fresh kills - signpost - day 4

Signpost – Day 4

White stone.  In my inner self, I thought of it.

Apparently the white stone thing, whatever it is, is outside my comfort zone and when I tried to penetrate out from that zone with the thought of something outside it, time snapped back on me. The stone is not within my grasp. Not yet.

I am travelling in a manner I had not felt before here, wherever here is. I FEEL dizzy!  Is time linear? I doubt it.  Suddenly I feel like the motorcycle rider, riding inside a spiracle cage at the county fair sort of thing.  I am spinning.  I should not suspend time again.  I am car sick without a car and without liquids moving.  A dry spiritual heave – so to speak.

I talk of spirit. Is spiritual the same as soul?  Does one precede the other?  What is the empirical evidence of either? How can I talk about the empirical here?

Ahead again I see some sort of white stone.  I have to wonder what it is? Is it not stone but rather concrete? Is it the finished pillar of an unfinished building? Or is it all that remains of a finished building?

Without hands, my mind, touches the stone.  Is it stone or some sort of molded plastic.  I think it is cold like stone but not the real thing in some way. I have heard the word touchstone used and have never looked it up in any dictionary.  I think it has to do with those little stone that pawn brokers use to test the validity of gold jewelry.  The jewelry is rubbed against the stone and a chemical added.  The resulting chemical reaction determines validity, reality, presence of gold.

Am I valid after I have touched the stone?  This stone.  What is it?

In an instant I seem to be again present in the dark.  The dark is pierced by a blinding light not unlike the blinding light of an arc welder.  There are workers here but I don’t seem to see them directly.  I hear murmurs like talk but do not understand.  I seem to be part of the debris of one of the fallen towers.

Apparently, I surmise that when I stopped time, I only stopped time for myself.  The other tower fell in my absence from the mortal sense of things.  In a way too, it was irrelevant to me specifically.  I had been killed, part of the first fall sequence.  I had heard a murmuring in the office.  Not many workers in yet.  Most are the usual ten to fifteen minutes late from the subway, New York time, to work.  I would always get to work early on purpose.  One, to make a decent cup of coffee and two to meditate on the tasks of the day that lay before me. 

I had not paid attention to the first plane hit in the other tower.  I imagined that some small private plane had hit near the base of the tower and had hit the big structure and what was left of the small plane had fallen into one of the smaller three or four story structure that ringed the building complex.

If I had been hyper and or paranoid and or truly human and cautious, I would have been on the stairs down out of this soon to be tower of death.

Just my luck to be the center circle of a target on my building.  Point blank.  I see the jet once more coming and I am not afraid of the impact.  The video of the replay has dissolved out of fear and terror and fallen into mild discomfort and distant analysis and viewing.  No slow motion however.  It all happening in regular split second timing. 

Wonder why they do the slow motion thing on TV regarding the sports thing.  Reality should always be in real time and real space.  If you miss the play, tough shit.  I did not however miss that crazy field goal. I was the goal.

Don’t take it personally.  I wondered how many had died with me.  There must be some way of knowing.

Then I hear a strange sound, small at first and then loud and shrilly.  I am dead.  You are waking up the dead.  The noise is the sound of bagpipes.  I lower the volume. Could death be as easy as touching my man stick symbol, my remote control device?

Silence and darkness.  Just as I think this death thing can get easier, it gets harder.  Am I asking the wrong questions again? Can I paint my own reality here on the other side?  Is this the other side?

“No. It is not” came a male sounding voice that was not my own.

Hello! Anybody there? - - -

Nothing.

Another wrong question? Am I doing this wrong?

Nothing.

Just then, the sound of the bagpipes returned along with an image of bagpipe players outside Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.  The bagpipers are playing “Amazing Grace”.

An honor guard of men in uniform are unloading the back of a hearse.  More honor guards.  Firemen?  Not used to seeing them in official dress uniform.  They are always in the overall type firefighting uniform most of their working life.  A coffin is handled up the front steps and placed on a wheeled cart.  The coffin is covered by the stars and stripes.  The central bronze door of the cathedral is open.  The bagpipes continue to blare with another song.  I see what appear to be a widow and children and assorted family type members following into the building behind the coffin.

I stop.  I do not want to follow.  I recall an image of a firefighter in the building, in the smoke.  The image fades. 

I am still in bright afternoon autumn day. Street trees are still green. Pedestrians are scurrying along crowded Fifth Avenue sidewalks across the street in front of the International Building of Rockefeller Center.  I notice the oversize statue of Atlas holding up an artistic but hollow globe.

I used to work there in the eighties.  I could remember that the windows in those old buildings could be opened.  The buildings were built on that border line between old technology skyscraper science without air conditioning and modern glass boxes like the World Trade Center with air conditioning.  Thus the ability to open windows in Rockefeller Center’s older buildings.

Why was I thinking of this?  Something was knocking on the backdoor of my consciousness.  I remember opening one of those windows on Christmas tree lighting night one December.  The open window was necessary as the heat form the old style radiators was oppressively hot.

Hot as hell.  I thought then.

I remember something as I turn back to the view of the funeral crowd reaching the front of the cathedral still visible thorough the open door.

The bagpipes have ceased playing.  I remember something.  The widow.  The wife.  I am married.  Where is my wife? Did I get a funeral?

My own voice answered me with a somewhat strange, disappointing. “You are not ready for that.”

When will I will be ready?

But inwardly I know the answer already.  After this period of quarantine.

I hesitate to follow the funeral inside.  Had worked around here once.  But was no fan of St. Patrick’s.  It is not a good place to pray.  Too noisy.  Too many tourists. I also did not like some of the stained glass.  St. Pat’s is at first a marvel of medieval gothic architecture.  But it really is only wood and plaster inside in many places that imitates real stone masonry.  And the images of potbellied popes in triple tiered tiara smiting Protestants with his pastoral staff was not an image that was conducive to thoughtful prayer and meditation. That and the stained glass looked thrown together like in an assembly line factory style.

I used to take my prayers down the street at St. Thomas Episcopal church. The stained glass was not the centerpiece for meditation but a great stone altarpiece of all the apostles and saints.  Only an occasional muffled subway noise under the massive stone masonry.

I travel up Fifth Avenue and want to see that old church but stop, seeing another funeral.  No, not a funeral, a memorial service and one for Brits killed at the WTC.  St. Thomas is so upper crust money and related to the COE class of yesteryear.  And there is Tony, what’s his name, the Prime Minister, exiting a limousine and walking up the front steps in the presence of cops, bodyguards, photographers and curious tourists and Brits who did not have an invite to the service.

Again a lapse to dark and silence.  Have I stopped time again? Is this too painful to witness?  No. I can count myself, the fireman down at St. Pat’s and some Brits here as among the dead.  I have no number but I was not alone in death those days, weeks ago?