Whitelodge 13.6

-13.6-

If what Bruce was saying hadn't been matching up perfectly with everything he had experienced on this weird night, Carlos would have thrown the author out the door he had come in by, and let the monster out there have its way with its creator. But being the only one in the group who had physically touched the thing, and had also experienced Bruce's rambling, borderline-psychotic -- but equally accurate -- description of its makeup and powers, he had no choice but to believe everything the crazed man was saying.

Bruce's revelations came fast: in the book, the "Qoloni" -- a play on words, because the thing really was a sentient, bipedal "colony" of much smaller things -- was the manifestation of the fears and insecurities of the young woman it was pursuing. The connection with mirrors, then, was a necessary narrative association. Princess Ynarra saw her own imperfections when she looked into the mirrors in what would soon become her bridal suite, if the prince of the castle chose her as the one he wished to marry. Because he was royalty, the reflections were of a quality she had never experienced before, and her own faithful image messed with her head. It was her lack of faith in her own inner power that caused those thoughts to become the creature they had all seen and been chased by.

Of course, all this exposition was densely couched in Bruce's ramblings. Carlos knew the man had been coming to the Deertail for years but had never met him before, and so was unable to tell if what that author had been through had changed his mental state at all; for all Carlos knew, Bruce had always been like this. To be honest, the effect was so off-putting that Carlos kind of zoned out for a little while, even though he knew he shouldn't have. Bruce was trying to explain, by yet another slightly different method, how the fruit he had seen in his dream-orchard had represented the little sub-world that the present group found themselves spun off into. Something about the confluence of coincidences has caused this little area of the world to split off into a looped, bounded mini-universe. Or something like that.

The point was, Bruce seemed positive that they could get themselves back into the main stream of space and time if they could destroy the Qoloni... by his reckoning, once the thing they had created with their collective imaginations was destroyed, normalcy should return. "It's like, the Qoloni is the stem," he was currently blathering, "the stem that holds this poisoned fruit we're in, to the tree! If we sever that connection--" and here, he used his hand as a samurai sword, bringing it straight down to bisect some unseen foe, "--we'll be free!"

Carlos looked uncertainly around at the others, and then said, "What if the fruit just falls from the tree?"

The author whirled around, so fast that he almost lost his balance. "What's that?"

Carlos twisted his neck to crack it, then sighed. "If we're the fruit, then won't separating it from the tree just imprison us here, with it?" He spread his arms out to encompass the tiny universe he believed more and more that they were in.

Bruce didn't seem to be able to track what he was saying. "No, you don't see... We're still a part of the tree, but *it* isn't. It's something else entirely. It's the personification of internal fears, can you not see that? It's... when the..." Bruce's words began to come too fast, piling over themselves in the rush to get out of his mouth.

Suddenly, Manoj spoke. They were the first words of his own that anyone could remember speaking since they re-entered the building. "I think I understand," he said. He waited a long moment while everyone turned to him, and Kelly's grip on his arm visibly tightened. "It has to go back where it came from," Manoj said. "Even if we don't understand exactly what it is or why it does what it does, that part makes sense. It was called forth from a mirror, and must be put back where it was."

No one moved, waiting to see if there was more, and after seeming to think about it for a long time, Manoj continued, "That's what Harmon was saying." He gestured down to Kerren, lying on the floor. "He's talking with... Benny, I think his name is?" He waited for an affirming, if shocked, nod from Carlos, then went on. "They've both read your book, Bruce, and they think they've figured it out. The thing has to be put back into a mirror, apparently."

Bruce looked stupefied. "Figured it out? But that's not what happens in the book. When I wrote it, I never destroyed the creature... the princess escaped, and rescued the prince. It was meant to be a twist on the usual fairy tale ending, although looking back I now have to admit that it's equally as trite. But... putting the Qoloni *back* into a mirror?"

The author began to walk back and forth, hunching forward and clasping his hands behind his back, suddenly seeming to have the clarity of thought you might see in a philosophy professor given a juicy ethical dilemma. Manoj spoke to him as he continued to pace, "They say it's the logical endpoint, if you look past the one you actually wrote. In saving both herself and the prince, Ynarra effectively left her fears behind her..."

Bruce abruptly walking and looked up at the man, thunderstruck. "Instead of putting them back where they came from! Of course..." he gasped. "Their way makes so much more sense. I was so out of my mind when I wrote it, I was just trying to make a resolution to the story that no one would see coming. But the elements were all there. Why didn't I see them?"

"Wait a minute," Carlos said, jumping in and turning to Manoj. "Did you say that *they* figured out what the book's ending should have been? You mean Harmon *and* Benny? Benny's okay?"

A puzzled look crossed Manoj's face. "I don't know. It was Harmon speaking for them both. But there was something strange in the feeling I got when he mentioned Benny, this implied silence..."

Before Carlos could question further, Bruce spoke again. "Do you think... maybe the fact that I didn't see the ending correctly, and that others did... gives potency to the story itself?" He seemed to be starting to ramble to himself again. "That the ability of our combined imaginations to conjure it forth was magnified because I took the story somewhere other than the way it naturally wanted to go?" He took a long look at the woman lying wrapped on the floor. Kerren looked exhausted despite her immobilization, and turned her tired eyes to meet the gaze of the shuffling author.

"What do you think, dear? It was your mother that inspired the story in the first place. Consider this -- there are two people here, myself and Mr. Gough, the Lodge director, who have had dreamworld visions of her. I wrote the story after meeting her, and at least two others here have read my words. Quite a confluence, wouldn't you say? My God, you look so much like her. Is your presence here enough to cause this? Or is it everything, all these elements all at once, that has brought us to this?"

There was no answer that anyone could provide, for one reason or another. Carlos looked to each of them in turn, trying to figure out where he fit into this group. He had never read this book that some of them had, nor did he have any interest in Bruce Casey, or relation to his muse. Was he the only one who had no idea why he had been chosen to stay behind in this place?

Carlos immediately began to look around, breaking the stalemate. "Are there any mirrors in here? Anything we can use?"

This seemed to galvanize the room's occupants, and the ones who were able to started combing the two supply rooms for the Lodge's stash of reflective materials. Carlos called out to Dale, who was simply wandering with Glenda in his arms, casting his eyes over the myriad shelves, "Dale, the mirrors in the rooms must get broken every once in a while. Any idea where they keep the replacements?"

The security guard's voice came back hollow. "I don't know. It's been years. Last time, it was a fight between a couple, something got thrown. I think we had to special order a new mirror at the time. And I remember it took a whole crew to get the old one down and the new one in place. They're fastened down pretty securely."

"So we can't just dash into one of the rooms and grab one," Carlos muttered as he continued his search. "Great." For some reason, when Manoj and Bruce had been discussing the prospect of using a mirror to banish the dark Qoloni, the thought had entered his mind as something that should be easy to accomplish. But why had he thought that? There were no mirrors here, and getting one out of the rooms wasn't something he had considered. So why had he...?

Realization crashed against his mind. "In the hallway!" he blurted out, causing heads in both rooms to turn his way. "The big sunburst mirror at the top of the stairs! It comes off. I almost knocked it down when I grabbed the vases to throw at that thing!"

Our Divided States: Division #4 - The Purpose vs. The Random

Thanks to the upcoming Dark Tower movie (or series of movies, dare I hope?), more and more people are becoming aware of the vast network of connections between Stephen King's written works, and the nature of the multiverse that contains them. For me, one of the most interesting aspects of it comes in a novel from the 90s called Insomnia, which doesn't reveal its connection to the Dark Tower meta-story until late in its 800+ pages. Before that, however, we're treated to a character that outlines some of the philosophical structure behind King's whole mythos. This is kind of a roundabout way to make the political point I came here to make today, but bear with me for just a minute.

The Universe, King suggests, is governed by two forces -- The Purpose and The Random. It's been a few years since I read Insomnia, but I believe the ideology goes like this: the Universe tends toward order, because it is directed by human will. That's The Purpose, a sort of collective upward intent of the entire human race. Of course, there is an external force working against this order, which he called The Random (and is embodied in a character called The Crimson King -- and if you've met him among the pages, that name should be sending a shiver up our spine right now). Anyway, The Random's role is to throw nonsensical obstacles into The Purpose's way, trying to plunge the Universe into chaos simply by preventing Purpose from taking root and establish itself.

As I read Insomnia, I noted how ingenious this was. Most worldviews place Evil as the opposition to Good, but King takes it into a slightly different place. We're all working together for Purpose/Good, essentially, or at least our personal idea of it, but if or enemy in this struggle were Evil, the battle would at least be well-defined. "Evil" at least makes some kind of sense, has logic to it, although it will no doubt be twisted. Fighting against randomness, though? That's something else altogether, even *more* antithetical to The Purpose.

That's what I've been thinking about since our current President's recent flurry of executive-order-writing. There are things about them that make me believe that they are not actually there to enact policy. Instead, they seem designed to create confusion and make us unsure of what or how we should be fighting against. Let's take his (unofficially-Muslim) travel (")ban("), for example:

First of all, look at the wording on this thing. It points blame at our immigration vetting process as the reason terrorists were able to enter the country and commit the atrocity of 9/11. Fair enough, but it then uses this same example as the reason we should enact this travel ban, acting as if literally nothing has been added to our national security or immigrant vetting processes since then.

It then imposes a ban on *all* people entering the country from seven nations, each of which seem to have been selected by using precisely three criteria: 1) They are at least 80% populated by Muslims, 2) the President has no business interests there, and 3) exactly *zero* successful terrorists have come from them... Remember, most of the 9/11 terrorists were from Saudi Arabia, a country that notably goes unmentioned in the order. The fact that this ban was originally on *all* people coming from those countries is another thing to look at. The White House went back and clarified that certain people actually could re-enter the country (green card holders and full American citizens, for example), but it did so without the oversight or input of anyone in the State or Immigration departments. It is a proclamation that is both grandiosely sweeping and bizarrely specific, issued with no oversight by people of experience who actually know how world politics work, and with no specific instructions on how government agencies should implement it. It essentially dropped a bunch of harsh-but-vague rules on government workers and then sat back to see how they would deal with it.

There's only one reason for such an abomination to be issued; to create confusion and fear. Answer truthfully now... if you are a practicer of Islam in this country, even after all this order's addenda and clarifications, are you going to leave the country for any reason, no matter how much documentation of your American citizenship and good intentions you have? This is no more than the start of a crackdown, ensuring that people from Africa and the Middle East don't know where they really stand in this country.

*That's* Random. Evil at least would be clear-cut, well-defined, if immoral, rules. This is not that. This is a statement to induce the following response: "I don't know what to expect, so I'm going to keep my head down for now." That's far too close to "Don't make waves and maybe we'll be okay" -- the repeated mantra of the oppressed people of the world -- for my taste.

Whitelodge 13.5

-13.5-

Harmon didn't know if he was getting through at all. He had to devote so much energy to translating his message into coherent speech through Kerren's compromised system that he couldn't also try to look out to see if anyone was listening. The only indication he had that he was being heard was the way his host's brain lit up when he mentioned her mother's name.

All he could do was continue to speak through her, hoping beyond hope that there was someone on the outside to hear him trying to verbally piece together the various ways the long-ago Sarah had impacted people at the Deertail Lodge. The visual similarity between her and Kerren really was uncanny, so much so that when he had seen the daughter earlier that evening, he had almost been forced to rethink his views on immortality.

As he spoke what he had since come to know and believe, he was delighted as new sections of Kerren's young brain sparked to life. It took a little while for him to realize that he was actually watching her fitting the puzzle together, and he hoped that there was someone else doing the same on the other side of her lips. Even if there were, it would have given him no extra satisfaction; when he spoke what he and Benny had discovered about the role of mirrors in the story, being inside Kerren's head had been like flying around inside a firework show.

It began to occur to him that maybe all his invasive activity was doing Kerren some good. All his mucking about with her neurons might actually be helping them mend from the shock of her injuries, or at least he was going to allow himself to rationalize it that way. As he told her about her mother, and the positive role she had played in the lives of people at the Deertail, he had begun to feel a slowly increasing sense of welcome. Either Kerren was getting used to the idea of someone being inside her mind, or he was becoming inoculated against feeling of intrusion. It still a minor rebellion against his sense of decency to do it, but it took away the moral sting a little bit. If Kerren's increased capacity started to show signs that she didn't want him in there anymore, he would gladly retreat.

She didn't, however. It compelled him to keep talking until he was done, in a way; he felt like he was getting Kerren better by doing it, and that in turn made his effort seem worthwhile. Not only this, but the strength of their connection made him even more aware of his physical proximity to her. The thought of them actually meeting again in the physical world was starting to become something he found he wanted.

There was something familiar about her brain; at times he felt like he knew its contours, recognizing the way information would flow from one place to another. He thought it must be some remnant of her mother; Sarah and Harmon had shared a few late-night talk sessions, and he had been entranced by the woman's thought processes, not quite like anyone else's he had ever encountered. That must have been the origin of the familiarity he was sensing in this vast, internal space.

If Sarah had shown anything other than cursory interest in him, he knew, he could have fallen for her. But he had learned that relationships cultivated while leaning against a bar never grow into anything more, and she had been the source of this realization for him. Like everyone else, she had spent her time at the Deertail, and then disappeared into the world beyond the foot of the mountain. He had never caught the same spark she had brought to his life again, and never expected to.

Before he had seen Kerren, if someone had told him that the closest possible copy of Sarah was about to walk into his life again, he would have assumed that he would immediately transfer some -- if not all -- of his years of romantic disappointment into feelings for her, but for some reason that hadn't happened. He had approached her and her wife at dinner the previous night out of a sheer fascination at seeing someone who his fiction-addled brain might have mistaken for his old love. Maybe it was because her romantic predilections were clear, or the fact that he was keenly aware of how much he himself had aged over the intervening years, but the kind of emotions he was experiencing were more like those that a teacher might feel for a promising young student.

Now he was speaking with no other impetus than to see Kerren's brain illuminating in new patterns, feeding off its own renewed energy. He couldn't entirely feel that he was personally responsible for the growth by adding his energy to the system; the only thing he could think of was that it felt like he was *inspiring* her. He had yet to see whether this new vitality would last, but for now he could feel its light, see its warmth, and it made his resolve even stronger.

With this in mind, he peeked at the world outside Kerren's skull. He didn't withdraw from her mind, only expanded his sphere of awareness. It was an aspect of his power that he hadn't really mastered yet, and was surprised to find how easily he could control it. It came with a strange sense of vertigo, however, a collision between perceptions of largeness and smallness. It was something like using a magnifying glass to examine a miniscule drop of water, and finding that there was an immense, bustling city inside it.

The group around Kerren were barely recognizable in their immensity and distance. They seemed to be segregated into two groups; on one side of his host's still-bound body were two women and a man. He immediately recognized Kerren's wife crouched nearby, but the others Harmon hadn't seen before. They were a blonde woman and a dark-skinned man, clearly a couple from the way they were standing close to each other. On the other side of Kerren's apparently miles-long body, Dale stood like a Titan, with Glenda in his arms. Harmon didn't quite like the way she was lying limply, or the way that Dale's arms minutely trembled, as if he had been holding her that way for a very long time.

Next to them was Carlos (whom he shouldn't have been surprised to see, since his known cohort Benny was currently sitting with Harmon's body in his small room under the stairs). Between the two men, also not too surprisingly, was Bruce Casey. He was talking a mile a minute -- thankfully, the sound was too far away for Harmon to actually make any of it out -- and gesticulating his arms wildly; first, they raised as if to mimic climbing a ladder, then reaching out for something, and then gesturing to other members of the small crowd. They all seemed to bear the same expression on their faces: dismayed indulgence. The author clearly had the floor, but no one seemed to be happy about it.

When it was clear that no one was listening to Kerren (and he wasn't even sure that she was still speaking for him), he let his words trail off. The flashes of disappointment that cascaded like a blazing Niagara through Kerren's brain made him want to go on, until forever if she would let him. But there was something more important going on in the outer world at the moment, and so he turned his full attention to it.

Our Divided States: Division #3 - "America First" vs. The World

I noted a comment recently by a Trump supporter (yeah, I guess there are a few who slipped in through the cracks of my social media bubble) who said that they "don't support globalism". To be honest, my first reaction was a slightly more profane version of "Holy cow, why do you think that is that even an *option*???"

This is where I start to question whether this whole concept of the "social bubble" -- which I admittedly just referenced as real in the first paragraph -- is even a valid one at all. One of the first attempts at honest analysis after the Democratic loss in November was typically-liberal self-reflection... Are we only talking to other like-minded individuals, and not even noticing what's going on in the world around us? I've taken time to think about this thoroughly, and my answer is simple... only sort of. It's actually dumbass comments like the one above that helped me come to that conclusion. Have I only been talking to people who support across-the-board sexual, racial, and religious equality, environmentally conscious politics and industry, and the forward progress of the entire human race? Well, if you can manage to fit all that into a bubble, then yes. The other side, the one where that sort of stuff isn't quite as important as racial/national/religious identity and regression into a xenophobic, paranoid, nostalgic, never-was past, is even more of a bubble, and one that is doomed to destroy itself to boot. By this token, "globalism" isn't a concept that we have the luxury of either supporting or not.

Let me illustrate my point with extremes: Let's say that you're about as right-leaning as a person can get. Let's say that you're way past leaning -- you've entirely fallen over and gotten red state all over yourself, and maybe even rolled around in it some. All you care about is forcibly combatting the dissolution of your concept of an idealized "America" tailored to fit you, in the face of all the immigrants and foreign terrorists that have come to take over everything "real" Americans have built, and to slake their thirst with the blood of infidels. Your focus, then, necessarily, has to be global. You can't build an impermeable dome over America (as much as you may want to) so you have to deal with your opponents on the world stage. This, by definition, is globalism.

Now, conversely, let's say that you're the opposite of the right-winger you just were, and have gone all the way over to the left. You're so busy appreciating the unique snowflake that is each and every human being and growing your own self-sustaining solar-powered whale farm that you barely have any time to stand in front of pipeline construction crews. All that matters to you is the benefit, equality, and well-being of everyone. Well, then congratulations to you too, because you have to deal with the world outside the borders of America.

There's literally nowhere on the spectrum between these endpoints where a person can afford to be -- or even truthfully say that they are -- "anti-globalism". It's the difference between being an active participant in the world as a whole, or pretending that you don't have to be. You might have been able to pull off that illusion before the Industrial Revolution, but I'm pretty sure that we neither can nor want to go back to the way things were then.

I've adopted a new personal motto lately, but I've been having trouble putting it into a form where it can be bumper-sticker ready. It goes something like "We can raise all the boats". The wording is kind of obscure, but my point is this: there is a way to run a country -- and a world -- so that everyone prospers. When you do this, it creates a positive feedback loop. There's nothing being given away when you eradicate inequality. The only reason to not want to divest yourself of unfair privilege is if you're sure that's the only reason you've gotten to where you are.

We've been conditioned to believe, through various forms of mass media, that situations are always us vs. them, and the "them" are usually motivated by nothing other than sheer stupidity or malice, evil for the sake of being evil. There's probably another essay waiting to dissect that particular idea, but for now let me stay on track...

Improving the lives of those around you isn't just beneficial for you, it's essential to your survival. This is true not just in your house, or in your community, but the world in general. We can't pretend that our country is a closed system anymore. It never was, in fact. The reason we've become one of the world's biggest powers is that we attract the best and brightest from around the world. I think one of the missteps in logic people sometimes fall into here is the belief that we assimilate newcomers and make them American; in truth, America alters itself to accommodate its ever-shifting influx of people and their particular influences. Resistance against this is self-defeating.

No one person's America is the *definitive* America. Make whatever outrageous claims you want to about the Founding Fathers and their motives, but the one thing that's fundamentally clear is that they didn't want too much power in the hands of the few. By cracky, that's how things have run so far, and it's worked well enough that both our general population and those they elect have had the luxury of temporarily forgetting it.

Well, here's our wake-up call. America isn't some kind of entity that exists outside the rest of the world. It's an integral part of it. So let's govern with logic and reason, and raise *all* the boats. Putting some people first, before others, is how we've gotten to this horrific tipping point. Globalism is the only way to survive, not to mention achieve the meritocracy that both sides of the political fence agree we should strive for.

Whitelodge 13.4

Dale didn't know he was going to hit Bruce. On the contrary, he was fully prepared to restrain himself. Despite what Bruce had done, Dale had had time to assess that it had not been his intention to stab Glenda and subsequently cause her death. He had meant to stab Dale himself, but strangely, the security guard took that much less personally. The man had been raving, and had in fact just injured himself, when Kelly prevented him from drawing his knife cleanly.

Despite all this, Dale thought he was going to give Bruce a chance. But when the author burst through the door, spewing words, taking the state he had been in when he had turned violent before and intensifying it even further, Dale's instinct went into overdrive. Before the man could take more than a few steps into the room or finish his sentence, Dale struck him with the only thing he had available...

Dale had seen many movies where it looks like the hero is about to shoot the bad guy, rifle or shotgun pressed tightly against temple, and then in a fit of mercy swinging it around and knocking him unconscious with the stock instead. The sound was always an affirming Foley-crack in those movies, but clocking Bruce in the head with both of Glenda's feet -- the pivoting force of Dale's full body weight behind them -- was markedly less satisfying.

The end result wasn't similar, either. The author took a half-step to the side, his voice erupting into a yelp that might have been his next ten seconds of babbled words compressed, and then tottered over, slumping to the floor, his shoulder taking the brunt of the fall and just keeping him from breaking his head open on the boards.

Kelly's hands instinctively reached out to catch Bruce, but it all happened too fast. She was left with arms extended into empty air. She looked down, saw the what a mess of blood Bruce's back was, and slowly lowered them.

"Bastard," Dale hissed under his breath into the overwhelming silence that filled the room in the absence of the author's babbling. Carlos' eyes were fixed on the door, as if fearing it would spring open again. Dale couldn't help but notice that he was making no effort to keep it closed, however. There didn't seem to be a lock on their side of the door anyway.

Dale checked Glenda's feet. They seemed to be okay; if she had been alive, he would guess that she would be in for at least a painful bruise. Even so, he couldn't help but think she would have approved of his rash act. Actually, he visualized her giving him a high-five for some reason.

On the floor, the author groaned. "Where the hell have you been?" Carlos asked him, bending angrily over the fallen man. "I tackled that... whatever it was... to keep it from killing you, and then you just disappeared."

Bruce shook his head in apparent denial as he rolled fully onto his side. He took several labored breaths, then feebly turned his palms toward them. "Give me a chance to explain," he uttered, and then took even more breaths. Dale didn't believe that he needed them, not for a second.

Dale didn't feel like waiting. "Get on your feet, Mr. Casey. You have some apologizing to do."

Bruce's sense of indignation flared surprisingly quickly. "Me?" He pointed a finger up at Kelly. "She's the one who slashed me in the back!"

"To prevent you from stabbing someone," she jumped in. "Which you did anyway."

The author didn't have an answer for that. His eyes fell across Glenda at that moment, realizing that she was the shape Dale was carrying, and the one whose feet had had struck him, and he fell silent. Dale felt a small portion of satisfaction, seeing the author actually wither as the realization of her state began to dawn on him.

"That's right," the security guard said, affirming the suspicion. "Now, why should we listen to anything you have to say?"

The question seemed to galvanize Bruce, re-flooding him with energy, although he remained cowed on the ground. "But I've been there! I've seen the stories! You've got to listen to me!"

Carlos stepped in, clearly concerned that Bruce was about to get bludgeoned again. "Slow down, Mr. Casey. Was that thing really after you?" He cocked his thumb at the undistorted, closed door.

"Yes!" Bruce blurted. "Well, not *directly* after me, but it's out there! It's made its way inside the lodge--" and here he cocked an eyebrow at Dale "--because you let it, and it has almost free reign of the halls. But it's okay, I know how to defeat it, how to send it back!"

"Back to where?" Kelly asked, with genuine interest in her voice.

Her sincerity seemed to give the author pause. His head still cocked up off the floor at what must have been an uncomfortable angle, he mused for a second. "I'm... not entirely sure. But what I can say is that it will be well away from us. Not only that, but I think that when we banish it, we'll snap ourselves out of this broken loop that we're in!"

Dale, Kelly, and Carlos all looked at each other, unsure of whether they were about to be presented with a bizarre solution to an even more bizarre situation, or if the man was just raving. Dale tended to think it was the latter, and he was fully aware that was because of the cold weight lying across his arms. He could already tell that he was never going to be able to forgive the man lying before him, no matter how mad he was, or how mad this terrible night had driven him.

"Okay," Carlos said. "Assume that we believe you. How do we destroy the thing?"

"The Qoloni," Bruce corrected offhandedly, before launching into another near-hysterical monologue. "The trees, the ones I saw in my dreams, they're actually *stories*, from all over the world, well, at least a tree-shaped representation of the human perception of them. For whatever reason, we've become trapped in some kind of version of one of the stories I created, as if this part of our world has split off and become a place for the creature from my book to grow...

"I thought I could climb the tree, pull that odd fruit off the branch, and maybe that would force us back into our real, waking world, but the closer I climbed toward it, it just seemed to be getting bigger, until it no longer seemed that I was moving toward it, but that it was pulling me in, encompassing me, growing larger and larger until I was falling into it, and it was bringing me back here... Then I was in the hallway, just outside this door. As if I had never left." At this point, his eyes became unfocused. "But *did* I ever leave? No, I must have..."

Dale had had enough. "Shut up!" he said to the author. "If you know how to end this, then tell us! If not, then we have other things to take care of." Even Dale didn't know if he was talking about killing the author in revenge or not.

"I do! I do!" Bruce Casey put his hands up, trying to placate the towering guard. "Just let me..." He froze, then tentatively put his hands on the floor, clearly trying to brace himself so he could get to his feet. He halted as his palms touched down, keeping an eye on Dale. When the big man did not move, Bruce pushed himself up, wincing in pain, and managed to get onto his knees. Then he sideshuffled over to the nearest wall, braced himself against it and slowly stood, wincing even more. His hands reflexively went toward the small of his back, but stopped short of actually touching it.

Kelly didn't step forward, but motioned to him. "Turn around. Let me see how bad it is."

The author pivoted slowly, rotating the wound in his lower back into view. It looked worse than it was; the vertical slit just parallel to the base of his spine was shallow, but a large amount of blood had soaked into his sleep pants and t-shirt, giving a horrific impression.

"You'll live," Kelly said, after giving it only the most cursory of glances. "Now turn around, but stay against the wall."

The author did, an earnestly contrite look on his face.

Dale spoke up again. "You said you know how to destroy that thing out there. So tell us."

"The Qoloni, yes," Bruce said. He had nothing else to do with his hands, so he started wringing them, as if he were obsessively washing blood from them. "You've seen the way it reacts when it touches physical objects, yes?"

"Not only seen, felt," Carlos said, shuddering at the memory of its buzzing, chaotic surface against his body.

"Well, I created it for the book when I was in a particularly... agitated state. I made it feel like I felt at the time, which was... I was thinking about what it happens when you touch a surface, because you know you never really *touch* a surface, you just get so close that the atoms in your hand start being electrically repulsed by the atoms in the thing you're touching, billions of these infinitesimally small interactions that keep you from passing through it altogether..."

Carlos jumped in. "So is that why, when I threw stuff at it, it seemed like it made the objects warp around itself instead of actually touching it?"

"That's right!" Bruce took a tentative step away from the wall, and toward the group. "It's made a completely different kind of stuff altogether. It can't touch anything in this world, not really."

Kelly spoke up. "So why are we so afraid of it, if it can't touch us?"

Carlos added, "Those horns certainly don't look harmless."

Bruce's fevered gaze flew between them. "That's the one place where it can at least partly intersect this world, at least that's how it was in the book..." In reaction to the disturbed glares he was getting, he continued, "It's the monster in the story! I had to give it at least some teeth... so to speak."

Kelly sighed in frustration. "So how do we do whatever you said... banish it?"

Bruce's attitude went from cowering to enthusiastic inside of a second. "Yes! That's the ending. In my book, the Qoloni first appears to Princess Ynarra by attempting to push its way through from the *back* of a mirror." His eyes went far away, deep inside his own invention. "She was looking into it, and saw her face begin to distort, only to find that the mirror is actually bulging toward her. Funny thing, that was something that happened to me during that time too--"

Dale spoke absently. "Like Sheryl claimed that it was trying to get through the back of her closet..."

Bruce continued as if he hadn't heard. "So the princess does just the reverse at the story's climax, luring it into the other side, the reflecting surface of the mirror. It's fitting, don't you think?"

His look of creative glee was met with utterly blank stares. Finally, Carlos said to him. "Come into the other room with us. You need to help us make an attack plan."

Our Divided States: Division #2 -- Fear vs. Anger

There were two main driving forces behind the presidential race of 2016, and frankly, neither of them served the country very well. While one side took the route of playing upon the fears of the nation, the other was seduced by the lure of righteous anger.

The Republican side, as I'm sure we can all remember, was largely informed by Trump's insistence (reinforced by Fox News, Breitbart and other right-wing news outlets) that the country was on the verge of literally going to hell, slowly being invaded by outsiders who might have either malicious intent or wanted to bring us Skittles -- I hope I'm recalling this right. In any event, I heard him say on several occasions that if Hillary won, the United States of America as a nation was effectively over. You can't cram much more mongering of fear into a sentence than that.

This isn't a new tactic: simultaneously predicting doomsday and presenting oneself as humanity's sole savior is a political gambit as old as the hills. And in this case, it came close to swaying the majority: almost half the country was able to overlook most aspects of one of the most odious personalities ever to enter the political arena, and cast its vote based on the fear of what would happen if they didn't.

On the other side, just *over* half the country was collectively stunned that such a person could even be considered a serious contender for the country's highest leadership role. Every new revelation -- from old interview tapes to up-to-the-second Twitter rants, not to mention campaign promises about literal wall-building, threats of mass deportations and explicit prosecution of opponents -- sparked new flurries of outrage. Friends were unfriended, vast swaths of Americans were called "deplorable", and the established media news mostly wrote off the opposition and its support base as a tasteless joke. I mean, this was someone that even other *Republicans* could barely stand. How could this end in anything other than a Democratic landslide?

And yet, somehow, here we are. As you can probably tell, I have my own opinions about the way it all played out, and I don't have the energy for the mental acrobatics required to be evenhanded about it. What I see the main difference as being (barring the now-accepted interference by foreign powers) is that the Republican party knowingly played on the fear of average Americans and got it to stick. The Democratic party allowed its moral outrage to blind it to the concerns of almost half the country. In my mind, intent is the key here.

But let me elaborate on the latter half of that previous statement. One thing that I've come to understand through my own experience of this upheaval is just how invigorating and passion-stoking that anger can be. I'll be the first to admit, I quickly unfriended pretty much anyone who would post anything on my social media feed that was pro-Trump or anti-Muslim (I didn't see anything anti-Semitic or anti-LGBT, which I read as a reflection of my inherently excellent taste in friends). I did this mostly because these sorts of things would make me angry, to the point of distraction. I found myself zoning out of things I should be paying attention to in order to dissect the utter wrongness of something I had come across, and to mentally compose the perfect withering counter-argument.

However, I sometimes would knowingly find an article or click-bait designed to be offensive, and instead of just dismissing it, I would dive into it. Holy cow, I would even sometimes *read* *the* *comments*, something I promised myself years ago that I would utterly and completely resist. It took me a while -- and a healthy heaping of self-actualization -- to realize that the reason I was doing this was that I was actually getting a rush from it. Dammit, it felt *good* to be so obviously right.

It's true. There's something so comforting and belief-reinforcing to hear someone voice an opinion bone-headedly opposite of yours, one where you feel absolutely no reserve or remorse in unmercifully railing against their stupidity, how their grandchildren will be ashamed of them, and celebrating the coming day when their brand of paranoid, antiquated mentality will soon be thrown smoldering upon the scrap heap of wrong history. (See? I'm doing it right now and I don't even have a specific issue in mind!)

The only reason I could come up with for my behavior is that, in general, I try to think critically and skeptically. I'm very aware that for most arguments, there are two sides who are equally convinced that they are right, and in most cases their convictions are utterly rational, based on their own particular points of view (I haven't forgotten what Obi-wan Kenobi said about that sort of thing). Here's the catch, though: this objectivity that I try to have often hamstrings my utter delight in being unreservedly bone-deep sure that I am right, while the other person is just all kinds of stupefying wrongity-wrong-wrong. Apparently, it's only when I'm up against the current level of anti-intellectual, anti-human demagoguery that I can let go of the reins and really let my hostility gallop.

So during this election run-up, when I saw climate denial, when I saw not just racist pandering but utter bullshit tribalism, or an instinctive mistrust of anything other than the white/straight/male/Christian status quo, it offended my bedrock beliefs so much that I couldn't help it. This is where I think the Democrats (and I among them) fell down this time around, because there are two rules of public debate: 1) don't feed the trolls, and 2) you're not going to convince anyone to change sides by insulting them. We broke both of these.

Have you ever been told that not only does your favorite band suck, but also that you're stupid for liking them? Did it make you stop and consider whether they really do? Or did it maybe even make you like them a little bit more, simply because you felt like you had more in common by being marginalized right along with them? Well, I'm afraid that's what we Democrats did this time around. We spent too much time enjoying ourselves, saying "Do you not *see* how horrible and unqualified this guy is, you idiots?!" and not enough time figuring out just how he kept right on steamrolling through every hurdle that was being thrown at him.

The only solace I can take right now is that if there was ever a case for a President being forcibly removed from office, it would be now. He's legitimized white supremacy, advocated sexual assault, publicly mocked such people as the press, immigrants the military and their families, civil rights heroes, and the disabled. Not only that, but the volumes of known conflicts of interests -- and likely even more that we don't know about yet -- should be more than enough to do the trick. If we can't force someone like him out of power, then I guess he was partly right after all. America -- as a nation we can be proud of -- is effectively over.

Whitelodge 13.2 & 13.3

-13.2-

Bruce couldn't remember a time when he felt so alive. He was bounding – literally *bounding* -- through the story-forest, hearing the whispers all around him, deliberately spurning literally millions of opportunities to stop and listen to the trees. Part of him longed to stop forever, however, to spend the rest of his life hearing the tales they had to tell. As much as he wanted that, there was also something pulling him along, a force that came as much from him as his destination, inexorably drawing the two together.

He had learned at some point in the past that lightning doesn't originate in the clouds. It partly does, but it also reaches up from the ground -- or whatever it is that is going to be struck -- simultaneously, a pair of possibilities seeking each other. Only when the connection is made does the bolt flow, linking the energies of heaven and earth. Now, barreling among trunk after massive trunk, barely missing them with uncanny accuracy, Bruce similarly felt what he was searching for ahead of him.

His stories were there, in the depths of the forest, beckoning him on.

Would they be strong, hardy growths? He knew of at least three that would be, if any of them were. These were the novels that had been made into films or television shows. They had been cemented in more people's minds (and presented more uniformly, which was something he intuitively knew was important in this forest) than any of his unadapted works could ever be. He imagined that triad as a grove unto themselves, with his more minor works surrounding them. It was this urge he was following, a burning need to see how his thoughts and dreams represented themselves in this world.

There they were, just ahead. The little drifting lights that illuminated even the darkest part of the forest -- which Bruce still didn't understand the purpose of -- seemed to grow more numerous around them. When he reached his own particular piece of the imagination grove, he instinctively slowed. The soul has a way of recognizing its own creations, no matter what form they may take, and his breathing became easier as he was able to stop and see his life's work in physical form.

He sighed. As humbling as it was to see his entire career distilled into a sizeable grouping of trees, he couldn't deny the pride he felt in being able to encompass it all in one look. He was right; the three major works (Trench City; Eyes of Malevolence; and The Unpaved Road) formed the boundaries of his area, whispering their familiar tales to the heavy air. In between, ranging in size from small seedlings to close rivals to the mighty trunks of the main three, were his other works, from essays and think pieces all the way to novellas and short stories, all of which must have sparked the interest of more than a few people, judging by how large they had grown.

He was surprised to see a few of them that he hadn't known had acquired such a following. Some of his stories seemed to have found quite an audience, but others that had done well for him financially looked particularly slim and even withered. He didn't know if this was because they had fallen out of favor, or maybe his creator's bias (not to mention all that money) had blinded him to the fact that they weren't that well regarded.

There was one in particular that was on the bigger side, and seemed to have more floating lights clustered around it than the others. As he grew closer to it, carefully stepping through the verdant grove without disturbing any of his other works, he suddenly realized which one it was, and his blood ran cold... He heard the name "Ynarra" coming from its gently whispering leaves. The Qoloni. Shit.

The book itself had been a quick cash grab, typed out in a three-week fever dream that may have been the result of particularly rancid batch of cocaine. The idea of the creature itself, that horrible dark thing with massive stag horns, had come to him so quickly and forcefully that he knew he wasn't going to be able to get rid of it until he purged it onto the page, and so he had. It wasn't his fault, entirely, that the result was a slim novel he had shipped off to his publisher and made a nice chunk of cash from without even remembering much about doing it.

The little lights were circling this particular story-tree in what, to them and their usually languid pace, looked like a kind of feeding frenzy. They circled and spun around the trunk in both upward and downward helices, as if hunting for a place to land. Watching their restless movement, Bruce dimly grasped that the lights were some kind of conveyance method for human thought. It might even be that the lights were what made the trees grow, their warming light and attention coaxing the creative works to rise even higher and stronger.

Bruce looked up the length of the trunk, watching as the story-tree strove upward, toward the overarching canopy that his major works were creating. Was it possible, he wondered, that The Qoloni could rival them, given the proper time and care? And, quick on the heels of that thought... Did he want it to?

The work itself didn't seem to care what its creator thought. It was growing dangerously close to punching through the canopy despite its relative slimness, and now that he was really inspecting it, he began to see how it was unlike all his other works. Even though the thought-lights were abnormally present at the base, Bruce could see that they were even more concentrated higher up, where there seemed to see some kind of secondary growth, a large protuberance hanging from its upper reaches. He squinted up at it, trying to figure out what it was. There certainly was nothing else like it up at that level, a sort of offshoot that was attracting a lot of the drifting lights...

In one of those wordless transactions that the brain sometimes makes when it fully realizes a concept all at once, Bruce understood. That thing up there, that not-quite-natural fruit high on the Qoloni-tree... what could cause such a thing? Did it have something to do with Theda -- or her conspicuous absence in his recent life? During the cataclysmic dream-storm so long ago, he was sure that she had been scared off by the Qoloni, as it somehow made its presence known here in this sacred grove-world. There were so many things he didn't know, but at least now he thought he understood what was happening, despite the reason.

Somehow, his fictional work had manifested itself in and around the Deertail Lodge. The side of the mountain became an offshoot, a pocket Universe splitting off from the main, taking Bruce's proximity (plus the Qoloni's own story elements) and dragging part of the core "real" world along with it. This dislocation had caused an avalanche, setting off the chain of events that led to him returning to his dreamworld and reaching this revelation.

But something extraordinary must have happened in the world that birthed it to create such weird fruit. Works of fiction didn't just spin off their own little mini-Universes all over the place... did they? He tried to marry this thought to what he had already learned about the AllStory. Given that concentrations of focused human imagination could combine to create a sort of reality out of fictional people and places, perhaps sometimes those things could infiltrate the commonly-experienced real world. It was like when Bruce had briefly seen one of his own characters outside the movie premiere party. It had been on all the revelers' minds, and they had all been picturing the vision they had just shared in the theater. Could there have been a similarly high concentration of thought being enacted in the Deertail for some reason?

Bruce had an inkling of why. He had seen it in Jimmy Gough's office, and on the face of the injured woman he'd carried out of her hotel room. Both times, he was looking at a woman that looked like Theda... but then again, Theda in turn looked like someone else, didn't she? Was it possible that this woman, the original muse for the story of the Qoloni, was somehow involved in all this? If so, she could be the connecting point of what must have been a colossal intersection of imaginations.

He had to get back to that tiny Universe, the one he could see represented by the ponderous weight hanging high in the Qoloni-tree above him. He could see now that the fault was his, and the people who had been trapped along with him -- although they must have their own parts to play -- had done nothing wrong. He was the one who had attacked them, stabbed one of them. His mind, gradually clearing of fear and panic, began to see how badly he had handled all of this. He had to return to what he had created, and end it.

Bruce moved to the base of the tree, reached out a hand and pressed it against the thin trunk. The thought-lights parted for him like water, altering their courses to spiral up and down uninterrupted. The trunk felt sturdy, unyielding under his hand. Bruce stepped forward and ran his hands across the bark, looking for any little protuberances of subtext he could find. There were enough to give him confidence, and he closed the gap, putting both arms around this manifestation of his creation. The lights enveloped him, giving him space to touch the tree while continuing their unending circling.

Bruce looked up the length of his story, judged what the best route was to reaching the fruit he had unwittingly formed, and started climbing.

-13.3-

Manoj felt that he had been holding together admirably. He had accepted things that were so far beyond his normal worldview that mentally, he was almost unrecognizable to himself as the man who had arrived at the Deertail Lodge with his girlfriend the day before. So he fully accepted it when Sheryl bent down and began listening to the words that Kerren was whispering, something that seemed to be about the blonde woman's mother.

After a few exchanges, Kerren's voice began to fade out, and Manoj found that Sheryl was leaning so far forward to hear that she was obscuring her wife's face with her head. "What was that?" he couldn't help but ask. "What's that about her mother?"

Sheryl listened a little more, her ear all but pressed against Kerren's mouth, and then straightened up a little, looking at the group standing around her, bewildered. "I can't tell. It's something about her mom. Kerren called her last night, actually, right before dinner, just a few hours... before the avalanche. But I don't understand what she's trying to say about her."

Manoj moved forward instinctively, wanting to help. "May I give it a try?" He looked down at Kerren, who was still lightly mouthing words, her eyes closed, speaking from the edge of consciousness, as if dictating a message from some other place.

Kelly nudged his shoulder. "Try it, Noj," she said.

Sheryl instinctively put her hand out over Kerren, palm down, as if by doing so she were putting an impenetrable barrier between the couple and her wife lying on the floor. "No, it should be me." She seemed disheartened, however, her eyes turning toward Kerren with a dismayed look.

Manoj was just about to back off and respect her wishes, when Kelly spoke up. "Let him try, Sheryl. You might not be understanding her because you're expecting to hear *her*. And I don't think that's what's happening here."

Manoj managed to say, "I'm often on long-distance conference calls with horrible connections. Please, Sheryl. Let me try to interpret her." When Sheryl didn't move, he assumed that meant her acquiescence, and carefully knelt down next to Kerren. He adjusted his ill-fitting hat to keep his ear clear, cupped a hand to it, leaned in, and began to focus on nothing other than the sounds that were being whispered through her lips, making no assumptions about their content, only concentrating on faithfully conveying them.

He consciously forced himself to relax, recalling when a colleague would call from across the world, dictating code for a particularly tricky patch that Manoj had to manually type into whatever project he was working on. He opened his mouth and repeated the whispered sounds he heard, barely taking time to think about them:

"Her name was Sarah. She arrived at the Deertail Lodge for the first time twenty-five years ago. I don't need to describe her for you, because you're looking at her right now; apparently, it takes a mother and daughter to look find two people so much alike. But the one thing I can't describe to you is the energy she carried with her. It was like you could tell she was about to enter a room. The air would turn electric, and you would start picking up a vibration that you couldn't quite pinpoint. And then you'd turn around, and she would be just walking in.

"I can't vouch for anyone but myself, but others must have been inspired by her too. They each tried to capture whatever kind of essence she brought, in their own ways, whether it was writing or painting. Jimmy Gough clearly never forgot the blonde woman, and apparently neither did Bruce Casey. Then there were others -- myself included -- that didn't have their kind of creativity. So I did what I could... I visualized her as the constant heroine of the books I read obsessively. I didn't even notice when I had stumbled across the very book that she was the real inspiration for.

"But I'm starting to understand what kind of mental connection something like that can have, especially when there are others nearby that feel the same way. I know how I felt when I saw Kerren yesterday... like time had frozen, that somehow I had gotten old while she stayed exactly the same. Now I'm wondering if that sense of dislocation has anything to do with what has happened to us here tonight.

"I also can't help but wonder if this never would have happened, had Benny and I not both read Casey's book. This thing that's hunting us, this Qoloni, has come to life, right out of those pages, just as this woman who looks like Sarah has walked right back into our lives. I don't know, is it possible that when four people who have been so inspired by the same woman all read the same book...? I can't even begin to figure it out. And honestly, I'm too old and broken and tired right now to try to figure that part out.

"But that's the thing. Even if Benny and me don't know why, at least we know *how*. It's right there; the answer is in the book itself--"

Heads turned at the sound of the storage room's outer door behind hit by something, hard. They all immediately knew it wasn't the Qoloni; its interactions with the physical world had never been anything other than perfectly silent. Manoj's eyes widened, as if waking from a dream.

"Let me in!" a voice called three inches of metal and wood away. "It's coming!" Bruce's voice had lost none of the panicked edge from the last time they had seen him, when he stabbed Glenda and ran bleeding up the stairs. Manoj might have imagined hearing Dale's jaw clench audibly, in between the bangs.

Kerren's voice continued, but with such external noise there was no hope of Manoj relaying the information. There was suddenly movement around him; three people immediately headed for the source of the sound. Kelly was the first into the other room; Carlos was a close second, and Dale, of all people, was the last. He still held Glenda's body in that classic movie pose -- judging by the man's posture, it was clear that she was a burden that he was prepared to carry as long as necessary, and possibly beyond. He was last through the doorway, taking care not to bump Glenda into anything as he did, calm and self-assured.

The banging from the storage room door continued, a hammering of fists that was escalating into a continuous drumroll. Manoj was still bent over Kerren, trying in vain to decipher her continued monologue over the sound of shuffling feet and creaking floorboards, but it was a lost cause. Then came the sound of the door opening, followed by stumbling, then that of the door closing and a hysterical barrage of words from the author: "Thank you God thank you now please hear me out I think I understand what's--" There was a strange whacking sound, followed by a startled yelp, and the thud of a body on the floor.

Then, silence. Manoj could no longer see what was going on in the outer room, but the sudden absence of motion and noise was jarring, so much so that he almost missed the last few words Kerren was saying:

"--the mirror on the cover. Do you understand? It's the *mirror*!"