I am Alive and I am Real

This story has been published in a magazine (Ulitsa) in Russian translation, but not yet in the original English, which appears here. Permission is granted to make and distribute complete verbatim electronic copies for non-commercial purposes provided this permission notice is preserved on all copies. All other rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to RSCohen@uic.edu or snail mail to Rex Sexton, 100 W. Chestnut St., Chicago, IL 60610.

Bio of Rex Sexton and synopsis of the novel Desert Flower

Desert Flower, excerpt from novel by Rex Sexton

Fiction and Painting of Rex Sexton on CD includes his novel Desert Flower, fvie short stories, poems/songs and images of 20 of his paintings, plus classic works of fiction by some of his favorite authors. His fiction introduces you to worlds that outwardly seem familiar, but that operate in accord with their own eerie rules and expectations. Once you get caught up in the characters, reading one of these tales is like watching your own recurrent nightmare -- you can't stop reading, and you'll never forget. Review in Large Print Reviews

"Light so radiant,

he could not see.

Only light,

yet light

everywhere..."

He was alone on the train. The empty car, ablaze with light, seemed as ephemeral as mist as it streaked across the night. His head bowed, his body bent forward, he sat in the back in a cold sweat, light headed and panic stricken. He could not yet determine whether he was awake or still asleep. Inside his head, the outside world was a disparity of shapes which often shifted into nightmare.

"If this is the way it is?" he shuddered.

The thickets and rivers and ravines flew wildly by him, like waving arms menacing his night trip to tomorrow. The ghost-white winter landscapes -- white hills, white valleys, white fields and woods -- were as much an unreality as his blazing dream of radiance. He tested his fingers against the knife blade in his pocket to see if he was dreaming.

"I am a veteran of Viet Nam."

He looked down at the poem which he found lying on his lap.

"name of Michael Lonigan."

He ran his bloody fingers through his sweat matted hair.

"They left me for dead,

with a bullet in my head.

But it was only a gag,

and I woke up in the morning

in a body bag."

If this is the way it is?" he shuddered.

There had been no mass for the dead in the parish beside the river for his father, nor had there been any long procession, such as the one which he stood watching, to take his father to his grave. His father had not died, Lonigan reflected, at least not in any tangible sense. He had been lost, forgotten. When he wandered away, that day, a dozen or so years ago, he simply had ceased to be. He had become a ghost like all the other living ghosts who inhabit a no man's land of migrant work and empty dreams in dollar rooms across the country. In some far city, Lonigan know, or in some river town where his work might take him, it would be the barmen and the beggars who might have overlooked his father's final rest - which would have been in a pine box and in a potter's field beneath an unmarked grave, and any mourners who might have gathered could only have done so out of curiosity. While Lonigan doubted god, and while he had never really known his father, he knew that no man, however impoverished, and for whatever reason, should have to live like that or die as he did.

The sleek black cars continued to roll softly past him along the parkway, down the hill, around the bend of the silent boulevard, beneath the lightly falling snow. It was a banker's burial and nothing less by the looks of it. Even as he waited a crowd of pedestrians began to gather along the walks. White Rolls and gray Mercedes, amidst the cavalcade of glossy cars the funeral limousines were least impressive. Across the road a crew of camera men were filming footage of the regal drive: of the women who were bundled in their bulky furs, and of the men in dark coats and hats. Lonigan found himself as awed by the ostentation as the crowds along the street seemed to be by the amassing of such wealth. The old fellow had failed even at that. Lonigan mused, even at that he had lost out. He recalled the lame joke about the last ride and how, if only in the end, everyone went out in style. From the cradle to the grave, his father had known little else but the lot of the shanty Irish.

The cathedral bells continued to toll their dull lament as Lonigan turned on his heel and headed up the parkway. The collar of his greatcoat was gathered against the cold, and his hands were pressed deep in its pockets. He shifted the weight of his duffle bag uneasily as the last of the big cars wheeled out of the drive and the crowds began to part before him. Lonigan walked slowly and he paused often. All about him the smoke from innumerable chimneys rose in could-like colonnades which curled across the sky, while along the lanes which wandered between the cherry dark buildings the incessant swirl of the silver eddies fashioned visions in the snow. He moved form the red brick of Beacon Hill past the coffee colored buildings of Boston's few fashionable streets, between the rotting mansions of the West End and around the negro tenements at the bottom of the Combat Zone. There had been a time when the crumbling courtyards of the Back Bay had been the only bit of beauty left between South Boston and the slums. They seemed a roofless prison now. Like all the remnants of his early life, they seemed to rest within their own reality, which lay as dark against the shifting snowfall as any dark shapes of a dream.

It was odd that he should end up there after all, Lonigan brooded as he walked. It was as if the dream, which had been a bad one, belonged to a winter locked world which Lonigan no longer could relate to. The bridge was like a gateway to that dream, and the shabby figures that bundled by him were like the keepers of the nightmare; and even as Lonigan drew nearer to the bridge which linked the Back Bay to South Boston, he had the uncanny sensation that even his memories were unreal. The past was a mist of make believe; the shadows of his past seemed to cheat across the tenements under the cover of the snow. They were memories of violence and confusion, of poverty and crime, alien to him now, bereft of shape or meaning, yet ominous nonetheless. It was even more rare than ironic that he should reminisce about his father, Lonigan reflected. He had forgiven the gaunt man everything, he even thought that he understood him, finally, but he felt betrayed by him as well; and all that Lonigan really remembered about his early years in Irishtown was the evening of his mother's death, his father's disappearance, the prison of the poor. "You're on your own from now on lad," were the last words his father had spoke to him, "for I will have no part of you." He cursed when he drank, Lonigan remembered, or at least he had that last time, but for the most part his father had been silent. But, as always, the image of his father remained vague, and even faintly bitter for him, and he felt no binding presence in it. He found no sense of company in any of his recollections of either his family or his past.

It was a dull windy day and, despite the whiteness of the falling snow, there was a gray cast across the city which seemed to accent the solemnity of the cathedral bells and the dark mood of the morning. The steeple bells had been tolling for the banker clear across the town. They became fainter the farther Lonigan moved form the center of the city, and they nearly vanished altogether amidst the rubble of the slums. Yet even from here Lonigan could hear them faintly ringing across the Commons, and in the distance, beyond the Commons, from the heights of South Boston's slender bridge, Lonigan could see the funeral train still winding its way across the city. The camera crew was fast behind it. Here and there, he caught a glimpse of the miniature media photographers clicking pictures of the drive. While Lonigan had always known that Boston was a bedlam for the poor, he now found himself wondering if it was all that much more stately for the starched staid rich. Perhaps, it wasn't much worse, after all, to die alone and of little consequence, as his father had, Lonigan was musing, than it was to be hounded to your grave. But in the back of his mind, Lonigan knew that he had to get some money up, and quickly too, how did not matter, or he would be locked inside this dream forever.

Irishtown was covered with snow. IT came in great flurries off the ocean, whorling with the north wind: a satin shroud descending as far as he could see. Behind the swift and seemingly random criss-crossing of the steep and shabby streets of South Boston lay an old and crowded corner of the city which had managed to seal itself way form the rest of mankind. Across the hills, the rows of working class houses formed a barricade of white against the crescent of the by. From the bridge, they looked like castles in the air, shadowy but unbroken, asleep above the sea. Beyond them, the great ships were ghostly silhouettes in the harbor; and the harbor itself seemed to be asleep within a mystic ring.

They were all asleep, Lonigan brooded as he walked. Lonigan rested at the base of the bridge and then moved quietly up the street. No life or youth stirred in him now, no plans or dreams or deep regrets; yet as he made his way across the shambles of South Boston, bleak visions of his early life began to shift before his eyes. He seemed to hear the shouts of his playmates in the snow, and event he cadence of his mother's voice seemed to call him across the wind. He remembered all the sullen faces of his schoolfellows: first as they had been when they were children of the tenements, and then, in the end, as he last had seen them, brutal, even bewildered, looking ahead to war. They were asleep beneath the shadow of the war, Lonigan reflected; they were at rest within the silence of the storm; they had escaped the sundry prisons of their early lives for an endless world of dream. Lonigan could feel them close behind him in the storm. They were a presence which not only was part of him but they were a fate which was to be.

Lonigan kept tot he cover of the hoardings along the river, a dark stiff figure of a solider. He moved amidst the small grubby pubs, and around the topling Irish tenements, past the shop fronts which were filled with such stuff as only the poor would buy, down illicit streets, past shacks and shanties, between the asylum and the school, around a towering church which loomed above the labyrinth. At a gaunt gray building, Lonigan slipped in from the cold. He moved carefully down a darkened corridor and then he quietly climbed the stairs. Now Lonigan no longer could elide the dream, nor could he flee the phantom shapes behind him. He was somewhere in his childhood below an altar beneath a blazing cross. He was burning up with fever as he ascended and there was something queer about the dark. He was lost amidst a night of war. He rose on rolling hills above barren plains toward ragged bluffs which mounted in the night. He was in between somewhere and somewhere else. He was moving toward an enemy village which never was but which must have been. From somewhere in this darkness came the voices of the dead. Their whispers along the passageways made him lonely and afraid. It was coming on again. Lonigan chattered to himself. He would have to relive his death again.

Lonigan followed the voices to the top of the stairs, and then he moved across the corridor to a small whitewashed room. Like the rest of the building the garret was stifling and dark, but in the center of the room there was a window upon the bay, and the queer illumination from the storm outside the window cut a shaft across the garret filled with dazzling light. Lonigan laid his duffle bag at the foot of the bed. He moved carefully toward the chair beside the table beneath the window. the strident voices stopped abruptly as he sat, the whirlwind rested, and yet the children continued to flurry past him in the snow. Lonigan could see him in the distance, across the crescent of the harbor. They chased one another around the moorings which lined the water. They mingled with the mists which moved across the sea. To go on to go on for what? Lonigan chattered to himself. To go on to go on for nothing?

The light from the window made strange patterns around the room, silvery constellations, hazy and hypnotic. Lonigan searched his pockets for a cigarette and made an effort not to fall asleep. He sat and he smoked and he watched the phantom figures with a hostile silence. Anger and emptiness ran through him as he sat. Sorrow and despair were with him too, but it was the terror that he felt toward the shadows of the dead which made the room close in around him like a coffin, and made the past seem to be a part of his inevitable waking dream. he must not fall asleep. Lonigan muttered to himself. He must make an effort not to fall asleep.

It was cold in the room and yet the air seemed hot to breathe. It was cold in the room, yet he felt feverish and enflamed. Lonigan took a notebook from his greatcoat and laid its contents across the table. He ran a hand over the blinding pages and made an effort not to fall asleep. The rafters in the attic were rotting at their stanchions, and the rubbish which had been piled on every landing of the tenement brought up the rank scents of the winter to the garret along with the acrid taste of lye. Lonigan tried to read the words but the writing kept eluding him. He tried to see the war in what was written, but his mind was given over to the silence of the winter, tot he ghost shapes along the harbor, and tot he tolling of the bells. He had forgotten how shoddy the houses were long the waterfront. He had forgotten how crowded the buildings were beside the river, and how mean had been those early years for both his family and himself. the shabby streets which lay below him ran like labyrinths through some interminable blind. They were bleak, and they were lonely, and despite the fairyland of falling snow, as always, they filled him with a sense of shame. It was a shame which was born from the denial which they stood for, and from a betrayal which Lonigan knew not only touched upon his own dreams but upon an American dream as well. the banker would be buried by now in some little cemetery in the suburbs. Lonigan brooded as he watched. He felt a peculiar sense of foreboding in that. He found himself reflecting, once again, upon the shortness and absurdity of individual lives, upon the loss and the isolation of individual existences.

Lonigan removed his shoes and moved from the table to the bed. He hung his greatcoat across a rafter and then lay back atop the blankets. The walk from the train had taken everything out of him. the shadows of his past, which were buried by the war, began to surface in some former self that mingled oddly in his mind with his memories of Irishtown. Through his fever and his delirium, he could vaguely feel the effects of the narcotics wearing off. The feeling was a sensation of falling, and with the falling the dull pain had come back into his lungs and it took an effort just to breathe. First you were nothing, and then you were something, and then in the end you were nothing again. Lonigan chattered to himself. You were less than nothing for you were a nevermore. Lonigan remembered all the roads which traveled nowhere. He recounted all the steps which led to nothing. Although he tried not to fall asleep, he know that he would have to sleep, for it was only in sleep that he could escape the silence of the winter. It was only in sleep that he could forget the death knell for the banker, the absence of his father. It was only in sleep that he could elude the gloomy room and shut out the tiny lives that beckoned beyond the white frame of the window. But in sleep lay death and the agony of dying. In sleep the nightmare war would meet him, and with the coming of the war the bombing and the breathing and the beating of machines would break the quiet of a jungle camp beside a village which had never existed.

No one had fought for this. Lonigan chattered to himself. No one had killed for this and no one had died for this.

"We were on patrol." Lonigan ran a hand through his tangled hair. Night had fallen. He sat near the darkened window, bundled up against the cold, and read his war notes by the light of a table lamp. Outside the snow was drifting through the streets. "We were looking for snipers, moving in a single file through the jungle, trying to cover one another's back."

He had slept all day, and late into the night. In his dream, the banker had come to visit him in the garret. He had been accompanied by the entire entourage from his funeral procession -- beautiful women glittering with jewelry, affluent looking men. They were bearing gifts for their local hero, food, cigarettes, drugs, money. The banker looked like Uncle Sam. They had come to welcome Lonigan home from the war.

"Dawn was breaking. There was a glow in the sky, although it still was relatively dark in the thickets. Through a break in the trees we could see the silhouette of a village, and beyond it ragged bluffs emerging form the night. WE moved slowly, quietly, cautiously forward, crouching low in the tall grass as we reached that clearing. AT a signal from our leader we began to fan out.

"Suddenly, there was an explosion, and then another. The next thing I knew I had been flung to the ground. My face smashed into the earth so violently that my nose was pushed back into my skull. There were more explosions. I could hear the rat-tat-tat of our rifle fire in response. I was on my knees, pressing down on my hands, my fingers digging into the dirt. My head was a helmet of blood, blood was dripping down my face and neck, pouring into a puddle on the he ground before me.

"I remember trying to rise, trying to push myself to my feet. But a great volume of weight seemed to be pressing down upon me. I tried to lift this mysterious weight, straining with a tremendous muscular effort to thrust it off me.

"My body sailed up into the cosmos -- not my body, but a me, somehow, without my body -- an invisible me, in a transparent body, as if I was encased in a vapor. Below me, in the clearing, I could see my body, as well as the bodies of my friends -- mere shells amidst the smoke of war. they looked small, sad, foolish, like so many toppled toy soldiers. My heart went out to them and to all the misbegotten among mankind.

"But I had little time to grieve, or to feel remorse, or to reflect upon the carnage of humankind. Already, I belonged to another realm. Lighter than air, I lofted into nothingness. I felt liberated, entirely free. I was floating in a darkness as soft as velvet -- purified, simplified, transmuted. A marvelous voluptuousness enveloped me. In this lush, luxuriant, transcendent state, there was no separation between the rarified sensual rapture that I felt, or the serenity of my soul, or the clarity of my mind. all that lay below me seemed never to have been at all. It was mere illusion, pure make-believe. I had never felt more gloriously alive.

"And then the light came flooding in -- light so radiant it was beyond belief: golden, glistening, incandescent hues of warmth and love."

Since his discharge, a year ago, Lonigan had discovered numerous books and articles which echoed his "life after life" experience: books by Raymond moody, Kubla-Ross. But these testimonies and presentations did not begin to capture the power of the experience. He had been a part of the everything, the all in all: brilliant, luminous. Nor did these books in any way allude to the experiences which, for Lonigan, were abruptly to follow.

"I awoke in a military hospital bed. One of the squad members had managed to send off a flare to alert a Med-Vac unit which was circling in the distance. The choppers swooped in. They checked us, bagged us, and then fought their way out. Somewhere long the flight back, one of the crew members discovered that, somehow, I had come back to life."

Shell shocked, shattered, burning with fever and backed by pain -- in the midst of nightmares, seizures, fits and hallucinations -- Lonigan began to become aware that while he had come back to life he had come back altered. Strange powers were taking possession of him. He had more out of body experiences, snatches of telepathy, heightened visual and auditory sensations --and worst of all through dreams, reveries, moments of meditation, the terrible premonitions began flooding his consciousness -- jolting disturbing visions of the future.

"I knew who would live and who would die in the MASH tent in which I lay. I knew who would lose a limb and who would go home in tact. I could vividly foresee these things. And more terrible yet, I knew which among the helicopter units -- the men who went out each day to retrieve the wounded from the fields of battle -- men who I came to know quite intimately as I began to recover and move about the compound -- I knew which of these crews would be shot down in their missions, and which men among them, if they did return, would come back in bags themselves, or else maimed or mutilated. So while my wounds were healing rapidly, at least my physical wounds, another deeper wound was beginning to open up inside me -- a wound which no clinician or clergyman in the camp could mend. it was an existential wound, and each day it widened, as I was forced to witness the dehumanizing spectacle of lives lived out, unwitttingly, under the direct manipulation of some immense and implacable exterior will."

Lonigan sat back in the chair and closed his eyes.

Fatalism, mysticism, war, poverty, drugs --he felt that great mysterious weight that he had felt in the war pressing down on him, burying him, smothering him.

This really can't be happening. Lonigan muttered to himself. This is madness.

Bio of Rex Sexton and synopsis of the novel Desert Flower
Surrealist paintings by Rex Sexton
Desert Flower, excerpt from novel by Rex Sexton

Fiction and Painting of Rex Sexton on CD includes his novel Desert Flower, fvie short stories, poems/songs and images of 20 of his paintings, plus classic works of fiction by some of his favorite authors. His fiction introduces you to worlds that outwardly seem familiar, but that operate in accord with their own eerie rules and expectations. Once you get caught up in the characters, reading one of these tales is like watching your own recurrent nightmare -- you can't stop reading, and you'll never forget. Review in Large Print Reviews

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