Chapter 2

And it was orange juice that Leslie found splattered on the kitchen floor, next to the figure of her fallen, unconscious father, when she came to water the fern. She scrambled to his side, calling him from the tides in which he drifted. ABC, she thought. She checked his airway, first, as he had taught her, to be certain he had not choked. He was breathing, still. Then she felt his pulse…weak, she thought; perhaps it was just poor circulation. She fumbled the phone in her lap when she first tried to call emergency services—then she tried to calm herself, timed her breaths for five second intervals. With steadier fingers she dialed.

It was also orange juice that was left on the tile when the EMT’s and ambulance crew had loaded her and her father and sped off to the hospital. It was orange juice in customers’ glasses which reflected the flashing blues and reds of the ambulance through the restaurants’ interiors as the vehicle rushed through the streets. Orange juice cramped in a cardboard box was sucked through a bendable plastic straw by a boy with a splinted arm in the emergency room. And orange juice was the first thing the nurse with the gorgeous blue eyes could offer her while she waited for the doctor’s preliminary report.

And midway through her cup of orange juice, she tried to remember what she had to do—short of waiting; nothing came to mind. Her stomach had twisted inside with the thought of losing her father—it had been difficult enough watching her mother die. She had fought, to the end of her strength, Leslie remembered her father saying of her mother. Would he? Surely, he would, if only for her. But death seemed a serpent coiled before her—if she had a spade she would lunge at it, hack its head off in a frightened vengeance. But nature had not equipped her with any such tool. Here she stood, watching, waiting, worrying. The w’s ate at her. Especially the w questions. Why her father? When would she know? Who could she turn to if…? What had happened? Where could she go if…? Would he be okay?

She sipped at her orange juice and picked up a cooking magazine. The arrangement of a Christmas ham reminded her of Uncle Stetson. She had completely forgotten to call him—how terrible. His own brother, hospitalized without his notification. She chastised herself, perhaps more harshly than another could have, and asked the nurse with the eyes of the ocean if she could use a phone. The nurse’s eyes smiled the answer before it came to her lips. “Why of course, honey. Right this way.”

Stet’s number, she contemplated, eyeing an irritating picture of sunflowers. When mom first found out, I was 12, dad was 37—the last part of his number. Area code’s same. Brighton is, what is Brighton a 205 or 520,250, 502. She decided to ask the nurse. “Excuse me,” she waved a finger. “Brighton’s first three digit’s?”

“520” came the reply. Ah! I knew it, she celebrated and dialed. The phone rang five times. On the sixth, an answer: “Hola.” It was her uncle’s gravely voice. Cheery for 11:00 in the morning, she thought.

“Uncle Stet, it’s Les,” she said in a quivering voice that didn’t seem her own, “Dad’s in the hospital, in the emergency room.”

“Ho! Is he okay? What happened?”

“I don’t know; I’m waiting for the doctor,” she said straining not to sob. I’m stronger than this, she thought, breathe deep, calm down.

“Hey, hey. Don’t worry—I’ll be right there. You at Mercy Medical?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Alright, Les. You hang in there, I’m coming.” He sounded distant, like he had the phone pressed to his shoulder with his ear. “No, my brother’s in the hospital! Yeah, come back next week. We’ll finish the painting then. Okay.” Then more clearly he addressed Leslie again. “I’ll be over in fifteen. You’ll be okay ‘till then?”

“Yeah,” she replied, nodding for some unknown reason, but unsure what he would have done had she answered negatively.

“Alright. See you in a few.”

She hung up, walked to the couch and collapsed into it. The gray leather was soft, cool. She took a feeble breath. Just explaining the situation to Stetson had taxed the limits of her emotional composure. There she sat, eyes fixed on that same giant unnerving painting of sunflowers. Its imbalanced hues of gold and orange, splattered about a sea of green faded in her field of vision; her eyes were fixed on some infinite point within the black-speckled center of a single flower. She stared, to relieve her consciousness of any thought. Her other senses betrayed her—she existed, but fluidly.

Twinges of necessity bypassed her—she felt nothing. Trancelike, she sat, amazed at the disappearance of the painting as her vision blurred. Sensual input seemed to cease altogether. Soon, she could quit breathing and be free—godlike. She didn’t even dare to think; her mind was quiet, somewhere beyond the yellow-green smear on the white in front of her. It moved, a serpentine head, yellow, tilted, opened black eyes. She stared, without blinking, into those infinite black eyes shining from the yellow head; she let herself slip further behind her eyes. They held the flower-snake’s gaze, testing, waiting.

Then something fell between them, a curtain. No, hair. Her hair. A breath of fresh air touched her cheek. Something rode the wind. Sounds. Ssssssss. Like the serpent. She focused her gaze on the yellow-green. Sunflowers, again. Disproportionate, like before. Before what? “Leslie!” and footsteps she heard. Her name. She shivered, eyeing the picture. Warm hands on her shoulders—she exhaled, blinked, regained mortality. She breathed again. Refreshing, like waking from an afternoon nap in the sun. Like a lazy, yawning, stretching cat. She smiled. “Are you okay?”

She glanced up and to her right. There was her bearded uncle, anguish clouding his bright eyes. She shook off her lethargy, bade him to sit down, and reminded herself where she was. Orange juice on the end table—on the tile in the kitchen, next to father. The ambulance ride, yes. The nurse, the phone call, the painting. Yes, now she could face her uncle.

“What happened? Tell me everything? You sure you’re okay?” His questions barraged her shore of consciousness while he moved around the couch to sit next to her.

“I’m alright,” she said with amazing clarity. She paused to collect her facts and glanced somewhere beyond his sympathetic gaze. “He had a headache this morning, when I woke him. He slept past his lecture, too. I heard him come downstairs and microwave his oatmeal. He said something about it, I think. When I remembered I needed to water the fern, I heard a crash and found him unconscious on the floor. The EMT’s said it was a head injury or something after that manner. But the doctor’s haven’t said anything, yet. I’ve just been waiting, here. Waiting, worrying, wondering. I mean, what if…” she stumbled on the phrase. “What if, like mom, he…” she left the inevitable unvoiced, as if they were unsaid, that possibility wouldn’t exist.

Stetson wrapped his arm around her and brushed her hair behind her ear, away from the tears emerging on her cheeks. “Now, now; you’re father will pull through. He must—he knows you love him too much. I’m sure God has a reason for this tragedy.”

“Don’t bring religion into it Uncle Stet,” she stammered.

“But it’s absolutely essential to acknowledge the spiritual powers at work here. It’s too much engrained in human nature; times like this test our ties, our faith in Him.”

“But why? Why after mom? If there was a God, why?”

“Death must find us all some time. How we react to death is what matters; how we shape our lives in its face,” he explained.

“You act as if he’s already gone, but he’s not. And while he’s still alive I want to think of him that way! Okay?” she pleaded.

“Do you want to pray with me?” he asked plainly.

“No, Uncle Stet, I don’t…”

“You are de-centered, Les. Let God help you regain that balance. In the days of Ancient Israel, the outer walls of the tabernacle were tied on both sides,” he began. She did not feel like hearing another of his lectures, but she was too exasperated to stop him. “Lines staked to the ground on the inside and outside to keep it taught, to keep it from falling to one side or the other. One tied to holy ground, the other to earthly ground. This is how we must be, centered. If we lose either of our ties, we will be de-centered and ineffective in our attempts at love, mercy, justice, etc. We must be tied to the holiness of God, else we lose ourselves in the darkness of this world. But we must not neglect our ties with our physical life within the world, else we fall into delusion and illusion of spiritual or emotional highs. You must take care to keep ties with the spiritual realm, Les, remember that, okay?” he encouraged.

She had her eyes shut, and kept them that way. She could not stand to look at him—the last thing she wanted was religious advice. It was not a part of her life, he knew that. Religion was for the elderly: talkative, wrinkled widows and pale-faced, quiet bachelors who could no longer evade the stark eventuality of death. If they found comfort in confronting their ends in religious appeal, good for them. But she knew science had easily overcome the function of religion—in explaining the mysteries of this world. And government had assumed the function of the church. Social programs fed the homeless, aided the elderly, provided for the widows, and public schools trained up the children in the way they should go. Why did people cling to religion so? She found no benefit in it at all—unless, it’s as the old proverb claimed: ignorance is bliss.

Her thoughts were interrupted by a flash of glass doors opening and a man in a powder-blue uniform striding purposefully towards them. She straightened, her ears perked, anticipating news. He looked at her with a hawk’s disaffection—a professional distancing himself from the response. Her heart was wreathed with a sudden black mist. “Leslie?” he questioned her. She nodded.

“And this is Stetson, his brother,” she added. His eyes darted to the bearded man momentarily as he shook his hand, then rested back on Leslie.

“Arthur is not well. He has a sizeable brain tumor on the frontal lobe. It’s caused that part of the brain to hemorrhage. We have to do surgery immediately to remove the tumor and release the built-up pressure.” He stopped and looked at a clipboard he carried. “The success rate of surgeries of this type is mildly successful. But the likelihood of permanent damage already done to the frontal lobe, however, is high. While I believe he’ll survive the surgery, I think that there will be a significant amount of brain damage, but I cannot tell what forms exactly this will take until after the surgery has finished.”

Leslie nodded and bit her lip. The doctor asked Stetson to accompany him to the desk for a moment. She fell back into her spot on the couch. It was still warm. Her eyelids clamped shut, like an oysters shell, holding back liquid. Her lips, her chest, her body quivered as she breathed. The painting glared at her, as if accusing her of all imperfections. She retreated deeper—behind the veil of blurry eyes—away from the vacant, black eyes in the field of green and yellow.

She pried her eyes from the picture and buried them inwards, into the endless blue of an inner sky—a vast expanse, ocean or sky she knew not. The pure color of emotion embraced her. It was beautiful, the immense planes of blue through which she fell. Fell or sank or plunged headfirst. She forgot time and locality, spiraling deeper, higher. Away from the yellow and green and black demon which had been glaring at her. Creatures of light, of beauty swam, flew beside her with pearlescent wings, diamond fins—all glowing with a cool azure flame. Faces—watching her dive, wishing her to rise—below, above her. With such grand wings, such brilliant scales. Hippocampus, Pegasi, soaring, gazing after her. On she went, pushing herself onwards, breathing freely, deeply.

And then, with a final effort, she moved beyond the blue; she was weightless, drifting in blackness. Pinpricks of light dazzled her: starlight—luminous, flickering specks within a swiftly consuming darkness. She relaxed in the chill of the vacancy; she floated beyond herself, into nothingness. Even the faint points of light faded. She rested.

Chapter 1

Dear Rachel,

Please consider the following for your Spring issue:

If I were to suggest to you “once upon a time,” it certainly follows that one of any number of contextual connotations would enter your logical faculty: an event located spatially in this temporal world we inhabit for a specific duration of time; a progression of any number of these events in a logical sequence to suspend your disbelief in a fantasy or a resultant, lightly masqueraded assertion of some moral view or theme for the benefit of children—a tale usually containing constructions of the imagination such as, but not limited to, elves, dwarves, fairies, witches, and talking animals.

What’s my point? If I say, “An autumnal spray of color tinted the shivering leafs of an old, proud tree,” you’ve illustrated a picture for yourself with your cognitive capabilities. According to your presuppositions about the world, you’ve also made assumptions and ruled out any logical fallacies for your picture. Take a look at that picture in your mind again. Is the tree in a desert? It wasn’t before, but now it is. Is it hanging upside down from the roof of a football stadium? You’ve just imagined it so. But these wouldn’t have occurred to you with the simple phrase. Why? Language is incapable of complete expression of thought, but highly influential in our thought process. Perhaps I intended to communicate that this old tree, flushed with color lies at the bottom of the sea or has been launched into space or exists only momentarily in the dream of a three year old who will never remember it, but regardless of my intentions, your mind followed the limiting suggestion of language in the confines of your own contextual experience. This is a danger. Why?

Well, let us examine another phrase. William Blake wrote, “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”[1] Now this evokes more than an image; it riles emotion. Disgust, perhaps. Or possibly intrigue. But this snippet also supplies a command—an instruction. Blake wants to tell the world something. Ah! Here is the crux of the issue: Blake has long been dead. He can no longer tell us whether the tree, per se, is in space, a casino, or hanging inverted in that stadium. The incapability of language to clarify intention haunts any literary venture. In speaking Blake’s words, I have given new life to them. They have been re-voiced. Resurrected, if you like. But to what end?

T.S. Eliot obsessed on this idea of re-doing voices from the past—on how to piece together bits of language to create meaning—a Dr. Frankenstein’s creature, constructed of miscellaneous part of the deceased. But what sort of meaning—what sort of life—can be expected of such an abomination? The whole reputation of language collapses. Again, you may ask, why do I bother with the breakdown of language?

I ask you to concern yourself not with the information presented by a speaker or a narrator, but with that which this teller does not supply you. The tree, remember, could only be a figment of a toddler’s imagination. The proverb is dead, buried like Lazarus, and when it is raised again, it does not speak on its own; it cannot supply meaning. The important thing is that you do not rule out all the possibilities—that you do not take long dead words and attempt to squeeze meaning out of them—they are “quiet and meaningless, as wind in dry glass.”[2]

—Arthur Heinlein

<>

Almost-blackness clutched at a weak, parasitic desk-lamp which illuminated a spot of the peeling, yellow wallpaper plastered to the corner of the room. Piles of books—strewn, stacked, broken—withered in the inky breath of the night. The close air and the thick, choking odor of decaying pages seeped around the narrow shoulders and thin waist of a figure bent in shadow. The old, woolen sweater, dyed with rusted oranges and faded olive greens, highlighted purposeful rotations of the arms; the lightweight, white dress-shirt pouring out of the hemmed edges of the sweater, swept with the flicking dance of the wrist and pen.

The old bleached paper, crossed with now-sea-green lines, hissed at the scratch of the pen tip—absorbed the streaks of ink, but as a Kuwaiti desert drinks crude oil. The green eyes, dictating the hurried strokes of the pen, flashed from left to right—now ahead, now behind the flowing ink—with the glitter of intelligence. Hair, dark and ruffled, like a storm-blown raven, fell among equally black eyebrows. High cheekbones lifted, wrinkling a small, unobtrusive nose in alternating chagrin and pleasure at the string of slanted, sloppy letters forming at the tip of the pen. At last the figure leaned back into shadow and inspected the work.

A faint smile pulled at the lips, thin and pale in the heavy shadows. The right hand stretched again to the document and flicked a signature in deep, looping strokes. Arthur Heinlein sighed, piqued by the dense atmosphere of the room. Removing an envelope from the drawer—a cavernous, tomb-like opening—he folded the draft in thirds and sealed the envelope. With another scratch of the pen, he scribbled another name on it: Rachel S. He stood. A floorboard creaked in protest. It was late; leaning over, he pulled the sweater from the fine curve of his back and over his head. He tossed it to the still-warm chair. He unbuttoned the shirt with faultlessly automatic fingers; he found it a place on the bed-post and unbuckled his belt and slipped out of long, gray trousers. Then he reached across the envelope on the desk and switched off the light. Shadows consumed the room—made it seem closer, cozier—without the light.

The bed groaned as he rolled underneath the sheets, soft and cool against his body. He sighed again. His lower back ached, still—a determined, incessant pinch. Arthur twisted himself, torso one way, legs the other, as the therapist had taught him so long ago. No longer did something give and snap into place—smashing the dam of relief, which used to flood his spine. No, now it was different and his late evenings writing didn’t help. The pain was noise—just as his perpetual headache—muted, indefinite, but ever-present. Arthur determined to ignore both—as he always did. And within minutes he had drifted off into a dreamland, free of pain, but never of darkness.

<>

“Daddy?” echoed a voice in the hollow recesses of his submerged void of sleep. Somewhere a ray of light slanted into his consciousness. He squinted to shut it out. But the voice—such a sweet voice—reverberated again within his skull. Blinking in the sudden light of late morning, Arthur massaged his forehead. The headache was back again this morning. “Daaaaddy...” It was his daughter’s voice—tinged now with annoyance. He pried his left eye open.

“Ahh, mornin’ sweetheart.”

“Good morning,” she answered, folding her arms.

“Whadya need?” he asked, propping himself against the headboard and rubbing his right eye. She seemed to tolerate his slow-moving mental state with a tapping finger and cocked lips, but a smile held its form beneath her chagrin.

“How late did you stay up last night?” she wondered. He waved the question off with a flat palm and circling wrist and yawned deeply.

“I dunno…two, three, maybe,” he replied, running his fingers through his hair. “Is that what you woke me up for?”

“It’s ten-thirty,” she observed with a faint twitch of a smile at the corner of mouth. This brought life to his eyes—they widened, glanced left to right and back again, squinted at the clock squatting on the bookshelf. His lower lip fell away as he fixed his gaze back to his daughter; automatic fingers moved to his temples to stem the rushing tide of pain.

“Oh no. I had that lecture at ten-fifteen.” His face twisted as his heart sunk. “Why didn’t you wake me sooner, Les?” he accused with cheeks scrunched high and his mouth still hanging half-open. She raised her eyebrows and swallowed a mocking laugh.

“I had Physics III at eight and Differential Calc right after that, Dad,” she defended with wide eyes. “I just got back.” He sighed his frustration.

“I guess the students will enjoy a cancelled class, then.” His eyes drifted to the far wall, where a print of Dali’s The Last Supper hung. “And that was a Lawrence lecture, too,” he mused. “A shame, really.” He folded his hands underneath his chin and sighed again. The morning air was easy to breath: fresh, new, though his gut still churned with guilt.

“That was my only commitment today, though—besides office hours. I guess I’ll take the whole day off,” he mused. He remembered his daughter lounging in the doorway. “What are you up to now?” he asked her.

“Reading,” she stated, and bit her lower lip. “I also have to finish the application for that program this summer.”

“The one for NASA?”

“Yeah. It’s due in two weeks.” He grunted approval. It made him proud to think of her as a future astronaut. She glanced at his bookshelf, leaning on one foot, crossing her other at the back of the ankle. “And then I have to go to town, but later. Two-thirty or so.” He nodded and narrowed his eyebrows at The Last Supper, as if her words “two-thirty” meant the basement had just flooded. She grinned cautiously and stepped backwards, as if to leave the room. Then his eyebrows shot upwards and he hummed and waved her back through the door.

“Remember your Uncle Stetson is coming over for dinner at six. So, plan accordingly,” he reminded her with widening eyes. She rolled her eyes and gazed at the streaked brass doorknob, cocking her jaw.

“Okay. Kosher, I know. I’ll put those pork chops back in the freezer,” she sighed. He laughed, but her gaze, level and dull, told him that she was not mocking her Uncle.

“You really do have to change your plan?” he asked. She ignored him.

“What do you think of Filets de Maquereaux á la Tomate?”

“Sounds fantastic, Les.” He said, reclining into his pillow. The door began to swing shut as she spun to leave. But another thought seized his consciousness.

“Oh Les! Can you mail that letter on my desk when you go?”

“Sure, Dad,” she replied with a lift of her shoulders. He thought how much she reminded him of his wife, bless her soul, when she did that; a good girl, she knew how to carry her shoulders well. But twenty-two years old and unengaged—it was beyond him how she had yet to answer romance’s call. He watched her hand fingering the dried, gray paint on the door. Suddenly epiphany dawned on his face.

“Oh, but I still have to address the envelope. So don’t take it now.”

“Okay, Dad,” she said, nodding and smiling. The sparkle in her eyes, too, he thought: that was her mother’s. She stepped lightly backwards and brushed her hair back behind her ear, signaling her intention to leave the room.

“If you could drop in and grab it before you go to town…”

“As opposed to after?” She paused while his shoulders and eyebrows drooped in annoyance. “I will, Dad.”

“Thank you, Leslie,” he sang.

“You’re welcome, Daddy,” she chirped. A short, potent silence invaded the room.

“Do I get breakfast in bed?” he ventured at last. She set her hands on her hips—just like her mother, damn it, he thought—and shook her head. The amber hair—just beyond shoulder-length—complemented her set stare: her mother’s soft blue eyes, tinted with his flashing green. A lagoon green, he fancied: as iridescent in which to gaze and as impossible to move.

“No, Dad. But it’s downstairs on the counter.” She paused again, with a half-open grin, seeming to consider leaving the room on that note. He turned his lips up and to the left—raised his thick brows. “You might want to heat it up, though,” she advised.

“Fair enough, Les,” he said, glancing at the hardwood floor.

“Bye, Dad,” she said, smiling again and slipping backwards out of the room, one hand on the door, the other on the jamb.

“Bye, Les,” he replied with a hyperbolic grin. She laughed and closed the peeling oak door behind her. It clinked as it shut and the handle wobbled in her grip. Uncle Stetson for dinner, she thought, oof. Well. First, put the chops back in the freezer. Then homework. Then application, letter, Mackerel and some fresh tomatoes from the market. We have onion and parsley already. She bounded down the creaking stairs and set about her tasks. When she drifted into the kitchen and beneath the main skylight, she tilted her head back to gaze at the sky.

Its infinite blue confounded her. Of course, it was just the atmospheric effect on the sun’s rays of light, refracting them into the azure wavelengths of the spectrum—she had known that much since she was a little girl. But it worked another effect on her now. The expanse, whenever divested of cloud-cover, excited a nerve somewhere between her stomach and her lungs—just to the left, underneath her heart—and made her gasp.

The earth certainly had a taste for blue. Atmosphere seen from land, oceans from space. And the perfect place in the world was the docks, when one could walk to the furthest plank and gaze seaward and see only blue—with just a few wrinkly waves to define the liquid mixture from the gaseous one. She lingered at the window and thought that, perhaps someday, she’d be able to watch that omnipotent blue finally fade into the starry black—without the fiery mediation of a sunset. That she would soar beyond the confines of this atmosphere and look back on blue, the cobalt puzzle-pieces of the oceans, and gasp once again.

Leslie pried herself from her daydream and the window pane. If she had any intention of going into space, the application for the astronaut training program had to be finished—and it certainly wasn’t going to fill itself in. She lobbed the frozen chunks of pork back into the freezer and poured her father’s glass of orange juice. And after hanging his hastily discarded jacket from the previous evening’s outing back in the closet and nudging his loafers off the carpet and into the entryway, she picked up her Calculus book and collapsed onto the sofa—a plush, white couch with furry pillows. With two well-executed kicks, her slippers fell among the other shoes crowding the entry. She rolled onto her stomach, clutched a pillow to her chest, and began reading.

<>

Arthur slung his legs off the side of the old spring-mattress and leaned forward. He massaged his pounding temples. Sleep was supposed to cure headaches—not frustrate them. I must be dehydrated, he decided. He hadn’t even downed a single drink last night—he had been mighty tempted to forget his pounding head in the haze of alcohol, but he refrained on account of this morning’s lecture. So much for that. He stood, wavering for a moment with the rush of pain, and made his way to the bathroom. There he found some aspirin, and plopped two on his curled tongue. With a quick gulp of water, he swallowed them and grimaced. Drinking water first thing out of bed should be forbidden. Water only intensified the grimy, bacterial-infested condition of his mouth. Orange juice was the best: something sharp and tangy. Or grapefruit juice. Anything to overpower the fermenting noxious wasteland in his mouth. Even coffee would do.

He filled his hands with the cold, clear water, splashing his face in the temporary pool. Water was at least good in this respect. Better than washing your face with coffee, he thought to himself and chuckled. As he rose to leave, he caught sight of his reflection in a speckled mirror. Is that what they call, “Professor Heinlein?” he wondered and grimaced for the second time in five minutes. He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. Oh well. He sauntered back into the bedroom and donned his bath-robe. He found his slippers under the wardrobe instead of beneath the bed—all with his head in his hands. Orange juice was sure to help.

Once downstairs, Arthur found his glass full to the brim with the nectar of the gods. He stooped and sipped at the bright liquid without lifting it from the counter. His eyes traveled down the edge of the kitchen island to his bowl of oatmeal. It wasn’t steaming in the morning light. He removed his lips from the rim of the glass and licked them. He would fix that. After a few moments in the microwave, the oatmeal seemed sufficiently revived—steaming properly, like an old-fashioned paddle ship going up the Mississippi. He shoveled some brown sugar into the creamy concoction and mixed it—ignoring for the moment the shimmering glass of orange juice. He filled the spoon with a heaping glob of the stuff and sucked it from the spoon. His eyes swept back and forth across the tiled counter-top as his jaws tested the firmness of the oats, his tongue the sweetness of the sauce. Then he nodded his head—but instantly cringing and raising his fingers to brace his temples.

“It’s good, Les!” he called down the hallway.

“You’re welcome,” came her distant reply. She must be reading, he thought and carried on with his breakfast, but rhythmically, meticulously. There was no rush now. If he was going to take a day off, he was going to make the most of it. But orange juice to start.

---

[1] William Blake: Selected Poems. “Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 77.

[2] T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems 1909-1962. “Hollow Man.” 89.

An Introduction

This, my fourth novel, in rough draft form, will be posted in chapters as I finish them (along with the final two-thirds of The Axis of Life and revising the final eight chapters of The Wars of Ashton) over the course of this coming Spring and Summer. This newest installment, however, is not directly related to the other novels. I have chosen the working title of Millennium's End and I hope you enjoy it. Please feel free to leave any comments you wish.

Kevin Muirhead