A DARKNESS PALE

RUMMAGING

…Irie feeling like she was going out of her mind went on a major bender and found herself at the apple orchard where she grew up, and found her father had tried to recreate her childhood home in a storage facility where they used to keep all the apples…

Rummaging

Portland was dark. When Irie arrived home from the Source Orchard she lit an oil lamp and tried not to drop it, and sank onto her couch and almost began to thaw out. She was still trying to make sense of what she’d discovered. She tried again. What was going on with her father? What had he been up to with the Source Orchard? All those years ago he’d come to her to give her the Source Orchard. Her whole adult life he was a bad guy, but bad guys didn’t didn’t do things like that. Bad guys didn’t care.

According to LIFE NOW, there were no bad guys or good guys, there was only community. Bad guys were actually just people with needs that weren’t getting met. Getting those needs met was their responsibility, and the responsibility of the community. Her father wouldn’t be considered a bad guy anymore.

He told her he loved her. Not directly, but that was the intent. He’d been drifting, she understood that now. He wasn’t crazy. How could love a mistake? If it wasn’t him, it was her. There was something wrong with her. She was staring at some boxes of personal possessions stored behind the clothes rack. Irie noticed the flaps of one of the boxes was ripped off with some of the contents littered around it.

Toula must have been rooting around. When. What for?

Irie pulled the box out and rummaged around. She found no answers, but she did come up with something she hadn’t seen or thought about in years. That little book, The Little Book Of Tao, the cover now greasy and coated with dust. Irie clutched it and thought, time for more drink.

There was a spot in the neighborhood by called Orca 33. Irie took a seat at the bar. A card explained how they grew their own hops in a vertical farm. She ordered the house stout. It smelled right, and the first few sips melted the stale drunk she was surfing.

Irie raised her glass to Toula. For better or worse, here she was. She flipped through The Little Book Of Tao until she found the shit about Wu Wei. Inner nature.

“This is good shit,” she told the bartender, and ordered another, though that meant she wouldn’t be able to afford Tasti until her next paycheck. Irie tried to contemplate. inner nature. It still made no sense.

“Hey.”

A blonde girl invading her personal space. She was thick and shapely and sported a nicely articulated Twiggy hair cut that made her sapphire eyes and rosy cheeks pop like they were infused with neon.

“Sorry if you were in the middle of something, but would that little book have anything to do with Taoism?”

“Yeah,” Irie said. “You want it?”

“Really? No shit. That’s so cool.”

“For sure,” Irie said. “I think I’m done with it.”

The girl slid onto the barstool next to her. “Thank you. Let me buy you a drink.”

She signaled the bartender who gave her a wary look.

He asked Irie, “She giving you trouble?”

“On the contrary,”Irie said, “She’s buying my stout.”

The girl gently shook a glass and said, “And I’m just sipping tonight, Carl. I’m chill.” To Irie she said, “Sometimes I get kinda fucked up and kinda go out of my mind. I drink vodka mixed with caffeine. I call it mudka. It reminds me I’m alive, which is exactly what those hipster Moluxhc twits in the lounge don’t like.”

Irie looked around. “You don’t dig Moluxhc?”

“Do you?”

“Fuck no. Never did it for me.”

The girl shivered with a disco radiance. “It’s like that Life Now bullshit. Fuck that. Be alive. Be confrontational. It’s always you and the other, you know? And you’re fucking going at it. That’s what creates real community, you know what I’m saying? We’re not where we’re at because of solar storms, it’s because people aren’t respecting the equation.”

Irie said, “I think I like how you think. But, the law is the law.”

“The law wants everyone to be everyone for everyone. Fuck that. How do you fuck like that? That’s not fucking. It’s not tantric fucking, and Taoism. Right? You know what I mean, right?”

For a second Irie saw Evie naked against her red sheets, cupping her hands behind her head and spreading her legs wide. She had a feeling this girl’s rosy cheeks would glow in the dark. Irie shook her head, her warm buzz suddenly replaced by a weariness which filled her like cold, dirty bath water. She knew, sitting in this bar, looking at this girl, she’d never get the buzz back. She knew with a certainty she very seldom possessed. Gone, and the drink was done.

…Irie will be reminded of what salvation really looks like…