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Page 48.
Scene 22. Jack Gray: Man from Nowhere
 In a certain amber city of American mythology, a dark knight waits in a marvelous urban villa until called to duty. His secret mansion in an unlikely inner city section looks plain and ordinary from the outside. Its graffiti-smeared brick walls are dark with moss and decay on the outside. Inside, the superhero’s fortress is filled with the latest luxuries and defenses.
The hero has risen from nowhere to become not only a financial prince and benefactor, but also a caped crusader to right such wrongs as bedeviled his childhood. Like Everyman, he is not some vapid fop, raised with a silver spoon in his mouth, but a hard-scrabble child of the gutters who made it big—but never forgot his roots as a common citizen.
The city fathers—corporate and governmental—have only to display his logo atop a light beam, projected as a signal upon the highest building on the skyline.
A garage door briefly opens, shedding a rectangle of buttery light into the darkness outside. A powerful dark automobile roars up from the light, flies like a shadow down a leafy driveway, and roars out onto city streets that have once again grown lawless (though not leafless). The season is, more often than not, autumn—or Fall, as the Americans call it so evocatively. Night and day are equal near the October equinox.
The hours of night and day are measured in strokes of the master clock in the entrance hall. The hero leaves his carpeted library, gleaming study, and Gothic hallways ornamented with leaded glass windows inset with stained glass.
There is a princess in his life—a shadow who moves languorously among heavy maroon drapes, which frame windows as dreamy and bleary as if they were perennially covered with rolling rain drops. Her shoulders are bare; her hair hangs in heavy waves, her figure is a delicacy in a sumptuous robe; her movements have a wounded musicality in a minor but intriguing key (like one lingering, broken piano chord); her lips are lush, and her eyes are filled with meaning. Whatever her name is, she does not just look, or drink in, with her eyes. She emotes, or radiates outward from her brain, through her eyes, as the ancients thought vision must function. She is all about our hero, and he is all about her. When they make love, they are a poem in one of his books. Action is everything. They never speak of love or sex. Ellipsis or omission is the most fitting enjambment in illustrated quatrains of amor (passion, sex) or caritas (loving, caring). Perhaps only a warrior like Jack Gray—losing himself in his post-doctoral Classics and History studies to forget the world outside his castle, or ranch—would appreciate these delicate nuances of the ancient Romans and their lost world.
The hero must once again rescue mankind from that small, predatory minority of its species who, in all places and all ages, manage to rise to the top through constant manipulation, ruthless backstabbing, false accusations, and downright sabotage or even murder. Some of these, like tame and noble stallions, eventually become the civic fathers of both finance and city hall. Their untamed siblings are lords of crime and corruption, ever filled with self-justifying ambition, boundless corruption, and salivation over power and wealth. Both types of men and women are united in their lack of self-doubt. Their shadowless egotism is the clockwork that drives the hands of crime around the clock of destruction. They give long-winded, rambling speeches whose focus is entirely on themselves. They are adults who never outgrew the infantile boundary—the narcissopause—where I end and others begin. Like Narcissus, they fall in love with their own reflection in the water. Like an infant, only they exist, and the universe is their suckling breast.
The ancients posited that all things in the universe are composed of four smallest, indivisible particles described as atomai (from Greek a-, without + temenos, a cutting or separation).
The thinkers of long ago—including brilliant heterae, women who were neither slaves nor wives, but an exalted gender—suggested that there were just four types of atoms, each representing one of the four elements. These are earth, wind, fire, and water. All things are built up of these, in endless combinations.
In human nature, one might imagine that some long-dead Athenian probably once sat on a stoa or porch (school) with his students, and taught that human nature consists of a fifth element, a universal compound forever blended from two qualitative atoms: good and evil. Whether anyone actually said this is not known, but the wisdom of the Athenians was eclectic and daring.
Our dark knight, shining hero, the Classics and History professor, would have pondered these things in his gloomy and heavy-curtained study full of books and globes and scrolls. He might have scribbled in ink over parchment, or stylus over digital pad, while dawdling over a glass of claret and perhaps a pungent cigarillo.
The two halves of human nature are an indelible part of human nature and cosmic law. Opposites attract. Computer language is binary—zeroes and ones. For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction. Examples are boundless. They are yin and yang, left and right, sweet and bitter, up and down, gravity and levity. Either-or. Ad infinitum. Castor and Pollux.
As long as the two viral strains of human nature remain separate, the hero knows there is hope for the world. Full of idealism, and reenergized by a good rest after his last adventure, the mysterious crusader sets forth once again to right wrongs and rescue honest citizens, including fair damsels who find him to be ruggedly handsome, charming, and intelligent—heterae who are neither wives nor slaves, but an exalted gender. Their name means other, because they are not of the household, but a curling smoke of dreams wrapping around the linearities and curvatures of the logical imagination.
Jack Gray's call to action came in the form of a signal from Rector.
Jack had only minutes ago down to lunch with his sister Janet. The kids were at school, and Jack's brother-in-law, Mark Barger, was away at work. Molly was out of town to help an ailing aunt in Napa County, some 500 miles or 800 kilometers north, beyond San Francisco. Jack and Molly had made their peace once again. They loved each other, but neither dared to push it any further than their current arrangement. If either found someone else, they agreed it would be for the best. Molly did not want to lose another husband in the line of duty, as she had before. She vowed that Roberta would never again have her loving heart wounded by the loss of a father figure. Jack was not ready to call it a day being a secret agent, and Catherine still loomed in his life, amor interruptus—better yet, caritas interrupta—an unfinished business.
Jack and Janet ate the meal she had prepared—a beef stew with red wine and new potatoes among the ingredients—along with a glass each of local Cabernet Sauvignon. Janet was no doubt thinking about the kids, about her husband, about the ranch. Jack was thinking of Molly and Roberta at the moment.
It was possible he might come home one day and find Molly embracing with some other man. Still, he thought of him and her as a planetary love. Would the moon and the earth continue in their long embrace around the sun, or would the earth awaken one day, and find that Selene had drifted off, run away, with some darkly handsome star from out of nowhere? The odds were totally against it, both literally and figuratively. So Molly—a long, slender figure in semi-gloom, on her bed beside him, sleeping while night wind and moonlight stole in past moving drapes—remained the moon in his life. Her kisses and embraces, shining with light borrowed from the sun and the moon, said the same to him. She would be his moon, as he would remain her earth. She would remain beautiful and beyond reach, but in his orbit; while he continued hunting, and worshipped her. So went the metaphors of their dreamy reveries by moonlight, stroking one another’s strong limbs.
But anything was possible. Each time Jack went off on another mission, he might never return. The hearts of Molly and Janet, as well as his daughters Gail and Marcia, and Molly's daughter Roberta, would be broken; not to mention Janet and Mark's two smaller boys, Tommy, 9, and Bobby, 11. Jack had gone every day up the hill to talk it over with Catherine. She had long ago released him from his self-imposed mission. She wanted him to quit, and live a normal life, and care above all for Gail and Marcia. The two girls resembled Catherine, in fact, as much as they resembled Jack. Not to play favorites, of course, Gail looked more like Catherine 's daughter—as the saying went—while Marcia looked more like a young Jack with softer, feminine lines but the same stubborn eyes.
As Jack and Janet ate, a hilltop breeze pushed Janet's softly checkered kitchen curtains in and out. It was the same breeze that stirred the meadows and dandelion fields. An airplane droned innocently in the blue sky amid big white puffy cumulus clouds.
Then came a chime of twelve hours on the living room wall clock. Jack glanced over at the antique Junghans in its ornate oak case. The time on the tin face read 12:32. Clearly, this was not the time for the full chime set, followed by twelve bongs. On cue, his wristwatch began to buzz. It tried to pull his hand around on the table. There was no mistaking the signal from Johannes Rector, which no doubt meant that Claire Lightfield needed his services once again.
"I have to run," he told Janet.
"Ja-a-ck," his sister groaned.
"Gotta do it. Work calls."
"What about the kids?"
"I'll be gone before they get home from school. Please give them big hugs and kisses for me, will you?" Though they stayed at their places around the table, he wrapped his arms around her. He nuzzled a kiss behind her ear, but she made a sour face. "C'mon, Sis. Help me out here."
"I give them lots of love every day."
"I know you do. One day, when I am ready—"
"—or dead, Jack—"
"—I will come home, settle down, and sit in the rocker on the porch. I'll hunt quail, and track my investments. I'll go for walks with you and the dogs."
She rose, in a huff, and took her plate to the garbage. In two rapid, angry moves, she forked her unfinished lunch into the pail. Then she stormed to the sink and began doing dishes. She turned her back, and did not look at him, but he could see her shoulders were heaving as she cried quietly. As designed by evolution, a woman's crying is more terrible and powerful than the squalling of an infant, which is a language unto itself, whose cues parents pick up. When a woman cries, her keening is like a dreadful wind from beyond. Her agony is like broken glass that cuts the skin and tears a man's heart. Jack wanted to rush to her and hold her, but he was the cause of her anguish. He must not make things worse with any clumsy words or gestures.
When she was upset, she could not eat, or she'd throw up. It had been like that when they were little kids, not yet ten years old, riding in the back of mom and dad's station wagon, to the movies or a restaurant or whatever. On a few occasions—like the time they'd driven past a dead dog on the road—Jack had held a garbage bag open while Janet spent twenty minutes on and off sobbing, hiccupping, throwing up in to the bag, and crying some more.
He went upstairs and changed into street clothes—very unassuming: cowboy shirt, blue wind breaker, denim trousers, cowboy boots. Not a ten gallon hat or even one gallon, but a San Diego Padres baseball cap.
By the time he came downstairs, Janet had cleaned up, done the dishes, and poured both their wines back into the decanter, which sat with its crystal cork on a shady shelf in the living room. For a moment, he thought she would not say goodbye, but before he could exit by the rear door, she came flying out of a corner where she had been dusting, and wrapped him in a tight embrace. "Take care of yourself, okay?"
"I promise, Sis." He stroked her hair as she closed her eyes and breathed against his neck. With her head resting on his shoulder, she looked as if she were asleep. Her skin was pale, except for a tense flush in her cheeks.
"I want you to come home to us," she whispered, barely audibly. Tears dribbled from anguished eyes. “The girls love you so. The boys too.”
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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