A bit of the Olive Grape Chronicles
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: The City
Olive Grape was far from home. Further than he had ever been or was likely to ever be again. He was now past the geography of any map currently used in the everyday world at large. Indeed if any map dared to include this place within its confines the words “Here there be Monsters” would certainly be ascribed to it. What road led him to this place was a mystery as was the amount of time since his arrival. Every aspect of Olive’s odyssey was an enigma. The simple road across the alien landscape and then the surreal city at which Olive arrived were each marked with a quality just beyond the tangible. If ambiguity could be expressed in geography then this is how it would do it. Little that senses encountered either in the tactile or in the basic emotional underscore in the air would easily find its equivalent in the world where Olive’s understandings were based. That is to say the real world of gritty substance and definable boundaries.
As Olive’s mind reflected, even time was not the good old day-to-day domestic kind most people are comfortable with. It wasn’t linear and seemed to have different qualities and rules by which it behaved. Or that may have been an illusion produced by exotic input into a more pragmatically geared mentality. Olive’s mind was definitely the type believing itself individually distinct from the mass of humanity. That was true enough for house hold applications but to use that scale for comparison here would be pointless. The best comparison to understand the flavor of things here would to call it dream-like. The procession of one event into the next was a smooth flow. As Olive advanced, he had no clear time line to measure his experiences against. The past fell away into a soup where no reference made itself clear. Olive’s trek could have begun that morning or it could have been weeks. It was just impossible to gage. Imagine how one remembers the earliest period your memory covers into childhood. Or the way time will vaporize during an auto accident. This gives a feel for the general flow Olive felt as he took in the sights.
Only a few confusing things were clear to Olive’s mind at this point. He was certain beyond any doubt that the name for the maze of skyscrapers he now walked among was “The Complex”. This seemed to be self evident in the same way water is wet. There was simply no other name it could have.
Confusion also surrounded the impression retained of a man. A very peculiar old man haunting Olive in the shifting layers of his sedated memory. The man was tall and gaunt with pale blue eyes that peered out from under a wide brimmed hat like the ones from his grandfather’s era. Those eyes blazed clearly in Olive’s thoughts. They had frightened him the first time their icy flame fell on him. A ghost of that fear lingered on now. Why did they have this effect? Neither the old man nor his eyes seemed to harbor malice. It was they way they didn’t focus on the same things Olive did. The weight of something very old, older than anything possibly could be, thrust itself behind the intensity of those blue eyes. An impact only some ancient witness to creation would have. Far in the future, when all the other images from this bizarre adventure would fade and fail, the old man would be as clear as corporal presence. Who this man was and what part he was to contribute to this unfolding dream remained veiled. What the nature of his connection to Olive’s arrival here remained as nebulous in a brutal rejection of clarity.
There were also vague recollections of names. Olive’s mind rolled and churned with a current of fragmented memories and occasionally visions that made their way to the surface of his consciousness. Squinting he quietly said, “Albuquerque.” Had this been his original destination? It might have been home… he wasn’t sure. That bothered him. “Pickle?” That utterance caused nasty feelings not easily dismissed. It was the worst of the disembodied vocalizations. It always left the sensations of guilt in its wake. It also evoked a weird association about fish smells and wads of fur. Why a condiment should bring that sort of thing to mind really was about the oddest abstract he could conjure. All these bits and chunks bothered him deeply. Olive still had enough of what made him “Olive”, active to be troubled by the random memories that squeezed up between the deluges of images from “The Complex”. Acuity of thought would not return to Olive Grape’s grasp for a while. It would wait almost the full duration of his aimless stroll among the many streets and alleys before it would snap back into place.
The road leading to “The Complex” had been over a featureless plain of short unnaturally green grass with a cultivated feel. Like a golf course only bigger, longer and free of golfers. There had been no change in the uniformity of the land Olive had traversed up to the point where the metropolis of indigo glass, black polished metal and dark blood colored walls came into view. The initial impression the skyline offered was that of a distant range of mountains occupying almost the entirety of the horizon. It rose up against a sky that was every bit as blandly unremarkable as the ground below it. There was no cloud of any kind to break up the porcelain dome of cerulean blue. Not one thing at all of any variety spoiled the canvas of this homogenous world. Not a single bird, beast or animate thing of any class made its presence known. No distant aircraft or trains mournful noise carried across the vacant air. Nothing was perceivable that would betray the presence of industry or its devices.
These details would not have met a very captive audience in Olive Grape as he made his way steadily across the plain. The further his movement progressed the less he actually thought about things. The scenery entered his brain, meet with mental processes on hold and left again. Few memories hung around to be stored. Olive himself was truly on autopilot. As the place Olive knew to be “The Complex” revealed itself in greater detail. The grass that had been all there was to see up to final approach yielded in the end to a fine sandy beach with an elevated avenue spanning its expanse. This beach reached approximately half way to a point between its beginnings and the skyline in the distance where it met a dark calm body of grayish blue water. Whether lake or ocean was not clear, but it seemed to surround the entire city.
“The Complex” held something fearful in its character. Its spires and towers of darkly tinted glass rose from invisible foundations with an implicit absolute authority. The interwoven metals that made up the superstructure proudly unfolded the colors of their polished surfaces in a variety amber, copper, and chrome hues. However the dominant color was a sobering black. The metal was woven in a lace of intricate detail held aloft by the booms and buttresses reminiscent of Gothic sensibilities. It was in the tradition of Europe’s cathedrals that this city seemed to look to for its inspiration. It was as if an entire city vast as New York City had been built from these gothic structures. The great sky scrapers were surrounded by a high wall of what looked like marble; its tone dark, moist red of merlot. So dark was the stones tone as to appear black at a glance. Occasional lights dotted its face and little more.
Olive paused when he reached the point where the simple road of the plains joined with the avenue of the beach. The border between the green of the plain came to the white powder of the beach. Here tall weeds introduced a small variation in the fauna. The wispy stalks displayed a paler green than that of the carpeted plain. Shades of brown also mingled among the growth here at the border but none of this registered with any permanence in Olive’s mind. There was only the “The Complex”. Olive lingered a moment more then continued. His mind all but blank at this point. Olive stood and took in the new landscape that revealed itself to him as he reached the end of the alley. So far his wanderings had taken him through narrow corridors whose walls soared to vast heights above him. “Curious tree,” he thought as he entered the plaza that opened up before him. This was the first thought that had occurred to him in over two hours of walking down the side streets of “The Complex”. His mind so full of wonder and confusion had been overwhelmed and his body with no new orders from the governing forces of his brain simply continued with the last instructions given to it and carried Olive further into the maze of this abstract metropolis.
It was all so overwhelming, the crystalline towers of light that soared above him in a prideful mockery of the heavens, the sodium lights, the seminal garbage that lined the streets, the odd feral cat that was seeing to its own purposes and various shadowy figures concerned only with their own agendas.
Olive had never been prepared for all this. He had come from a small desert town full of gossip but short on news of the outside world. This was something so different from the schoolbooks he had read in his grandmother’s attic months before.
The damp smell seeping up from the cracks in the streets, the filtered glow from above. Olive found his senses in overload. Then there was that sound. It started with the faint echo of a distant church bell and grew to a clamor...
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: The Plaza
Before we investigate the sound, however, let us return to the tree upon which Oliver bestowed his intellectual commentary. “Curious tree,” he had thought. In truth, however, the tree was not curious at all, in that it too had heard the noise which even now makes Olive’s heart palpitate in ways he wished it wouldn’t. Yet it had not so much as turned to look or blink an eye at the din. Though the sound was new to the ears it did not have the tree knew “The Complex” was always breeding new sights and sounds. If one paid attention to every new addition this place offered it the business of being an unusual tree would too complicated to be a reasonable line of work. The tree being the pragmatist it was had adapted and learned if it didn’t have an axe it probably was not worth any bother.
Olive, however, not being an English Major, or even having graduated with a certificate saying that he learned the English language, can be forgiven his faux pas. For, unlike the English Majors of the world, Olive had learned to wield the language just so and no further. He could order a sandwich with it, but did not have the grip of the language necessary, as you may witness in John Cleese, to slash an opponent to bits with his cutting remarks. Fortunately for Olive, the tree was not feeling at all oppositional and did not even take offense at his making assumptions as to how it was thinking.
In an imprecise sort of way, in the ordering-sandwich-capable sort of English, the tree was curious in that it was a curiosity that of course was its purpose. It had been breed exclusively to that end. Its appearance gave Olive a start, only partially nasty, and snapped him out of the fugue that he had quite failed to notice he was in. This fugue had enveloped him upon his “Stroll of Doom” as he would later come to call it when reminiscing at the cocktail parties he would not be attending. For the tree, you see, had eyes painted on it in several places along it's trunk, the eyes came in various colours but mostly bright blue. On its branches, where leaves should be, there were big flesh toned, slightly too pink for accuracy, hands. More than likely the hands were made of paper maché, or so thought Olive, by the look of them. But Olive was no expert on these matters of craft and so could not be certain.
If it had not been for that rather wildly unusual tree startling him back to his more immediate surroundings, Olive may not even have noticed the noise. The visions of a world so strange as to overwhelm his mind and leave it void of even the most basic thoughts until at last this tree so odd in this realm of odd snapped his thoughts back into gear it had turned his brain from the visual cataloging mode it was in to on that was able to once again respond to stimuli. Yet that sound, that alarming noise that suddenly thrust itself into his mind, at first a minor addition to the newly discovered tree was now rapidly demanding center stage. It would suffer no competition soon.
The tree itself who now found Olives attention waning and the sound a bit to theatrical for its taste turned its thoughts to Edwardian poetry in a hope to make the interlopes go away.
Olive stepped past the tree into the plazas openness that stood in contrast to the alleys that had comprised the majority of his aimless meanderings so far. The noise seemed to be coming from behind the huge statue of some unrecognized historical figure a short distance ahead of Olive.
*Olive cautious drew closer.* Upon approaching the base of the statue he encountered a sort of small shelter whose shape and form did not match the monument or any other feature of the plaza. It was made of loosely thrust together poles covered in some sort of dirty fabric. Bravely, or perhaps stupidly, he ventured closer to look within the new structure. The sound now boiled in his ears. It was without a doubt coming from within the shelter. So loud now was its song, that it shook the tent like structure and even managed to evoke some minor attention from the ambivalent tree.
Trembling now himself, Olive reached out to pull back one of the flaps of the shelter that now vibrated like an epileptic tee pee. The cloth of the shelter felt brittle to Olive’s fingers as he grasped a hand full and started to pull it back. A faint glow inside the messy construction illuminated its contents. Abruptly the sound stopped and the plaza now echoed with its absence. The sudden and alarming quiet froze Olive momentarily, but after a blink and a soft gulp, he continued and looked within.
Before we delve into what Olive saw. Let’s turn for a moment to our other narrative already in progress.
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: Cats and Politics
Megan had met him online: a nice guy, slightly odd in a lot of ways. A whirlwind romance ensued and all was bliss, except for this one itsy-bitsy little thing that she absolutely could not stand about him and felt she had to change immediately or risk their love perishing altogether. This man, you see, had cats.
Now Megan had nothing against cats as a race. In fact, as she would often exclaim while shuddering in revulsion as she passed the kitten display windows of pet stores, some of her best friends had cats. She loved to watch films, too, on the wild cats of the Serengeti Plain. Cats were nice enough to look at and she could certainly see why one would find them entertaining and even like to pet them when visiting others who owned them, but to actually live with one... to accept it into her family!?
That was asking too much! It went against the natural order of things! Cats had cat boxes and pooped in places they shouldn't; delivered dead things they shouldn’t have killed to live beings who didn't want them; shed fur about the house, and not just a little bit - people who had cats never could wear anything to a cocktail party that did not match their cats fur; they sharpened claws on furniture; they hung from the draperies (still talking about the cats, pay attention); and, she suspected, they drove your car while you were sleeping. If you didn't have a car or couldn't be tricked, they'd find a neighbor that would suit. Megan was sure of this in her heart, seeing evidence time and time again in that her friend’s cats were never around for the full night before the keys ended up lost in the morning. Cats, due to their nature, also seldom put keys back where they got them from or filled up the gas tank. All of Megan's friends who had cats were always exclaiming that they thought they had more gas than that, they didn't know how they possibly could have driven 50,000 miles since they bought the car, and so on.
The exception was one man who actually owned two cats, but who was an insomniac. Megan would visit him and lean over his cats, seeming to be enthralled in the innocent enjoyment of scratching them under their chins and exclaiming, “Oh, it must drive you crazy!” The man was bemused by her adoration of his pets, but Megan and the cats all knew that she was secretly taunting them for their inability to go joy riding.
This of course set the stage for the play of events that would unfold for her over the coming weeks. A stage constructed by the cats for the play that they too had written. A poorly directed play with a fuzzy plot that meandered about wildly with a story line that seemed at first glance to be about tuna and dead rodents but was in fact a bad attempt at political humor. A play in which some of the key actors only lines appeared to be "meow".
Cats it seems have been trying their paws at literary diversion for centuries. Cats had been attempting in a vain effort to communicate these ideas and visions to the only other creatures on Earth capable of setting these works in stone or onto paper. Those creatures being us human folk with our ability to write down concepts, build stage sets, run cameras and hand out awards.
They had devised a complicated code that consisted of shed fur and carefully timed deposits of deceased small critters to confer their thoughts and aspirations. The code however was laid out before blind eyes. The frustration of the cats as well as their envy of some of the larger members of their species has in fact led to the general cranky and arrogant attitude so often seen demonstrated in their behavior.
In all of human history only one civilization has come close to recognizing the efforts of the cats, the Egyptians. Unfortunately they didn't quite get it right but they did get close enough to understand something was going on but were so frightened by the whole affair they decided to worship the furry little authors in the absence of anything better to do. This misplacement of awe while common to human history in regards to things that frighten us, did nothing to forward the cats agenda (though they did eat up the attention).
Megan was aware of none of this. Nor was Olive Grape, the strange and alluring cat owner that currently held her hearts attention and the keys to her apartment. Olive’s cat, Pickle was aware but too engrossed by his latest work in process, “The Tuna of our Discontent”, to care much past leaving the keys to Olive’s ‘82 Renault Le Car under the couch in a stunning way to announce the completion of chapter 5.
Megan decided to simply lay everything on the line with Olive, the cats and all her hearts confusion. Just get it out there and let the pieces fall where they may. Now having made that decision she could not track down Olive and arrange a date. Three days of leaving messages had yielded no results. When she inquired at the antique store where he was employed, they informed her that he had simply up and quit. Driving by his home revealed nothing more than his cars oil leak was getting worse indicated by the exponentially larger stain on the street underneath it. A peep in the windows only revealed a bit of clutter and invoked a nasty glare from a passing cat. Olive had something about an errand somewhere but she couldn’t remember the details. Surely he would not leave the cats unattended for so long. Something was, without a doubt, wrong.
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: The Bar
Whether Eddie’s behavior was because he was drunk, ill, or suicidal would not have been apparent to the casual observer. Casual observers never took much notice of Eddie Thibodaux most times. That was because Eddie was an angel and angels tend to be all but invisible to the casual eye. Seeing divine or diabolical beings tends to be more than the average mind can handle on the average day so when the eye reports seeing one to the brain, the brain generally ignores the message and tells the eye to forget about it and get on with the visual recon work required in this modern age when ordering a coffee.
In any case, there were never any casual observers in The No-Where Bar because it was not the sort of place you could afford to be casual in. Any observers in The No-Where Bar would be ill tempered, armed and suffering from the kind of non-casual attitude that caused them to take dangerous (to themselves and more importantly, to others), crazed actions when they observed things they didn’t like.
As Eddie’s interaction with the bartender unfolded one of those awful hushed silences slowly fell over the entire bar like a wave. A tidal wave. At the moment the silence reached its peak, it was louder than most rock concerts. Only Eddie and the barman’s conversation could be heard.
Even the mad homeless man who was the bars most frequent customer (indeed he was damn near more a part of the bar than the furnishings or requisite neon lights) ceased his monologue of curses and conspiracies, mixed with the odd cannibalistic threat. A diatribe that he endlessly addressed to an audience that, while if not actually hallucinatory, was none-the-less not present in any visible form (he was the sole soul that had recognized Eddie as an angel but due to the fact that he was always seeing angels…among other things).
“What are you concerning yourself over?” Eddie asked the bartender in a voice so cheerful as to sound sinister. “Is it the expiration date?” he added with a tone of perfect innocence (angels do “perfect innocence” well). It was the kind of innocence Hitler conveyed to Lord Chamberlain about his rezoning plan prior to August 26, 1939.
“I ain’t worried bout the expiration date” was the bartender’s answer. The bartender’s voice had the same quality that a gun in the hands of a sniper has as it levels upon its target.
On the bar top, a meaty hand rested on top of the card that was the catalyst of the debate.
With a smile, Eddie began to rise in what appeared to be a gesture of imminent departure.
“Excellent,” he said and tossed back the rest of his beer. He then pulled a silver pen from a coat on the stool beside his.
“I’ll need a receipt for my expense report. Nothing fancy mind you, just something that will match the card statement. The boys in accounting will scream to high Heaven otherwise.” He added with that barely contained laugh people let escape when making an inside joke to someone not in the know. He then broke eye contact with the bartender and picked up his coat from which he hand retrieved the pen.
The bartends gaze never left Eddie. It was a gaze that would have shamed an ice age.
Eddie started to put on the coat in preparation of a quiet but swift retreat. He was aware of the bartenders cold stare (like all angels and devils as well, Eddie didn’t need his eyes to be pointed in the direction of what they were looking at in order to see).
The hand of the bartender left the card and settled onto Eddies’ shoulder. It felt like a side of beef. It prevented any further retreat as effectively as a lead door. Despite being an angel, Eddie was in a physical form and subject to most of the common laws of physics. At least in principle.
Eddie was just under six feet tall, slight of build and weighed in at 160 pounds. The bartender (who’s name was Cecile incidentally) on the other had stood six foot four, weighed 285 pounds and was built like a bulldozer. He secretly harbored notions of becoming a florist and rather liked raising tropical fish. He was a large but benign thug in truth. An air of sweet gentleness poured from him. It was however, the kind of sweet gentleness that dealt murderously with people who behaved as though they wished to be murdered. Unlike Eddie’s divine nature, Cecil’s qualities were perfectly obvious to all but the thickest brain. Gentle and otherwise.
*Olive, cautious, drew closer.* or *Olive cautiously drew closer.* Either one works and they both hold the same ideal. Personally, I like the first choice though; it gives a real sense of suspense. Now that I’m writing this (and looking back), another option in the second is switching cautiously and drew. The only “problem” I see in that is the fact that you have two “C” words right next to each other.
Olive Grape was far from home. Further than he had ever been or was likely to ever be again. He was now past the geography of any map currently used in the everyday world at large. Indeed if any map dared to include this place within its confines the words “Here there be Monsters” would certainly be ascribed to it. What road led him to this place was a mystery as was the amount of time since his arrival. Every aspect of Olive’s odyssey was an enigma. The simple road across the alien landscape and then the surreal city at which Olive arrived were each marked with a quality just beyond the tangible. If ambiguity could be expressed in geography then this is how it would do it. Little that senses encountered either in the tactile or in the basic emotional underscore in the air would easily find its equivalent in the world where Olive’s understandings were based. That is to say the real world of gritty substance and definable boundaries.
As Olive’s mind reflected, even time was not the good old day-to-day domestic kind most people are comfortable with. It wasn’t linear and seemed to have different qualities and rules by which it behaved. Or that may have been an illusion produced by exotic input into a more pragmatically geared mentality. Olive’s mind was definitely the type believing itself individually distinct from the mass of humanity. That was true enough for house hold applications but to use that scale for comparison here would be pointless. The best comparison to understand the flavor of things here would to call it dream-like. The procession of one event into the next was a smooth flow. As Olive advanced, he had no clear time line to measure his experiences against. The past fell away into a soup where no reference made itself clear. Olive’s trek could have begun that morning or it could have been weeks. It was just impossible to gage. Imagine how one remembers the earliest period your memory covers into childhood. Or the way time will vaporize during an auto accident. This gives a feel for the general flow Olive felt as he took in the sights.
Only a few confusing things were clear to Olive’s mind at this point. He was certain beyond any doubt that the name for the maze of skyscrapers he now walked among was “The Complex”. This seemed to be self evident in the same way water is wet. There was simply no other name it could have.
Confusion also surrounded the impression retained of a man. A very peculiar old man haunting Olive in the shifting layers of his sedated memory. The man was tall and gaunt with pale blue eyes that peered out from under a wide brimmed hat like the ones from his grandfather’s era. Those eyes blazed clearly in Olive’s thoughts. They had frightened him the first time their icy flame fell on him. A ghost of that fear lingered on now. Why did they have this effect? Neither the old man nor his eyes seemed to harbor malice. It was they way they didn’t focus on the same things Olive did. The weight of something very old, older than anything possibly could be, thrust itself behind the intensity of those blue eyes. An impact only some ancient witness to creation would have. Far in the future, when all the other images from this bizarre adventure would fade and fail, the old man would be as clear as corporal presence. Who this man was and what part he was to contribute to this unfolding dream remained veiled. What the nature of his connection to Olive’s arrival here remained as nebulous in a brutal rejection of clarity.
There were also vague recollections of names. Olive’s mind rolled and churned with a current of fragmented memories and occasionally visions that made their way to the surface of his consciousness. Squinting he quietly said, “Albuquerque.” Had this been his original destination? It might have been home… he wasn’t sure. That bothered him. “Pickle?” That utterance caused nasty feelings not easily dismissed. It was the worst of the disembodied vocalizations. It always left the sensations of guilt in its wake. It also evoked a weird association about fish smells and wads of fur. Why a condiment should bring that sort of thing to mind really was about the oddest abstract he could conjure. All these bits and chunks bothered him deeply. Olive still had enough of what made him “Olive”, active to be troubled by the random memories that squeezed up between the deluges of images from “The Complex”. Acuity of thought would not return to Olive Grape’s grasp for a while. It would wait almost the full duration of his aimless stroll among the many streets and alleys before it would snap back into place.
The road leading to “The Complex” had been over a featureless plain of short unnaturally green grass with a cultivated feel. Like a golf course only bigger, longer and free of golfers. There had been no change in the uniformity of the land Olive had traversed up to the point where the metropolis of indigo glass, black polished metal and dark blood colored walls came into view. The initial impression the skyline offered was that of a distant range of mountains occupying almost the entirety of the horizon. It rose up against a sky that was every bit as blandly unremarkable as the ground below it. There was no cloud of any kind to break up the porcelain dome of cerulean blue. Not one thing at all of any variety spoiled the canvas of this homogenous world. Not a single bird, beast or animate thing of any class made its presence known. No distant aircraft or trains mournful noise carried across the vacant air. Nothing was perceivable that would betray the presence of industry or its devices.
These details would not have met a very captive audience in Olive Grape as he made his way steadily across the plain. The further his movement progressed the less he actually thought about things. The scenery entered his brain, meet with mental processes on hold and left again. Few memories hung around to be stored. Olive himself was truly on autopilot. As the place Olive knew to be “The Complex” revealed itself in greater detail. The grass that had been all there was to see up to final approach yielded in the end to a fine sandy beach with an elevated avenue spanning its expanse. This beach reached approximately half way to a point between its beginnings and the skyline in the distance where it met a dark calm body of grayish blue water. Whether lake or ocean was not clear, but it seemed to surround the entire city.
“The Complex” held something fearful in its character. Its spires and towers of darkly tinted glass rose from invisible foundations with an implicit absolute authority. The interwoven metals that made up the superstructure proudly unfolded the colors of their polished surfaces in a variety amber, copper, and chrome hues. However the dominant color was a sobering black. The metal was woven in a lace of intricate detail held aloft by the booms and buttresses reminiscent of Gothic sensibilities. It was in the tradition of Europe’s cathedrals that this city seemed to look to for its inspiration. It was as if an entire city vast as New York City had been built from these gothic structures. The great sky scrapers were surrounded by a high wall of what looked like marble; its tone dark, moist red of merlot. So dark was the stones tone as to appear black at a glance. Occasional lights dotted its face and little more.
Olive paused when he reached the point where the simple road of the plains joined with the avenue of the beach. The border between the green of the plain came to the white powder of the beach. Here tall weeds introduced a small variation in the fauna. The wispy stalks displayed a paler green than that of the carpeted plain. Shades of brown also mingled among the growth here at the border but none of this registered with any permanence in Olive’s mind. There was only the “The Complex”. Olive lingered a moment more then continued. His mind all but blank at this point. Olive stood and took in the new landscape that revealed itself to him as he reached the end of the alley. So far his wanderings had taken him through narrow corridors whose walls soared to vast heights above him. “Curious tree,” he thought as he entered the plaza that opened up before him. This was the first thought that had occurred to him in over two hours of walking down the side streets of “The Complex”. His mind so full of wonder and confusion had been overwhelmed and his body with no new orders from the governing forces of his brain simply continued with the last instructions given to it and carried Olive further into the maze of this abstract metropolis.
It was all so overwhelming, the crystalline towers of light that soared above him in a prideful mockery of the heavens, the sodium lights, the seminal garbage that lined the streets, the odd feral cat that was seeing to its own purposes and various shadowy figures concerned only with their own agendas.
Olive had never been prepared for all this. He had come from a small desert town full of gossip but short on news of the outside world. This was something so different from the schoolbooks he had read in his grandmother’s attic months before.
The damp smell seeping up from the cracks in the streets, the filtered glow from above. Olive found his senses in overload. Then there was that sound. It started with the faint echo of a distant church bell and grew to a clamor...
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: The Plaza
Before we investigate the sound, however, let us return to the tree upon which Oliver bestowed his intellectual commentary. “Curious tree,” he had thought. In truth, however, the tree was not curious at all, in that it too had heard the noise which even now makes Olive’s heart palpitate in ways he wished it wouldn’t. Yet it had not so much as turned to look or blink an eye at the din. Though the sound was new to the ears it did not have the tree knew “The Complex” was always breeding new sights and sounds. If one paid attention to every new addition this place offered it the business of being an unusual tree would too complicated to be a reasonable line of work. The tree being the pragmatist it was had adapted and learned if it didn’t have an axe it probably was not worth any bother.
Olive, however, not being an English Major, or even having graduated with a certificate saying that he learned the English language, can be forgiven his faux pas. For, unlike the English Majors of the world, Olive had learned to wield the language just so and no further. He could order a sandwich with it, but did not have the grip of the language necessary, as you may witness in John Cleese, to slash an opponent to bits with his cutting remarks. Fortunately for Olive, the tree was not feeling at all oppositional and did not even take offense at his making assumptions as to how it was thinking.
In an imprecise sort of way, in the ordering-sandwich-capable sort of English, the tree was curious in that it was a curiosity that of course was its purpose. It had been breed exclusively to that end. Its appearance gave Olive a start, only partially nasty, and snapped him out of the fugue that he had quite failed to notice he was in. This fugue had enveloped him upon his “Stroll of Doom” as he would later come to call it when reminiscing at the cocktail parties he would not be attending. For the tree, you see, had eyes painted on it in several places along it's trunk, the eyes came in various colours but mostly bright blue. On its branches, where leaves should be, there were big flesh toned, slightly too pink for accuracy, hands. More than likely the hands were made of paper maché, or so thought Olive, by the look of them. But Olive was no expert on these matters of craft and so could not be certain.
If it had not been for that rather wildly unusual tree startling him back to his more immediate surroundings, Olive may not even have noticed the noise. The visions of a world so strange as to overwhelm his mind and leave it void of even the most basic thoughts until at last this tree so odd in this realm of odd snapped his thoughts back into gear it had turned his brain from the visual cataloging mode it was in to on that was able to once again respond to stimuli. Yet that sound, that alarming noise that suddenly thrust itself into his mind, at first a minor addition to the newly discovered tree was now rapidly demanding center stage. It would suffer no competition soon.
The tree itself who now found Olives attention waning and the sound a bit to theatrical for its taste turned its thoughts to Edwardian poetry in a hope to make the interlopes go away.
Olive stepped past the tree into the plazas openness that stood in contrast to the alleys that had comprised the majority of his aimless meanderings so far. The noise seemed to be coming from behind the huge statue of some unrecognized historical figure a short distance ahead of Olive.
*Olive cautious drew closer.* Upon approaching the base of the statue he encountered a sort of small shelter whose shape and form did not match the monument or any other feature of the plaza. It was made of loosely thrust together poles covered in some sort of dirty fabric. Bravely, or perhaps stupidly, he ventured closer to look within the new structure. The sound now boiled in his ears. It was without a doubt coming from within the shelter. So loud now was its song, that it shook the tent like structure and even managed to evoke some minor attention from the ambivalent tree.
Trembling now himself, Olive reached out to pull back one of the flaps of the shelter that now vibrated like an epileptic tee pee. The cloth of the shelter felt brittle to Olive’s fingers as he grasped a hand full and started to pull it back. A faint glow inside the messy construction illuminated its contents. Abruptly the sound stopped and the plaza now echoed with its absence. The sudden and alarming quiet froze Olive momentarily, but after a blink and a soft gulp, he continued and looked within.
Before we delve into what Olive saw. Let’s turn for a moment to our other narrative already in progress.
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: Cats and Politics
Megan had met him online: a nice guy, slightly odd in a lot of ways. A whirlwind romance ensued and all was bliss, except for this one itsy-bitsy little thing that she absolutely could not stand about him and felt she had to change immediately or risk their love perishing altogether. This man, you see, had cats.
Now Megan had nothing against cats as a race. In fact, as she would often exclaim while shuddering in revulsion as she passed the kitten display windows of pet stores, some of her best friends had cats. She loved to watch films, too, on the wild cats of the Serengeti Plain. Cats were nice enough to look at and she could certainly see why one would find them entertaining and even like to pet them when visiting others who owned them, but to actually live with one... to accept it into her family!?
That was asking too much! It went against the natural order of things! Cats had cat boxes and pooped in places they shouldn't; delivered dead things they shouldn’t have killed to live beings who didn't want them; shed fur about the house, and not just a little bit - people who had cats never could wear anything to a cocktail party that did not match their cats fur; they sharpened claws on furniture; they hung from the draperies (still talking about the cats, pay attention); and, she suspected, they drove your car while you were sleeping. If you didn't have a car or couldn't be tricked, they'd find a neighbor that would suit. Megan was sure of this in her heart, seeing evidence time and time again in that her friend’s cats were never around for the full night before the keys ended up lost in the morning. Cats, due to their nature, also seldom put keys back where they got them from or filled up the gas tank. All of Megan's friends who had cats were always exclaiming that they thought they had more gas than that, they didn't know how they possibly could have driven 50,000 miles since they bought the car, and so on.
The exception was one man who actually owned two cats, but who was an insomniac. Megan would visit him and lean over his cats, seeming to be enthralled in the innocent enjoyment of scratching them under their chins and exclaiming, “Oh, it must drive you crazy!” The man was bemused by her adoration of his pets, but Megan and the cats all knew that she was secretly taunting them for their inability to go joy riding.
This of course set the stage for the play of events that would unfold for her over the coming weeks. A stage constructed by the cats for the play that they too had written. A poorly directed play with a fuzzy plot that meandered about wildly with a story line that seemed at first glance to be about tuna and dead rodents but was in fact a bad attempt at political humor. A play in which some of the key actors only lines appeared to be "meow".
Cats it seems have been trying their paws at literary diversion for centuries. Cats had been attempting in a vain effort to communicate these ideas and visions to the only other creatures on Earth capable of setting these works in stone or onto paper. Those creatures being us human folk with our ability to write down concepts, build stage sets, run cameras and hand out awards.
They had devised a complicated code that consisted of shed fur and carefully timed deposits of deceased small critters to confer their thoughts and aspirations. The code however was laid out before blind eyes. The frustration of the cats as well as their envy of some of the larger members of their species has in fact led to the general cranky and arrogant attitude so often seen demonstrated in their behavior.
In all of human history only one civilization has come close to recognizing the efforts of the cats, the Egyptians. Unfortunately they didn't quite get it right but they did get close enough to understand something was going on but were so frightened by the whole affair they decided to worship the furry little authors in the absence of anything better to do. This misplacement of awe while common to human history in regards to things that frighten us, did nothing to forward the cats agenda (though they did eat up the attention).
Megan was aware of none of this. Nor was Olive Grape, the strange and alluring cat owner that currently held her hearts attention and the keys to her apartment. Olive’s cat, Pickle was aware but too engrossed by his latest work in process, “The Tuna of our Discontent”, to care much past leaving the keys to Olive’s ‘82 Renault Le Car under the couch in a stunning way to announce the completion of chapter 5.
Megan decided to simply lay everything on the line with Olive, the cats and all her hearts confusion. Just get it out there and let the pieces fall where they may. Now having made that decision she could not track down Olive and arrange a date. Three days of leaving messages had yielded no results. When she inquired at the antique store where he was employed, they informed her that he had simply up and quit. Driving by his home revealed nothing more than his cars oil leak was getting worse indicated by the exponentially larger stain on the street underneath it. A peep in the windows only revealed a bit of clutter and invoked a nasty glare from a passing cat. Olive had something about an errand somewhere but she couldn’t remember the details. Surely he would not leave the cats unattended for so long. Something was, without a doubt, wrong.
Excerpts from the Olive Grape Chronicles: The Bar
Whether Eddie’s behavior was because he was drunk, ill, or suicidal would not have been apparent to the casual observer. Casual observers never took much notice of Eddie Thibodaux most times. That was because Eddie was an angel and angels tend to be all but invisible to the casual eye. Seeing divine or diabolical beings tends to be more than the average mind can handle on the average day so when the eye reports seeing one to the brain, the brain generally ignores the message and tells the eye to forget about it and get on with the visual recon work required in this modern age when ordering a coffee.
In any case, there were never any casual observers in The No-Where Bar because it was not the sort of place you could afford to be casual in. Any observers in The No-Where Bar would be ill tempered, armed and suffering from the kind of non-casual attitude that caused them to take dangerous (to themselves and more importantly, to others), crazed actions when they observed things they didn’t like.
As Eddie’s interaction with the bartender unfolded one of those awful hushed silences slowly fell over the entire bar like a wave. A tidal wave. At the moment the silence reached its peak, it was louder than most rock concerts. Only Eddie and the barman’s conversation could be heard.
Even the mad homeless man who was the bars most frequent customer (indeed he was damn near more a part of the bar than the furnishings or requisite neon lights) ceased his monologue of curses and conspiracies, mixed with the odd cannibalistic threat. A diatribe that he endlessly addressed to an audience that, while if not actually hallucinatory, was none-the-less not present in any visible form (he was the sole soul that had recognized Eddie as an angel but due to the fact that he was always seeing angels…among other things).
“What are you concerning yourself over?” Eddie asked the bartender in a voice so cheerful as to sound sinister. “Is it the expiration date?” he added with a tone of perfect innocence (angels do “perfect innocence” well). It was the kind of innocence Hitler conveyed to Lord Chamberlain about his rezoning plan prior to August 26, 1939.
“I ain’t worried bout the expiration date” was the bartender’s answer. The bartender’s voice had the same quality that a gun in the hands of a sniper has as it levels upon its target.
On the bar top, a meaty hand rested on top of the card that was the catalyst of the debate.
With a smile, Eddie began to rise in what appeared to be a gesture of imminent departure.
“Excellent,” he said and tossed back the rest of his beer. He then pulled a silver pen from a coat on the stool beside his.
“I’ll need a receipt for my expense report. Nothing fancy mind you, just something that will match the card statement. The boys in accounting will scream to high Heaven otherwise.” He added with that barely contained laugh people let escape when making an inside joke to someone not in the know. He then broke eye contact with the bartender and picked up his coat from which he hand retrieved the pen.
The bartends gaze never left Eddie. It was a gaze that would have shamed an ice age.
Eddie started to put on the coat in preparation of a quiet but swift retreat. He was aware of the bartenders cold stare (like all angels and devils as well, Eddie didn’t need his eyes to be pointed in the direction of what they were looking at in order to see).
The hand of the bartender left the card and settled onto Eddies’ shoulder. It felt like a side of beef. It prevented any further retreat as effectively as a lead door. Despite being an angel, Eddie was in a physical form and subject to most of the common laws of physics. At least in principle.
Eddie was just under six feet tall, slight of build and weighed in at 160 pounds. The bartender (who’s name was Cecile incidentally) on the other had stood six foot four, weighed 285 pounds and was built like a bulldozer. He secretly harbored notions of becoming a florist and rather liked raising tropical fish. He was a large but benign thug in truth. An air of sweet gentleness poured from him. It was however, the kind of sweet gentleness that dealt murderously with people who behaved as though they wished to be murdered. Unlike Eddie’s divine nature, Cecil’s qualities were perfectly obvious to all but the thickest brain. Gentle and otherwise.
*Olive, cautious, drew closer.* or *Olive cautiously drew closer.* Either one works and they both hold the same ideal. Personally, I like the first choice though; it gives a real sense of suspense. Now that I’m writing this (and looking back), another option in the second is switching cautiously and drew. The only “problem” I see in that is the fact that you have two “C” words right next to each other.
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