Good People are good ...right?

Written within the Baguas of feng shui are the secrets to organizing a life within nature. But what happens when you are older...when the future has scars of the past and memories loom large? How do you set your compass and sail off toward the life of your dreams?

The novel starts at True North with Mary Sue, a fifty-seven year old nurse listening to the sounds around her that remind her of water, a boat, a man who loved music and exploring, as she contemplates her upcoming marriage to someone new...

North:

Mary Sue’s Waistline

 SHE THOUGHT SHE HEARD THE ECHO OF THE ROPES clanging their hollow, chained song, whipping their masts, in a moored, bittersweet music, crying wistfully that all boats long for the sea. For a moment she wondered as she always did, if it was f# minor. If a heart had one sound, and if the sounds of the world fit into the octave of man, that was it for Mary Sue.       

    Not that she was musical or a musician, but she had picked out the key of f# minor as hers. “It’s Mahler’s 10th Symphony,” he had said when she came into the office and she saw him; a leather jacket, soft curling dark hair cut crisply, but touching his shoulders,as his head was thrown back, just a touch of grey with his feet up on the desk.

     Not bare feet, but shoes made of mercurial wings woven in a golden hue. She couldn’t remember the shoes at all actually. 

THE RUPTURED PRIVACY of his display of immersion in senses was hers to account for. He was available for office hours, she thought, but that meant he was in the room, as himself, doing his own things clearly. She felt the nakedness in her midheaven where her understanding lacked, and a supply of input roared into view.  Why would a “non-traditional” student come to office hours except to skirt the vibes, to test the differential, or to take something away? Even if she had a question, the weight of school loans on top of flimsy potential earnings collapsed her purpose in view of ease. She could hear her own heart beat in her ear. 

 “It’s so, so powerful.” She stammered, knowing she was staring and immediately felt like another word would have been better like: ‘elegant,’ or ‘dramatic,’ or ‘doing too much.’ “It’s that f#minor. It was never finished. And how can I..what can I do for you?  He put his feet down. Dr. Adam Haderix PhD, as the diplomas on his wall declared he was qualified officially to teach Spanish Literature, and could tell by the copy of La Celestina in her hand, that she was his student. 

His eyes caught the fear, the mystery, the broken shadow of each of them instantly seeing something like a door ajar to a world that had a familiar ring to it like running through grass to a coop for eggs in the morning..

And so really to skip what happened next, everything stayed attached to that chord in her mind. Everything. 

THE HAUNTING CHIME SOUND STAYED WITH HER as she watched the birds from afar from her porch.  She laughed out loud into the dry wintery air as she felt her mood shift with the cry of the nearing gulls that joined in the chorus of sound. It was getting windy.

   The irony of these water birds here on her landlocked property was funny to her, but only in the lexicon of her private symbolism.  Birds equaled Adam and loss. That sound of beachy birds got her every time. There was a pond nearby, it wasn’t a miracle. She was willingly transported into a daydream nevertheless. 

     “I see you’ve gotten over me….” a figure was tapping her shoulder and then laughing silently. As if one could transcend death’s wing-man, time. She could feel herself looking up, casting her side-eye at him though no one was there.

A cartoon figure with a scythe only seemed to have come across the field like a cloud’s shadow to sit next to her as a very real being. 

“Got a bagel to feed the birds? “ Why would she produce this hallucination, or this painful question? 

She saw as one sees with half-crossed eyes, a figure beside her with a smile produced by the laughing a person might fake to get a good photo, gesturing out toward the field grass. But Mary Sue did not feel afraid. She saw in this half light, the imaginary realm in her mind’s eye, where envisioning takes on the look of life; people who still live, people who almost loved you, who almost spent their remaining lifetime with the love of their lives, but went the wrong way because they got very turned around out there moving across that dark water, exist with you somehow in glimmers. Her heart seemed to stretch toward them, that quorum of remembered souls who for her were co-workers, family, friends, even customers. She longed for them and yet felt more unsure than ever if she ought to call someone just because she thought of them, not knowing if it might be right or wrong.“It isn’t right to wish for people, “ Adam had said. “You should only wish them what is right for them.” He was axiomatic, informative and curious. He liked objects: a scrap of coral, a replica of an antithykera cosmos mechanism, old doubloons, an alternator. He would have been drawn to the rain chain of dry, copper, cascading umbrellas and the sun dial bird bath. A loud gull squawked in threes. 

 IT SOUNDED EXACTLY LIKE A DISCARDED CHILD’S TOY TOP  that when pumped would spin with a tiny diorama inside of a beach scene and a white lighthouse with black stripes, red-and-white flashing lights,and metallic foghorn bells. It had been bought second-hand. It betrayed a whimper made larger-than-life with the pneumatic pumping of its red top that spun into a screaming hunger that bore an entire lifetime of feeling, yet was left like the carcass of a small mammal on the welcome mat which she flushed. Maybe there would have been a child for this toy.

   She felt a cry lodged in her throat. The sound that left the gull traveled on the air and particles of vibrating air went in and around her.The bird spoke in her stead, mournfully under which she imagined a lonesome player piano in a foyer playing f sharp minor, and how this was a half-life, unlived fully without them together. 

    He hadn’t texted in four months. It was nothing now but a regurgitated, discarded sack of blood and bones.  A dry bagel eaten alone on the dock by the waterfront. The feel of his hand in hers slipping out for the last time as he helped her cross over to the dock. He caught her gestures. He understood her nuances.  

  She missed him, and he came to her like this, in regret, very real regret. Regret not just for lost time, but time still passing. Time that she was certain would end with him leaving the world irreplaceably, bursting the bubble of his idea. Because Adam was Adam, he’d fall off a cliff, drown in a snorkeling accident, ski into a tree, or worse, die immobilized by a stroke alone in a hotel room. She worried he wasn’t loved, and then she realized he must be. He was magnetic for lovers. She didn’t know which was worse. Knowing he was fine without her, or gone. 

   And yet even this shadowy suggestion of his being itself in the form of a cloud was life-giving, induced future-thinking and made a laugh come up out of the damp worry of her chest, spreading a smile across her face. He was a paradox, and crossed all of time. The divine beloved, the eternal groom. All of the symbols clashed, birds-as-hope, light-as-life, and life-as-music.       

    All felt funereal instead, exactly as confusing as laughter mixed with tears, in the richness of light breaking through a storm in rainbows on fine grey mist, with music, in f# minor, probably.

    Yet as unreal as words are when trying to explain things, they suffice, because when it came to Adam, her heavy heart did unfold like this into a sunbursted day of light reading on the porch after all. He really messed her up when he left like that.