Chapter 5 - Bekks

I decided to paint a Scape to properly exist in, one that replicated my origin lifetime. I held a brush in one hand and a colour palette in the other. I had entered a vintage, Art Scape. The room resembled a formal art studio, and the lighting was dim and warm. I wasn’t sure how I found it, and was less sure if it found me first, before pulling me in, disregarding my own trains of thought. This side Scape might have been triggered by my conversation with Juve in the drug den, like keyword advertising tailored to suit the subliminal interests of a potential consumer. All I remember is floating up from the drug den after visiting the cemetery on the lake, and then landing in front of a blank canvas. The paint brushes and colour palette were prepped for me. I wonder if Juve staged the whole temptation, to trick me into creating again. This seemed very plausible. It was just like him to assume he could read my thoughts. So, I resolved to trick him back. I would create a tableau from my origin past. I had never tried it before, but maybe by painting an origin reality, I could create the Rabbit Hole I was looking for, a portal to a true reality Scape. How different could that reality be from the art representing it, I asked myself, as I took hold of the pain brushes, testing their pliancy. And if I wasn’t permitted to travel to an origin lifetime through Scaping, why not create it myself. All I needed was a setting and some characters, which seemed to be the foundation of any reality, even the virtual ones in Dreamscape Domination.

So I painted away with the belief that if I were precise enough, it might introduce the whereabouts of the Rabbit Hole.

The setting of my origin scene was a circle. Not an actual circle, but a cul de sac, or what they called the neighborhood where I lived with my family in an origin lifetime. The street name was posted on a pole at the corner of the circle and it read, Keholme Cr. in white against a green plate. When asked where I lived by anyone, especially my teachers, I would automatically answer Keholme Circle for some reason, instead of Keholme Crescent. Maybe it sounded better to a child, the concept of circle over crescent, the idea of perpetual over a slice of the moon.

Seven houses occupied the plot of land in this tiny crescent, so I began designing each of the houses with my virtual paintbrush as they appeared in my memory. I remembered each of the houses specifically because I once played with the children living, like me, in this protected little hamlet of houses.

The first house on the corner was the light grey brick one. This home stood out because the rest of the homes in the crescent were brown and red brick. This one was tall and rose two stories high, featuring cast iron fake balconies covering the windows for decoration. Giovanni lived there, with his parents. Giovanni was a kid at heart for the rest of his life, but a hairy man. He was considered slow, according to his intelligence, but he became the gatekeeper to the circle. He waved at every car that pulled in, or at every neighbor who walked by. Curly, wiry hair meshed his body irritating red pimples underneath, while a chalky, yellow substance permanently sheened his teeth.

Next to Giovanni’s house lived my Aunt Marie. Aunt Marie was left by my uncle, for a taller, tattooed lady, but her twins, Pan and Pi, boy and girl, were my age in the memory. I painted Pi’s baby blue dress and Pan’s brown corduroy pants. The scene was coming together as they chased each other in between houses and into backyards with freshly laundered sheets fluttering from clotheslines.

As I inserted more detail, the scene on the canvas vibrated, like it was adrenalized to create itself by my invention. Some invisible artificial intelligence challenged control over the creation of the visuals, before I took the time to manually trace out the outlines. Before long, I was working in tandem with this invisible force, to construct this memory microcosm from my origin lifetime. Now, moving cars drove in and out, and bicycles raced each other against big wheels on the gravelly circle asphalt. With help from this invisible force, the still tableau had become a moving film.

Other adult neighbours manicured lawns with clippers, while an elderly grandfather sat on the front porch across the street from my home, smoking homemade cigarettes and observing the activity with an evil eye.

Mr. Hunter.

He presided over our play in the time between three o’clock, when the bus dropped us off at the street sign, to five o’clock, when the adult headlamps paraded into the circle, separating like a centipede into garages or oil stained cemented driveways. But Mr. Hunter didn’t move. I stepped back from the canvas. I wasn’t smelling the metallics of the colours anymore. I was beginning to detect cigarette smoke and whatever else scented him Mr. Hunter from an opened bottle next to his lawn chair. Lily, his granddaughter, and my best friend, said he needed it to breathe, like medicine, or Vaseline on his chest. Mr. Hunter never left his porch, except when it was too dark to find a light.

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Lily, a blonde, pig tailed girl with green, Irish undertones in her reddish skin colour, never liked to talk about her grandfather. He was a war hero, or so the medal he wore on his pajamas indicated. His skin was leather worn and lined with age, and his hair streaked silver grey in the slick of grease that allowed Mr. Hunter to comb it behind his ears, where it winged out.

Although I had hoped to create a literal reality, something as close to real origin life as possible, I understood the scene was resembling an hallucination, or a mirage. Sooner or later, it would dissipate into the same air from which it was created, only to fade to a dully grey canvass, similar to the ashtray on Mr. Hunter’s porch. If that were to happen, I would entertain a train of thought and transport myself back to the Drug Scape. These were comfort escapes to me. And only the Drug Scapes could soothe this violent longing to return home. My real home on Keholme Crescent.

Finding that permanent Rabbit Hole to satisfy this longing was not so easy in the Dreamscape Domination Scapes. But I had a gut feeling. I would find it one day, like an undiscovered black hole in an astrological universe. And it would suck me into an entity that defied time, that created warps. And I would return home for good, with another chance to live what I had taken for granted at such a young age in my origin lifetime.

“Bekks, let’s move closer to your house,” Lily spoke out loud from the heart of the scene, the road between our two driveways. It was like breaking the fourth wall in reverse. I was the creator of the scene invited into the canvass to experience my art with the characters emerging from it. When Lily spoke to me bright colour raced in to fill in the empty spaces, like a child had taken my place to recklessly colour in the remaining spaces with crayons. The colour for each of the subjects in the scene had crossed the dimension outlines, like a piece more abstract in nature.

“Why, Lily? Your driveway is smoother. Our skateboards will move faster on it.”

Lily tilted her head to the side.

“My grandpa. I don’t want him looking at you.”

“He stares at everyone, Lily.”

“Yes, but he only looks at a few. It’s disgusting,” Lily lowered her voice to a whisper.

Inside the scene and out, I regarded my younger self in the same way I would a documentary, or a biography of my childhood, which was rather objectively. As a young, school girl I thought nothing of Lily’s warning, then. But as I aged a little more, I had learned more of Mr. Hunter, and why they chained his leg to the iron railing of the porch. Why chain such an old man who refused to move, I once questioned, even openly to Lily. And then the streetlights came on in the scene. All of the children returned to their homes with the lighted windows. Except for Lily and I. We refused to go in, or was it Lily who stalled the exodus inside. I remembered it more as a pact. We wouldn’t go in until our parents were angry enough to command us inside.

“Can I sleep over your house?” Lily asked often.

“Yes, but it’s a school night.”

“What does it matter? Will your parents mind.”

They did mind, I remembered. No friends over during night time hours on a school night.

“What if I stay in your garage? I can sleep in your father’s car, Bekks.”

Lily was insistent, but I didn’t see it the same way then, in the context of getting in trouble with my parents. Instead, I perceived her begging as flattery. My best friend never wanted to leave me, like the sister I had always prayed for after my brother disappeared.

“I’m sorry, Lily, but my parents will get mad.”

Lily’s face turned a maroon colour, like it was bruised and blushed at the same time.

When we were teenagers, Lily found clever ways to crash over my house. Over such sleepless nights, Lily introduced me to alcohol binges and drug experimentation. We would pass out often as teenagers. But by that time, it was only my mother and I living in the home on Keholme Crescent. My father had fallen in the garage and couldn’t wake up in the hospital, despite the attention he was receiving from all of us.

“I’m in love with this escape to your house. Isn’t it always the best adventure?” Lily was excited. She opened her closed first to a handful of red and yellow pills.

“I know what you mean,” I agreed, pointing to the art I had created to decorate our spider webbed basement. I had taken an art class at the hospital, for family members in need of therapy.

“Does your art take you to another place too,” Lily proceeded to share one of the red pills, placing one onto my tongue, before she stood up to peer into the piece I brought home from the hospital.

I nodded yes. It was the first time I believed in something inside of me.

“I can live with you forever, Bekks, if you only say yes.”

“My mother will get upset. It’s a school night.”

“School won’t help us escape for good, Bekks. It will only lock us up for good.”

The tableau colours turned a shade of gray on the heels of her words, like they had the power to make life black and white with a short sprint. After the images depleted their colour and passed this black and white stage, they resembled drawings in a comic book, printed on cheaper newsprint.

One of the edges caught fire like a virus, and the scene eventually curled into smoke and a pile of ashes. I recognized the hint and wisped away into a safer Drug Scape.