twilight garden. lchristopher.***


But none of this happened.

Our shoes are pressed into the sand, toes touching, the canvas shoestrings undoubtably talking to one another. The storm of war was eighty miles away and growing closer every instant.

Zazie Bensen put a record on her vintage portable record turntable and lifted the phonograph arm. They were on the beach but Charlie Nod was thinking of her room. Her room was China white. The magenta raincoat was drying on the back of her chair and her cat, Green, leapt into her lap and began kneading her knees pleasantly whenever she was on the computer, as people said then. Her mother is calling from the foyer, but that isn’t necessary to the storyline, and so we – like her, shall strike it from the record. Our bodies are back at the beach. The Bikini Park Atoll.

The Democrats were in power in 1979, and in 1979 the idea of the Fifth Season was born. The Fifth Season was not a mathematical concept at all. The Fifth Season wasn’t even a prototype, it had not been built, it was not a philosophy, it had no scholars to build impression or politicians to fund the coffers of such. It existed for one year out every twenty.

Somewhere in Oregon a house is burning. It is November 8th 1979. A house is
burning over an air conditioner. It was eight months late and almost summer when his father purchased the air. It was almost December when the house burned for good. The Canadas, the distance there.

No mailmen. The mail had been forwarded, and it was her home anyway. If one was to take a photograph the difference would be very clear. Zazie Bensen had been dreaming in photographs since the age of eleventeen.

There were trains in the distance, he could hear their whistling horns cutting through the flat and the sere of the afternoon sound. Isabelle was seeing a man that worked at the University as a professor, no deafmute to the 2nd Amendment, tugged his .38 revolver out of the slipspace between their doublebed and the wall, and jumped in his truck. There were a pack of cigarettes on the table, and he took those too. He showed his son where the boiler switch was. Then there was dust, a line following his father down the Interstate that disappeared when the road went to asphalt six miles later.

The first weeks weren’t so bad, he thought. Not for the lack of freedom most six year olds were given. Schools were used to their charges not showing up, this was farm country. He waited for a truant officer than never came, and mysteriously the mailman had suddenly given up.

The airconditioner was the only thing left.
The lights like Vegas.

It was the late nineteen-nineties and the world was made of candy. our friends were turning millions in Silicon Alley. Brooklyn was just being re-rediscovered. It was time.
We had less than thirty years to live.

Charlie Nod, the Historian, is gently alarmed. The chromium steel of his zippered jacket twinkled in the August sky.

“I will know you then.”
“No, you won’t. This is real life. This is no storybook. There will
be disruption, and pain. You will finish University and go on to graduate
school. You will fly off on your own like a very little boomerang. “
“Oh, you dork. You positive nerd.”
“Careful now. I’m a boy. We fight hard to protect our weak egos, you know.”
“Pfft. Kiss me quickly, will you. It stops your words.”
“I will be thirty-three. The number of Christ.”
“I will be twenty-nine. My breasts will be deflated sacs. I will have to
wear makeup.”
“No.”
“I will be hideous, and that is okay, because I am all of 19 years old,
and American.” She’s so beautiful, he thinks. She doesn’t know it. She
doesn’t know that her skin is perfect, and that the trees lay bare their
leaves when she happens to gaze upon them.
“I won’t let you.”
“You are sweet, Charlie. In your rough-and-tumble sort of way.”
“Not smart, though.”
“Sometimes you are.” She spit dandelion seeds into the wind at him. Charlie mock-stared back.
“Not now.”
“Not when it concerns you.”
“Instinct is a tradeoff, it’s true.”
“I feel…” she toys with her anklet, her knees drawn up to her chin, her lower half the pivot-point of a closed scissor.
“You feel, dot-dot-dot,” he prompted, and toed her pale shin. She had shaved her legs the day before. He had already learned the pattern of her follicle growth.
“I feel I will hurt you. You are so sure.”
“You’re not?”
“I’m young, boy. There is so much I haven’t done yet, haven’t seen.”
“Go then.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“Not all the time, love. But right now I’m with it. I’m hip, I’m cool. Take all the time you need."
"This is where the glacier came, defining the town, the Island. The terminal moraine."
"All right," he said, running his hands along her long, handsome neck. She shivered. Not from the cold. He felt that part of him. She felt it too, and pressed her grey corduroy-bottomed rump back into him by way of messaging. It was a radio check of the flesh. Sending. Transmission to receiver. Receiver acknowledges. Go ahead, transmitter. And...

“There will be a sign," she says, and stops.
“A biblical sign?” he asks, vaguely uncomfortable with the idea. He had been in a church only once in his twenty three years. he was wearing his hat, which had been his father’s hat in the Great War, which wasn’t really a War but a war because America did not have Wars anymore. Now they had Operations. We have become a nation of doctors overnight, he thought sourly. From the farmer’s plow to surgeon’s tools. Unbelievable, this life of mine.

“Fuck, no," she says, laughing behind her eyes the way that truly beautiful women can do without even thinking about it. without even knowing that they are. because once they know it, it is spoiled. besides, i’m a Jew.
“What does that make my Gentile ass?”
“A goy.”
“What?” Chuffing smoke in a steam engine trail behind him, stubbing his cigarette on the heel of his engineer boots. This was a boy who used to prep for drag racing chip braised performance gasoline Chevrolet underworld rolling iron by blasting Hole doing “Violet" before that album had found its way into the cities of industry that were  nearly all of North Jersey then. They would race on the runways to the Teterboro Airport between the flight patterns. It was a fucking miracle no one had been arrested or killed already. One plane already had to redirect itself back to Newark International, and that was nearly the end of that until they managed to get a man inside the operation. And he was...

“Desirable, Charlie. Able to think for yourself. Not huddled over, stooped with the guilt and the forethought of a hundred generations of your kin before you, planning your life before you are even born.”
"Right," he said, knowing that she had caught him out, not paying attention.
“It’s bad too, you know. Yeah, I can be anything I want at University – but then again, I’m paying for it. I don’t have a path and I don’t have guidance to find my way back to one that has been laid out for people that want to do the sorts of things I do."
“It will come in 2014, and it will be our fault.”
“Readiness Exercise 84 was never put away.”
“We will not go to war. War will come to us.”
“World War III?”
“A World War must involve the world. The global state of affairs as it has been these past few years of the Clinton era cannot last forever. 87 cents a gallon isn’t empirically possible, forever. Not at our rate of return and the Saudi’s in bed with anyone and everyone with a few more pockets than the rest of us.”
“The eschaton is nearing. It is, Charlie.”
"Horseshit."
She looked away to the seas, or where the seas would be. To the East.

***

Charlie Nod pulled on his cigarette - it was 1996, right before the government would begin taxing the everloving shit out of the stupid fucking things. You could still find them for 1.75 if you knew how to look. He knew how to look. He worked in a tobacconist’s that was open 24 hours a day, the graveyard shift. When you are young you really don’t have to sleep. Not with coffee to drink and cigarettes on the regular, that was.

“It’s that C-Span shit that’s doing this to you, you know.” He pushed his hand through his hair, which was long and tied back with a black elastic band. He would allow her to brush it when he was in good humor, both early and often, as the saying goes.

“Have you eaten?”
“Not I, said the Charles.” He flicked his cigarette end into the waterafter pinching the filter off.
“Weird habit,” Zazie told him, trying her best to win a fight with the chainlink fence she was trying to climb with some modicum of dignity and barely passing.
“Shit doesn’t biodegrade the same as just plain tobacco and paper.”
“You lonely, boy?” He looks at her as if she has a social disease, then takes her hand, cautiously.
“I’m hungry.”
"You're starving, boy. You passed hungry about forty pounds ago."
"Yes'm."
“Come back to my house, then.”
"Rock and roll," he said, and reminded himself to open her door for her. 

When they reached the Chevy, he remembered, and he saw the firecrackers in her eyes at the gesture. Like an old movie. You are slow-motion to me, Charlie Nod thinks, and pops the chicken switches under the front fender in the correct sequence: 1, 2 and 3. The ignition wouldn't catch without it. Old ways die hard and all that.

***

He drives the car up past her development, to the bird sanctuary. He drove last night from the urban dustoff of Central New Jersey into the dawn, Leonard Cohen pounding out of a Pioneer soundsystem that looked complicated enough to launch a moon rocket and had more instrumentation than the Chevrolet fastback itself.

“Whose car is this, anyway?” Zazie looked around at the grey-blue interior and then behind her at the traffic rushing up to meet their tail, as if apprehension would be the most logical way to end this most random of forays.

“A friend of a friend. You know.” He shrugged it off, and Zazie let it go. The boy kept things close. She was one to talk. 

They continued posing in that heightened, unspoken defensive way that couples have prior to the development of trust. Perhaps that was all that love was. It was a territory, not an emotion. It was a place to set your feet, open your heart, and wait.

He threw the shifter up into first and stabbed the paper-thin bitchy clutch back, chirping the tires just enough to show class without overstepping into the ring of asshole behavior. A fine line, that. There was quiet for a beat, and then the beat went on.

“I knew you’d come," Zazie said. I had a feeling.”
"How could you have a feeling," Charlie Nod said, "if you were climbing out of bed when I was in your parents' kitchen for at least an hour waiting for you to get up?"
"A dream, Charlie, OK? I had a dream."
"You're dreaming of me? What will the neighbors think?"
"Shut up, you. I'm trying to explain."

"All right," he said. "No bullshit, now. Tell me."

Alexander unlocked the box. there were no keys. there was no grand mystery. no codes. It was in a copy of Charles Dickens a tale of two cities. it was a telegraph key and a sheet of morse code.

“How do you KNOW this?” he said.
“The same way you don’t know it. It just IS.”
“Is it like a dream, or a vision?”
“No. It’s like knowing where your running shoes are, or your locker combination back in high school, or how to drive a car or fuck yourself to orgasm or pass an algebra exam.”
“I’m terrible at algebra.”
“I’m terrible at masturbation.”
“Well then”, he said, and laughed, blowing the cigarette ash from his long fingers.
“Boy”, she said, laughing and shying away her eyes. “Come here.”
“Your parents.”
“They know you’re here. They’d rather you be here in my bed than off somewhere else.”
“Jews,” he said, striking a match off the square toe of his Kenny Cole Blacks. "In my neighborhood your daddy would be chasing me out of the bedroom window with a shotgun."
“We are,” she said, matter-of-fact with tinfoil wrapping the edges as neat as you please, unwrapping herself in the gleam and the glow of that twenty-second autumn night.

A twelve-inch switchblade snapped open in his hand. The men looked at it like it was a curiosity, which, for all intensive purposes, it was.It was a stupid weapon that was more flash and dazzle than actual workhorse. But it raised the bar when you went through life not really meaning to cut anybody. Like this. Like suddenly there was a fork in the road and the situation at hand needed to be raised towards a committee.
He set it on the bedside table. He set it on the bedside table but left his watch on. 

Zazie watched him curiously as he undressed. So many scars. One like a roadmap. His penis like iron, standing ridiculous and peacock proud. She touched his mouth. Charlie Nod kissed her. 
Finally. 


***

The aviary was moving in the night.

“This is important. This is Theodore Roosevelt’s great plan, his last act as President of these states United. In school they made us learn these things. The Glacier, the Bird Sanctuary, and the Town. Like they were necessary, somehow. And I don’t know what or why but I’m scared, Charlie. I’m so fucking scared.” Her large brown eyes were trying to hold her tears up and could not. Her cheeks broke loose like a tide of waves.

“This is the Alice Garden, Charlie. This is Alice’s rock right here, the rock where that man raped her and beat her head scarlet and grey into the face. Here are the chips her fingernails dug. You wouldn’t believe it possible, I know. I was awake that night; I could not sleep. When I cannot sleep, I walk. It was still safe, then. No one had been killed in a long time in these parts, Charlie. Not like where you grew up. I suspected it, I knew it was leading towards something, and I did nothing. I didn’t scream. I watched, and I enjoyed it. It turned me on, Charlie. Nineteen years old and not even knowing what gets me off, and I put my hand over my panties and rubbed and rubbed. The friction is better that way, at first, you know? Boys are so silly. But I knew she would die, and I knew she would die horribly. That she wouldn’t make it to the rabbit hole in time. The first time I ever came from masturbation, it was to a little girl being bludgeoned to death by the force and the weight of her own body. I’ve never had trouble sleeping since.”

I knew she would be, and I watched it happen. I cried tears of pain and wept for her. I had taken nude pictures of her for her boyfriend in the marshes here, 35mm, where the glacier moraine struck the island and formed the Sound. Gatsby’s Sound. The most lovely place on earth. She had a little redhead's firebush and her middle name was Irene and I loved her a little, I think.”

SHE KNEW ALICE WAS GOING TO DIE, AND THIS BESTOWS THE BELIEF THAT SHE WILL BE RIGHT ABOUT THE END OF DAYS, THE ENDGAME, THE ALICE GARDEN, THE ROLLERCOASTERS INTO MONTREAL, WHAT HAVE YOU. AT THE END HER PARENTS WILL DIE AND SHE WILL NOT WARN THEM BECAUSE SHE CANNOT BELIEVE THAT ONE PERSON CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. IT IS THEM OR NOTHING. CHARLIE IS THE OPPOSITE. HE KNOWS THAT ONE MAN CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

Alice Meyer. Not Jewish money. This is where the reconnaissance boats came. This is where the Sioux Indians laid their claim and were gifted with pox and Pennsylvania-rifled musket balls.

“You are a very strange girl, Zazie Bensen Frischmann.”
“Oh boy, don’t start with me. Your reputation is legion.” Amy crossed her legs over the rocky carafe then, and flipped her hair even more notoriously. Faux anger, flashing eyes, coquettishness from a a woman who had never quite used it before.
“Whatever could you mean?” Charlie hitched the chain of his
motorcycle wallet over the cuff of his buttock and sat down adjacent to
Alice’s stone. Her corduroy slacks showed the swell of her hips, her
argyle socks, her tiny broken feet seated in John Fluevog Angels, shoe leather
bought on Prince Street in Soho, Manhattan, only forty miles out and away
from this. If you flipped the shoe over, the sole read, matter-of-factly: RESISTS ALKALI, WATER, ACID, FATIGUE AND SATAN. Satan resistant footwear. Charlie Nod figured he could use all the help he could get.

“You know full well.”
“I don’t have a lady friend.”
“No. You have a collection. They are like dolls in a house – a house of affairs, a playpen of whores. Thank you, but I don’t want to be part of that house.”
“It’s all window dressing. It’s nice to have references, though.”
“I didn’t know your little girls knew how to dress. That’s not how they tell it at school.”
“My, we’re defensive.”
“Don’t start with me, boy.”
“If I were starting with you, your panties would be around your knees right about now. I am not starting with you. Truth is, I kind of like you.”
“Oh, please.” She pushed him away, but her eyes were locked in close. A beat.
“Nothing.”
"Nothing?" Nod echoes. 
“Nothing, Charlie. This is real life, and in real life men do not act. They do nothing. They wait for their enemies to tire themselves out and then walk quietly over them.”
“No. That cannot be the way.”
“It is, my love. It is.”
“How can you separate yourself? How can you love more than one man?”
“How can you sleep with more than one woman at a time and still claim love for another? We don’t realize or reckon the things we do will harm. We don’t have accountability. We don’t have political oversight committees like the Senate and Congress do.”

***

Suddenly the memory was upon Charlie so thick it was like a field of lemons being cut open simultaneously. Everything he saw was gone and they were standing inside a record store in Central New Jersey:

He picked up the Chieftains, No. 4 The Coombe.
Zazie lifted her head back at the Princeton Record Exchange and said: “I don't know anything. I need to learn so much and there’s so little time.”

***

They had talked about her feet the night before. Her arches were confused at birth, she said. She needed to wear some kind of inserts in her shoes and she probably wouldn’t be able to walk when she was older as she was constantly forgetting to.
“Miss Elevator Shoes.”
“Shut up, you.” He caught her tone and decided to do just that.
"Oh, all right." 
“Oh Charlie, why won’t you kiss me?”

yeah, there’s a girl in my bed at home, but it’s not my bed because nothing is paid for, nothing is ever paid for, all i know how to do is live by my wits and the fact that i am not hard to look at and no white man can best me. i’ve thrown away the best internship a poor white kid from the industrial factorytowns of North New Jersey couldever hope for. and she may have drug sickness, cotton fever, rotten gimmicks and you sank my battleship. it is my third overdose and you were raised in the words of the Phantasy Star Sega gaming set, you were raised on the industrial edge of a blue-collar envelope where others just gasp and hope to dream.

“Tomorrow,” he resolved. “I will kiss you tomorrow.”

This was after the blue sedan went south to the seas and oceans.

An 8mm projector to keep the drunks and sadness away.
The sky filled.
Index refracting like a telescope.

HE DREAMS OF THE BOAT: SCENE AND SEQUEL.

1930’s, Demeter Nod pulls up.
Charlie’s dreams were tight and lost. He could not get used to the bed, its softness, and the fact that her parents knew that she was in her room and did not care.

He pushed the boat into the water and fell amongst the waves.

***

Pretending to be doctors as the sky blew itself into volcanic glass and ripped the magnetism from the very soil of the Earth.
“There’s a carburetor. A magneto. That’s it and that’s all.”
“What’s a magneto?”
“It’s a device used for building electrical energy when a battery isn’t present.”
“Old school. The golden age of radio.”
“I must learn the Art of Silence and the Gift of Noise.”
“What are you babbling about?”
“I don’t know.”
“I was there for your sexual awakening. Kate Chopin had nothing on you.”
“Yours too.”
“Things were so much more sad then.”
“What did you dream of last night?”
“The internal combustion engine and its means of ignition.”
“What did YOU dream of?”
“Newfoundland.”
“Newfoundland?”
“Yes, Newfoundland. It’s where puffins live.”

He thinks he sees it then. The Déjà vu, the remembering, the feeling that all of this had been done before, reasoned with, fumbled with, mastered, controlled. That he had been there. That this was love and stageplay all in the same breath. That it made sense to wonder just who pulled the strings. He could not help himself. He went back to her house and had her. It was not yet the turn of the millennium. The world was still right here.


FIN. ~lchristopher. Wednesday, May 6th, 2026. 1:02PM Fort George, Manhattan NYC.