THE CRYSTAL  TIGHTROPE

(a work in progress) 

 © copyright, January 1, 2003

Synopsis

or Santiago—Everything goes wrong and then ultimately everything goes right – Santiago’s first two books become international best sellers. He is miraculously cured of disease,  and finds a large bank account can make him happy – buys a house in the hills above Santa Barbara, California, a Mercedes Benz  and a three thousand dollar Armani linen suit.

Santiago discovers having everything can be nothing too and starts the third book of his life.

Santiago had a pastis. It would be his last pastis in France. He had completed the journey begun more than thirty years before. He did not remember anything about it. Even his own name, Santiago McBoil seemed like it belonged to a stranger. His mind was almost a perfect blank.

He was sitting in AU LONG COURS, a small corner bistro on the pedestrian precinct near the old town of Nice. It was Monday morning, misty rain was falling while antique vendors set up their usual stalls filled with every kind of trinket treasure the world had regurgitated since the beginning of the 20th century---a very astute shopper might discover an article from earlier centuries, but nothing as a bargain---the collectors had emptied these rare finds long before in the bountiful years of Scot Fitzgerald and Hemingway. The beautiful and the damned now were a form of Euro-flotsam that permeated every square meter of Nice's fashionable streets.  The time of American Bohemians had long passed. Santiago was just another tourist.

Corsica flashed in his mind earlier in the morning when he stopped to look at a painting of the sun rising above a Mediterranean coastline. Just for a moment the urge to weep like a baby swept over his soul.

Santiago tightened his lips and walked back into the din busy browsers.  The feeling left him, but the craving for a pastis emerged.

In a few more hours he would be on a plane sitting next to Thaana, returning to America. She knew  who he was and where he was supposed to go. She didn’t know she was leaving his daughter, Tara, stranded in Corsica.

June 1, 2008

Hey! Do you know who is writing this book? It’s me, Santiago. I get to do everything here. I get to be me. I get to be the big-eye-in-the-sky that sees everything. I get to be all the dogs, cats and weird-ass populace that pops across these pages.

I like it like that and this is my story and I’m not going to change---not for you, not for them or any big shot publisher that wants to squeeze a dollar out.

The fact is, I get to be God and that is damned powerful. You want proof? I can even put you in this story if I wanted to, because there you are, sitting or walking or laying down. It doesn’t matter. Your eye is on this spot. Right here, right now.

For instance look at this. It is a big black period. Some people might call it a spot, but it ain’t. It’s a period, period. Don’t confuse the two.

I’m going to say it again, the thing about a crystal tight rope.

Hey, you say, how can there be a crystal tight rope?

To tell you the truth, that is a good question. The answer is this: it’s as dangerous to walk on as it is to fall off.

That is the real damned mystery.

So anyway, the Big-Eye-In-The-Sky was talking about old times, France, Corsica and a thousand threads that came together once.

I am the carpet woven out of it.

To tell you another thing, if I ever meet the real Big-Eye-In-The-Sky, I’m going to punch it in the N.O.S.E. I don’t care. I might even knock a few T.E.E.T. H. loose.

You know why?

Because I’m one pissed-off S.O.B., that’s why.

But this is how it goes.

I bet you if I met the Big-Eye-In-The-Sky, (abbreviated hence to B.E.I.T.S.) he will say this, “Hey Dude, who is writing this story?”

Why would he be any different from 99.9% of the rest of the mess walking around denying any responsibility to the pickle we are all in?

No one wants to admit responsibility.

General Westmoreland didn’t want to admit responsibility, nor few generals before or after him. Grant did, then drank himself to death.

There is only one thing to do. Admit complete responsibility and take charge of your actions. Do it now.

All right. This where the F.U.N. begins.

B.E.I.T.S. is hereafter renamed The Beat. One gets tired of placing all those damn periods, period.

The Beat thinks this: See all of those wiggly things down there? No, I don’t mean your toes or those strange little electrical pulsations going around in Santiago’s mind.

It is something so obvious and endless in the infinite multitudes of chaos. It is all those two-armed, two-legged, one-headed mutations from a source that has no definition of time or space.

It is the human crust of bubbles, never failing to make its ring of skin-scum around the perimeters of the observable bath-tub.

Homo-erectus, the plague and plateau of chemistry gone bonkers---the work of Merlin’s Merlin.

That is the wiggly thing one must consider, if you read past this page.

For instance, Santiago is a wiggly thing.

In the course of his life, he actually touched seven million. Two hundred fifty one thousand other wiggly things either on purpose or by accidental bumpings.

He passed some kind of communicating such as words or lustful humpings with five hundred, twenty two thousand wiggly things.

Roughly half were male, the other half female, spending on the average three minutes of shared consciousness of being in some space.

Santiago had some kind of human relationship such as family members, lovers or enemies with two hundred fourteen wiggly things which hence will be known as wigglibump(s).

Santiago knew one hundred and eleven by name and sometimes thought about their personal history and occasionally considered their welfare.

In the course of his experience, he was on intimate terms with twenty-one.

Seven of that group he loved.

Out of the entire mass of wigglibump interaction he killed six in 2.1 seconds in 1968.

He did not know them or their names or even touched them other than through the trajectory of metal in linear  space.

After all the wigglibumps had encountered in his 64 years of existence, the six who had briefly breathed in front of him for 5 seconds, before he stopped their breathing in 2.1 seconds, affected him more than all of the combined time of all the wigglibumps he had ever seen, knew or heard of including the seven loves who had shared most of his adult passage as a fellow  wigglibump.

2.1  seconds of wigglibump-off  was longer than 64 years.

This is a phenomena that is created only through the power of me, The Beat.

I take the responsibility as well as the credit for creating the  completely cursed and blessed wigglibump known as Santiago McBoil.

June 2. 2008

Thaana knew Santiago was nuts the first time she saw him but she just couldn’t stop herself.

He looked so good dressed up in those black leathers and motorcycle boots, even if it was only a 50 cc MoPed he was on.

There was something so familiar about him, all she could think, was Peter Fonda on that big hog in Easy Rider.

Somewhere deep down in her, she knew instantly she was going to take Santiago to her bed, and he was going to be the best wigglibump in her life.

It is also true that Thaana was completely nuts.

They were made for each other.

This is how they met. It was an accident. They were both lost in the same

spot at the same time, and I don’t mean period. It is the arrow to the octagon, it is the whisper to the heart. Who can tell why so much comes from so little?

A spot is different than a period because a period may come again and again, period.

But a spot, I should say a true spot, only happens once, period.

bove the city of Ajaccio is the valley of the Gravone. The valley runs north to south.

 La Gravone, one of the biggest rivers in Corsica, flows more or less down the middle of the valley into the bay of Ajaccio.

There are many little villages scattered on the slopes of the valley such as, Boccagio, Tavara, Carbuccio and Pére on the east slope, and Vero and Sarrola on the west slope.

On one particular day Thaana and Santiago both got lost in the Gravone Valley, and through the gold-almighty-power of me, the Beat wound up in the same village at the same time.

Thaana had rented a car and was trying to get to the village called Sari D’orcino which was in the next valley to the west, above the Gulf of Sagan.

She was looking for an old lover remembered from her wild young wigglibump years in New York.

Her lover had been a Corsican playwright who had his first play presented by a small company in Greenwich Village.

They had a hot night of wine, pot and sex together and said goodbye in the morning.

She returned to her Jewish brain surgeon husband and the playwright returned to Corsica.

Twenty-five passed when one day Thaana bought a ticket to Ajaccio and rented the car.

That is the rhythm of The Beat.

Santiago had been on the island of Corsica for over two months. He had once lived on the island. There, he was tested in the fires of lust and love more than once.

It was Corsica where he lost his wife and ran off with a jezebel Corsican who broke his heart not once but twice.

Twenty-five years had passed since the Corsican hussy had first burnt his bridges and scalded his soul.

Santiago had returned to find her one more time. He planned to murder her and then shoot himself.

She lived in the small mountain village of Pére which the Corsicans pronounced “Parr”.

Somehow is an overused word, for the meeting of Santiago and Thaana was not somehow, it was providence, but even so, somehow they both arrived in the village of Carbuccio at the same spot, which began a new period in their lives.

*   *   *

haana got out of her rented car, when she realized she was in the wrong valley. It didn’t really matter much because she didn’t know why she was in Corsica in the first place.

The lover from 25 years before had only been a springboard in her mind that had bounced her out of the deep rut life had become in New York City. The village of Carbuccio was a beautiful spot to stop and smell the proverbial roses.

As she walked between two stone houses on the narrow road, she saw an old man dressed in the flat brimmed hat and hunting costume of old days, stop and watch another man approaching on a 50cc MoPed.

The man was dressed in motorcycle gear, black leathers and all, but on his head was a ridiculous bicycle helmet, the kind that looks like an elongated ostrich egg.

The black leathered ostrich-egg-head man slowed and came to a halt in front of the old man.

At this spot in time, the three wigglibumps stood within a small circle of only ten feet. The old man was the center. Thaana was fascinated, knowing something unique was going to happen.

The black leathered Santiago slowly released the chin strap of his ostrich-egg helmet, pulled it off his head and said to the old man, “Bon jour.” He did not seem to notice Thaana.

“Où Paris?” Santiago said quite clearly ooo-wee pear-ree.

What he was trying to ask was, “Where is Pére?”

Santiago was not good with languages. After years of living in a French speaking country the tongue still escaped him.

The old man scratched his chin in bewilderment, shook his pointed finger in to the northern sky, then said in broken English, “Paris? It is far away, across the sea…a boat…a plane is better. Too long on this little machine…”

Santiago now looked puzzled. “Merci,” he said while starting the MoPed and turned back in the direction he had come.

The old man went to the local tavern in Carbuccio and told the other old men that the tourists coming to the island were crazier than ever. Imagine trying to get to Paris on a MoPed?

Thaana went back to the rented car and caught up with Santiago a kilometer down the road.

Pére lies on the upper road going to or from Carbuccio. Thaana had gone through it on her way. Her understanding of French was as bad as Santiago’s, but she knew what he was asking.

What the old man said went over her head, but not the other old men he told the story. The tale of the mad American tourist on a MoPed would circulate around Corsica for years until it was manifested into The MoPed Rally, Paris to Pére in 2011. That is the power of the Beat.

Meanwhile back to Santiago, just as he was coming to the “Y” in the mountain road, one being the high road to Pére and the other the low road to Vero, Thaana caught up in the rented car.

She honked the horn and cut in front of him. He slammed on the brakes hitting a patch of gravel that sent him somersaulting ostrich-egg-head first into a large granite boulder knocking him out cold as mackerel.

The loaded 38 pistol tucked inside his leather jacket skidded on down the mountain was found in 2011 by Henri Trousseau, one of the Paris to Pére MoPed Rally racers who had stopped to have a pee in the brush. Henri shot himself in the head after learning he had come in last--the destiny of that pistol was at work.

At the precise moment Santiago was knocked out as cold as a Mackerel, Martina the woman who had broke his heart twice, was seducing the 79 year old mayor of the small village of Pére.

The mayor was senile, rich and madly in love with Martina, promising to murder his legal wife with arsenic so they might be married.

Martina would be the first woman mayor of Pére in 2011, give the first gold, silver and bronze trophies for the Paris to Pére MoPed Rally.

A year later, Martina would succumb to her own madness and complete belief in a Mayan legend by shooting herself December 20, 2012 with the pistol found next to Henri Trousseau’s body. She believed the End Time was the next day, December 21^st. She was wrong, but the pistol at last completed Santiago’s dark desire.

The Mayans were wrong too, but not by much. The End Time came in the first week of 2013.

As everyone knows the number 13 has a bad reputation. Yet in the whole world only 13 people survived which gave a whole new story to the bad-assed number.

But I am getting ahead of my story. The Beat knows when to spill the proverbial beans.

ello, my name is Thaana. Would you believe it? I ran off just like some kind of lunatic to France---well not really France being Corsica is like a state---you know, like New Jersey is a state even though it’s a pit---but there you are. I mean, there I was. You know what I’m saying? Go figure.

I can’t even remember how I got there I was in such a state leaving that jerk husband of mine in Manhattan. 30 years I live with that schnook and he has the nerve to tell me he is in love with our maid. The nerve!

So what do I do you ask?

I say goodbye Harvey, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way out‘a here.

He was gone only ten minutes when I go to the bank and transferred 300 grand to my personal account. Hey, that’s all he had left.

I find out from his secretary Mabel-what’s-her-face, he had three other floozies he was spending his brain surgeon payola on. The guy should’a transplanted his own brain. Go figure.

I mean, last I knew, we had over three million stashed away for our retirement in Florida and there we are down to peanuts. Hear what I’m saying?

So I take the 300 K, put the apartment up for sale, sell the Lexus to Charley, Mabel-what’s-her-face’s boyfriend and the next thing I know I’m on a plane to an island in the Mediterranean thinking I might see a guy I nailed when I was a hot young thing. Go figure.

I was nuts.

And then for no reason at all I chase a stranger I meet when he falls off his motor scooter.

A lot can happen in a week. You know what I mean?

haana didn’t mean to run Santiago off the road. She turned in front of him just as he was turning to take the high road to Pére where he hoped to find his old heart break, shoot five holes in her and with the last slug put it through the roof of his mouth. One rarely fails at termination from that placement of lead, unlike Santiago’s old army buddy Pete, from Mylai.

Pete managed to miss with a 12 gauge shotgun and blew off the right half of his face as well as performing a superb lobotomy. The good thing about it was Pete never again remembered Vietnam or what he did in Mylai.

Thaana was horrified when she saw the man in black leathers tumble off the MoPed and fly into the bush far below the road. “Oh my God,” she said with the hush of New York understatement.

She would have been more correct to have said, “Look what the Beat has done.”

Only five minutes later when she brought Santiago back to consciousness would she be marginally close to personal clarity.

Santiago opened his eyes and said, “Where did you come from?”

“Beats me,” she said.

Santiago McBoil was wearing a thin bicycle helmet when he landed on his head in the maqui of Corsica.

He was lucky he was wearing it otherwise the pointed granite rock that split the bicycle helmet would have split his skull. If he had not been killed, most certainly he would have achieved the lobotomy his grunt-in-the-mud-Mylai-buddy, Pete, had done with a shotgun.

As it was Santiago got a severe concussion resulting in general amnesia that would last for over six months. He did not know his name, or the name of the woman he had been intent on murdering. He did not even remember her. He had no idea of where he was although it seemed vaguely familiar.

In fact, he did not remember a thing. How cool is that?

He was like a brand new wigglibump---a clean slate without a blemish.

He was born again, with everything seen for the first time except for a strange string of words that kept echoing inside his head.  T. S. Eliot wrote the words many years before even though Santiago did not know who T. S. Eliot was or what the words meant.

The words were, “…and the end of exploration…”

Santiago’s mind turned white as the words dribbled away so faint he could not hear them at all. They were like drips of water on a flat rock at the edge of recognition.

Being The Beat, I can have a lot of fun, screwing with wigglibump certainties.

ey, it’s me again Santiago. Don’t listen to the other guy, The Beat. He should be called The Beast because he’s a God-damned thug the way he screws with people.

He treats humanity like a little kid blowing through a soap ring, watching the bubbles glitter for a second before he sticks his finger in them or laugh as they crash and pop. Yeah. He’s a beast and all he wants are death bubbles and killing things. 

Family and friends and the government wanted me to kill. One at a time, they took me to their killing rituals. 

My dad Jose gave me a rifle made in 1906. He bought it from another Mexican who stole it from a pawn shop. It was a 33 Winchester.  Very few people even know about them, but the slug is like a freight train when he goes through something.

I was 11 years old the only time I went deer hunting with my old man and buddy Pete. Pete was a year or two older than me and he’d been hunting before. When we got older he got good at killing.

But this time was October 1955—the mountains were full of maniacs and the aspen trees were golden.  We set off before sunrise and started walking up a valley.

My old man yelled, "Santiago, you stay up on the south side of the hill. I'll walk down through the middle, and Pete can walk up on the north side— so if something comes your way, you just point that thing at it and pull the trigger."

The explosion of the rifle and the way it slammed into my shoulder with that instant acrid smell of gun powder—all of that thrilled me.  I didn’t think about what the gun was supposed to do—what it would be like when I killed.

*   *   *

I was seven or eight years old the first time I killed with the Johnson boys who moved in next door. Jackie, Ray and Lee. They loved killing things.  They would invite me to come along to watch them kill.  I didn't know what they were going to do. I didn’t know killing.

Ray the oldest,13, took one of the pigeons out of the coupe his father had built. He laid the sacrificial bird out on a board.  Jackie and Lee held the bird, pulling its wings out to the side. Ray took a hammer and nailed the bird's wings down.  I was fascinated by the pigeon's black eyes and his beak as it opened and closed.  A puff of sound was all it made. “Look at this,” Ray said. He took a knife out of his pocket.  It was a switchblade that he was very proud of slinging open.

Jackie, Lee and me watched Ray as he put the point of the blade on the breast of the bird and laughed. He looked up at us, and there was something strange in his eyes. He raised the knife up two inches and put it back down poking the blade into the bird's breast just a little.  I gasped and Ray laughed again.  He raised the knife again this time six inches and looked at it greedily.

“Come on Ray, kill the fucker,” Jackie said.

“Yeah, kill him, kill him!” Lee chimed in.

I looked at Jackie and Lee. They were smiling, the same smile as Ray. They seemed to feel some kind of excitement that I wanted to feel, but I felt nothing.  I just stood there watching, wondering if Ray was going to do it.

Without warning his hand shot up 12 inches then slammed knife down.  I expected the bird to scream something like, “Don't kill me,” but the black eyes of the bird just got really big and its beak went wide-open. Silence came out.  Its eyes fell like skin curtains—the lids slowly dropped over the glassy black as if the bird was going to sleep.  It was almost peaceful, almost a dream.  I was fascinated. So that's what death is, like going to sleep.

I couldn't stop thinking about the bird going to sleep, how peaceful, how quiet, how beautiful it was.  I wanted to kill something. I wanted to see what it was like to send something quietly to sleep, so instantly. I thought about my lizard.  He was a pet I kept in a box. I caught flies and worms and even gave him spaghetti once in a while.  I wanted to see if I could send him to sleep.  I went into the kitchen and took a knife from the cupboard and came back into my room and caught the lizard.  I held him down on my table, but the knife was bigger than the body width.  If I stabbed the lizard it would slice him in half.  That didn't seem like the thing to do. I put the lizard back into the box and went looking for something a little bit smaller. 

On my mother’s is sewing machine there was a big pin cushion with a long needle pin that had a fake pearl on the end of it.  It was perfect.  It was like a fencing sword in comparison to the size of the lizard.

“Right lizard, this is it,” I said, “you're going to go to sleep buddy.”

I took the pin and placed it the same way Ray had done on the pigeon. I pushed down just a little bit.  The lizard nearly jumped out of my hand, and I had to hold a lot harder.  It was difficult to raise the pin up and down the way Ray had done the knife, so I decided just to put the point of the pin on the lizard’s chest and push down very slowly to see if I could see him go to sleep.  I pushed and the lizard thrashed in my fingers. He didn't want to go to sleep at all. 

I pushed a little bit harder but the pin was so dull it wasn't going through the lizard’s skin.  The lizard was making funny little kissing sounds and its tongue was licking around its mouth.  I didn't know whether to stop or push harder. Suddenly the pin went down through the skin and blood spurt out onto my hand.  The lizard twisted violently for a few seconds then went completely limp. It was not the same as the pigeon.  There was nothing peaceful about what happened in my fingers.  I began to feel very bad.

*   *   *

I heard my old man scream in the trees at the bottom mountainside below me. His voice echoed across the valley.

“He's coming your way Santiago.”

I didn't know what he meant. I thought maybe it was Pete coming up so I stood there not doing anything. I heard limbs and branches cracking.  I looked down through the aspen trees and saw something earth colored moving through the white bark. 

I didn't think. I raised the rifle and pulled the trigger without aiming. I heard the explosion of the rifle, I smelled the cordite and I could feel a muscle spasm in my shoulder. I was amazed when the deer fell on its front legs only 10 feet from me.  There was a bright red gash, like bloody lips the size of a quarter on its shoulders.  I stood just looking at the deer as it kept trying to get up on its legs while making a grotesque wheezing sound.  It kept falling down on its front legs while its rear legs spread out like it was doing the splints.

“Good going Santiago. Ya’got the son of a bitch,” Pete yelled as he came running up through the aspen trees. My old man was a little further down the hill yelling, “Did he get him, did he get him?”

Pete walked around the deer and said “You sure fucked up this hamburger.”

I was bewildered---kind of shocked.  It was too easy to knock down a huge deer by squeezing your finger on a little piece of metal.  The wheezing sound continued while my old man ran up to the deer.

“Good Fuck’n shot Santiago! You blew his ass out of the woods!” Pete said.

He had that smile of the Johnson brothers. So did my old man. I didn’t like the look.

I became aware of the rifle in my hands. It weighed a hundred pounds.  I saw my old man lips moving but the sound of rasping breath was all I could hear.  I slowly walked up to the deer. Pink frothed death bubbles were coming out its nose and mouth.  I walked to the other side of the deer and was hit in the eyes like a hand slapping my face.

The bullet hole, the size of a quarter on one side had turned into the size of a dinner plate on the other, smashing bones through the lungs of the deer.  The Vesuvius exit of the bullet left a blown-out swamp of bloody dripping meat. The breathing of the deer was gurgled drowning.  It was not going to sleep— it was dying a miserable death.  I felt bad.

*   *   *

Thaana had never killed anything bigger than a mosquito either on purpose or by accident in her life. The site of any creature suffering made her deathly ill, and if she saw blood she became faint.

When Santiago tumbled off the road, she ran down to where his twisted body lay crumpled on the ground. Blood was trickling down his forehead from the small tap the pointed boulder made just under his skin. For a dizzying split second the sky swirled in a spiral above her and it was all she could do to force herself to look away from the blood.

She focused on Santiago’s crotch and noticed the zipper had fallen open where below she could see ragged underwear looking like filigreed lace from the wholes.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe this,” she said then began patting his face trying to get a response. “Hey buddy, buddy, I’m sorry. Hey wake up Mr.”

Santiago lay on the ground imitating 150 pounds of thawed out freezer hamburger. Even his black leathers began to feel like slippery wrapping paper under Thaana’s hands.

Thaana’s light taps on his face began to become ferocious slaps that sent tiny skin thud echoes across the valley. “Come on Mr., don’t you dare die on me. You can’t do this…hey are you even breathing?”

She was so terrified her own hyperventilation obscured any sound or movement that came from the limp body under her. It occurred to her the leathery figure would soon become a corpse without CPR, so she knelt over Santiago’s face, squeezed his nose like a mechanic’s vise and began to blow hot puffs down Santiago’s throat.

Instantly Santiago coughed and his body jerked convulsively as he sat up with one eye squeezed shut and the other full of tears and dust. He had no idea what kind of animal was attacking him, except it had very curly long black hair and smelled pleasantly of lavender.

“Mr., Mr., God I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to run you off the road,” Thaana screeched.

“Who are you?” Santiago said as he slowly opened his shut eye and the face of some kind of woman materialized in front of him.

“Beats me,” Thaana said in the predestined checkmate game that was about to unfold. “But who are you Mr.?”

“I  am…” Santiago began before the great void of nothing rolled over him, and all he could do was to repeat her refrain, “…uh, beats me too.”

For some unfathomable reason, Thaana and Santiago locked eyes and both began to laugh like village idiots. This was their beginning…

*   *   *

There are many reasons men and women get together, of which in the thousand of years human kind has wondered around the earth over a ten trillion combinations have been experimented, counting body positions, vocal renditions, philosophical puzzle plans and just plain rape and pillage variations.

Santiago and Thaana did not create any new technique or curiosity spark. He liked the deep brown color of her eyes and sugary bouquet that wafted off her hair. She liked his shiny black leathers and sharp angled nose hanging over a long bushy beard. But there was one thing they intuitively responded to—they liked the taste of each other. I don’t mean style, I mean the juices they shared when Thaana blew the kiss of life slurpingly down Santiago’s mouth and he unconsciously gargled back into hers. Love at first sip.

Another odd phenomena occurred. Being his brain had been bonked on the granite rock, Santiago’s mind was somewhat similar to a baby duck coming out of the shell. His first compulsion in seeing Thaana was to follow her where ever she waddled.

She on the other hand, had never given birth to a child, although her entire female spirit was designed to nurture something, although thus far she had only care-taken homeless cats and dogs. If Santiago wanted to follow her home that was all right by her. He was just another innocent creature she could protect from the calamities of the world.

This where it all started; the taste of a mouth and following the leader. Also this is where it all ended; the life they knew before.

Because of a fork in the road and a little gravel, Santiago and Thaana were welded in destiny to become two of the last 13 people on earth who would survive The End Time.

It is true that both Santiago and Thaana were eccentric if not down right crazy before they met each other. But on one hand Santiago was cured of his nightmarish insanity by the God-Almighty-Whack-On-The-Bean, that gave him a six month vacation from the memories of betrayal, murder, mayhem and rage.

Santiago became like Einstein’s equation, in which the fundamental force of gravitation is described as a curved spacetime caused by matter and energy…uh, that is the equation determines the metric tensor of spacetime for a given arrangement of stress-energy in spacetime…oh screw it, in other words, something in Santiago’s brain was not disappeared, it was just transformed. Santiago began believing the voices and dreams that came in the next six months, were the direct messages of me, The Beat. Screw Einstein. Santiago’s brains were scrambled and he needed my help.

That’s right, God in the control tower, was directing traffic.

Thaana just wanted to believe in something, in fact almost anything would do, if it was real. I mean really real, not just in the flesh real. She wanted a dream to believe. Santiago would in reverse activity show Thaana the way by in fact following her.

*   *   *

When Santiago stopped laughing, the first thing he noticed about lying in the dirt looking at a woman with very beautiful warm dark eyes, was there was a sweet fruity and booze taste in his mouth. He liked it.

The second thing he noticed was the woman was fiddling with his fly zipper trying to pull it up, except his ragged underwear was caught in it. What was odd about this was he knew what a zipper was and what it was supposed to do. He also knew what was under the torn shorts, but he had no idea why he was sitting on the ground with a woman he had never seen before.

At first it was peculiar but not frightening. In fact it seemed completely natural, and quite possibly he had always been there with her. She smiled at him and kept asking if he was all right.

“Sure, sure, I’m fine. No problems, uh, mam…”

“Who are you?” she asked again.

That is when the whole thing became a little scary if not just weird. He started to answer her again, but the problem was he did not have a clue who he was, or for that matter, where he was. He was on the ground, sitting in the bushes with an odd woman fussing over him. The sky was blue, the air was warm and he could see down to the foot of a valley where there appeared to be a shoreline and some kind of big lake or ocean shining to the horizon.

“I’m…I’m…I’m…”

“That’s okay honey, you just sit here for a moment and then I’ll take you to a doctor…oh my God, I hope I haven’t hurt you,” Thaana said.

“No, I’m…uh, I’m…okay, kind of...” Santiago wasn’t sure what was wrong with him but something was different. He saw the leather chaps and coat. He saw the split bicycle helmet and the bent up MoPed laying a few feet away. The road sign poked up over the woman’s head and he could read the name Pére. It all seemed familiar.

That is when he heard the voice. It was me The Beat. I said, “Shut up you moron and follow this woman where ever she goes.”

“Okay,” Santiago and looked at Thaana like a baby duck.

*   *   *

Thaana managed to get Santiago up on his feet and supported him as she walked him up to the rented car.

She drove to the village. A black-haired attractive mature woman was standing in the door of what looked like the village community center. Thaana asked her if there was a doctor near.

Thaana did not ask in French, nor did she think it peculiar when the woman answered in English, that the closest doctor was in Ajaccio, twenty kilometers away. The woman never took her eyes off Santiago, while he sat in the car looking like a blank black-board.

Thaana saw the woman in the rearview mirror come out into the street and watch as she sped off in the direction of Ajaccio. Santiago smiled and felt like something creepy and painful had just evaporated. He never felt better, although, he had nothing in his mind to compare another day.

In Ajaccio at the emergency room in the hospital, Santiago was examined by an indifferent intern who found nothing wrong with him other than a large goose egg on his head. The intern mumbled in French to watch out for prolonged head-aches or any other abnormal condition which might occur. He gave Santiago a small packet of aspirin.

It was at the hospital when Santiago took off his leather jacket, an envelope fell on the floor. Thaana picked it up and discovered it contained a return Delta airline ticket to Nice, going on to London then Atlanta and ended in Albuquerque, dated for 7:00 PM on this day. There was also ten thousand Euros, his passport and a tagged key to a locker.

It was 3:00 PM. Thaana gave him the envelope and its contents. She wasn’t sure if the man on the passport photograph was him. The man was clean shaven and appeared years younger. The man in front of her had the beard of Methuselah and was apparently 20 lbs lighter and a lot older.

“Is all of this yours? I mean, hey is that really you?”

Santiago looked at the passport and the money. He did not remember a thing about either but he knew the key was his and instantly saw a bundle of books and bound manuscripts in a wall locker.

“Well? Is it you?” She asked again.

“Gee, I don’t know…I mean, the key is mine and something is mine in a locker, but I don’t know who that guy is…”

“Have you got a wallet?”

“A wallet?”

“Yeah, you know, where guys keep their rubbers in their back pocket.”

Santiago reached in his pocket and pulled out a folded brown leather wallet. He handed it to Thaana like it was a bomb about to blow.

Thaana flipped it open, finding a social security card, a New Mexico drivers license, an AAA card and a Bank of America debit card. The license and the debit card had photos on them. Both were clearly the man in front of her.

“You’re Santiago McBoil?”

Santiago looked at her blankly. “I don’t know.”

“Whadda ya mean you don’t know? You hiding from the law?”

“Honest…I don’t know. I just fucking don’t know,” he said and for the first time felt as though he was walking on quicksand, and would be swallowed at any moment. His body tensed and his eyes closed to small slits.

“Ah come on honey, its all right…everything is going to be okay,” Thaana said seeing he was upset. “It was just that bang on the knob you got baby…probably just a simple case of temporary amnesia.”

“But I am somebody!” Santiago wheezed.

“Yeah sure you’re somebody. You’re Santiago McBoil unless that is an alias on the cards.” She put the driver’s license and debit card in front of Santiago.

“That’s what I look like?”

“Baby it’s either you or your twin bearded brother. The question is, what do you know? What about the ticket and the dough and the key?”

“Fuck knows. I have no idea except for one thing,” he said digging his fingers into the strands of his beard. ‘The key, its mine and I put some papers in a locker…they’re mine.”

“Where are they?”

“They’re…uh, I don’t know…”

“Why hey, they gotta be at the airport, cause look that’s the airport here isn’t it,” Thaana said holding Ajaccio’s Campo del Oro airport tag attached to the key.

“I guess, I don’t know. God it seems right but I why?”

“Baby, one way to find out. We go to the airport and get what’s in the locker, then you will probably just flash and remember everything, right”

Santiago looked at her. Deep down there was something in him that did not want to know what was in the locker, or remember who and what he was. All he really wanted was how he felt when he first saw Thaana and they were laughing on the hillside.

“Anyway baby, it looks like you’re leaving the island in just a few hours…the ticket you know, it’s got your name on it too.”

“Yeah, maybe that is the thing to do…yeah lets go.”

*   *   *

It was only a few minutes in Ajaccio’s afternoon traffic to get to the airport. When they found the locker, Thaana opened it not knowing what to expect, but dreaded a chopped up body would fall out on the floor.

Inside the locker was nothing except a yellow copy of a document for freight shipped to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was shipped express two days before, weighed twenty kilos and was in a box 25 X 40 X 30 centimeters.

They checked luggage to be sure it was shipped out. It was gone. They asked the clerk if he could track it. He looked at them pitifully and made the hand gesture of rigid fingers wiggling on a rubbery wrist, which in France means something between Murphy’s law and the fickle finger of flying fate.

“Putain de merde, it coood bee eenywherruh… perhaps it is still in Nice…normally they wait until they have plane load theen sheep eet.”

“You mean it could still be in Nice,” Thaana asked.

“Why not?” the clerk said and turned away.

Santiago and Thaana stood looking at each other for a moment.

“Shit,” Santiago said. “Who in the fuck am I?”

“Look, I have an idea. Why don’t I come with you to Nice, and maybe then we can find out who you are and what you are supposed to be or whatever…I mean, I am sick of Corsica anyway and was thinking a big city would be more fun…hey I even have my bags in the car, and this is where I rented the car…hey baby,  it’s almost like I’m supposed to go with you, you hear what I’m saying…go figure.”

*   *   *

There is a theatrical game, called WHO’S TO MOVE NEXT. At this point in time Thaana and Santiago began their version of the game. There was no script, and no consequence of what ever choice one made but to continue the game until its natural conclusion of choices.

One either ran out of guessing, or guessed at a  junction of crossed paths which one was supposed to follow. If you did not want to guess, the game was simply renamed, AT THE CROSSROADS. Then one went nowhere.