Following the Signs/or The Curse of the Leprechaun

 Following the Signs/or

The Curse of the Leprechaun

Carl (C.P.) Ellis hated the idea of being blown like a feather in the wind. He considered himself the master of his destiny, and would brook no winds of fate on his Horatio-like horizons. Nevertheless, he did believe in the power of the collective unconscious to guide him to hidden solutions to problems, that rational thinking could not uncover. He was somewhat disciplined in this area, or obsessed, as you choose, and noticed every subtle sign that mythical mind raised before his sight on the grand high way of life. He never followed the signs because he refused to depend on the kindness of stranger-generosities of fate, not generated by, or directed by, his own will. 

Still, on that rain-gray morning, he had awakened without opening his eyes, considered the matter, his day off and all, and vowed to spend the next 24 hours taking direction from any and all intuitive messages the gods saw fit to pass him down.  Unselectively and without a will of his own, he would go wherever the signs pointed, no matter how outrageously irrational the directions were. Then, just as he had decided to make himself the subject of his own experient in psychic reality, he opened his eyes, and was not surprised to discover a little leprechaun, five or six inches high, sitting on his bedside table, grinning brogue and blarney, and pointing at the wall. 

He thought, for an instant, about being surprised to see a leprechaun sitting on his bedside table, but, no, questioning was not part of the deal, and anyway his eye, his will, were being irresistibly drawn, as if by a magnet, to the object of the leprechaun's finger-pointing—the wall next to his bed. There was a crack just below the new paint that disfigured the intended smoothness of plaster. The blemish formed a relief map of some unknown wilderness, and became more and more familiar as it became more and more unfamiliar to C.P.'s narrowing scrutiny. There was a deep crack, angling north by northwest, which split into three new cracks radiating out from the mother crack like fingers reaching—fingers reaching out toward a red rose petal, faded remnant of ancient wallpaper hastily painted over by water-base landlord-purchased off-white. 

A journey, he thought,  I must find three fingers reaching for a rose. Again, he thought about questioning, but the same magnet-like force was impelling him into a stream of  events, into a current of time, the power of which he could not resist. He then abandoned the wallpaper,  three fingers etched in his mind, found this pants under a blanket on the 4-poster bed, and he was off.

He bounded down his two-story staircase like a child discovering grass-stain, and leapt toward the city bus stop on the corner; just as C.P. tripped off his porch, a splash of rain streaked his glasses from a light drizzle fussing in the timorous air, and, right on cue, a bus rolled up. C.P. took a breath and hopped on.  

He flashed his faculty I.D. and sat down in the front seat opposite the driver. Searching for signs, hoping against hope to see another leprechaun, C.P. examined the the bus.  There was an old lady wearing a leprechaun green hat, with little baby's-breath buds captured in gauze; but no jigs did she sing in the silent contemplation of her feet.  There was gum next to her left foot, and C.P.'s eye followed the line, of the traction-groove in the rubber carpet, down toward the driver's foot on the accelerator—a gray-green shadowy mechanical thing, sans leprechauns.  

C.P.'s eye roved up past the steering wheel to the windshield wipers. The right and left wipers were doing that little dance they do when one wiper is cycling slightly slower than the other so that they are:

together for a moment, 

then they fall out of sync for ten or twelve cycles, and then they come back together again.

This was his favorite part of riding on a bus, and he became so hypnotized by it's playful allures, rain-drops dancing between Siva's destroying arc, that he almost missed the second sign.

The bus took on passengers at Green St., and was just about to take off again, when C.P.'s eye brushed past the brass-rust-green statue of Alma Mater out in front of the student union: the statue was significant to C.P., to be sure, an icon of his youth, a dusty relic of his middle-age—but he was so used to the rush of memory she always inspired, he would have ignored her this time as usual, except that he notied out of the corner of his eye that she was wearing a leprechaun on her head. Jay leapt from his seat, burst down the steps and out, barely escaping the chomping teeth of the electric doors. He gazed in amazement at the Statue as though he had never seen it before. (He had walked by this statue on his way to class, first as a student then as a professor, practically every day of his life since he was  about ten—many thousands of times by now.) It was a Statue of Liberty wannabe for sure, with her outstretched arms (he treasured the memory of swinging on those arms, like a monkey, when he was in junior high), Athenian queenly, with the be-shielded soldier of the future on her right, and the be-robed scholar of the past on her left; but there was something off about the statue that C.P. noticed for the first time: she was sitting down in her Parthenonian alla Paris throne with her arms outstretched. SITTING with her arms outstretched! Now, who the hell does that? Sits down with arms out? The balance is all wrong! You wouldn't do it!  She should be standing!

Suddenly, Alma Mater was standing (arms outstretched) and memories of sitting with his friends in her vacant chair flooded his mind.  That was weird—to flip back and forth through alternate pasts like that.  With this thought he knew his idea to follow the signs was a good one; he could feel the power of the force already—already weird shit was  happening.  He was caught in the chaotic order of a Schonberg piano concerto, only it was real.  Weird shit is totally happening! Then, his eyes were drawn into a conversation with the eyes of the leprechaun. 

Leprechaun was gesturing impatiently in the direction of a spot further down the street past the ghost of the university's future.  His mind tracked a sequence of synchronized events: a gust of wind, a swirl  of leaves, a shadow behind the tree (he is moving all the time toward the tree), the shadow behind the tree, draped lightly over the ground, points its baren crest (three fingers spindling out from a fourth) at the precise point of confluence of the three rivers into the one.  At this precise point there is a newspaper on the sidewalk.

C.P stooped to pick up the newspaper, and searched it for clues, as he paced along the outer perimeter of the quad.  It was precisely 9:00, and the morning bell rang out its bartered-from-Big-Ben song of solidarity and tradition. C.P. hated that whole bartered-from-Big-Ben thing, and the sound of the bells, though laden with nostalgia, grated on his nerves and hurt his ears.  He started to cover his ears with the newspaper, when the leprechaun appeared right in front of his nose, grinning "No, no, no," finger bobbing straight up.  C.P. instantly understood, and put the newspaper on top of his head.  There was a plop of pigeon poop, fielded by the newspaper like an easy pop-up, and when he lowered the paper to his eyes, to assess-mess the damage, he saw a grainy-white, drippy, direct hit on an ad for a special lunch deal at a diner on the edge of town.  It's barbecue time! he said.

He had no sense of movement as he walked all the way to the interstate. Only the power of the magnet registered lightly on the perimeter of his consciousness, dragging him on, and providing a comfortable feeling of complete absolution of responsibility as the universe paraded before him, breathless audience, shifting dimensional modes, up and down quantum leaps, every few minutes. 

The circus was definitely in town.  One time as he glanced across the street, he saw a woman dressed in white  bend forward in the rain, and become C.S. Lewis's White Witch for a moment; a minute later, the East Side Mall had grown a moat—he knew it was a moat because he almost fell into it—he tracked mud for a block, even after the mall resumed its normal aspect, perhaps a bit foggier. A Chipmunk-squirrel approached him, acorn in hand, sat up, quoted a line from Nietzche, and scampered away.   A vision of his father appeared before him like Hamlet's Ghost  swinging from the branch of an elm tree; he was stern of aspect, but kind—then the face smeared, the colors ran, and C.P.  once again saw the Angry Green Giant of his youth, whose abuse had—well, never mind. 

This foray into his emotional life filled C.P.'s heart with various and contradictory feelings, but centering on  himself reminded him of his body—he was tired already, and hungry. A good, greasy, barbecue sandwich began to teeter on the edge of his desires with a mixture of ambivalence-appetite-ambivalence, but, when he arrived at Red's Route 95 Slurp and Burp Truck Haven, what he saw there banished barbecue from his mind.  

A truck was pulling over to the side, to pick up a young female hitch-hiker.  The driver had just thrown open the door to his great red, horny cab, and revealed himself to be a caricature of Popeye's Bluto—great, hairy, tattooed arms, beer belly and whiskers, complete with McCoy-plaid flannel shirt and suspenders.  A smile played hide and seek in his beard, gentle lust in his great fat heart as he beckoned to her to get in; but then she did what chicks do—they thumb down a ride, and then don't like the looks of the guy behind the wheel so they wave him on. (C.P. looks back in the rear-view mirror of memory and sees a skinny woman standing with two suitcases, under a foggy streetlamp, who, in the fucking midnight middle of winter, rejected him—just looked in the front window and shook her head like a pitcher waving off a catcher's signal. He fumed about that for years; "I was only trying to be nice—I didn't know I was auditioning!")  Anyway, this blond hitch-hiker flaunts her ponytail in the driver's face as she removes her leather bag from the scene.  

She was distracting to be sure, but C.P. didn't miss this this blarney-green and invitation to ride in a refrigerated meat truck.  The driver could not hide his disappointment upon seeing C.P. climb aboard instead of this cute, short-of- cash coed,  but if ever there were a time when misery loves company it was now, so C.P. slammed the side-view- mirrored door, and let the country music begin.

It turns out Mr. Hairy Ape was something of a musical connoiseur—he had one of those self-compilation CDs of all the great trucker tunes, yechh, but he had some Grateful Dead, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and Bob Dylan mixed in, so it was all right. C.P.  wandered with Jerry Garcia in the morning dew, and followed Mr. Tambourine Man down the beach into the jingle-jangle. It was on this next lazy leg of the trip (green milege signs waving below the evergreen tree line, as vista after vista flows by) that C.P.'s thoughts returned to himself; and he pondered again the deep thoughts of life and death, wondered again if the only legitimate philosophical question was suicide? It was his theory that if you died a little every day, eventually you would be dead. This is to be a good thing. He had not yet witnessed proof of this proposition firsthand, but he had sufficient confidence in it such that he resolved, as of an act of faith: "If I am truly sincere, in my wish to hasten my own demise, I ought to die a little twice a day." 

Hastening his own demise was C.P.'s hobby.  He had gone through multiple stages of fearing and desiring death;  and at this point he had just about settled in to a middle-aged apathy about the whole thing. "Life—take it or leave it, that's my motto." This did not stop him from  habitually staging his own suicide, in his imagination, several times a day. He no longer took the thoughts seriously (he merely brushed them away like flies), but the fact remained that the tip of his consciousness was never far away from some morbid consideration of wherever he found himself.  His life had been something of a success and he could point to numerous distinctions displayed on his mantelpiece; but somehow everything had become dust in his mouth, and he had come to loathe the shallowness of his existence; he had come to regret all his wrong—irrevocably made—decisions so deeply, that he could not help thinking of himself as damaged goods.  The dream, that had so hotly fired his youthful ambitions, was a phantom now, without substance, with no hope of ever becoming real.  

It may occur to you to wonder what dream it was, whose failure to materialize had so damaged poor old C.P.? The fact is, it doesn't even matter which specific unrequited wish it was that tortured his sedentary mind; we all have cloudy dreams tucked away in in our bag of defeats, we all deserve something we will never get. When you try to understand C.P., substitute one of your own heartaches, mulitply the magnitude by two, the depth of field by three, the number by thirty-five, and you will aproach an accurate pain-and-suffering statistic. C.P.'s inner demons all bore instruments of torture in their orc-ish claws, and took turns savagely assailing the fortress of his inner defenses in waves. 

It is not clear whether it was a single one or all of these legions of grief that had vitiated C.P.'s lust for life, but, so deeply disappointed was he, that he saw no particular reason to live out this counterfeit substitute for a life to the last act, if he could help it.  Therefore, he had created a program of purposeful self debilitation, aimed at ending his life around sixty.  His body was strong (coming as it did from Irish peasant stock) and he knew that if he played his cards right he could easily stretch the years of his life into his 80s; but these were cards he did not wish to play—the thought of twenty more torturous years of looking in the mirror at a burnt-out cinder of his true self, was a future for which he could generate no inner enthusiasm.  He was on this little joy ride in the first place because he, Carl C. P. Ellis, doctor of music, master of his fate, was a cosmically huge fuck-up, and if there was no relief to be had on this blarney-green multi-dimensional roller-coaster, then he might as well not even wait till 60, but end it right now with the 357 Magnum he has had hidden in his closet since he was twenty-five, for this specific purpose.  In his later years he asked himself why he had thought he needed such a huge gun just to blow his brains out. "Youthful ardour!" he replied. He secretly thought that if the bullet were bigger it would hurt less.

He had recently come to admire the laughing buddha as a particularly potent symbol for the deity's role in this great comedy of errors. The open stone mouth intoned the Om of everyman's failure.  But did the peals of laughter mean:

"It's okay kid," slap on the back from Grampa God, "nothing major here,"?

or did they mean: 

"I enjoy watching you suffer so much, hee, hee," tiny horns and pitch-fork flames, "I think we'll go into overtime. Turn up the heat in here!" 

C.P. did not know if the laughter was at him or with him, but he knew it was there, and it drove him crazy.  He needed to test the reality of this laughter, to measure it against his ability to take pleasure in anything on this earth, and use it as evidence in his final trial.  Who knew that C.P.'s final search for truth would turn out to be a hunt for leprechauns?

Midmorning stretched into afternoon, with classic Bonnie Raitt crooning, "You-oo-oo-ooo send me," into the intimate cab.  There had been strangely little chit chat; C.P. concluded that Harry Ape must be either an introverted poet type, or he was just still pouting about not picking up that blond ponytail. Anyway, the music and the miles mixed into a medley of bright visions, ever so pleasant, ever so calm; but even eternity was not meant to be so static.  It would make a certain amount of sense to say that each new sign flashed into C.P.'s conscious proscenium suddenly,  since all surprising things are sudden;  and yet, today, sudden surprise had become a category of recurring experience; C.P. was scanning all the time, and was somehow ready for the signs, whether they came in quick succession or hours apart, like now. Even on this relaxed ramblin' road, C.P. never dropped his guard, kept one corner of his mind on red alert, while he allowed the rest of himself to sink into the moment.   

It was his level of relaxation that he first noticed—the drifting thing had subtly turned into a directed thing: he was so at peace that he could barely feel the magnet pulling again. He came to realize that the strength of the pull was directly proportional to his sense of well-being; when he felt good he could barely feel it at all, and, having that thought sent a wave of insecurity through him, which magnified the pull and made him see leprechauns.  Yes, leprechauns, a whole chorus line of them, all the same Blarney Bill multiplied eleven times. A kind of Ives thing happened then—the music of the singer passed by bagpipes in parade, and C.P. asked to be let out up here at that little sideroad, thanks for the music.

His heart soared above the gravel road.  The ragged tree-line dictated a plunging, expressionistic symphony in 5/8 time; each stone he kicked was an accent, each breath of breeze, a sigh of strings. The road descended into a valley of elves, and rose to meet a glare of afternoon trumpets in Apollo's brilliant train.  A fawn doe-eyed him from the field to his left, but she could not hold his gaze and fled into the tree line with an uncharacteristically blonde flounce of tail.

Suddenly he found himself in the woods, the dark wood, the Hansel and Gretel Wood of Oskionsewee State Park.  He thought he felt the breath of a whiskered snout on his hand,  but when he turned, the path twisted mobius-like and he could not turn around. It rained heavily for exactly 47 seconds, but instead of raindrops, he felt himself pelted with park maps, reproduced on yellow pastel copy paper.  "The highlight of Oskionsewee State Park's constellation of natural attractions," it read, "is Flaxen Falls,  the source of the River Yahoo;  three tributaries, the Oskionsewee Major, the Oskionsewee Minor, and Mipento Creek, merge and drop a hundred feet into a single great, raging flow. (The rainbows are awesome!)" The map showed a slender wrist reaching toward C.P. with three fingers. He was home. 

The last yellow leaflets darkened to a green, and leprechaun flew like a butterfly in a gale right into a white rockface, at the top of a ridge, 200 yards to his right.  The rock became a fresco of the Virgin Mary by Hieronimus Bosch, or one of those medieval painters, then it became Athena, right off the Alma Mater statue, then it became his mother.  His revulsion was intense, but he realized he must follow the sign anyway. "He must," in this case meant, "He had no will of is own." He was drawn up that rockface like Pinocchio on a string. 

He scrambled, he slipped, he dropped off into sloughs of busted lutes and  got his feet tangled in the hairs of viol bows. The trees were closer now, and the acceleration of his body's energies sent his mind into a tizzy.  There was his old friend from high school, estranged now these ten years, laughing like leprechauns, turning back to the flying piano; his first wife sang high D on mescaline, and never spoke to him again, but that was just a rerun. 

There was other fun stuff.  His teacher who had disappeared in a white van in Mexico, lectured him on the Golden Section one more time before crumpling into a dusty dictionary of  archaic geographical terms. The dictionary smoldered for awhile before the smoke took the shape of a little fiddle player who used to play West Virginia for hours on the boardwalk with his father who played the saw.  And there was a gold-haired Siren (Wagner  would be so pleased) whose high notes lured him on when his strength almost failed. All in all, C.P. preferred Bluto's musical minions over memory's mojo-jangle, and it gave him pleasure to remember the recent pleasures of his red truck ride as he bloodied his hands on the White Rock.

At one point, he hung above death by a fingernail, literally kissing his mother's cheek, albeit with his foot in her mouth.  At the top of the climb he enjoyed a reprise of the 5/8 symphony, as the trees codaed down to the water.  Yes, there was the water. The three fingers, bent at the wrist, were shrouded in the rising mist of the falls,  but he could smell the ozone from here.  The rush of wind and water eventually traveled uphill to his ears, intruding their own gigantic roar into the tree-line texture.  The smell, the sound, the sight, were all magnificently archetypal, but C.P. could not tell how.  He must know how.  He must go down. 

The trees were in the way now, as he slipped in the skree, fumbled through bushes, and fell among thorns—he was a mess.  If the trees had not been in the way, he would have seen the girl Scout troop serenely displaying their girlish green on a great flat rock directly above the falls. He would have seen the one off by herself teetering over an especially splashy outcrop.  Of course nothing was surprising anymore, but with no warning the one off by herself has a beard and glasses.  It is he who has just now slipped his grip.  He hangs unpleasantly awash in rainbow radiance.  C.P. takes this time moseying down to the spectacle.

But then, it is not a leprechaun, but a little girl, seven maybe, blond hair, freckles, cute; it is she who has fallen into the rushing stream!  Someone must save her!  Jay pondered his fate for an instant only before taking the plunge.  It was an act of such uncharacteristic heroism, that he doubted himself even in the moment when the freezing water reached his crotch.  He swam bravely, straight toward her for while, but then the current swept him in a wide arc into the center of the boiling flood, and he watched her from afar as she climbed up onto a great rock, safe and dry.  The last sound he heard as he plummeted  down into the falls was her blond-haired voice singing- laughing-singing a blarney-green melody. Had he missed a sign?  Had he jumped too soon? But no, here it comes. 

His fear of flying was dispelled in an ecstacy of flight; and as his head smashed on the rocks below and his brains squished out like ripe kiwi, it barely hurt at all. He realized that all the signs of all the days of his life had pointed toward this one moment, this one truth; everything was meant to end here and would have ended here no matter what. And as he faded into entropy, as his life bubbled to the surface of the stream in a single insignificant plop, his last articulate vision was the leprechaun thumbing his nose at the signs. But C.P. could not tell if it was an Angel Band he heard at the end of the distant tunnel, or snot-green guffaws.