Blind Savior, False Prophet

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© 2008 Joseph DeMarco. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 8/4/2008

ISBN: 978-1-4343-9126-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4389-0395-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-9804-6 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008906937

Contents

PART I

PART II

PART I

PART II

Part III

Part IV

For the Nommo, if they are indeed up there,

and for Philip K. Dick, wherever his soul resides.

This is a prison, and few men have guessed. But I know, he said to himself Because that is why I am here. To burst the walls, to tear down the metal gates, to break each chain.

-Philip K. Dick

CHASING THE GHOST

PART I

FLEEING THE SCENE

It has been regularly argued that schizophrenics cannot tell the difference between literal and figurative language. Joe Kaye, Siann’s seventh grade teacher, would argue that’s because there is no difference. The difference is only in the mind. The mind sees what it wants, it believes what it sees, which is a vision that it has created.

Siann Campbell was a dirty blonde both literally and figuratively. Her dirty blonde hair was at least three different shades of yellow and gold, mixed with roughly five to seven shades of beige to auburn brown, which accumulated into a frizzy, ratted-up mop that looked like it had been electrocuted several times. Surely, at least in her mind, Siann had short-circuited. Somehow she had stolen a car, some old Japanese car that she hoped would look inconspicuous, and driven halfway across the country. She was strung out on drugs; she hadn’t slept in days. Forget about the last time Siann showered. She had a cracked ice pipe under her seat. She had taken two or three rips from the pipe, but that was back more than a few hours ago. She at least felt sober now. She was speeding toward Miami, chasing the ghost both literally and figuratively, or maybe physically and metaphorically is a better description. Chasing the ghost is a metaphor sometimes used for people addicted to ice.

Then, from there what? Onto the island, but how? Maybe she could find someone going that way. Or maybe, just maybe, she’d steal a boat, buy some crystal methamphetamine. Who knows, Miami is a crazy town.

When she got out of rehab, they had never prepared her for this. What she had seen, what she had done, it couldn’t be chalked up to coincidence. It all added up to this. The clues. The scavenger hunt. The island. Kaye’s Amazing Maze, an unfinished maze at that. That was why he was speaking to her; it was her job to finish. Finish what? Well, that remained to be seen.

She rubbed her eyes; they had giant bags under them. Bags of black and blue, and I think there was even some brown in there, too. She needed to sleep; still, it was the furthest thing from her mind. The lights from the freeway looked like synapses flashing in her brain, and she was unquestionably uncertain about reality. What is real? Since finding out about Joe Kaye’s belief about the message, she had started to read a lot of Philip K. Dick, and question everything.

Joe Kaye was an American poet, philosopher, schoolteacher, and author of 11 books. Born in New York City, Joe taught in New York, Hawaii, and Michigan. In Hawaii, he started writing and by the age of 25 he published his first manuscript. He later moved to Michigan and then to Wisconsin, where he developed a tumor which began to give him delusions. His delusions led him to construct a giant labyrinth on a tropical island. He also had an obsession with looking for a message he believed he had left for himself in a past life, in the form of a poem, song, or story. He went insane with paranoia and believed the karma police were coming to take him away. He also became obsessed with cheating death, practicing a religion called Voodoo Botany, believing it would make him a god. On a late night talk show, he made a prophecy about the extinction of the human race. He was sent to rest at Fennimore Place Institute. The maze was never finished. He died broke and penniless.

Joe Kaye also happened to be Siann’s aforementioned seventh grade teacher. A teacher she had had a crush on, but that was years ago. He had since passed on. She had seen him one other time in a mental institution in Wisconsin, and had never spoken to him again. Now more than twenty years after he had been her teacher, she believed he was trying to contact her from beyond the grave. But why Siann? She wasn’t so special. Joe Kaye certainly didn’t treat her any differently than any other student. He had, in fact, failed her. Siann had to repeat seventh grade because of Joe Kaye.

What most books won’t tell you about the life of Joe Kaye, The False Prophet of Fennimore Place, is that before he thought he might be the reincarnation of Mark Twain, and after he thought he was the reincarnation of Jim Morrison, he thought he might have been a very strange science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick. During the time Joe Kaye believed he might have been Philip K. Dick, he wrote a novel called Blind Savior, in which he not only attempted to blend all major religions (Hindu/Jewish/Buddhist/ Christian/Muslim/Taoist) into one, but also attempted to say all major religions were started by the same person reincarnated again and again. He buried the story in an unknown location. The world was not ready.

The reason most books will not be able to tell you about a manuscript written by Joe Kaye, The False Prophet of Fennimore Place, buried in an unknown location is that, it seemed, only Siann knew of the manuscript. She read about it in a notebook.

In 1974 Philip K. Dick was struck by a series of visions he referred to as 2-3-74. One of the visions was a beam of light that came down from space. He believed that the beam of light might have been from the Almighty Father who art in Heaven. After the laser beam hit him, he instantly knew things he hadn’t known before. He knew Greek. He knew his son was dying, and how he could, in fact, prevent his son’s premature death. After saving his son, he spent the rest of his time on this planet trying to determine what, if anything, had contacted him in 1974. Was it aliens? The Government testing some new satellite? God? He never found out what the laser beam was, but did write a book called Valis about the incident. The book Valis was part of a trilogy that never got finished. Blind Savior was, in Joe Kaye’s mind, the missing book in the trilogy.

Siann had pieced this flimsy idea/story together from a notebook she had stolen from Joe Kaye back over twenty years ago. He presumably had buried the novel after she had stolen the notebook, but he gave foreshadowing evidence of a plan to bury it.

What the short story The Spit of Siann will tell you about Siann Campb ell is that her father was an astronaut. He died when she was very young, but not before she contracted a strange virus from him. The virus was not like anything on this planet. It was called Taraxacum Varicellovirus. The virus had one side effect; it caused people to age 2/3 slower than the normal human rate. Siann did not know this and probably would have been blessed with looking young her entire life had a decade of crystal methamphetamine abuse not negated the effect of the virus.

It is scary to think what Siann would have looked like at the actual age of 37 after a decade of ice abuse had it not been for the Taraxacum Varicellovirus. It wouldn’t have been pretty. Siann stared into the rearview mirror at her malnourished face. Siann wasn’t sure what Philip K. Dick and Joe Kaye had in common, but she was pretty sure there were a few things other than Joe Kaye’s whole obsession with Philip K. Dick. She knew one thing: he had written a story in which he thought he was Philip K. Dick. She wasn’t sure where the story was or even if it still existed, but she was fairly sure he wrote it.

Another thing, well, they were both writers, Siann thought to herself. She couldn’t think straight. She pulled the car off to the side of the road. She pulled the pipe from under her seat, and pulled off her sock. She looked out the window. There were still many cars on the road, but none seemed to be pulling over. She spit into her sock several times, and then put the fire under the pipe. There was the sound of butane, the smell of burning plastic, as Siann inhaled the crystal methamphetamine. Siann put the sock under the glass and heard the pipe hiss like a poison snake about to bite her.

Sssssssss. Siann put the pipe back under the seat. Her mind was going a mile a minute now. Where was she? On the edge of Florida in a stolen car, all high. If she got pulled over now, she was fucked, but then she was fucked anyway. She had been fucked since she was a little girl. Fucked by men, fucked by boys, fucked by two testicles walking with feet, fucked by the government. She had been through abusive relationship after abusive relationship since she was fifteen. She did not want to go into details. Men were scum. She knew it, it was an absolute truth in her mind.

She pulled back onto the freeway.

What else did Philip K. Dick and Joe Kaye have in common? Her mind was speeding now, the car doing a comfortable fifty-five miles an hour. Siann looked in the rearview mirror; her eyes looked cracked and disheveled with streaks of red lightning branching across them.

If she was pulled over now she was fucked. She increased her speed to sixty-five. Glancing in the rearview roughly about sixty-five times a minute, she changed lanes abruptly. Her mind was firing at a speed that was beyond rational thought. Subliminal pictures flashed through her head, pictures of people she didn’t know, people she had never met, but people that existed nonetheless. She didn’t know they existed. She also didn’t know why she had pictures of people that she didn’t know popping into her head.

Who were these people?

A portrait of three guys that were standing around flashed into her head. All three of the guys had longer 1970’s haircuts.

Were these real people? And if they were real, why were they flashing into Siann’s head?

What else did Philip K. Dick and Joe Kaye have in common?

If she got pulled over now, she was fucked.

Her brain kept looping around to each thought, then bouncing on to the next one before she could answer it. The shadows were starting to creep and slither, like black roots from an enormous tree.

It’s just the drug, she told herself.

You can make it.

The yellow lines were flashing on and off, dancing like Christmas lights, and Siann feared she had had way too much eggnog. She pulled over to a truck stop. It was just before dawn. Siann’s eyes were playing nasty, foolish, demented tricks on her. She kept thinking some ghostlike phantom was waiting just beyond her eyesight.

She had his notebook. Joe Kaye’s notebook. It was green and faded. It was over twenty years old. She had stolen it way back when, when she had been a little shit seventh grader. Mr. Kaye was constantly on her case, giving her detention just because she broke the rules. Once she tore in half Mr. Kaye’s copy of this book called Choke by Chuck Palahniuk. Mr. Kaye had been laughing about this one part, and Siann thought it was really annoying.

"Buy land, they stopped making it." Mr. Kaye was ranting.

"Actually, they’re still making it on the Big Island of Hawaii," he said a minute later.

When he gave her detention that day she waited until he wasn’t looking, walked up to his desk, and ripped that book in two. Another time she had taken one of his published novels from his backpack, and read almost half the book, although reading at the time was against her principles. And finally she had taken a green notebook that was marked 2-3-74 through 1-2-07: Philip K. Dick to Joe Kaye. She had flipped through the notebook many times, but she didn’t know what it meant. Any of it. It was weird. It didn’t make any sense. She flipped to the first page:

Hunter Thompson’s Assertion

"There was madness in any direction, at any hour… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle-that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark-that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back. "

-Hunter Thompson

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Hunter Thompson was incorrect. The Wave never broke. The momentum of the Wave just let up. For a moment. A moment in this case referring to twenty-five to thirty years. A generation. The Wave would gain even more strength again in the next generation, and with each passing generation would become more fierce, more determined. The Wave (to which Hunter Thompson refers) is what we might call the evolution of spirituality.

The sixties were the beginning of a new spiritual age for man. The end of worshipping a big man that sits in the sky and passes judgment on us, or the beginning of the end, anyway. The beginning of the next spiritual evolution. Man would finally be able to break the oppressive chains that bind him. Hunter Thompson’s mistake was believing that man would accomplish this in one generation. This is a journey that would take hundreds of generations.

The writing trailed off after that. There were a couple of sentences that were crossed out and a few sentence fragments. And at the bottom of the page, underlined, were the words:

It is the place where time meets space.

Siann had no idea what it meant. She had read it many times. It still meant nothing.

She grabbed the ice pipe from under her seat, and started to make that vile chemical fizz and bubble. She took an enormous rip, and put her sock once again under the hot heated glass. The sizzle sent Siann into spasms and shakes. She knew she was tweaking too much to drive. Tweaking is a term referring to when someone is really revved up on ice. She was close to Daytona. Maybe she should stop there for the night. That little white trash ghetto by the sea would do nicely concealing her for the night.

She put the car in drive. She was heading back onto the freeway, when she once again swerved off the road. She couldn’t think and drive at the same time. She needed a place to rest. Well, she could rest here, but she needed a place to unwind, or perhaps get more wound-up. She put on her emergency lights, and just sat in the car shuddering and shaking. She didn’t know what she was doing, she didn’t know where she was going. She thought she had been contacted by the ghost of Joe Kaye, who in turn wanted her to fulfill a mission that was unaccomplished in his lifetime. The mission she believed had to do with a novel that he had written that was unpublished. He had written the novel, but then decided that the world was not ready for it. He would release it later, when the world was ready. He had died. The novel remained hidden. Was that why she had driven from Wisconsin straight to Florida, to please the ghost of her dead seventh grade teacher? She looked over her shoulder.

If I get pulled over, I’m fucked, she said into her rearview mirror.

The reflection in the mirror looked back at her and said, You’re already pulled over and, guess what, you are fucked.

She leafed through the green notebook marked 2-3-74 through 12-07: Philip K. Dick to Joe Kaye. There was another strange chapter called:

The Occluded Dreams

Besides having the dream of following a little green bird to Kaena Point in Hawaii, I have had one other recurring dream. Unlike the first dream, I do not know the place where this dream occurs. I have never been there, at least not in this life. In the dream, I live in a giant house on a giant hill. The house is a towering mansion in the middle of nowhere. There are no other houses around for miles. The architecture of the house is very strange as though not of this planet. The giant house on the mountainous hill is surrounded by a forest, and although the trees are green, I suspect this giant hill and this giant house to be some other planet.

Is that possible?

Sophisticated life on another planet?

Sophisticated life on another planet of which I was a part, of which I am having one single remaining strand of memory. The last and only link to my last life.

The rest of my memory of this place is occluded except for this one dream. I don’t know why, or worse, I can’t remember why this place holds any significance over me, but it must. I believe deep down it is my home or it was my home in another life.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe in the dream. It is a real place. I have been there many times in different stages of my life. It is part of me. It is my home.

When I was little, I dreamed of the giant house on the mountainous hill many times, but as I age, I find it less and less in my dreams. As I grow up, I forget more of my old life.

If we don’t remember our birth, we can’t possibly remember what happened before our birth.

The dream of Kaena Point in Hawaii was far more vivid. This was a dream I experienced many times over just a few months in Hawaii. The weird thing about it was the dream progressed further each time. A progressive dream. When I got to Kaena Point the dream ended. As if I had resolved something in my dream, some innate issue within my soul, or part of my soul had been freed. The last dream of Kaena Point (that I had during the accident) was perhaps the most vivid, so much of this writing will focus on that dream and several soul theories I have espoused because of what this dream indicates.

STANDARD SOUL THEORY-Everybody gets one soul. (I guess you’re naturally assuming this is true, but if you think about it, reality and the world make more sense if you figure not everybody gets a soul.)

ANOTHER STANDARD SOUL THEORY-Our soul goes into our body when we are born and leaves when we die. (I guess you naturally assume this is true, but then why don’t you remember your birth? It would make more sense for your soul to come into your body some time after you are born. Did you know Jim Morrison believed he perceived his soul coming into his body from a dying Native American when he was eight?)

Christians, Jews, and Muslims-believe if you are good your soul goes to heaven, if you are bad your soul goes to hell.

Hindus and Buddhists-believe your soul is reincarnated into another being after you die. Whether you are reincarnated into something better or worse depends on how you act.

*Let it be stated what the Hindus and Buddhists believe makes a lot more sense to me

However my dream indicates that this standard soul theory may not be the case. We may share souls or some beings may have one or more souls floating around in them.

This may explain why:

1)   Some people lead dual lives

2)   Some people having trouble making mundane decisions

3)   Some people have night and day attitudes and emotions

4)   Some people are schizophrenic

There it was again, that word Schizophrenia-a schism of the mind. That word had followed Siann her entire life. That word angered her because no one ever questions whether maybe the things schizophrenics are hearing and seeing might possibly exist somewhere. Siann continued to read.

Throughout the dream I am heading northwest to the point, my final destination. When I get to my final destination I merge physically, spiritually, and emotionally with a young woman through the act of lovemaking. Although I (Joe Kaye) am having the dream, in the dream I am not myself. I am a Hawaiian with triangular tattoos on my thighs and arms.

In one particular dream I remember I looked in a reflection pond and I did look like a slightly browner version of myself with a wicked scar across my face.

There is also this phenomenon, which I call dream memories, that has only happened to me during the Kaena Point dreams. Most of my dream memories are of the young woman. Our childhood. Our first kiss. Our first time. Memories of events that never happened to me.

At the point when I merge with the woman there are several indications that something else other than a physical act is taking place, although it is unclear whether I’m losing a piece of my soul, gaining a piece of my soul, gaining my whole soul or freeing my soul from something. Someone would have to explain to me the rules of the afterlife to figure out what is going on.

I have underlined several passages that attempt to explain what is happening, but fall short in reasoning.

Oh… I waited for many generations…you were caught between worlds, and I was in the afterlife.

I believe this passage indicates that although my body (the ancient Hawaiian) had died and passed on, my soul was stuck. The weird part is, although my soul was stuck, another body was reborn, as Joe Kaye. This I don’t understand. How can I be reborn without a soul and be connected to my past-self if my soul is stuck somewhere else? Wouldn’t the soul be ouronly connection? Again this seems to indicate there are pieces of the soul or parts of the soul or many souls in one body.

As she orgasms she melts into me, and I feel like she is becoming part of me. I hear her voice in my voice. I feel her blood in my veins. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off me. It was as if a piece or part of my soul had never been free or whole until that moment.

This passage I wrote confuses me also, especially since the woman in question in the dream has been dead for over200years. How can she merge with me? How is she part of me? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Again the passage indicates souls being in pieces or parts; that is why I included it.

Siann flipped to the next page. There was a poem/rant called Aumakua Rant. Aumakua is the Hawaiian word for spirit animal. Joe Kaye believed his Aumakua to be a little green bird called a Japanese white eye. This is a copy of Joe Kaye’s poem/rant:

Aumakua Rant

I was running up the mountain,

Just dog-tired,

Suffering,

My mind drifting

Between the Infinite Rift.

My Aumakua (spirit animal) stops on a branch nearby.

He starts to chirp a mile a minute. I cannot understand him.

For a second I imagine his chirps as something other than sounds.

This is what the little bird might have said,

"If Friends come and go

Enemies must

Stay and stop.

Or what happens

If I don’t think?

Does that mean

I am not?

Could I just fizzle away

Into the immaterial matter in the air?

Become one with the universe,

Dissipate like the wind

Which has a pulse and a spirit

And a really bad temper.

The wind gets really pissed

If you break its rules.

For every reaction

There is a bell that goes off in a parallel universe

And two porcupines make love very carefully

Until one of them pokes the other

In the way that poking is bad…"

I put my finger in my ear, and realize the bird is still

chirping and chattering, But for some reason I can’t

understand him any more. Maybe I never could.

Siann closed the book. Mr. Kaye was still the only person she knew that was weirder than she was.

Holy shit, she said out loud. This fucker is bonkers.

She was tired, or at least somewhere off in the distance in her mind, a little light went on, and her Mommy was calling, Siann, time for beddy-bye. Siann shook it off. She was no longer 13 years old. She didn’t want to drive much further, but she also knew Daytona was about twenty miles away. A haven of trashy bars, bikers, aging strippers, used race car drivers, and rednecks still sniffing for the American Dream, a place Siann could get some more of her precious paper. Paper in this case being slang for ice. Ice in this case being slang for crystal methamphetamine.

She pulled back onto the thruway, rolling down her window. The rush of warm air instantly changed her perception. The lights on the freeway seemed to do a double take before resonating to a different hue and tone. The air seemed to calm her, as if its very essence was there to make everything all right. She could smell the ocean. She knew she would make it to Daytona. She began to ease up. The car seemed to drive itself.

This of course gave her time to think, which was probably not a positive thing. The broken recollection of an ice-head’s thought patterns is something like a radio stuck on scan. Siann was skipping between stations. Every five seconds her brain would skip onto the next idea, never really giving her any time to think of anything. Her mind was on yesterday and tomorrow, unable to focus on the present, where she was dangerously swerving between lanes.

She almost hit a car, as she screamed obscenities out the window at the driver she had almost cut off.

What else do Philip K. Dick and Joe Kaye have in common?