God grant me the strength

Always to embrace

Everything you give me

 

Saturday, March 28, 2009
Chapter 1
‘Upon Waking’

His eyes moved under lids that fluttered and subsided in little fits, like wounded birds wings.   
        "Gerry?"
        “He’s awake!” an excited but hushed voice called from the next room.  But Edith didn’t move from her place next to Gerry.  His eyes continued to move, and it even seemed to her that he was smiling, though the change was so subtle that it may have been her imagination.   
        In the corner of the room, fidgeting and frowning unconsciously while looking around at nothing in particular—anything but Edith and the man in the chair, whose forehead she was stroking—a delicately featured man waited painfully for some conclusion to this scene. 
        In the next room, a different sort of drama was unfolding.  Another young man, reposed in a chair identical to that of the unconscious man in the first room—except that he was held to his chair by powerful restraints that as yet no one had been able to remove—had awakened and was looking up and to the right, faintly smiling; his blue eyes were clear and bright but focused somewhere beyond the boundaries of the room’s walls.  The stubble on his face was still only a shadow of a beard, and his muscles showed no signs of atrophy. 
        “Hello.  Do you know your name?” 
        The young man’s eyes had come back to the room and his mouth opened and closed in response to the question, intimating some brief but infinitely important monologue in silence—for no air escaped—and so no one could tell whether he was answering them or asking a desperate question of his own. 
“Your name—do you remember it?  Hey!  Stay with us buddy.” 
        But just then a tumult in the next room put this development on hold.   
“Gerry!”   
“Give him a shock—can we get some help in here!”   
All but one man abandoned the blue eyed young man, rushing robotically into the first, almost identical room.  There was a moment of hushed, intense activity and then some audible sighs of relief as the forgotten overtone of cardiac rebellion subsided into ecstatic and regular blips.   
        But the drama was not concluded.  A loud swear suddenly sounded from the second room, and the relieved occupants of the first were stirred back into frantic activity—ants responding to a cosmic torturer.   
        “His heart just stopped!  I didn’t even notice right away because of all the excitement over there.”  
        More frantic attempts were made.   
        “It’s useless.  He’s dead.”  Silence.  
        “Does anyone know who he is?”  Another, longer silence ensued; no one knew much about Gerry’s activities in these rooms, and they were not obligated to sort it out.  It was a welcome diversion, but they were serious people with serious commitments, and they would not think too much about it.  
        “His name’s M—” she cleared her throat, “His name was Madison.”  Edith stood in the doorway between the rooms, chin lifted, eyes lowered.  The white noise of bustle and hushed conversations, noise that no one had been aware of, died, and everyone heard the change.  There was a sinking feeling, but sudden intense curiosity buoyed them up. 
        Edith was looked at more closely than before, and many seeming contradictions were reconciled in her face, a face so perfectly balanced that it seemed contrived until one looked at the guileless eyes; her mystery was understood as such: her surprising knowledge, her liaison with a man universally not comprehended, her face, her curvaceous body, her guileless eyes.     
        “So, Gerry discussed his research with someone after all?  I apologize.  You are familiar with the deceased?” 
        “I know his name and where he came from, but I’m not sure it’s any good to us yet.  We can’t exactly contact his…family, until we know what’s happened…and that…I—don’t—know.”    Meeting his gaze directly and chanting the final three words in a low marcatto, Edith seemed to grow suddenly older; then she lowered her chin a notch and calmed those momentary waves of emotion back into the ocean of her personage.  And this seemed to settle the matter of who was in charge and whether something must be done.   

Show Diary 
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Modified Arts

The show on Thursday was one of my favorites in a while.  The audience was graciously attentive, sound was good, and I befriended a couple of delightful bands, including 'The Autumn Film', from Colorado.  It was nice having some of the art pieces on stage along with mood setting candles, but the mood was really set by the people in attendance.  Also, I got to try out a new, unfinished song...'God in the 22nd Century' or 'Dr. Mann' or 'Alienation'...let me know which title y'all like best.

-EB

And that is how I awoke that day. I was more keenly aware from then on, of how parts of me awoke every day and also of how parts of me went to sleep every day. I think it happens to us all the time; we are constantly waking and falling asleep, dying and coming alive."

-The Narrator