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.