Chapter 18
Luke’s younger brother Trent and his girlfriend Debbie sat in the quaint living room with Mrs. Coppens. It had been a typical Wednesday night for them. I had walked in with my journal in my hand and almost immediately, upon noticing it, Trent asked if he could see it. You see, he was a writer too. I passed it to him cautiously (for I had let him read from it before in California), and he leafed through some of my fresh pages as Debbie sat beside him on the couch. Debbie smiled uncomfortably at all of us.
“If you really want to take your writing seriously, you shouldn’t show it to anyone,” Trent handed the journal back to me.
“What? Why?” I was confused by this.
“That’s what I do. I covet my stuff and keep it from everyone, even Debbie. I’ll continue to keep it from everyone for the rest of my life, until I am old and I can’t write anymore.”
“And then what will you do with it?” I asked him.
“Burn it!” Trent said aloud with animated affirmation, looking up at me with his thick brown curly hair and his heavy eyebrows. He had a serious look on his face, but this was Trent. He might just as well be joking with me; one never knew what he was really thinking.
The Kansas nighttime warm wind blew in through the screen door beside me with a rush. Averting Trent’s funny look, I perplexedly turned and looked out through the door and immediately turned my focus to the large thermometer attached to the porch beam that still read a humid eighty-one degrees. It was ten o’clock p.m. Even though it was late, the sunflower state still burned with a fever that wouldn’t let go. Beyond the thermometer I still heard all of the cicadas talking in the night, from the cornfields across Mrs. Coppens front yard all the way to the capital building. What Trent was saying to me was crazy.
Lucas kept a journal too. I had glanced through some of his stuff on Interstate 70 coming into Kansas as we drove into the cornfields. I read his notebook in the backseat of the Fairlane as our surfboard skimmed the tops of the rustling cornstalks, surfing toward Topeka.
Lucas wrote of other worlds, other realities out there, on the “other side of the mirror,” as he put it. There were multiple planes of existence, he felt, and our present world was only one of those many places; these other planes that were out there were a mere half turn away of the Great Creator’s socket wrench. We just couldn’t see them, he said, for they existed in another entire dimension. Because of this, these worlds were inaccessible to all who walked among us, layered right over our own world. These different planes took up our same space with other selves living in these other planes; they were just a torque or two off of what we were all like.
Luke’s stuff was deep. He had one story of these people from one plane of existence breaking through and coming into this new plane of existence. They traveled faster than the speed of light in several giant ships to get there. It was like bursting through a giant soap bubble. The problem was that when the fleet of ships broke the bubble to enter into the other plane, it caused an atomic chain reaction with the molecules of time, and the whole new world blew up. And there they were stuck in this postapocalyptic place, all of their ships damaged, and no way to ever get home. I thought about The Planet of The Apes movie where in that last scene on the beach, Charlton Heston comes up upon a half-buried Lady Liberty. It is here that he suddenly realizes he will never get home—because he is already on earth, but a future earth in another plane of existence, with everyone that he knew gone.
Lucas had another story about the clash of what he called “The Givers and the Takers,” a story about two nations going to war.
“It was like two tribes existing in two totally independent worlds,” he said, “until the day that one of those tribes discovered the other. You see, the Givers lived in balance with nature and the earth, while the Takers consumed everything and slowly were exhausting the staples of the earth. The Givers were very spiritual, living large and telling great stories around the crackling campfires of night, retelling the great feats of their ancestors. The Takers were materialistic; they came to the Givers’ world on great ships, and tore through the land in search of the most valuable resources to send back to the motherland. A great war ensued, and the Takers, victors, forced the Givers to assimilate to the customs of the Takers. And then everything was lost.”
“Are you comparing this to the story of America?” I asked him.
I wondered if the warm winds that blew outside in the Kansas night still carried with them all of the stories of America’s past. I imagined the great warriors of the plains whispering on the winds of eternity, with invisible echoes of crackling campfires beyond the rustles of the cornstalks. The wisdom from great thinking minds, stories that had never been printed on a page, still rustling on these winds; perhaps they hadn’t been lost forever.
“We’re still taking,” Lucas said to me.
The great nations of the plains were gone. These were great civilizations, civilizations of America’s past that stretched down across our beautiful continent and blew into the ancient rivers of the Southwest, through adobe structures of hard-baked mud with outside ovens baking fresh tortillas. These were civilizations that fed into the jungles and cities of the Mayans and the Aztecs; this was our forever migrating humankind, stretching as far as the lands of the Incas of South America and beyond, but now, forever gone. I read that some were wiped out by the diseases brought by the Europeans; most were pushed out by the ever-advancing immigrant tide.
I thought about the great stretches of our continent from Kansas spreading all the way to the Hudson River and eastward, all the way into New England and the Merrimack River Valley, even.
In Lowell, it was Passaconaway, the great chief of the Pennacook, leader of the Pawtucket and The Wamesit nations, who was sheer legendary. He lived on that little island, Tyng’s Island, in the Merrimack River where Vesper Country Club now sits. They said there was never a bad thing written about Passaconaway; he was a saint, always working with the white man, well into his hundred years, just so his people could live peacefully.
I wished I was back there in Lowell during Passaconaway’s time just to walk around for a few days with him. I dreamed too about journeys throughout the native lands of the Hudson River Valley with James Fenimore Cooper’s Uncas in The Last of the Mohicans. It was really sad how much Native American history we had actually lost.
And this thing called human conflict was prevalent amongst groups of people everywhere throughout all of history, I imagined. My ancestors wanted the English out of their Ireland. My grandmother told me that the English owned all of the land, but they made the poor Irish farmers pay them ridiculous rent to use it. They were dying over there. Then came the Great Potato Famine, so they had to leave; it was called the great migration of the 1800s. Poor Paddy didn’t come to Lowell to conquer; he only wanted to eat again.
So the bloody English were to blame, my grandmother told me. Us kids had been told this our whole lives, just like what old Arnold, the Irish singer at O’Malley’s Irish Pub in Paradise Beach, sang every night in his closing song, “The Patriot Game.” It was the fault of the English all along.
“I would just burn it,” Trent said again above the whispering wind.
“But why do you say this, Trent?”
“For the sake of art, that’s all, Mike. For the answer to still be out there for someone else to look for. Lose your ego and burn it!”
Our America was in the crux of the Cold War now. There were two tribes, two superpowers, drawing lines in the sands of the beaches of the whole world. We were aiming missiles at each other, missiles hidden in the silos of Kansas; missiles to defend our freedoms and beliefs; missiles to overcome the enemy for the good of humankind.
I feared again that everything would be lost.