Post 1

2009-08-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

Island of Sand

By Jack B. Wily

Island of Sand: Venus in the Sky, White Rose in the Sand

PLAN B: On the Edge of the Sea; They lit up the skies.

She was an old Thai woman, but she kept her hair in a bun and smiled at all the Golems who had walked by her life. She won. She had grey hairs, but they were kept in place. She knew somehow not to ever give disgrace to the Human Race… Her photo had been in the fix for quite some time, it never could be erased from Golem’s mind. She had developed more than much of her race, the race that people played, called the Human Race. She had come to expect that people played games with her, but like a palm, she bent, she flexed, she never broke…she thought of the birth control that she never had, the condoms spent. She lived like most, on the edge; yet, she saw more than most and knew a lot of things that the cubicle people never saw. The cubicle people had become a race of their own. It didn’t matter whether they were black or white, Caucasian, or Negro. Hispanic didn’t bother her. Spaniard, Mayan, it was of absolutely no concern to her. She was too old to harbor inhibitions. She rather hoped that before she died someone would give her a rocking chair, so that she could rest in peace…That is all she ever wanted. She never coveted the air conditioners that she knew of. She wanted peace on planet Earth. That is the only vision in her mind now.

Fiction is moral, but somewhere it got bent. A chapter fractured here and there, lines left out like a child missing a parent. Think orphan here.

Before the Earth was round, it was flat and it was known that a soul could fall off the edge. When the Earth became round, people forgot that the edge exists, that they may be standing on it as we speak. A story could be printed and received in 48 hours and a writer could stop off at the mall and be shot by a kid with an assault rifle and never see the story that she wrote in print.

He paused…it looked like nonfiction…yet, the world was becoming a place that made for better fiction with the passing of each minute…horror—the genre… Then again, a lot of things were starting to look like iguanas to him. He had been on the island for a long time.

In a story such as this, that at times appears to be so grim and broken hearted, it is necessary for a tad of author intervention at the very beginning. It is necessary to state that throughout the battle Jack B. Wily saw some almost imperceptible thing about his nation that was like a great love. Right up and throughout the end he hoped it would all work out. It was too great an idea to fail. It may be a requirement that the reader gives the story some faith of their own right up until the end. That they spread their wings like an Eagle and seek freedom and recognize that previously held beliefs can sometimes be shackles yet when an experience is absorbed the epiphany can bring something more than was there before. Be it a love of nation or another person it is sometimes necessary to make a journey to see one’s self. Like the fabled forty birds who upon reaching their destination found what they were looking for. Was Jack proud of his nation? That is something the reader can decide. There are forty birds making their way up a slope. What will they find and how many will get there?

Jack be quick … Plan B is nearing Earth.

CHAPTER ONE

Son of the Son and Sun in the Rocking Chair

Before Pot, it may have all started when Space Shuttle number 105 reported that it had sighted ants on the surface of the planet. Houston… we have ants. Copy. And then everyone in Thailand downloaded a picture of an ant. The thing is… these ants walked on water. They had long spidery-like legs that made them look like ships. They were photographing the planet. They were sent here. They were sent here to investigate the evolution of Venusians and Apes. It had all gone wrong when Cain screwed the gorilla. He was drunk. He had been sent out of the garden ... and he was lonely. The gorilla was good looking enough in his current state. The birth of a child was something that had not happened in the history of interplanetary travel. Half the crew was left behind all because Eve ate an apple and no one knew what happened to Cain. It was about two thousand years later but the ship had traversed galaxies and returned. They didn’t like what they saw. These inhabitants of planet Earth were investigating cloning. Soon they’d have all the powers of God. They’d have the power to create life. And they wouldn’t know that they had initially been clones themselves and currently were working on making their own clones. These ape-like Venusians, half Cain, half ape on Earth could even use these clones to explore another galaxy and certainly would, if they were not destroyed. The inhabitants of the mother ship found it somewhat amusing that a bunch of clones on a ship of their own were now discussing the moral implications of cloning. God had decided long ago that it had been a big mistake. But he had as consolation the fact that all of this stuff on Earth was in the image of God and in fact they were the shadows of the Venusian spirit mind.
Before Venus got too hot they had developed 3-D entertainment for their own kind. The soul without a body could project images in three dimensions on Earth and change the plots of their imaginations at will. They created their own stories. They had a lot of fun at this. Their projections felt pain, reacted with artificial intelligence, displayed emotion, all the things that a pure spirit could never experience, and of late the empire had even started allowing trips to Earth by Venusians in special suits that they called body suits. This allowed the Venusian soul to experience the perception of life in a three-dimensional world with orgasms and all of the sensual pleasures that were not possible in the present climate.

What Bill Brigs did (A skier of wild unopened mountains) was open people’s minds: “Risks are a part of life. For me it’s why I am here. Jeez, it’s to have some adventure. It’s tough when you are alone. You dream of what you want to accomplish in your life and I don’t know how many people get a chance to fulfill that. It was beautiful, the mountain combined with human tracks. You can live your life like a lamb or you can live your life like a lion. You feel you are a very little thing in a big universe. If you do something wrong the mountain could be fatal.”

The problems continued on, however, because some of the humans were actual physical beings created in the image of the pure Venusian, before corruption created almost a different race of them, and thus had to interact with the virtual projections of adult and child Venusian spirits, who were just, in their minds, having fun. Venusians who played these virtual games with Earth thought it was all some sort of electronic game and no one ever did get hurt. They didn’t know—some of them, that when they chose to watch a natural disaster that a lot of Ape Venusians really did die. And there was also a sect of rebel Venusians who from their ship enjoyed watching real pain.
Golem, with a large percentage of spirit genes was pained as were all humans who lived through war, natural disasters, politics, and other childish games. Golem was enough of a soul that when he saw a person trampled to death in a Wall Mart, by others rushing to by HDTV’s, he could see it was a mistake, while this sect of rebel Venusians delighted in the game. Hey, look what I did, was all an undeveloped Venusian spirit said when he put super cheap TV’s in stores as bait.
There was a war going on in outer space that mankind was not aware of, though was a part of. The really good Venusians were nearly perfect. The really bad ones were oh, so imperfect. The really good Venusians wanted to solve the problems on planet Earth. The evil sect rather enjoyed the carnage and even had suggested Plan B—the plan to eliminate all life on planet Earth.
The God sect was looking at a plan He called it Plan A. That was a sort of another Noah’s Ark scenario to straighten out a bunch of stuff that had gone wrong before colonizing planets and establishing life on them was abolished. No one ever thought to think that Eve would screw with Adam. Millenniums in the past men had been so careful not to bring back any contaminants from the moon, and then all of sudden there was sex with creatures found on other planets. God. Who would have thought that clones created in the image of God (shadow) would sleep with the apes and create a semi-intelligent race? Even God now thought of Earth as having been a mistake. He had allowed them to eat meat before He left. Let them eat the animals. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. The group had to be left on Earth, Cain sent out to multiply, and there hadn’t been any viable alternative at the time. Earth was the planet that was supposed to provide an environment to save the Venusians as Venus got hot. And to think that these humans were now contemplating inter-galactic space travel and the creation of clones in the image of themselves. They were even selling their eggs on the internet— a record of the human race not so unlike the Akashic Record of Outer Space—but lately Golem had come to think that we were the Akashic Record. They either had to improve or be eliminated, and God was thinking every minute of whether Plan A or Plan B should be used to correct a situation that had gotten out of hand.
What bothered Golem most was that he Foundout that we were clones. And lately he was gathering evidence of a fourth dimension; THEY were coming back to right a wrong. The production of clones in the cloning factory, the inclusion of a human soul, a cerebellum, a tree of life; the Bird Venusians hadn’t counted on that. The seven fallen angels. Stuff like that. Now these humans wanted a life of their own, and a few from the mother ship had given it to some. At first, everything was under control. The clones agreed to care for the ship, provide comfort to the Birds, allow them to live in the Garden of Eden. Met their every need. But then, some of them learned they were alive themselves and had a soul and they had to let them go. Cain jumped a trench and went out to populate the world, in accordance with the plans of the spiritual Venusians. He didn’t want to go at first, but they gave him a mark, circumcision and told him he’d be protected. Everyone would want to kill him he said. Especially, those without a cerebellum who still defended the original plan and claimed that it was wrong for people to build a tower of their own. Those who believed we shouldn’t know, were programmed to think along those lines, followed their DNA, inserted in them by the Birds. Some of them would continue to follow the plan … seeking to kill and hide knowledge, seeking to thwart people from coming together, seeking to promulgate war, refusing the reconciliation of Israel and the Middle East out of greed, and the concealment of a plan.

What if people worked together and stopped causing pain. Golem was convinced that this was the plan of success;

people all over the world caused themselves more pain than any disease or natural event. Why is it that each day a lot of us get up seeking peace, a pleasant day, and some get up and kill another, or destroy infrastructure that causes famine, death, destruction? Golem had often wondered in his life about this thing … this self-inflicted pain of people against people when we should be on the same team.

RULE # 1 If the destruction of a nation is the ultimate goal, cause the people to be divided. If the ultimate destruction of the human race is the goal, cause the world to fight amongst themselves. Split them up in impossible to reconcile configurations. Confuse their borders. Sooner or later the tower will fall.

He lifted off the bed, worried about hitting the ceiling fan, went out the window, above a slanted, shingled ledge that dropped off onto a noisy, bustling street below not unlike those in the story The Streets of San Francisco. “It’s not a suicide,” he yelled to those on the ground. He floated up above the tiles, for a moment he thought he’d lose his concentration and his power of flying, and then floated back into the room. He considered for a moment the Earth had lost its gravity, but he had flown. It was as if he had turned off that physical quantity, and as long as he let it, and didn’t think he couldn’t do it, he could float up and over the city. He was timid as he went out the window and for a moment had considered falling, but he returned to the state that allowed him to float. It was a very real dream, he remembered every detail. But amongst his dreams was one detail that never left him—we were clones. The proximity of the antenna to the hut on the sand … if not for that he may never have known. It wasn’t in the cards for clones to know they were clones, as they explored the universe on a planet, ship with an everlasting food supply. Yet, he was still human and at times figured it must be in jest, and at times while in another state of mind he’d reflect and try to tell a lie to himself to make himself feel easy—

And then, on return from his morning walk on Saturday they saw a mark on the street pointing to the right and further on there were two—pointing left and right and a bit later they saw a solid line. It was then that they realized that these symbols were there to guide the ant-like ships in. They would land in Bang Saen and from there spread on opposite sides and take over the world horizontally. They would split up at the second mark and then when they saw the solid line lift over the sea on one side and the hills on the other and take the world by surprise. He knew immediately that he had to get the story out—

On second thought, it might have been the vodka that made them think that the right turn arrow and then the left turn next to another right and then the crosswalk further on were actually some sort of guidance as the engraven air fields seen from the sky in other parts of the world. It may all have been a mistake. But it was fun. The islands always were.

But on the last trip to Koh Chang there had been surveyors walking around the huts. They were photographing the beach. They were sent here. The camera flashes still made a slight digital-like poof as they photographed the surface of the sand and looked through little lenses set on tripods, and they were careful with their words when Golem asked them about their ‘plan’. But Golem knew the end was near and the next morning sat on his bungalow porch and felt a twinge of fear. He glanced over at the couple next door who’d been coming here for years. He’d seen them when he came here on the last three trips. Dutch he thought. He thought about the little huts and the lives of four and a half billion people. You see … he had a little plan of his own.

When he came out of school the next day his helmet was covered with bird guano — it was then that he knew it was imperative that he find the place with no birds. The aliens were using them somehow as a part of their plan to end life on Earth. What was in the guano?

The lie never lasted long in his mind, never fooled those he told the story to. Never succeeded in allowing him to feel better about being a clone. At times he’d pontificate to friends his theory:

Did the devil win and were we alone? He’d tell them of the transfer of data back to an antenna on Venus, data transferred while we slept. He’d get up early to spy the planet and watch the horizon, and in doing so fell deeper into its trance. He’d tell people not to sleep, and speak of a battle long ago as Venus became hotter and Hell took over the world. The good spirited Venusians cloned themselves in their own image and planned to populate Earth, you see they had no three-dimensional sense of form or feel. Earth required body suits, into them were injected souls, but alas, that was not how people became to be cloned.
Initially, the devil cloned them to seek out good in the universe on a ship that the good Venusians themselves had created in goodness. The cloning idea was never supposed to happen, but when evil won, cloning moved along. When the clones found good, the devil destroyed it.
After the battle and the initial cloning the original pure Venusians saw that their only chance of survival was to inject their souls into some of the clones where they would inhabit Earth and await a second battle. The devil and God were warring; the human heart became the battleground.
The Venusians did not foresee the mating with the apes that would make man a combination of Venusians, clones, apes. DNA was mixed and began to inhabit the Earth. As the mother ship approached Earth, captains in command ordered the release of clones. Mutiny, calamity, things not written down, stories in the Bible approximating things unknown or too horrible to tell. Some Priests said to comfort the survivors, some initially wanted the truth. After the meteor struck Earth a thousand years later, there weren’t any left who knew the truth. Those on the side of evil took over God’s I.D., used it to become god themselves, replaced God on Earth with lesser clones of evil.

Let’s go back in time a bit and learn a bit about this devil. These were the winged Venusians, the bird-Venusians the regular Venusians called them. Wings were not what made the Bird Venusians unique. All Venusians had wings in the fourth dimension, though they could not fly on Earth and some thought the wings were imagined things, more projected from the fourth dimension to the third then real in the sense of the word. It was the beaks, claws, evil things that screamed, scaly fish-like skin. Hideous red bulbous eyes that burned flesh like the breath of a dragon through trickery of light, absorbing it in such a way to halt the projection from the mother ship. Claws with icy, rubbery pads on the bottoms of the sole. On a human soul they felt as frozen flesh, yet soft and grasping, they stuck to their prey through some sort of psychic force, and as a tremendous vacuum sucked out the good, leaving evil. Their excrement was digested good, broken into nothingness. They used a sort of antimatter-like force that annihilated good, scattered particles of it as if rewriting some concrete facts, making it out to mean the opposite. They caused confusion, using beautiful, soothing words.

Golem saw these Bird Venusians in the birds of Earth, thought of giant winged reptiles, flying, snatching life from the surface of the planet, before a meteor reduced them in size to crows, ravens, other things with tiny beady eyes that people praised as having beauty and singing beautiful songs; yet, Golem saw within a raven’s eyes a longing, a desire to eat him and a knowledge that these Ravens and other winged creatures had of their glorious past as much feared beasts, when they were much higher up the food chain and ate a lot of things that didn’t crawl on the ground and live under rocks, snails, slugs, worms; the biggest of their species now could eat a rabbit, carry off a small child perhaps. Golem saw in them, the Bird Venusians — an antimatter of good. They sing a pretty song; their eyes tell another story. What if they were big as small palms with foot long beaks, would we think they were pretty then? What if they ate people like ants picked off a lawn? What if we had to run from them when we heard a screech in the sky? These were the Bird Venusians’ physical form in a three dimensional world — projected from another place, shadows of the Sun.

Note: I really do think this is a likely scenario.

Golem read a lot of books on the Pyramids, how they were built, what they did and one day came to believe that the pyramids were built to detect changes in the structure of the Earth. Using their iron tips and tons of granite set on a granite foundation some one long ago sat inside with a plumb and waited for something to approach the earth. A meteor struck and wiped out the dinosaurs, another in 7000 B.C. wiped out a civilization, and this time they had built a structure and left it to humankind. They wrote that future civilizations should view the sky. Then something wiped them out. And people tried to figure out what secrets these granite goliaths contained. They tried to build ships as they were on a ship of their own, traveling through space, towards an unknown destination. Did their DNA contain memories of the past? Was their DNA the Akashic record of the past? Revolving around and around and moving through space, gathering knowledge for another race. He’d read that some thought that someone had told Noah that a huge flood was coming and that it was believed that a declinometer (a device used to measure changes in a magnetic field) had been developed that measured changes in gravitational force as a large object approached Earth. He wondered about this and then one day it struck him as he read that the inside of the pyramids looked like machines and sometime after that realized that the pyramids machine-like look and pictures of people holding plumbs could be explained by the pyramids themselves being the declinometer that was thought to exist.

Out in a desert a lion sat with huge granite structures and paws, waiting for impact. It closed its eyes when it was dark and sometimes a hundred years later opened them. Not many gave it a second thought now and probably wouldn’t until impact, when eyes would be on the sky in awe and fear. And eyes wide open closed again for years. Some would say that evil had been destroyed on the planet, yet a cycle of evil would begin again. The Bird Venusians told Noah they’d destroy the evil ones. What if all of us were evil in their eyes? These were clones; some of them had minds, would one day be equal to their creators. These slaves revolted.
Then two thousand years in the future past and present, flash drives would be recovered, new archeologists would try to figure out what had happened and a lion with wide open unafraid eyes, and huge granite structures would sit and wait for the next time. They may have grinned if grinning greatly wouldn’t give away the plan. And sometimes the lion grinned at those who he knew knew the plan, who sat watching them day in and day out, waiting for the next time when the eyes would close decades rest, commence and a sun disappear.
Or perhaps the sun would spit out a planet, radiation would mutate life on earth and millenniums later new people-like creatures would emerge, ready to once again try and figure out where we were going and where we had come from, concerned with today so much that the future and the past were forgotten. Where did we come from, why were we here, where were we heading? Golem wanted to know. Venus, once inhabited, created, then destroyed. Life migrating to Earth. Others watched reality TV. Golem knew his own reality.
Another galaxy exploring the universe with clones and ships of their own. Leaving just as the meteor approached. They knew. They knew what was going to happen. The people were becoming just like them. They would have all the powers that their galaxy owned. They would have ‘their’ wars ‘again’. They had light years to go before they’d rest and those on the ship were too old and weary for that.
Then their languages were confused and one day they woke up alone. If not for the Venusians they’d be simple clones killed off in a madman’s plan, without souls, without the tree of life in the back of their skulls, without knowledge, without knowing they’d been supporting a garden of eden with slave labor. If a few good Venusians had not deceived with a Trojan horse like plan—the evil bird-like Venusians. Now we had a chance to live.
Eons in the future these people on another plane and planet galaxy would realize their mistake and try to travel back to Earth to right a wrong. Out of the fourth dimension they would come to eliminate cloning in their past. They’d have to come back to the first time. The first time it was done and stop it. The father was engendered by his son.
Two galaxies trying to meet each other. Two galaxies as one dependent entity. Cloning had done that to them.

He made his way back to the Venusian Hotel on the beach of Bang Saen (a coastal town on the northern tip of the Gulf of Thailand) and wondered what exactly was going on. He knew he was telling a story—something as simple as that.
Somewhere an 87 year old man sat in a rocking chair and knew it was just that and grinned and sipped on a Singh Light beer. He had found the thousand baht that he was looking for and was happy, had been looking for something more, but then life rarely offers forth exactly what one is looking for. He kept it between the pages of a tourist guide. The old man knew that Golem was a fictional character in a book and that he could do whatever he pleased with him—but he had no way of knowing that Golem would one day cause his death—when Golem got out of the book and rewrote a lot of the story that is. The little guy even tried to tell people he wrote the book. And even Wicket tried to steal it. This old man knew better than that, or at least he once believed he did. In the end he wasn’t so sure. Why when all was said and done this Old Man created Jack—it didn’t seem quite fair. But he wouldn’t have to live with that. He was 87 years old when the story was done and he had been 87 many times before—The story was inscribed in stone. He thought of himself as a guy who would die in a rocking chair. And why did the story have to be inscribed in stone all the time. Couldn’t people just believe it the way it is? Another Old Man had inscribed the story in stone generations ago, and now it looked as if people didn’t exactly believe it anymore. The Old Man could pour out the Petri dishes and start fresh. And why not? If life on Planet Earth didn’t work out, why not start again. He was planning on checking up on the planet soon, and he didn’t like a lot of what he saw so far on the internet. He was pissed off just enough in fact to introduce Satin, and let him sort things out. He rather loved the beaches of Thailand and thought that these had been some of the really good things that He had created, but after that he thought there was a lot of evil, and when he thought about evil He thought that Charlie might like to take care of that. He had after all kicked him out of heaven and just now things were not going perfectly, so He considered an idea, and the more he thought about it, the more he thought that His plot might get Charlie back into heaven and that the initial kick in the butt might have been a big mistake. After all, no plan went according to all the little details written down. And if man had to eat meat, well then the animals were available to him. And God had eaten meat and found it delicious.

–it was this permission that God gave man to eat the animals after the seven parts of the comet hit earth that sounded like a compromise of sorts; one of many things that made Golem think we didn’t know the whole story. After the Noah’s ark scenario God suddenly told them they could eat the animals. It was sort of political in nature and it made Golem think. He didn’t worry too much about it until one day on the net when he came across a bit about the fourth dimension. In a three-dimensional world, objects, people even, cast a two dimensional shadow. In a four dimensional world objects when shone in the sun would cast a three dimensional shadow—hey, do you mean us? Are we some sort of 3-d playground for the fourth dimension. Are we something akin to 3-D projections. And if we are, are we all a bit too serious? Are we providing high-tech entertainment for the fourth dimension. Then he realized that we couldn’t see those in the fourth dimension, and he read a bit more. The blurb said that 3-D objects when viewed in the fourth dimension are transparent. They can see right through us, he thought. They know everything that goes on on planet Earth and we don’t know anything about them. It was perplexing and Golem felt a zit ooze forth on the tip of his nose. Man was created in the image of God, he thought. That’s a movie. We all play a part in the highest-high tech movie on planet Earth.

When Golem ate a steak he savored it. He knew of God’s plan, and he followed it and ordered a plate of asparagus to go along with the baked potato. Golem went after every vegetable in the dish and wanted more. In fact, one night Golem got so hungry that he scarfed down a portion of human meat. Charlie of course had put it on the plate, but Golem just sat and ate. He wanted all the protein he could get, because it was, after all, a long book and a book that was part one of a three part series.
And now what follows is a most obnoxious part of the story. Golem, well, I must admit it I suppose, ate a poodle. Please, do not be the first to cast a stone. He is brave now. A poodle in a story. But, he promised himself to tell the complete truth and the whole truth. And at times he told stories in jest. Golem, you see, was interested in story, nothing more, nothing less. But this poodle thing had to be addressed. Golem knew of a jackal that tried to teach a thing or two to the human race. And Golem claimed most often that dogs were actually smarter than people. They knew things that we didn’t and stood by our sides until death. They had more faith than Golem could remember, knew more of physics than the human race, yet golem had to tell the story straight. So … he had to give an understanding of the dog here. The dog, he thought knew of good, and had never tasted evil. Dogs knew of what or should be in your soul. Dogs were trusting. And as much as Golem loved them he could not write of or from a soul that loved dogs. He’d seen a lot of evil done in the name of a dog and humans using them to replace things that can only be replaced by a human and for and from a human soul, and he thought that dogs somehow had figured that out and that humans should take this wisdom from them. Because dogs knew how many times the earth had been destroyed and knew the reason why, and if there was no reason knew it anyway.

If God put a dog on a spit, Golem would have ate it. That is just how hungry he was. He would have picked the hair out of his teeth and laughed at the Iguanians, who as far as he could see now worshipped dogs more than they did God. And worshipping an animal had never been a part of Golem’s plan. When he saw all those things about dogs that were splashed on the silver screen, he changed the channel. It was just that any real dog long ago planned to give its life for a human one. And Golem rather thought that that was the real reason people loved them. They were man’s best friend; lock your dog and your wife in the trunk a car for an hour and see which one is glad to see you when you let them out. It was just that Golem did not plan to live his life according to this new dog dogma. He had no plan to be God’s best friend next to the dog. As much as he loved all dogs, he knew that people’s problems were wrapped up in themselves and not about a dog. It was not OK to blame the dogs for what was going on. He was so hungry for meat at the moment that he would have barbecued a poodle if he had seen one on the beach. With the proper spices, after all, a poodle was bred to be a roast; a poodle could make a good meal. Please remember, Golem was trying to bring people together, and there were Koreans in his class that saw dogs as creatures to eat. So be it. And Golem at this time in his life had a corrosive, gritty soul that liked to bite.

Ok, so it all began with an American chick in his class that had two poodles and then when Golem said he ate one once she thought it was rather trendy, funny and went with it. He had perverted her obviously. Maybe she saw her poodles as a food source now. He didn’t know. He never had coveted a poodle before. But then again a poodle would fit in his microwave. Maybe he could shave it first. Maybe poodles hid behind their hair. Maybe they really were delicious. Maybe they really were like chicken. Maybe a poodle with a bit of salt and pepper could address the world’s shortage of meat. After all, we could cultivate them and pluck the fur and serve them up for sale. Not a cow certainly, and certainly not a buffalo, but a poodle—it would be something new. And after all, why not? Americans sat with their snoozes in steak, while much of the rest of the world starved. Then they snickered and criticized populations that chose to eat dogs or octopuses or brain or tripe and laughed. Why not barbecue a poodle on a spit and get all the laughs out now?
At least if you have imagined a meal of poodle, you can rest assured that there is nothing so worse so horrible and scary than that in these pages—at least nothing from the third dimension. Rest assured you have tasted worse, and continue on … And all of this from a guy who could communicate with animals … a guy who really did love dogs, but who was disgruntled at having them shoved down his throat and up his ass as if they were the answer to complex problems — by a mass media gone mad. It may have been that buying sunglasses for dogs and keeping them in hotels was a bit much for Golem, who thought more of kids with bloated stomachs around the globe; — buying gadgets for dogs didn’t really turn him on. How did a nation once thought of for innovation become a nation that didn’t have anything more interesting to say than it loved dogs and on and on as if the dog was something invented recently like some kind of weird new toy? They even elected a President who had a child that was allergic to dogs, and now that family certainly had to buy one just to prove he really was an American. It was going to have to be of the hypoallergenic kind. That meant it was going to be a dog once designed to be a roast — that most wonderful adorable poodle kind. Nobel ideas? Where were they to be found?

And then there was, again … the plan to burn the bungalows down, the afore mentioned plan that may have led Golem to the Venusians in the first place. They were going to build a new hotel on the last open stretch of White Sands Beach on Koh Chang Island in Thailand. They had been taking photographs and surveying for a year now. It was only a matter of time before Golem would be homeless. The Prime Minister of Thailand had bought up a lot of land and magically enough, out came a plan to turn Elephant Island into one of the main tourist islands. A lot of people were making a lot of money on the deal, but Golem mourned the day when the bungalows would burn. He sometimes thought that if anyone was going to burn them it should be him.

Dear Diary-

I learned today that all of us are clones that mixed with apes. We were sent on a journey to record and transmit information back to a civilization that no longer exists. In other words, we do not have a purpose. The last meteor to strike Earth destroyed 99 percent of us, the rest of us are circling the sun, transferring data to a location on Venus. The data banks are huge. Venus is a dead planet. We are alone. Each vision and thought recorded on the mind of God, the Akashic record, never to be read. I think it is imperative that we read ‘ourselves’.

(Golem didn’t as of yet know the whole story—he hoped.)

Golem thought about three horns coming together and Israel deceived by a land with a huge army, an alliance. He came to think that the situation had to be corrected. Israel was out of its UN borders, the US was fighting a war for them, and many in the current government of the United States had dual citizenship with Israel. There was a lot of money in the story. And Golem thought that until Israel left the occupied territories all together that the US would not be able to defend them through a morally correct vision. Just what would be so hard as telling Israel to leave these lands and get back inside their nation? And if a comment like this is anti-Semitic, then no discussion can really be had, can it? –it is not an issue of Auschwitz, of previous suffering … it is an issue of right and wrong and currently we are in the wrong … Golem thought, when he thought of the Middle East, which plays a role in this story, since two different towers are down, and fighting still going on.

—Meteor strikes Earth, rest of story inserted later. They found the flash drive frozen in his hand. Thailand was in the north now. Archeologists deciphered the language… it appeared to belong to an advanced race. What had happened here? The first 36 pages were perfectly preserved. Then Golem’s heart began to beat again. Jack didn’t make it out alive. Golem didn’t mind.

Of course every story has a component that is about a human going through life, not knowing, or able to control most of the events that seem to come from cosmic forces, war, depression, good times, bad times, everyday life. And this story, at least initially is the story of the life of a fairly normal everyday sort of guy. Of course, this was a guy who knew that we were clones, and of a plan. But before that, he was, at least initially, just a human, not knowing much about life, life after death, or why we were here, stuff like that. A guy who one day got on a North West flight bound for Thailand and departed on a runway in Bangkok; not ever having seen a tropical island, a hut on shore, palm trees swaying, bikini-clad girls removing their tops on the porch, girls everywhere saying to him “I love you.” Taxi drivers slowing down each time they passed asking if he was in need of a ride. Girls with smiles wider, broader, like some sort of canyon in the middle of their faces, innocent, some not innocent, but how many of us are?

***

Colonel Pot, a cop on Elephant Island for a long, long time, examined the iguana and after that the actual diary and stopped at one entry as he considered what it was that could have driven Golem insane. Of course, at this time Pot knew nothing of Charlie.

Golem knew nothing of Charlie either, and therein lay the problem. At this time Golem did not realize that Charlie was doing the killing. He took responsibility for it himself as at this time he believed he was responsible for all the world’s problems—every last one of them.

Later he’d hear some words, and sometime after that, match them with a face and many years later realize just who it was saying the words.

“Look at your own hand Golem. You had a hand in the current situation.”
“What are you saying Charlie? The current state of affairs was caused by me?”
“I don’t even have to say it Golem. It’s what you think isn’t it? Just keep blaming yourself. We’ll get along just fine. Turn around Golem, I think I see a grain of salt on the horizon.”

When later he learned that Charlie had taken all the shots and taken out all the humans, he was chagrined and a bit more than a little bit relieved because for now he was staring. And what he saw was beauty, truth, and simple.

So deep was I in a trance-like state that sometimes I didn’t know if I could get out. I was trapped by beauty in nature; held prisoner in my own hammock. I couldn’t have imagined that so much of my time on the island would be spent mesmerized by these scenes of beauty. I couldn’t take my eyes off that painting. I didn’t know it at the time, but I may have been seeing a fresco in Arezzo, Italy. And some scene from long ago.
I would pay special attention to Venus this evening. It may have transferred something to my soul. Something had certainly been downloaded.

Colonel Pot looked at the package in his hands, and at the dead man in the rocking chair and at the live iguana peering at him with a flash drive in its mouth, and then at all the guano stuck on things. A few days later, he composed a letter. He did the best he could with his street English and used parts of Jack’s instructions as a crutch.

Deer Iguana,

I sending you manuscript on half of Jack B. Wily. It come in my hand in unortholbox maynner. He say you want synopsis tell you involved a plot. Kill 4 billion persons and to do save trillion and do that only justification could in end give for action. He say he think you understand and let know you it diamond rough way. It only story he written. He think you do to read middle to see thing he is got at. That gold not easy find as pot at rainbow. He say do say Jack put synipsis in letter cover attached to clover. It four leafs paper. Please do to excuse hole snippet. Show evidently of hashish oil residue in burn. I only old man island cop Thailand. This man Elephant Island last twenty-five years. He eighty-five day he dead, September 6, 2044. No one make claim body. You government no record existence. Ashes live shrine Bangkok memorial souls lost. He ask me close encounter act executer will and will hope to do that all money be pay The Iguana Bank account Thailand. OK if give number my account? Can us make some cash in good way like table under? Far as can know now here Thailand, name not Jack Wily now we unable to do identify. Let us do to know you wish buy to story. Some the money build bungalow complex Jack burns and will to do give family tourists he say have do be killed by acquaintance of him. He not know sure Seem to do think people living in he head. His family will to do to control other money. Please see attacked manuscript.

Col. Pot

Lt. Colonel Pot Cop
Island Police Box 21
Elephant Island
Thailand

(SEE NEXT PAGE FOR MANUSCRIPT)

As Pot licked the envelope he wondered if he was doing the work of a psychopath, a madman, and yet still he knew Golem. He knew Golem had done nothing wrong. Pot loved unspoiled beaches and cheap places to stay in. Much of the island he loved was now concrete with little walkways leading down to a narrow stretch of sand and not much higher than the high tide line, was a wall. Pot could remember when the beach was full of coconut trees and the sand glided gently down to shore and tiny waves licked the surface.

Still the Iguana was pissing him off with the way the stupid lizard stared at him as if he was the only human left on the planet. When he looked in the stoic lizard’s eyes, he saw some intelligence staring out at him, some intelligence that seemed almost human, like the eyes of a shaman even, some creature that knew the past. The lizard seemed to be watching him as if to say that it knew what was true and not. And at this point Pot felt complicity. He would drink a bit more whiskey this night than he usually did and smoke a bit of maryana. And damned if he could spell that word after the act.

-------------------------------------------

Address: Deceased Word Count 250,000
Email: Deceased Last Wish: Survival of Human Race
Contact: Golem

Island of Sand

A very personal note

Post 1