Engine

DISCLAIMER: The events, characters and entities depicted in this journal are fictional. Any resemblance or similarity to actual events, entities or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Chapter One: Birth

In the mid 1970s a child was born on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. This was a monumental event for several people. The sex of the child was unknown until birth (that’s how people did it in the 70s) so there were two names picked out for the oncoming child. If boy: Erik. If girl: Alisha. The child was a boy so forget about the name Alisha insofar as you can, knowing that the boy may have been named that. The boy, of course, won’t forget this detail. There were baby-girl dresses in the closet at home waiting for him if he had emerged as a female. The dresses were yellow and blue, purple and green, brown and turquoise, and whatever else was popular at the time. Instead, Erik was dressed in almost exclusively blue. Navy Blue coincidentally became his favorite color from his infancy onward.

The child was born in a military hospital. These places were known for their cold sterility and nearly absolute void of emotional warmth. The child’s mother, Gabrielle, was particularly upset by her surroundings. Gabrielle had spent over 40 hours in labor in this place while her husband was drinking in a nearby bar. She suspected that he was smoking with his friends in celebration of the birth. Cigars, at least. This upset her not on principal but because she was jonesing hard for nicotine having been a regular smoker for the past decade or so, from the time she was a younger woman until now, in the military hospital bed. She had gone 40 hours without a cigarette, in labor, and was not very happy to put it mildly.

Of course, smoking was not reviled at the time. She also didn’t always necessarily use a seatbelt when she was driving an automobile. This was the 1970s and Gabrielle went with the flow. She was from a dirt-poor town, literally the daughter of a coal miner, a raven-haired beauty in her youth, popular among her peers in the days of disco. So of course she smoked cigarettes. From the womb, Erik listened to a lot of ABBA. Being encased in a warm sac of fluid, dosed with nicotine, and exposed to the rhythm of disco, he began to dance. Nobody can be sure how the prenatal nicotine withdrawal affected him.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Trollheart

Engine, I'm delighted to see that you've decided to make a journal. I always suspected there were some great ideas in that head of yours, that just needed to be framed properly and could make some great reading, as you've proven here.

I'm hooked man: don't leave it too late before your next update if you can!

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Engine

When, finally, the moment of Erik’s birth arrived, Gabrielle insistently gained the attention of the military hospital staff and forcefully suggested that they retrieve her husband immediately, which they did by phoning the nearby bar.

Once he was reached and informed of the situation, Gabrielle’s husband slammed the phone back onto its receiver, dropped whatever he was smoking and ran out the door without so much as a nod to his friends. Presumably they knew what was up. He rushed to the military hospital, confirmed that what he was told on the phone was true and proceeded to the Waiting Room where, customarily, husbands waited for their children to be born, away from all of the potentially nasty particulars of the birth. He nervously lit another smoke wondering whether the child would be called Erik or Alisha. He really had no preference. Foremost on his mind was that his first offspring was on its way into the harsh light of the world outside of Gabrielle’s womb. He had no idea what happens after a birth and at this point he did not care. He was both afraid and elated. Also kind of drunk.


The birth was not an easy one, which was normal. Gabrielle screamed in pain while the military hospital staff, ignoring her completely, managed to wrest Erik from Gabrielle’s womb headfirst. When the pain ceased, and the baby had clearly been expelled from her body, Gabrielle’s mind allowed her a moment of respite. But it was a short moment because she quickly realized that once her own screaming had stopped, all she heard was silence. She became worried and angry. She was a member of the US military herself and she knew that the only way to get the attention of the brass was to scream. The military doctors had huddled together out of her view and she cried out,


But her cries were ignored as Erik was rushed out of the room and remained so until a military nurse came back and blankly assured her that the child had begun breathing pretty quickly after it exited the womb and was going to be alright. It was a boy.

Gabrielle lay back into the military hospital bed and cried tears that simultaneously expressed joy, relief, anger, and frustration as she stared up at the pale green paint of the military hospital room ceiling wondering why her newborn baby was not in her arms and where the fuck was her husband.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Gabrielle was born in an Appalachian town in the late-1940s. Her father managed to get his shift covered that day and the next. He could hardly decide which was more exciting, the birth of his first child or two days off of working down in that goddamned sooty mine.


Sergio took full advantage of his time off and decided to sleep in. After working for the past sixteen days in the mine, he needed the sleep. The previous night, when his wife went into labor, he made the prudent decision to phone a taxi service and arrange an early-morning pickup of his wife for a ride to the hospital. That night was a very special time for Sergio. He stayed up drinking beers and playing with the television set that he had recently bought for the household. The television was thrilling and even drowned out the moaning of his wife. He was convinced that he had made yet another bold and rewarding decision by buying the thing.

He got the idea to buy the television from one of his co-workers who had convinced him that the purchase, although quite a luxury, would be well worth it because its presence in his home would be proof that he was a true American and that it would provide endless hours of entertainment, which he would need, having a new baby on the way. So Sergio proudly went to the appliance store and, in English, ordered the biggest and best television set that he could afford. He knew that his father would have been proud of him now that he was living in America, in a row house that he could afford on his own without sharing it with another family, fitted it with a television set, and had a baby on the way.

In the early morning of the day of Gabrielle’s birth, Sergio had made sure that a taxicab picked up his wife and took her to the hospital presumably well before the birth would occur. After the taxi came and left with his wife, he sat back down in the plush chair, lit another cigarette, opened another beer and attempted to find something to watch on his beautiful new television set. He found that all he could tune in was high-pitched static but this was still far more interesting than pounding coal so he sat back, took a swig of his beer and a deep inhale of his unfiltered cigarette and relaxed knowing that he had finally made it.

He was in America. He would soon be blessed with an American baby, and he was ready to forget all about his poverty-stricken past in Italy. As he drifted off to sleep while his monstrous television broadcast static, his neighbors pounded on his door in a wild plea to make Sergio cut off the noise so that they could have another hour of blessed sleep before their work shifts began. But he was already dead to the world having finished his beer and letting his cigarette butt fall onto the hardwood floor of his house. His half-conscious mind laughed at the plight of his poor, ignorant neighbors who were so much less fortunate than him.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

As he lay passed out in the plush chair, oblivious to the outside world and pleasantly dreamless, Sergio gradually heard the incessant ringing of his telephone machine. He sat up in a bit of a stupor, noticed a surprisingly high number of empty beer cans surrounding his chair, and a truly horrifying burn mark on his beautiful hardwood floor where his cigarette butt had fallen from his sleepy fingers and put a stain on his castle. He immediately began to calculate the cost of one new floorboard, and the cost of tools required to remove the burnt one and replace it with a new one, including varnish.

Mechanically minded as Sergio was, he found this calculation to be especially difficult, which surprised him because he was used to tuning out all mental disruptions when thinking of such things. And the amount of the previous night’s alcohol intake should not have mattered because it was a negligible amount for him. Then he realized that two things were disrupting his normally linear thought process; His telephone machine was ringing and his television set was hissing at a seemingly much louder sound level than it was when he fell asleep.

In one swift movement, he kicked aside the beer cans that lay in front of his feet, switched off the television and rose to answer the telephone. From the other end of the telephone line came a woman’s voice. It belonged to someone who worked at the local hospital where his wife was giving birth to his baby. The voice told him that something was wrong. This voice continued to babble but as soon as Sergio’s limited understanding of the English language communicated to him that a problem had arisen, he hung up the telephone and ran out the door. He continued to run the approximately five miles to the hospital.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

When Sergio was nine years old a tragedy struck his town. Until then he had lived a happy pastoral life in a small town that sprung from the shadow of Mount Vesuvius. It was normal for him to spend his early childhood days playing by himself because other children lived far away or chose to play games that did not interest him. He preferred to find large plots of land where no vegetation had thrived, and to draw elaborate things in the dirt there.

His drawings are best described as geometrical patterns but Sergio considered them to be pictures. One of his pictures, for instance, consisted of sixteen ovals that he intertwined to make one large perfect circle, or at least as perfect a circle as he could see from his perspective standing approximately one point two meters from the surface of the ground. With sharpened twigs, he dug those ovals deep in the dirt so that they wouldn’t be disturbed by rain and, in fact would be enhanced by the rain because the infrequent, short rainstorms caused his earthy canvasses to solidify a little bit. He felt as though he was carving sculptures in stone.

In the late-1920s, a special tragedy struck Sergio’s town. The nearby mountain had erupted with a spew of intensely hot lava and ran down through its crevices to the place where Sergio had been born and raised.

On that day, he was alone in a field working on his next masterpiece when he heard screams from people who were quickly approaching him. Before he could see anything unusual he smelled something strange and he could not identify the smell. Without any frame of reference, Sergio, to his dying day, remembers this smell as the smell of darkness. This memory was reified by when he looked up to identify the screams and saw an actual darkness covering the sky above him. The sight excited him because he associated it with the sight of a fast-moving rainstorm that would solidify his new dirt-art. But milliseconds later he knew that this was not an event to celebrate.

Almost immediately following his discernment of human screams, a view of a wall came into his view. This wall was built of people who were running towards him. Before he could discern how the wall had been built, he was swept up by it and lifted high into the air. The wall was in motion and it carried it with him.

At first, Sergio had no instinct to hold on to the wall, because it simply carried him. But he soon felt a heat emitting from the wall. And its heat increased to the point that he scaled the wall to the very top and held on for his life, panicked.

At this point Sergio’s mind was overcome with a feeling of numbness. This is how he remembered the feeling. His pre-developed brain was inundated with too many sensations for it to process. The screaming of the wall of people below him nearly deafened him. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut against a flow of intense heat, and the smell of the wall below him was unlike anything he had ever smelled before. It was as if his face was being forced directly above a pot of pork stew so closely that he had to close his eyes to shield them from the heat and the fumes, which were intense enough to burn the flesh of his face and disgust his nose. Somebody had vomited into the cauldron, and for some reason, his head was held forcefully and directly into these sickening fumes as people screamed into his ears from every direction. All of his senses were overwhelmed and he was powerless against whatever held him there.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Sergio physically survived the tragedy that killed each and every one of his loved ones. Some of the people from his town also survived but he did not know them very well. Anyway, he never saw any of them again. He ended up in an orphanage run exclusively by nuns in a town far away from where he was from. Their dialect confused him and he became silent. His new custodians attempted to assure him that his family was now in Heaven, which was a great place to live. Sergio believed it but didn’t care much. He was nine years old and he figured that by the time he reached Heaven, it might be an entirely different place. Perhaps a volcano would have destroyed it. And he would probably be an old man by the time he arrived there so his relatives probably would not even recognize him. He tried to draw pictures in the sand of the ground of his new living quarters but it did not work. Nothing made him happy and the nuns seemed to hate him for this. His soul was broken.


Many sad days passed in Sergio’s life. He did not smile for over two years. His favorite hobby went from drawing pictures in the ground, to sleeping. As far as he knew, he did not even dream while he slept. He struggled with the idea that he may need to live fifty or sixty more years this way, on this land, maybe even in this orphanage. The other boys there ignored him as he did them. When he did pray, Sergio asked God to send him to Heaven as soon as possible.

One day, a girl appeared on the grounds of the orphanage. Since the burning, this was the only female that he had laid eyes on other than the nuns, and the nuns' eyes did not count as female to Sergio. This girl was his age, and he found her outside sitting in the dirt, carving images into the ground in her black dress. He approached her without hesitation and asked her who she was and what she was doing. Without looking up, the girl replied that her name was Malena that she was making pictures. Hearing those words made Sergio’s stomach do a somersault inside of him. Her long wavy black hair obscured her face and touched the dirt where she was making her pictures.

Unsure of what to do or say next, Sergio simply stood in place. Malena continued to carve the ground and told him that he would see her again and that they would visit someplace amazing together one day. The place would be a land full of space to make pictures and they would grow old there together. She then paused, brushed the thick hair out of her face with her hands, looked up at Sergio and smiled. Sergio stared into Malena’s eyes and quietly fell in love for the first time. He was full of questions about what she had told him but could not find any words to speak. He had almost forgotten what a smile looked like.

Before he could collect himself a nun breached his contact with Malena by virtually running towards them, scooping her up in her arms, and carting her away while quietly admonishing Malena for entering the boys’ area of the orphanage. As she was whisked away, Malena continued to smile and look into Sergio’s eyes as if to assure him that what she had told him was definitely the truth. Sergio watched her until she was out of sight and then sat down and continued to work on the pictures that Malena had begun to create, wondering how she knew what she said was true but believing it fully, curious about where they would go.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

As he sat nervously smoking in the waiting room, Dean, Gabrielle’s husband and the father of Erik, held his composure as best he could. He did not pace or sweat, or awkwardly ramble about the pleasures of fatherhood like some of the other men in the room with him. He assumed that they were enlisted men, not officers like him, which explained their lack of cool. Rather than blather like a fool, he thumbed through a magazine and pretended to read about the Guatemalan Civil War, a topic that normally would have intrigued him greatly, being a military man who never actually wanted to be a member of the US military, but who had demonstrated a remarkable talent for understanding political science and foreign policy as a young man.

Indeed, when it came time for him to finish his post-graduate education he saw that he had no choice but to either enter Officer Training School, or wait to be drafted into the ranks of the dullards who were sent to the front lines to sweat in front of the enemy as heavily as these guys in the waiting room with him were doing. He had heard of the option to burn his draft card and flee the country, or join the Peace Corps, or become a “conscientious objector” of the Vietnam conflict but all of these options seemed, to him, about as enticing as getting shot in the knee and spending the next few years in a Viet Cong POW camp. So he became an officer of the US Air Force. After all, he had loved aircraft since he was a small child so why not?


When, finally, he was called into a room to view his child, he abruptly stamped out his cigarette and forcefully brushed past the other men in the waiting room. His crying baby was wrapped in a blue blanket so he knew that this was Erik, his son. As he held Erik he was overcome with a joy that he had not felt before but had heard would happen so he was prepared for it. One detail that he was not prepared for was the ache that began to form in his facial muscles. As it turns out, large grins sustained for several minutes caused this. Having been born and raised in Southern California, he had heard of the “perma-grin” that was suffered by users of marijuana and LSD. Standing there in a military hospital room, holding his newborn son, and grinning like an idiot, Dean felt that he understood why the burnouts smiled so much and, possibly, why they consumed drugs in the first place. They wanted this joy.


After a short time of being left in peace to hold his baby, a military doctor approached Dean and told him that he needed a word. Dean’s smile quickly faded and he steeled himself against whatever bad news the military was going to tell him this time. They never needed a word if they had good news. That kind of thing was sent by mail. The doctor told him that Erik was perfectly healthy and that he could go home with Dean but that there was a small problem with Gabrielle and that she would need to remain in the military hospital for several days at least, for observation. Dean did not ask what the problem was because he knew that it was uterine or cervical or some other female thing because Gabrielle had suffered at least two miscarriages before the birth of this boy that he now held in his arms. He knew that if she were in serious danger he would have been told outright because one thing the military did efficiently was dole out horrible news. They wanted to get that kind of thing over with asap, so Dean trusted that whatever was wrong with her was minor and could be dealt with between her and the doctors for now. After all, Gabrielle was an Army nurse so she certainly would know what to do with the information better than he could. So he focused on going to her and sharing the good news that Erik had been born and he was healthy.


As he approached Gabrielle’s bed she immediately perked up but he could see the final traces of the dark stare that she had been giving the ceiling. He knew that look, and he always did everything possible to make it stop, or at least avoid it. He placed Erik in her arms and Gabrielle glowed in a way that Dean had not seen before. He wondered if the joy that he felt just minutes ago could rival hers and he doubted it. He sat down next to her and glowed with her for maybe hours, he didn’t notice how much time had passed before a nurse entered the room and told them that they needed to run some tests on Gabrielle soon. Upon hearing this, both Dean's and Gabrielle’s glows faded quickly. He had not yet told her that she would need to stay and that Erik was going home with him. He did not know for how long. Gabrielle cried. Dean assured her that it was nothing serious and that he would bring Erik back to her early the next day. Through her tears, Gabrielle nodded and handed Erik back to Dean. He kissed her forehead, told her he loved her and tried to turn and leave before he caught a glimpse of the dark look that he knew would quickly overpower all of her facial features. He didn’t turn quickly enough though. She caught him and gave him a small dose of her cold, angry darkness before he was able to avert his eyes.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

Time passed and Sergio grew. Physically he had outgrown most of the other boys in the orphanage but this did not stop their taunts. He suffered the verbal abuse that occasionally turned to physical beatings. It did not bother him. He recalled the days of his childhood when tears ran from his eyes and he tasted them. They were salty. As years went by he found that tears forgot to fall from his eyes. Now he only tasted the saline of his own blood, which was mixed with a metallic flavor. When blood fell from his nose he licked his lips and tasted it. The sensation was not pleasant or unpleasant; rather it gave him physical strength.

He had grown accustomed to routine trimmings of his hair by the nuns and he began to refuse them. In his early teens Sergio grew much taller than the nuns and he found that they could no longer control him. They made him kneel before God and they smashed his knuckles with their flimsy sticks. He bled but was not moved. He would not pray for forgiveness and he took his punishment. When the nuns tried to cut his hair he turned away and refused their scissors. This forced them to strip his back and flay it but Sergio would not accept their haircutting attempts. He recalled his burned village and the older boys there who let their hair grow long, obscuring their eyes and their intentions, and he was determined to let his grow as such. He would not allow the nuns to see what his eyes revealed.

At a young age Sergio found his sense of irony as the nuns and the other boys in the orphanage treated him with a contempt that he did not deserve and that they all shared. He was constantly reminded that he had no family, was without a past, and worthy of no future. This made Sergio laugh as he saw who delivered this mockery. Celibate nuns and orphans. He hated them and restrained his urge to hurt them.


Years passed like this. Sergio suffered them graciously until he was called upon by God to change his life. It was in the chapel when he felt it, when he knew that he would leave. As one of the nuns smashed his knuckles with a switch as they had for years, Sergio stood. The nun screamed at him that The Lord commands him to sit and take his place. But Sergio did not sit down, no, he looked down at the nun and saw fear in the sister’s eyes. He wondered briefly why he had not seen it before and what would become of him. Then he turned and walked out of the classroom, out of the chapel, and out of the orphanage walls.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

Engine

The baby with the surprisingly thick black hair arrived at the orphanage’s doorstep completely unannounced, which was not a rare occurrence. It was mostly status quo for the area’s facilities in the dawning years of the 20th century. So, naturally, when the girl arrived, the nuns took her in without hesitation. Some of them were a bit frightened by the girl. Her large nearly black eyes never broke their gaze and her hair… how could it be so thick at such an early age? It’s thick waves needed daily brushing to prevent unmanageable tangles and this was not an easy task. Her caretakers often needed to run brushes over the girl’s scalp with so much force that surely it caused pain. But the harder the strokes, the happier the girl seemed. Whenever a brushstroke required a hard pull that was sure to bring tears to the girl’s eyes, she only looked deeply into the nanny nuns’ eyes and smiled widely, appearing to be on the verge of laughter. There was something in that grin, hair, and unwavering stare that did not sit well with some of the sisters. It frightened some to the point that rumors circulated concerning the possibly unholy nature of this little girl. Others thought these rumors ridiculous and superstitious. Perhaps for these reasons, she was given the name Magdalena, and the more sympathetic nuns saw to it that she was officially known by that name’s abbreviated form: Malena.


As Malena grew older her natural beauty and intelligence became apparent, and in chapel she was a favored pupil who never caused any trouble and excelled greatly at her studies. She preferred to be alone and did not play games with the other girls. She chose to sit at her desk and draw pictures during any and all of the free time that she was allowed. Her drawings were on a different level than the drawings of other children. Not only were they free from common depictions of flowers, friends, chapels, and other imagery that was available to her everyday senses. Instead, she drew only what can be called symbols. And not the Catholic symbols that were in her field of view daily, everywhere she went. They were symbols that none of the nuns had ever seen before. The more superstitious of the sisterhood were incredibly suspicious of the origins of the Malena’s symbology. Some openly complained that they were demonic, or worse. But the masters did not take heed. Malena was an intelligent, mostly obedient child, and they saw no need to stifle her creativity or talent so long as it did not cause disruptions among the other children.


In her teens, Malena blossomed into a beauty of a young woman that was unparalleled at her institution. The thick waves of her hair fell cleanly down her back, as they were too time consuming to braid, and too thick to tuck into her headscarf. She grew taller than nearly all of the sisters and she was forced to wear an oversized frock, because the protrusions of her breasts, hips, and calves from clothing in her size was considered distracting and not-at-all pious even by the more liberal nuns. One day, at age sixteen, Malena was sitting in her classroom, Bible open in front of her, when one of the suspicious nuns stormed into the room and angrily dropped a pile of dozens of Malena’s drawings on the desk of the presiding sister. The drawings were eerily perfect depictions of one large circle, evenly flanked by seven smaller perfect circles. Inside the larger circle was a clear, nearly photorealistic drawing of a newborn baby with a peaceful look upon its face and large dark eyes. This image shocked everybody who saw it and Malena was asked sharply what it meant. She replied that it was a child that she saw in her mind. As for the circles, she simply found that they framed the child beautifully. Late that same night, Malena was awoken from her sleep and given a satchel with a small amount of money, some clothing, and a carved wooden crucifix. Malena simply stared at the sisters who roused her. Nothing was said as she was hastily dressed and whisked outside and into a carriage driven by a man wearing a low brimmed hat that obscured his features. He did not respond to Malena when she asked him where she was being taken so she sat back and watched the sunrise, and the countryside roll by her at a quicker pace than she had ever seen. The carriage arrived in a small town square, paved with cobblestone and surrounded by many humble buildings. Malena sat on a nearby bench, examining the contents of her satchel wondering what she should do next. As the afternoon sun shone above her and people had begun to stare at her as they walked by, Malena decided that she must choose a direction in which to walk. Before she stood to go, she pulled the wooden crucifix from her satchel and laid it on the bench, for she did not know how long she would walk and found the thing to be unnecessarily heavy.

__________________

Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.