Troubled Midnight
From Laenif: Book 1, chapter eight: "Troubled Midnight" which details the three-eyed a conversation between Marsle, the first-person narrator with three eyes and Freddy, a young man in his twenties who is searching for some kind of meaning or beauty....
"I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose." - TS Eliot
Freddy and I met a couple weeks after first opening my third eye, back when I was so caught up in enlightenment that I didn’t mind Ghoid’s absence. Freddy and I had a talk somewhere up north, I think. I know it was a little bit after I met Victor so it was probably somewhere up north. Anyway, Freddy was some kid, not even twenty. I told him directions to my house over the phone and he was knocking at my door in less than fifteen minutes.
I hugged him when he walked into my house. “How have you been?”
“Great,” he replied. My third eye could sense his energy. I could see its illumination emanate from within his being. I had forgotten how bright he was.
“Good.” I smiled at him and then turned on the lamps in my den. “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”
“Well, you want the long story or the short one?”
I leaned back and got comfortable in my couch’s fading red cushions. “Give me the long one.”
He nodded, took his backpack off, and leaned forward with his elbows resting on knees. “Okay, so the past two years I’ve been working my ass off at the goddamn grocery store. That’s where we met, remember?” I gave him a nod and he continued, “Right. They fired me last month, okay? So I was sitting around, thinking to myself about what the hell I’m going to do and I bummed myself out. I was thinking like I don’t want to go to school and everything fucking sucks and I can’t do shit. I was bringing myself down, down beneath the ground. And then I get sick. My head hurt all day. I was coughing my lungs out. My nose was all stuffed up and I couldn’t breathe. I was about to lose it. I was about to go absolutely crazy, yo. You don’t even know…”
I looked over at him. “How are you now?”
“Fine,” he stated. “I’m fine. See, once I started feeling better, I realized everything was getting better. I felt a mystifying compassion all around me. I became aware of a… how should I put it? A love, I guess. It was a grand energy of love I’ve never been able to feel before. It possessed me and excited every blood cell in my veins and then I remembered you and your… three eyes. Like, when I felt this love… I remembered you for some reason. I remembered you inviting me to visit. So I figured, ‘what the hell?’ and I packed some shit and headed down to find you. I still had your number in my wallet.”
“That’s it?”
He nodded energetically, staring at me anxiously. “Now I’m here.”
“Well that was some story.” I shifted my weight on the sofa cushion. “What if I hadn’t been home?”
Freddy laughed a happy laugh. “I don’t know.” His stretching smile felt like it might tear his cheeks off. “I’m ready for anything, I guess. I just couldn’t stop the pull of whatever energy it was that lured me to you.”
An odd quiet crept between us as he seemed to become wistfully hypnotized by one of the paintings on my wall. It was the first one Ghoid had ever done… the sunset over the lake in the mountains. I coughed to try and break our focused silence. His eyes remained glued to the paint. “So, uh, earlier today I was walking around in the woods,” I declared.
“How was that?”
“Good,” I replied. “I met up with a family of deer and just sort of hung out with them for a while. It was weird, but I liked it. It was startling yet peaceful. A clarifying love similar to the one you just described washed over me as the deer and I simply enjoyed the beauty of an early autumn wood.”
Freddy’s leg started to speedily bounce. “Cool.”
I shifted my weight again and eyed the boy up and down with my first two eyes for a moment or so. “What’s up, Fred?” I questioned, dimming the tone of my voice. “What exactly did you come here for?”
He finally snapped his eyes out of the painting and looked over at me. “You,” he responded. “I came to be with you.” He looked into my third eye and grew more and more giddy. Human emotions had a tendency to lose themselves when their gaze got lost staring into my third eye. It was indescribable the ability it had to open every human heart to witness it. After a small moment slipped by, he leaned his head back and asked, “Do you smoke weeds by any chance?”
I laughed lightly. “Not since I was in school.”
"You want to?"
I guess at the time I figured I didn’t have anything better to do that night. “Sure,” I said. “If you have some.”
He reached behind him and grabbed his backpack. He unzipped the front pocket and pulled out two small glass pipes. “Which one?” He presented his palms to me. “Sunny or Puff?”
“The yellow one,” I said.
“Sunny.” A child’s smile bloomed across his face. As he reached into his jeans’ pocket and pulled out a plastic bag slightly filled with green buds, I for some reason thought of Jesus Christ whispering ‘unless you live like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.’ “How’d you get your third eye?” he asked while opening the bag.
“Aliens,” I answered in a rush.
“Really?”
I nodded. “One alien to be more specific.” Fred’s eyes begged me to elaborate. “This alien changed my whole life and after he gave me the blessed eye, he vanished.” I shook my head, overwhelmed. Then I looked back up at the kid and told him, “The alien said he was sent here to change humanity. He was sent here to fix us, and he left this burden unto me. In truth, I think I have grown lost. I don’t even know where to begin. I thought I did once, but that feeling is gone now.” I dropped my head into my hands. “I don’t even know what exactly is wrong with humanity…”
“There is something wrong with us, though,” Fred said. “I can feel that. I’ve felt that my whole life I think. In fact…” His expression grew loose and weak. “…the only feeling to ever overcome such hopelessness was the love that drove me to find you.”
“Are you going to light that?”
He lifted the pipe to his lips and then stopped himself. He handed it over to me with a pale blue lighter. “You go first.”
I held the piece to my mouth and lit the packed bowl while inhaling the smoke. Holding the hit tightly in my lungs, I then exhaled into a harsh cough. “That takes me back,” I spouted.
He laughed before puffing on the bowl to then unleash swirling clouds of thick haze. “So why the hell do these aliens care about us?” He offered over the pipe. “If you don’t mind me asking, that is…”
I shook my head and snatched the glass from his relaxed grip. “Apparently,” I said, “Earth and their planet, which is called Laenif by the way, exist in a combined consciousness…” I lit the weed again, inhaling.
“Combined consciousness?” Freddy’s face looked twisted with mounting confusion and excited curiosity.
I handed Sunny back to him as smoke pinched my lungs like they had been stabbed by the feather of a broken glass bird. “It’s like…” Exhaling released surprisingly calm waves of gravity to crash into my mind. “Laenif is this great, peaceful planet and Earth is its sister.” My lungs expanded and my vision sharpened. “So because humans are so, well, violent and so full of greed and fear… these beings on Laenif sent this alien to Earth to try and fix us…”
Smoke drifted from Freddy’s mouth. “These aliens want to, uh, fix us ‘cause they’re somehow affected by what we do?”
I pitifully released a shrug. “Something like that.” I refused the smoke when it was offered again. “I’m done.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.” I took in a large breath. “I’m really high.”
He lit the herb to breathe in another small mouthful of smoke. “Well okay, hang on. Let me try and get this straight…”
“You can try,” I muttered.
“Humans and beings from this other planet are, in some abstract or spiritual sense, connected. And so, because our greed and shit like that is messing up their good time… they sent one alien to you to try and fix it?”
I forced a loud cackle with the burden of Atlas weighing me down again. “I just found him,” I replied honestly. “I found him. He didn’t find me. I found him. He asked for my help, and I impulsively hid him from the rest of the world. In a matter of months, he changed everything about me. He changed the way I see the world. He changed the thoughts in my head. He changed my soul until everything I felt was true and pure. He did all this and still I wanted more from him. I begged him for my third eye and when it ripped open… he was gone.”
“Damn.” Freddy was sitting loose on the couch across from me. His dumbfounded look and red eyes were gliding into infinite space. “So what now?”
“I don’t know.” Smiling bleakly, I shrugged. “I don’t know what I have to do to change the human half of a vast, unified consciousness limited only by abstract yet cosmic proportions. Forgive me, but I do not know. I’m lost and I don’t know what to do anymore. At first I thought I would figure it out but I’ve had three eyes for almost three years now and still nothing…”
Freddy’s face slowly shifted back into a concentrated countenance. “Well if I understand all this correctly… and I think I do…” He cleared his throat. “Then for any drastic or significant change to happen to the human half of this consciousness, some equally significant change has to happen to Laenif’s half, too.”
I shoved out a frustrated groan. “You’re probably right, but you should understand I know nothing about Laenif other than what the alien told me.”
Freddy loaded the glass cylinder of his pipe with more weed. “Did this alien happen to mention if he was the only one of his kind to come here? It seems weird to me that they would send one, lone alien to save a vast interplanetary consciousness.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “It is messed up. But I mean, the alien and I mostly just talked about Earth. We talked about reality and illusion, life and death. Only a scarce few times did he talk about his home and when he did, it was all through his eyes. It was his life’s stories. It wasn’t about the history of his kind, nor was it about their myths or prospects…”
“Nothing?”
I dug into deep tunnels of my memory. Some time went by and Freddy smoked more. “Okay,” I finally said, smirking. “I remember something. When he was telling me about the alien elder who sent him here, it was explained to him that a long time ago, his kind came to Earth to help humans. I guess something happened, because ancient human societies banished them and they were never able to return....”
Fred shook his head. “Well if they were banished then how did your alien get here?”
I went on to rummage through my piles of recollections until the answer caught up to me again. Freddy lit the pipe and inhaled. I explained, “The hour Ghoid awoke with three eyes, he was sent here by this elder of his, who told him he had to go to Earth and save humanity. Then I think the elder gave him mushrooms and somehow he ended up here…” I stabbed my stare at this kid sitting next to me, and then pointed out the window to my left. “I found him around those woods over there.”
Freddy blew out a rush of smoke. “What if you’re just nuts, yo?”
I made a heavy laugh. “Then I would be relieved.” I looked out my window into the shadowed night. I could see nothing but the faint glow of a waxing moon gently spread around the tips of trees. “I fell in love with Ghoid,” I said. “It is a love so strong that even if it were just mere illusions built of madness and insanity, it would still find a way to be completely divine and true.”
“Wait…” Confusion emerged on Freddy’s face again. “What exactly is a Ghoid?”
*
A couple ages earlier, on Laenif, Ghoid was still a two-eyed Indopi resting in a cave. He had been occupying this grotto for a couple weeks, and this night was no different. Moonlight slightly slipped through the cavern’s mouth as he sat in quiet darkness. He was meditating about the way he had been living his life. He was in deep thought, thinking hard about Aetheticia, his diminishing childhood, and how he would live the rest of his life before inevitable death.
The bumpy cave walls were blanketed with glistening shadows. Ghoid’s still form sat deeply immersed in the thick darkness that lightly teased moonlight creeping in. His mind filled the hole in the ground like a bright light, stretching far beyond his body to touch all walls of the cave and even bathe in a moon’s dim rays. The peace that always humbled itself in Laenif had found yet another comfortable bed in this young Inodpi’s heart. It was as if nothing could destroy this holy state of mind.
And yet on that very night, far away from Ghoid and the forest of Phoresion, Wibodian was unconscious by a log on the edge of a whole other forest. Yards away from him stood a lumber shack by a garden and a lake, where Hulep and his two younger siblings modestly slept amidst peaceful dreams they had always known.
But within Wibodian’s head, another nightmare crept in. A nightmare of his world on fire attacked and submerged him into a fearful, melting hell. But unlike his first dream of Laenif burning, this vision held golden floors painted with blood sitting beneath an image of his face. Within his head, trees fell and smoke filled the air until all that stood was a golden fortress. Blood soaked dirt. Bugs grew and multiplied to serve the Great Wibodian.
For when he realized that in this dream the golden structure was built for his name, his dread evaporated. He ordered a crown be built for his skull. Despite the death surrounding the gold palace, a kingdom is sweet to rule. Realizations of armies and kings sprouted in his heart. Thirsty for such power, he was determined now seize it. He would kill for it.
He would raise an army and protect it like nothing Laenif had ever seen before him. The golden castle would be his. None would be greater than he- not even the Prophet or the Guardian. He would be king and in his churning mind, he was. Wibodian sat on his throne for years until the nightmare became a beautiful dream…
And then he woke up.
Written by BW Derge, All Rights Reserved 2024
© USA
This was an excerpt from Laenif: Book One (2013), chapter eight: Troubled Midnight
