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The beginning of book 3, The Path According to Karena:
I had a sense of where it would end before it started but there was nothing I could do. The ending was bound to come and if I meddled, all I’d do would be to make it harder for Frank. He’d chosen his path. The hardships and impediments that had filled his life had prepared him. Now the time had come and all I could do was watch. I started coming to see him once in a while knowing not much was happening now, but knowing that was about to change, and I wanted to be around when it did.
Carol lived in the house with him, but not in the way they’d lived together in Venice. I’d met Carol briefly before their romance began. Frank had taken me to the restaurant where she worked. Now after the years their TV series had run and Carol’s success with a feature film I didn’t think she’d remember me, but she did.
Carol changed when she moved here with Frank. Frank said the change had come when she saw him come out of the tunnel at the end of his last journey. Seeing the bright light and seeing him come out through the arch and then seeing the arch and light fade until only the cinderblock wall remained convinced her all his journeys had been real. And believing that then convinced her he was someone special, chosen by the Gods for something special. That was when she gave up all she had going for her to serve him. Frank was grateful for her support but didn’t think she was justified in taking it as far as she had. I didn’t tell Frank, but I knew she was right about him. I knew he needed her help more than he understood and I knew he was afraid to believe what she believed. He was afraid she was right.
Carol’s lived in the house but Monk was transient. Frank had given him a room and he stayed there some nights after staying longer in the pool. He and Frank would hang out some evenings by the pool, but more often the three of them would have dinner together and then do their own things.
But then Frank started having me come upstairs with him to talk. We’d walk through his office with the two tables with the ever-changing stacks of books. Every time I came through, the books had been re-sorted into different stacks. I hadn’t picked up an awareness of their purpose and hadn’t taken the time to ask. We’d go out on the balcony that fronted his bedroom and office and he’d sit in a lawn chair on one side of the table and I’d sit in the lawn chair on the other side of the table. We started by talking about our lives. He talked about his life with Carol past and present and about the stoic existence he was presently living. I talked about being single again. He asked what had happened to my marriage and I said, “Jim kept doing more and more location shoots and fooling around more and more. But then he started fooling around with a wardrobe girl on a regular basis and I got fed up.” Frank said, “So much for ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’” I said, “Try ‘Absence makes the organ wander.’ That’s closer to the truth.”
But then Frank told me about Kate. She had to vacate her apartment in the name of progress. They’d been friends off and on for some time and he told me how much he liked her matter-of-factness and tolerant theology. He didn’t tell me he’d slept with her but he didn’t have to. I knew he had but I also knew that wasn’t the reason he was thinking of taking her in. The decision to take her in was Frank’s start down a path of magic and mayhem, but I knew even before he invited her to stay that it would be.
Some time later I was made aware the way I was always made aware of the big ones. I began floating through dimensions of hazy shapes and shades, forms that couldn’t be known and colors that couldn’t be named. Images spun through my head like a kaleidoscope of dreams. Then the haze slowly cleared and I was back in my life. I was back in my life but one if the dream truths was still in my head. The awareness this time was not specific but only that at that moment Frank was becoming something more, I went to see him as I knew I was meant to.
I got to his place before he and Carol and Kate reached home. The minute they walked through the door I knew something that mattered had happened. I asked Kate to tell the story of what had happened to help me connect with her. She waited for Monk to be there then told the story and then it was clear Carol was right. Frank was special.
What follows is Frank’s first encounter with his enigmatic host, and the start of his first journey:
. . . so I go to my desk and push through my email. Most of it is meaningless but I still have to look for the few that matter.
“Frank.”
I snap my head around. I thought I was alone in the house. I don’t see anyone but the voice was right there.
“Down here.”
My desk is near the office door. The hall outside has a trapdoor. The furnace had been in a hole underneath, too small and too muddy to call a basement. The space was prone to flooding so the remodel raised the roof over the kitchen and put the furnace there. But crawlspaces are still accessible from the pit, so they redid the trapdoor with the floor. They did it sparingly though. No hinges and only a small brass ring for a handle.
“Come on down,” the voice says.
I grab my letter opener and use the point to lift the ring out of its recess. I put down the letter opener and pull up the trapdoor, pivoting it on the end away from the ring. I lift it out and lean it against the wall, then pick up the letter opener and peer down through the opening. Enough light from the hall lets me see there’s no one there.
“Where are you?”
“Come on down,” the voice says again.
“Who are you?” I feel the letter opener in my hand.
“I am who I am.”
“Yahweh said that. Are you telling me you’re God?”
“So did Popeye.”
“Popeye said, ‘I am what I am.’”
“Same thing,” he says. “You try saying it.”
“What? I am what I am?”
“Does it make you feel like God?”
“No.”
“Too bad. Come on down. I have something to show you.”
I’m kneeling by the opening. I hesitate, then turn around and reach with one foot for the top rung of the makeshift two-by-four ladder bolted to the floor stud.
“You won’t need the letter opener,” the voice says.
Without thinking about it and without wondering why I’m not thinking about it I leave the letter opener on the hall floor and climb down the ladder.
The space is seven feet nine inches by eleven feet two inches. (I measured it when I measured the rest of the house.) In one corner a cracked wooden table stands missing a leg and in another a musty old golf bag lies on its side with golf balls spilling out. Both were down here being moldy when we rented the place. There’s also a burst bag of cement someone dropped through the trapdoor hole. The cement is caked from the flooding that still happens sometimes.
What is new is the opening in the end wall that used to be solid cinderblock. A cave mouth with mirrored letters arching over the top takes up most of the wall. The light is too dim for me to read the letters.
“I can’t see what it says,” I tell him.
“Next time bring a flashlight,” the voice says. I decide to let slide the implication of a next time. The letters light up as if illuminated by a light but when I look around I don’t see the source. The letters read, “Truth and What Is.”
“Are you ready for it?” he asks.
“For what?”
“Truth.”
I’ve been down here a few times crawling under the house to check the plumbing and look for termite damage, but the wall was always solid cinderblock. Now it has a cave mouth.
“In there?”
“Make you nervous?”
“Even more than you make me nervous.”
“You can climb back up to your office and I won’t bother you again,” the voice says.
“A nice way of saying I only get one chance at this.”
“I see why they picked you,” he says. “You’re quick.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.
“You’ll meet some in your travels.”
“All gods like you?”
“Would you rather I be a car?” he asks.
“A car? Why a car?” Not exactly a godly image.
“Why not? I could be a fancy souped-up DeLorean.”
“Back to the Future. How do you know about that?”
“I go to movies,” he says. “It’s just that I have to sneak in since I never have money for a ticket.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Am I?”
I pause, staring into the blackness of the cave. How can I not be curious about what’s in a cave that suddenly appears in my basement that a disembodied voice is inviting me to enter? If the purpose is to hurt me he could have done it in much easier ways.
“Are you going or not?” he asks, his tone giving me a shove.
“Okay, what the hell.”
“Not this trip,” the voice says. I don’t want to think about the implications in that answer either so I head into the opening.
At first what little light remains shows chiseled rock walls like the walls in the old mines in Joshua Tree. After exploring the first one Shay and I found with the flame of a cigarette lighter we never went anywhere again without flashlights. Now when I lose the last bit of light I promise myself if there is a next time with the voice, I’ll have one here, too.
Then in the blackness something strange begins. I’ve done three skydives over the years and now I start feeling the same falling sensation I felt in free-fall. At first I think it’s my nerves, but it gets too real to think so anymore. My feet are walking and I bump my head a couple times on rocks jutting down from above, but I’m also falling through emptiness. At least I am until I land sprawled face down on what feels like a rough rock floor.
“Bumpy arrival, but here you are,” the voice says.
“Where the hell are we?” I ask, less calm than I was before going into the darkness.
“I told you, not this trip.”
“Cute. But where are we?”
“That’s for you to figure out.”
“Is this place real?”
“Are you real?”
“I’m having these thoughts so at least my brain is real.”
“Thank you Mr. Descartes.” The voice says it with respect, for Descartes I assume, not for me.
“So since that much of me exists, there has to be some sort of reality.”
“Then what is it, and how do you catch a peek?”
“I’ve done philosophy 101 so I can play. Maybe it’s nowhere. Maybe the reality in my head is the only reality.”
“Ah yes. Is there an Absolute Truth behind your subjective truth? Is there a What Is behind what you perceive to be? Looks like you have your work cut out for you.”
“What’s that mean? How am I supposed to figure that out?”
“Try groping.”
The first chapter begins with the following dream sequence and the first evidence of Frank’s corrosive family ties:
I’m raw naked. Kids are pointing and laughing. The laughter sounds as if it’s coming through a long tube. I don’t have any way to cover myself. The hall stretches for miles. Gray lockers line each side, stands interrupted by gray cast-iron radiators. I can’t find my room and I’m naked in front of everyone.
Between two classrooms I see a door with no window. I pull it open and duck inside. It’s a utility closet. I yank the door closed, burying myself in its darkness. I feel around for a light switch but can’t find one. The spigot in the sink is dripping. The lock clicks. I grab the handle but can’t open the door. I yell for someone to let me out. I start pounding on the door and shouting that I’m locked in, but when I stop to listen I don’t hear a sound. The drips from the spigot are explosions in the silence.
I feel through the darkness for something I can use to pry open the door. I bump things that clatter to the floor. I knock over an uncovered can of something. Thick liquid splashes on the floor and spatters me. Now I’m standing in a sticky puddle. I ignore it. I can’t find anything for prying.
I pound on the door, then listen. I keep doing it over and over. I’m about to pound again when I hear the lock click.
The door opens and Rona is there. Her white dress glows as if the summer sun is a spotlight shining on her. The gossamer cloth clings to her, pushed against her by a light breeze. Her hair has the look of polished mahogany, gold flecks flashing over red-brown grain. Her jade-green eyes are translucent in the brilliance. I want to run to her and have her hold me but I’m naked in front of her. I cringe back into the darkness.
“You can come out now Frank,” she says, but I can’t.
* * *
The sun was still above the horizon as we crossed the shoreline already low in our descent. Whitecaps glinted silver along the tawny brown sand. The sea had seen it all and would tell anyone who took the time to listen but we left it behind to reach the land we knew. Still too soon for the twinkle of lights, evening’s gray shroud had just begun to settle.
With just a carry-on I caught the parking-lot shuttle to the bus stop, then the Santa Monica Blue Bus that stopped a few blocks from my street. I picked up an order of pad thai to make up for the airline food I hadn’t eaten and reached home in darkness.
I ate, then showered, then sat in my underwear with the towel over my head while I called Mother and Father. It didn’t matter if the towel muffled their voices. No one was going to say anything of consequence anyway.
“Oh that’s right,” Mother said when I told her I was home. “You were in Hawaii. Did you enjoy it?”
Anytime she asked about my life the question was yes-or-no and that was how she expected me to answer. She didn’t want to be bored by details.
I’d gone hoping I could handle a week of fun-in-the-sun and I enjoyed the glistening teal of the days. But at night the clubs were crowded and loud, a dark muddy brown, and I didn’t know what to say to anybody. When I found myself sitting alone at the bar, my fingers making cat’s cradles without string, I knew it was time to go back to my room. It didn’t matter though. The mystery I’d found at Pearl Harbor had opened up the ageless indigo of World War II.
Father, typically, used what he could for ammunition.
“If you can afford to go to Hawaii when you’re unemployed, you can afford to come back for your brother’s wedding.”
I’d cashed in my credit card miles for a ticket to Hawaii before Jason’s announcement. I’d explained that to Father more than once but his strategy was to ignore what he didn’t want to hear. He’d make his point again in a different way later as if it was a fresh idea, but each time my red got darker like an old barn under the hot summer sun falling deeper into disrepair. I think his record was six. That happened eight years ago when I told him I wanted to move to California.
“Is Jason getting married again?” I asked.
“Don’t play that with me Frank. I know you too well.”
Jason and I were as different as two people could be. He was handsome, slick, and amoral, a tawdry gold. Still, people liked him, even women. He worked at a bank in charge of foreclosures. In keeping with the myth, I thought his name appropriate if you took “fleece” to be a verb.
This was Jason’s third wedding and I’d been to his first two. I promised Father I’d make the fourth.
That night I had the dream. The school in the dream wasn’t the one I was going to for my writing class. With cast-iron radiators and inside halls, it wasn’t a Southern California school at all.
The last chapter begins with another dream sequence, intimating how much Frank has changed over the course of the book:
Rows of gray lockers separated by gray cast-iron radiators line the halls. The classroom doors all have large glass windows. Some of the doors have teachers standing by them. The halls are crowded. Each face I look into appears as a glass shell with a mirrored back. I see a reflection of myself inside each of them.
Each hall has more halls branching off at odd angles. The lights overhead dim and brighten. The occasional window looking to the outside only shows blackness.
I turn a corner and meet Rona. Looking at her, I see myself.
“Let’s use this room,” she says.
She opens the door and holds it for me then follows me in. When she closes the door the back side of the glass window is reflective. I see myself, a mirrored shell like everyone else. Looking at my reflection in the door is looking into two parallel mirrors reflecting each other. The view reaches to a depth that isn’t there. I feel the awe of what I’m seeing.
Rona goes to the blackboard, picks up a piece of chalk, and writes, “No lock is real. No door is locked.”
“Have you learned the lesson yet?” she asks. “It’s the lesson you taught me.”