Nanowrimo day 1

It's the ugliest parking lot anyone has ever seen. Fossilized gum, oil stains, broken glass, old tires...this lot has it all. Connoisseurs come from all over the world to soak up the horrible ambiance. They can be seen on all fours, dirty raincoats hitched up, communing with a cluster of vintage Wrigley's doublemint; or arranging cigarette butts in personally significant mounds. It can't be called a hobby, more of a religious observance. These poor men (and they are almost exclusively male) have lost their spiritual anchors. Adrift, they avoided the shoals of Scientology and the Laguna Desolata of the LDS church. What they have found is squalid and filthy. Their practices are seemingly pointless and unhygienic. Yet their souls have opened up. They have a direct line to something that less actualized beings call god. And they are happy.

For some values of happy.

Aldred is here, not to observe the parking lot with it's nearly obliterated white lines and crumbling concrete slabs. He tried it for a year or two, but came to the eventual conclusion that opening up his soul to this particular enlightenment was not for him. He could feel his personal perception of Universe arranging itself into the grimy network of symbols and meanings that drive the acolytes around him, and he didn't like it one bit. So as he had so many times before, Aldred picked himself up, dusted off his senses and started all over again.

Today he is here to observe the worshipers and learn from them. Why does this work? While he knows personally that there is nothing for him in a blown out radial with destroyed steel belts spilling out, it does genuinely mean something to the man with the broken glasses who appears to be taking a near carnal pleasure from running his fingers over it's peeling surface.

Nearer than near carnal, thinks Aldred, observing the man's protruding trousers.

But it would be a mistake to dismiss it all as prevision, mere or grand, simple or very (very) complicated. The lad leaning up against the abandoned attendant's station, there's nothing earthly in the ecstasy that shines in his eyes. The boy is transfixed, hurtling through an inner cosmos of endlessly patched and repatched blacktop, striped barriers keeping him on the path marked out by a trail of cat's eyes stretching into infinity. He has genuinely found something here, and it is so hard for Aldred to believe that it is all subjective, that this meaning is non-transferable, and that when he thinks all he sees is a filthy parking lot that is because for him a filthy parking lot is all there is to see here. It is no great triumph for the boy and no great failure for Aldred. It is simply the way things are.

Well, perhaps the boy does have a certain force of will, when it comes to credulity. Aldred knows there's no way he found this crapulent path on his own. Some dark night, not so long ago, if the boy's looks are anything to go on, he must have been wasting his youth in another lot like this, when he stumbled upon his first guru. A wizened older man, Aldred imagines, balding and scabby, beating out an arrhythmic tattoo on a dented cast off hubcap. No teeth, but such eyes. The boy was transfixed: this seemingly mad tramp knew something that nobody else the boy had ever met knew. As his shaking old hands scratch and tap, pausing from time to time to lovingly stroke a faded Buick logo, the boy feels eternity opening up. He is Blake in the dreary gardens of Lambeth, having a revelation where none is meant to be had, while the black hand of industry unfolds around him. He is Paul, being caught up not on the road to Damascus, but in the parking lot of Daltrey Circle.

The man never speaks to the boy that night, or indeed ever after, but they are inseparable from that time onwards. At first they stick to the many different parking lots of the relatively small New Jersey town. They move in a complicated circuit depending on the time of day, and the vagaries of cops and skateboarders. Cops and skateboarders are the great heretics of the parking lot brothers: those who park or take money are part of the unspoken theology, they belong and function. But cops bring in outside trouble and conflicting beliefs, and the skateboarders just don't show the proper respect. The boy learns to hate both at first. He then learns to pity them, and at last to love. His first transcendent moment came two years into his period of devotion. A cop told him to

“Move along, son.”

“I will officer. I am,” the boy replied, and the simple truth and rightness of it all burst his heart into a shining ball of pink light. The cops were something holy and unholy simultaneously, for ever after the Qliphoth hovering around the boy's personal tree of life, blasted and instructive shells, as precious as anything that was truly of the parking lot, though they come from Outside.

And now he rests in the holy of holies, the most perfect lot on earth: not to big not to small, in as great disrepair as it can be without being condemned. He sits, floating inside, knowing that it must be paved to be paradise.

That's the narrative Aldred constructs in his head anyway. The truth is probably less sublime, and while the look in the boy's eyes is definitely genuinely spiritual, the crumpled paper bag in his hand and numerous discarded Krylon spray paint cans gives perhaps a more complete picture of the source of all revelation. But perhaps Aldred is being unfair: perhaps the bag only contains a simple sandwich or extra pair of shoes. He daren't ask: while hardly anthropologically scrupulous, Aldred simply doesn't want to know the full shape of this boy's personal practice. He is happier with his construction in this instance, if not in general.

Aldred's observation lasts a few more hours. At one point he is noticed. More than noticed, recognized. A spindly and thick lipped man lopes over to him and points.

“You. I know you. Stephen Aldred. 'The Mayor'.”

Aldred's face is somewhere between a wince and a smile.

“Great Scot, no one has called me that in years, decades maybe.”

“Doesn't make it less true. You. You're Aldred. I know you. The Mayor. Aldred called The Mayor. Why did they call you that? Aldred? Why that?”

“Well,” says Aldred, desperately trying to remember who this wreck is, “I suppose it's because I was the mayor -I mean, a mayor- at one point. It didn't last very long. Malfeasance and backstabbing and corruption and all that makes up the great and horrible storm of politics-”

“It's because you talk like your The Mayor. Aldred. The Mayor. We always said you should grow one of those bicycle bar mustaches-

“Handlebar, I think you'll find.”

“You are The Mayor alright. Bicycle. Handle. Aldred. It's all mustaches in the end.”

Aldred is growing distinctly uncomfortable. “Look my good man, I'm afraid you rather have the advantage of me-”

“Luther. Stark.”

“Luther Stark? I'm afraid I don't-”

“No. Reverse it. Think like a Mayor.”

“I- Oh! 'Stark' Luther! I remember you.” But Aldred is uncertain. “That is, I remember someone named Stark Luther, but you are not him.”

Stark Luther (if it is he) looks defiant.

“A lot can change in a few years they say. A lot can change a man. And a lot of lots can change a man a lot, make a lot of changes in him.”

Whether this is true or not, this Stark Luther is completely different from the man Aldred had once known by that name. The Stark Luther of the late eighties was round and soft, with shoulder length hair and a stutter. This Luther is like something out of Egon Schiele, elongated, all angles and spikes. While his speech is definitely impaired (or perhaps his mentality) there is no trace of a stutter.

“It's impossible,” says Aldred. “Hard living and rigorous spiritual practice can't account for the fact that you're a completely different person.”

“The Mayor still can't see around his bicycle. Still has a handle in his eye. Aldred. The Mayor. The Tourist.”

“Tourists don't stay for three years.”

“Tourist. Stay: not a tourist. Go: tourist. Nothing in between, not even for Mayors.”

Stark Luther looks at the ground, the patched synthetic bedrock of his existence.

“There was nothing inside for you, Aldred. Nothing outside either.”

“I'm rather of that opinion myself.”

“So go. Go like a tourist. You've seen enough. Not gonna see anything new.”

Stark Luther shambles off, still staring at the ground. No, not staring at the ground, but worshiping, walking a devotional path. Aldred wants badly to envy him. He wants to want that certainty and direction. But in his heart it terrifies him. If the man was Stark Luther, the change wrought in him is alchemical. He is literally a new man, if new can apply to such a used looking creature. This loss of personal integrity is a true horror. Aldred knows he wants fulfillment, but he also knows he wants to still be Aldred at the end of his road.

Perhaps this fear of disintegration is what's been holding me back, he thinks. Perhaps I need to disappear.