Our Divided States: Division #1 -- Business vs. Government

The one overarching concept of this year's presidential election can be summed up in one word: division. It's becoming more and more clear that America is splitting itself along a bunch of different axes. And while everyone seems to be looking at the firmly established dichotomies that the rest of the world deals with as well -- rich vs. poor, left vs. right, white vs. apparently every other race -- there are a couple that I don't think we should ignore. At least to me, they seem to drive right to the heart of what makes America unique, and in unique peril. I can think of three of these off the top of my head, each worthy of contemplation and frank discussion, and here's the first of them...

Over the years, I've developed my own personal theory about how America works, and if anything, Trump's less blatantly-offensive actions as he prepares to take the country's highest office are bearing it out. So let me share this theory with you, although I can almost guarantee that regardless of your political bent, you're not going to like it...

In short, America is based on an uneasy alliance between capitalism and socialism. These are directly opposing ideologies of how a human society should work, but every part of the continual back-and-forth of American politics and American business directly derives from their ongoing collision.

Now, since both of the terms I use here have taken on negative connotations -- mostly by the concerted efforts of supporters of the other -- let me define what I mean by them. By "capitalism", I mean an economy based on the process of gathering resources, using them to produce something that people want or need, and then selling it to them for the lowest possible price, thereby raising their quality of life. And by "socialism", I mean it in its original, intended form, which is an economy based on giving people an equal share of wealth and resources, and using their combined mental and physical efforts to provide everyone with what they need to be safe, healthy, and comfortable.

If you look at the way America currently works, it's a constant battle between these polarizing tides. American business seeks to expand its revenue and reduce its costs, but when it does, it always comes at the expense of someone. And the government looks to counter this -- to keep workers from being exploited and unfair business practices being enacted. Conversely, when the federal and state governments take control of rights that should be in the hands of the individual, big business uses its leverage to keep freedoms intact. That's the main idea, anyway.

Let's use the example of a big, hypothetical corporation to illustrate: A big company necessarily operates on the money and credit it garners from appearing continually profitable. It has to, in order to maintain itself. In order to do this, it needs to sell more product. So it looks for cheaper resources, cheaper workforces, cheaper whatever. It looks to pay workers less or even outsource its production work to other countries. So the American federal or state governments aid unions to make sure that workers have bargaining power and can be assured to make a continued decent living from their job.

It works the other way, too. Look at our country's welfare program, which doles out taxpayers' money to people who either cannot work or are currently unable to find or are untrained for work. The capitalist part of society sees this as the antithesis of what it stands for, and lobbies to get welfare programs reduced or cut, claiming that programs like this indoctrinate people into dependence on the government, undercutting their motivation to work, innovate, and in general progress as a society.

This directly puts capitalism and socialism in conflict. The capitalistic side of the equation feels they're being hindered from continuing their necessary growth by having to pay American wages and American resources, and the socialistic side strives to keep people from being exploited or having their jobs taken away. In my opinion, it would be much easier if we dropped our pretense of political parties and defined ourselves as advocates for either Capitalism or Communism. Of course, due to the stigma those words have garnered over the years, it's not going to happen, but we're basically working under these veiled labels already. Rename either ideology and it seems to work well...

Republican/Capitalist: "Economic growth is how society and individuals progress. Wealth can be made most efficiently by large companies who then pass it on to the people. There is plenty of opportunity for people who want to put forth the effort, and teaching people to be dependent on their government opens up a short path to oppression and the rule of an elite political class."

Democrat/Socialist: "All people need to share in progress. Business expansions must be regulated to protect people and the planet alike, and there has to be a safety net for common citizens when bad things happen. When money is concentrated in one place, what happens is that a class system is established, those who have the money and those who have to work to gain it. Unless measures are put in place, business will look out for its own interests, without caring about what happens to people who work for their living."

Writing it out, I can see one striking similarity between the two ideologies: both believe they are in the business of keeping the other side from creating stratums of society, something that America was founded by being fundamentally opposed to. Everyone seems to agree that having upper classes and lower classes, with people born into one or the other by chance rather than their individual merit, but their approaches to keeping this from happening take wildly divergent paths.

You can probably tell where I fall on this issue from what I've written so far. But it's still true that I've experienced both sides of this: I worked for a large corporation for many years, and then had to fall back on the government for a few years after the recession swept it away.

Personally, I believe that the corporate goal of unending growth is impossible, resulting in bubble after bubble that artificially inflates wealth and then snatches it away, with the middle and lower classes bearing the brunt of every financial upheaval. I also believe that when bad things happen, a government has a responsibility to be there to keep an average person's life from falling into ruin. The only people who truly benefit from the current state of play are the ones who 1) know when to bail from the next bubble that is about to burst, and 2) stay illness-free. And there are precious few human beings who can reliably fall into both those categories.

So here comes the bad news: we are about to enter into an era where the people in charge believe that a country can be run like a business, when in fact government and industry were maintaining a balance -- Not well, admittedly, but they were mostly maintaining it. As you can see, the incoming President's cabinet is being filled with multimillionaires who are going to try to apply their "successful" business principles onto a "workforce" of 370 million people. They've also been put in charge of the federal entity that, in the past, has regulated them.

The biggest issue I have here is one of allegiance. Big business is beholden to no one, and no particular place. It will go where it needs to in order to be competitive and survive, and treat people in whatever way benefits them the most. On the flip side, federal and state governments exist -- at least in theory -- to be the advocate for the people, to be their voice, to protect them against tides of misfortune, engineered or otherwise.

So here's a parting thought: The earliest set of laws we have from human civilizations past is the Code of Hammurabi. You'll learn about in any social studies and law classes you make take, but one thing I never knew until recently is that the Code explicitly states its purpose, which is to prevent the weak from being mistreated by the strong. So what do we do when the proverbial strong are the ones who are deciding these protective laws? Do we really think they're going to act with all peoples' best in mind?

Whitelodge 13.1

-13.1-

Sheryl was perched between two strong emotions, not knowing which way she was going to tip. On one hand, she was back inside the Lodge, out of the elements and inside an environment that was bounded and she at least could pretend she understood. Not only that, but she surrounded by people she trusted, and who she felt deeply bonded to, now that they had gone through Glenda's tragic end together. Laid across this layer of comfort, though, was the fact that Kerren was still hurt and needed more care than getting carried around wrapped in a rug, not to mention that they had just re-entered the lair of some bizarre creature whose abilities and intentions weren't even clear yet.

She decided to put off her decision on how to feel until later. Right now, there was someone new in their midst, a man wearing what looked like an apron that seemed to have an inordinate amount of blood on it. She and the others had finished carrying Kerren down the stairs from the roof, and she kept moving, forcing them to keep following her. She walked until she was standing next to Dale, who was just standing there in silence, with Glenda still draped across his arms.

"Who are you?" Sheryl said to the bloodied man. As soon as she had spoken, she knew the words sounded harsher than she intended.

The man's eyebrows raised, clearly assuming he'd be welcomed more readily. "I'm Carlos," he answered. "I was working in the kitchen with Benny when the avalanche hit. Does she need--"

Sheryl didn't let him get distracted with questions about Glenda, who the man had clearly been looking at. "No. We need to know what's going on out there. You've seen that thing with the horns?"

Carlos focused back on her, nodding. "Like I said, it chased me in here. Benny's hurt, though. I told him I'd try to find a way to lure it away, so maybe we could get him some help..."

"Well," Sheryl said, nodding in various directions, "we've got people hurt too." She glanced over his shoulder and into the room beyond. "What's in there?"

"Just more storage," Carlos said, but his eyes kept drifting over to Glenda. This time, he spoke to Dale. "Is she going to be--"

Dale shook his head ruefully, and looked down at the woman in his arms. The snow that had accumulated in her lashes and on her cheeks had melted in the Lodge's relative warmth, the sheen making her look decidedly more alive than she had been outside.

Carlos breathed out an "Oh," and then stood with the group as silence gathered around them. A moment passed, and then Sheryl spoke again, as matter-of-factly as she could. "My wife's legs are broken. Is there someplace we can take her?"

Carlos eventually turned his attention back to her. "Well, it looks like any closed room would okay. Whatever that thing is, it can't pass through anything solid. I hit it with a -- a vase, I think -- and that almost brought it to a total stop. Like it had some kind of force field around it. Or maybe it *is* the force field. I don't know. What were you doing on the roof?"

"Trying to leave," Sheryl said. "But we just ended up right back here, where we started. There's no way to get off the mountain. So it sounds like we're stuck in here with it."

"Well, I came out here to see if I could find anyone else," Carlos continued, "so now that I helped that author guy, and found you all, I want to get back--"

The tension in the room started to ratchet back up. Manoj spoke up from the back of the transom that carried the blonde woman. "You saw Bruce Casey? Where is he?" The edge of rage in his voice was unmistakable.

Sheryl saw the look in Carlos's eyes get suddenly cagey, as if he was aware that what he was about to say was the vocal equivalent of walking through a minefield. "That thing was going to get him... So I grabbed it, and he got away."

"Where?" Sheryl asked insistently. "Where did he go?"

Carlos chest puffed out a little. "Sorry, but I was wrestling with what might be a literal demon at the time, I didn't get a chance to see. He was down by the other end of the hallway, where the whole thing collapsed. It was almost right above the kitchen where I was. But I left Benny down in Harmon's room, so now I'm going to--" He was starting to turn and leave.

"Wait. Please," Dale's voice filled the room, his throat strained. He nodded to Glenda, where she lay across his arms. "Let me go with you. I want to get her somewhere... safe." The regret in his voice was painfully clear. "Harmon's room would be good. Quiet. Can we take her there?"

Carlos looked at the big man, as if surprised by his sudden vulnerability. "Sure, Dale. We can get her there. It'll be a little crowded; Benny's not doing so well himself."

Sheryl jumped back in. "But it's a safe place? Can we take Kerren there too?"

As if given a cue, Kerren began twisting her head from one side to the other, letting out little, troubled hisses. Sheryl, concerned that she would hurt herself, said "Down! Put her down," to the couple holding the far end of the rug, and together they lowered the troubled woman to the floor. Sheryl ran and knelt next to her head as soon as she could. "Honey?" she soothed against Kerren's continued twisting inside her confines. "What's wrong? It's okay, we're going to get you someplace--"

She paused, listening. It was strange, but she thought she had heard something articulate in Kerren's breaths. She bent close, and there it was again. She was saying two tiny phrases: "In here" and "Again".

"What's happening to her?" Manoj asked in an anxious whisper. For some reason, it didn't sound like he was asking because he didn't know.

Kerren's hisses started to sound a little more like "heart". Sheryl leaned closer, trying to soothe her. "It's okay, honey, you'll be comfortable soon..." Her voice drifted off as she drew more disturbed by what her wife was doing. The urgency was starting to drift out of Kerren's repeated utterings of "heart", and her eyes were starting to take on a faraway look, as if there were something high overhead that was distracting her from where she was and what she was doing. Sheryl almost felt her old feelings of panic settling in, almost convincing her that the shock of Kerren's injuries had finally kicked in and she was fading away like Glenda had... but she managed to keep them at bay, at least for a few moments.

"What's that, Kerren?" Sheryl asked her, leaning closer, trying to divine her fading words.

"Sarah," Kerren said clearly. "It's all about Sarah. They all know her."

"Sarah?" Sheryl asked, confused. "What about her?... Honey, What does this have to do with your mother?"

The Cult of Amurrica

I've been watching Leah Remini's documentary series about Scientology for the past few weeks. Her mission, plainly and boldly stated, is to expose this self-described "Church" as nothing more than a cult and amoral money-making machine disguised as a humanistic organization. I've always found Scientology kind of fascinating, not only because one of the first sci-fi writers I read with any regularity was the Church's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, but merely because the movement itself is from the outside so obviously batshit-crazy that it throws into relief how many of our other institutions -- religious, academic, and social -- are, at their roots, cult-like as well, only have been more normalized over time.

The more episodes of the show I watch, the more I start to think that our divided country has a large faction of it that operates much like a cult.

Let's compare: Scientology started with a forward-thinking leader (Mr. Hubbard) who looked at all the wonders of the Space Race/Atom Age and wondered whether any of it could help solve the dilemmas of the human psyche. The purity of the cycle of the scientific method (hypothesize, experiment, observe, analyze, theorize, refine) which had brought us amazing technological wonders, put us on the moon and cured polio, seemed like it might also be applied to solving our mental neuroses and cycles of abuse, if applied with the same rigor and objectivity. So it at least pretended to have a noble start. But from that logically sound beginning, things quickly started to go off the rails.

As time went on, both Hubbard's paranoia and grip on reality loosened. He first took to basing his organization on boats in international waters to evade various countries' laws. Then he coordinated the largest espionage attack on America ever perpetrated (Operation Snow White, a fascinating and frightening research topic). As time went on and he realized he had to follow through with completion of his bogus religious mythology, he created the increasingly expensive and ludicrous "revelations" one learns as they climb the Scientology bridge... this is where the great galactic lord Xenu comes into play, as well as the ever-more Earthly insanities laid bare in Ms. Remini's riveting series.

My point is this: even if Scientology may have started off with a noble premise, it was eventually led astray by its own fear, self-delusion and insularity. And when I look at what America is today, I can see much of the same thing happening. What Trump tapped into on that fateful day in November is often referred to as "Amurrica" by the rest of the population, and is the shadow-self of our nation. The utter poetry of the way it stands in direct contrast to what it thinks it stands for is pretty amazing, and I think a pretty good analog of what happened with the Church of Scientology.

Sit any elementary school student down and ask them what America is, what it *means*, what it stands for. What do we collectively tell ourselves makes America different from just about every other country? Well, the standard answer is it's our inclusiveness. Anyone from anywhere in the world can come here and make a better life for themselves. You can practice any religion you want in the manner you see fit, and everyone has an equal chance to work hard, study hard, and make the best use of their mind and body they can, all to build a stronger, unified country.

At least, that was the ideal set down on paper at the beginning. And there are still a lot of us (if you believe the numbers, a little over half) that still aspire to it. But we've recently heard loud and clear that there is a large faction of us that have turned the idea of "America" into a sort of cult, where nearly every single one of the Founding Fathers' original thoughts have been completely subverted and re-packaged as truth.

It's this new idea that's what "Amurrica" lives by. It's a place where "freedom" and "patriotism" means protecting ourselves against the constant threat of outsiders, people of different colors and religions, creeping in on all sides, threatening to change established modes of society that have been in place for as long as anyone cares to remember. The federal government is part of this too, a cabal of elites who live far away and know nothing of the reality of life, but wish to impose their will on common, salt-of-the-earth people, leaving "us" defenseless and dependent.

This is cult mentality writ large, indoctrinating a population that pays lip service to democracy and multi-culturalism, when what they secretly want is the exact opposite. They want to perpetuate the monoculture they've been born into, and which they can easily understand. They want one Voice of Authority, which can provide them with all the answers they desire. There's no room for dissent, no place for the Outsider except as an example to demonstrate our magnanimity and charity. But then the Outsider always has to go back outside.

"Amurrica" is a worldview that's filtered through an increasingly smaller number of legitimate-sounding news sources, and politicians who would rather voice their policies via Twitter than actual press conferences, where they could face follow-up questions and be asked to provide facts to back up their assertions.

The repetition of untrue doctrine until it becomes ingrained as fact, the intimidation and bullying tactics to keep the indoctrinated in line, the innate infallibility of leadership... these are things that all cults do well. They remove other options, instill fear, monopolize attention, and magnify the natural uncertainties of life. Then they offer an ironclad solution that you can attain, and all you have to do is follow without question. It's these tactics that both L. Ron Hubbard and our President-Elect have used to "help" people retreat from the new, connected, real world of the twenty-first century, all the while claiming to be reinforcing the very ideals they're undermining.

Oh, and there's one more crucial way these two men are similar: They've taken a great deal of money from hard-working people doing what they do.

Whitelodge 12.5 & 12.6

-12.5-

They were going to have to get out of the room, which at the moment seemed like a pretty tall order. They were two old men, broken in different ways, and it was unclear just how far from this rickety old cot they could manage to get. But they had the fire of knowledge, and they would just have to hope that was enough.

Harmon withdrew from Benny's fractured brain slowly, carefully, not wanting to cause any more damage than had already been done to it. He wasn't even sure he had such power, but he didn't want to risk it. He opened his eyes and he was back, Benny sitting next to him slumped back against the wooden wall of Harmon's small understairs room. Looking at the broken man, he marveled at how incredibly complex and beautiful the human mind was, even in such a compromised state. It was a depressing shock, going from such a sense of limitless potential and space, to being trapped inside a tiny box of bone. It was no wonder that people expected so little of themselves, and each other.

As disappointing as the physical world was compared to that of the mental, he had to fully return. Things needed to be done. The look in Benny's eyes when Harmon spoke to him meant that the kitchen worker knew this grim fact too, but with nearly infinite regret he knew he wasn't going to be much help.

"No worries," Harmon said to him, cautiously patting him on the knee. "We'll figure this out. I guess I can walk a little more, since I've made it this far. Maybe I can lure the thing out from wherever it is, get it to come to us..." The fear in Benny's eyes was growing more intense, so Harmon stopped his vocal spitballing. It was belatedly starting to dawn on him that if the two of them were going to defeat the Qoloni, they'd need more than one working body between the two of them.

It was his longing for the sense of weightlessness that came from being inside another's mind that made him think of Kerren again. Even while he admitted that the feeling could possibly be addictive and he should be careful, he knew that it was their only means of getting additional help. Out on the snow, he thought he had heard the distant sound of one of the lodge's snowmobiles heading down toward the village, and if that were true, the blonde woman (who looked so much like Sarah) was most likely one of the passengers. If they had made it all the way down, they might be able to send assistance. Of course, how he could possibly explain what the Qoloni was, and how it would have to be fought, was something he would have to work out later.

Turning to Benny again (and feeling a flare in the broken ankle he had almost forgotten about in his inner travels), Harmon said, "I'm going to try to reach Kerren. Maybe she can send help to us." He didn't feel like explaining that Kerren was dealing with some mental and physical trauma of her own, because Benny seemed to be in a particularly emotionally vulnerable state. "Hold on," he said, "I'm going to see where she is, and get a message to her if I can."

Surprisingly, as he closed his eyes and prepared to reach out -- a process that seemed to get a little easier each time he did it -- Harmon felt a shaky, hesitant hand slip into his own. It was Benny, trying to hold onto him, as he would a lifeline. "Don't worry," Harmon said without trying to shake off the hand, "I'll be right back. And right here." It was true; where he was going next, his body would necessarily stay behind.

He felt that unique sense of dislocation again as he expanded his thoughts to outside his own body, pushing into the feeling of anti-world that he now understood existed everywhere, between all spaces and times. Almost immediately, he was distracted by something else, something fascinating: the presence of Kerren, less than a hundred feet away. She was high above him, much higher than he thought she should be, and far enough away that he had to wonder whether she was still in the Lodge or not. So she hadn't been on the snowmobile after all...

Harmon drew his disembodied presence back, trying to get a better overall look at the surroundings. He backed through the lobby, trying not to look at the disturbing, fading traces of life in the blood stains across the floor and up the stairs. He tried to keep his attention high, but he kept having to raise it, up above the Deertail's second floor, up above the thin attic space that lay on top of it...

He actually heard himself say aloud, "The roof, goddamnit. She's on the roof," and dimly felt Benny's hand clench a little too hard against his, back in his tiny room under the stairs.

They were *all* up there, in fact. Well, five of them were... no, six, but one of them... dear God, one of them felt vacant, a complete shell, nothing left... what had happened? As if he had willed it -- and maybe he had -- Harmon felt his consciousness slip inside that silent, still mind, and then just as quickly retreat. One phrase was all he could sum up about that vast, unlit space -- *There was nothing left.* They were the only possible words to describe what he had seen and felt in that eons-long instant he had been inside Glenda's mind. Until that moment, he hadn't even realized it was her, the person he had interacted with more than anyone else at the Lodge, because she was so unrecognizable in that form. He didn't feel the tears that spontaneously ran down his corporeal cheeks.

The only thing that gave him solace was Kerren. She was right there, next to the darkened form, so luminous she almost blinded his vision, forming a perfect counterpoint. How could one person be so incredibly *alive* while another, less than two feet away, was utterly, irrevocably absent?

He forced himself to turn away from this unsolvable dilemma, to turn to more pressing matters. How had they gotten up on the roof? A quick survey of the area seemed to answer this: the avalanche had piled snow up to and over the roof line at the back of the Lodge, so they must have driven right up onto it. But why?

Now he became aware of movement elsewhere on the roof. Dale (he had come to recognize the man's particularly warm energy signature, but now it seemed strangely ragged and dim, and Harmon thought he could understand why) came over and knelt down next to Glenda's former self. Harmon watched as the security guard gingerly picked her up and turned to walk away. Harmon followed, watching as he carried her into one of the little cupolas, which he always assumed were merely ornamental, at the front corners of the Lodge. Now, he could see that there was a hatch there that led down into the attic space. A young couple had just finished prying it up, and now leaned it against the inner wall of the cupola, standing back as far as they could to make room when they finished.

Dale moved slowly, reverently, as if enacting a ritual, and the others patiently waited while he descended into the Lodge with infinite care. Once he was out of sight, Manoj and Kelly moved out of the cupola, coming over to help Sheryl and Kerren -- it surprised him only a little that he knew all their names, having picked them up tangentially through his previous time in Kerren's mind. They seemed to know exactly what to do without speaking, and picked up the injured woman, who had been wrapped in a rug around a thick piece of board that acted as a sort of stretcher. They moved without outward or inward communication, following Dale's pilgrimage into the cupola.

Harmon prepared himself, whispered an apology for intruding again, and dipped into Kerren's blazing mind for a second time.

-12.6-

The door slammed shut, and immediately warped as the dark thing impacted it from the other side. Carlos watched, fascinated, as it twisted and struggled, bending the door, its jamb, and the surrounding walls in ways that shouldn't have been possible. Before, when he had been down in Benny's room, he had been too terrified that the thing was going to break through to appreciate the phenomenon, but now that he was reasonably sure it couldn't, his feet became rooted to the spot where he stood, and he just observed it happening.

The blank face of the creature, until now, had lent it a kind of detachment. At least, that's how Carlos had thought about it; when your pursuer didn't have an expression to be read, you could never be sure of its motives. Was it angry at Carlos? Was it hungry? Was it insane? He would have been able to tell if it had a mouth, or eyes to look at. But its mere approximation of a human face made it hard to read. Carlos guessed from the way it was contorting its body, its hands blindly grasping in his direction through the membrane its strange physics made of the door, that at least two of his guesses were true.

Now that he was out of immediate danger, Carlos was able to inspect his shoulder, which had taken so much force when he slammed into the door that he feared it might be broken, or at least dislocated. He touched it gingerly with his free hand, then rubbed it. It would be quite bruised, but it seemed intact. He was able to rotate it most of the way around in its socket, with nothing stronger than the expected ache. He had lucked out on that count.

He watched the ripples and thrashes from the other side of the door until they started to subside. There was one final flurry of slashing activity from the other side, and then the thing retreated slowly, stealthily. The tips of the antlers were the last thing to disappear, the hard points receding high up on the wall above the door. It wasn't until it had entirely withdrawn that a long, deep shiver passed up the full length of Carlos's spine. He tried not to think too hard about what he had just escaped from. The most unnerving thing, he realized, was that it was so silent. Not even the twisting of reality itself as the walls and vases and doors wrapped around the thing's lean, horrible shape had made any sound. The ambience it left in its absence was almost as frightening as when it was snapping at his heels, which just lent even more surreality to the experience.

It was in this silence, however, that Carlos was able to discern a totally new sound. It was nearby, but muffled, a kind of hollow stepping and scraping, as if several people were walking slowly, methodically, in another room, over resonant wooden boards. For some reason, he was almost as afraid of this sound as he had been of the silence of the dark thing that, for all he knew, could still be waiting just outside the door. There was something ominous in its order. All that was missing was the deep tones of a dirge being played underneath them.

Carlos's eyes drifted to the back corner of the room, where he saw a door he hadn't noticed before. It was unusually wide. He'd never been in this part of the Lodge before, but he assumed what lay beyond was more storage. Maybe some of the larger maintenance equipment? He stepped lightly over to it, listened to the steps as they continued their heavy treads. Some of them seemed weirdly synchronized, as if there were some kind of marching maneuver taking place inside. He tested the doorknob, found that it turned silently. He returned the knob to its resting position and backed away, not knowing whether he should risk going back into the hall, or seeing if the procession would try to gain access to his new hiding place.

All of a sudden, Carlos found himself filled with anger, which he hadn't been able to bring himself to feel against the dark creature he had been grappling with. Maybe it was the residual adrenaline from that encounter, but he found that he didn't want to spend the rest of his time in the Lodge running and hiding. He reached for the knob again, decisively turned it and threw the door open.

On the other side was another, longer storage room, lined with plastic storage racks, all of which were filled with every manner of things needed for the upkeep of a large, wooden building: cans of paint, stains, and varnish; boxes of nails, assorted woodworking supplies and equipment. But in the center of it, a long, shallow-grade staircase with open slats descended from a large rectangular gap in the ceiling, which let the moonlight hinted at through the window in the outer room shine down directly.

Next to this stairway -- which started almost over Carlos's head and descended to the far side of the room -- stood Dale, the Lodge's head of security, with a limp female form draped across his arms. He turned to look at Carlos as the door opened, and the expression on his face was confusing. It took a little longer for Carlos to realize what was coming down the stairs: three people together, one in front and two in back of a long, cylindrical shape as they stepped down the stairs as a unit. Carlos could only see the backs of their legs through the thick slats of the stairs, so he couldn't determine any more facts than that.

"What... what's happening?" Carlos's excitement about finding other able-bodied people in the Lodge was tempered by his uncertainty about what they were doing. "Is she all right?" He was speaking to Dale now, nodding his head at the woman in his arms. As soon as he had said the words, he realized that it was Glenda, the desk clerk who always had a warm smile for him -- and, he assumed, for everybody -- whenever he would venture out from his work in the kitchen. Dale only shook his head gravely.

Now the group was hitting the bottom of the stairs, and turning in his direction. Once all three of the group carrying the long shape had pivoted around his way, everyone stopped and looked at each other. It became clear to Carlos that what they were holding between them was a woman, wrapped in a rug. She surprised him by tilting her head his way, her bright eyes regarding him coolly. This made him assume that Glenda, despite the knife stuck high in her chest, was merely injured as well.

He broke the silence by saying, "It's outside the door. It chased me in here. But it can't go through solid objects. So we're safe for now."

The best feeling Carlos had that night, aside from when he realized that Benny was still alive, was the collective shudder of relative relief that went through the group when he spoke those words.

The America That Could Have Been

I couldn't care less about what kind of demographics America ends up having, racially or otherwise. In fact, I'll go one step beyond that -- I don't think America will be able to reach its full potential as long as any one race has a de facto headlock on determining the direction of its politics or its culture. To further clarify and de-mince my words: once White America is no longer in power by default, the country's going to be much better off.

Sound radical? Actually, what I think is radical is the backward-bending that white people have gone to in order to make sure they retain enough of the majority to stay in power, and even further to rationalize those actions. From the gerrymandering of Congressional districts to the flat-out racist tactics of the recent Presidential election, there is a large faction of this country that is deathly afraid of having to share the country's steering wheel with hands that have even the slightest tint of brown in them.

Full disclosure: I say this as someone who identifies as a white man. Of course, as with anyone, there's some uncertainty and wiggle room in my real genetic racial profile, but for the record, this much I can verify. I'm most definitely half eastern European (my maternal grandparents were WWII refugees from Latvia), one quarter Scotch/Irish... and through a quirk of family history, one quarter that I'm not at all sure about. But regardless of origin, I do know that my non-Latvian ancestors were middle-America, blue-collar white folks. I specify this just so you don't think I have something to personally gain from the rise of minorities (and I'm glad to say that it sounds increasingly stupid to my ears to use that term for the entire non-white population).

One of the many rallying cries we've heard this past year, both here and across the pond during the whole Brexit mess, is that we have to take steps to "preserve our way of life". As if the continuity of culture is automatically something that people should strive to keep, as their birthright. So let's unpack what this one little phrase means... It means that the way we've been doing things has value, simply because it's the way we've been doing things. I can't say I agree. The America of the past -- the one that supposedly was so great that it needs to be made that way again -- was one of redlining ... burning rivers... 16-hour workdays... "the love that dare not speak its name"... "a woman’s place"... children being "seen, not heard"... Manifest Destiny... Jim Crow. One thing all those abominations of thought from the past have in common is that they're the sorts of things that taking steps to preserve "your way of life" really means.

What I see in America today is the impending endgame of this national attitude. Everyone wishes for things to be better for their children, correct? So what do you do when your continued way of living -- for example, a coal-burning, climate-change denying, waste-driven society -- is in direct opposition to those improvements happening? Do you hold back your children -- and their grandchildren -- by beholding them to the same traditions and norms that you grew up with? Do you not see how contradictory that is? When you think about it, it's no different from bullying, which is something I'm already thinking I'm going to have to address in my next entry. But the underlying question -- the neverending whine of the bully -- is the same: Why should you have it better than I did?

Until about 8pm on this past Election Day, I could see the future of America clearly. At least, I was clear on the way I wanted it to go, and HRC seemed to be on the right track. I could see America founding a new future on alternative energy, inventing and manufacturing all kinds of new technologies to bring clean water to dry lands, and non-emission power to wildernesses. We would be a center for not only manufacturing the necessary instruments to make these things reality, but to export the very process itself to other countries. This wouldn't take the form of an invasive process that would usurp the power of heritage and culture from other countries... it would merely make it so that people living there wouldn't have to spend most of their time not dying from hunger, poverty, or thirst. Any social adjustments that would be made out of that change would be honestly earned.

Look, America. We have the capability to not only set the standard for the wired, clean country of the future, but we could change our main industries to exporting that knowledge and tech to other countries. We could fuel our economy by shoring up our infrastructure, and then showing the rest of the world how to do it right. Smart power grids, ecologically sound roads and bridges, refined wireless communication and power transmission... we could be at the vanguard of it all. But what did we vote for instead? A President who won the election on promises of re-opening coal mines, expanding oil fields and pipelines, and fracking the hell out of everything. Basically, running the country like a business, the inevitable outcome of capitalism run amok.

Why did people fall for this world-ruining, backward-facing tactic? One of the many answers, I fear, is because of the phrase "it's what our family's done for generations". I'm sure that idea has nostalgic value, but the world is different now. We have to worry about everyone, not just ourselves. Just as every other country should be doing. We should be acting as one world. What we need now is a sustainable path toward the future, and even though it may contain more change than most people are comfortable with accepting, we were heading that direction with the Obama administration.

That was the first in a series of steps that would lead us toward what I see as the future: a world where, in terms of genetics, love has won. People no longer have children with people they're assigned to by class, or because of mere proximity and race, but because they love them. This will inevitably result there being no one majority race; everyone will have a varied and rich multitude of heritages, the world unified by an adaptable infrastructure that will last for generations. We'll work with nature instead of in defiance of it, powering our lives and innovations with light from the sun, the wind, and the earth itself, and take our water for drinking and agriculture right out of the air.

Make no mistake, that's where we're going. We'll get there eventually, if for no other reason that the isolationist, head-in-the-sand climate denial track we're backtracking down just isn't sustainable. At some point, we're going to have to start acting like the caretakers of the Earth, which is the mantle we have taken upon ourselves by our past actions. The only question is whether we're going to continue to put that delicate future in the hands of morons who will continue to look to the past (and their own personal interests) and hold us there as long as we can, perhaps until the climate itself makes it harder for us to survive, or whether we're going to trust in our collective intellect, pivot our way of life and ensure that "the way we've always done things" becomes "the way we're doing things from now on".

Whitelodge 12.3 & 12.4

-12.3-

Kelly knew what was happening. She had been watching for the warning signs for a while, ever since she had seen Dale not quite let his emotions flood through him when he realized that Glenda had died. It was his sense of duty that had gotten him back on the snowmobile after they had made the terrible discovery. She hadn't known the man long, but enough to know that this was his primary driving force. He had told everyone that he would get them down the mountain, and that was what he had focused on, not allowing his mind to fully accept what he had just lost.

Being around athletes as much as she had been in her life, she had seen the scenario played out many times, in many permutations. Everyone went through the traditional five stages -- denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance -- but she also knew that for each individual there were little epicycles of emotion contained within them. In the sports world it paid to know the various ways these could play out. Loss was utterly visceral out on the field, often accompanied by physical jolts of one kind or another, and there was often little time to react before you had to go back out and deliver a better performance. The paths through grief were varied and rapid. And right now, with her arms looped around Dale, she imagined she could feel everything he was going through. And the outlook wasn't good.

After the strange white-out and the realization that he might not be able to fulfill his primary directive of saving them all, she had felt the change in the muscles of his midriff. When he saw the Deertail Lodge come back into view after thinking they had finally left it behind, he had tensed in panic, but then relaxed. This humiliation, piled on top of loss -- and yes, she could tell that the security guard was taking his inability to deliver them all to safety as humiliation -- dealt him a second blow that closely matched the pain of the first. It was like a ball player who breaks their leg near the tail end of a clearly losing match... It seemed unnecessary and vindictive, even if there was no source to point blame toward.

Kelly hadn't started to get scared until she felt resolve flooding back into Dale's muscles. This kind of tension felt different from effort, and she recognized it quickly. It was the kind a batter who's been brushed back too many times and is about to storm the pitcher's mound gets, or the footballer who is about to double down on the behavior that has gotten her a yellow card *because* she has gotten a yellow card. With a sudden pickup in the snowmobile's speed, and the failure to change direction, she still didn't know exactly what Dale was intending, but she knew that any decision he made at that point would likely be impulsive and self-destructive.

Pain of this sort, more specifically internalized pain, was the only thing that would make a man like Dale forget about the others his decisions were going to affect. And so, with the treads of the snowmobile churning up the roof tiles, the whole vehicle feeling like it was going to shake itself to pieces, and the leading edge of the hotel roof approaching, she did the only thing she could. Kelly's arms, already wrapped around Dale a few inches above his utility belt, lifted. She turned her head, laying her ear and cheek flat against the broad expanse of his back.

Her left hand slid up his chest, to just over the place his heart must be, and lightly pressed there. Then she clenched her thighs around the seat of the snowmobile and forced herself to be conscious of Manoj's arms, which were in turn wrapped around her, savoring the warmth and reassurance of them. She hoped that Dale could feel that warmth as well, the warmth of all of them, passing through her and into his broken heart.

She waited. Seconds streamed past like the wind, and since she had no idea how much runway they had before the roof ended in empty air, there was nothing else for her to do but wait, and hope that it was enough. Please, Dale, she thought, hoping that he could somehow feel her thoughts, think of us. We all have homes to return to, like Glenda. We she have wanted her death to be the thing that doomed us all?

For a long moment, Dale's body did not change, as if he had turned into stone, bent on taking all six of them to oblivion. Then, beneath the palm of the hand she had placed on Dale's heart, Kelly felt him exhale, in one long, shuddering sigh of resignation, defeat and acceptance. Then she felt herself being pressed closer against his back, just as much because his muscles were loosening as that the snowmobile was beginning to slow.

Kelly heard a distant yelp from Sheryl, guessing that the sudden pressure she was feeling on her legs was unexpected. It didn't matter, because it wasn't until the combination vehicle had almost come to a stop that the sledge it was towing began to slew a little to the side. Then they were no longer moving.

The engine cut out, and a stunning silence descended. Kelly remained where she was, her hand over Dale's heart, her other arm around his waist, feeling the coiled tension in his muscles. She waited patiently, and the ultimate release finally came. She felt the big man start to curl around her palm, closing in himself like a flower being crushed. He hunched down over the handlebars, and Kelly continued to hold on. She knew the second part of what was coming. She had seen a smaller version of it so many times, in locker rooms and the quiet spaces of empty stadiums after everyone had left, the inevitable result that comes with the knowledge that a possible future, one that could have been so beautiful and triumphant, is now closed off forever.

She remained pressed close to Dale's back as his spine arched, his head tipped back, and he released a cry of anguish so visceral that tears squeezed out of the corners of Kelly's eyes. She could actually feel his release of energy, the way his very frame shook with his explosion of grief and regret. His voice tapered off into a long, pained whimper, and although she expected it to devolve into sobbing, it didn't. By the end, it seemed like he had nothing else to let loose. His body, deflated, lowered down over the handlebars again. She kept her hand pressed against his chest the whole time, wondering if maybe it was the pressure of her arms around him that had kept him from literally flying apart with sorrow.

Dale drew in a long, deep breath, replacing all that he had lost in his protracted cry. The rise-and-fall flow of it returned, and it wasn't until she felt it that Kelly was reassured that they were all not about to go over the edge. The man had given voice to his hurt, and now he could move forward. She opened her eyes, lifted her head, and took a look around.

They had come closer to the forward edge of the roof than she felt comfortable admitting; only about four feet of shingles remained in front of them before the drop-off. They were close to one of the front corners of the Lodge, marked by a small cupola, about the size of a large tool shed, a smaller version of the lobby facade that reared higher into the black sky a good two hundred feet away. They had come down the avalanche slope right onto the roof of the half-enveloped lodge, which must have looked to the bereaved driver of the snowmobile like a custom-made ski jump to nowhere.

She still didn't move, because Dale didn't either. She would stay there as long as he wanted her to, but so far there was no resistance, no subtle shrug that told her he didn't need her anymore. For a long time they just sat there, waiting for the last of it to pass.

-12.4-

He really would have done it. The solution was right in front of him, as clearly as if the avalanche had laid out a destined path, one that he only had to follow. And Dale had had every intention of doing just that, until he had been stopped by a hand.

On a very conscious level, he knew that the palm that had laid itself so gently across his aching heart was Kelly's. With that knowledge alone, it wouldn't have been enough to put the brakes on. With the wind increasing in his face, with the edge of the world coming on ever faster, his mind chose to conjure something decidedly unreal, but sharper and more real than anything else he had experienced that interminable, horrible night.

What if, his thoughts unspooled, that hand were Glenda's? He imagined that if she had ever placed her hand directly in the center of his chest, that's exactly what it would have felt like. He knew it wasn't hers, and understood that on every level, but his mind wouldn't quit imagining it as something else. It was some extension of her, telling him not to give up, to keep fighting even though she was no longer there to help and inspire him. It was this thought -- which he heard clearly in her voice, even though he knew it was really his own mind -- that convinced him to bring the snowmobile under control, and to finally let it stop.

Even then, it wasn't over. He still felt the urge to punch the throttle, to finish the job. It seemed preferable to a life of years stretching out before him without Glenda in them. All that time, every morning waking up and remembering what had happened. Could he really face that? This is what prompted his howl, all the rage of a beautiful life destroyed being thrown up into the indifferent sky.

And all the while, that pressure remained on his sternum, never changing. When he finally slumped forward, every last ounce of energy seemingly expended, it stayed there, a gentle reminder of how he was not alone. Not on this snow-covered roof, or in this crazy looping nighttime world. There were still others.

For the moment, at least, that was enough.

He straightened, pulled back his shoulders to their natural position. He felt his chest expand, cool air flow back into his depleted lungs. And still the hand remained. He took his hand -- the one formerly poised over the throttle -- and covered the hand with his own. He knew it wasn't Glenda's, and he knew that it wasn't going to be there forever, an eternal reminder of her, but for that moment, he allowed himself to believe that both those things were true. For the first time, he felt a twinge of relief that he had not sent them all plunging over the edge of the roof, to slam into the snow-covered garden that ran the length of the front of the lodge, far below.

He took another deep breath, patted Kelly's hand twice, and pulled it away from his chest. He focused on keeping the feeling of its pressure in place, though. He hoped it would last. "Thank you," he whispered, not knowing if Kelly heard him. She gave no overt sign that she had, but he did feel her arm on his waist squeezing him slightly before releasing its hold.

He heard Manoj's voice, unsteady. "How do we get down from here?"

Finally, a question Dale knew the answer to. Moving slowly enough to make sure that Kelly wasn't going to get kicked, Dale lifted himself up off the snowmobile and dismounted. "Over here," he said, and walked toward the cupola at the corner of the building. He stepped up the side of it that faced the rear of the building, and threw open a latch that was all but hidden in the multiple layers of woodwork that gave the structure an ornamental feel. The entire back wall of the cupola swung out, revealing it to be entirely hollow inside.

Kelly and Manoj followed, fascinated by the revelation. "What is this?" Manoj asked.

"Roof access. For repairs," Dale said, his throat scratched by the first words he had spoken since his desperate cry. "It was part of the original design, but it's been modified since then. We should be able to get everyone back down this way."

The young man continued, "And we... want to go back down?"

Dale paused from his survey of the cupola's interior. His back still turned to the couple, he muttered, "What other choice is there?"

He heard a sound that might have been Kelly swatting her boyfriend's sleeve, silently imploring him not to answer that question. It was okay; he knew enough about Manoj now to take his concern at face value. Of course he was going to look for alternatives; it was in his nature.

Dale continued to survey the inside of the small shed. It was still as he remembered from three years ago, when he had accompanied the maintenance crew in the pre-season inspection, just to see the mountain from a new vantage point. The long trapdoor in the floor seemed untwisted, just as the cupola's exterior was... the avalanche's damage didn't seem to have affected this forward corner of the building as much as elsewhere. He took just a moment to look out of the downslope window, silently cursing the devious mirage of the town that still hung there, glowing warmly far below. They had been so close to escaping...

He turned, walked right past the young couple hovering at the doorway and headed for the sledge. He threw a "Would you mind opening the trap, please?" over his shoulder to them as he steeled his nerves for picking Glenda's body up off the spot where she still lay reclined against the storage bags. Four expectant eyes -- Kerren and Sheryl -- looked up at him from their places next to her.

"We can get back inside through the trapdoor in there," he said simply.

Sheryl had sat up, no longer bracing her feet against the back of the snowmobile. "A trapdoor?" she asked. "How are we going to--"

"You'll see. It won't be too hard." Dale said, his voice tired beyond measure. He was looking down at Glenda, who lay as if sleeping. The light from the blind moon overhead, shining on the bits of unmelted snow that had settled on her face, gave some semblance of life to her skin, but Dale knew it was an illusion, like so much else in this new world.

The two women watched as he bent down to the desk clerk and peeled away the bags he had laid across her, sticky and heavy with blood. Underneath, he clothes were in the same blackened condition. It physically hurt to look at her, the obscene knife handle sticking out of her chest. He wanted to wrench it out, throw it over the edge of the roof (just as he had almost thrown all these people off), but couldn't. He couldn't shake the feeling that to do so would hurt her, and he couldn't bear to take even that small a part in the terrible act that had destroyed her.

He picked her up, supporting her shoulders and knees, never taking his eyes off her face as he hoisted her tenderly. Without watching his feet at all, he carried her steadily across the slightly-angled roof to the cupola. Kelly and Manoj were just finishing his struggle with the oversized trapdoor, swinging it up to release a draft of significantly-warmer air out of the five-by-ten gap they had just created in the cupola's floor.

Underneath, a shallow set of wooden stairs led down into darkness, and alongside it was an equally shallow-graded ramp, really just an extra-wide, flat rail, built of apparently the same wood as everything else. It had been designed for equipment to be slid up or down as maintenance workers went up and down the stairs. Dale walked around to the far side of the trapdoor, past Manoj and Kelly where they stood solemnly, and reached the top of the stairs. He only looked away from Glenda's cool, relaxed face long enough to watch his foot take the first step, and then he began to descend, carrying her as, in a different universe, he might have carried her over a threshold, making sure that her head and feet cleared the sides of the roof. They disappeared together down into the dark.

Weapon of Choice / Cowardly, Lyin'

-Weapon of Choice-

The more time that goes by, the more clear it is that people feel the need to *do* *something*. Whether it's protesting in the streets below Trump Tower, or wearing a safety pin, or repeatedly calling their Congressmen to get them to oppose whatever new ridiculousness is being foisted on us, everyone has an opinion on what we should *do* *now*.

Believe me, I'm in the same boat. There are so many forms of protest that it's hard to know where to start. Especially when, as soon as one form starts to gain some solidarity behind it, a backlash comes through that says that it's a nice gesture but it's not enough, or here's proof that such-and-such a method is really ineffective, so why bother?

As I've sifted through the different possible methods to voice my distaste at the sense of legitimacy and empowerment that racist and xenophobic groups have suddenly decided they have, and the general ludicrousness of a President that has only a tenuous grasp of what power a President actually has, I've had to take a look at the way I am currently living my life.

The truth of it is that there are responsibilities I have in my life that I just can't shirk while railing against tyranny and hatred. My resources are limited: I don't have much money to donate, or much time to volunteer. So, I have to ask myself, what is it that I *do* have? What can I contribute in a way that is even the slightest way unique? The answer, when I framed it to myself in such a way, came quickly. I've got *words*, dammit. *Words*.

Now, go ahead. Say that it isn't enough, that quiet, rational contemplation never got a country anywhere. Action, not words, etc.... But if the last week has proven anything to me, it's that there's always going to be someone telling you that what you're doing isn't enough, or that you're doing it the wrong way. If that's going to be the case, why not do it in the way that feels most right to you, and that plays to your strengths?

I actually started writing essay pieces several years ago, while I was unemployed. They ranged from science to pop culture, autobiographical to philosophical to political. Compared to my fiction, they were some of the most widely viewed and disseminated things I've done. They're still viewable right on this very blog, because I've never felt the need to publish them (plus, to be honest, I now look at them as a little too navelly-gazey for me to not be a little embarrassed by most of them).

My point is that I've been unconsciously preparing myself for this for a while now. And this is all stuff that I've got to get out one way or another, because if I don't it's going to coil itself into a small, searing ball directly under my sternum that's going to distract me from actually living my life.

So I'm going to do what, ideally, we all should do... find an avenue that is the thing that you individually can do best, and use it to battle the injustices you find. Because they're going to be coming fast and furious over the next few years, friends.

I have a caveat to this declaration, though, and it's that I'm not going to stop my fiction. I've come too far in my current novel to set it aside, and an argument can be made that art is going to be very important in the coming years. So here's the deal. Some Fridays you'll get some new chapters about the progressively weirder goings-on at the Whitetail lodge on this blog, and some weeks you're going to get an earful of my take on what's happening in this post-truth, post-Obama world. Sometimes you'll get both. Read all of it, some of it, or none of it. I'm going to write it anyway. It's not all I'm going to do, either. Reading and thinking is never *all* you should do. But this place, right here, is where I'm going to make my primary stand, with the weapon that feels strongest in my grip.

-Cowardly, Lyin'-

The most disturbing trend I'm seeing today -- one among many -- is the validation of white supremacist groups. I'm not saying that they're abnormally on the increase -- they've always been around, and always grow if they're given visibility -- but they have a platform now: a President who at best will not denounce them, and at worst will sees no problems in loading his Cabinet and staff with their members.

The leading edge of this group's ideology is that there is something inherently superior about being from Western European ancestry. They claim that it is their genetic destiny to monopolize the world's somehow-finite stockpile of adventurers and thinkers and inventors, and that subjugation of others is an inevitable by-product. This is, of course, bullshit. In reality, this mentality is an excuse and avoidance of the fact that White people aren't better than other races, they're just historically better at being exploitive, aggressive assholes, the bully in the playground that makes it impossible for anyone to relax or thrive.

So here's what I have to say to white supremacist groups: The world is more diverse and complex than just your little corner of it. I know, it's comforting to surround yourself with those who look and think just like you. It's certainly the easy way out, and it was an simpler goal in the past. However, the world is connected now and that's a one-way street. Those of us in urban areas have a better understanding of this. We know that cultures can be peacefully integrated and mutually benefit from it. It happens all the time.

You know those trouble spots that you're thinking of, the gang-riddled, lawless zones which you're convinced every city is? It's because white people have engineered them as places where inequality is the norm, where people have been hemmed in and oppressed by lack of education, lack of opportunity, and lack of support.

I can see where your isolated little worldview makes you think the opposite. In your narrow sight, America is dying. Crime is rampant, morality is out the window, most people are leeches sucking off the system set up by the divine right of the Caucasian race. But here's the reality that you need to lift up your head and see: The world is a more peaceful place than it has been in the recorded history of humanity. Inequity and poverty has always been a problem, it's just that until now it hasn't been *your* problem . Funny how you suddenly feel the need to solve your race's conflicts with others, now that you're not twenty points in the lead anymore.

And let's get that straight. As hard as you try to play it this way, you're not the victim. White people are still in the lead. Through no effort on your part, you lucky Straight White Male you, your particular genetics have allowed you to start out with a significant statistical lead. The idea that there's any other ethnic or sexual group even growing *close* to you in influence is frightening, because suddenly you might have to admit that you're not the center of the Universe after all. And in my opinion, that's one of mankind's biggest problems in general. It always has been.

Once you cross that psychological hurdle, you just might realize that your statements about how races can never really get along is just your own hatred, projected on everyone else.

Some of you are making it easy for the rest of us, by trying to backtrack the world into its violent past in your comfortable old symbols and costumes. But be aware that you are being watched. Even if you're not wrapped in a Confederate flag or you've taken off your white hoods, we recognize who you are. You will not win. Time and numbers are against you. Take your victory lap while it lasts, and then make way.

But bear this in mind: your new visibility makes it harder for you to hide. There have been a lot of disgusting verbal and physical attacks, and defacings since the election, but the most common thread running through them is that afterward, you seem to feel some kind of relief, even going as far to say, "Finally, we can say these things out loud again!" So let me understand this... you apparently have been in torment, holding back your venom lo these eight more-tolerant years, but why? Was it because you thought you were in the minority? Well, you still are. Because of who the President was? Well, then that just makes you a coward. Just watch the rest of us *not* hold our opinions back during this next administration, regardless of who the official leader of our country is. And let that demonstrate to you how weak you truly are. The only thing you have to contribute is temporary obstacles, driven by your own fear. Well, there's one comforting thing about being paranoid: No one will ever be able to prove you wrong.

Whitelodge 12.1 & 12.2

-12.1-

Now that Sheryl had switched places with Kelly, she could appreciate how hard it was to be the buffer between the snowmobile and the sledge. She had to recline between Kerren and Glenda (trying hard to drive from her mind the thought that one of the women was deceased), and brace her feet against the back of the snowmobile, right below where Manoj sat.

When she had been up on that seat herself, there hadn't felt like there were much change in the hybrid vehicle's downward velocity. Now, with nothing but her body making sure that the two pieces didn't collide with the slightest fluctuation in speed, it was getting harder. It was taking most of her strength and concentration to keep everything steady.

She decided to take a chance and throw a look back over her shoulder toward Kerren. The sight of her wife's face was pretty much the only thing that was keeping Sheryl going; it was the reason she had asked Kelly to trade places with her, so the two of them could be closer. When she looked back (which was as much a matter of tipping her head back as turning it to the side), the expression of incredulity on that lovely face was enough to get her to look down the mountain.

It was surprising how quickly she determined what she was looking at, what they were heading for. She had experienced that strange period of whiteness just as it seemed everyone else had, and it had so disoriented her that she wasn't particularly surprised to see the Deertail Lodge on the slope below them. It felt natural to her somehow, although she wasn't even close to being clear whether it had been relocated, or they had.

Regardless, it was there, and growing larger in Sheryl's view. It was kind of hard to see, because she was almost lying down on the sledge, and so close to the rear of the snowmobile that the vehicle obscured most of her field of vision. Before this catastrophe had occurred, she he had to admit that she had been nervous enough about hitting the ski slope the next morning that she had already imagined/dreaded seeing the building from the upslope side. It might be because of this that she recognized it so easily.

Sheryl braced her legs, sure that Dale was going to slow down so that they could at least reevaluate their journey. Were they going to go around its half-buried bulk and try again, or stop and go back inside? Was it just a fluke that they had looped back around above the Lodge, or would it happen every time they tried to get down to the town? She tried to shut her mind away from that thought; it brought up too many other thoughts, not the least of which was that it would mean that their imprisonment -- and maybe the avalanche itself -- had some kind of design to it. Once you opened that door, the question of a designer came up, and then things got *really* terrifying.

She realized that the change in pressure against her feet, which would happen every time the snowmobile slowed and the sledge started to catch up with it, wasn't happening yet. If anything, she felt as if the snowmobile were pulling away from her... which would mean that Dale was speeding up. Why would that be happening? She could chalk it up to his impatience, except for the fact that they were still heading toward the building. Not toward the center, between the two wings, but if they kept on this heading, they weren't going to avoid it.

Panic started to creep in around the edges of Sheryl's mind. What was Dale doing? She started to tap the heel of her boot against the back panel of the snowmobile to get the attention of someone of the vehicle, but got no reaction. She kicked a little harder, and then even harder. Soon she was drumming both feet against the smooth surface with as much force as she could, the continuing acceleration of the snowmobile making it difficult to make a truly loud noise, as the sledge kept trying to pull back from it.

She even tried to lift her foot enough to nudge Manoj's butt with it, but couldn't get her leg up that far without first gaining solid purchase on the sledge, which she just didn't have. There was nowhere to sit but the edges of the storage bags that had been laid over Glenda to keep the blowing snow away from her, and they slid around dangerously every time Sheryl tried to move her legs too much.

The building continued to draw closer, and their vantage point became higher as they rode the gradual rise of the snow that piled there during avalanche. Sheryl began to panic; she was becoming more and more convinced that Dale was not going to stop. They were going to ride up onto the roof and... then what?

From here, she couldn't see much of the roof, nor could she tell how flat it was. Could it be that he was waiting to slow to a stop until they were on some clear patch of roof? It would be easier than skidding to a stop on snow, but then shouldn't he at least be not accelerating?

Sheryl threw her head back to look at Kerren again, completely at a loss for what to do. She realized how much she was like Kerren, nearly immobile and unable to affect what was going on around her. Panic began to rise to the back of her throat when she saw the expression on her wife's face; clearly, she was thinking the same thing Sheryl was. This was all wrong.

Sheryl tried to call back to her "It's okay!" and then went back to kicking the back of the snowmobile, digging in with her boot heels. She watched the panel buckle under the force, twisting the moonlight and shaping it into crazy arcs. She threw out her arms and tried to grab the edges of the sled, giving herself as much purchase as she could. She could only reach one of them, on Kerren's side, although it might have been that she felt weird about reaching across Glenda's body to grip the farther side.

She started yelling, trying to get someone's attention. As far as she could tell, no one on the snowmobile had changed position... did they know what was going on? Whatever Dale's plan could be, was it possible that they were going along with it? That was the only thing her mind had to cling to now; that there was something in front of them that she couldn't see, something that made sense for them to speed onto the Lodge's roof.

She kept kicking, kept yelling, although when she felt the transition of the snowmobile's skis and treads go from churning through snow to grinding across roof shingles, she closed her eyes.

-12.2-

Bruce looked at the spot Theda had disappeared from, acutely aware that this time he was not asleep. It wasn't all that different experience, he found; things that before had been kind of hazy and wavery were just in sharper focus. Colors were sharper, and there was a vital sense of place that had been lacking before. Of course, when he had visited this place in dreams he had been waiting for her, eager to hear the ideas she would always impart to him. But now that she had left, he had nothing to do but analyze his surroundings more closely, and strive to figure out how to get back.

He found himself turning around and around inside the circle of Sounding Stones, trying to determine which direction was most likely to provide escape. The first gap he tried was the one Theda had been standing at, opposite her usual direction of approach from the nearby forest. But when he stepped into the space between the stone columns, he felt the same invisible backward pressure he always had, the one that kept him from moving between the stones.

He turned around one more time, facing back toward the forest. Was there some coded message in her coming to him from the other direction? He walked across the circle, approaching her usual spot, and stopped. Yes, the world was different here somehow. He just had to figure out what it was. He stood there for a few moments, looking back and forth between the opposing directions, and literally felt the answer lock into place inside his head.

Before, on those nights he had come and there had been no Theda, he had noted that his dreamworld had been shrinking. And it still was; in the nights that had passed since he had last been here, the horizon had gotten appreciably closer... but only in the direction he had just seen her in. When he looked instead at the forest, he could see that it was just as it had always been. If anything, it had grown more lush with foliage. Perhaps that was why Theda had forced him to turn around the other way -- she wanted him to notice this.

He drew close to the two Sounding Stones that he was accustomed to seeing Theda between. Before he got too close, he noticed the change. There was an openness that hadn't been here before, a lack of pressure that allowed him to feel, probably for the first time, what the air was like outside the deceptively open-appearing circle. He passed between the stones with no resistance.

He took a deep breath, only now realizing how rich and oxygenated the air was, compared to inside the circle. It was like being relieved of an asthma attack he didn't even know he was having. The air outside was so deliciously dense, and he realized that if had been wearing flowing robes, they very well might be doing that underwater-floating thing that he always noticed Theda's doing. He turned his bare feet -- luxuriating in the feel of the velvety soil on his soles -- onto the path she had always come down on those imaginatively fertile nights.

The forest ahead was singing. He could hear it calling to him, and as he drew closer he could see more of those faint, lazily whirling lights in its interior. They beckoned him forward, drifting along branches, jumping the span between closely-packed trunks, as if the tiny lights were searching for something, or carrying important messages. Bruce couldn't deny that they seemed to have a sense of purpose. And through it all, a low hum permeated the thickened air, voices in thousands of languages that seemed to have no real source. The only thing they had in common was their shared sense of eagerness. They had something to say, these voices, and took great delight in speaking it, even if those voices were heard by no one in particular.

He passed into the vague shadow of the trees, his feet crossing the boundary between the forest and the rest of the dreamworld. The air inside was cooler, but thrummed with energy. The voices grew in volume, replacing the sound of brushing leaves and creaking branches that he would have expected if he had been in an earthly place. His breath caught as he heard a fragment of phrase in English. At least he thought it was English; the accent was unlike any he'd ever heard, although at times it came close to complete recognition.

It was hard to parse out every word over the general low-level cacophony, but every now and then there were words he recognized, mostly because they were unique and linked by a common thread. He first heard "hurly-burly", then "Dunsinane" and "Birnam wood". Bruce stood, swiveling his head from one side to the other, trying to triangulate where these particular words were coming from. With each recognition, he took a few steps toward where they seemed to originate. Eventually, he could hear entire lines from the tale he was so familiar with: "Show his eyes, and grieve his heart; Come like shadows, so depart!"

Somewhere, Shakespeare's Macbeth was being recited, the first scene where the future king encounters three witches that prophesy his future. The play had always been one of Bruce's favorites, in his mind the perfect literary encapsulation of man's unending drive for power, and how it inevitably causes his downfall. The words themselves seemed to be emanating from the yards-thick tree in front of him. How was this possible? And were all the other voices surrounding him also coming from the millions of trees? This particular one did seem to be sturdier that the others, Its bark dark and thickly grooved. It had seen many years of healthy growth, and even its lower branches overhead were heartier than the trunks of many of those around it. As an organism, it was unutterably beautiful.

For the briefest of instants, Bruce caught a flash of the memory he had experienced earlier, when he had seen one of his invented characters apparently conjured out of thin air near an unusually effective movie premiere. He had that same electric feeling now, that he was seeing a story spontaneously made into something alive. Then, it had been a person; now, it was a tree. But the similarity was undeniable...

A realization hit him with almost physical force. He was standing in a forest that was also what he, for lack of a better name, had been calling the AllStory. Since the night of that premiere, he had tried to find out more about this unusual concept. The awareness of it had been around long before Bruce came to learn of it, but had been hidden well, its secret details discussed and discreetly passed along only by a select few. Over the years he had found tangential bits of it, and felt he knew a little of its nature, if not its true name.

The secret, he learned, was this: stories, in their own way, are alive. And not in the sense that they live in our hearts and minds. No, that night in the alley had been his first glimpse into the possibility that when stories are loved, when they are felt in human hearts and turned around and around in human minds, as they are told and retold over years, that process of imagination weaves some kind of alchemy that begins to shape and bend reality.

At first, his mind rebelled against the concept. But the more he pulled at the thread, finding tiny mentions of it in secret literary circles by authors who had similar inklings of the nature of thing, it began to make more sense. He began to think of all the characters he had read about, and how the best ones had become ingrained in him, a part of his soul. These experiences formed some of the deepest human connections he had ever known. And now he was aware that there were many others who had read those same books and conjured those same people out of their own thoughts... the same words forming a common neural path in the vast network of human minds, ones that were continually reinforced, by the exact same words, the exact same conveyance of thought. Couldn't the argument be made that a character like Lady Macbeth, or Huckleberry Finn, or Gilgamesh, was more fully realized, more shared, more *real*, than just about anyone else in the history of the world?

The hardest part to accept in all this -- that the world of humanity was the jumping-off points for countless other worlds, ones that had started out imaginary but had evolved into their own little universes, where heroes and villains lived and breathed, where anything from fantastic epics to tiny scraps of fancy had a chance of being made flesh, tangentially weaving themselves into the tapestry of reality?

Bruce was now faced with the idea that what he had been chasing all these years was real. All of it. The author wondered what all these other trees clustered around Macbeth were. Where had they come from, what language emanated from their cores, how were they affected by the stories whose branches and roots entwined with theirs? And, his sharper-than-average ego spoke from the back of his head, where were *his* trees? What worlds had he dreamed, that now grew in this impossibly fertile place?

He was starting to run through the forest, his bare feet pounding through the lush underbrush. His mind had suddenly become ravenous to see more of this forest, to try in some meager way to grasp its breadth and its inner connections. He sprinted through lush, green chapels formed by arching trunks, whispering voices urging him on, deeper into the heart of the story-forest, faster and faster, until it seemed to be rushing toward him more quickly than he was moving toward it, denser and darker and denser and darker...

11/9: Today, I Disbelieve

Okay, I'm out of panic mode. So let me put some words down and see what I really feel about this abrupt right turn the country has made. Actually, the more I contemplate it, my biggest shock is that it isn't really all that abrupt. On 11/9, having my hopes dashed over the course of the previous evening in a way that I can't ever remember experiencing, I rose to face a morning where it seemed that everything I thought the country stood for had been flipped on its head.

As I thought about it, and the more I read the shock, awe, and disgust that my friends were rightly venting on Facebook, my mind eventually turned toward trying to figure out *how* this happened. My assumption was that there was something I must have missed. And I think it was the same thing that all the polls and talking heads that I paid attention to all year had been missing. There really was a "silent majority", and they made their voice collectively heard that Tuesday night.

Who are they? I began to wonder. To figure it out, I first threw away all the studies that I had read about how Trump supporters are high-income whites, or non-college educated white males, or whatever. Because the sources telling me that were the exact same ones that also had Hillary winning from anything to a 3-point lead to a landslide.

Let's start with this question: are over half the American population racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ maniacs that will swallow any populist lie they're told? The answer, of course, has to be no. There's no way this country could exist in the form it does if that were true. Even further than that, I don't even think it's possible that they're all so ambivalent that they're okay with supporting a candidate who is. Because there are tons of non-election-related surveys over the span of the past ten years that say that the country is gradually but steadily leaning *away* from those things.

So why did they do it? The answer, even though I was too stunned to see it at the time, lay in the election analysis maps that they kept referring to during the televised coverage. It was repeated in state after state... blue cities, with red in between. I remember seeing the same thing in previous elections, although it had been less pronounced. This time, however, I started stitching it together with a couple other things I had been thinking about...

My parents both grew up in a small town in Ohio. It was a thriving community back then, a company town that had been built up around a local manufacturing plant for a major industrial supplier. Two of my four grandparents worked for it, and a third was in an ancillary development company. But the plant closed in the late 80s. The town is still there, and several of my relatives still live in the area, but what does a town do when its major economic driving force is gone, and it's basically in the middle of nowhere, thirty miles from a major interstate? Honestly, there's not a lot it can.

That's why the people who live there now can't see themselves included in the years of Obama progress. It simply didn't affect them, and the situation gets worse as income, industry, and young people slowly bleed away to the big cities. When you live in a situation like that year after year, without a clear solution in sight, I imagine that you'll be willing to put up with an offensive blowhard *if* he tells you that he can fix it, if he tells you that your situation is not your fault (and on that point, if not much else, he's right). He says that it's the fault of the immigrants that are simultaneously a drain on the economy and also "taking" good jobs, religions you have never come into close contact with, evil corporations that are moving overseas, welfare moochers, etc. It must sound particularly good if the alternative is four more years of the same.

In no way here am I sticking up for Trump, or endorsing him. Honestly, it's like someone asked me to fill out a questionnaire about what I find most odious about humanity, and then turned it into human form. But what I'm trying to figure out is *why* a generally rational person -- which, like I said, we have to assume most of his supporters are -- would act like they've lost their damn mind and actually vote for him.

It struck me, when network news started describing who was voting for Trump on that fateful night, that I was kind of hearing myself being described. "These are people who are struggling," they said. "They live paycheck to paycheck, and any increases in their salary are not enough to match the increase in the cost of living. Gains in the economy aren't applying to them, and the feel that they're being left behind." Wow. That's me. My wife and I work one-and-a-two-thirds full time jobs, raise our child, live in surprisingly affordable housing considering on its location, and yet we worry about paying the bills. We don't live beyond our means, and in general we have what we need to get by without a ton of hardship, but we're well below the country's median income. I went ahead and tallied it up, and was surprise to find that my personal yearly income over the past six years has increased by a shade over 6%. Now, this figure spans three different companies, two of which I was laid off from due to their financial difficulty, so I have to say the recession paid a large part in this. But still, there was a time when a 3% yearly increase was considered the standard, enough to cover the general cost-of-living increases and the usual rise in health care costs. This isn't to complain, I'm just saying that I think that, while we're living on the fringe of an affluent, major metropolitan area, we're still just one layoff, accident, or mechanical breakdown from seriously losing our hold on things.

I know we're not alone. Many of our friends, I'm sure, are in the same boat as we are. It's kind of the reality of American living these days. While the economy was recovering, we accepted this, but should we anymore? Why aren't we one of the 49-whatever-% that voted to be led by a disgusting, misogynist bully? I'm starting to form an answer for that.

The Obama years have brought many things back to the country since it was handed to him on the brink of collapse, and I will always commend him and his team for stopping that from happening. We took serious damage, but in general it was a huge nation-killing bullet that he helped us dodge. But you know what I admired most about him as a President? It was the social change that he fostered. By the time he leaves his office, he will have significantly advanced women's rights, provided a safer national environment to fight racism, rape culture and homophobia, and in general made America more inclusive for everyone. For me, economic growth has taken a backseat in the last few years as I've seen gay marriage legalized across the board, grassroots anti-racism movements gain momentum, and women's roles in government and business escalate. These are the main advances I don't want to see go away under a Trump presidency. One thing I am sure of here is that I will do whatever I can to prevent rights being rolled back for anyone who's gained ground in these comeback years.

So that's my main personal agenda: continued social progress. I am positive that we can't help but prosper economically when over half the population (women and traditional minorities) aren't hamstrung and limited in how much they can contribute to the country. All the boats will rise, I say. But I say this with full awareness that, despite everything, I have the financial luxury to make it my priority.

So why was this such a rope-a-dope to most, if not all, of us Hillary supporters? I have to take a look at where I chose to go for my reassurance. Yes, I was one of those people who would open Nate Silver's 538Election website in the morning and periodically refresh it all day. It would dictate my moods, watching the red and blue squiggles thrillingly diverge and converge. And why shouldn't I have believed it? I chose that particular source because its founding principle was utter impartiality -- Mr. Silver's goal has always been to find the truth behind the numbers, utterly devoid of the urge to craft a story arc out of them. I found it refreshing, based on the skewed journalism I saw everywhere else, and in his goal he very well might have succeeded. He wasn't doing the polling himself, which was where the flaws entered the equation.

But I digress. What were my other sources? Well, they mostly came to Facebook in the guise of major metropolitan news sites and pitches from celebrities. I didn't piece it together until it was too late that all these sources originated in -- aha! -- big cities. It truly did seem like there was a tidal wave of Hillary support, but what I didn't consider was the online persona I had unwittingly crafted for myself. You see, as the tide of Trump support began to rise, I began to obsess when I saw one of my friends post something pro-Trump, gun-positive, or anti-Muslim. In my head, I would try to craft the perfect counter argument regardless of how much thought (or lack thereof) they put into their post or share. It would dominate my day and would never amount to anything I deemed worthy to respond with, so eventually I found it was just mentally less taxing to unfriend or block them.

But I see now what I was doing there. I was drawing up my bridges, creating a protective barrier of like-minded folks around me. And while it has been a source of great feelings of support and solidarity for me, it totally cut me off from what was happening in the rest of the country. (By the way, I don't see this practice changing. I won't voluntarily put up with hate speech in any form.) So while the Republican forces were marshaling, I was blissfully unaware, looking forward to another four years of prosperity without realizing that my family was only marginally profiting from it all. It was the same trap that our major news institutions and everyone else who had a real voice in the media fell into.

So what do we do now? Well, for one thing, we have to be even more vigilant than before to keep social progress from backsliding. What we Democrats all focused on was the support Trump had from racist and anti-immigrant groups, and this was well-founded. They're the scariest, most vocal and self-delusional minority in his base, and that's what we've trained ourselves to pay attention to. But they support him for a different reason than most do. Eradicating hate is not the only thing we need to do. But he sad truth is that we misled ourselves. We've ignored the bigger picture, which is that there is a vast segment of the country for whom the current system is just not working for, and hasn't been for a long time.

And so I come to a truth that keeps getting demonstrated to me... and I hate it because it goes against everything I was taught as a child. Even so, I'm forced to admit that it must be true: If you see something as a black-and-white conflict between good and evil, you're not looking closely enough. The problem is always more complex and harder to fix.

(Note: As I was working on this, I noticed that there were other people around the Internet that were seeming to come to the same conclusion. While this reassures me that my thinking may be on the right track, they often say it much more clearly and with better jokes than I ever could. Case in point, David Wong's recent article for Cracked that he wrote *a* *month* *ago*: http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about/.)

Whitelodge 11.5 & 11.6

-11.5-

Harmon proceeded cautiously, even though he had no idea what he was on the lookout for. He knew there was something in the Lodge, something that did not belong there -- or in the same universe, for that matter -- as he. The lobby, which had once been so familiar, had utterly changed in his absence. Now it held the unnatural hush that a haunted cathedral might have. All the life had been removed from it, as if a museum replica of the room had replaced what used to stand on this spot. He could only hope that his little sanctum under the stairs was as he had left it.

He moved unhurried, still leaning heavily against his makeshift crutch as he crossed the floor. By now he was used to the particular brand of pain that erupted from his broken ankle every time he moved it. Still, he went out of his way not to make any extraneous noise, skirting the bloodstains on the floor by a wide margin, still puzzling over what kind of tragedy they could be spelling out. The closer he got to them, he became sure that they didn't quite connect among the confusion of tracks, pools, and smears at the base of the stairway. Whatever had happened, the injured parties weren't there now, and thus Harmon was able to absolve himself from concern without much guilt.

After the blood, he had to weave through the scattering of women's clothing on the floor. He assumed this was the result of someone trying to outfit themselves (and maybe a few others) before going outside. He finally approached the door to his apartment -- and although it was little more than a well-equipped closet, he thought of it in more elegant terms -- and adjusted his balance before reaching for the doorknob.

He opened the door, and paused. The little light he had on the dresser was on, and had been moved. There was a staggered line of his paperbacks fanned across the floor. And most notably, there was someone lying on his cot. Harmon waited until he saw that the figure's chest was moving up and down in shallow, sleeping breaths. He stepped into the room, and closed the door.

Once his eyes adjusted to the yellowish, battery-powered LED light, Harmon was quite shocked at his new roommate's appearance. The man had clearly been through a lot, his face bloodied and burned until he was almost unrecognizable. Despite this, Harmon did recognize him; there wasn't anyone working in the hotel that he didn't know, even if their name didn't immediately come to mind. This was one of them, a familiar face from the kitchen that he had never been officially introduced to.

Harmon would have squatted down next to the man on the cot if he had been able, but at the moment all he could manage was to stand over him and look down, studying the man's battered face as he slept. He held some kind of metal piece close to his chest, and it took Harmon a moment to figure out that it was the metal logo of the Deertail that used to hang over the fireplace in the restaurant. Whatever the reason, the man was holding it like a security blanket.

"Hey," Harmon said, intending to make a more assertive sound than the tired croak that came from his throat. The man on the cot didn't move. Harmon tried nudging his leg with the shaft of the ski pole. "Hey," he repeated.

The man on the cot stirred, and just as Harmon thought he had fallen back asleep, his eyes flew wide, surprised to find someone in the tiny room with him.

"Don't worry," Harmon said, raising his hands. "It's just me. I know you from the kitchen, don't I?"

The man on the cot twitched a little, eventually making a motion that Harmon recognized as a nod. He wondered if the man was leaving dried blood and bits of charred skin on his pillow.

"Looks like you've been through hell, buddy," Harmon said. "I'm glad you found my room. Comfy, isn't it?"

No response this time, just a continued wide-eyed stare.

"I've had a rough time myself," Harmon said, looking around for a place to sit although he knew there wasn't one. Honestly, he'd never needed one before. "Don't suppose you could make some room?"

The burned man, an apologetic look clear on his face, immediately started trying to sit up, then realized he couldn't and rolled on his side, lowering his feet limply to the floor.

"No, no," Harmon said when he saw the man's difficulty. "Don't worry about it. I think you probably need the rest more than I do." This didn't deter the man's efforts, however. He kept trying to sit up, and Harmon was unable to bend down and physically stop him, so he gave up and let room be made for him. Through the maneuver, he kept a close eye on the metal emblem, trying to decide if it was being clutched so tightly because the man didn't want to let go of it, or if he physically couldn't. By the time there was space for Harmon to sit, he still hadn't decided.

"Well, thank you," he said, making sincere eye contact with the wounded man before he turned around and tried to lower himself down. Grimacing, he propped himself against the wobbling ski pole and tried to seat himself on the cot as tenderly as he could. By the time he had to give his trajectory over to gravity, he had realized that there was no way to do it without more pain than he'd experienced so far on his entire trip. He gritted his teeth and let the pain have its way with him until he was sitting next to the man on the cot.

"Whew," Harmon said finally. He turned to the man, tried not to be shocked by how much more horrifying his injuries looked close up. "I apologize," he said, "but I'm having a devil of a time trying to recall your name." The disappointment in the man's inability to communicate was obvious and painful to see.

The man, intense sadness in his eyes, seemed to be trying to form words with his lips, but they quivered and couldn't quite coordinate themselves to do it. After a few moments Harmon shushed him gently and said, "That's all right. It will come to me."

For a while, the two elderly men sat side by side in the quiet room, sharing a moment with their individual injuries and shared predicament. In that short interval, Harmon made a decision. It was one that never would have crossed his mind before this night, or even before he had gone out into the snow, trying to outrun an avalanche like a damned newbie.

This time, he didn't ask for permission. Harmon closed his eyes and reached out in that way he had with Kerren, but this time into the mind of the man sitting next to him. As he had wandered through the filigreed light of that woman's mind, he had been moved to tears by its beauty. It was like a nearly endless labyrinth made of soaring, living crystal cathedrals. But now, he immediately entered a place that was horribly corrupted. The inside of this man's mind was similar to Kerren's, but its lofty architecture had suffered a horrible attack, some awful cerebral approximation of the London Blitz.

Many parts of his mind had gone dark. Whole planet-sized areas of it had been cracked apart and stained pitch black. Elsewhere, jagged cracks were the origin of bleeding areas that coated other vast sections in crimson viscosity. But Harmon kept looking for intimations of life somewhere else; he could sense its direction by the way the dark parts were lit from behind, or from the side. It was like trying to divine the sun's position using only stray beams that punched through the cloud cover. He kept moving, and found his way to the core.

The man's name was Benny -- as soon as Harmon heard the name, he realized that he had once known was it was, but had forgotten. There was a little startled activity as he realized that Harmon was present, but calmed down quickly as the two realized how kindred their spirits were. They were two men, old enough to feel themselves past usefulness to the world in general, who had found a new place to belong, high up in the rarified air of Deertail Mountain. This was what Harmon could glean from the glittering, sputtering part of Benny's mind that was still functioning like it always had.

After this era of mutual understanding, Harmon began to ingest all the information that Benny had from what was currently happening, and in turn he shared with Benny his own experience. They found even deeper kinship there; both had sustained horrible injuries, and had fought hard to persevere despite them. It was when Benny started to unweave his thoughts about the Qoloni that true horror began to dawn on Harmon. Of course he remembered the creature, although it had been several years since he had read the book, one of the long list of things he mostly forgotten about. With Benny's sensory impressions of it, though, Harmon recalled the visceral thrill he had experienced then.

Reading about something terrifying and actually coming face-to-face with it were two entirely different things, however. As he thumbed through Benny's catalog of mental images from when he had been attacked by the thing, seeing how Harmon's own little sanctuary had almost been invaded by the thing, he felt despair beginning to creep in around the edges of his own disembodied mind.

Together, they began to attempt piecing together how something from a book could possibly find its way into their real world. It must have had something to do with the author's presence. If Bruce Casey were here, was it possible that he had brought the thing with it? Was it some kind of real, haunting presence that had dogged him for years -- since the book had been published back in the heady year of 1991 -- and had followed him here?

They worked together, their intellects cranking in a sort of tandem that would have been impossible in the outer world, even if they had been fully able to articulate their thoughts to each other. Inside, thoughts took on almost physical forms, intricate shapes of light and chemicals that could be understood more intuitively than any perfect string of words or line of prose. They tried to recreate their idea of the novel together; it was harder for Harmon, because he had read it much longer ago than Benny, but found that different parts of it had made impressions on each of them.

For example, Benny seemed to recall Princess Ynarra's initial exploration of Cheval Castle's dungeons more clearly due to his childhood fear of his grandparents' basement. He brought the memory forward for Harmon, who could viscerally taste the terror in the child's throat. For his part, Harmon had formed such a clear picture of the initial ceremony where the Prince of Cheval greets his suitors at a grand ceremonial dinner. Harmon read that part right after he had recovered from a bad stomach flu, and there was still a good two hours before the lodge's restaurant would open. He was ravenous, and Bruce's purple prose as he outlined the menu of the banquet had set Harmon's stomach growling in the most enjoyable way.

Eventually, they had painted a mutual picture of the story, the way the initial beauty of Ynarra's experiences at Cheval were eventually stripped away, revealing the frightening skeleton of intrigue and dark magic underneath it. They had sculpted the shape of the tale inside Benny's mind, and could turn it this way and that, examining it from all sides. It was a strange way to look at a tale, but it made sense in the way that a vision of beauty in a dream does. And when they turned it just the right way, they saw what they were looking for, the reason they had been collaborating to reconstruct it in the first place, although neither had known it.

It was there, inevitably woven into the very fabric of the tale itself. It was plain, obvious to them in this quasi-physical form. The novel's ending was menacingly unresolved, even though Ynnara escaped. But now they were able to unlock the secret. They both knew how to stop the Qoloni.

-11.6-

Carlos didn't look back. He just ran. He had no idea how long his feet would keep him ahead of the grasping hands (or, even worse, the razor-like swinging antlers) of the dark, buzzy thing pursuing him. He just kept moving as fast as he could, as fast as the uneven floor of the hallway would allow. He could only hope that it was slowing his pursuer down as much as it was him.

He was almost past the stairway down to the lobby. He thought briefly about bounding down them out into the snow, just to get the thing out of the building and away from Benny's hiding place, but it didn't work out that way. His foot caught on an unfortunate fold of carpet just as he was about to swerve, causing him to stumble and take a lateral step away from the stairs to retain his balance. He realized that he wasn't going to be able to correct his trajectory without slowing down, and then the footsteps chasing him would undoubtedly catch him. So he kept running straight, down the opposite wing of the Lodge, his heart threatening to throb itself out through his ears.

He had never run in such a blind panic before. Not even the time when he was small, and they had visited a horse farm. It had belonged to one of his dad's cousins, some small ranch far off in another mountain's foothills. Little Carlos had somehow wandered out into the pasture, and suddenly an eight-foot horse was coming over to investigate. To his child's eyes, the thing had been the size of a freight train, and closing in on him much faster than he could run away. He felt that same panic now, barreling down the Lodge's upper hallway, so fast that he felt like his legs might detach from his body. Only now, the thing behind him really meant him harm, to catch him, throw him down and impale him...

Just beyond the stairs, one of the guest room doors stood open, and it wasn't until it was too late for him to aim his stumbling body toward it that he realized it would have been an ideal place to hide. He could have just thrown the door closed behind himself and been safe. He was sure the thing couldn't have followed; it would be blocked by the physical solidity of the door just as it had before. But as quickly as this thought came, the hope was dashed and the door passed behind him.

Carlos still hadn't managed to fully correct himself, and his pounding feet skirted the left side of the corridor. He could hear some distorted grating sound behind him, which he assumed were the tips of his pursuer's antlers scraping the wall above and behind him. The sound was like nails on a chalkboard fed through a broken amplifier, and sent jagged bolts of discord up his spine. He wondered if that resistance was buying him time. His breath wheezed in and out between his gritted teeth, and he was acutely aware of how his life was boiling down to a scattering of infinitely small moments and incidents, ground gained and lost in millimeters as the distance between the clutching hands of the thing behind him and his fleeing heels.

There was something in the hall ahead, propped against the wall, giving him a reason to keep trying to steer his never-fast-enough body toward the middle of the hall. The shape drew closer, and he realized what it was; a decorative table, narrow enough to be of no practical purpose other than to carry two small but elegant vases, which were perpetually filled with dried but lovely flowers. A table runner ran the length of it, pinned down by the crystalline weights at the ends, and a large, framed mirror hung on the wall above it. Carlos was surprised to see that, despite the disruption of the avalanche, this arrangement was still mostly intact. The mirror was still hanging straight on the wall, and only one of the vases had been knocked over, tipping out its freight of pussy willows across the table and onto the floor. Barely thinking about it, he grabbed the fallen vase, then passed it to his other hand and grabbed the second as he ran by as well.

He flipped the upright one over in his hand, dumping out its freight of dried sticks, and grabbed it around the neck. He took a quick look back over his shoulder, and found that the shape -- so vague against the pervasive darkness of the hall -- was closer than he thought from just listening to its approach. *Much* closer. Now in a near panic, he flipped his left hand over his right shoulder, releasing the vase at what he hoped was the right instant. He couldn't help but continue to watch as it flipped end over end, reflecting what dim light it could gather from the surroundings, until it impacted the horned thing in its chest, right where its heart might possibly be.

He should have seen the reaction coming, although he would later think to himself that he didn't know what was going to happen. However, the pursuing thing stayed true to its physical nature. It couldn't affect the vase's presence in the world, so in the collision of kinetic energies moving both forward and backward, it inevitably lost. Carlos had a fleeting glimpse of the vase being bent out of its true shape, wrapping around the creature's shoulder like a wet towel being slapped across its skin, and then the thing was twisting in mid-stride, one side of it being almost entirely stopped in its tracks. Its antlers swung by as it pivoted, mere inches above Carlos's head.

He ducked instinctively and turned back forward, realizing that he had just bought himself a few more tenths of a second of life. He knew he had to take advantage of it, and try to get his legs to pump just a little faster. He heard the vase, having presumably slipped around the dark figure's space-warping edge and come out unscathed and unaffected on the other side, make its final glittering crash on the floor far behind them both.

At the moment, however, Carlos was trying to figure out what the end of the chase was going to be. He was rapidly approaching the end of the hallway, which was farther from light sources than any other, but he knew that there was a door there. It didn't lead to any room, instead contained a service area where the majority of the housekeeping supplies were stored. He was heading straight for that door, and if he could buy himself enough time to get it open, dash through it and shut it, he might make it out of this encounter unharmed.

That was a big if, though. He could already hear the horned thing's footfalls regaining their rhythm, not as far away as he would have liked. Maybe he had just prolonged the chase, instead of winning it. His legs were getting weaker, his breath rasping in his throat. Before he knew it, he was just a few steps from the door, and couldn't remember... did it swing into the storage room, or out into the hallway? His shoulder impacted with the force of his entire body behind it, and he immediately knew it was the latter.

He bounced off and spun to the side, which brought him around to see the horned thing. It was bearing down on him with frightening speed, and for a moment Carlos thought they were going to replay the tackle that had happened at what was now the far end of the hall, this time with Carlos pinned between the thing and the wall, instead of the other way around. He obliquely wondered how his body would react when compacted between the thing and an immovable object, and braced himself...

But it turned out that he had been thrown too much off course for the thing to collide with him. Instead, it ran full speed into the maintenance door; clearly, Carlos's prior knowledge of the Lodge's layout was an unexpected advantage in this near-total darkness. He threw his hands protectively over his hand and ducked away, aware of the way those fearsome antlers were spearing their way into the wall above his head. Even so, he could figure out what had happened. Similar to what had happened at the far end of the hall, the horned thing bent the door inward almost three full feet. Then, after a moment of suspension, it was flung back out. Carlos marveled again at how the immovable material that he had smacked his shoulder into could now appear so pliant. The horned attacker stumbled backward, its arms pinwheeling in a decidedly human fashion, trying to keep its balance under the weight of its enormous antlers tipping backward from the impact.

Carlos saw his opportunity, and grabbed for the door handle. At the exact moment he felt the cool solidity of the knob, he also felt a debilitating pain shoot up his arm, collecting at his left shoulder and turning into a bright flare. He still held the second vase in his right hand, so opening the door with it wasn't an option. He pushed through the feeling that his arm was on fire, grabbed the knob, and yanked the door toward him. It swung open easily, but he overestimated how hard he had to pull that the knob flew out of his hand, and the door swung wide open.

If there had not been a small window high up in the wall of the storage closet, the blackness inside would have been impenetrable, but after the dimness of the hall, the small gateway to the moonlit mountainside turned into a virtual spotlight, shining on the horned thing as it strove to regain its footing. Carlos realized he had maybe a second to make it inside. At this point, he didn't even care about getting the door to close behind him. Maybe the thing's wide antler-span wouldn't allow it to enter anyway. That was all he had to hope for as he dove into the gap. Two steps in, he wheeled around.

The horned thing was so close it was almost filling the doorway. At the same time, he was aware of his peripheral vision revealing the way the antlers were pressing into the walls above both sides of the doorway as well, like splayed fingers trying to push through a membrane. It lunged forward, trying to force its way over the threshold, stretching the doorframe farther than Carlos had thought it could. Its outlines, while still far from certain, were limned by the light from behind Carlos, making his heart threaten to stop out of terror. Because of the stark lighting, he could truly see the contours of its face for the first time... and he felt that sudden sense of dislocation that only comes with profound shock. Fortunately, the one instinct he did have was to raise his hand and throw the other vase.

It was little more than a lob at such close range, but it caught the thing squarely in what would have been its throat, had it truly been human, or even animal (Carlos had long since begin suspect that it was neither). Instead, Carlos witnessed in full illumination the way the shape of the crystal distorted, wrapping around the thing's neck like a melting choker necklace, and the thing was swept backwards by its light but undeniable kinetic force. It wasn't until it had backed away that Carlos realized he now had an opportunity to close the storage room door.

He jumped forward, every impulse in his body screaming at him that it was the wrong direction to travel in. He threw his right arm -- now blissfully available to do work his left couldn't -- around the jamb and fumbled for the knob while trying to keep an eye on the horned thing. He couldn't keep his eyes off it, trying to tell if what he had seen in its face a moment before had really been there, or was just a trick of his eyes.

His hand found the knob, slipped once across its slick surface, then tightened around it and pulled. At the same time, his nemesis started recovering from the attack, and Carlos watched in fascination as the door swung closed and the thing lunged. He had no idea which was going to win the race.