Editor’s Note: I saw this piece from Marlow over the weekend. I had just finished another pass on “The Seventy Days” book about the recent craziness

Amazon tells me they may approve it for release tomorrow. I will let you know how that goes. In the meantime, what follows is something that struck me hard. I was tempted to write about how this merry country wound up with a first-class National Security State and speech control, but that can wait a day or two. What Marlow describes is what many of us who spent time in the changing system felt as the events unfilled. More on that when we get to it. In the meantime, Marlow sums things up pretty nicely in his Coastal Empire.

– Vic

Author’s Note: I have worked this piece for many months trying to get the feel right. It’s time to let it go and move on.

– Marlow

Observant

At the dark waking hour during our middle plague time days, we would rise, enter the bathroom and gaze through a window at our three-tiered garden fountain’s splashings that looked like diamonds due to the pencil beam LCD lighting. We were not exactly young nor doddering, dressed in grey night clothes, tall, dark-haired, unplump, fully headed of uncolored hair, and carried our meager prescription meds in our hands as we padded downstairs for our morning coffees and feeding of the house mistress and black cat, Angel.

My unshaven face was as always since the mid-60s adorned with rimless granny-style eyeglasses. I never fully left that era with its supernatural pretensions. My other and better — a slim, younger woman with long tousled reddish and grey streaked hair with her red woolen robe — was wearing her slippers.

Once seated in our white leather recliners in the barely sunlit kitchen, we with coffee in hand looked up at the light bulbed BAR sign, whose lights went off precisely at its preset time of 8 PM the prior night regrettably informing us Happy Hour was a long way off until 5 PM the coming day.

Ah, yes, we noted the first oddity of our new “normal” mornings in an otherwise dreadful time. There was not a single person to be seen or heard as daylight strengthened, not only out on the sidewalk but on our Avenue — one of the major east west connectors across Forsyth Park in the old part of town.

No one came out under the city’s century old Spanish Mossed live oak trees, no one sat on park or square benches as the City had removed them, so early morning walks were on empty streets, sidewalks and through public gathering spaces.

Having finished drinking her java, W would prepare for her morning walk and I’d take up my writing tablet.

Months later came a second but new oddity, touching me alone. I suddenly stopped my hiccupping after eating my morning toast — bread in all its forms has afflicted me with these temporary interruptions for more than a half century, my heart skipped a beat, as I looked around in puzzlement, not understanding what had frightened me so. I thought “What’s the hell’s the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart’s acting up . . . I’m overworked (. . . no, you’re retired, dummy). Maybe it’s time to take some calming brown liquid elixir from Kentucky ( . . . no, W’d hear the ice clink the bottom of the glass and cut that off at the pass) . . . ”

Yet here was the sweltering fall air thickening out in the garden in front of me, and a shimmering almost transparent person with an odd artsy look spun himself out of it. A peaked florescent dye job and haircut glammed his smallish head, a short dark dinner jacket from one of the many secondhand stores that the local art and design school students favored accentuated one of our times ever meme-y t-shirts from social media online sales sites, along with nice slacks and designer shoes finished the look of this 6 foot 2-ish tall, thin, but, with a kindly face, that hid a jeering mind and attitude towards what we were doing.

I was not just unaccustomed to extraordinary phenomena but was a strong disbeliever in such for the most part. Screwing up my slumpy posture straight, I rubbed my eyes clear of any residual sleepiness and, it was, and, goddammit, the large garden gnome dissolved, vanished, and went poof.

It was garden variety hallucination I kept assuring myself.

“Well, sh*t . . .” muttered I with my laptop no longer tapping the day’s writing on with that conversation interrupted by my stuttering endlessly, “Jesus H Christ.”

Had I just called forth some virgin-birthed garden apparition?

I decided it was just a figment and after another cup of coffee my writing restarted.

Then late the next morning, he appeared again as I was in the garden a bit after W went out the front door towards the park.

He was dressed much the same and now upon closer inspection looked to be well over seventy despite the make-up. Upon closer inspection, his shoes’ well shined leather uppers hid well-worn heels and soles. He was well travelled. Having passed by our front porch inside our gated wrought iron fence, he suddenly sat down on our small front bench on the garden’s main cobbled path, to gaze around at W’s creation that was rectangularly framed by the jasmine vined front archway. It was obvious that he was seeing the place for the first time and that it interested him. He apprised the garden’s upper geometry before resting his glance at the parterres’ textures and colors.

At once a conversation was struck up, it was obvious he knew far more than he should about us and our pasts. The very long ago and personal. Insider kind of stuff.

“Listen here, Marlow.” I said to myself in a whisper, “Dude’s no tourist. A spy, maybe? This stranger’s fool routine like his dress is lame.”

I stopped my inner dialogue and shuffling old sailor gait, when the smell of the garden’s peach colored floribunda roses foretold a bad day, because this smell had been an ancient sign of a nearby corpse being readied for burial.

It mingled with the smell of old leather and sweat exuding from the stranger.

“Ye gods . . .” I mumbled as my head began to ache. Through the arch I could see the fountain spray lightly misting the roses and adjacent parterres’ flowers. I spied a cast iron chair off to the side of the fountain and, since there was no remedy for this pain, I sat down in the misting.

Early on, I offered him something to eat and drink. He refused even a glass of wine. That raised concerns. I have found that there is something amiss if not foul about men who avoid wine during good conversation. People like that are either seriously off or they don’t care for their fellow men.

I felt a predatory presence in him, like a cannibal who lovingly cradles his victim as he digs around for his heart. He seemed to like conversing with his. Was he an intimate agent of death?

My garden guest continued his chatter.

“ . . . well, there, it’s all but over,” he said, glancing benevolently my way, “and we should be extremely glad. I’d advise you, Marlow, to leave your home for a while and go for a stroll in the parks and squares. A storm will come, but it will pass quickly . . . ”

How he knew I had only recently been sequestering myself in our house I could not fathom.

I was close to choking on my desire to expose this stranger, and, odd as it was, an anticipation of something that enjoyable was born in me. It happens that way when one as weirdly prescient as he could be easily seen as simply desirous to be the center of attention or sensational. His deception was based on our nouveau digital ways that overvalued the aesthetic above the ethical.

I scoured him again with my eyes and ears. Dark-haired. Right eye black, left – for some reason – bottomless. Dark eyebrows, but one a bit higher than the other. In short, an expressionless stranger.

I knew from long ago that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes — never. His blank eyes were empty of any such significance. Even my sudden questions did not cause his orbs to flinch when he avoided the easy truth, while he spoke quite convincingly absolute rubbish. Nary a facial wrinkle or iris narrowing betrayed the bottom of his soul when I cast my snares.

He turned, narrowing his eyes as the sun came out from behind the maples, “Later on, towards evening, another stroll would do you good. You are too shut in and have definitively lost confidence. You must agree, one can’t place all one’s affection on a cat. Your life is impoverished, Marlow.”

Then in a cracked, hoarse voice, I grumbled in guttural French, “What the f*ck, my good man?”

“Please tell me that you are a spy or a magician. Admit it.” I continued in French.

“No, Marlow, I am neither.” he replied in French, almost delighted by my reaction to his fluency and my name.

I scowled deeply.

“How did you know I have an indoor cat that never seeks the windows, let alone, the outdoors?”

“It’s very simple,” he replied in French. “You were moving your hand in the air” — as he repeated my smallest of gestures — “as if you wanted to stroke a small something.”

“But of course.” I softly hissed.

“Very well, then, if you want me to keep it a secret, I will do so. It has no direct bearing on you or your health during these plague times.”

Thus, unknown to me at the time, had my lessons in advanced observation begun in earnest.

In the garden a north wind gust blew in the visitor’s face and flung a few specks of garden path grit in his empty eyes, as if cautioning him. A window on the second floor of the house next door slammed down so hard the glass nearly broke, and the tops of the maples on our tree lawn rustled alarmingly. It became cooler.

He rubbed his eyes and saw a yellow-bellied storm cloud creeping low over the city from due north. Both of us looked up when we heard a distant rumbling.

It felt like he was milking me until I mooed.

Overseeing these strange doings was our 140-year-old, two-storied, creamed-coffee-colored house that stood just beyond the city’s main park in the depths of W’s multi-roomed garden, separated from the sidewalk by an old, vined fence. The small front porch was discretely decorated in multi-hued gingerbread and in front of it were more peach-colored roses.

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The sun had not yet had time to approach its highest point when its rose aroma producing power would pinnacle. It was quiet in the garden. And the specter disappeared once again as the birds waiting in the trees for a drink and those splashing about in the fountain suddenly flew away.

I have not seen him since.

His absence like his presence I confess still astonishes me.

After he vanished that second time, I laid down that afternoon on our deep wine-colored, velvet sofa and fell asleep without turning out the lights or drawing the curtains. I was awakened by the feeling that an octopus was in the room with me. Groping about, I managed to find my glasses and reorient myself. The tic-toc’ing wall clock showed two o’clock. I wasn’t falling ill nor did I wake up sick. Yet, I was overcome with the strong sense that the autumn’s growing darkness would push through and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as if in an octopus’ ink cloud. We had held our long rambling conversation unmasked.

From time to time four months later, I feel cramped by a certain wrath of impotence.

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