Thoughts and Ponderings

La ilaha illallah [Chapter 30]

2012-01-30T14:23:00.000-08:00

I'm posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 30:

Adam Hueghlomm had one brand new U.S. Army boot on the Baghdad road and the other one up on an ancient, broken curb. He wore the comfortable blue jeans and the loose gray T-shirt that he had on during the long flight over. He basked in the early morning desert sun, eating a spicy samosa — cooked potato cubes mixed with green peas wrapped together inside a triangular shaped, deep fried dough crust. He washed down the local snack with a small bottle of soda pop that was at room temperature. Even in early childhood, he had found that the two tastes complimented each other impeccably — spicy, fried eastern treats mixing together on his eager tongue with gulps of fizzing, sugary western soda pop. The label on the soda bottle admonished “Do Not Sell Individually.” He had bought it individually.

He knew that he shouldn’t be out here, but he wanted to see the city and the people. And he was hungry for spicy food, something that he couldn’t get in the troop mess hall.

The streets were beginning to wake up with hawkers, pedestrians and cars. Hueghlomm finished his samosa, wiped his hand gently on the side of his pant leg and downed the remaining swig of soda. He looked about for a trashcan for the empty bottle, gazing around the concrete office buildings across the street, the mosque down the way, by the tall palm trees, through the alleys and curbs and all around the shops. No trash can.

Someone suddenly grasped his earlobe from behind. Hueghlomm turned sharply. It was a small, wiry old Arab man. The sun had turned his brown skin to leather and he had a wispy, gray beard under a prominent nose with flared nostrils. He was smiling ear to ear. His stained teeth looked like Stonehenge, large rectangles spaced far apart. He was wearing a black and white Palestinian headscarf. He held steady to Hueghlomm’s earlobe, pinching it painfully between his weathered thumb and index finger.

“Say ‘La ilaha illallah,’” the old man instructed forcefully. Hueghlomm stared at him dumbfounded, mum. The old man repeated, louder, “Say ‘La ilaha illallah!’” It was an Arabic phrase, a basic article of faith in Islam that translated into “There is no god but God.”

Hueghlomm muttered the words, gazing wide-eyed and stunned at the old man grasping his earlobe. The old man insisted in heavily accented English. “More loud!” Hueghlomm repeated himself, louder. The old man laughed a hissing “ha, ha, ha” full of mischief and dirty jokes. His breath rasped with tumbleweed dryness, his sharp, pinpointed eyes were twinkling desert stars. He let go of Hueghlomm’s ear and handed him a small loop of prayer beads. The white string was flimsy, but it held the plastic, neon-green beads well enough.

Recovering, Hueghlomm thanked the old man in Arabic. “Shukran.”

“Journalist?” the old man asked in splintered syllables.

Even though Hueghlomm had gone out of his way to dress unobtrusively, something about his carriage or demeanor must have betrayed his foreign upbringing. “No, not a journalist…just hungry,” replied Hueghlomm.

“My name Mohammed,” said the old man.

“Adam,” said Hueghlomm, touching his own chest, pronouncing his name with the characteristic long “ah” sound at the beginning, the sound that his mother had always used when saying his name.

“Baba Adam,” the old man said, nodding approvingly, making reference to Adam, the Father of Mankind in the Quranic Garden of Eden.

“Why?” asked Hueghlomm, one palm facing up in the rising desert sun. Although he wasn’t explicit, the old man knew that Hueghlomm was asking why he walked about the streets of Baghdad grasping strangers’ ears, insisting that they profess allegiance to God.

“One day I die,” explained the old man. “I sick. I die and I come back. My wife, she hold my hand while it happening. I paining very hard, but then no pain, no any pain.” He moved his palms in front of himself, like a baseball umpire calling a player safe. “I see garden. My pretty mother,” he reminisced lovingly. “She sitting there. She make her hand to tell me, ‘Come, Mohammed.’” He moved his hands in front of himself, making inviting gestures. “My father, he also there.” The old man’s voice suddenly grew stern, “He tell me hard, ‘Go back! Your work still left to do. Not yet,’ my father say.” The old man raised his wrinkled finger and waved it side to side underneath Hueghlomm’s nose. “Not yet. I say ‘Baba, please, I stay with you.’ But he say, ‘Not yet.’” The old man stopped and swallowed. “Then he come and lift me and put me back to my wife.”

“Your father?” asked Hueghlomm.

“No, no!” The old man spoke like Hueghlomm hadn’t paid attention, like he had missed the entire point.

“The Prophet,” said Mohammed. “Prophet Jesus.”

Icarus Should Have Known Better [Chapter 29]

2012-01-24T03:39:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 29:

World Court
Eastern District, World Capital
----------------------------------------------- x
Creation

- v. – INDICTMENT

Creator,

Defendant.
------------------------------------------------ x

The Relevant Parties And Entities

1. At all times relevant to this indictment, a World Court Tribunal duly empanelled on or about July 4th, 2076, herein referred to as the “Tribunal,” was sitting in the Eastern District of World Capital.

2. At all times relevant to the development and issuance of this indictment, World Court, herein referred to as “the Court,” was the independent judicial branch of World Government. The Court was responsible for, among other things, the administration, enforcement, and adjudication of World Government’s regulations, laws and statutes.

3. At all times relevant to this indictment, the Lord (the Defendant) was the senior official of the Cosmos. In this position, the Lord oversaw the affairs of the Cosmos, including the making of all final decisions regarding rewards, punishments, circumstances and outcomes beset upon any and all life forms from Genesis to the Age of Aquarius.

Hear ye, the Tribunal hereby charges the Defendant, the Lord, as follows:

COUNT ONE

(Mass Infanticide)

On or about 1250 B.C., the Lord clearly stated intent to commit mass infanticide in or about the land of Egypt. Recorded conversations quote the Lord saying, in relevant part:

“For I will pass through the land of Egypt this night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt…” [Exodus, Chapter 12, Verse 12]

The Tribunal finds that, having stated a clear intent to commit mass infanticide, the Lord carried out his intent as stated. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And it came to pass, that at midnight the LORD smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon…” [Exodus, Chapter 12, Verse 29]

The Tribunal further finds that the extent of the infanticide warrants designation as “mass” infanticide. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“…for there was not a house where there was not one dead.” [Exodus, Chapter 12, Verse 30]

COUNT TWO

(Homophobic Genocide)

On or about 1900 B.C., the Lord sent two angels to Lot to announce the Lord’s intention to commit genocide upon the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Written records indicate that said angels conveyed the Lord’s intent to Lot as, in relevant part:

“For we will destroy this place, because the cry of them is waxen great before the face of the LORD; and the LORD hath sent us to destroy it.” [Genesis, Chapter 19, Verse 13]

The Tribunal further finds that the Lord targeted Sodom and Gomorrah for genocide because of the large number of homosexual residents in said cities. Written records of the Lord’s conversations clearly corroborate the Court’s finding. These conversations include, in relevant part, the Lord stating his reason for destroying both cities as:

“…Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous,…” [Genesis, Chapter 18, Verse 20]

The Tribunal further finds that the Lord tangibly acted on his aforementioned intention to commit homophobic genocide. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“Then the LORD rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.” [Genesis, Chapter 19, Verses 24 and 25]

COUNT THREE

(Felony Animal Cruelty)

On or about 2500 B.C., the Lord clearly stated his intent to perpetrate an indiscriminant mass extermination of all living creatures upon the Earth. The Tribunal considers the resulting extent of animal deaths sufficient evidence to support the charge of felony animal cruelty. Records of conversations quote the Lord stating, in relevant part:

“…I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.” [Genesis, Chapter 6, Verse 7]

Further, the Tribunal finds that the Lord’s weapon of mass destruction was intentional flooding with the intent to induce mass drowning. Records of conversations quote the Lord stating, in relevant part:

“…I shall cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.” [Genesis, Chapter 7, Verse 4]

The Tribunal further finds that, having stated a clear intent to kill and having selected a weapon of mass destruction, the Lord acted on his intent. The act resulted in uncountable animal deaths. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth…” [Genesis, Chapter 7, Verses 21 and 22]

COUNT FOUR

(Conspiracy to Violate Resolution 786 (** see note below for summary of Resolution 786))

The Tribunal finds that the Lord conspired to violate Resolution 786 in his interactions with Pharaoh Ramses. On multiple occasions, the Lord sent Moses and Aaron to the Pharaoh to make requests that, if denied, would result in negative consequences for the Pharaoh. On each of these occasions, the Lord himself caused the Pharaoh to deny the request. He then proceeded to punish the Pharaoh for the denial.
Records of conversations between the Lord, Moses and Aaron reveal the Lord’s conscious intent to conspire to violate Resolution 786. These records indicate, in relevant part, that the Lord said to Moses:

“Thou shalt speak all that I command thee: and Aaron thy brother shall speak unto Pharaoh, that he send the children of Israel out of his land. And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiple my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt.” [Exodus, Chapter 7, Verses 2 and 3]

Written records indicate that the Lord then executed his stated intent as he directed Aaron and Moses to, on multiple occasions, ask the Pharaoh to allow the Children of Israel to leave Egypt. Upon issuance of each request, the Lord himself caused the Pharaoh to be unable to grant the request. Records indicate, in relevant part:

“And he [the Lord] hardened Pharaoh’s heart, that he hearkened them [Aaron and Moses] not; as the Lord had said.” [Exodus, Chapter 7, Verse 13]

“And the Lord hardened the heart of the Pharaoh, and he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had spoken unto Moses.” [Exodus, Chapter 9, Verse 12]

“But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go.” [Exodus, Chapter 10, Verse 27]

The Tribunal further finds that after the Lord ultimately allowed the Pharaoh to release the Children of Israel, he again violates Resolution 786 by causing the Pharaoh to follow after them, resulting in a measurable detriment to the Pharaoh’s personnel and material resources. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And I will harden the Pharaoh’s heart, that he shall follow after them…” [Exodus, Chapter 14, Verse 4]

** Resolution 786 was unanimously passed by the 7th World Congress on May 7th, 2063. The resolution strictly forbids unsolicited extramortal interference in human affairs, especially that interference which does or may produce negative outcomes for the affected human or humans.

COUNT FIVE

(Multiple and Varied Violations of Resolution 786)

On multiple and varied occasions throughout human history, the Lord knowingly and deliberately violated Resolution 786. The Tribunal finds that on or about 6000 B.C., the Lord placed a snake in Eden and allowed that snake to entice Eve into violating an agreement that she and Adam had entered into with the Lord. Upon learning of said violation, the Lord immediately initiated strong and permanent punitive action against both Eve and her mate. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And the Lord God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.” [Genesis, Chapter 3, Verse 13]

“And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heal.
Unto the Woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
And unto Adam he said, Because thou has hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life;” [Genesis, Chapter 3, Verses 15, 16 and 17]

The Tribunal further finds that on or about 5980 B.C., the Lord’s disrespect toward Cain’s offering precipitated the first murder in human history. Written documents indicate, in relevant part:

“But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.” [Genesis, Chapter 4, Verse 5]

The Tribunal further finds that as a result of the Lord’s lack of respect toward Cain’s offering, Cain was moved to commit the first murder in human history. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.” [Genesis, Chapter 4, Verse 8]

The Tribunal further finds that on or about 1800 B.C. the Lord did consciously sow division and discord amongst the peoples of the earth, and did consciously thwart their desire for human unity, and, further, did consciously make more difficult humankind’s technological progress by scattering humankind about the earth and by purposefully confounding their language in an effort to make intergroup communication and collaborative research more difficult. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” [Genesis, Chapter 11, Verse 1]

“And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound the language of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” [Genesis, Chapter 11, Verses 4 through 9]

The Tribunal further finds that on or about 990 B.C. the Lord did consciously and intentionally induce David to number Israel. Written records indicate, in relevant part:

“And again the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them to say, Go, number Israel and Judah.” [II Samuel, Chapter 24, Verse 1]

Written records further indicate that when David completes the numbering of Israel, as he was moved to do by the Lord himself, the Lord then selects and imposes punitive action wholly non-commensurate with the alleged offense. Specifically, records indicate:

“So the Lord sent a pestilence upon Israel from the morning even to the time appointed: and there died of the people of Dan even to Beer-sheba seventy thousand men.” [II Samuel, Chapter 24, Verse 15]

Considering the totality and the gravity of the charges noted herein, the Tribunal provides the Lord a Period of Grace not to exceed ninety (90) days to answer said charges, after which time the Lord is to be summoned for a fair and speedy Inquisition.

Respectfully submitted:

Adam Hueghlomm
_____________________
ADAM HUEGHLOMM
Special Prosecutor, World Court

Noted, Approved and Entered into Docket:

Thomas Torquemada
________________________
THOMAS TORQUEMADA
Inquisitor General, World Court

If You Wanna Be Good, Make Someone Bad [Chapter 28]

2012-01-21T03:36:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 28:

Platoon 110 had just returned from patrol. The teenagers sat around on the cement floor of a large, empty aluminum airplane hangar. The sun glared outside. The air inside was parched. Large pedestal fans stood at each corner of the open hangar, pushing dry air across the soldiers as they sat here and there in their T-shirts and combat pants, cleaning their weapons, open water canteens standing next to each of them.

“Hey, you hear the one ‘bout the two gerbils walking by the fag bar?” Lee made sure that he spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. Baker looked up at Lee with a smirk on his face, anticipating a crude punch line. “Yeah, the one gerbil said to the other, ‘Hey, you wanna go in there and get shit-faced?’” Harrrrrr, har, har! The young men laughed raucously, rocking back and forth, looking at each other through tearing, squinted eyed. Lee turned, laughing, to see Lamech’s reaction. Lamech was peacefully cleaning his weapon, ignoring the jokes and the ruckus. The laughter slowly subsided in a rolling chorus of sighs and “Oh, shits.”

Lee waited a minute or so, wiping the barrel of his weapon with an oil-stained rag. “Yeah, Lamech, my man….” He didn’t complete the sentence, sounding as if he couldn’t think of how it should end. He ran a bore cleaner through the open end of the long gun barrel, then held the hollowed cylinder up toward the ceiling light, peering through it with one eye closed, inspecting the inside for dirt. “What I wouldn’t give for a whiff ‘a pussy,” he finally said in exaggerated wistfulness. He paused, put down his weapon and faced Lamech, straight-faced. “But then you wouldn’t know much ‘bout that, huh?” Lee and most of the other teenagers burst into a second round of schoolhouse laughter. The loud barks bounced off the stiff aluminum walls and back onto the hard, waxed floor, drowning the fans’ electric hum.

Lamech continued to avoid sight of his tormentor and focused on cleaning his weapon. “You’ve got major issues, Lee,” he said.

“Yeah, but sucking cock isn’t one of them,” replied Lee, eyes squinted, clucking in laughter.

“Man, leave him alone,” Webster protested.

“Fuck you, Webster,” said Lee. “Don’t be protectin’ no rump ranger, man.”

Webster stood and tensed threateningly, his eyes as hard as nails, staring at Lee, pores simmering in rising anger.

“What?” said Lee, hunching his shoulders and looking around wonderingly.

“You been fucking with everyone steady, the whole time. Let people be.” Webster’s bright white teeth stood in sharp contrast to his dark face. He was the largest soldier in the platoon. His muscles, heavily packed and bulging through his T-shirt, hunched about his neck, turning him into a snorting bull.

“He’s just joking, man,” Baker told Webster, trying to break the tension.

“Fuckin’ with people ain’t jokin’,” said Webster.

“Let it go, guys,” said Lamech, softly.

“Shut up, faggot!” yelled Lee, darting a speared glance at Lamech.

“You shut up, redneck!” Webster barked at Lee.

Lee stood abruptly, his weapon dropping off his lap and onto the hard, waxed floor in a rattled crash. His eyes narrowed and his lips fumed, ready to form caustic words as the rest of the young men joined in bellowing their respective thoughts and stances on the current situation. The hard aluminum shell over them caught the cacophony of vicious bellows and roars and bounced them back into the floors and walls, turning the airplane hangar into a busy neighborhood bowling alley on Friday night.

“At ease! At ease!” First Sergeant Blake’s adult voice shouted from the adjacent Recreation Room, a tone of fatherly sternness soaked into his words. “This is clean-your-weapon time, not smoke-and-joke time.”

Mumbles and murmur.

“I can’t hear you!” First Sergeant called to them in an exaggerated, singsong tone.

“Yes, First Sergeant!” the soldiers answered in unison.

Look at That, Man! [Chapter 27]

2012-01-16T15:35:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 27:

Platoon 110 had trudged through the ancient orchards, passing through the dark night, crunching fertile soil and fallen oranges under worn and able combat boots. The soldiers’ gloved palms moved before them, pushing aside thin branches of fruit trees. They grasped weapon handles with their other hands, index fingers held over solid, black triggers. Their equipment was the same as on day patrols except for the rigid night vision goggles clinging around their temples and in front of their eyes, bathing the darkness in a grainy, pond-green.

The night insects remained undisturbed by the trickling drops of faceless, anonymous male forms as they quietly dripped through to the outer edge of the orchard. The forms stopped in puddles of shadowed patches, staring out of the darkness like a pack of hiding wolves huddled along a snowy and black tree line at midnight. They gaped across a softly glowing white-dusted road, at the silent grouping of structures on the other side. A long, gray cinderblock warehouse stood before them in the hard, dark shadows of the starry desert night, two smaller huts adjacent. The soldiers quietly listened to a soft murmur of masculine voices under the black-tiled roof of the warehouse, unintelligible babble skipping along the surface of the resting, night air.

“Man, this would be easier if we all spoke the same language,” whispered First Sergeant Blake to no one in particular.

“I wouldn’t want to speak their shit, man,” hissed Lee. “Everything they say sounds so fucking dirty.”

“Shut up,” said Webster.

They became quiet, watching, stalking, silent underneath a canopy of moonlit night.
A thin man dressed in jeans and a short sleeve shirt walked out of the warehouse and casually sauntered to one of the huts. He vanished inside for a few minutes and then came back out, joined by another man, taller and stockier, also in jeans. One of them spoke in a youthful, clear voice. The other replied in deep-throated, single-syllable grunts. They spoke a while, the smaller man gesticulating with his hands, the larger one grunting short replies, his block-shaped head nudging back slightly each time he opened his mouth to talk. The smaller man lighted a cigarette and said something quickly. They both suddenly laughed wantonly, strolling together into the warehouse. The soldiers of Platoon 110 watched the lighted cigarette tip move across the inked shadows in jagged swirls that abruptly vanished into the warehouse’s waiting darkness.

“Weapon’s cache,” said the First Sergeant. “It’s in the warehouse.” He raised a small pair of black binoculars that were hanging at his sternum and brought them to his tight, intent face, rotating his gaze slightly to one side and then to the other. “Poorly defended,” he concluded, and continued to assess the tactical scenario. “Two men, lightly armed at best. Content of huts, unknown. Lamech and Webster, suppress both huts with small arms fire. Warehouse has one visible exit and entry point. Sanders, emplace your machine gun on that point. Kill any threats that come through it.” First Sergeant Blake turned and looked at Sanders to emphasize his next point. “I said threats, Sanders. Not a little girl or her mother.”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” said Sanders.

First Sergeant swallowed, gathering himself, then turned and peered back at the still warehouse, running tactical options and calculations through his disciplined mind. “Baker, Vonnegut, Mughal.” He pressed his top and bottom teeth hard against each other, the muscles in his temples bulging and resting in turns. “Put your grenade launchers on the warehouse. Baker – west end. Vonnegut – center. Mughal – east end. Take out the whole thing. Cache is in there somewhere.” He added in a slow, determined tone, almost to himself, “It will be neutralized.”

First Sergeant shifted to look at Lee. Lee looked back, asking what role he would play in the destruction, asking with eager, crazed eyes. “Lee, you stay with me,” said the First Sergeant. “And keep your fucking mouth shut until we’re done.”

The soldiers of Platoon 110 fanned out to their assigned positions and waited. And waited. A half hour passed, labored minutes during which nothing had moved between the warehouse and the two huts. The stage and all its players lay quietly immersed beneath a still sea of starry night.

First Sergeant finally motioned to Lamech and Webster, sweeping gray motions of hands and arms speaking across the darkened orchard. Lamech and Webster followed orders, both sending short, three-round bursts of small arms fire into each of the adjacent huts, whistling lead plunging through the cool, still air. The huts absorbed the bullets without a twitch. Seconds later the insides of the warehouse became alive with anxious, frenzied shouting. The two voices that they had listened to earlier were shouting over each other, each keeping its own characteristic identity, the one youthful and clear, the other grunting.

First Sergeant motioned to the rest of his soldiers, lying in wait. Sanders rattled a pulsing salvo of machine gun fire onto the warehouse doorway. Baker, Vonnegut and Mughal lobbed a burst of grenades onto the warehouse roof. Tiles leapt off the roof and vanished, swallowed down the throat of the shadowed night. Puffs of blue smoke formed above the warehouse, got caught in a snare of moonlight and floated away like a gang of retreating ghosts.

They stopped firing a moment. The shouting inside the warehouse had fallen to one desperate, high-pitched voice barking the same set of sounds over and over and over. The soldiers sent more bullets into the empty huts and put a second and a third volley of grenades onto the warehouse roof. The beaten, weary structure suddenly began to explode on its own in graduated increments. Its east end crackled with uncontrolled, unfocused small arms fire from inside. Singed moments later, the center of the warehouse erupted into a cascade of fireballs, the first and strongest sending the shattered remains of the roof tumbling up and into the night, raining down on the warehouse perimeter and into the adjoining orchards. The soldiers reflexively put their gloved hands on top of their combat helmets. Someone cheered like people do during the finale of a Fourth of July fireworks show. The warehouse belched two smaller fireballs from its bowels and then fell asleep under a blanket of soft, blue smoke.

The soldiers waited, watching for anything else that might need to be killed or destroyed. Nothing. Only the crisp night air, softly caressing and lifting the lilting blue smoke into the sky in gentle, swirling swaths of glowing gray cotton.

“We killed ‘em!” shouted Lee. “Let’s go get a beer.”

“You guys aren’t old enough for beer,” said First Sergeant Blake. “Grab your weapons and let’s go.”

They trudged back the way they came, through the orchards, fleeting through the swallowing desert shadows. Lee couldn’t help but look back. One small piece of vertical wall had survived the battering. It was taking a bath in long, undulating flames, throwing a lovely, peaceful campfire glow onto the adjacent huts. Lee followed the flames’ dancing fingers into the sky above. In between the stars and the earth, above the shattered corpse of the warehouse, the peaceful night winds had sculpted the glowing, blue-gray smoke into the shape of a large crucifix.

“Look at that, man!” Lee marveled. “Jesus would have loved this shit.”

Better Than Truth? [Chapter 26]

2012-01-07T01:43:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 26:

Adam Hueghlomm hopped briskly up the white marble stairs of World Court, moving quickly underneath a plain gray sky. The wide, sweeping steps and all the streets outside were empty, not a soul in sight. Hueghlomm wore a conservative black suit, a deep blue shirt and a tan tie. He carried a black leather briefcase as he strode through the high, regal halls of World Court, moving quickly to where the Tribunal was to be held, in the East Room. Hueghlomm approached the room’s stately wooden doors.

The East Room’s heavy, noble doors were made from a deep, reddish brown wood that had dark, black veins running through it. The two doors stood erect, stuffed, and as ceremonial and proper as the personal guards of a Queen Mother. Each door had three wooden rectangular panels on it, panels of equal size placed in vertical stacks that together filled the full length of both doors. Bas relief scenes had been gouged deep into the panels, formed from darkly scarred patterns, like a tribesman’s facial markings. The scenes depicted moments of thunderous historical and spiritual significance, perpetual and eternal moments that marked important beginnings, pivotal epiphanies, seminal sacrifices, and Promethean discoveries.

The doors fell open before Hueghlomm, a slow, choreographed opening, falling back and away in practiced, mirrored movement. As the heavy curtain pulled aside, it uncovered in waxing phases the patrician grandeur that was the East Room. The doors made their long arch across the imperial entry, moving over a hard marble floor of deep gray tiles punctuated with a subtle, disperse network of soft, white clouds. The marble had been shined immaculately, and it caught and packed small bursts of light here and there, tossing them back into the belly of the room in soft, graceful twinkles.

The room had an open vastness to it, the ceiling so high that it was almost not visible. A long, narrow marble path sliced a sharp, straight walkway from the entry towards the high and imposing tribunal bench, cutting the viewers’ gallery into two equal parts along the way, leaving long wooden benches on either side. A wooden rail stood guard in front of the forward most viewers’ bench, separating the plebian gallery from the prosecutor, the defendant and the tribunal. Beyond the wooden rail and before and below the towering tribunal bench sat two small worktables, a simple chair behind each. The witness stand sat alone, abandoned, to the right of the bench, its empty chair circled by a waist-high rail. The tribunal bench itself was cut in tight, squared angles and had three high-backed black leather chairs behind it, the largest and highest sitting in the middle. Each chair had a gavel at its place. A plain clock hung from the wood-paneled wall behind, centered above the tall, middle chair. A large door hid within the paneling behind the bench. Its perimeter cut a subtle, black outline that was noticeable only if someone knew it was there and looked for it. Every piece of furniture and paneling in the East Room looked as though it had been cut from the same tree as the heavy, wooden entry doors.

Adam Hueghlomm entered the East Room with a determined gait, pacing quickly down the marble center aisle. He pushed aside the rail gate, turned sharply and quietly placed his black briefcase onto the prosecutor’s table, sitting down.

Moments later, the majestic, hidden door at the head of the East Room slowly fell open. The bailiff ordered, “All rise!” Thomas Torquemada, the Inquisitor General, entered the courtroom flanked by his partners, Morilla and Martin. Torquemada’s portly body stretched his black judge’s robe wide at the waist, his expression serious, stone. His face was full, authoritative, unforgiving. His jowls hung like heavy sacks, pulling at his eyes, dragging them towards the ground.

Martin and Morilla both wore long, black monk’s robes, topped with sharp, bright, white collars strapped around their necks. Morilla was a miniature replica of Torquemada. Although Torquemada’s sternness came easily and naturally, Morilla seemed to be working hard at his. He was short, with a spherical head. His nostrils stood out like tiny dark spots below a pug nose that sat at almost the exact center of his circular face. His eyes were two buttons of dark chocolate pressed into cinnamon dough, his mouth held tight, giving an air of general dissatisfaction, a warning of an explosive temper. He had short, black hair that stood in menacing spikes over his rounded scalp. The sides of his face, his chin and the strip of skin over his stiff mouth were always cloaked in a heavy shadow of beard no matter how recently he’d shaved.

Martin, slight and small-boned, wore a hat of iron gray hair over his gaunt eyes and thin lips. His face had a grandmotherly gentleness to it. His hair, combed back in a softly waved pompadour, formed a subtle widow’s peak centered above restive, gray and slightly bushy eyebrows. Martin had an emotional lightness about him, something that separated him from his colleagues, and he managed to give Hueghlomm a small smile as he entered the East Room.

The Tribunal took the bench, grave, expressionless.

Hueghlomm stood before them, behind the prosecutor’s table, his hands folded across each other below his waist. A stack of brimming manila folders sat on the table in front of him. His unlocked black leather briefcase rested next to the stack of beige. Hueghlomm’s face was neutral, waiting.

The defendant’s table sat obtrusively empty. Silent moments later, the stately wood doors of the East Room fell open and a large, gruff guard led the Lord into the courtroom, handcuffed and sullen. The Lord wore the same white-stripped shirt, gray slacks and scuffed black shoes that he had on at his arrest. His shirt was worn, pilled at the elbows. His clean-shaven middle-aged face had deep vertical creases on either side of his thin-lipped mouth. His eyes were brown, beady, shifting. Although he had a full head of dark brown hair, portions around the top and back betrayed a subtle thinning, giving the impression that he would soon bald. He was two or three inches taller than Hueghlomm and had a medium build. He carried himself more like a middle-income department store manager than the Creator of the Cosmos. His guard and he shuffled across the floor, the Lord pensive, looking this way and that around the empty viewers’ gallery. When he and the guard reached the defendant’s table, the Lord moved to sit in the adjacent chair. His guard stopped him.

Torquemada spoke. “You may be seated.” A mild swoosh of fabric and air sounded as everyone recessed into their seats. “Dr. Hueghlomm.” The Inquisitor General’s voice was gravelly and matter of fact. “Has the defendant been afforded an adequate Edict of Grace?”

“He has, Your Honor,” said Hueghlomm.

“During said period, did the defendant confess?”

“He did not, Your Honor.”

Turning to the Lord, Torquemada said, “Please confirm for the Court: you were provided an Edict of Grace during which time you did not confess. Do you confirm that for the record?”

The Lord chuckled a few times, saying nothing.

Exhaling dramatically, Torquemada explained. “Sir, we must reconcile the charges against you. We must follow due process and procedure. I ask your participation to insure a fair and speedy inquisition.”

“And how does my forced participation validate the fairness of your said proceedings?” asked the Lord, a mocking, sarcastic voice.

“Sir, the court is not the object of this inquisition. You are. Please help us treat you in a fair and just manner. That is our most fervent desire. That is the bedrock of the philosophy by which we live.” He exhaled in a long, winding sigh and continued. “You were given an Edict of Grace during which time you may have confessed to the charges in your indictment. Did you?”

“I did not,” said the Lord.

“Very well. Let the record show that the defendant did not confess during the Edict of Grace.” Torquemada looked up from the bench with a slanted smile. “Do you see the fairness with which this inquisition is proceeding?” He raised his index finger and shifted his eyes towards the Lord. Martin and Morilla smiled, nodding affirmations.

“Now, then,” continued the Inquisitor General. “In our unending efforts at fairness, we must confirm the prosecution’s report that you have declined counsel. For the record, have you declined counsel?”

“That’s lie number one,” said the Lord. “I expressly asked for the Fallen One.”

Hueghlomm spoke for the prosecution. “Your Honor, the defendant has been informed that the Fallen One does not exist. We’ve pointed tachyon beams to the north, we’ve pointed them to the south, we’ve pointed them to the east, we’ve pointed them to the west. He hasn’t materialized. He doesn’t exist.” Hueghlomm stopped, resting in Torquemada’s gaze. The Inquisitor General tilted his head down and peered at Hueghlomm over black bifocals, his jowls heavy on either side of his face, pulling down at the corners of his mouth, creating his signature permanent frown.
Hueghlomm realized that he had failed to follow procedure. He corrected himself by making an appropriate statement for the record. “The Fallen One does not exist. Defendant refuses to appoint alternate counsel.”

“He exists!” shouted the Lord. “Go through the written records that you yourself used to indict me. Selective inclusion and exclusion, the opening move of all corrupters!” The Lord’s body shivered as he spoke each angry word. “That’s the farce of this whole exercise. That, and this self-righteous know-it-all!” He pointed accusingly at Hueghlomm, his gesture and stare moving easily across the chasm between the prosecutor and himself.

“Defendant will address the prosecution respectfully,” Torquemada reminded the Lord. The Inquisitor General turned to Hueghlomm. “Dr. Hueghlomm, has the prosecution exercised due diligence in attempting to locate the Fallen One?”

“It has.”

“Has it located said ‘Fallen One’?”

“It has not.”

Their exchange was mechanical, for the record.

Torquemada turned to the Lord. “Defendant is instructed to choose alternate counsel.”
The Lord stared at Torquemada in disgust. He huffed sarcasm. “Alternate counsel — I’d like to tell you to go to hell, but that’d put you right back in that same chair at this same moment.”

“Please answer for the record, sir,” pressed Torquemada. The Inquisitor General followed his narrow and straight path as well as he understood it, with persistence and rigor. He insisted that others do the same.

The Lord was obstinate. “I don’t want counsel. Why waste another being’s time with your silly exercise?”

“Let the record show, defendant has refused counsel,” answered Torquemada, and rapped his gavel. He turned again to Hueghlomm. “Dr. Hueghlomm, please review the charges against the defendant.”

Hueghlomm looked down and read from the indictment that he had written, flipping the pages as he recounted each allegation. “Your Honor, the defendant, the Lord, is accused of the following: Count One, Mass Infanticide. Count Two, Homophobic Genocide. Count Three, Felony Animal Cruelty.” Hueghlomm paused a moment and glanced at the Lord. The Lord was struggling to suppress laughter, looking as if he’d just thought of a dirty joke while sitting in church. Hueghlomm continued, his voice louder. “Count Four, Conspiracy to Violate Resolution 786. And Count Five, Multiple and Varied Violations of Resolution 786.” Hueghlomm stopped and looked at Torquemada.
Torquemada turned to the Lord. “Sir, how do you plead to these charges?”

The Lord sighed, realizing that he would have to play along. “So that’s what you nailed to my door,” he said to Hueghlomm, pointing limply at the indictment papers. “I guess, ‘Not guilty.’” The Lord raised his hands and made mocking quotation marks in the air to underscore his plea.

“Please provide the basis for your plea,” said Torquemada.

“Your Honor,” said the Lord. “The charges are grounded in contextual misunderstandings and lingual misinterpretations.”

“Sir, you will have to do better than that,” said the Inquisitor General.

“Better than Truth?” said the Lord, suddenly serious.

Keep Your Eyes and Ears Open [Chapter 25]

2011-12-20T05:43:00.001-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 25:

“Gentlemen, thank you for taking time from your mission to be here this afternoon.” Colonel Klick was clipped, pressed, cropped, trim. He stood in a large block of shade in the middle of the Iraqi desert. The rolling tan tarp above him sagged from the beating sun. It stood a story high, held up by a network of thin, leaning aluminum poles. The teenagers of combat infantry Platoon 110 sat in a set of loose rows in the shaded sand before Klick, some hugging their knees in front of them, others cross legged, all with their helmets and weapons within reach. Hueghlomm stood at the opposite end of the shade, behind the soldiers, facing Klick.

“Men, we have a fella in back of us,” said the Colonel, bony, veined hands on his hips, serious eyes tilted down at the young men. “I want you to turn around and take a look.” The soldiers turned their faces to Hueghlomm in a murmur of collective movement, some smiling, some frowning, most blank. Their closely cropped hair exposed all the scars and cuts that their short lives had left on their scalps. They quietly peered at Hueghlomm.

Hueghlomm had on a brand new, ill-fitting combat uniform. His face was soft underneath fragile glasses, his cheeks much fuller than those of the trained, lanky teenagers staring at him. His hair, too, was different, longer than theirs, neatly parted on one side, almost reaching the tops of his small ears. He had no weapon. In its place, he carried a plain, lime-green government-issue journal at his side. And unlike the soldiers of Platoon 110, his face wore a pleasant smile. “That there’s Doc Hueghlomm,” said Colonel Klick, pointing a thin, sharp finger.

Private Lee sat holding his knees in front of himself, down in the sand adjacent to where Hueghlomm stood. Lee glared resentfully at the soft, brown man before him, pondering how his great Army could allow such a pocket of feeble weakness into its midst. He looked down to Hueghlomm’s side, at the lime-green notebook that hung limply where a stiff, ready weapon belonged. Meek, black letters centered in the top half of the notebook cover told everyone “RECORD.” Below, bottom and centered on the cover, Lee read the small print with a denigrating mental sneer — “Federal Supply Service.” Lee huffed to himself, took one last glance at Hueghlomm and quickly turned away, as if avoiding the sight of something offensive. In this, his combat environment, Lee felt that the image of Hueghlomm was wrong, just…wrong.

Colonel Klick continued. “Doc’s with us this week. He’s got some good ideas about how to deal with the roadside bombs that are blowing up our vehicles and guys. Doc’ll be following us around, collecting some G2.” G2 was Klick’s shorthand for tactical intelligence. “He’s looking to see where the bad guys place the bombs, what they make ‘em of, how deep they bury those suckers and what kinds of detonating devices they’ve got. That kind of stuff.” Klick stopped and turned his head all around, looking at as many of the soldiers as possible, making a display that he was checking to see if everyone had listened. Satisfied, he gave the soldiers their orders. “It’s your job this week to escort and protect Doc while he collects G2, G2 that might save your life. But remember, men — the bad guys don’t care if you’re out there taking notes for some science project,” he said “science project” with mocking emphasis and continued. “The bad guys’ll kill ya dead whether you’re petting your dog or praying the rosary. So keep your faith in God, men...which means keep your eyes and ears open and your weapons locked and loaded.”

How Could You? [Chapter 24]

2011-12-20T05:42:00.001-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 24:

2083 Anno Domini — the World is finally at peace. Every framework of theological belief enjoys equal reverence. Utopia is the gleeful offspring of the twenty-first century’s Omega Wars, a tumultuous time of manmade and natural upheavals that witnessed the violent rise of fundamentalism in each sect of humankind.
Fundamentalist pawns occupied the seats of most major governments by the middle of the century. Democracy proved only as good as its elective results.

Most historians of the time postulated that the emergence of multiple strands of diametrically opposed fundamentalism would create a cataclysmic clash that would consume civilization. They were wrong. In response to the rise of fundamentalism, secularists militarized their rhetoric, their organization, their abilities, and themselves. It was this clash, the clash between fundamentalism and secularism, that begat the Omega Wars.

A series of armed skirmishes erupted between the two rival factions, lasting a bloody one hundred and eight days and culminating in a nuclear exchange. Three sunrises after the nuclear holocaust, the Sanskrit symbol for Om appeared in cloud formations around the world. The symbol continued to appear and reappear for forty days and forty nights. Combatants, distracted, ceased hostilities. Then a large crucifix appeared and reappeared in the clouds for forty days and nights, followed by the sun symbol for Ra, a meditating Buddha, a pentagram, a Star of David, a compass and square, Ganesh, a crescent and star, and, finally, the All Seeing Eye. Humanity laid down its arms and embraced peace. World Government was created to protect and preserve tranquility. Humankind named this period of global reconciliation “the Age of Aquarius.”

Immediately upon the end of the Omega Wars and at the beginning cusp of the Age of Aquarius, humanity was graced with a more personal dialogue with all the faces of the Lord. One face began to take precedence in that dialogue. Gradually, that face grew more antagonistic towards humanity. Humanity reciprocated. The Seventh World Congress passed Resolution 786, global legislation that forbade the Lord from interfering in human affairs. Using the resolution as a founding premise, World Court initiated legal proceedings against the Lord. The Lord, reacting in anger, refused to answer the court’s charges.

In various conversations, the Lord had revealed that he resided “on the other side of Light.” Einstein postulated that the speed of light was the upper speed limit of the universe. However, by the 2050s, physicists had empirically harnessed tachyons, massless particles of pure energy that travel at superluminal speeds. During the course of a particularly antagonistic exchange with the Lord, World Government secretly showered his voice with a focused beam of tachyons, revealing the lightly flickering shadow of a physical form.

The equations were simple. If energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, or E = mc2, then mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared, or m = E/c2. World Government did not know the Lord’s mass. But c2, or the speed of light squared, is a constant, so World Government varied the energy, or E, of the tachyon beam until the value of energy divided by the speed of light squared, or E/c2, equaled the unknown mass, or m, of the Lord’s physical form. When the value of E/c2 reached 171 lbs, the Lord’s apparent weight in earth’s gravitational field, the Lord materialized in human form.

He was immediately captured and imprisoned.

It was under the direction and the authority of World Court that Adam Hueghlomm had spent the better part of a sullen, introspective year composing, coordinating, staffing and defending an indictment of the Lord. But then, he had had the time. A year ago, fate had suddenly and callously robbed him of his mother, relieving him of any remaining family obligations. Becca, his perennial and sole source of friendship, affection, affirmation and care, had never asked him for anything more than a good laugh. Circumstances had allowed Hueghlomm to immerse himself in scripture, to investigate legal precedent, and to note and document multiple sources to corroborate the Lord’s alleged infractions of Resolution 786. Now, with the Lord’s capture, World Government would move forward with the tribunal and the inquest.

Pie-In-The-Sky [Chapter 23]

2011-12-13T14:59:00.001-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 23:

The helicopter blades noisily slapped air and dust at the hard roads and the sun-baked fields. The earth and the asphalt pushed back angrily, billowing the dusted air into treetops in big, swirling clouds. “What do you have for us, Doc?” shouted the tired captain over the loud, pulsing thuds of the helicopter engine.

Hueghlomm was sitting across from him in the open cabin. “Neutron beam emitter coupled with a gamma detector,” he shouted.

“About as useful as tits on a boar,” said the tired captain.

Adam realized that he owed this battle hardened infantry commander a better explanation. “We’ll focus a neutron beam onto the roads that your convoys travel. We’ll capture the resulting gamma emissions using a high-purity germanium spectrometer. Based on the gamma signatures, we should be able to tell if it’s plain old road that we’re looking at or if there might be something more dangerous under the surface.”

“So how the hell do we deploy your little phasers?” asked the tired captain, unconvinced, yelling over the engine noise and rushing air.

“We’ll mount the neutron source and the spectrometer on the bottom of a low-flying scout helicopter,” said Hueghlomm.

“It sounds pie-in-the-sky.”

“It beats losing more men and limbs, sir.”

“Fuckin’, aye,” said the tired captain, staring out the dust blown cabin door. He gazed down, watching the white powdered roads passing below. Groups of little brown children ran and waved at the helicopter as it slapped and thumped its way over their homes and villages, falling forward through the cloudless sky.

“Fuckin’, aye,” muttered the tired captain.

I Am Who I Am [Chapter 22]

2011-12-12T15:58:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 22:

Adam Hueghlomm passed his time reading during the long flight. The plane cabin was dark with night. A column of light fell from the overhead compartment above him, glanced the front of his light brown face and splashed over the open pages of his books. He was taking turns reading from four texts. He had taken off his glasses and had put them on the empty seat beside him, holding whatever book he was reading at the time just inches from his near-sighted, brown eyes.

He found the Old Testament and the Quran to be churning cauldrons of wisdom and violence with equal parts of each being issued from humanity and from Above — infants murdered while asleep in their cradles; the brutal destruction of two cities because of the sexual orientation of their citizens; an indiscriminate mass drowning of global proportions; and an unending procession of so many more vengeful, fatal interventions in human affairs. “And that’s just the good guys,” Hueghlomm chuckled to himself. As Fatima had taught him, the two scriptures corroborated each other in countless places. Perhaps his parents’ marriage was wholly appropriate, he thought, and not the anomaly that many regarded it.

Along with the Old Testament and the Quran, Hueghlomm had brought along Dostoevski’s Brothers Karamazov and Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham. But he grew tired of reading. He leaned forward, reached underneath the seat in front of him and pulled the maroon backpack that he had borrowed from Becca into his lap. He dragged open its top zipper and took out a small, silver cardboard box. He lifted the lid and smiled happily at the handmade twenty-two carat gold ring inside. The ring’s face formed a circle, a brilliant pink jewel resting at its center. A dozen small diamonds marked the circumference around the center stone, twinkling like bright stars on a lazy summer night. The ring was older than he was, he reminded himself, the handiwork of an Indian jeweler practicing his trade in faraway Africa.

Becca planned to pick him up at the airport when he returned. He was scheduled back at the end of the week, on Easter Sunday. He looked forward to surprising Becca with the ring, to seeing her freckled face break into a bright, translucent smile as she slid the circle of gold onto her thin finger. He smiled again, growing more pleased with the gift and with the anticipation of Becca’s gratified reaction. He closed the little silver box and put it away, sliding the zipped backpack underneath the seat in front of him.

Hueghlomm leaned back into his seat, reached up and turned off the reading light. He shifted his head to look out the window as the plane approached the coast of Africa. Daylight was rushing over the dipped horizon ahead, rushing to meet the plane, finally catching it in its yellow grasp. For hours the desert passed under them, vast, pale, arid, unending. They finally flew over a narrow straight of white, rippled water, then over small villages and big cities.

He remembered Becca’s trepidation about this trip. She’d never asked him to forego a trip in the seven years that they’d been together, not until now. “Silly girl,” he mumbled, smiling lovingly, and went to sleep.

Crazy Bastards [Chapter 21]

2011-12-11T14:58:00.000-08:00

I'm posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Chapter 21 is the first chapter of the third act of the novel. Here's Chapter 21:

Act III Cuneiform Tales

“So you all ready for Baghdad, Doc?” The technician in a T-shirt and blue overalls and sneakers folded his thick, hairy forearms across his chest, resting them easily on his enormous belly. He had a large, round skull topped with the thinning remnants of a full head of bright red hair. His face was pasty white, looking as if it would blush to burgundy with the slightest provocation or exertion.

“Yeah, Gabe. I think I’m ready,” replied Adam Hueghlomm. He enjoyed coming to the fabrication shop. He liked working with the technicians, good-humored old-school machinists who could build working prototypes out of the most theoretical equipment designs. In addition to the fascinating lessons in applied engineering and the occasional off-color joke, Hueghlomm could get away with wearing an untucked polo shirt and comfortable jeans while in the long, high-ceilinged cinderblock warehouse.

“Let’s hope this works,” said Gabe, his hoarse voice at once both friendly and gruff. “I hate seeing all those poor kids coming back from Iraq in caskets, missing limbs. Roadside bombs. Umm!” Gabe tilted his head slightly and pulled his mouth open on one side. “I thought I’d seen it all in ‘Nam, but here we go again. Who woulda thunk it?”

“Everything packed in these three cases, Gabe?” asked Hueghlomm.

“Yes siree, Doc.” Gabe stood from his wooden stool and walked his rounded form to the front of the workbench. “Neutron source packed in lead shielding, right here.” He dropped a meaty palm on a hard, gray box. “Germanium spectrometer, here.” He slapped a second box. “Mounting hardware, here.” He tapped the last container twice with a thick, stubby index finger. Gabe turned his head from side to side and furrowed his brow. “Golly gee! You got some crazy bastards over there, Doc.” The old technician smiled and squinted his eyes teasingly at Hueghlomm’s Pakistani complexion and Middle Eastern features. “With your looks, though, you oughta be OK, huh?”

“One would think,” said Hueghlomm.

“Just don’t let ‘em know Daddy was a Jew,” laughed Gabe, his shoulders beginning to bounce up and down like a cartoon character, his face reddening the way it always did before a hard laugh. “Take it from a good ‘ole Baptist boy, don’t let ‘em know Daddy was a Jew,” he snorted.

“Yeah, I heard Jesus got the same advice before his last trip to Jerusalem,” said Hueghlomm.

“Doc, you crazy, mixed-breed bastard!” Gabe snorted again and caught a few quick, sharp breaths, now completely red faced. “I bet you don’t know who to kill and who to kiss.”

“Wrong again, Gabriel. I’ve never been short on ideas about who to kiss,” said Hueghlomm.

Gabe stopped laughing in a series of gradually fading sighs that ended in a moment of silence. He filled the silence with an uncharacteristic slice of seriousness. “I’ll see you when you get back, my friend.”

“That you will, Gabe.”

“And if your little idea works out, you’ll save a lot of lives. That’s big. Maybe you’ll get a medal from God, huh?”

“One can hope,” said Hueghlomm. “One can hope.”

Shut Up and Live [Chapter 20]

2011-12-10T02:56:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 20:

The door on Becca’s side of the bedroom closet was open, revealing a network of well-organized, box-shaped compartments of neatly arranged shoes, gloves, and clothes. A simple bed with a wood headboard stood on the plush, green carpet in the middle of the room, squared against the back wall. An open black prayer scroll with graceful Arabic script hung from a small hook on the wall, centered above the headboard. The scroll was a present from Fatima. Neither Adam nor Becca knew what it said.

A framed print hung on the wall adjacent to Adam’s side of the bed. It showed the image of four melted books scattered about in the forefront, suffering before a plant-less, chocolate-brown desert landscape of stretching arid plains that ended at the foot of a still, reflective sea and a faraway jut of sun swept, rusted mountains. An empty yellow horizon watched over the abandoned scene, arching up into a starless, gray-blue sky. One of the books hung limply on its back, slung over the thin, black horizontal branch of a dead and decaying tree, a hangman’s noose dangling from the outer tip of the lifeless limb. Another of the books had snapped into half in a painful right angle over the sharp edge of an unusually long student desk. The third book draped like a burial shroud over a sexualized image of Mother Mary lying on her side on the barren, brown ground. A fourth book lay open on the top surface of the long desk, one side strewn in a scribbled amalgam of Arabic, Hebrew and hieroglyph script, the other side set ablaze.

“Who’s to say that nothing travels faster than the speed of light?” Adam said. He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, almost talking to himself, hands on his hips, standing barefoot in their bedroom in his T-shirt and pajama pants. “Maybe there’s an entirely different form of existence beyond that boundary.”

Becca felt too tired to reply. She sat cross-legged on her side of their bed, wearing green boxer shorts and a loose, gray T-shirt. She slowly rubbed moisturizing lotion into her palms and around her forearms and elbows. She was exhausted and generally annoyed. She had a headache and her eyes were stinging, feeling burdened to stay open.

It was late. The dark green blinds had been pulled up high earlier to allow in the bright afternoon sun. Now, the blinds stood open on two pitch-black windows. A wispy sheen of silver crept through the top corner of one of the panes. Outside, propped high in the shadows of heaven, the moon hung weightless, an angry crescent in the black sky.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got a chance to study every religion and then applied their very own personally selected cross-section of lessons and parables to their own lives?” Adam continued to postulate.

Becca didn’t have the strength or patience to conjure an answer. Still, she tried her best to entertain Adam’s persistent need for philosophical conversation. “Why would that be nice?” she allowed.

“Spirituality is a deeply personal journey,” he said, oblivious to her condition, raising one hand to the air, as if lecturing students in a large hall. “Your journey to understand and come to terms with God is your journey to understand and come to terms with yourself. A multidimensional approach personalizes the application of that journey. There are so many powerful theological frameworks from which to choose — Hinduism, Christianity, ancient Egyptian gods, Buddhism, Paganism, Judaism, the teachings of Masonry, Islam, Babylonian gods and everything else going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh.” Adam smiled in abstracted wonderment, relishing the thought of living in a world teeming with so many different ideas to learn, to explore. He walked to his side of the bed, stepping over a pile of scattered books, and sat, facing away from Becca. His mouth continued to move under vacuous, absent eyes. “If we could regard all those systems of belief with equal reverence, the world could enjoy a global Age of Aquarius.”

“Why don’t you just shut the fuck up and live?” Becca’s words cut.

Adam’s countenance grew dark, stiff. He peered silently at the pewter reading lamp that he kept on the small, round nightstand adjacent to his side of the bed. They were preparing for sleep, the wrong time to stoke a debate, he thought, the wrong time for an argument. He considered her question a moment. “Am I boring you?” he asked, insulted, hurt.

“Sometimes,” she said, truthful, short.

He became more upset, feeling rejected. He suddenly heard himself blurt, “Then go find someone else to talk with.”

“I will,” she defended, standing up off the bed in halting, angry stomps as her tube of moisturizing lotion fell to the floor.

He stood and turned to her with a look of abject confusion on his face.

Becca snapped her hands to her hips and spoke sharply. “No one’s going to put up with your weird shit all day long, Adam Hueghlomm!” Her anger began to feed on itself, growing as she glared at him, moving her weight from one leg to the other over and over. Her gray eyes grew in their sockets, squeezed inside her clenched face. She bellowed, “Seven years of wacky shit!”

“I’m sleeping downstairs,” he said, abrupt, angry, leaping towards the door.

“Get out!” She met and raised the stakes, stomping towards him. “Leave! Just leave when I’m trying to say that I need something. It’s always been about you and the wacky, twisted shit that’s always going on in your head.” She formed both her hands into white-knuckled fists and shook them in front of herself in small, jerking motions, beginning to cry.

“What’s got into you?” Adam was genuinely confused.

“I’ll tell you what!” She stormed at him and thrust a finger in his face, tears now smeared across her cheeks, her expression contorted in a steaming cauldron of frustration, exhaustion and anger. “Normal couples are planning shit by now. Not you! You just want to go on playing your jackass graduate school word games, coming and going whenever you please, acting like a total card-carrying asshole!”

He looked at her, dazed, lost, helpless.

She looked in his eyes. She saw no malice. He was a puppy who couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong. Her anger slowly dissipated into more tears and she realized that she couldn’t forgive him because there was nothing to forgive. She quietly conceded, “You don’t get it.”

He continued to watch her, ever helpless.

She peered at him through hurt, frustrated eyes, feeling sorry for herself. “You’re an emotional cripple,” she said. Her voice had open wounds, like an injured child’s voice, coming to a parent for help. She began to cry again, her words cracking into shards and splinters. “I’m sorry, Adi. I’m so sorry. I’ve asked a lame man to go on a long walk with me…and now I’m getting upset because he’s walking so slowly.” She folded her arms across her breast, head bowed, and sobbed, alone.

Adam Hueghlomm watched her, her soft chestnut hair hanging in limp tousles, hiding the sides of her tear streaked face. He wrestled furiously in his head to determine if this problem could be reduced to a four by six matrix or a five by seven.

Mazel Tov [Chapter 19]

2011-12-08T02:53:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 19:

Becca smiled radiantly in her tan shorts and beige, sleeveless top. A small maroon backpack rested between her shoulder blades. She and Adam had flown to Utah for vacation, leaving behind their comfortable home in the outskirts of Baltimore. They had been hiking in Arches National Park in the May sun for the last four days and Becca’s normally white complexion glowed in uneven patches of reddish brown around her sunburned shoulders and face. Her dark brown hair occasionally fluttered about in soft tousles in the sun swept canyon breezes, soft curls of chestnut that she brushed away from her eyes with a combing stroke of open fingers. Although it was their last day of long hikes, Becca’s stride was as strong as ever.

Adam struggled to follow behind her, stumbling from time to time, worn and tired. He had read a series of studies on melanoma while an undergraduate and had developed a paranoid attitude regarding sun exposure and so he wore long khaki pants, a long-sleeved light blue cotton shirt and a wide-brimmed safari sun hat.

Becca peered back at Adam from a high ledge, chuckling at the weary, soft man trailing behind her, all bundled against the hot sun. Her characteristic freckles were visible underneath the sheen of pink-brown sunburn around her nose and cheeks. She shouted, her lean muscular arms hanging at her sides. “Come on. Let’s get to the arch.”

“Coming,” said Adam, pausing a moment to catch his breath, one hiking boot up on a rock, a listless brown hand resting above bended knee. They had hiked all morning, stopped for lunch and a rest, and were now completing their final trek of the trip. An hour into the early evening hike, Adam was growing tired. He gulped a series of forced, deep breaths, gazing about from underneath the shade of his wide-brimmed hat. The quiet coffee and russet landscape was flooded in daylight, at rest and peaceful. He took one last gasp and turned towards Becca, peeping up from under his safari hat. She was standing on a shelf of rocks above him, under the shadow and backdrop of tall protrusions of jutting brownish-red formations. She had both hands resting patiently on her hips, her bare arms and legs smooth and taut, smiling down at him like a child enjoying the clumsy antics of her new puppy.

“Come on, Mr. Limpy Dingy,” she teased.

“You not happy with our love life?” he shouted back across the dusted pebbles, joking, buying himself another moment of rest before he had to start moving again.

“Did I sound happy last night?” she said, never outdone in sarcasm or humor.

“You better be careful,” he said, half serious, walking towards her, feet aching with each labored step. “The walls in that cheap little hotel are pretty thin.”

“Who cares?” She turned and walked forward, laughing off his concern.

He finally reached her on the ledge, standing behind her with a silly look on his face. “Who cares?” he mocked in a contrived female voice.

“You gonna make it?” she asked, ignoring his humor, concerned for his endurance.

“We haven’t eaten in a while. Do you have anything in your backpack?” he said.

“No,” she replied, looking back over her shoulder. “Food isn’t all you need to get you through life.” She turned and moved forward.

He stood in place.

She stopped and looked back, sensing his stillness. She smirked and held her palm out to him. Her smirk turned to a smile that was at once both loving and teasing. “Come on.”

He trotted forward, grasping her strong hand and they moved forward together through the beautiful desert terrain, the sun throwing longer and longer shadows across the dusted trail and landscape as they trekked through the late afternoon light.

“I liked the rock art near the trail head,” he said at her from behind. Their hiking boots softly crunched at the pebbles and parched dust strewn all along the wide trail. He watched the muscles in her calves quietly flex and rest with each strong step. He wondered if she’d respond to his statement. She didn’t.

“How do you think those people viewed God?” he asked, persistent, beginning to pant as he strove to keep up with her.

“What people?” she shouted, not looking back.

“The ones who created the art that we saw. Those etchings. The gazelles and hunters and…” he paused, reassembling the images in his mind. “And were those horses?”

“Adi,” she said. A few steps later she finished her sentence. “Stop overthinking everything.”

They wandered the desert, through a procession of muted, scenic moments as the sun’s chariot dipped lower in the painted sky. Becca’s vigorous stride had opened a chasm of distance between her and Adam. Time to time, she would glance back to make sure that he was OK, that he was coming along. She smiled to herself each time she caught a glimpse of him struggling to keep up, plodding through the desert.

The trail faded into itself, conceding boundary and form to the larger landscape. The earth turned to brown powdered dust, tall, still cacti bearing witness to a cascade of lighted and shadowed images twinkling in dusk’s silent grace. A small lizard scurried across the sun baked soil, darting out from under a sanctuary of dry, rustling shrubs, vanishing into the caves and shadows of a scattered pile of crimson rock. Shade began its slow climb over the expanse of rolling desert plains, splashing a rippling current of fissured texture across the stern, old faces of the surrounding rocks and canyons. And the short wheat colored shrubs, relegated and invisible in the heavy glare of day, acquired personalities in the blossoming patches of soft, gray shade, the cooling desert breeze kneading through and about them in lulled, whispered whistles.

Adam’s legs became heavy and he stopped, stooped forward, his hands on his hips. He watched Becca’s silhouette ahead, a lithe spring bouncing within a still panorama of cacti and jutting rock formations. The soft, sideways sunlight cast a pleasant yellow hue on one side of everything and the air had cooled. Adam took off his hat. His sight expanded up and back and he felt connected to the blue-gray sky. He ran open fingers through his hair, brushing it back, letting the sweat on his scalp cool and dry. He stood in place and cleared his throat.

Becca heard him from far ahead. She stopped and turned, looking back at his still form across the expanse of desert. Although Adam couldn’t see her face at that distance, her carriage and stance showed concern. “I’m fine,” he shouted to her, waving his hand in her direction. “Just taking a rest.”

“Do you want me to walk back?” Her hardy voice skipped along the powdered path and bounced through the shaded hollows of rock.

“No, just give me a minute.”

“I’ve given you seven years. You can have another minute,” she said.

He moved ahead in gradual, languid steps, watching her form grow larger as he approached. Her sunburned arms and legs reflected the falling sun in a glow of long golden lines. A sudden breeze brushed a tousle of brown curl over one of her eyes and she tossed it back with a smooth swirl of her neck.

“What do you think about planting a weeping willow in the backyard next spring?” she shouted to him.

“I think that’s a great idea,” he said in between heavy breaths.

“Come on, Baby Cakes,” she said. “We get there in time, we can watch the sunset through the eye of the arch.”

He stopped, leaning forward, hands on his hips.

“It’s downhill all the way back,” she reminded.

He trudged ahead, dragging his hiking boots across the powdery terrain, leaving behind long, strewn footprints.

She waited, smiling, watching him.

“I think I’ll throw myself off the next ledge,” he joked, making a series of clumsy gestures to dramatize his exhaustion.

“Don’t tempt fate,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Girly-Man,” she teased. “I’ll draw a hot bath for you when we get back to the room. But don’t make too much noise in the tub,” she added in a goofy, contrived voice, now she mocking him. “Remember, the walls are awful thin.”

“Very funny,” he said, finally reaching her.

They stood alone in the desert, facing each other in silence.

“What?” she said softly, an awkward smile on her freckled face.

He didn’t answer, watching her gray eyes. Her face fell into a comfortable repose. A dry, gentle breeze curled cat-like through the still space between their standing forms. He gave her a kiss, not a very good one at all, but she didn’t seem to care.
“Come out and play, Adi,” she whispered. “There’s a whole world outside your head.”

He watched her gray eyes.

“Come,” she breathed the softly rasped syllable while tilting her thin torso forward, holding a muscled, sunburned arm towards him, palm open in invitation. “Come. We’ll walk together the rest of the way.”

He grasped her firm hand and they trudged forward. He walked faster, not wanting to slow her down. She walked slower, not wanting to leave him behind. The sun continued to plunge lower in the horizon as they made their way to the lovely arch. They moved quietly, in peace, as the sun threw cinnamon-laced honey here and there across the distant hilltops.

They followed the trail as it swung behind a ridge and carved itself into a steep cliff of pinkish crème sandstone. Steps had been cut into the sandstone at points where the slope became steep. The hard path continued to curl up and around the waist of the large rock formation. They followed its steep slopes in the gray shade of twilight, Adam now on his hands and knees, afraid of the large drop growing at the fenceless edge.

“Come on. You’re doing great,” Becca encouraged him, not far ahead.

They finally reached the top and stood side by side, gazing ahead at the broad, flat plane of reddish gray sandstone that lay before them in a slightly downhill slope. A deep, black fissure cut across the stone plane, splitting one slab of rock from the next. Ahead, across the fissure, stood the lovely delicate arch that they had come to see. They walked towards it, their legs appreciative of the descending slope after having walked uphill for so long.

Adam peered at the arch. One of its legs stood much thicker and broader than the other. An arm curled up and around, connecting the legs, creating a large, framed arch atop a broad expanse of lovely reddish gray sandstone.

“I bet the striations mark the ages,” said Adam, pointing at the horizontally layered texture of the arch.

“Forget the ages,” said Becca. “It’s beautiful to look at here and now.”

They peered over and through the arch, to where the distant slopes and hills reached up and touched the thinly clouded twilight sky.

“The Lord’s one hell of a painter, huh,” Adam exclaimed, stunned. “How would you like to have all of that to yourself?”

“I’d rather just have a good life,” said Becca.

Adam looked about, soaking in the wonder that was the world. He suddenly felt someone watching him. He turned and noticed a silly smile on Becca’s face.

“What?” he said.

“I got you something in that little gift shop we ducked into yesterday,” she said.

He looked confused.

“The one we went into so you could use the bathroom,” she reminded. She pulled off her maroon backpack and slung it down in front of her, yanking open its top zipper. She reached in and pulled out a small plastic carousel and held it towards him, resting it in the middle of her palm. Her face broke into a toothy, dimpled grin as she watched him. Adam stood still as she moved her free hand to a butterfly-shaped key on the side of the carousel and wound it, sending a ratcheting burr into the placid twilight with each sharp wind. She let go of the key and the carousel began to turn, playing “Silent Night” in a surprisingly melodious series of chimes. She giggled at him. The carousel began a second chorus and she sang along with it. Her voice was lovely, floating across the desert air in delicate, affectionate tones. The carousel had begun to wind down and its chimes slowed. She slowed her singing to fit its pace, finishing.

She moved her palm towards him, offering him the gift.

He picked it off her palm with a smile. “Thank you,” he said.

“You like it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

They strolled across the hard sandstone and sat at a vantage point where the arch stood off to one side and from where they could gaze over the broad expanse of rock at the faraway hilltops, the clouds, the unending skies and the orange horizon. Becca reached again into her backpack and pulled out two small ceramic teacups and a thermos. She threw Adam a smile as she opened the thermos and poured hot chocolate into each teacup. She handed the sugary concoction to Adam. “I know you’ll like this.”

Adam took a small first sip, smiled, and took another bigger one. “You’re right,” he said. “I love it.”

They finished their warm drinks in silence as the sun set across the quiet horizon, throwing reddish gold rays of last light on the distant, tree studded hills. A few minutes later the sky started to darken and the stars began to show. Adam looked over at Becca, his knees up in front of him. She smiled at him, sitting cross-legged. They sat in silence in the enveloping twilight, resting under a canopy of star-splashed heavens.

The night suddenly became more silent, cooling in a quick plunge. A rustle of air gathered and moved behind them, mixing spicy tones of musk into the arid desert scents. Becca turned hastily, her brow furrowed in curiosity and surprise, looking about. Nothing. She turned back around and glanced at Adam. His head was bowed in a dour reminiscence. The gathered air brushed its graceful fingertips over Becca’s bare, sunburned shoulders in paternal gratitude, leaving behind goose bumps as it curved towards and around Adam. The gentle breath came around again and then again, until it had completed seven circles around them, and then floated off into the ageless desert, its ashen palm fading, a pale smile turning away into darkness.

Becca faced Adam. “Do you want to get married?”

Adam choked on his hot chocolate. He moved his hand quickly to cover his mouth, dropping his teacup. It fell to the hard sandstone in a tiny, shattered crash. “Damn it,” he muttered in hushed exclamation.

“Relax,” she said, stretching forward to pick up the pieces. “Let me get this cleaned up and we’ll move to another spot. I don’t want you getting a piece of glass in your butt.” Becca policed the broken shards into a plastic baggy and they stood to move. She watched Adam’s face intently as she slung her backpack over one shoulder and onto her back, pulling the straps secure under each armpit.

Adam avoided her eyes. He knew that she wanted him to answer her question, but he was afraid. She noticed his awkwardness, sensed his hesitation, and decided to let it drop…for now.

They strolled together a few feet across the sandstone, swimming next to one another in a darkening pond of twilight. Her still silence was uncharacteristic. It made Adam uncomfortable.

“I love you, Becca,” he blurted.

She smiled. “I know,” she said. She moved her palm behind Adam’s head, cupping the back of his scalp firmly, and turned his face towards her. She craned her neck forward, moving her mouth onto his. Her lips were firm, her kisses always strong and forceful. She pulled back from him, her eyes on his mouth a moment, a lost look on her face. Her eyelashes fluttered and her eyes lifted to meet his. He watched the sun’s retreating rays behind him, reflected in her pupils. The characteristic smile that was her public signature slowly formed over her mouth and a teasing spring burrowed its way back into her voice. “Now suppose you could reduce that sensation to ‘X equals negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus four times A times C divided by two times A?’”

“Suppose you could?” he wondered.

“It wouldn’t mean shit,” she teased. “It wouldn’t make one hill o’ beans of difference to how much I love kissing you.”

She turned to watch the sunset, standing next to him. He felt her shoulder against his and realized how much he liked that feeling. The drying sweat on the back of his shirt felt refreshing in the cool air. They stood noiselessly, side by side, as the noble desert night joined them, a quiet, imperial stranger with a soft, gray beard, wearing a flowing robe of purple felt.

Itsy Bitsy Spider [Chapter 18]

2011-12-06T02:47:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 18:

Adam and Becca sat on a wide stone fence on the Mt. of Olives overlooking the Kidron Valley, across from Jerusalem’s Old City. The minarets, synagogues and churches looked serene and still in the setting sun, a gold dome topping boxes and towers of beige and gray.

“Can you believe we’re here?” Becca flashed her toothy, dimpled smile at Adam.

Adam closed his eyes a moment and frowned. His words were laced with sorrow. “I wish Mom could have joined us.”

“Me, too,” said Becca.

She waited, giving Adam time to untangle himself from the thicket of melancholy.

“God’s a shit,” he said, head down, an angry tone.

“Adam,” she said and stopped. She had heard the rant before and didn’t want to have it ruin their time away from home. “Please try to let it go.” She watched him, anxious.

They sat in silence as the evening grew darker and the faraway cars vanished into moving headlights.

“I really liked that church,” Adam said, changing the subject.

“Which one, Einstein?” she teased.

“The one where Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples. It was peaceful. I liked the plants…the open sky roof…and how all those tablets looked on the wall, written in all those beautiful scripts and languages.”

Becca gazed at him lovingly, reminded of how attractive she found his appreciation of beauty. “I thought the tablets were the Ten Commandments,” she said. “I’m surprised that the weeble-wobble nun there didn’t crack my knuckles with a ruler when I said that. Did you see the look on her face? Man! Wouldn’t ‘a been the first time I got the ruler.”

“No, Silly Rabbit, it’s not the Ten Commandments,” Adam teased in a mocking voice.

“Shut up!” she protested, half annoyed, half in jest.

“Yeah, you shut me up,” he provoked in a playground tone.

“I will,” she said.

“Yeah, you and what army?

“Becca’s Brigade,” eyes squinted in feigned anger.

“And exactly who are they?” shrugging off the threat.

She suddenly thrust her head forward and pressed a smacking kiss on his mouth and then pulled back sharply, staring at him with a half smile on her face, her lips stretched thin from side to side.

Adam’s eyes twinkled as he chuckled at her in the evening light. He became quiet and still in soft, slow increments. His head tilted down gently and he confided, “I felt bad.”

“Adi, what’s wrong?” Becca put an open palm on his hunched shoulder.

“I felt bad when you guys all said the prayer together and I didn’t know the words.”

“You mean the Lord’s Prayer?”

“Yeah.”

“I can teach you. Mum-mum taught me,” she said eagerly.

He looked up at her, wanting to thank her but before he could, she excitedly pursued her idea. “Listen, ‘cause here goes,” she blurted, animated. “I’ll say the whole thing through, then we’ll do the smaller pieces over with you following along.” She brought her hands together in front of her chest, each in a lazy OK sign. “Remember,” she told him, “It’s even easier than ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider.’ OK?”

“OK.”

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

Becca took a breath, falling quiet for a moment. Her gray eyes moved up to the right briefly, then came back down, resting on Adam’s face. A soft, blurred smile floated across her mouth as her lips moved to excavate antique words from layered strata of childhood memories. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” He watched her recite the prayer, admiring the shifting planes and curves of her face as they caught and caressed shadow after shadow in the surrendering daylight. “Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Her voice skipped through the evening air in lovely, tender hops. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, for ever. Amen.”

The smile on her face grew wide when she finished reciting the prayer. She quietly peered at him. Curls of brown made a tousled, flowing frame around her luminous face, her freckles playing like fading ghosts underneath her eyes. A crisping stream of air suddenly lifted a mist of perfume from underneath her ear and sprinkled it onto Adam’s face like wedding rice.

“So you want to learn, Baby Cakes?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I do.”

So Be It, Part II [Chapter 17]

2011-12-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 17:

Two days later, Fatima smiled from her hospital bed. Her dark eyes beamed. Rosiness had caravanned back into her cheeks. “How was the dinner, Adam?” she asked, a lively tone.

“OK. We missed you. I wish you hadn’t asked us to have the dinner while you’re in the hospital. I wasn’t comfortable. Becca did some great cooking. We really missed you.”

“Our losses hurt more than our gains please,” Fatima laughed, cheerful. “Choose to be happy,” she counseled, adding in her native Punjabi, “You should get married.”

Adam deflected, replying in English. “You need to get better and back home.”

“I want to hold your baby. I want to hear his silly questions,” said Fatima, eyes twinkling. “I want to see him talk back to you and push his mind against the world and against God, like you do.” She put her hand on top of Adam’s, lovingly. “I want to see him make you crazy like you made me.”

“They’re running a set of follow-up tests, Mom. I think they got the infection.”

“Becca is a good girl.” Fatima began to sound weak again.

“I’m going to go check on those test results,” said Adam.

“When you come back, bring me my hairbrush. I want to brush my hair,” she said, speaking Punjabi again.

“I will.”

Adam left, walking about the wide, bright halls, lost, one ear listening to the disembodied voices over the hospital intercom, the other catching snippets of this or that conversation as he moved past room after room. He stopped, looking down a moment, wondering whether the doctor’s office was on this floor or on the one above. He couldn’t remember and decided to go back to the room and ask his mother.

The hospital room was different when Adam returned. Fatima was convulsing in pain, a nurse by her side.

“Where does it hurt?” shouted the nurse.

“Everywhere!” Fatima said, writhing. “Pain is here, here, here,” she said as she placed her inwardly curved fingers above her breast, on her sternum, on her stomach, noting each locus of suffering.

“I’m going to give you something for the pain,” the nurse shouted to Fatima. “Tell me when it stops.”

Fatima winced, crying without tears while Adam watched through terrified eyes, frozen. A doctor burst into the room, rushed to Fatima and began moving her arms about feverishly, her back to Adam.

“Less pain?” the nurse yelled.

“No,” said Fatima, a small, scared voice.

Adam heard his mother gasp. The women over her shouted amid a heightened shuffle of unseen motions. A sorrowed scent of musk and sandalwood moved through the air, mixing tenderly into the unobservable blue radiance that had begun parting from the world in yielding sighs of echoed pulses. Adam watched everything in the room suddenly tighten into a crisp, hard focus. The floor gave way abruptly, tilting under Adam’s feet and the razor-sharp images of the hospital room dulled into a tear-soaked blur.

Fatima was no longer in the room.

All the King's Horses and All the King's Men [Chapter 16]

2011-12-04T11:03:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 16:

Fatima Hueghlomm had been admitted to the hospital unexpectedly. The night before she was excitedly picking out an outfit to wear to Adam and Becca’s weekend dinner party. Her lower back hurt the next morning. By noon, a screaming ambulance whisked her to a local emergency room.

Becca and Adam spent most of the evening at the hospital, difficult hours receiving a flurry of status reports, test results and evolving prognoses. They sat in the uncomfortable hospital chairs, watching Fatima rest. Tilted back in her hospital bed, needles and tubes running into the top of one hand, haggard and worn, Fatima insisted, “Have your dinner party. Don’t disappoint all those people.”

“Mom, that’s ridiculous,” snapped Adam, his voice weighted with worry.

“Mom, rest,” said Becca. She turned to Adam and muttered, “You too.”

Adam’s eyes dropped to the floor as he retreated into himself.

“We spoke to Dr. Patel,” Becca told Fatima. “He says they’re running some pretty strong antibiotics through your system. They want to make sure that they get the kidney infection. They’ll keep an eye on you for a couple of days. You should be home soon.”

“Ummm,” said Fatima. She slowly added, “Take Adam home. He should eat.”

“I will, Mom,” said Becca. “I’ll take care of him.”

What Are You Thinking? [Chapter 15]

2011-12-04T02:35:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 15. For those of you not familiar with literary cubism, I chose to make Chapter 15 a poem:

What Are You Thinking?

There are no headlines on the newspapers today
And the clock's second hand won't move
And I, I've become humanity's whore
Plunging back into my iris
Collecting every tear since Eve,
Tasting every spite since Adam
Vomiting the twisted panorama into my heart

Hurting, I've burst back through my pupils
Into now, the living day
I watch sunlight dance in prisms
Around your brown, island nipples
Your eyes flutter, open-mouthed
Clutching for my image

I've become a traveler again
No longer falling forward at sixty seconds
Per minute;
Still, frozen, aching, alone
Parents' trinkets of affection, so needed
Lay vaulted in iron-barred jail cells
Someone, please...
Tell me you love me
Tell me I'm good

Your sudden collapse jars me to now
And there’s moist panting on my neck
Your lips taste like oceans, as I fade
And find myself sweating on the corpse of a lie
Wishing I had Marilyn Monroe's legs
So I could open them
And let everyone love me, just to feel close
But I don't have her legs
So I string words into gaudy necklaces
And offer them to circumcised minds
For introspection
Some call it art, but it's drained puss
Aspirated from the ballpoint of an ink pen
Tangential sentences in an oblique suicide note
Written by an apocalyptic asymptote
Approaching an axis called intimacy
Closer, infinitesimally closer
But never...touching

I belong to the present again
As you gently trace a fingertip along
The outside curve of my ear
In a gesture as honest as a backwoods stream
You softly ask, "What are you thinking?"
And I whisper, "Nothing."

Subdued, laying glistening and spent
We reach to suckle nocturnal breasts
So kiss my closed eyelids
And douse me in slumber
And let the sunset scrawl its cherry epitaph
On this, our special afternoon

An Insect [Chapter 14]

2011-12-03T17:10:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 14:

“I’ve read Kafka. I really don’t think he’s all that Kafkaesque. What do you think?”

“I think you’re funny,” replied Becca.

They were lying side by side and face up on their bed. Adam wore loose blue jeans and a flannel shirt with a black and white checkerboard pattern. The sides of his face and chin carried soft shadows of Saturday stubble. His eyes, so often absent, rested in faraway contemplations.

Becca had on her favorite gray sweats, the ones that matched her eyes almost perfectly. She was slightly shorter than Adam, with a thin, muscular runner’s build. Her thick, brown hair reached a palm’s length below her shoulders and was naturally wavy, which is how she kept it most times. She almost never wore makeup. Her face was smooth, cheeks lightly freckled around a small nose. Although teenage boys and middle-aged men glanced at her often when she went places, she behaved in ways unaware of her physical attractiveness. She had carefree and large expressions, becoming happy or angry or sad in enormous degrees, choosing to taste life in big, lusty gulps. Her words formed and moved like her moods and passions — sweeping, obvious and blunt.

Adam looked at her and remembered how he loved the way her gray eyes reflected green when they went hiking in the woods every summer. “So how many layers of meaning can be in one piece of writing?” he asked.

“As many as the reader puts there,” she said.

“No, really. Like when that guy, Samsa, turned into an insect. Wasn’t that powerful?”

“Yeah, that’s realistic — an insect,” she said, her voice drenched in sarcasm.

“I don’t think The Metamorphosis really happened. Samsa didn’t turn into an insect.” Adam’s words and thoughts were as nimble as ever. “If he had become an insect, he would have stopped considering his own consciousness. No, Samsa became a human being who was trapped inside an insect, which is fundamentally different than becoming an insect. And as far as being realistic, if a work of artistic expression doesn’t have a traditional structure, that doesn’t mean that, taken as a whole, it doesn’t still have some valuable or otherwise instructive form or substance.”

Becca had always given Adam a kind ear. She knew he had many relationships and that each one served some functional purpose in his life, but he had no real friends. His emotions seemed in a permanent retreat, bunkered somewhere deep, hiding in wounded fear. She knew that if she stopped listening, he would have no one. And she had made a promise to herself after years of courtship, a promise that she would never abandon him. So she listened, responded.

“Kafka’s Samsa…what kind of egomaniac puts himself in his own writing?” she teased.

Adam remained quiet, waiting, knowing well the acuity with which she chided, the painful truth of her bladed sarcasm.

Becca grinned, realizing that Adam was sizing her impending onslaught. She quietly issued a provocative challenge. “Who even reads that shit?”

“No. That’s not the question,” Adam said. “The question is, ‘What does that mean?’”

“No, the question is, ‘Who writes that shit?’”

“Great writers,” said Adam.

His seriousness made Becca rock with laugher, her head tilting back like it always did, her knees pulled slightly off the mattress, mouth thrown wide open, bellowing loud and riotous. Cackling, she stammered, “I can’t believe you ever got laid.”

“You lay me,” he said, composed, staring forward at the ceiling fan’s still, wooden blades.

She turned to him, done laughing. “Yeah, those are sympathy lays.” She scrunched her small nose and tapped his lightly with her index finger, her way of telling him that she’d just outwitted him.

“Well, are you feeling sympathetic?” Adam raised and lowered his eyebrows like Groucho Marx.

“Hardly.” The jest in Becca’s voice was at a rolling boil.

Adam continued his grotesquely poor Groucho Marx impersonation. “You know, Karl was the fourth Marx brother. Yeah, Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Karl. Karl wanted to join the comedy team, but the other guys always told him, ‘You know, Karl, you’re just not funny.’ So he went and invented Communism. See what happens when you’re not nice to someone?”

Becca closed her eyes and nodded her head gently from side to side, speaking to Adam in a lover’s knowing and muted gestures, telling him how inept she considered his attempt at humor. “You know, Adi, if you keep trying, maybe one day you’ll have a near-life experience.”

They rested, hushed and peaceful for many soft moments, smiling.
Adam nestled in place on their pillow, palm under his head. “Becca, do you like me?”

“Errrrrrrrrr,” she growled in feigned exasperation. “I like you, I like you, for the bazillioneth time, I like you.”

“Do you think I’m funny?”

“You’re funny,” she said.

Noiseless moments passed. Becca sniffled, gently brushing the back of her hand under her nose.

“Promise me in the end you’ll only remember the good stuff,” she said suddenly.

“Life’s a magic show,” said Adam. “And you’ll always be a virgin.” He dropped his head to the side, putting them face-to-face, noses touching.

She giggled. “You look like Cyclops.”

“Thank you,” he whispered.

Bone of My Bones, Anno Domini 1999 [Chapter 13]

2011-12-03T03:08:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 13. Chapter 13 is the first chapter of Act II of the novel:

Act II Incidents of Heart

“I liked your poems.” Rebecca Gowetski’s words rang through the phone line like playful school bells. “I’m surprised to see interesting poetry come out of the Engineering Department.”

“Thanks,” said Adam Hueghlomm.

She waited for more. Nothing. She wondered if she might have somehow insulted him with her comment about the Engineering Department. She cleared her throat. “Yeah…I’d like to run both of them in the Spring issue of Focus. Can I get your permission?”

“Sure.”

More silence.

“OK.” She waited a few moments to let him speak. He didn’t. “Thank you,” she said. Realizing that it was all business, her words lost some of their playfulness. “Your last name’s unique. Let’s confirm the spelling: h-u-e-g-h-l-o-m-m. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“Jewish.”

“Well, I’m a Po-Wop,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“Half Polish, half Italian. That’s what my Mum-mum used to call me…her little Po-Wop.”

“Mum-mum?”

“Grandmother.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Do you really wish you had Marilyn Monroe’s legs?” she asked suddenly.

He hesitated a moment, caught off guard, then realized that she had recited a line in one of his poems. “Eh…no…no, it was just an image,” he replied.

“Well, why? I mean, do you think it’d make you look sexy?” Her voice had recaptured its pogo stick bounce, teasing him.

“Um…no…eh…loveable,” he said.

Her riotous laugh reverberated through the phone line. “To each his own,” she said, still chuckling.

“Thank you for paying attention…to the words,” he said.

“I’d be one lousy editor if I didn’t, huh?” she ribbed.

Both fell quiet.

She pulled them out of silence. “What year are you?”

“I’m finishing up my doctorate. I work for the Army, a civilian research engineer. They sent me back for my third degree. Third and last.”

“I bet that’s exciting,” she said, suddenly matter-of-fact. Unlike many other college students, she sounded wholly unimpressed with the prospect of a Ph.D.
Adam became curious. “How about you?”

“Masters student. Education. Minor in literature.”

More quiet.

Again, she led. “I felt a lot moving underneath your words. Your poems are like cooling lava. Interesting stuff, but you wonder what else might be churning in the volcano.” She paused. “Something eating at you?”

For the second time in their first conversation, she had caught him off guard. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“The second poem. Blame, blame, blame.”

Quiet.

She filled the silence, backtracking, trying to create a comfortable escape for him. “I mean, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. I like it and all…” She stumbled about, trying to find the right words. “It’s powerful and you really make some thought-provoking points. I was just wondering — what kind of answer do you really expect from your Alpha, your Omega?”

“I don’t think it’s a question that can be answered.” His voice softened, becoming introspective. “But that doesn’t mean that it’s a question that shouldn’t be asked,” he added, a far-away tone. His mind left and wandered the cold stars. His eyes blinked and he suddenly remembered that she existed.

“Thank you for paying attention,” he said. His words had lost their machined edges.

She smiled, surprised by his softening tone, his dropping guard. “Do you like coffee, Mr.…” she groped for the proper pronunciation of his last name. “Huge-loam? Hug-lum?”

“Hue-lum,” he said. “Silent g, silent h. Do you go by ‘Po-Wop’?”

“No.” Her laugh was hearty and full of mischief. “I like ‘Becca.’”

They both stopped talking, stillness soaked in a silk, pulsing hum.

She led them softly, out of the silence. “Well, Mr. Silent G, Silent H, would you like to have coffee sometime?”

“Umm...sure…I mean, yes.”

“OK. You have something to write with?” She could hear him over the telephone. He was rustling around ineptly for a pen or a pencil. She chuckled, covering her mouth with her hand, tilting the phone away.

“OK.” He was back on the line, slightly flustered and a little out of breath. “Got it.”

“Take this number down,” she said. “Call me when you’re ready.”

But He Doesn't Tell Me What the Sounds Mean [Chapter 12]

2011-12-02T23:07:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 12:

“Adam!” Fatima yelled from the kitchen to the rear of the house, toward the bedrooms, as she dried her hands on a dishtowel.

“Adam!” she repeated, louder, her eyebrows moving closer together with the effort.

No reply.

“Adam, Mr. Ishmael is here for your lessons. Come here!” her hands on her hips, head down.

Still no answer.

Fatima came into the family room, gave Ishmael an embarrassed, forced smile. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go get Adam.”

“Yes.” Ishmael smiled, nodding politely, rising ever so slightly off the comfortable sofa.

Fatima darted through the corridor that connected the entry and the kitchen, her long, loose skirt flapping floral patterns into the gray shadows. She moved quickly toward the bedrooms, her soft nurse’s shoes making no noise as they glided over the hard floor. She reached the door to Adam’s room, clutched the disc-shaped metal knob and stopped abruptly. The door was locked. Fatima rolled her eyes, placed a soft, open palm on the wooden door and called to her son, a concerned tone. “Adam? Adam?”

“Go away,” she heard his young voice on the other side.

“No, you come out right now.”

She waited.

“Open this door right now, Adam,” she insisted.

The hall became quiet, the door held its ground. Then she heard the key slowly turn, dry metal parts dragging across each other bit by bit, a rigid bolt moving out of its dark slot and back into the body of the door. She exhaled lightly, turning the knob, bracing, pushing away the stiff, wooden barrier that stood between them. Adam had backed away from the door, sitting on the edge of his small bed, across the room, angled away from her, looking out the window. He was barefoot, wearing his favorite gray shorts and a yellow T-shirt.

“Adam, I told you to come out and do your lessons with Mr. Ishmael.” She moved towards him gently and sat down next to him on the edge of his bed, placing a tender, open palm on his small shoulder.

“I don’t like him,” said Adam, staring at trees and sky.

“You don’t have to like him. You have to learn from him.”

“There’s nothing to learn.”

“Stop being difficult, Adam. Go to the family room.”

“He never tells me what the sounds mean!” Adam shouted.

“Shhhhhh.” She moved a hand towards his mouth quickly, her index finger pressed vertically across both his lips. “He’ll hear you,” she whispered, her face suddenly tense.

“So what!” yelled Adam.

“Adam, be quiet.” She glared at him and added, “Right now!” in a sharp, intent whisper.

They stared at each other, battling wills.

“Adam, what’s going on with you? You want to argue about everything these days — what you eat, what you wear, about praying...”

“I don’t want to pray anymore,” he quipped.

“Adam, you were a five-timer, you never missed a daily prayer. What happened? I was so proud of you. But ever since we got back from California…”

“Don’t talk about Dad!” he shouted.

“I didn’t say anything about Daddy,” Fatima said, adding angrily, “And what if I did? You don’t tell me what to talk about.”

“And you don’t tell me!”

“Adam, what’s wrong with you?”

“God took away Dad because Dad believed in him,” he said.

“Adam, that doesn’t make sense.”

“You don’t make sense. You don’t like me,” he said through small, clenched teeth. “You don’t pay attention.”

“You need to learn your prayers, Adam! We’re moving to America soon. And there’s no one there who can teach you prayers. I need you to learn here, before we go and there’s no one.” A profound sadness swept through her being and she hung her head, pleading in a whisper, “No one.”

Adam peered at his mother, perplexed, lost, helpless.

“Mom, I’ll go out,” he acquiesced, suddenly worried about his mother’s changed demeanor.

Fatima didn’t speak or move. Her head suddenly bowed in rippling waves of melancholy.

She broke the silence, a tone of realized finality. “No, Adam. Don’t go out there.”

“What?” he muttered, confused.

“Don’t do anything you don’t want to,” she said, not looking at him.

“Mom, are you OK?”

“I’ll pay Mr. Ishmael and tell him not to come back.”

“Mom, I’ll go out,” he said, a troubled submission. He fumbled through a long series of half-syllables and halted words, finally composing an unasked explanation. “He’s strange, Mom…it’s just...he never answers my questions…and he won’t tell me what the sounds mean, he just forces me to learn a bunch of sounds. But he doesn’t tell me what they mean. There’s a lot more to what words can mean…and sometimes a lot less.”

“There’s no need for this, Adam,” she said, not looking at him, holding an open palm in his direction, cutting short his unnecessary annotations. “Stay in here as long as you want.” Fatima stood, pointing to the floor adjacent to her son’s bed, wanting to make a symbolic assertion of her maternal authority. “And pick all these books up off the floor.”

She left in peace, slowly shutting the door to his room as he watched.

Adam was moved to voice one final disagreement at the closing door. “There is someone in America, Mom. Someone who’ll teach me to pray.”

The door closed.

Fatima moved back through the quiet corridor in a surrendered grace, passing the entry and the kitchen. She came into the large family room where Ishmael was waiting patiently.

“Mr. Ishmael,” she said, a polite professional.

Ishmael stood from the sofa, the creases in his long, white robe falling straight, a wide, greeting smile on his black-bearded brown face. “Yes, Mrs. Fatima?” he said pleasantly.

“Adam won’t be coming for lessons today.”

“Is he ill, Madam? Should I go to the drug store for medicines, maybe?” His Arabic accent commingled with a tinge of British.

“No,” Fatima replied, a slightly embarrassed mother with a proper smile on her face. She added in genuine gratitude, “But thank you for being kind.” The polite, matter-of-fact professional tone returned. “Mr. Ishmael, we’re moving to America. Adam will no longer need your lessons. Thank you for teaching him everything that you have. Here’s your fee for today’s lesson.” She put her hand forward, bills folded between her fingers. A second later the bills were gone.

“Perhaps the future will provide an opportunity for me to give Adam more lessons,” said Ishmael, being polite.

“Perhaps,” Fatima replied.

“America?” Ishmael said, head tilted, eyes wide, nodding slowly, his mouth pulled down at each end in reflection. “I once knew a lady from America — Amber,” he said in a fleeting, peculiar reminiscence.

“Will America allow you to raise little Adam a Muslim?” he asked, returning to the present.

“I’ve been there twice. You can raise yourself whatever you want. There aren’t any rules,” Fatima said.

“No written rules,” Ishmael agreed, persistent, his eyes squinted, pushed together by the forced, enormous smile decorating his long brown face. “But all the unwritten rules.”

Fatima said nothing.

The volley had flown out of bounds, lost, and Ishmael took one last swing at the air. “Will America make little Adam a Muslim or a Jew?”

“Is there really a difference,” said Fatima. In tone, delivery and intent, it was a statement rather than a question.

For What? [Chapter 11]

2011-11-28T21:04:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 11:

Fatima Hueghlomm held the heavy receiver of the black rotary phone to her ear, dutifully listening to the determined voice at the other end of the world.

“Fatima, why?” Dora Hueghlomm paused a moment, hoping that her logic would take hold in her daughter-in-law’s mind. “Fatima, why, I say?” her old voice demanded.

“Mom, a lot of my family is still here.”

“A lot of your family is here,” said Dora Hueghlomm.

“Mom, it’s a big change. I don’t want to do this without thinking.” Fatima frowned and brought an open palm against her chest, gently resting it below her throat. “It was difficult when Idi Amin threw us out of Uganda in ’72. With nothing, only our clothes, our lives, Albert drove us across the border to Kenya in his old Mini Minor. Adam was only seven, so scared, so small.” Fatima’s weak, sad words soaked in remorse and loss. “Idi Amin claimed to be a Muslim. A Muslim isn’t supposed to harm another Muslim.”

“So that’s the rule, is it?” Dora Hueghlomm enunciated in hard stone.

“Rules,” Fatima said, a mix of disappointment and anger. “Things were finally settling in Nairobi. And now,” she paused, pressing back tears. “And now,” she stopped again, forcing her way out of self-pity, mustering resolve. “I have to think,” she said sharply.

“What’s to think?” Dora Hueghlomm asked in stern sympathy. “It’ll be better for you.” She waited, letting the correctness of her stance soak in, and then her voice softened, as if the subject had moved to its core. “And think of the boy…the boy…I see Albert’s eyes in the photos you sent.”

Silence.

“It’ll be better for him,” Dora Hueghlomm argued with the silence.

“America’s so far away, Mom. And I’m alone. What will I do? There’s no one.”

“There’s everyone!” Her admonishment was riddled with tender concerns. And then Dora Hueghlomm sucked in a long, drawn breath in California.

Fatima heard the breath in Africa. She braced.

Dora Hueghlomm released the air in her lungs in a rattled series of jagged syllables. “You listen to me, young lady. I lost my Uncle Leo to those criminals in Austria!” Her voice suddenly verged on shrillness. “I lost my little boy to those criminals in Africa.”

A pause.

“For what!” Dora Hueghlomm shouted. “For what?” she said, quieter, sadder, plumbing so many deep sorrows. “May you never have to bury your child,” her voice cracked. “How many more times?”

Dora Hueghlomm cleared her throat. Her voice came back into the present with a quite dignity, demanding compliance. “Bring the boy to America. I’m here. Everyone’s here.”

“Mom…” Fatima’s sentence swerved in indecision.

“What, Fatima? What!”

“Mom…I’ll start talking to people about getting an American nursing license.”

“Good girl!” Dora Hueghlomm was elated that an elder’s good sense had been accepted. Her honed words now formed a bold, determined statement. “And I will help with this nursing license bit.”

Fatima Hueghlomm pictured her mother-in-law saying those words, her five foot frame standing like an iron bolt in her perfectly clean, perfectly ordered kitchen in West Hills, California. In her mind, Fatima saw Dora Hueghlomm’s face and eyes harden in resolute purpose as she made the statement and moved a small, strong hand to her waist, grasping her cream colored open sweater on one end and pulling it closed in one sharp, taut movement, a gesture that stamped a seal of finality on the decision that had just been made.

The picture in Fatima’s mind was wrong. Dora Hueghlomm’s sweater was not cream colored. It was light blue.

How Dare She! [Chapter 10]

2011-11-28T19:31:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 10:

The tall, wiry man with a long black beard and a stained prayer cap knitted from red and white yarn came to their Nairobi home once a week to teach Adam Islamic prayers. Ishmael was from Saudi Arabia, in his mid-twenties, the privileged and lazy son of an oil sheik, a son who had parlayed his father’s position, name and wealth into a leisurely lifestyle built around amateurish and inconsequential dabblings in theology. He had begun creating this lifestyle in Saudi Arabia, bored, but had gotten caught driving drunk in Riyadh with a busty, incoherent blonde slouched across his lap. His embarrassed family asked him to leave for a few years, giving him parting gifts consisting of a large trust fund and a choice of family real estate scattered around the world. Ishmael picked Kenya for the climate and the safaris. He had recently begun teaching Islamic prayers to local Muslim children for a modest fee, a way to earn some extra pocket money, create a potentially useful social network and perhaps, he thought, meet his first wife.

Ishmael had a long brown face with dark, lazy eyes. His nose was broad and flat. He had a hard, curling beard that started at both ears, covered the sides of his face and wrapped itself above and below his thick, wide lips. Its heavy, black mass hung down to his clavicles. Although his face and eyes had an unyielding harshness, when he spoke, his voice carried through the air in a lilting, soft dignity.

Ishmael’s loose white robe had grown light from wear, flapping helplessly in the placid breeze as he walked to the wrought iron gate of the Hueghlomm home. Although he could well afford many new robes, he clung to this one, having always been stingy in alms and spending that did not involve instantly gratifying physical pleasures for himself.

Ishmael called from outside the gate, “Mrs. Fatima! Mrs. Fatima! I am here.” His heavy Arabic accent was laced with British inflections, leftovers from a childhood of private schooling.

A thin, feminine figure appeared in the second story window. Fatima peered past the gate. “One moment, Mr. Ishmael!” Moments later, she was moving down the gray, cement steps, a proper and welcoming smile on her face.

“I seem to have lost Adam,” she said, a motherly tone.

“Ah, boys,” said Ishmael walking through the opened gate, a smile on this thick lips, nodding knowingly at the antics and ploys of young men. He followed Fatima up the stairs, carrying a Quran wrapped in green cloth at his side.

They turned into the entry and walked a short corridor, into the large family room.
“Please sit.” Fatima motioned at the chairs and sofas, inviting Ishmael to make himself comfortable. “I’ll go find Adam.”

“Shukran.” Ishmael thanked her in Arabic and reclined easily into the comfortable sofa as she left the room. He sat quietly, staring about the room, at the lovely large leafed plants, the coffee table littered with books and magazines, the tasteful and functional furniture. “Middle class,” he muttered to himself, a denigrating smirk on this face. His gaze turned to a metal wall shelf. He stood, walking towards the shelf, running his dark eyes over the items on it. He frowned at the centerpiece, a menorah. He had never seen one, and he studied it, eyes squinted in curious disdain. A wedding photo stood to the side of the menorah. A slightly younger Fatima beamed in her bright red Pakistani wedding outfit, her shoulder gently nestled against the side of Albert Hueghlomm’s black tuxedo. Her lovely bride’s outfit was emblazoned with soft, glittering patterns of gold embroidery. Ishmael looked closer and noticed Fatima’s fingers resting tenderly on Hueghlomm’s opposite shoulder. The new wife had one arm behind and around her husband in a pose that was at once both protective and possessive. Hueghlomm smiled broadly in the photograph, his teeth showing, his pasty white complexion standing out against his dark tuxedo and the burst of red next to him. Ishmael moved to look at the photo standing on the other side of the menorah. Fatima, tired and jubilant, stood cradling a newborn baby wrapped in a downy pink blanket. Albert Hueghlomm, in blue jeans, wearing a proud, happy grin underneath exhausted eyes, stood next to Fatima. He held a suitcase in one hand, a large tote bag slung around his opposite shoulder.

Fatima was suddenly back in the family room. “I can’t find Adam,” she said quietly. “Which is strange.” She put a softly closed fist to her chin, absent eyes, and said in a perplexed, questioning tone, “He knew you were coming.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Ishmael allowed.

“No, he’s very exacting,” replied Fatima. “He doesn’t forget.”

“Shall I help you find him?” offered Ishmael.

“No,” she said. “But thank you.” She crossed her arms and nodded her head down slightly. “I’m sure he’s OK. He’s just…hasn’t been himself the last few months.”

“I’ll come back at your convenience.” Ishmael smiled.

“Let me pay you for the lesson. I’m sorry my son didn’t come as agreed.”

“OK.”

Fatima left and brought back her pocketbook. She opened it, pulled out a billfold and counted out Ishmael’s weekly tutoring fee. She held her hand forward, the money between her thumb and forefinger.

Ishmael snapped the folded bills out of Fatima’s hands in an unobtrusive, quick blink, dropping the money safely into his breast pocket in one fluid movement. He gave Fatima a tilted nod and a thankful smile.

“Next week?” he asked.

“Next week,” she replied.

“I see your lovely photos.” He gestured toward the shelf on the wall behind him, sweeping his broad, open palm in its direction.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Why the candles?” he asked.

“It’s a menorah, a wedding gift from my mother-in-law.”

“Ah,” he said, eyes wide in acknowledgement.

They stood in ginger silence.

“You are Muslim?” he asked, finally.

“Yes,” she said.

“Your son?”

“Muslim and Jewish.”

His face fell into repose, his eyes dropped to the floor. A moment later he pursed his lips. Both eyebrows hopped higher on his forehead.

Fatima chuckled out loud.

He looked at her, no expression. “Next week,” he said, nodding his head slightly to one side.

“A Syrian Imam married us, my husband and me,” Fatima said as she slowly moved her hands to her hips. “He told us a story before the ceremony. He reminded us of the Prophet Muhammad’s Jewish wife, Safiyah, about how a few people around the Prophet ridiculed her because of her faith. Safiyah went to our Prophet with her concerns. The Prophet told her to never mind those people and that if they continued to pester her, she should remind them that as a Jew, she is a daughter of the Prophet Aaron, a niece of the Prophet Moses and the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Being surrounded by prophets, the people who live to ridicule others had best leave her alone.”

“Of course,” conceded Ishmael. He flashed an angry glare at Fatima’s stiff form, a glare quickly hidden behind a wide smile. “So you understand our faith?” he asked, subtle tones of sarcasm laced through his words.

Fatima didn’t reply.

“I’m surprised since the ancestors of Pakistanis are said to have been idol worshippers,” said Ishmael.

“Didn’t Arabs worship the moon god Hubal and three hundred and sixty other idols in Mecca at the time of the Prophet?” said Fatima, eyes fixed on Ishmael’s.

He stared back at her, silent. “I look forward to seeing Adam next week, madam,” he said finally. “Next week?” Ishmael confirmed, smiling pleasantly.

“Next week,” replied Fatima.

So Be It [Chapter 9]

2011-11-28T05:23:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 9:

The shining black miniature Mercedes sat parked on a cement step, twinkling in the brilliant Nairobi sun. Adam raised a large rock over his head, grasping it viciously on either side with his small, determined hands. He swung the rock down hard onto the car, the impact vibrating through his wrists, into his forearms. He pushed the rock aside and glared at the remains — shattered plastic windows with both tires on one side bent out sideways, flattened at a grotesque angle underneath the car’s mangled body. Adam was disappointed that the car wasn’t more broken. He brushed its corpse into a pile with other crushed, fractured toys, reached into his cloth carrying case and pulled out a small Land Rover. He placed it onto the cement killing field, measured and set just so, his lips pursed, intent.

His mother suddenly shouted at him, staring down from the top of the steps, “Adam!”

He looked up, turned away and ran, crashing hastily into the closed wrought iron gate.

“Adam!” he heard her shout again from behind. Her slippers snapped against the hard steps as she moved in his direction. He fumbled at the gate’s stubborn handle, hitting it with closed fists, shoved it open and ran across the road, darting into the hidden alley. Adam kept running, gulping labored breaths, his face contorted in anxious escape. He ran until he was sure she wouldn’t follow, until the brilliant tall weeds on either side of him changed colors and became short, until the curves abandoned the red-soiled path, allowing it to flow in sloping straight lines that led away from roads and homes and voices, lines that emptied into an expanse of rolling, wheat brown fields.

Adam stopped, his head nodded to the earth, his hands on his hips, panting. He swallowed, looked up. The world was behind a curtain somewhere back there, behind him, he knew, but not here. Here, the sky’s gentle, azure hands held soft puffs of cotton in the far distance, at a line where rolling tan fields reached up on barefoot toes to softly kiss lazy blue eyes.

There were no witnesses.

Adam caught his breath. He refused to look back, preferring abandoned fields and infinite blue. He stumbled to the path’s edge and dropped down, hugging his knees in front of him, staring at the gravel aimlessly, at the V-shape of the red rubber straps of his flip-flops, starting in a fork at his big toe and stretching over and around his small brown feet. The fields suddenly basked in a subtle scent of sandalwood. Adam felt a rustle of air gather and move behind him. It brushed its delicate fingertips against the back of his neck in paternal faith and then trotted off into the fields, its ashen palm fading.

Adam closed his eyes and sobbed.

We Pray Your Assistance [Chapter 8]

2011-11-28T02:11:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 8:

To: United Nations Human Rights Commission, New York

We pray your assistance.

The white mans body found at Jinja Dam past week could now have a solved death. A Nile Hotel servant lady in Kampala was promised her name to be secret to explain of the many dangerous happenings at the hotel.

During first days of November this scarred lady speaks that a lorry brought many extra prisoners to Nile Hotel, one being white. She remembers him as to she was ordered to clean all things around him urgently as to leave completely no signs.

When arrived, Army officer called Kireka directed the white man to a lift which took them to room 311. They went together. There Kireka said in a very long way that President Amin was to investigate the Israel event at Entebbe Airport, especially as to Kenya’s help. Kireka said to the white man he was a Israel spy. The man said no. Kireka said to the man he was a Jew, at which he said yes. Kireka said to the man he lived in Nairobi, at which again he said yes. Kireka said the man help Israel people in a aeroplane when it escape from Entebbe. Quiet was the white man. Kireka said what happened at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi? Then he hit the white man very hard. Kireka said what is your work in Kampala. The white man said to buy sugar. His whole work was to buy sugar. Three hours they talked sugar, aeroplanes, Entebbe, Israel, with Kireka hitting the poor man when the talk was wrong. Two hours alone, Kireka questioned the papers in the fellows pockets, his money belt and his shirt. The poor lady servant sweeped around his chair and picked all papers before the man was taken to room 326 for evening sleep.

Next day Kireka and one more big officer had the white man in room 305, a room very hard to clean for its many devices on the floor. The white man was told to remove his pants and shoes and shirt and was beaten very much by the new big officer, all the while Kireka was talking again for aeroplanes and sugar and Entebbe. His blood was too much difficult to clean from that room, room 305. Then Kireka said he would kill him if he did not confess to helping enemies at Entebbe. He showed the white man a telex he said the man sent to Israel embassy at London that admitted his spying. Kireka then laughed and dropped the telex on the floor which added to the poor ladys cleaning time.

The poor white man was next whipped until bleeding again. A electric thing was turn to on and became redhot which was put on his legs and privates. The man was then saying things the servant lady learned from Sister Mary when she was little, the Lord is my Shepard, he said. Kireka himself, not the big officer, put salt and red spice on the white mans whipping cuts at which he again spoke as Sister Mary. Kireka told the man a suggestion that if he got Shs 750,000 he would be released. But the white man and all his mess was all cleaned completely and again at Nile Hotel or even Kampala his face she did not see.

The good peoples here request all readers to see with open eyes. The voice of thy brothers blood crys to you from the soil. This mans voice is only sound to your ears from the mouth of a hotel servant lady who is herself afraid and living very dangerous. But this one was a white man and since a white man maybe you will now listen.

We pray that the good people will see.

Milton Otanga

Kampala, November 1976

Bone of My Bones [Chapter 7]

2011-11-27T03:11:00.001-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 7:

Thirteen years ago, Albert Hueghlomm had limped into the spotless and new emergency admissions room at Mulago Hospital in Kampala. The hospital had been built only a year ago, in 1962.

“Can I help you?” asked the admissions nurse. Her English labored under a heavy African accent.

“Yes. I’ve hurt my knee.” Hueghlomm came around the desk to show her his injury. He placed a delicate palm over his knee. His heavy pants were tattered and bloody. The skin around his knee was torn, raw, soaked red. He grimaced slightly when he looked down at the wound.

“How?” the nurse asked.

“I fell off my motorcycle,” he said, adding in triumph, “The motorcycle’s OK.”

“Please sit,” she told him. “I’ll get someone for you.”

Albert Hueghlomm sat and waited, looking over the bare white walls. Across the room, a woman gently rocked and breastfed a baby, her back to Hueghlomm, her heavy, rounded shoulders hunched forward, cradling the infant. Her soft cooing soothed the air. A bare chested old man slouched asleep at the furthest end of the room, snoring lightly. He had contorted his wiry frame so that his whole body fit into the chair, his feet and legs folded up in front of him. A brand new burlap bag lay beside him, his thinly muscled purple-black arm threaded through its looped handles.

“Sir, please come back with me.”

Hueghlomm looked up from his chair. The woman in front of him wore a white nurse’s uniform. She had a light brown complexion and straight black hair that gently tipped the top of her soft, thin shoulders. Hueghlomm stood gingerly. The woman’s eyes were darker than he’d ever seen, the brown around each pupil almost as dark as the pupil itself.

“Can you walk or should I get a wheelchair?” she asked.

“I can make it…a few yards, at least.” He wanted to be brave.

“What happened?” She was making conversation, putting her patient at ease.

“Fell off my motorcycle.”

She gestured into a side room. He turned in and sat on the examining table.

“I didn’t tell you to do that.” Her look was stoic, all business.

"Sorry.” He slipped off the table, grimacing as he put weight back onto his injured leg.

“Please remove your pants. I’ll be able to check and treat your injury better.”

She turned and began to pull gauze and sponges and antiseptic bottles and forceps and plastic gloves and many other items and devices from a white cabinet drawer. Each of the objects made its own tap as she placed them onto a metal tray. She turned to Hueghlomm, metal tray before her, and examined his bared, bloodied knee.

“You can bend it?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to wash it. This will sting.” She was right.

Grimacing, Hueghlomm finally noticed her Indian accent. He made clenched conversation to keep his mind off the antiseptic bite. “You from India?”

“Pakistan. Raised in Uganda. How about you?”

“Israel. Raised in California.”

“Hmmm,” she was thinking. “Pakistan and Israel — countries created to accommodate religions.” Her sponge washed a stream of water and blood off his pasty, white knee and into a metal pan below. She looked over the cleaned wound, leaning close. “More blood, less cut,” she concluded. “I’ll put you together, Humpty Dumpty.” She looked up at him and smiled. He hadn’t guessed that she could.

“Can a serious person have a sense of humor?” he teased, being careful not to tease too hard. After all, she was filling an anesthetic injection and threading a needle for stitches.

“Our fall from the Garden of Eden wasn’t a complete one,” she explained, moving the anesthetic needle towards his knee. He watched her delicate hands guide the tools skillfully. She inserted the needle into the flesh around his wound. He grunted softly, teeth clenched. She spoke while slowly pushing anesthetic into him. “A merciful God let us take two gifts with us — the ability to laugh and the ability to fall in love. Whenever we do either of those things, we’re closer to the Garden.”

She removed the needle from his knee and placed it on the tray — “Click,” it said. She smiled at him. “So I laugh every chance I get. Now let’s wait for the injection to do its job.” She noticed his embarrassment, sitting before her with his pants off, injured, helpless. She found his vulnerability endearing, attractive.

“You don’t like jewelry?” he asked out of nowhere.

“Why?” She was surprised by the question.

“Whenever I see Pakistani women around the bazaars, they’re always wearing so much jewelry…lovely gold jewelry. But you aren’t wearing any,” he said.

“Just because they like it, it doesn’t mean I do.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hope I didn’t offend you. I wasn’t generalizing, just wondering.” He looked down, quietly awkward.

Noticing his discomfort, she obliged an answer. “The most I’d ever wear would be a ring, a small one, with bright, pretty stones.” She ducked her head slightly to peer at his face, to see if her answer had relieved his awkwardness.

Hueghlomm shook his head in a politely restrained, stilted acknowledgement.

The anesthetic began to take effect.

“My brothers drive motorcycles,” she shared, watching his face.

“Really?”

“One of them races at Nakivubu Stadium.”

“So do I!” he blurted, suddenly animated. “I never win…but I love to race.”

“I thought I’d seen you somewhere before. You’re the European chap who walks around the stadium smiling before the races. I wish you’d be more careful on your motorbike.” She smiled at him.

He noticed her small forehead and high cheekbones. “There’s a small scar underneath your eye,” he said, feeling bad for her. “What happened?”

“We had roosters behind our house in Karachi when I was a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. I got too close one day and one of them tried to pluck my eye out.” She moved her index finger underneath her eye with a slashing motion and squinted in disapproval. “I don’t like angry things, things that need to show dominance.”

The anesthetic had fanned away his pain. Albert Hueghlomm’s muscles and tendons relaxed. He suddenly felt that the day’s chase and toil had ended, that he was at home, resting. He tilted his head back and allowed himself to see her whole face at once. She was beautiful.

Yours, Fatima [Chapter 6]

2011-11-26T03:10:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 6:

Deeply hurt, navigating through a twisting whirlwind of grief and loss, Fatima Hueghlomm strove to do what she believed was right. She contacted Albert Hueghlomm’s family in California to notify them of his passing. At first there was anger, anger at Fatima’s tasteless practical joke. Anger morphed into abject disbelief, incoherent questions, demands for official confirmation. A flurry of frenzied phone calls ensued, giving distressed voice to fury, rage, accusing incredulity. All the divergent passions that accompany loss, the many branches of loving relations that had been broken, that had perished — all burned together in crackling embers, leaving behind an ash heap of dull regrets and suffering remorse.

Fatima’s beloved husband was no more — yet she realized that Albert Hueghlomm was much more than her husband. He was a son, a father, a brother, an uncle, a friend. She wanted to honor those many relationships and her husband’s family, people whom she knew only through occasional telephone calls and one brief visit to America. She asked them their wishes.

Albert Hueghlomm’s family wanted him buried in a Jewish cemetery outside of Los Angeles. Fatima agreed, asking that the plot next to her husband be reserved for her. She and Adam would attend the funeral.

Dora Hueghlomm, Albert Hueghlomm’s mother, told Fatima to select the inscription for her husband’s headstone. Fatima complied, quoting the inscription in a short, tear-soaked note —

Dear Mother,

“It is from Allah that we all come and it is to Allah that we all return.” No one can ever love Albert as much as you. I am a very close second.

Yours,
Fatima

He is Gone, Chapter 5

2011-11-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 5:

“Adam.” Fatima always pronounced her son’s name in its Arabic form, with an “Ah” sound at the beginning. She held back sobs as he drew close. They were together, alone, in the echoing family room of their large Nairobi home.

“Mom?”

“Your Daddy is gone,” she said in her characteristic Pakistani accent, tears streaked down her face.

“I know. Kampala. For work.”

“No, Adam. He is gone,” she repeated, whispering, more insistent.

“Mom?”

No answer.

“Mom?”

“I’m sorry.” She held him, cupping his head against her chest, sobbing.

Judaism and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Chapter 4

2011-11-12T16:39:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 4:

Albert Hueghlomm was flat on his back in jeans and a tee shirt, lying in the African sun on the cement floor of his garage. He was pushing the black rubber top of a wire onto a brand new spark plug. He spoke to his son while finishing. “You want to be sure that,” he stopped and strained underneath the motorcycle, “you’re properly seated so that,” more strain, “you catch the spark.” He finished and looked up at the wire, gently wiggling it to make sure that the connection was good.

Albert Hueghlomm had a round face with a prominent nose that held up a pair of black-framed glasses. His dark brown hair, parted on the side and barely touching his small ears, stood out against his pasty white complexion. He was of medium height and build. He spoke to Adam without looking at the boy, “Did you see the spark plug that we took out?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“It was worn and corroded,” he said. “Did you see the old plug’s tooth compared to the new one that we just put in?”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“That’s why I had to kick the pedal so hard and so many times before the motorbike started last week. It wasn’t getting a good spark…to make the petrol fumes explode…and start the engine.” He looked over at Adam, “See? Everything’s connected. If you just look and think, in the end it all makes sense.”

Adam continued to watch his father work in the morning light. He wore a light blue football shirt, a new pair of red flip-flops and his favorite gray shorts. He had his father’s facial features and his mother’s light brown complexion. Adam enjoyed helping his father by handing him the tools that he needed to make the repairs and he had always been fond of his father’s impromptu lessons on internal combustion engines. He was a child full of curiosity, intrigued with learning. His mother often boasted to the other wives in the neighborhood — her son had started to speak before he was a year old, communicating in three languages in broken but full sentences. By the time he was six, Adam spoke fluent Punjabi with his mother, English with his father, and colloquial Swahili with the servants and locals.

Fatima seldom discussed her biggest concern about her son, and then only with her husband. Even at a young age, Adam had never used his language skills to create human relationships. Instead, he used language as a tool for data collection and analysis. She knew well his inner warmth and care. She had seen it often in how he took a tender interest in the habits and welfare of the local wildlife that frequently visited the perimeter of their home. But she had never seen him express or demonstrate that kind of overt warmth with humans, not even with his father or with her.

“Dad, I don’t want to be alone tomorrow,” Adam said.

“You won’t be. Santina will be with you.” Santina was his babysitter. His father continued, “And Mom will be back the day after I leave.” His mother was completing Umra, the smaller Haj or Muslim pilgrimage, that year, away at Mecca. “I hadn’t planned on leaving, but there’s a chance for a big sugar buy in Kampala at a good price. I should make this trip.”

Albert Hueghlomm looked at his son, realizing that his explanations hadn’t assuaged the boy’s concern. He tried another approach. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll bring back an Action Man from Kampala.” Action Man was a toy that Adam had asked for a couple of weeks ago, a plastic soldier with moveable limbs.

“OK.” Adam accepted the consolation. “How did Action Man get that cut on his face?”
he asked his father.

“Being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said Albert Hueghlomm.

“Why didn’t you go to Mecca with Mom?”

His father didn’t reply right away. “I’m not allowed,” he finally said, and then stopped and wondered if there was any way to explain why to a child. He gave up and stammered, “It might not be safe.”

“If it’s not safe, why did you let Mommy go?”

“It’s safe for her.”

“But you’re bigger than her so it should be even safer for you?”

“I didn’t mean that kind of safe.”

“Isn’t there only one kind of ‘safe’?”

“There’s a lot more to what words can mean…and sometimes a lot less.”

“Then what good are words?”

“Adam,” he said and then stopped, his frustration growing.

Adam pressed, “You’re leaving. Mommy’s gone. Words don’t mean anything. And all I have is Action Man.”

“Adam,” Albert Hueghlomm’s tone was starting to become angry. He felt flustered by his son’s characteristic inquisitions and he had a lot to do on short notice to prepare for tomorrow’s trip to Kampala. “I’m sorry, Adam.” His tone softened as he caught and controlled his paternal frustration. “I’m sorry.”

Sensing his father’s annoyance, Adam let the issue drop.

Albert Hueghlomm knelt and placed his tools back into their box, wiping his hands on a shop rag, now smiling over at his son. “Hey, I know something you can do for me one day.” He stood and walked to Adam, continuing to wipe his hands on the rag, a wistful smile on his face. He leaned down to Adam lovingly. His cologne was a mixture of sandalwood and spicy tones of musk. His eyes sparkled like Christmas lights as he spoke. “One day I want you to go to Jerusalem and say a prayer for me. I’ve never been. I’ve always wanted to.” He stood straight and tossed the rag on top of the closed toolbox, smiling broadly, becoming more and more pleased with the thought of his son making a pilgrimage to the Holy City on his behalf.

“We have Jerusalem now, you know,” he beamed proudly.

“Who had it before us?” asked Adam happily.

The circumstantial irony froze Albert Hueghlomm in place.

All Those Babies, Chapter 3

2011-11-09T03:27:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 3:

The Nairobi streets dozed under a blanket of moonlit night by the time they started their drive home. Albert Hueghlomm drove, his wife to his left, sitting in the black leather passenger seat. Adam sat in the back of his parents’ comfortable car, a white Corsair.

“That was nice of Marty and Rachel,” said Fatima.

“Yes it was,” her husband agreed. “Thanks for coming tonight. I haven’t been to a Passover Seder in a while. They did a good job with it.”

A block of streetlight moved through the car, lighting Fatima’s face for a moment. It brushed across her husband softly, over Adam, and then quietly stole away, stepping outside through the back window.

“Mommy, I didn’t like it,” said Adam, staring into the dark.

“Jewish food isn’t spicy, Adam,” said Fatima. “We’ll get you something spicy at home.”

“No, the seder,” Adam mispronounced it see-der.

“What about the seder?” his father asked, curious. He glanced for Adam in the rearview mirror, finally finding his young eyes.

“The dead babies at Passover,” said Adam, staring back at his father. “Why did Allah kill all those Egyptian babies? Why do we celebrate the killing of babies?”

No one answered. No one said another word.

They drove home quietly, swimming through the peaceful African night. The tires crooned a soothing hum as they swept across the cooling asphalt, a thin sheen of evening dew forming on its smooth, black surface. A forest of enormous trees zipped by on one side, a dark, surrounding rim of thick trunks and wide, floppy leaves hanging like elephant ears, dimly lit in the silvery shadows of moon. Blocks of streetlight took turns coming into and out of the car, sweeping over them like an endless caravan of silent, faceless nomads. Adam watched the side of his mother’s face. The light did a sultry dance with the shadows around her eyes and nose.

The Old Man from Nairobi, Chapter 2

2011-11-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 2:

Adam Hueghlomm was eight years old and on school holiday. Every morning he would wake, wash, and put on his favorite gray shorts and red flip-flops. The cool Nairobi air always tasted full of blossoming vegetation when he climbed down the cement steps at the front of their house. A tall, black wrought iron fence surrounded the property. By sunrise, the street outside the gate came alive with dusty cars and busy walkers. The vegetable lady regularly passed along a couple of hours after daybreak, strolling on the gravel sidewalk, her booming voice announcing the day’s produce while she carried a heavy basket atop her head, its content brimming with shiny green, yellow, and red spheres and cones.

Adam’s mother, Fatima, came down the hard steps, drying her hands with a dark blue dishtowel along the way. She wore a long, loose cotton skirt with a gentle floral pattern. Although far from tight, her long-sleeved yellow top held her thin form more snugly than her skirt. Her straight, shoulder-length black hair shone in the morning sun, bouncing softly around her light brown neck as she walked, a burst of color moving against the gray cream of the house.

Fatima shouted over her son, at the vegetable lady, “Aye, aye!” Her husband loved spaghetti and tonight she would make the sauce with fresh tomatoes.

The vegetable lady stopped immediately outside the wrought iron gate, “Ah, mama need vegetable this day.” Her words carried the heavy soak of a Swahili accent. She lowered her basket from the top of her head and held it below her waist, grasping it steady by two side handles, tilting it towards Fatima. She invited Fatima forward with a broad smile, lips stretched across a pristine set of bright, clean teeth.
Fatima leaned into the basket and picked over the day’s produce, culling out the best tomatoes of the lot, picking up this one or that, turning each around in her thin hands, running discerning eyes over the skin, gently pressing her fingertips into the firm spheres, testing freshness. The vegetable lady watched patiently, mentally tallying her total sale. Fatima made her final selections and placed the chosen tomatoes into the blue dishtowel, holding it like a miniature hammock. She began the bartering ritual, wanting to save every possible shilling, more on the basis of principle rather than need. Adam caught fragments of the Swahili conversation.

“These look like they were picked yesterday,” opened Fatima, a subtle British accent woven through her words.

“Noooooo, no, no. They were picked todaaay,” countered the vegetable lady, her words stretched in African inflections, her dark face nodding no, gently.

“But they’re bruised and the skin isn’t tight. They must be from yesterday.”

“The skin is very tight, good lady.” The vegetable lady tilted her head, mentally selecting the most compelling images for her next sentence. “My old, old mother work soooo hard. She pick these todayyyy, no matter how much her back hurrrrrting.”

Fatima decided that she would pay the asking price today, but she continued a token negotiation so that she wouldn’t be branded an easy mark in future transactions. “Yesterday they seemed bigger.”

“Same plant, same plant. Same size.” The vegetable lady nodded her head gently from side to side and made little clucking sounds with her tongue.

“OK, OK. But only because I know you,” said Fatima.

“Madam will like these tomatoes,” said the vegetable lady, smiling, her mind rolling numbers behind her eyes like a cash register.

Paper, coins and tomatoes changed hands.

Amid the bartering, Adam watched the old man on the other side of the road. He was shuffling down the sidewalk, the same as every day, bobbing along, his face the color of eggplants, his torn, dusty khaki pants crinkling and uncrinkling in cadence with his shuffling gait, a mud-caked burlap bag clutched close to his bare, ebony chest.

Fatima and the vegetable lady parted, exchanging smiles, bidding each other goodbye in Swahili, “Kwaheri!” The vegetable lady continued moving down the road announcing and hawking her produce, “Mboga safi na fresh kweli-kweli.” Fatima turned and hopped back up the cement steps, blessing the tomatoes in Arabic along the way, “Bismillah.”

Adam stayed on his side of the unlocked gate, watching the old man. The man had just gotten to where a side alley met the road. He dodged quickly into the hidden path, the same one he vanished into every day. Circumstances fused with curiosity, creating an enticing opportunity to discover the old man’s secrets. Adam buckled under the heavy weight of temptation. He turned sideways and slipped through the gate, glancing back from the corner of his eye at the cement steps to make sure his mother wasn’t looking. Outside the home compound, he stood on his side of the road, waiting for traffic to subside. When it did, he moved forward and across the road, walking in a quick, stilted gait.

Adam turned into the side alley and moved down the hidden, red-soiled path. A blanket of stillness nestled around him. He listened to the sound of gravel crunching underneath his flip-flops. Blossoming African weeds loomed taller than him, beautiful, on both sides of the path. Then he saw him. Around a gentle curve and a few feet off the path, the old man stood with his shiny, thinly muscled purple back facing Adam, his legs slightly apart, burlap bag crumpled on the ground beside him. He was peeing into the weeds.

The gravel stopped crunching. The tall weeds disappeared. Adam stopped thinking. He followed his limbs, walking closer. The old man grew bigger. He had one wrinkled, leathery palm resting gently on his hip, the other in front of him guiding a yellow stream into the weeds, its parabolic curve visible through the thin space between the back of his legs. The button on the old man’s rear pant pocket hung by a thread and was caked in dried blood. He cleared his throat noisily and gasped a parade of deep breaths. His lungs sounded like old newspapers fluttering helplessly in a strong gust. The yellow stream made a final lurch into the weeds like a falling rope. The old man smelled like sweat, urine and salt boiling together in a teapot. He bent his knees and hunched to one side to pick up the muddy burlap bag. He suddenly turned to stone.

Adam froze, icy fear.

Slowly, almost without moving, the old man’s onyx head turned towards the little boy until his tilted visage locked eyes with Adam’s. His wrinkled, leather eggplant face slowly broke into a bright ivory smile, squinting black pupils like bottomless wells drilled into the white snowfields of his eyes. And it was his eyes that then invited Adam to come look into the mud-caked burlap bag.

Adam pulled forward, a reluctant puppet on a horizontal string. The old man’s stance and expression remained unchanged, his wrinkled coal hands holding the dirty burlap bag open by its two frayed loop handles. Adam craned his neck to peer inside. Nothing. No, wait…he heard a faint, muffled tweet, tweet, tweet. He stepped closer, gazing to the bottom of the bag. A gang of bright yellow chicks scurried about inside the bag alongside a worn and sunburned copy of the Quran.

Adam looked back up at the old man, still hunched around his own ivory smile. The old man thrust a deep gaze into Adam’s eyes, silently asking him what he thought of the content of his bag. And then his squinting, ivory-framed eyes grew together into one large eye that absorbed his forehead. Adam blinked and the old man’s face became an enormous dark pupil reflecting scenes of war and death and pilgrimage, like a speeded up old movie reel, oscillating and rushing scenes that eddied into one final peaceful tableau of the giant black cube in Mecca — still, deserted, quiet, bathed in soft blue moonlight.

Adam screamed. He turned and ran, his heart beating hard inside his throat, rushing blood that clutched at his windpipe until he almost couldn’t breathe.

He lost one flip-flop forever.

He never followed the old man again.

Chapter 1, We Got Him

2011-11-03T02:17:00.000-07:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. Here's Chapter 1:

“The Lord has been captured and is in our custody. He is in a secure location awaiting his trial for crimes against humanity,” read the global public release statement. Adam Hueghlomm, the prosecuting attorney, stared at the Lord in his cell, a plain looking middle-aged Caucasian man with an air of resignation and just a hint of sadness.

“I promise a fair trial,” said Hueghlomm. “I’m reviewing your five-count indictment to tally the specific charges. You’ll be given every opportunity to defend yourself. You have right to counsel. You may make a motion to disqualify me as your prosecuting attorney. I assure you that I will follow procedure, with reverence for and adherence to the rule of law.” Hueghlomm stopped to gauge the reaction of the accused, to see whether his words were being acknowledged.

Stone silence.

Hueghlomm turned to walk away.

“Six millennia!” the Lord shouted at his back. “Six millennia,” quieter now, speaking half to himself and half to Hueghlomm. “I’ve been watching you stumble about, whining, crying, killing, shifting blame and belching abuse on earth’s bounty. You spoiled, demented, half-baked irreverent child. You wouldn’t know what to do with great opportunity if she stood naked before you. God help you if true adversity ever visited you.” He stopped and looked down. Then a faint smile appeared on his face and his eyes sparkled with mischief. “Is the Fallen One available?”

“What do you mean?” said Hueghlomm.

“You said that I have right to counsel. Is the Fallen One available?” said the Lord.

“Stop playing games. There is no Fallen One.”

“You are telling me to stop playing games! Not only a lawyer, but a comedian too. How multi-faceted. Your mother must be proud.”

“My mother’s with you,” said Hueghlomm.

“Don’t bet on it.”

More stone silence. Hueghlomm and the Lord stared at each other. Hueghlomm was short, a little over five and a half feet tall with a stocky torso and thin legs. His round, light brown face brimmed with character, somewhat attractive, although not at all classically handsome. A prominent nose held up a pair of thin-framed glasses with circular lenses. His black hair was parted on the side and cut over his small ears, framing a set of dark brown eyes that conveyed a feminine kindness most times. When he fell into thought, those eyes ran a thousand miles away. Although in his early forties, less than a handful of grays had found their way into the hair around his temples. His smooth, soft face had no wrinkles. Taken together, his features often gave strangers the impression that “this is a pretty smart guy.”

Hueghlomm started to speak again, slower than before, deliberate words, maintaining a square fix on the Lord’s eyes. “Sir, you are under indictment and arrest for a number of serious crimes against humanity. You are accused of mass infanticide. You are accused of homophobic genocide. You are accused of felony animal cruelty. You are accused of violating Resolution 786 against societal leaders, against innocent women and children, and against unwitting animals, sir!”

“Am I, who am I? You’re shortsighted beyond your wildest imagination,” said the Lord, sitting back on the metal bench inside his cell, gently folding his arms across his chest.

Hueghlomm’s Cereb-Ear beeped. He gave it mental permission to sound.

“Chicken tonight, Sweetie?” Her playful voice ran through his inner ear.

“You mean for dinner?”

“No, stupid, I mean to choke.” She loved sarcasm, teasing. “You silly pervert.”

“Burgers,” he said.

“OK, but no cheese. Let’s not clog up your arteries any more than they already are, Mr. Limpy Dingy.”

“I need to go,” he said.

“Don’t get bent.” Her inflections were full of inside jokes. “Busy?”

“Yes.” He snapped his Cereb-Ear off.

“All well?” asked the Lord, looking at Hueghlomm. Hueghlomm didn’t reply. He felt that the Lord knew whom he had just spoken with. The Lord looked as if he knew that Hueghlomm knew and that he wanted Hueghlomm to know that he knew.

“It’s all in my mind,” Hueghlomm thought to himself. “He’s trying to get into my head.”

Prologue

2011-11-02T02:47:00.000-07:00

The prologue from Resolution 786

Prologue: 2036 Anno Domini

She brought a gnarled, frail hand to her wasted mouth, lying in cadaverous repose on stiff white sheets draped over a small hospital bed that sat on top of a sterile frame of gray metal tubes. Bright plastic light filled the tiny, colorless room, ricocheting in impersonal waves off four vacant walls. Her being quivered, alone, in rushing pain as she struggled to feed her papery lungs with sharp little sips of air sucked between savagely broken lips, precious oxygen dragged across an acrid, twirling black tongue. Her skull twitched with each labored breath, patches of bare scalp reflecting a cold sheen of bleached white between wispy mounds of lifeless, brittle hair. Her fractured trunk languished in a sunken crush, no breasts, bony humps of sternum studded through the top of a loose hospital gown. A set of desolate, listless hands and feet lay destitute at the ends of her surrendered circulatory system, writing their armistice in blue ice.

The hospital intercom spoke in a booming, loudspeaker voice, prompting her eyes to open a moment, reflexively, bulging spheres ailing in forced effort. The unseeing, jaundiced glass balls rolled about in a film-soaked swirl, pupils finally becoming lost inside her forehead. Her mouth and eyelids fell in unison. The lids stopped unclosed, marking a set of thin, grotesque yellow-white lines where her eyes had been. Her open mouth, coal tongue still, became an aged hollow with stubs of broken, muddy rocks ringed around its entrance.

The world’s best medical specialists had not been able to diagnose the former presidential advisor’s ailment. It had started strangely, almost three decades back. At the time, Madam Advisor had been a national figure and a key proponent and architect of the first war of the twenty-first century, a war that she argued would be won easily, resulting in the quick emergence of a Jeffersonian democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a fully functioning egalitarian state that would provide the people of the region a stable and secure beacon of enlightened ideals, a new nation, conceived in liberty and perpetually beholden to the morally superior West. So she argued.

Instead, one decade into the twenty-first century, Madam Advisor’s war had given rise to an oil rich, nuclear powered fundamentalist theocracy that ruled from the former Soviet Union to the south of Turkey, one that oppressed its women, threatened its neighbors and had plausible designs for the conquest of southern Europe. The theocracy’s passionately fundamentalist leaders detested the Western powers that had funded and nursed it through its birth, the countries that had invested an enormous treasure of life, limb and gold to vanquish the region’s secular dictators and place them, the fundamentalists, into power.

And so, as the Islamic Federation of Greater Iran grew, so did Madam Advisor’s inexplicable ailments. The theocracy’s birth pangs had come in a tumultuous maelstrom of blood, tears, sorrows, and loss. As above, so below — the anguished turmoil crossed the gossamer curtain between Heaven and Earth. The angels, disturbed, drew lots to repay the turmoil to its mothers and fathers. And so it was Azrael who collected every drop of blood spilled in Madam Advisor’s war, collected them into a bottomless grail, which he then poured into Madam Advisor’s spleen. And it was Malik who collected every tear shed in Madam Advisor’s war, collected them into an ancient chalice that he then poured into Madam Advisor’s glands. And it was Mukar who cast a net of air over every sorrow born of Madam Advisor’s war and he cast that net, full and brimming, deep into Madam Advisor’s heart. And it was Nakir who tossed a canopy of still space over every loss suffered in Madam Advisor’s war and emptied that canopy one loss at a time into Madam Advisor’s dreams.

The blood, the tears, the sorrows, the loss — all rightfully hers, pressed themselves into her body in a complex of twisted sinews that wrapped and clung to her soul like a poisonous vine.

Thirty years ago, when her ailments had slowly begun to fester, she had busied herself in avoiding responsibility for the war, hiding behind clever and contrived rhetoric founded on the ambiguities of war, the wrongness of others, the inaccuracies of information. No matter the cunning of argument, no matter the volume of assertion, no matter the minions of sophists dispatched to every media outlet imaginable, the facts remained true. The war was long and bloody. Fundamentalism had grown exponentially as a result. The world was now a much worse and infinitely more dangerous place.

Childless, loveless, friendless, alone — she decayed in a maelstrom of exhaustion, uncontrolled crying, piercing headaches, recurring infections, hair loss, eczema, and auditory hallucinations.

Her lonely descent to death’s doorstep had lasted three bone-numbing decades. Tonight, she had reached the last rung. A thin, blonde nurse with a kind face gently stabbed an anesthetic needle into to the top of Madam Advisor’s wrinkled, wasted hand, a needle made from recycled metal, metal that contained two atoms of iron from the shell casing that fired a final bullet into Adolf Hitler’s temple in Berlin in 1945. Madam Advisor’s rotating glass eyes stilled. Her worn out mouth closed and she appeared to be thinking. Her breaths came further and further apart as her mind assembled her last full thought. It was a thought about the Lord, a Lord whom she adored, a Lord whom she looked forward to finally meeting. She spoke to him in her head in devoted and loving tones, reminding him of the dire sacrifices that she had made in his cause. “Dear Lord Jesus Christ, I did all I could to follow your hallowed teachings, up to and including giving my all to your Doctrine of Preemptive Strike. That’s in the Gospel, isn’t it? Yes, I know it is, for I have given myself to you. And thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving me so.”

Her mind lost words forever behind a drape of sounds and tastes and scents and colors and she heard an antique piano recital playing along side a mix of proud parental pronouncements, affirmations that seeded a limitless ambition into her child’s heart and then…a crimson moment of searing, ripping anguish swept through her Universe and she thought that she heard a distant Echo approach and speed over her like a screaming war plane…I never knew you...It said…and vanished. Her tired lungs nudged away air one last time. At that moment, a moment without Time and outside of Space, a dozen dutiful angels stood around Madam Advisor in a perfectly symmetrical ring. They cycled about her seven times as she gasped last. Not one angel fluttered even a feather to relieve a single pang of her mammoth agony.

Introduction

2011-10-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

I've started posting the chapters of Resolution 786. I'll post each successive chapter roughly every 3 or 4 days. We'll start with the Introduction:

Introduction

I’ve walked the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem’s Old City. I was baptized in the Jordan. A Presbyterian minister taught me the Lord’s Prayer on the Mt. of Olives one peaceful April evening, just the two of us sitting above the Kidron Valley in full view of the Temple Mount. I’ve sailed the sloshing eddies of the Ganges at dawn with a Brahmin. I’ve prayed in Sarnath alongside American-born Buddhist converts at the spot where Buddha gave his first sermon after enlightenment. I’ve knelt in Mecca shoulder to shoulder with Muslim pilgrims from all over the world, immediately before the Kaaba, so close that each time I leaned forward to place my forehead to the earth, my head touched the base of the large black cube. I’ve greeted the Lord at Israel’s Western Wall, praying together with orthodox Jews at the base of the temple wall that Herod built.

God has many faces, and I have had the enormous privilege of celebrating several of them.

But Resolution 786 is not at all about the Creator. It’s about us. It’s a story about our journey from Here to There and about the sometimes tender and the sometimes savage things that happen to us in between, the swirling, rushing currents of love and lust and loss that form into experiences that become the building blocks of our lives. And if the story sometimes seems a confused patchwork of discordant imagery — well, it was written by an American of Indian heritage who was born in Africa, raised a Muslim, turned into a refugee by another Muslim, given safety and sustenance by a Christian church, and who is now happily married to a Jewish woman.

I beg forgiveness if my introduction will in any way prejudice a reader’s individual interpretation of this novel. Interpretation of literature is not at all the province of the writer. It is wholly and solely the province of the reader.
God bless you, dear reader. God bless us all.

Mohamed Mughal
Baltimore, Maryland
September 11, 2007

Our World

2011-10-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

We live in a world where it's OK for every global media outlet to run multiple photos of a mutilated corpse, but a photo of a topless woman breastfeeding her child would be censured as obscene.

Presentation, Cedarhurst Unitarian Church, 23 Oct 2011

2011-10-24T15:53:00.000-07:00

I gave a presentation at Cedarhurst Unitarian Church last Sunday. This was my fourth presentation at a Unitarian Church this year. Many people have asked me to post the text of the talk. I've provided it below. Remember, these are just my talking points. Each talk becomes a separate and unique exchange of ideas based on the interests and questions of the audience.

I think the that topics that I speak on are important and timely. I thoroughly enjoy the open-minded sharing of perspectives during the talks.

The Basic Beliefs and Practices of Islam and the Notion of the Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys

Good Morning. My name’s Mohamed and I want to thank you for inviting me to join you here today. I’m speaking on two topics this morning. The first is Islam, its basic beliefs and practices from an American Muslim’s perspective. Our second topic is the notion of good guys vs. bad guys, an exploration of who’s good and who’s bad. I’ll discuss these topics for about 20 minutes after which we’ll have an audience-driven Q&A session.

It’s difficult to synopsize any world religion in 10 minutes, but I’m going to try. I’ll start by discussing the five pillars or basic practices of Islam. After that, we’ll read from an English translation of the Quran, the scriptural basis for Islam.

The five pillars are:

1. Profession of Faith: There is no God but Allah and his prophet is Mohammed.
2. Prayer: Practicing the 5 daily prayers.
3. Fasting during Ramadan from sunup to sundown (not just food but any kind of bodily appetite).
4. The paying of alms.
5. Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca.

In doing a top-level summary of those pillars, we see that Islam is not that different from most other theological frameworks in that it places emphasis on prayer, fasting, alms and pilgrimage.

Now what about the Quran, a book that some churches in the U.S. believe ought to be burned? We’ve heard so much about this book in the last few years, but does anyone know much of its content? I’ve brought along my family copy of the Quran and I’ve tabbed some passages for reading.

Read passages on: Jesus, Garden of Eden, Moses, Noah, Lot

To recap what we’ve learned so far, we see that Muslims have 5 pillars of faith that range from prayer to fasting to alms to pilgrimage. Their sacred text is the Quran, a book of vignettes, lessons, prescriptions and warnings.
We’ve taken a sampling of readings from this Quran. Let’s use this sampling to begin discussion of our second topic, the notion of good guys vs. bad guys. We’ll start by trying to collectively answer, “Is the God of the Quran a good guy or a bad guy?” Let’s take inventory of what we’ve heard about him.

1. He killed a generation of babies because the Egyptians didn’t grant the Israelites freedom.
2. He massacred two entire cities because of their sexual orientation.
3. He killed every living creature on our planet because he was unhappy with the actions of a few humans.

Killing babies, genocide driven by homophobia, mass annihilation of all life – maybe he is a bad guy?

That’s a possible example of a bad God. Are there examples of a bad people?

- Read Matthew – ask audience, where from?
-Read Luther – ask audience, who wrote?
-Read Amin

We have a bad God, two groups of bad people. Do we know any bad individuals? Here’s a description. (Read from 1984); ask audience, who is this?

(note how closely the content of a work of fiction from 1948 mirrors what we’re experiencing today).

So What Do We Make of It All?

Human thinking tends to operate in dichotomies, black and white, yin and yang, good and bad so I think we trap ourselves into finding a bad guy because we need to fulfill this dichotomy.

In all this discussion of bad guys, there’s a side of the coin that’s missing. We didn’t discuss the good guys; who are the good guys? I’ve looked through scripture and literature and listened to theologians and commentators from many parts of the world. My conclusion is this: when you ask the question, “Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?” the good guys are always the people you ask. If Adolf Hitler was sitting here with us this morning and we asked him who are the good guys and who are the bad guys, I can virtually guarantee that he wouldn’t designate himself the bad guy. The point: Invariably, the good guys is us, the bad guys is the others.

Conclusions

I want to read something from one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, something that’ll move us towards a concluding thought about our discussion.

(Read the short piece by Kurt Vonnegut where he discusses a conversation he’d had with his father before his father passed away)

Vonnegut said that he didn’t believe in villains. In a universe void of absolutes, I tend to agree. Is this moral relativism, a philosophy that can leave people believing that there are no good guys and no bad guys, a type of intellectual cop-out? No, I don’t think it is. I think this perspective espouses the tenants of a philosopher who himself was branded and punished as a bad guy. That poor fellow also asked us to not brand bad guys when he told us “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

We’ve covered a lot of material here in a very short amount of time. If anyone asks me, “Mohamed, out of all you shared with everyone this morning, what’s the one thing you’d want them to remember most?” It’d have to be that one sentence: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”

Putting out First Novel in Installments

2011-10-20T05:50:00.000-07:00

I've decided to post my first novel, Resolution 786, to this blog in chapter installments beginning next week. I'll post additional chapters roughly every three days.

Now, to get moving on that elusive sophomore novel, Christmas in Mecca!

A "Cube" of Writing from "Christmas in Mecca"

2011-10-13T07:23:00.000-07:00



A Report on Life-forms on the Third Stone Orbiting Sol: The Closed Case of Rover

Background

....Our team from Igramafore examined a representative sample of the carbon-based life-forms who live within the oxygen-rich, toxic atmosphere of the third stone orbiting Sol. Sol is a medium-sized star that continually cascades through the ten dimensions within an outer arm of a medium-sized spiral galaxy which resides in a cluster of galaxies draped behind the Great Fold of Space.

The Sample Subject

The sample subject responded when called by the sonic construction: Rover. The subject moves about on four pods within a gravitational field that exerts 42 omboms per hua per hua. It ingests the following: its fellow life-forms; oxygen; and two hydrogen atoms bonded with one atom of oxygen. It excretes reduced combinations of these items in solid, liquid and gaseous forms. The subject displays the characteristics of one half of a male/female coupling. However, examination reveals that the reproductive organs have been removed. Subject’s bloodstream carries substances foreign to its own physiology, suggesting medical interventions such as surgery and/or inoculation. The subject’s psychology is rather simple: most behaviors have the objective of obtaining items for ingestion. However, subject also expends appreciable effort in obtaining social and interpersonal interactions for the sake of interaction, suggesting emotional and/or communal needs. Mind-scan reveals a matrix of chemically preserved memories confined to experiences within only three physical dimensions. The totality of memories suggests a deep loyalty to the recurring personas within the subject’s life experience. Life experiences are strung together and artificially sequenced within omnipresent time in a fashion that would give the beholder a sense of linear time, a contortion of the Cosmos where one series of experience no longer exists and another series of experience has yet to exist, perhaps giving rise to fallacious constructs such as a past and a future in lieu of the actuality of omnipresent existence.

Conclusions

The life-forms on the third stone orbiting Sol are wholly engrossed in fulfilling their physical and communal needs. They have rudimentary skills in medical science which they use towards sterilization and inoculation. They are uncomplicated, loyal creatures who experience only three of ten dimensions, a severely truncated experience base nested within a contorted sense of past and future. Our team from Igramafore concludes that these life-forms are incapable, both intellectually and emotionally, of determining a true sense of space-time; understanding the basic nature of matter, light and physical experience; creating meaningful or uniquely expressive art; or waging organized warfare.

Our Message to the Supreme Council of Beings
There is nothing of deep interest or of imminent danger in Quadrant X69. We recommend no further research in this quadrant.

Death of a Character

2011-10-10T11:53:00.000-07:00

4:17 a.m., the 10th of October. In a mix of moonlight, slumber, dusk and sleeping dogs, I came to a groggy conclusion: Allah Om Ilahi Elohim, the original (and fictional) author of Genesis, compelling as he is as a major character, does not fit into the tapestry of storyline in my second novel, Christmas in Mecca. Elohim is a diversion from what is evolving into the novel's central anchor, the plight (emotional, sexual and professional) of Dr. Harold Hawkins.

Attending My Younger Brother's Renewal of Vows Ceremony

2011-10-04T18:17:00.000-07:00

Upcoming Talk

2011-09-29T07:09:00.000-07:00

A link to my upcoming talk this Sunday:

http://www.chestertownspy.com/unitarian-universalists-welcome-dr-mohamed-mughal/

Fonzi’s Jacket, Archie Bunker’s Chair and Richer Expressions of Literary Cubism

2011-09-27T14:23:00.000-07:00

I visited Washington, D.C. on a quest last week. I wanted to see Fonzi’s jacket at the Smithsonian’s American History Musuem. I failed. I never found the jacket.

Instead, I found: Archie Bunker’s chair; Dorothy’s ruby slippers (yes, the heels were clicked together); the original Muppets; and Catwoman’s leather outfit. I moved along the National Mall under cloudy skies, sneakers crunching over the softly pebbled walkways, walking into the Natural History Museum where I saw the Hope Diamond and an array of other gems and minerals. I then made my way to the National Gallery to stand before the creative progeny of Rodin, Monet, Van Gogh and Picasso.

It was here at the National Gallery of Art, through the accident of freeform milling and through the failed quest to find Fonzi's jacket, that I discovered new perspectives on literary cubism. The small exhibit tucked into a small corner of the sprawling museum was titled “Text as Inspiration: Artists’ Books and Literature.” Intrigued, I entered the area and studied the fourteen artists' books on exhibit. The books were cubist in that their authors employed various modes of artistic expression to tell a story; the individual cubes of art became building blocks that converged into a thematic whole.

The form of literary cubism that I use in my writing is limited to various modes of written expression. I’ve used poems, letters, e-mails, government and legal memoranda, news articles and even automated spreadsheets as the cubes or building blocks of fiction. The books in this exhibit transcend the use of words as a sole means of expression. These books couple words with visual and tactile formats, giving the reader a synthesis of text, image and form.

Hmmmmm.

Have I unnecessarily and blindly shackled the expressive components of literary cubism in my practice of fiction writing?

Yes, I have.

One of the texts on exhibit was Sandra McPherson’s book of poetry titled “Eve.” In it, the author includes a papier-mâché sculpture of Adam’s rib covered in a feminine black veil. The text of the book falls out of the sculpture in an accordion-like fashion.

Literary cubism is a potent and provocative technique for creating fiction. A richer and perhaps more expressive mode of this technique goes beyond the use of only words. Literary cubism gives full license to inclusion of visual and tactile formats.

Another Speaking Engagement

2011-08-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

I enjoyed my visit to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Hagerstown this past Sunday. What an open-minded and interesting congregation of folks! We discussed: Islam; Martin Luther; the Quran; George Orwell; Kurt Vonnegut; and notions of Good vs. Bad...and we did it all in 20 minutes :).

What a fun group of people; thanks for the great experience!

Bo's Cafe Life: Exploring the Writing Life

2011-06-30T09:39:00.001-07:00

Well, it had to happen sooner or later...someone was bound to put one of my literary ruminations into a comic format. Wayne Pollard did just that in his 500th installment of Bo's Cafe Life. If you click on the link, bounce around on Wayne's blog and enjoy more of his observations regarding the comic aspects of the writing life.

Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Easton

2011-06-16T14:27:00.000-07:00

I'll be speaking at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship at Easton on Sunday, June 26, 2011. My topic's "The Basic Beliefs and Practices of Islam and the Notion of the Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys." Wish me luck!

Happy Easter!

2011-04-21T02:55:00.000-07:00

Pre-Christian pagan cultures celebrated the March equinox, paying homage to Eostre, the goddess of spring and fertility. Hundreds of years later, in 325, the Nicene Council established Christian Easter on the first Sunday after the full moon following the Spring equinox.

This Sunday, much of the world will celebrate the rebirth of a man who asked us to stop being so mean to each other. As he was reborn, may his teachings, too, be reborn. May we all, one day, follow the behavioral recommendations of Jesus of Nazareth.

Happy Easter!

Best Friends

2011-02-07T19:26:00.000-08:00

The Hungry One

The Elusive One

The Handsome One

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-25T06:31:00.000-08:00

Merry Christmas, everyone!

May Jesus' teachings for interpersonal behavior continue to influence how we treat each other throughout the new year.

Prologue

2010-11-30T04:24:00.000-08:00

An excerpt, the prologue from Resolution 786

Prologue: 2036 Anno Domini

She brought a gnarled, frail hand to her wasted mouth, lying in cadaverous repose on stiff white sheets draped over a small hospital bed that sat on top of a sterile frame of gray metal tubes. Bright plastic light filled the tiny, colorless room, ricocheting in impersonal waves off four vacant walls. Her being quivered, alone, in rushing pain as she struggled to feed her papery lungs with sharp little sips of air sucked between savagely broken lips, precious oxygen dragged across an acrid, twirling black tongue. Her skull twitched with each labored breath, patches of bare scalp reflecting a cold sheen of bleached white between wispy mounds of lifeless, brittle hair. Her fractured trunk languished in a sunken crush, no breasts, bony humps of sternum studded through the top of a loose hospital gown. A set of desolate, listless hands and feet lay destitute at the ends of her surrendered circulatory system, writing their armistice in blue ice.

The hospital intercom spoke in a booming, loudspeaker voice, prompting her eyes to open a moment, reflexively, bulging spheres ailing in forced effort. The unseeing, jaundiced glass balls rolled about in a film-soaked swirl, pupils finally becoming lost inside her forehead. Her mouth and eyelids fell in unison. The lids stopped unclosed, marking a set of thin, grotesque yellow-white lines where her eyes had been. Her open mouth, coal tongue still, became an aged hollow with stubs of broken, muddy rocks ringed around its entrance.

The world’s best medical specialists had not been able to diagnose the former presidential advisor’s ailment. It had started strangely, almost three decades back. At the time, Madam Advisor had been a national figure and a key proponent and architect of the first war of the twenty-first century, a war that she argued would be won easily, resulting in the quick emergence of a Jeffersonian democracy in the heart of the Middle East, a fully functioning egalitarian state that would provide the people of the region a stable and secure beacon of enlightened ideals, a new nation, conceived in liberty and perpetually beholden to the morally superior West. So she argued.

Instead, one decade into the twenty-first century, Madam Advisor’s war had given rise to an oil rich, nuclear powered fundamentalist theocracy that ruled from the former Soviet Union to the south of Turkey, one that oppressed its women, threatened its neighbors and had plausible designs for the conquest of southern Europe. The theocracy’s passionately fundamentalist leaders detested the Western powers that had funded and nursed it through its birth, the countries that had invested an enormous treasure of life, limb and gold to vanquish the region’s secular dictators and place them, the fundamentalists, into power.

And so, as the Islamic Federation of Greater Iran grew, so did Madam Advisor’s inexplicable ailments. The theocracy’s birth pangs had come in a tumultuous maelstrom of blood, tears, sorrows, and loss. As above, so below — the anguished turmoil crossed the gossamer curtain between Heaven and Earth. The angels, disturbed, drew lots to repay the turmoil to its mothers and fathers. And so it was Azrael who collected every drop of blood spilled in Madam Advisor’s war, collected them into a bottomless grail, which he then poured into Madam Advisor’s spleen. And it was Malik who collected every tear shed in Madam Advisor’s war, collected them into an ancient chalice that he then poured into Madam Advisor’s glands. And it was Mukar who cast a net of air over every sorrow born of Madam Advisor’s war and he cast that net, full and brimming, deep into Madam Advisor’s heart. And it was Nakir who tossed a canopy of still space over every loss suffered in Madam Advisor’s war and emptied that canopy one loss at a time into Madam Advisor’s dreams.

The blood, the tears, the sorrows, the loss — all rightfully hers, pressed themselves into her body in a complex of twisted sinews that wrapped and clung to her soul like a poisonous vine.

Thirty years ago, when her ailments had slowly begun to fester, she had busied herself in avoiding responsibility for the war, hiding behind clever and contrived rhetoric founded on the ambiguities of war, the wrongness of others, the inaccuracies of information. No matter the cunning of argument, no matter the volume of assertion, no matter the minions of sophists dispatched to every media outlet imaginable, the facts remained true. The war was long and bloody. Fundamentalism had grown exponentially as a result. The world was now a much worse and infinitely more dangerous place.

Childless, loveless, friendless, alone — she decayed in a maelstrom of exhaustion, uncontrolled crying, piercing headaches, recurring infections, hair loss, eczema, and auditory hallucinations.

Her lonely descent to death’s doorstep had lasted three bone-numbing decades. Tonight, she had reached the last rung. A thin, blonde nurse with a kind face gently stabbed an anesthetic needle into to the top of Madam Advisor’s wrinkled, wasted hand, a needle made from recycled metal, metal that contained two atoms of iron from the shell casing that fired a final bullet into Adolf Hitler’s temple in Berlin in 1945. Madam Advisor’s rotating glass eyes stilled. Her worn out mouth closed and she appeared to be thinking. Her breaths came further and further apart as her mind assembled her last full thought. It was a thought about the Lord, a Lord whom she adored, a Lord whom she looked forward to finally meeting. She spoke to him in her head in devoted and loving tones, reminding him of the dire sacrifices that she had made in his cause. “Dear Lord Jesus Christ, I did all I could to follow your hallowed teachings, up to and including giving my all to your Doctrine of Preemptive Strike. That’s in the Gospel, isn’t it? Yes, I know it is, for I have given myself to you. And thank you, Lord Jesus, for loving me so.”

Her mind lost words forever behind a drape of sounds and tastes and scents and colors and she heard an antique piano recital playing along side a mix of proud parental pronouncements, affirmations that seeded a limitless ambition into her child’s heart and then…a crimson moment of searing, ripping anguish swept through her Universe and she thought that she heard a distant Echo approach and speed over her like a screaming war plane…I never knew you...It said…and vanished. Her tired lungs nudged away air one last time. At that moment, a moment without Time and outside of Space, a dozen dutiful angels stood around Madam Advisor in a perfectly symmetrical ring. They cycled about her seven times as she gasped last. Not one angel fluttered even a feather to relieve a single pang of her mammoth agony.

Editing First Drafts, A Useful Rule

2010-11-16T03:58:00.000-08:00

Kurt Vonnegut provides a set of eight rules for writing a short story in his book, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction. I've been using the fourth rule to do quick edits of my evolving WIP. The rule is:

"Every sentence must do one of two things—reveal character or advance the action."

I've found this to be an extremely potent rule for expunging superfluous content from my first drafts.

How about you? Do you have any useful quick-and-dirty editing devices for improving first drafts?

Harold Hawkins, the Best of Childhoods

2010-11-13T05:18:00.000-08:00

A draft excerpt from Christmas in Mecca.

_____________________

The leafless trees stood speechless, a disorganized gang of rigid mutes, brittle black sketches scribbled against the gray canvas of the late November sky. “If I hear more bad news at the next parent-teacher conference, you’re a dead duck,” she said from the driver’s seat, her aggressively intent gape stabbing into the traffic and pedestrians ahead. Hawkins sat in the back, watched the trees nested in the yielding expanse of gray heaven. He unconsciously felt each of his slow, rhythmic breaths, moist air gently flushing in and out of his lungs.

“Harry, I’m talking to you,” she shouted, spinning the steering abruptly, thrusting the car’s rust and sputters into the narrow side street that led to Hawkins’s elementary school. “Don’t you dare not pay attention, young man,” she warned, squinted eyes, slowly approaching a crosswalk. She stopped the car, watched the blue-coated guard, whistle in mouth, gesturing oncoming traffic to a halt while giving the scattered column of small, bundled children hand signals to cross. She glared at the river of cheerful kids, their bright coats and happy backpacks lolling about, forming a trickling tributary of brilliant color moving in a high-pitched, happy swirl into the washing grey stream of the day. “Look at them,” she said, disgusted. “They don’t even know enough to be angry.”

Hawkins, still and detached in the back seat, stared out the side window, watched a lone, brittle brown leaf clinging softly to the twigged tip of a forgotten branch growing sideways out of a gnarled, sprawling wooden mammoth. The leaf shivered, rested, hopped and turned, rested. So many forces had acted on it through its season, Hawkins thought: the nurturing gentle rays of spring sunlight that conspired with April rains to give it a life of supple lime; the blazing, heavy jostle of the summer sun that toughened its cloak to a deep, thick emerald; the cooling autumn breezes that lulled away its moisture and color, prompting impending slumber. So much happened to that leaf, he thought, in a cycle of existence that was at once both predictable and unique.

“Harry, damn it!” the air thundered inside the closed cell walls of the messy car.

Hawkins broke his gaze from the trees, the leaf. He stared from the backseat at the rear of his mother’s head. A bun of wiry braids turned in on themselves, jagged grays poking out of the dirt of flat brown. Her neck was full, sitting atop rounded, pudgy shoulders. “You are worthless,” she said, both fists clenched before her, shivering white parentheses that angrily flanked either side of the cold, black steering wheel. Hawkins continued to stare, a tired stoic whose eyes blinked from time to time. Outside, the traffic guard continued her duties; the happy river of chanting, bouncing children flowed unabated. “Harry,” she said, oblivious to the sun and the joy outside, shook her head slowly from side to side, a tone of wounded exasperation. “Harry,” she said again, this time nudging her head forward and down in a sharp dip, a gesture of exclamation to accompany her second frustrated utterance of her son’s name. She pursed her mouth, her perennial precursor to emotional vengeance. Her chapped, dry lips parted, then words began to drop from her mouth, a runaway train of heavy, black cannonballs. “Harry, when you were born there was an ugly, turbaned couple in the hospital bed next to mine. They were having a child as well. You know what I think happened?” she asked the air, watching but not seeing the little children crossing happily before the frozen car. “I think our babies got crossed up. Yep. That’s right. I think my child went to them and I got theirs.” A look of disgust grasped her face, bulged her eyes and left her lower jaw askew. “Because there’s no way you belong to me,” she said, hissed, acid words.

Hawkins stared at the back of her head, stringed brown knots held together by wires of gray above her fat neck and heavy shoulders. He dropped his sight and fixed a gaze on his small hands, his left thumb crossed over the right, fingers interlocked, hands holding on to each other in a tender intensity. He turned to watch the world outside, the gray, the wind, the cool and the light. A fluttering, weightless struggle caught his eye. That leaf, that same brittle, dry leaf now shivered and quaked and clung for all its worth.

Christmas in Mecca

2010-11-11T07:38:00.000-08:00

My second novel work-in-progress is no longer a novel. It's an exorcism.

What's In A Name, Rama Muhammad?

2010-11-09T08:19:00.000-08:00

Fantasy Author, N.R. Williams, just concluded a character-naming contest on her blog. She copied each of the twenty-four entries onto small, folded slips of paper, put them into a bowl, tossed them around and then had her three and a half year old granddaughter pull a name.

Guess what?

She pulled my entry.

Now Ms. Williams' upcoming Amazon Kindle book, The Treasures of Carmelidrium, has a pianist extraordinaire named Rama Muhammad. I can't wait to read all about her!

A Late Night Post

2010-11-08T02:55:00.000-08:00

Falling Asleep

Scenes splash my mind's caves
Quiet moonlit rolling waves

Faces, feelings, promises, past
Bitter twilights of lovers last

Barren blue beach, not a sight
The landscape in my head this night

Mohamed's Fortune Cookie

2010-10-25T12:30:00.000-07:00

My fortune cookie today said: "You are not illiterate."

Oh, my.

Good.

Reading Club Questions, Resolution 786

2010-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

I recently made an offer to U.S.-based reading clubs: I'll join your group discussion of Resolution 786 via telephone. A reader once asked for a list of questions that his reading club could use to guide analyses of the novel. On the chance that the list might be useful to other reading or book clubs, I've provided it below.

How about you? What questions would you suggest to reading or book clubs to help guide their discussions of your latest work-in-progress?

___________________

Reading/Book Club Questions for Resolution 786

1. Is the Indictment of the Lord a fair document? Why or why not?

2. What religious identity (i.e. – agnostic, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Pagan, etc.) best fits Adam Hueghlomm?

3. Most novels and other dramatic works have protagonists and antagonists, good guys and bad guys. Who are the bad guys in Resolution 786? Who are the good guys?

4. Does Becca love Adam? What makes you believe that she does or doesn’t?

5. Is Resolution 786 anti-war? Why?

6. Is Resolution 786 anti-God? Why?

7. Based on the novel, what do you believe the author believes with regard to God?

8. In what ways, if any, are the circumstances of Adam Hueghlomm’s life like those of the life of Jesus of Nazareth?

9. How did you feel after finishing the novel (sad, hopeful, perplexed, angry, etc.) and why?

10. Page 29 makes reference to the Prophet Muhammad’s Jewish wife. Prior to reading Resolution 786, did you know that he had a Jewish wife? Were you surprised? Why or why not?

11. Are you comfortable with the author’s cubist style of volleying between the past, present and future?

12. By the time you reached the trial, did the writing immerse you to the point that you accepted the “fantastic arena” without a mental jolt?

13. What insights do you think that the author hopes you will gain from reading Resolution 786?

14. Which character(s) in Resolution 786 could you see yourself being friends with and what would be the nature of that friendship (i.e. studying colleague, hunting companion, romantic partner, etc.)?

Mazel Tov, Thanks to Shadow

2010-10-20T04:36:00.000-07:00

Shadow commented to my post of September 27, 2010, the post with a link to one of my short stories from 10th grade, Johnny vs. Johnny. She asked for a more recent sample of my writing, something that she could compare to my 10th grade prose to determine if I've evolved as a writer these last three decades. I can't say whether or not I have. That said, I've provided a sample chapter out of my 2008 novel, Resolution 786.

A literary aside: if any of you enjoy interesting imagery coupled with poems of emotion and reflection, take a look at Shadow's blog, 1 Door Away from Heaven. I think you'll enjoy it!

"Mazel Tov" - An Excerpt from Resolution 786
_________________

Becca smiled radiantly in her tan shorts and beige, sleeveless top. A small maroon backpack rested between her shoulder blades. She and Adam had flown to Utah for vacation, leaving behind their comfortable home in the outskirts of Baltimore. They had been hiking in Arches National Park in the May sun for the last four days and Becca’s normally white complexion glowed in uneven patches of reddish brown around her sunburned shoulders and face. Her dark brown hair occasionally fluttered about in soft tousles in the sun swept canyon breezes, soft curls of chestnut that she brushed away from her eyes with a combing stroke of open fingers. Although it was their last day of long hikes, Becca’s stride was as strong as ever.

Adam struggled to follow behind her, stumbling from time to time, worn and tired. He had read a series of studies on melanoma while an undergraduate and had developed a paranoid attitude regarding sun exposure and so he wore long khaki pants, a long-sleeved light blue cotton shirt and a wide-brimmed safari sun hat.

Becca peered back at Adam from a high ledge, chuckling at the weary, soft man trailing behind her, all bundled against the hot sun. Her characteristic freckles were visible underneath the sheen of pink-brown sunburn around her nose and cheeks. She shouted, her lean muscular arms hanging at her sides. “Come on. Let’s get to the arch.”

“Coming,” said Adam, pausing a moment to catch his breath, one hiking boot up on a rock, a listless brown hand resting above bended knee. They had hiked all morning, stopped for lunch and a rest, and were now completing their final trek of the trip. An hour into the early evening hike, Adam was growing tired. He gulped a series of forced, deep breaths, gazing about from underneath the shade of his wide-brimmed hat. The quiet coffee and russet landscape was flooded in daylight, at rest and peaceful. He took one last gasp and turned towards Becca, peeping up from under his safari hat. She was standing on a shelf of rocks above him, under the shadow and backdrop of tall protrusions of jutting brownish-red formations. She had both hands resting patiently on her hips, her bare arms and legs smooth and taut, smiling down at him like a child enjoying the clumsy antics of her new puppy.

“Come on, Mr. Limpy Dingy,” she teased.

“You not happy with our love life?” he shouted back across the dusted pebbles, joking, buying himself another moment of rest before he had to start moving again.

“Did I sound happy last night?” she said, never outdone in sarcasm or humor.

“You better be careful,” he said, half serious, walking towards her, feet aching with each labored step. “The walls in that cheap little hotel are pretty thin.”

“Who cares?” She turned and walked forward, laughing off his concern.

He finally reached her on the ledge, standing behind her with a silly look on his face. “Who cares?” he mocked in a contrived female voice.

“You gonna make it?” she asked, ignoring his humor, concerned for his endurance.

“We haven’t eaten in a while. Do you have anything in your backpack?” he said.

“No,” she replied, looking back over her shoulder. “Food isn’t all you need to get you through life.” She turned and moved forward.

He stood in place.

She stopped and looked back, sensing his stillness. She smirked and held her palm out to him. Her smirk turned to a smile that was at once both loving and teasing. “Come on.”

He trotted forward, grasping her strong hand and they moved forward together through the beautiful desert terrain, the sun throwing longer and longer shadows across the dusted trail and landscape as they trekked through the late afternoon light.

“I liked the rock art near the trail head,” he said at her from behind. Their hiking boots softly crunched at the pebbles and parched dust strewn all along the wide trail. He watched the muscles in her calves quietly flex and rest with each strong step. He wondered if she’d respond to his statement. She didn’t.

“How do you think those people viewed God?” he asked, persistent, beginning to pant as he strove to keep up with her.

“What people?” she shouted, not looking back.

“The ones who created the art that we saw. Those etchings. The gazelles and hunters and…” he paused, reassembling the images in his mind. “And were those horses?”

“Adi,” she said. A few steps later she finished her sentence. “Stop overthinking everything.”

They wandered the desert, through a procession of muted, scenic moments as the sun’s chariot dipped lower in the painted sky. Becca’s vigorous stride had opened a chasm of distance between her and Adam. Time to time, she would glance back to make sure that he was OK, that he was coming along. She smiled to herself each time she caught a glimpse of him struggling to keep up, plodding through the desert.

The trail faded into itself, conceding boundary and form to the larger landscape. The earth turned to brown powdered dust, tall, still cacti bearing witness to a cascade of lighted and shadowed images twinkling in dusk’s silent grace. A small lizard scurried across the sun baked soil, darting out from under a sanctuary of dry, rustling shrubs, vanishing into the caves and shadows of a scattered pile of crimson rock. Shade began its slow climb over the expanse of rolling desert plains, splashing a rippling current of fissured texture across the stern, old faces of the surrounding rocks and canyons. And the short wheat colored shrubs, relegated and invisible in the heavy glare of day, acquired personalities in the blossoming patches of soft, gray shade, the cooling desert breeze kneading through and about them in lulled, whispered whistles.

Adam’s legs became heavy and he stopped, stooped forward, his hands on his hips. He watched Becca’s silhouette ahead, a lithe spring bouncing within a still panorama of cacti and jutting rock formations. The soft, sideways sunlight cast a pleasant yellow hue on one side of everything and the air had cooled. Adam took off his hat. His sight expanded up and back and he felt connected to the blue-gray sky. He ran open fingers through his hair, brushing it back, letting the sweat on his scalp cool and dry. He stood in place and cleared his throat.

Becca heard him from far ahead. She stopped and turned, looking back at his still form across the expanse of desert. Although Adam couldn’t see her face at that distance, her carriage and stance showed concern. “I’m fine,” he shouted to her, waving his hand in her direction. “Just taking a rest.”

“Do you want me to walk back?” Her hardy voice skipped along the powdered path and bounced through the shaded hollows of rock.

“No, just give me a minute.”

“I’ve given you seven years. You can have another minute,” she said.

He moved ahead in gradual, languid steps, watching her form grow larger as he approached. Her sunburned arms and legs reflected the falling sun in a glow of long golden lines. A sudden breeze brushed a tousle of brown curl over one of her eyes and she tossed it back with a smooth swirl of her neck.

“What do you think about planting a weeping willow in the backyard next spring?” she shouted to him.

“I think that’s a great idea,” he said in between heavy breaths.

“Come on, Baby Cakes,” she said. “We get there in time, we can watch the sunset through the eye of the arch.”

He stopped, leaning forward, hands on his hips.

“It’s downhill all the way back,” she reminded.

He trudged ahead, dragging his hiking boots across the powdery terrain, leaving behind long, strewn footprints.

She waited, smiling, watching him.

“I think I’ll throw myself off the next ledge,” he joked, making a series of clumsy gestures to dramatize his exhaustion.

“Don’t tempt fate,” she said. “Come on, Mr. Girly-Man,” she teased. “I’ll draw a hot bath for you when we get back to the room. But don’t make too much noise in the tub,” she added in a goofy, contrived voice, now she mocking him. “Remember, the walls are awful thin.”

“Very funny,” he said, finally reaching her.

They stood alone in the desert, facing each other in silence.

“What?” she said softly, an awkward smile on her freckled face.

He didn’t answer, watching her gray eyes. Her face fell into a comfortable repose. A dry, gentle breeze curled cat-like through the still space between their standing forms. He gave her a kiss, not a very good one at all, but she didn’t seem to care.

“Come out and play, Adi,” she whispered. “There’s a whole world outside your head.”

He watched her gray eyes.

“Come,” she breathed the softly rasped syllable while tilting her thin torso forward, holding a muscled, sunburned arm towards him, palm open in invitation. “Come. We’ll walk together the rest of the way.”

He grasped her firm hand and they trudged forward. He walked faster, not wanting to slow her down. She walked slower, not wanting to leave him behind. The sun continued to plunge lower in the horizon as they made their way to the lovely arch. They moved quietly, in peace, as the sun threw cinnamon-laced honey here and there across the distant hilltops.

They followed the trail as it swung behind a ridge and carved itself into a steep cliff of pinkish crème sandstone. Steps had been cut into the sandstone at points where the slope became steep. The hard path continued to curl up and around the waist of the large rock formation. They followed its steep slopes in the gray shade of twilight, Adam now on his hands and knees, afraid of the large drop growing at the fenceless edge.

“Come on. You’re doing great,” Becca encouraged him, not far ahead.

They finally reached the top and stood side by side, gazing ahead at the broad, flat plane of reddish gray sandstone that lay before them in a slightly downhill slope. A deep, black fissure cut across the stone plane, splitting one slab of rock from the next. Ahead, across the fissure, stood the lovely delicate arch that they had come to see. They walked towards it, their legs appreciative of the descending slope after having walked uphill for so long.

Adam peered at the arch. One of its legs stood much thicker and broader than the other. An arm curled up and around, connecting the legs, creating a large, framed arch atop a broad expanse of lovely reddish gray sandstone.

“I bet the striations mark the ages,” said Adam, pointing at the horizontally layered texture of the arch.

“Forget the ages,” said Becca. “It’s beautiful to look at here and now.”

They peered over and through the arch, to where the distant slopes and hills reached up and touched the thinly clouded twilight sky.

“The Lord’s one hell of a painter, huh,” Adam exclaimed, stunned. “How would you like to have all of that to yourself?”

“I’d rather just have a good life,” said Becca.

Adam looked about, soaking in the wonder that was the world. He suddenly felt someone watching him. He turned and noticed a silly smile on Becca’s face.

“What?” he said.

“I got you something in that little gift shop we ducked into yesterday,” she said.

He looked confused.

“The one we went into so you could use the bathroom,” she reminded. She pulled off her maroon backpack and slung it down in front of her, yanking open its top zipper. She reached in and pulled out a small plastic carousel and held it towards him, resting it in the middle of her palm. Her face broke into a toothy, dimpled grin as she watched him. Adam stood still as she moved her free hand to a butterfly-shaped key on the side of the carousel and wound it, sending a ratcheting burr into the placid twilight with each sharp wind. She let go of the key and the carousel began to turn, playing “Silent Night” in a surprisingly melodious series of chimes. She giggled at him. The carousel began a second chorus and she sang along with it. Her voice was lovely, floating across the desert air in delicate, affectionate tones. The carousel had begun to wind down and its chimes slowed. She slowed her singing to fit its pace, finishing.

She moved her palm towards him, offering him the gift.

He picked it off her palm with a smile. “Thank you,” he said.

“You like it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

They strolled across the hard sandstone and sat at a vantage point where the arch stood off to one side and from where they could gaze over the broad expanse of rock at the faraway hilltops, the clouds, the unending skies and the orange horizon. Becca reached again into her backpack and pulled out two small ceramic teacups and a thermos. She threw Adam a smile as she opened the thermos and poured hot chocolate into each teacup. She handed the sugary concoction to Adam. “I know you’ll like this.”

Adam took a small first sip, smiled, and took another bigger one. “You’re right,” he said. “I love it.”

They finished their warm drinks in silence as the sun set across the quiet horizon, throwing reddish gold rays of last light on the distant, tree studded hills. A few minutes later the sky started to darken and the stars began to show. Adam looked over at Becca, his knees up in front of him. She smiled at him, sitting cross-legged. They sat in silence in the enveloping twilight, resting under a canopy of star-splashed heavens.

The night suddenly became more silent, cooling in a quick plunge. A rustle of air gathered and moved behind them, mixing spicy tones of musk into the arid desert scents. Becca turned hastily, her brow furrowed in curiosity and surprise, looking about. Nothing. She turned back around and glanced at Adam. His head was bowed in a dour reminiscence. The gathered air brushed its graceful fingertips over Becca’s bare, sunburned shoulders in paternal gratitude, leaving behind goose bumps as it curved towards and around Adam. The gentle breath came around again and then again, until it had completed seven circles around them, and then floated off into the ageless desert, its ashen palm fading, a pale smile turning away into darkness.
Becca faced Adam. “Do you want to get married?”

Adam choked on his hot chocolate. He moved his hand quickly to cover his mouth, dropping his teacup. It fell to the hard sandstone in a tiny, shattered crash. “Damn it,” he muttered in hushed exclamation.

“Relax,” she said, stretching forward to pick up the pieces. “Let me get this cleaned up and we’ll move to another spot. I don’t want you getting a piece of glass in your butt.” Becca policed the broken shards into a plastic baggy and they stood to move. She watched Adam’s face intently as she slung her backpack over one shoulder and onto her back, pulling the straps secure under each armpit.
Adam avoided her eyes. He knew that she wanted him to answer her question, but he was afraid. She noticed his awkwardness, sensed his hesitation, and decided to let it drop…for now.

They strolled together a few feet across the sandstone, swimming next to one another in a darkening pond of twilight. Her still silence was uncharacteristic. It made Adam uncomfortable.

“I love you, Becca,” he blurted.

She smiled. “I know,” she said. She moved her palm behind Adam’s head, cupping the back of his scalp firmly, and turned his face towards her. She craned her neck forward, moving her mouth onto his. Her lips were firm, her kisses always strong and forceful. She pulled back from him, her eyes on his mouth a moment, a lost look on her face. Her eyelashes fluttered and her eyes lifted to meet his. He watched the sun’s retreating rays behind him, reflected in her pupils. The characteristic smile that was her public signature slowly formed over her mouth and a teasing spring burrowed its way back into her voice. “Now suppose you could reduce that sensation to ‘X equals negative B plus or minus the square root of B squared minus four times A times C divided by two times A?’”

“Suppose you could?” he wondered.

“It wouldn’t mean shit,” she teased. “It wouldn’t make one hill o’ beans of difference to how much I love kissing you.”

She turned to watch the sunset, standing next to him. He felt her shoulder against his and realized how much he liked that feeling. The drying sweat on the back of his shirt felt refreshing in the cool air. They stood noiselessly, side by side, as the noble desert night joined them, a quiet, imperial stranger with a soft, gray beard, wearing a flowing robe of purple felt.

liberation..##.!

2010-10-15T09:33:00.000-07:00

liberation..##.!

...from desires and needs…
--- passion and possessions ---
/fame…power…security…fortune/
need, oh blasted need!
let its blinding currents
rush, then
eddy, then
drip,then
drop,then
nestle…….
……slowly, and become Lost
in cool, green moss

Upcoming Talk, Unitarian Universalists of Fallston

2010-10-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

I'm speaking at the Unitarian Universalists of Fallston in Fallston, Maryland from 11am to noon on October 24, 2010. My talk, titled The Good Guys vs. the Bad Guys, explores scripture and other literary sources to sample cultural notions of who’s “good” and who’s “bad.” More details? Here's the press release.

Writing creates so many intellectually enriching opportunities beyond the written word. I look forward to a lively and enlightening interaction with the congregation of the Unitarian Universalists of Fallston.

Johnny vs. Johnny

2010-09-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

I began writing in middle school. By high school I had finished my first batch of short stories. Some were perverse, others dull. One starred Urine as a central character (yes, the bodily fluid). Looking back, my prose was forced, lacking color; my themes were difficult to follow; my stories were glaringly unlikely with plot-holes big enough to fly a jet through; my characters were uni-dimensional, stereotypical cardboard cut-outs. Despite these searing truths, I saved some of that adolescent mess. I even posted one of those early stories on my web-site.

Guess what? That story, born of hormonally driven adolescent angst and titled Johnny vs. Johnny, has somehow become the most viewed item on my author web-site.

Is my writing as a 15 year old more interesting than my writing now?

That's a frightening question. The answer is probably even more frightening.

Ramadan Mubarak!

2010-08-11T04:44:00.000-07:00

Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting, begins today and will end on or about September 10, 2010. I'm taking this time off from blogging to focus on observance and family gatherings. I'll be back after the sighting of the Eid moon. Until then, Ramadan Mubarak to the 1.5 billion humans celebrating this holy month. May G_d bless every precious living being on our glorious planet!

Mohamed

Friday Friends: So What Do You Do for a Living?

2010-08-06T04:14:00.000-07:00

Are there ideal vocations that prepare people for becoming great writers? If so, what are they? Both questions have been lingering in my mind ever since I read a recent post on aspiring_x's blog, Hairnets and Hopes. In Raising My Plebian Voice, aspiring_x discusses career choices, literary perceptions and writing. She shares some of her recent experiences and offers an interesting range of reactions and conclusions. I'm sure that each of you will have a unique opinion on the piece. Personally, I savored aspiring_x's raw honesty.

I've considered the relationship between vocations and writing once before. The question came up during my virtual book tour in March. An anonymous reader asked if my background as a chemical engineer influences my writing. I answered honestly: it does.

How about you? Do you believe that there are ideal vocations that serve as training grounds for writers? What's your career choice and how does it affect your writing?

Planning a Virtual Book Tour

2010-08-02T05:45:00.000-07:00

Writing World recently published my article on how to plan a virtual book tour. The article describes a simple, five step process that I used to plan my own tour in March 2010 and includes sample text for hosts and for press releases.

Would I do another virtual book tour? As I say in the article: "Absolutely! Done right, the process yields increased visibility to an author while increasing traffic for the host blogs. It's an ideal venue through which to create and leave behind a long-lasting cyber-trail of information about your book, about your writing and about yourself. Most of all, a virtual book tour is a perfect vehicle through which to enjoy the benefits and revelations of a real-time, deep conversation with readers and literature enthusiasts the world over."

I've always said that I value our cyber-community here at Thoughts and Ponderings. I truly do. That said, if any of the followers of this blog would like to do a virtual book tour this year, I'd be happy and honored to be one of your hosts.

Wishing each of you a week full of enjoyable reading and lucid writing,

Mohamed

Friday Friends: Learning to Write Through Other Artistic Means

2010-07-30T04:24:00.000-07:00

Can writers improve their craft by participating in or studying other modes of artistic expression? Absolutely. A case in point: e.e. cummings was an accomplished visual artist. He imported those skills and techniques into his writing. The next time you read one of his poems, pay attention to its graphic layout. As an example, in Cummings' poem, Grasshopper, the letters and "words" appear on the page like a jolting grasshopper.

That short preamble brings us to this week's installment of Friday Friends, the July 21, 2010 post from Lynda Young's blog, W.I.P. IT, A Writer's Journey. The title, 8 Tips Actors Can Give Writers, is certainly fulfilled in the text of the post.

Although I've never acted, I have created a comic strip. I found that many of the themes, puns and dialogue from that strip found voice in my first novel. In that sense, I have personal validation that the creative impulses of non-writing artistic pursuits can and do influence an author's writing. Lynda's post is yet another instructive demonstration of how the lessons of acting can positively influence a writer's prose.

How about you? Do your non-writing artistic ventures influence your writing? How so?

Trendy Blog Award!

2010-07-27T04:16:00.000-07:00

Medeia Sharif was kind enough to bestow a Trendy Blog Award to Thoughts and Ponderings. Hmmmm. Who would have thought that the internal ramblings of a nerd could ever be trendy? :) Alas, I accept the award with the same graciousness with which it was given. Now - the rule is that I post the award and then pass it on to 10 others; never being one to follow rules, I'm passing the award on to 5 others :). My vote for 5 trendy blogs:

Cruella Collett
Alexis Hallum
Creepy Query Girl
Jennifer Hillier
Dori the Giant

Thank you, Medeia, for thinking of me in the context of trendy {blush}!

Friday Friends: Don't be So Sensitive!

2010-07-23T04:25:00.001-07:00

This week's Friday Friend is Dr. Lydia Kang's blog, The Word is my Oyster. Dr. Kang's post of May 26, 2010, titled A Scientist's View of a Writer's Thick Skin, is what prompted me to click the "follow" button on her blog a couple of months ago. I've been reading each of her posts since.

Looking at Dr. Kang's illustration, which end of the dermatological spectrum are you on: "bleeds and cries easily" or "nothing gets through this sucker?"

Medical analyses aside, the truth is that many of us who want to be writers are of a sensitive nature. Somehow that doesn't seem incongruous; it takes a sensitive nature to pay attention to so many details of life and existence and to then want to communicate those observations back to the world in emotionally and intellectually pleasing and instructive vignettes of self-expression. OK, it's great that we're sensitive. But don't let that same luxurious sensitivity that compels you to want to be a writer grow horns and compel you to not want to be a writer. Let me explain. When you first get serious about writing (yes, at the beginning, that most fragile, vulnerable point in any enterprise including careers, marriages and friendships), you'll beat yourself up for the slop that you see yourself putting on paper. Day after day, draft after draft, you'll work to a point where the slop looks acceptable enough to you so you'll share it with others for critique. You'll graduate from local critiques, you'll expand the distribution of your writing. And then: agents and publishers will reject you; the self-appointed "best and brightest" in various writers' cliques will treat you like an inconsequential upstart; cyber-bullies will grow their own sense of self-worth by belittling your work in an assortment of forums.

As in life, so in writing; distill the truth from the venom.

The venom: ignore.

The truth: use it to become a better writer.

Most of all: keep writing. Use the years and your own hard work to get better and better. You'll get there! :)

Writers' sensitivities: a gift or a curse? Each of us answers that question by how well she or he manages and channels those sensitivities.

Earlier in this post, I asked you for self-disclosure regarding sensitivities. It's not fair if I don't reciprocate with equal disclosure. Looking at Lydia's illustration, I must admit that I'm closer to "bleeds and cries easily" than to "nothing gets through this sucker?" Oh, well. At least I have the gift of being able to fall in love deeply :).

Happy weekend, everyone!

Kismet

2010-07-20T04:47:00.000-07:00

The following is a response to a question from Rama, one of this blog's followers.

Rama asks:

Hi Mohamed,
I don't know how relevant is my way of writing a short story is with the topic in discussion.
Anyway I thought I should share with you. Before I start writing, I always have an idea of the story in my mind, but I have seen as the story moves on, my idea changes, my characters change and my situations change, in fact everything keeps on changing as I keep writing , and finally I find that my story has no resemblance to what I had in my mind. But somehow I like it. I don't know why I can never stick to my original idea. Should I consider it as an advantage or a disadvantage, please let me know what you feel.
Rama.

Mohamed answers:

Dear Rama,

Please don't feel alone; my characters and stories also evolve through the course of conception. I'm sure that they do for other writers as well. My vote is to allow for that serendipity, especially in first drafts. You'll have plenty of opportunities to enhance consistencies in storyline and character once you're done the initial draft and into editing and revision.

The notion of serendipitous writing came up during an author interview that I did last year. Quoting an excerpt from that interview:

Ed: What’s your writing process?

Mohamed: Serendipity, really. (stop and thinks). It’s difficult to operationalize creativity. If we could, we’d produce Picasso’s paintings or Michelangelo’s David on a conveyor belt. That said, there are specific techniques available to artists of every medium. In my writing, I like to get a set of ideas down and then explore and expand them through prose. Sometimes the prose works, other times it’s crap. Start stringing words together – in the end, that’s the process. That’s about as simple or as complex as it gets. As R.A. Salvatore once wrote to me in an e-mail: “Writers write.”

Ed: Where did you get your ideas for Resolution 786?

Mohamed: The story started out as a concept for a play, a loosely assembled set of literary images that floated around on my desk on scraps of paper and little yellow stickies. This went on for about a year. The play carried a tentative title of “War Crimes” and was a courtroom drama with God on trial. In the midst of this never-finished draft, the Iraq War came about and the events of those days began to stand out in my consciousness. Eventually, those headlines wrapped themselves around “War Crimes,” turning the embryonic play into a cubist novel. See? Serendipity.

You say that your characters and situations change. Well, in this case, not only did that happen in my writing, but the structural medium of the piece changed from a play to a novel. Change happens. Let it.

Later in the same interview, Ed asks if I've had any specific experiences of serendipitous writing. I refer to phenomenon as "kismet" in my response. Quoting that question and its answer:

Ed: Tell us about your forthcoming non-fiction title?

Mohamed: While doing research for my second novel, I realized that I’d developed a set of techniques for creating fiction that may be useful to other writers. I decided to catalogue and describe these techniques in Creating Fiction: A Hands-on, Practitioner’s Guide. So far the draft has chapters on the essentials of reading, developing ideas, constructing narrative, style and voice, and the utility of colleagues in what is otherwise a solitary undertaking. I also have a chapter titled “Kismet,” where I explain how characters can be born from the womb of the story.

Ed: Have you experienced that?

Mohamed: Yes. The custodian in Resolution 786 didn’t come from out of my head and onto the page. He was born from within the story itself.

No only do characters change, Rama. Sometimes new characters are actually born from the story. As you might guess by now, I value serendipity and kismet in my writing. Should you consider it an advantage or disadvantage? It's neither and it's both (I realize that's a strange answer, but I AM an absurdist:)). The larger point I'm making is that the passion and magic of creation is beyond mechanistic description, somewhere outside of dichotomous right or wrong. That said:

Don't fear serendipity.

Don't fear kismet.

Let it flow.

Keep what works.

Ditch what doesn't.

In your question you make the point that although your stories evolve mid-stream, when you're done, you "somehow like it." If there ever was a benchmark for evaluating your own creativity, that has to be it. If you like it, embrace it.

Keep writing, Rama. I am and I will continue to be one of your readers :)

Mohamed

Friday Friends # 2

2010-07-16T06:09:00.000-07:00

Here goes the second installment of a new custom that I've created for this blog: Friday Friends. Each Friday I select an interesting, instructive or otherwise intriguing post from one of the blogs of my followers and I post a link to it.

Our second-ever Friday Friend is from Valerie Geary's blog, Something to Write About. Ms. Geary's post from June 20, 2010, titled 6 Reasons Why I Haven't Read TWILIGHT...Yet, is a lovely tribute to bucking trends. Is it dysfunctional to not embrace the current "it" phenomenon? No; I believe that it demonstrates a healthy and courageous independence of thought that's refreshing, stimulating and appealing. Whether or not you agree with Ms. Geary's 6 reasons, you can't help but applaud her courageous honesty.

How about you? Are there any "it" phenomena, current or past, that just didn't do it for you?

y ~ eye ~ f

2010-07-15T06:49:00.000-07:00

y ~ eye ~ f

friend
tormentor
sister
confidant
lover

in : ter : twined

{ legs + hearts = lives }

Thank g_d for u

"remember that time when...?"
"i forgot about that!"

lover
confidant
sister
tormentor
friend

y ~ eye ~ f

Using Literary Cubism to Write a Novel

2010-07-13T10:49:00.000-07:00

In the following question, a reader asks about using literary cubism to write a novel.

Specifically, the readers asks:

Greetings Dr. Mughal,

As a Poet/writer I'm always contemplating the best/right approach to relaying the message. Resolution 786 has introduced me to the realm of Literary Cubism, and I'd like to know why Cubism as your approach? It certainly was the best approach as Resolution 786is by far, brilliantly written. Did Cubism as your approach come before the message that Resolution 786 carries, or the other way around?

Its incredible how the elements of history and religion are infused together, along with the fragmented forms in poetry, legal documents, etc... again brilliant. How long did it take to put it all together and fine tune it in such a way that harmony is achieved in connecting all the elements together in one book?

Congratulations on a well-written book and the challenge offered to the readers, through it, to expand the mind to undiscovered realms. Your work is surely a Storyteller's Artwork. Much kudos.

Mohamed answers:

Dear reader,

Thanks so much for your kind assessment of my work. It means a lot to me, especially since it’s coming from a practicing poet.

I think the reason I use literary cubism is grounded largely in who and what I am as a human being; my multivariate geographical, theological and educational backgrounds likely contributed to my cubist inclinations.

You asked how long it took to write this first novel. It’s difficult to put a start time on beginning the novel. Here’s why: The story started out as a concept for a play, a loosely assembled set of literary images that floated around on my desk on scraps of paper and little yellow stickies. This went on for about a year. The play carried a tentative title of War Crimes and was a courtroom drama with G_d on trial. In the midst of this never-finished draft, the Iraq War came about and the events of those days began to stand out in my consciousness. Eventually, those headlines wrapped themselves around War Crimes, turning the embryonic play into a cubist novel. The novel took about six months to set into a loose, cubist form. Through the next six months, a few trusted literary friends reviewed the draft and provided comments ranging from coherency to clarity to just plain-old grammar and spelling. All in all, I think it was about a year and a half before I was happy with the final draft.

You also pose an interesting “chicken and egg” question regarding the structural antecedents of the novel: “Did cubism as your approach come before the message that Resolution 786 carries, or the other way around?”

Hmmm.

That’s a tough one; it’s tough because in my mind, I can’t see any sharp, defined delineation between my approach to writing a novel and the eventual message that that novel carries. Writing a novel is a wholly creative process brimming with a serendipity that’s driven by the random influences of our accidental human experiences.

Consider: we set out to write an anti-war novel with a human dimension, a novel that “fits” the newspaper headlines of the year in which we’re writing it. A particularly intriguing actual headline, in adapted form, becomes the basis for a newspaper excerpt in our fictional story. A new policy or incident at work invokes the most absurd elements of human experience; that incident, again in some adapted context and form, becomes a vignette in our draft. A beautiful young woman walks by you at the mall; you mentally capture some quintessential sense of her motion and gesture and you imbue that into a female personality in your story to help bring that character into three dimensions.

For me, writing novels is a serendipitous, non-linear process of unfettered creation. Because of this, I can’t truly say that cubism came before the message or vice versa. Rather, I think my literary approach and the book’s eventual message did a year-long dance of co-creation, a wanton and impassioned tango in the ballroom of my mind. Resolution 786 is the child of that crazy dance.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts with me. Best wishes with your poetry in the coming months and years.

Your fellow writer,

Mohamed

Friday Friends

2010-07-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

I've created a new custom for this blog. I call it Friday Friends. Each Friday, I'll pick an interesting, instructive or otherwise intriguing post from one of the blogs of my followers and post a link to it.

Ready for our first-ever Friday Friend? OK. Here goes:

Our first-ever Friday Friend is K.M. Weiland and her blog Wordplay: Helping Writers Become Authors. I enjoyed Ms. Weiland's post from July 4, 2010 titled Is the Thesaurus Your Friend? I found the information instructive, even-handed and immediately applicable to my writing.

How about you? Do you use a thesaurus for creative writing?

Indictment of G_d?

2010-07-07T08:58:00.000-07:00

In the following question, a reader asks about the indictment of G_d in Resolution 786.

The reader asks:

Mohamed, The story line seems to contain an indictment (pardon the pun) of a particular version of God (known in many circles as OOO, omnipotent, omnipresent and omniscient). What would you say to that? Is the book against that version of God? Is it just pointing to questions that are asked by spiritual seekers in trying to determine how their concept of God fits their theology? Something totally different?

Mohamed answers:

Dear Reader - I see it's time for some literary hardball/fastball :). Only kidding -Resolution 786 is a novel all about asking the hard questions and your particular question is certainly consistent with that theme.

First the short answer: No. My novel is in no way meant to be pejorative towards any concept of G_d or towards any framework of spiritual belief, to include the belief that the Cosmos is inert of spiritual elements.

That said, why a storyline that focuses on the Abrahamic “face” of G_d? Simply put, because that’s the face that I, through the circumstances of my birth and life, am most familiar with. I was taught to pray in a certain direction, in a certain way and at specific times of the day. I was taught a set of stories that depict a G_d who behaved out of jealousy and anger and who, at times, hurt and killed. As a child, I questioned that G_d. I got older; I lived in Africa, Europe and North America; I traveled on pilgrimages to Varanasi, Kathmandu, Jerusalem and Mecca, into the rituals of the Masai in Kenya and through the ruins of the Mayans; I read; I lived with and loved souls of different faiths. Now, through the mosaic of those life experiences, I no longer question the G_d of my youth. I question humanity and the choices that we make for ourselves.

Adam Hueghlomm lives in a prison of his own making, trying to force logic and linearity onto a phenomenon that lends itself to neither. The notion that one may find G_d through entirely logical means is akin to saying “I will reduce the process of falling in love into an integrated set of first order differential equations and when I solve for variable ‘x,’ I will be in love.”

You can’t. I tried.

And so G_d is a minor player, background scenery in the stage that frames the story of Resolution 786. In the end, it’s a story not about G_d, but about us and our struggles and our choices and the world that we’ve created for ourselves, a world in which we see a tremendous, hopeful spirit of human kindness residing side-by-side with a shameful disposition towards butchery.

Is Resolution 786 an indictment of G_d? No. Rather, it's an open-eyed, full-frontal exploration of ourselves.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for thinking. Thank you for taking the time to ask the hard questions.

Mohamed

Happy 4th!

2010-07-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

This weekend marks America's 234th birthday. I scanned the haphazard array of books in my study for an appropriate read. I settled on Jimmy Carter's We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land, a selection plucked from my small collection of signed books.

The book reminds me of our country's tradition of good deeds. As a nine year old refugee, I was a direct beneficiary of our benevolence. We Americans have a national tradition of doing good in the world. On this, our 234th birthday, I know that we have not lost our grace.

Happy Birthday, America! May G_d bless you.

Versatile Blogger Award

2010-06-27T05:47:00.001-07:00

Thank you, WritingNut, for this award! If you haven't visited WritingNut's blog yet, give it a look; I think you'll enjoy its mix of inspiration, imagination and writing tips.

The award came with a few fun rules:

1. Thank and link back to the person who gave you this award.
2. Share 7 things about yourself.
3. Pass the award along to 15 bloggers who you have recently discovered and who you think are fantastic for whatever reason! (In no particular order...).
4) Contact the bloggers you've picked and let them know about the award.

One is done!

Now to two; 7 things about myself:

1. I write fiction in the traditions of literary cubism and absurdism.

2. My academic background isn't in literature or its related subjects; I'm a chemical engineer.

3. I'm a proud American; my parents are Indian; I was born in Africa.

4. In addition to absurdist fiction, I created a cartoon strip titled Dr. Mohamed. I asked Kurt Vonnegut if he'd like to collaborate on the strip. He declined via postcard:

5. A Presbyterian minister taught me the Lord's Prayer on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem at the site where Jesus is purported to have first taught the prayer to his disciples.

6. I visited Mecca in the 1990s and got so close to the Kaaba (the large black cube) that each time I bowed to pray, the top of my head touched the base of the Kaaba.

7. Laughing, sex and artistic creativity are my favorite things in life!

Now, to pass the award on to 15 super-duper bloggers:

1. Samuel Park @ Samuel Park's Daily Pep for Writers
2. Medeia Sharif @ Medeia Sharif
3. Stephanie @ Relics of My Mind
4. Ted Cross @ Ted Cross Blog
5. Lua Fowles @ Bowl of Oranges
6. Lydia Kang @ The Word is My Oyster
7. Amanda Borenstadt @ A Fortnight of Mustard
8. Kristine @ Light and Shadow
9. Valerie Geary @ Something to Write About
10. Michele Scott @ Holy Terrors
11. Cruella Collett @ The Giraffability of Digressions
12. Jennifer Shirk @ Me, My Muse and I
13. KM Weiland @ Wordplay
14. Susan Fields @ Susan Fields
15. Talli Roland @ Talli Roland

Latest Reader Review, "Resolution 786"

2010-06-26T05:54:00.000-07:00

Isabel Gildyn posted her Amazon review of Resolution 786 earlier this week. This is the first time that a reader's review has made specific mention of the "trial of Jesus Christ" as part of the novel's storyline. Ms. Gildyn is right; it's in there.

Local Poetry Reading

2010-06-24T09:02:00.001-07:00

Our very own May Kuroiwa is organizing a joint reading for two local poetry groups, the Harford Poetry and Literary Society and Lunchlines.

More details:

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: An Evening of Poetry

Join us for readings of original work by members of the Harford Poetry and Literary Society, and the mid-day poetry group, Lunchlines.

Monday, August 2nd
The Vineyard Wine Bar
142 N. Washington St.
Havre de Grace, MD 21078
443-502-2551

Readings begin at 7 p.m.

Many thanks to The Vineyard Wine Bar; the Cecil County Arts Council and the Elkton Arts Center; and the poetry groups, Lunchlines, and the Harford Poetry and Literary Society.

http://vineyardwinebar.com/
http://www.cecilcountyartscouncil.org/
http://lunchlines2010.blogspot.com/2010/03/lunchlines.html
http://harfordpoetrysociety.org/

Blessed Litha!

2010-06-21T04:07:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Naval Observatory puts the upcoming summer solstice at 7:28 AM EDT on June 21, 2010. Hail the conquest of light, greetings to Ra, hail the luscious bloom of Nature!

Wishing each of your a blessed Litha,

Mohamed

Tantra Bensko's "Everything Experimental Writing"

2010-06-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

Those of you who follow my blog know that my draft novel, Christmas in Mecca, contains vignettes formatted as plays, poems, e-mails, instant messages and government memoranda. I'm experimenting with those various written media to weave a tapestry of syllables that, taken together, convey the themes, meaning and spirit of the evolving story.

As an avid practitioner of cubist writing, I was elated to see that Tantra Bensko has posted a link to my article on literary cubism on her web-site, Everything Experimental Writing. Visit Tantra's site and indulge your interest in literary approaches unbound by tradition and stricture.

A Reader's Question on Literary Cubism

2010-06-16T08:58:00.000-07:00

A reader recently asked about my use of literary cubism in Resolution 786. The reader's question and my answer follow -

The reader asked:

Dr. Mughal,

Thank you so much for being willing to answer questions. I loved your first book, and hope it means more to come. I think I saw on your Facebook that you have two books in the works - one fiction and one nonfiction about writing. When are they coming out?

What I'd really like to know about Resolution 786 has to do with it's style. It seems Literary Cubism is a very interesting choice considering the fact that much of the meat of the story has to do with Adam's literal understanding of things. His way of thinking and viewing the world seems in juxtaposition to the style of the book, which for me made it more "alive" and "real" and "three dimensional" if that makes sense. The intense contrast between the nature of the main character and the style of the book adds to the intrigue. Was this intentional? Accidental? Can you elaborate a bit?

Thanks!

A. Reader

Mohamed answered:

Dear Reader,

First, about the two books that I have in the works - I expect and hope to have both drafted by the end of 2010. As for when they’ll be “coming out” for public consumption, we’ll see….

On your question about the contrast between the nature of the main character in Resolution 786 and the style of the book: I had never thought of it!

Yes, Adam Hueghlomm has a linear, literal mind that’s steeped in logic. Yes, on the contrary, literary cubism is a non-linear multivariate mode of viewing and telling a story from different perspectives through the use of various written media, a method of writing that’s free from any strictures of temporal propriety.

Was the juxtaposition between the nature of the main character and the style of the book intentional? No. Not at all.

Was it accidental? Not entirely.

Keep in mind, as a writer, my background is that of an Indian born in Africa and raised in the United States; a child born into Islam who has had the privilege of studying and experiencing Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Masonry and New Age thought; a chemical engineer dabbling in the humanities, theology and philosophy.

I am an amalgam of influences. It is inevitable that my written works will reflect those many sources of learning and experience. Thinking through both your question and my answer, I realize now that literary cubism is perhaps the ONLY mode of literary expression for a person with such a patchwork of geographical, theological and educational background.

No, in retrospect, my choice to use literary cubism to write Resolution 786 wasn’t to create a non-linear juxtaposition for Adam Hueghlomm’s linear intellect. Rather, I think it was a demonstration of who I am as a person and, more importantly in this context, who I am as a writer.

Write With Your Six Senses

2010-06-13T04:54:00.000-07:00

Be a keen watcher. Be a sponge. Scan the people and the animals around you for gestures, expressions, habits, poses. Once you've honed your personal second nature for seeing, expand your sensory collection to your other four senses: hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting. Hear the unique inflections, patterns and dialogue in the conversations around you; feel the intoxicating plethora of tactile sensations during love-making; smell the evening jasmine in your father's garden; taste the grit of a desert sandstorm. All of these sensations, so many and so varied, are an invaluable cache of experiential fodder from which to build a richness of description into your writing. They provide a linguistic superstructure that bestows a three-dimensional reality to your scenes. They inform and influence everything in the composition of your fiction from dialogue to character to setting. In short, they are an essential component to giving your readers a convincing, emotionally engaging, full-fledged experience of the events in your narrative, a potent means through which to help your readers meet your characters.

Keep in mind, writing fiction is truly a creative process. Don't limit yourself to just reporting your collected experiences. Throw them into a box, shake the box around and see what kinds of interesting and contextually appropriate new syntheses you can form. I had a vignette where a character was surprised and bewildered. The second sentence in the scene is: "Crashing cymbals of bright radiance clanged before his eyes." Radiance is seen. Clangs are heard. Yet the dazed character "sees" the clang of cymbals. The discordant merging of sensory experience conveys the disorientation intrinsic to the vignette and it gives your readers an interesting, multi-sensory image to consider.

OK. I've made the case that your five mortal senses will give you more than enough material with which to weave a rich tapestry of description into the fabric of your stories.

But there's a sixth sense.

Strictly linear thinkers need not read further. Skip to the next post. The rest of you, please come this way...oh, and watch the little, dancing wood nymphs around your feet, young man. They're fragile and they don't appreciate being stepped on.

I've felt and experienced sensations beyond the traditional five senses. If any of you have "seen" inside the psychology of strangers walking past you at the mall or heard your pet's thoughts or watched a window shatter before your eyes for no reason or felt an empty kitchen blow dry, frigid air onto the back of your neck in the quiet stillness of a bright winter day, then you know what I mean. Unless one of these experiences is deeply personal or has an essentially private nature, consider including a description of it in your fiction. There's a first-person description of the afterlife in one of my novels. Yes, the novel's fiction. But almost the entirety of that vision is someone's actual experience.

Use your senses as a tool for creative writing...use all six of them.

What's in Your Writing Process?

2010-06-10T08:48:00.000-07:00

Readers send me questions from time to time. Here's one about my writing process -

Baddestbadass asked:

I guess as someone that has great procrastination tendencies, I wonder how the process of writing a book is for different people. For you is it something you start when other parts of your life are quiet and you hibernate til it's done, or do you write whenever you can...? what is your writing process like and do you have specific writing rituals?

Looking forward to reading your new stuff.

Baddestbadass

Mohamed's answer:

Dear Baddest Badass,

Considering your name, I think it best that I indulge your question with a quick answer…or else pay a heavy price (smile).

I can relate with great procrastination. When my tenth grade English teacher (Mr. Green) asked what I wanted to be, I said, “Writer.” Thirty years later, I’m finally writing. Now that’s procrastination!

My writing process is non-process. I like to open my mind and let ideas flow; I put the ideas into words and then move the words around to create themes. Some work. Some don’t. I throw out what doesn’t work; I nurse what does.

I write because I have to, so I MAKE the time to write and I consciously preserve my creative energies for imaginative composition. If I waited to write till my life was quiet, years from now they’d be burying a fellow who always said that he wanted to be a writer but who didn’t write.

“hibernate til it’s done,” you ask. I only wish! That’s indeed my fantasy, to write the great American novel ensconced in solid, delicious isolation…but then…fragments of real-world existence intrude on the fantasy, life’s incidentals, things like: work, bills, the wife, social obligations, maintaining personal health (physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual). I write in the middle of it all, despite it all.

No, I don’t have any writing rituals. The only “act” that counts is moving fingers on a keyboard. If that counts as ritual, that’s mine.

Thank you for reading my work. And please don’t give up on writing. It’s an opportunity to create art. We are at no time closer to Creator than when we ourselves are creating, than when we passionately tap the gifts of our own artistic expressiveness.

Take care, my friend!

Mohamed

Creating Characters

2010-06-06T03:44:00.000-07:00

Tabitha Olsen's blog, Writer Musings, had an instructive post on using Character Worksheets. I'll take this tool out for a test-run the next time I'm working on a new piece of writing.

I wonder if the Lord used something similar when he created Adam? :)

Writing Science Fiction - Two Lessons from Arthur C. Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”

2010-06-05T04:46:00.000-07:00

Having enjoyed Stanley Kubrick’s movie of the same title, I decided that it was time to read Arthur C. Clarke’s novel 2001: A Space Odyssey. What a well-written novel brimming with so many intriguing ideas! As I placed the finished book on my nightstand, two things stood out in my initial impressions:

1. Clarke does a splendid job of describing the beauty and grandeur of nature. Here’s the fascinating twist: he doesn’t have first-hand personal experience with the natural phenomenon that he so artfully describes. Yes, we’ve all read and written literary impressions of brilliant sunsets and peaceful dawns. Now, to write equally evocative passages about an earth-rise on the moon or about noiselessly sailing through the rings of Saturn…you get the point; in science fiction, many times you’re writing of things that you’ve never seen.

2. 2001: A Space Odyssey was copyrighted in 1968. The world’s population was roughly 3.556 billion that year. In the text of his novel, Clarke makes reference to the population of the Earth in 2001: “…six billion people….” Want to guess the actual global population in 2001? It was 6.1 billion people. Good guess? I doubt it. With first-class degrees in mathematics and physics from King’s College, London, I’m sure that Clarke must have run demographic numbers to get such an accurate forecast of the total global population thirty-three years into the future.

Taking mental inventory of the points above, what lessons have we learned about writing science fiction? There are two. First, be prepared to violate that age-old, well-worn axiom of writing that tells us to “write what you know.” The events and physical circumstances of science fiction often will take you to the brink of the unknowable. By necessity, you’ll have to write beyond what you know. Second, no matter how outlandishly speculative your core premise for a particular piece of writing might be, in the end the best science fiction gestates around a superstructure of science fact. Take the time to do the necessary research to create plausible settings of scientific truth and your readers will be much more likely to reward you with a temporary suspension of disbelief, that psychological opening that compels them to continue reading despite your narrative’s eventual introduction of: ETs; waking up an insect; living forever; time travel; putting God on trial for crimes against humanity.

Vonnegut Declines

2010-06-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

I created a comic strip a few years back. The strip's titled Dr. Mohamed. Its title character is an American Muslim engineer with a philosophical disposition, a bi-sexual Jewish girlfriend, a dog named Buck, and an archenemy named Comet Kohoutek. Comet Kohoutek, a former heavy-metal bass player, is now a fundamentalist American Muslim convert who's repulsed by Dr. Mohamed's liberal lifestyle. The 24 strips that I completed revolve around themes of social and religious commentary with side helpings of quantum physics and special relativity.

I asked Kurt Vonnegut if he might be interested in collaborating on future strips of Dr. Mohamed. He declined in the postcard below:

I can't imagine Vonnegut not being funny enough for Dr. Mohamed. I just can't imagine :)

5 Things for Which I'm Grateful

2010-06-02T14:37:00.000-07:00

An intimate recently became exasperated with my most current regression into melancholy. Her prescription: make a list of 5 things that you're grateful for; when you feel a slip to melancholy, pull out the list and read it.

Wow.

I want to see if this works. First things first; I need to write the list.

Here goes:

1. Sex

2. Art (experiencing and creating)

3. Peacefulness

4. A family who loves me

5. Being an American

Why I Write

2010-05-31T08:34:00.000-07:00

I can't think of a more succinct statement of why I write. Once again, thank you, Mr. Vonnegut.

Civil War Within the Alphabet, A Cryptic Excerpt from "Christmas in Mecca"

2010-05-29T03:25:00.000-07:00

T lived in contented comforts; he hardly gave a fleeting thought to Z. Yes, T had personally witnessed the demise of R and S, had watched time’s dispassionate march and unfeeling boot heals trample S and R into transience before his very eyes. And so somewhere deep, T held an unknown knowing that Z would come. Once, mired in a bout of self-reflection that had been conscripted by a small, transitory personal adversity, T thought back on compelling words attributed to D, a fabled letter of yore. The story of D had been passed through the ages in cryptic parables that reached T through a series of retellings and translations by F, G, H and J, tales of sacrifice and heroism where D, in final feat, proclaimed that D himself, chosen before all others, would triumph at the coming of Z and that Z was indeed only the perfected reflection and anointed realization of the “new D.” Millennia after D, L is purported to have claimed that he was the Way, that he had perfected and completed the original message of D and that L and only L was a sole path to Z.

T wasn’t so sure about anything. T pondered Z many times, often in fear. In his mind and heart, T often denounced Z as a crafty saboteur, a thief, a robber.

Somewhere a universe had been born and had died.

The sun rose in the east…

T pondered and searched and ritualized to no end, but he couldn’t seem to gather enough proof to embrace or repudiate D or L. Once, quiet by accident, T had come perilously close to the Truth about Z. But that moment of philosophical immersion shattered in the midst of an encroaching offense from S, an offense that prompted a necessary and violent response from T, a response that shaped the nature of U and was essentially a mathematically precise line regression to the self-preservationist impulses of the oceanic, gurgling existence of A and the grunted cave art of B, a response justified by the vengeful commandments of C and deaf to the forgiving restraints sermonized from the mount by L.

Time’s boot heals stomped left, then right, ashes and dust, and T’s eyelids now drooped and an insight unfolded from within…or was it a voice from outside?...that told T that Hitler and Gandhi are the same soul in different circumstances, so who can judge?

T’s eyes closed and he became the whole alphabet.

U’s eyes fluttered open with a cry.

Reader Feedback: The Beauty of Life

2010-05-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

Readers often share thoughtful and interesting observations with me. Here's one:

The reader asks:

I like the way you put words together. It's pretty and also poetic. You seem to write about macabre and bothersome parts of life like war, religious strife, death.
Will you ever write about the beauty of life?

Sandy

I responded:

Dear Sandy,

First off, thanks for the literary compliment! I work hard at the craft of writing. Sometimes I succeed. Many times I don’t.

Regarding my topical choices for writing - Life is a matrix of experiences. Literature is a fun-house mirror reflection of that matrix. It’s a mirror because ALL literature, no matter how speculative or outlandish, is SOMEHOW a manifestation and product of a human being’s/writer’s experience. The mirror’s a funhouse mirror because we writers contort and distort and reframe those life experiences into alternate images that are based on the original but modulated to fit the content and context of our particular piece of writing.

Adversity is the crucible in which our character is forged. As a child, I remember a soldier who came to our house in Kampala, Uganda while my father was at work and my mother was at home with my young brothers and me. The soldier made the point that we (Asian Indians) would soon have to leave Uganda and so my mother should let him inside so that he could take our belongings. Later than year, my family and relatives and many other Indians who had lived in Uganda for generations were deported to a refugee camp in Naples, Italy. We were there because of the color of our skin, our ethnicity.

Everyone’s character is created and tempered by their life experiences. When I sit to write, those seared impressions are the first to leap from my mind and into the blank computer screen. The world teems with “war, religious strife, death.” But yes, Sandy, it teems with beauty too.

Resolution 786 is a first novel. There will be more. As I write each successive work, perhaps I’ll have the good fortune of metabolizing the strife and discord that I’ve seen in the world. When all that is successfully exorcised through the cathartic cleanse of written expression, perhaps my last work will be the world’s greatest love story :). I hope it will.

Finally, I’m compelled to note that although Resolution 786 focuses primarily on themes of “love and war and God and lust and loss,” it is not completely void of beauty. When Becca indulges Adam by listening to his philosophical dirges, she does it not from topical interest, but rather, from love. When Lamech’s mother sends him an e-mail in Iraq assuring him that his room at home is the same as he left it, that it patiently awaits his safe return, she makes those statements from love. There is love in Resolution 786. And there is no greater beauty in life than the beauty of one being’s love and affection for another.

Your Writing, Yourself

2010-05-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

Readers posed many interesting questions during my recent virtual book tour. Here's one that I went back to and re-read today. Is an author's fiction a reflection of her or his reality? You decide.

The Q & A -

Sasha asked:

I would really like to know how autobiographical the book [Resolution 786] really is! There are certain similarities between the writers personal life story (mentioned on the cover) and that of the main character, this is not by chance, is it?

Thanks again for a great book! enjoyed reading it...

Mohamed answered:

Sasha,

And my thanks to you for your kind assessment of the novel!

I can’t put a numerical value on how autobiographical this novel is, but qualitatively, the short answer’s “A lot.” Scene 1 has a physical description of Adam Hueghlomm. It’s pretty darn close to what I see in the mirror. Adam’s an Indian born in Africa. Same here. Adam’s an engineer working for the Army. You can guess who else is. And the list goes on and on….

For me, fiction is a form of catharsis for long-standing psychoses. Accepting that premise, it’s inevitable that the created is a reflection of the creator. I came to a realization recently while quietly composing at my writing desk in the early winter morning: the primary male characters in my second novel are projections of major archetypes that comprise my present being. These archetypes are the noble poet; the miserable wretch; orthodoxy’s interrogator; and the curious child. I think that all writers write from their personal experiences, from who and what they are at that moment of composition. That said, I don’t think that most writers indulge themselves as much as I do in making their central characters SO MUCH like themselves. That type of self-indulgence does have an admittedly narcissistic quality to it, and I don’t give myself a free pass. On page 42 of Resolution 786, in speaking about Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Becca asks, “What kind of egomaniac puts himself in his own writing.”

The lovely Becca Gowetski might be saying that, but the truth is, that’s me taking a well- deserved jab at myself.

Thanks for picking up on the autobiographical elements of the novel. No, it wasn’t by chance. It was by self-indulgence.

Roots

2010-05-18T15:30:00.001-07:00

Peace Talks

2010-05-18T15:25:00.001-07:00

786?

2010-05-18T06:19:00.000-07:00

My thanks to Omar Khan for his insightful review of Resolution 786 on Amazon! This review's especially unique in that this is the first time that a reader/reviewer shares an interpretation of the Islamic notion of the numbers 7-8-6.

Becca Gowetski's Ode to Adam Hueghlomm

2010-05-17T07:18:00.000-07:00

Passing

By
Each passing
A miracle fades
To darkness.

Our love
For the miracles,
miracles now gone,
Our bittersweet longings
Bestow upon that darkness
A tactile grandeur,
an earthly vision,
making it a place:

< virgins, harps, clouds, saints, gates >

vision, be damned!
It is,
in the end,
the darkness.

And, in the end,
the stiff slap of loss
tells us
our miracles,
our precious
living, breathing, talking
miracles,
are

gone.

etc.

"Waiting for Godot" - Samuel Beckett's Attempt to....What?

2010-05-17T05:49:00.000-07:00

I just finished reading Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. Is this an avant-garde tribute to the theatre of the absurd?...a morality play structured around the quintessential themes of existentialism?...an angry cry born from the suffering pangs of inconsequential human experience?...

Whatever it is or isn't, Beckett's work inspires me to continue to complete Christmas in Mecca.

John Steinbeck’s Hitchcockian Moment

2010-05-16T18:59:00.000-07:00

And here I thought that I was the only writer whose characters stand up, think on their own and talk back while you’re writing them into a scene. In the prologue to John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, a central character named Mack talks about what he’d say if he ever ran into “the guy” who wrote Cannery Row. Among other things, Mack says that he’d have told the writer to give the chapters titles rather than just numbers. Steinbeck dutifully follows Mack’s sage advice.
Thinking back on my blogs from last year, I remember promising myself a Hitchcockian moment in each of my novels, an instant in the story in which I, Mohamed Mughal, have a personal presence that somehow molds that small slice of narrative. As one would expect and as Steinbeck clearly demonstrates, what I call Hitchcockian moments are nothing new. Writers’ characters, in some form or another, have been interacting with their creators ever since that anonymous scribe put quill to parchment to etch out Epic of Gilgamesh.

A Poem, a Cubist Piece of the Novel, "Christmas in Mecca"

2010-05-16T18:29:00.000-07:00

Sun Dials

Time:
Stoic beard
Gray, unbegotten
Forever – pacing –

Leaping \\
>> Lunging
Streaming <<
// Crashing

Open ocean
Washing beaches
Bigger than we
Can ever know
No?

Engineering Boundary Conditions and the Outer Limits of Literary Permission

2010-05-14T02:23:00.000-07:00

One of the problem solving techniques that we were taught in engineering school was that of setting boundary conditions. Before solving the core problem, you defined the system by either knowing or assuming its behavior at its outer boundaries. You can do the same when creating literature. Different writers are comfortable with different boundary conditions, different limits, different edges-of-the-envelope.

Two literary techniques that I use to push my writing’s boundary conditions are literary cubism and absurdism. Literary cubism gives me permission to explore the outer boundaries of literature along the dimension of structure. Rather than narrative, I’ve used e-mail messages, legal documents, handwritten notes and poems to advance the story and define characters. There’s nothing that keeps me from using the structure of a play, a haiku, a grocery list, or someone’s doodle to achieve the same ends…and, in fact, I do in my most recent works.

Absurdism gives me license to dip my toes into the outer boundaries of literature along the dimension of premise. Can humans capture the Lord Our God and put him on trial? Sure. Do extraterrestrial intelligences co-exist with us in dimensions that we don’t perceive and, hence, don’t experience and can all this be happening right next to us at the present moment? Yes.

I encourage my fellow writers to push to the edge in everything, most certainly in your literary efforts. Edges set the tone. Edges dictate what’s permissible and possible. Edges are the crucible of creation.

Virtual Book Tour, the Third (and Final) Q & A

2010-05-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

I promised to post questions and answers from my recent virtual book tour. Here's the third and final installment on that promise. This Q & A comes from Austin Camacho’s blog, Another Writer’s Life, in Washington, D.C.

Libby asked:

Hey, speaking of your two new books what are they about? Your stuff's a bit weird and sometimes even strange but your book's people are like real people so sometimes I feel like you're telling me what happened to you today rather than I'm reading a book like the ones in English class. Do people ever think you're weird like your books?

Mohamed answered:

Dear Libby,

You’ve served me a well-basted roast of two queries and a side helping piled high with steaming commentary. Bon appetit.

Now to clear the plate.

Starting with your last question: Yes. Through these many years, quite a few people have commented that I sometimes come off as weird…introspective…sullen…isolated.

Are my books the same? Probably. They’re the intellectual progeny of my mind and, as such, they have a strong chance of inheriting my mental and emotional deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

Working backwards through your post, I’ll now address your comment about the “people” in my books. I’m elated to learn that you feel my characters are real. A novel’s “people” do not become well-written characters until they assume that third dimension of depth, that flawed and vulnerable humanity, that believable and recognizable voice. I’m fascinated that you think my books read like “I’m telling you what happened to me today.” That’s not entirely surprising. Vonnegut’s experiences as an American soldier in WWII are an anchor in the storyline of Slaughterhouse Five. Steinbeck’s experiences growing up in Salinas give generous contribution to the settings, images, characters and “feel” of his novels. Likewise, many of the scenes in Resolution 786 did happen to me, scenes like the debate regarding the meaning of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis while resting in bed; or the mysterious old man in a dusty Middle Eastern street grabbing onto people’s earlobes and handing them neon-green prayer beads (I still have the beads); and the beautiful and philosophically indulgent trek through the Utah desert leading to the Delicate Arch. So in all those instances, in a very real way, I actually AM telling you “what happened to me today.”

Now to your opening question: what are my two new books about?

Christmas in Mecca is a cubist novel about many things: the strategic tensions between the West and Islamic fundamentalism; our search for intelligent extraterrestrial life; the internal reconciliation of one character’s battered self-worth; the searing pangs of the unfulfilled quests in our lives and how we resolve to live with those disappointments as we journey between the womb and the grave.

Much of the book is traditional narrative. But the text also includes government memoranda, e-mail messages, and poems. Unlike the first novel, parts of the story in the second novel take the form of a play; others are dialogue structured in the form of a volley of instant messages. I don’t employ these alternate formats out of literary indulgence or as a gimmick. Chosen formats must fit and amplify the context and demonstrative power of the scene. In the case of the instant messages, I had come to a point in the narrative where two characters have a philosophically and personally revealing exchange of thought and perspective. Each character is introverted. Each is intelligent. Each is comfortable with and drawn to the written word. How best to frame such a dialogue, a discussion between two reclusive, bookish characters? I decided on instant messaging. This form of interpersonal communication preserves the informational and revelatory content of the dialogue. It also sets the conversation in a context that reveals the introverted nature of the characters, two people who prefer to exchange ideas while sitting alone in the privacy of a closed room.

That’s plenty on the first new book.

The second new book is my first shot at book-length non-fiction. It’s titled Creating Fiction: A Hands-on, Practitioner's Guide and it summarizes my literary lessons and techniques, the experiential by-products gleaned from the task of creating two cubist, absurdist novels.

Thank you for sharing your thoughtful observations of my writing and of my nature as a writer. There are many hardships to writing, things like self-doubt and finding the time. There are also many rewards. The greatest reward is to have readers like you, Libby.

Keep reading,

Mohamed

Christ!

2010-05-12T08:47:00.000-07:00

I promised to post questions and answers from my recent virtual book tour. Here's the second installment on that promise. The Q & A came from Imran Ahmad’s blog, Not-quite-a-blog, in London, England.

Curious 1 asked:

I saw so many reflections of Christ in the circumstances of Adam Hueghlomm's life. I saw him, like Christ, overcome the three temptations in the desert and even the stations of the cross near the end of the novel. Was that intentional on your part or is it just circumstantial that I saw that?

Mohamed answered:

Dear Curious 1,

I see you’ve followed the tour from Berlin to London. Do I have a groupie? If so, I love it! :)

You use the term “Christ,” an English adaptation, I believe, of the Greek “Khristos,” or “anointed one.” I don’t believe I ever use that term in Resolution 786. I do, however, create a strong thematic and symbolic association between my character, Adam, and the storied events of Jesus of Nazareth. Yes, when Adam and Becca trek through the powdered deserts of Utah, I did invoke a reflection of the three temptations that Jesus was subjected to in the deserts of Palestine: hunger, to tempt the Lord, all the kingdoms of the world.

Having personally walked the Stations of the Cross in Jerusalem, I couldn’t help but structure the final scenes of Resolution 786 as a progression through that sequenced series of events (it was done subtly, I thought, so I’m surprised that you picked up on it).

But there’s more.

The novel’s sub-title is written on the front cover so that the words form the shape of a crucifix. Adam leaves for Iraq and is due “to return” on Easter Sunday. Jesus is invoked during Adam’s encounter with the old man, Mohammed, in the dusty streets of Baghdad. The soldier, Lee, sees a crucifix appear over the shattered remains of a destroyed weapons warehouse during night-time combat operations. That same soldier concocts a “story” in a fit of angst in the soldiers’ Recreation Room, a story that, although told in vulgar expressions, is remarkably similar to the Passion Play.

Yes, Jesus “appears” in numerous instances and in numerous ways in the same novel that indicts the God of Abraham for Crimes Against Humanity.

What does it mean?

I’ve found that Jesus is somehow something different to different people. In the spirit of relativistic thought, I will let each individual reader decide the “meaning” of Jesus’ appearance in each instance. And remember, in Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, there are no privileged frames of reference. In the sense of relativity that you will apply to deduce the meaning of Jesus’ appearance in Resolution 786, there also are no privileged frames of reference. Your answer will be right for you.

And that is profoundly OK.

Winter, 2010

2010-05-11T15:14:00.000-07:00

Looking out the Window

Icy Scenes

Dug Out of the House...Finally!

Howling for the Snow to Stop

The End

2010-05-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

About a year ago I mulled my use of “The End” following final text in my stories and novels. I decided that that phrase limits the contextual residence of my writing; it implies that an isolated universe is created within each piece of prose and that that world is immutable, irrefutable and final. It isn’t. I realized this when the draft of my second novel, Christmas in Mecca, evolved into both a sequel and a prequel to my first novel. Nothing ends.

My stories and novels depict fragments of experience that occur within the moment, but that are also nested within a dynamic sea of future and past. A focused lens into the past can provide valuable, revelatory insights into and about the present; a retrospective gaze from the realized future can redefine and more precisely account the broader implications of that same present. In the infinite plate tectonics of the cosmos, nothing stands alone, absolute, stoic and stone.

I am no longer comfortable using “The End” when I finish novels and stories…but what then to use, if anything?

I thought of “etc.” Etcetera. A literal translation from Latin is “and the rest.” Common meanings include “and so forth” or “and other things.” I think this better captures my sense of my writing…and the rest…and so forth…and other things.

Hereon in, my stories and novels will not end with “The End.” They’ll end with “etc.”

Virtual Book Tour, One Q & A

2010-05-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

I promised to post questions and answers from my recent virtual book tour. Here's a first installment on that promise. The Q & A came from Inna Selipanov's blog, Onions and Tea.

Anonymous asked...

Hello Inna! I'm excited to be the first poster. :-) I'm a chemist and I believe that Mohamed has studied chemistry, as well. I was wondering how his background as a chemical engineer influences his writing, if at all.

Mohamed answered...

I have to start by saying that I absolutely LOVE your question. I’ve never really thought about it explicitly, but the truth is that my academic training in chemical engineering does indeed influence my creative writing.

I think I’ll answer your question along two dimensions. The first is structural. The second is topical detail.

Structural: My training as a chemical engineer entailed problem-solving through the use of linear thinking around the notion of processes and repeatable, predictable reactions. In that sense, I can see that in my creative writing, I tend to organize my themes and thoughts (and hence, my prose and plot) in ways that are consistent, integrated and logically cohesive. If you read Resolution 786 closely, you’ll see that many scenes, especially at the minute (molecular?) level, have an integrated set of details. For example, if someone cites an event or characterization in an e-mail message, many scenes later, a detail of description or dialogue will support that previous citation. An interesting permutation of my detail-oriented linear thought process is the fact that I use literary cubism as my overall architecture for telling stories, so data and storylines and narrative exposition are offered through multiple written venues such as e-mails, poems, dialogue, and legal documents and may appear, at times, to be non-linear. Still, despite what might at first glance appear to be an unorthodox amalgam of cubist writing, in the final analysis, as applied by me, becomes an integrated, internally consistent system of systems that, if successful, weaves an understandable story that has a unified theme and is told through the motives and experiences of consistent and believable characters.

The second way in which my training as a chemical engineer influences my writing is along the dimension of topical detail. Yes, my first novel and the partially completed draft of my second novel both deal heavily in themes of theology. But looking back through the prism of your question, I now see that topical details revolve around my training and experiences as a chemical engineer. Adam Hueghlomm is in Iraq to collect data to test the efficacy of a new mine-detecting technology; he carries a research notebook with him. Hueghlomm’s intense reverence for logic and literal interpretations is the basis for the legal indictment of the Lord in that first novel. Euclidian geometry and the mathematically infinite nature of pi are invoked in the title of the final chapter of the novel, a tip of the hat to my engineering training in mathematics. Moving from my first novel and into the second, here’s how a minor but frequent character in that novel is introduced:

“Aetch-to-oh.
Oh he loved his own kind, clinging to them in a square dance of loose bonds. His rotund torso held up two punctuation marks, small appendages that poked into the world in a dissolving, soft clutch, an ever open 104.5 degree arc of welcome. Aetch, as he often called himself, had been born in the early twilights, above a gurgling, empty ocean, on the tip of a crackling electrical discharge that shot from nothing to nowhere. He was a quite witness to the endless turn of wheels, the cycling infinity of death and rebirth. ‘Each one of them is a retold pun in a never-ending cosmic comedy,’ Aetch-to-oh often told himself, a gargled giggle.
Oh, the people he’d known. Oh, the places he’d been. Oh, the things he’d seen.”

Who is Aetch-to-oh? He’s a water molecule who has been floating about the earth since the early twilights of creation. That’s right. A water molecule is a character in “Christmas in Mecca.” I believe this, too, is an observable manifestation of my training as a chemical engineer. Who else might include a water molecule (complete with his 104.5 degree molecular geometry) as a character in a novel?

Apologies for the rather long answer. Here’s the short version:

Yes, my training as a chemical engineer influences my fiction. It forces me to have a logical and internally consistent storyline despite my seemingly unorthodox literary style of cubist writing. It also provides me background material that helps me create the details of scenes, settings, characters and chapter titles in my fiction.