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Dwayne Hoover ~ bio~
...is a self professed late blooming writer. ArtSees Staff welcomes Dwayne as our Holiday "Help". He claims "I am at the beggining of my middle agedness. I like to write stories that catch my interest. Mostly an amalgum of fiction and reality. I play music in my free time, and record it for a time when I can no longer play; when my hands are bent from arthritis and my voice weakened by smoking. Then I will dream of what was and what will never be. But, until then i like to put my thoughts to paper, or in this case to plastic keys that send eletric currents to a magical box, that speeds my thoughts into the ether. I am afraid that the world has taken a wrong turn somewhere, and may have no way of finding its way back. I believe that the only magic left in this world is our imagination... READ ON
January 2009 D. Hoover
Manufacturing Armaggedon
“They are manufacturing Armageddon,” he shouted loud. “Behind a shroud of wispy smoke, and stories passed on down through the ages.” I watched him talk and I watched the few who took notice. They kept their distance from the man, and moved on their way. But not me, I was fascinated, by him. He was draped in cardboard hanging from his shoulders by thin ropes. His megaphone had long since run out of batteries, but he held it to his mouth anyway for show. His voice was getting scratchy and horse from the yelling but the words continued to pour out ceaselessly.
“Rex Mundi walks, and twists the minds of the feeble sheep. He is the dark king that rules from the shadows,” he said. I noticed he had nothing to drink by him, or food to eat. He wore a=2 0beige button up with a pocket protector where his black markers and pens sat peeking out from behind the sandwich board. His trousers were black and faded and his loafers gave him the look of Sunday church. But it was Tuesday in Chicago, and the streets were a bustle and blur of sound and motion. He stood in the center of the passing crowds of pedestrians, who stepped aside from the plain preaching madman, as if he were a beggar. He held out no hat for tips, nor asked for any.
I sat on a stone bench in front of the old Marshall Field’s building eating lunch. I sat there every day at the same time. Today was different though with the arrival of the prophet. This prophet did not speak of religion like the others I have seen from time to time, preaching fire and brimstone, and eternal damnation to the sinners, no, this man was different. His cardboard bulletin had strange things written all over it like (The pretend end is nigh, or, I am sorry I was mislead but I was text messaging). He never noticed me looking. I don’t think he was here for attention. His eyes were so full of purpose that they demanded a listener though, but there were none who listened except for me.
“Fear feeds the fire and blood oils the cogs of the great wheel of history. We are doomed to repeat what we ignored the first times around. And, repeat we will, for we walk into it woefully ignorant. My fellow sheep stop and look at the sky for a moment. Do you notice that it is blue? Do you see the thunderclouds on the horizon? Look!” He pointed upward without looking. Instead he watched, as I did, the unreceptive, trudge on trapped in forward momentum. His eyes were sad and he bowed his head low, pausing his sermon for a moment. He looked like a statue in a dying garden. His head lifted and his lips pulled over his teeth in controlled fury. “These buildings you rush too are but dust in the cosmos, as are we. In the river of time, do you think that any of this will be of any importance? No, I say, it will be washed away in a torrent of time’s infintesitude. Do you think the minutes you live by add up to a pile of gold? They are barely a breath.” He would not be beat by indifference, I noticed. He was not a slave to what people’s opinions of him were. He was a simple man with a bad dream.
I felt weird checking my watch right then, after what I had just heard, but I was already late caught up in the reverie of my musings. I stood up and dusted my pants and de-wrinkled. I walked towards my building and right past the man who sort of had his back turned towards me. As I passed him I connected eyes with him. It was as if a magnet was turned20on inside my cells. His eyes locked on mine, as he continued to speak and I continued to walk, unable to look away.
“Remember my friends, my words today,” He spoke and I was walking slowly backwards listening. “They are manufacturing Armageddon to trap our minds. Fear is a fire kept behind glass. It is allowed enough air to breath, and enough fuel to last. It must not be allowed to spread for it burns down the house. And no one can live in a burned down home.”
He turned his eyes away, and continued to shout, as I made it to my building and went back in to work feeling empty. What did he mean by what he was saying, “Rex Mundi walks?” Who is Rex Mundi? “The dark king, text messaging, a storms coming?” What storm?
I returned to work, with a lot on my mind. I went through the motions as always, but that day it felt harder to do. People talked to me, but I could not hear them. They floated past my vision like feathers on the wind. I typed the words Rex Mundi into my internet search, and a couple hits came back. They were Latin translation sites, and apparently Rex Mundi meant “king of the world.” So that was20who the “dark king” he talked about was.
Free the Moon ch. 1
The moon lights up the night like a dull flashlight. I sympathized with the F.T.M. movement. The lunar landscape is littered with giant advertising. It is such an ugly site to see. The moon has logos from Happy Drink, Chevronco, Telegram Bell, ToyMax, SportMax, Chemcon and a multitude of other companies neatly positioned across it, that it looks like it should have been driving in the Indianapolis 5000. The moon when I was a kid, was a source of inspiration, but now it looked like a cheap magazine ad; The moon which I would stare up at, at night, and wish I could be one of the original colonists, was now a corporate run bill board. All romantic visions no longer existed.
The trouble started a few years ago, when colonists from the moon, started their own government, The Lunar Council, in response to high taxation by Apollo Corp. Before the Lunar Council was formed, Apollo Corp owned and operated the earth’s natural satellite. They paid for state of the art fully self sufficient colonies to be built on the moon, and they paid for the first colonists to live there. They rented out sections on the light side of the moon, to big paying companies.
Soon it came to pass the Apollo Corp who paid top dollar to uproot people from earth and send them two hundred thousand miles away from their families, started to become very influential and powerful. Presidents from Apollo Corp started to get elected to top political offices. Nicolas Manning, who used to be president of Apollo Corp, was elected as the president of the confederacy of Nations. Apollo Corp now ran the worlds government. They started to tax the people that worked for them, to recoup some of the outrageous20cost of the lunar terra forming. They started charging for not only rent from the Apollo Corp housing sections, but also for water and air that they supplied to the resident workers. Electronic mail was also taxed; if people wanted to contact their families on earth they had to pay Apollo Corp’s fee, which as of the past two years is about a year’s salary.
The people that worked on the moon demanded answers on why, for all the work they have done for Apollo Corp in the last thirty years, no one was listening to their cries for fair treatment. Basic human needs were being charged for. Just recently it was reported that a man who refused to pay for air and could not afford passage back to earth, was thrown out of an airlock. The front page of every newspaper on earth was splattered with the gruesome headlines of the incident. That is where I come in.
My name is Stephen Miles. I do free lance work for Apollo Corp as a private investigator. I am on my way to the head office of in Tokyo to catch the first flight out tonight. I have been brought in to investigate the Death of Apollo Corp employee #11227, who according to my files is the same person whose face is on the cover of the copy of The World Times on the seat next to me. The headline reads Herman Mudgit just wanted to breathe free. I felt a chill run up my spine when I saw the picture of Herman smiling with his family.
As my driver lands the aircar in front of the Apollo Corp building, we float past protesters, holding signs that read Free the Moon, and Give the People Back Their Blood. A man with his face hidden behind a bandana holds a sign up to the front windshield as we pass, screaming something I can’t hear in the quite of the aircar; his sign reads Sic Semper Tyranis (And always the tyrants). The anger o f the mob gathered in front of the building puts me on edge. I nervously look down to avoid eye contact with the people as we hover past and through the garage bay door. I gather my briefcase and news paper as the driver stops by the entrance.
I step out of the aircar and the driver retrieves my suitcase from the trunk and hands it to me. Good luck, he says as he gets back into the car and takes off out of the building. The roar of the crowd is startling I watch the aircar pass through the crowd again. This time they attack the car kicking it and shaking it. I hear gunfire as the bay door closes. My heart races as I witness the chaos. I take a deep breath and start to walk forward toward the door. Two guards in head to toe body armor holding machine guns pay me no notice as I pass them through the door and into the massive complex.
The air inside the facility is cool and fragrant. The architecture is top class. The inside is an open plan stretching vertically up four hundred floors. Mail carts zig zag across the open air of the interior delivering mail to different floors. Lift carts carry people up and down to their destinations. There are no elevators in this building. The reception desk is a hundred feet long with thirty people taking care of visitors to the building. Armed guards stand sentient along the inner perimeter. I walk up to the desk and a lady approaches me with a plastered on smile.
“Hello and welcome to Apollo Corp, where the world of tomorrow is the world of today,” she says as if reading from a script. “How can I help you today?” The smile never leaves her face.
“I am here to see Mr. Deckard on 321,” I hand her my pass that has my name on it, she nods and presses a button.
“Mr. Miles, to see Mr. Deckard.” She paused then says, “Right away sir.” She looks at me with that same smile as a lift lands next to me. She points for me to step on. “He is waiting for you sir on four hundred, have a nice day.” I notice her smile fall away as the lift shots upward. Floors rush past in a blur. I chance a look down and feel a terrible sense of vertigo. I grip the hand rest to steady myself. The ride is quick and over in thirty seconds, and I thankfully stepped off the cart clutching my bags to my chest for comfort and hesitantly walked into the quiet plush waiting room.
Fish tanks with genetically altered fish surround me. The glowing lights of neonfish pulsed as minisharks stop swimming to look at me stand there. I feel like food as I wait for five minutes. The solitary door in the corner of the room finally opens up and a beautiful woman stands there. She signals me to come through never saying a word. She wears the same dumb smile as the receptionists downstairs. I walk into an opulent office that has a three hundred and sixty degree view of Tokyo. Aircars and zipcars fill the city sky in the distance, but only Apollo Corp vehicles could be seen nearby.
“Mr. Miles, welcome to Apollo Corp, Jerle Tay said you are the best.” I turn around and see an old man sitting at a desk that lifts from the floor and turns around towards me. The man is writing in a book not looking at me. “As you know I brought you in today, because of certain events beyond my control.” He continued writing. “One of our agents, number 11227 was put through an airlock in the Shakleton Crater Housing Complex20section of gamma sector five.”
“Yes I know,” I held the paper out to him as he looked up and smiled.
“Yes it is everywhere isn’t it.” He closed the book he was writing in and stood up. “Please come here Mr. Miles.” He walks over to the glass wall and points up. I walk over and look up at the moon in all its picturesque horror. “Do you see anything different Mr. Miles?” he asks and I study the dead orb with scrutiny. I nod no and turn back to look at him. “Near the Sea of Tranquility.” He continues to point. I look up at the giant logo of Chemcon. My eyes scan down and there it is. The symbol of the F.T.W. movement, a plain circle with two dots and a curved line sit right on the surface, a smiley face as clear as day. “You see it don’t you? That appeared this evening. All attempts to locate the perpetrators have failed. All attempts to remove that retched symbol have also failed.” A look of scorn suddenly creases his face, his eyes turn hard, and then it is gone, replaced by a pleasant fatherly smile.
“So that is why I am here Mr. Deckard?” I ask. “To help you find who did this?”
“Partially, there is another matter that has come up, a personal matter. You see Mr. Miles my daughter has disappeared while working yesterday. She was last seen in her office, and then she was gone. No one had seen her leave. We believe this man is responsible.” The woman who showed me in, walks over with a file and hands it to me. I open it up to a very familiar face, the face of Voight Polakov the famous scientists. He was responsible for building all of the facilities on the moon. He was also the builder of the quicktrip rocket that greatly cut the travel time to the moon, from three days to a few hours. He is Lunar Corp’s resident genius.
“Polakov?” I ask, studying the photo. “Why?”
“I have asked myself the same question.” Deckard says as he walks back to his desk with his hands behind his back. He sits down in his chair and sighs. “Over the past couple years he has started to exhibit strange behavior. It started with him becoming very reclusive. He would no longer work on projects that we would assign him. He claimed that god was angry with him for what he had done. I still do not know what he meant by that statement. He has been in hiding now for quite some time on the dark side of the moon. He has ceased all contact with us.”
“I thought everything was fine? At least that is what the papers were saying until the other day.” I say as I looked back at the moon. “Mr. Miles in business one must keep up the appearance that nothing is wrong even when it is. We cannot have our stock plummet over every little problem we come across.” He says, the look on his face make my P.I. skills kick in. He is hiding something or not telling me something.
“I understand,” I say as I walk over to the desk and sit in the extension chair that detracts from the desk’s side at my approach.
=0 A
“You will be leaving immediately for the moon, when you get to Imbrium Interplanetary you will meet with our contact that will fill you in on the specifics. Whatever you need they will provide you. Ms Till will show you to the Quicktrip pad for takeoff. Once again Mr. Miles I thank you for your help.” I stand up and the extension seat retracts, Ms Till leads me out of the room; I turn to see the desk spin back down into the floor. We step onto the lift that zooms us to the quicktrip pad. I have the strangest feeling that this was going to be the toughest job of my career.
The quicktrip pad was forty floors below. I approached the steaming craft and say goodbye to Ms Till who nods and turns away. I take one last look at her figure and board the ship. I look around and notice I am the only passenger on the tiny craft and close my eyes to catch a little nap for the ride. I was going to need some rest for what I was about to face. I drifted to sleep. When I awoke I looked out the little window to the giant view of the moon. It looked so different from this close.
THE PIANO
December 2008
The piano sat in the corner of the dark dilapidated saloon. Dust covered its antique surface in piles. Its lid pushed itself back with a creek. The bench slid back from underneath it and the cracked and worn cushion depressed as something unseen sat upon it. The sound of cracking fingers pierced the quiet of the forgotten space, as a ray of sunshine shown through a crack in the wall. Motes of dust sparkled like glitter as they broke through the beam that stretched across the room, and settled on the ancient instrument.
Crickets and birds stopped singing their songs as they gathered for the timeless show. Animals came out of the woods and lined the old saloon, settling on pieces of ground where they could be comfortable. Rabbits sat next to foxes and bears next to bees. Squirrels sat on the backs of deer that moved aside to let the wolves and mountain lions get better seats. Ducks and geese sat on the water of Old Sid’s Pond nearby and made room for fish to poke their heads out for a listen. Ants and spiders sat with flies and beetles on the giant willow trees. They swayed gently with the breeze and made small talk. Of course there were magic folk there, but they stayed hidden,=2 0they did not like to come into the open, on chance that they would be seen.
Out of the quite came the first note. The note floated out through the cracks of the ruined walls. It was a note of the most pleasing kind. It sent shivers through the creatures that were gathered and spread out across the Appalachians. Trees and flowers turned their leaves towards the sound, as if stretching for sunlight, all across the land. People that lived deep in the mountains came out of their shacks, gathering their families. They told stories to their kin, of hero’s and warriors and magic.
The next notes were an eerie reminder to all about the quickness of life. It was as if life connected on some invisible line that stemmed from the center of each plant creature and stone. Each living thing saw their own birth and death. They were humbled by the respect they felt for each other.
The next somber melody painted a picture in the clouds above. First there was nothing. Then the sky burst forth in blast of light. It sky swirled in a cosmic display of fire. Countless stars formed from gas and swelled. Their size compelled dust clouds to gather and form planets. Comets struck the surfaces of the planets and brought life to some of them , and their very own songs. Then the sky collapsed in on itself and everything returned to the way it was at the beginning. The life below, watching this spectacle, looked on in awe. Those that had mouths, held them open. Birds and bees shook and fish jumped in and out of the water joyfully. Ducks and geese shook their tail feathers squawking with their tongues out. Trees shook leaves from their branches that danced down to the earth. The ground began to shake in primal understanding.
A cacophony of sound radiated from the inside of the shack. Allegro, fortissimo, metzo forte, andante. The piano keys depressed and popped up again over and over, in every pattern, every note ringing true. The bench’s legs seemed to bend with the strain of what ever sat upon it. The pedals pressed down and held a note here and there, at just the precise times. Each note was perfect. Each beat pumped life into life.
For over an hour the music played on the old piano. Life mingled and danced. Mountains stood guard as they have for millions of years. The wind picked up the song and fed the world.
| Heroine |
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I park my car on California. I hate coming here. The buildings look like a bomb was dropped on them. I dress down so as not to look like I have money. This is not a place you want to get mugged. No one will help you anyway.
My name is Steve and I have come to the city today to buy some heroin. It's not for me, if that is what you are thinking. No, no, this is for my son. I will talk more about that later.
Right now, I hop out of my car and lock the door. I check my pocket for my little 22 caliber pistol. I feel the weighty piece and this helps relax me a little. I start walking. All around me are homeless people sitting in the gangways of burned out apartment buildings, and crack houses. Prostitutes walk down the street, but I do not look them in the eye as I pass. A cop goes by and I hear a whistle from the roof top of an apartment building. The look out, signals the drug dealers and the pimps and they hide in the shadows until the cops pass. The cops take notice of me as they drive by. A white middle aged man in this neighborhood sticks out like a sore thumb, but they do not bother me. It is as if, there is an unwritten law that in this place, everyone can come and buy drugs, without a hassle. Maybe they are paid off.
Two weeks ago I was here, I saw the police arrest a man for selling drugs, and the next week he was out slinging rocks again, as if nothing happened. This is the Wild West and the Red Sashes are in control, not the police.
But, back to my mission. I turn the corner, and there are a lot of people in the streets. All the white people come here, to 26th and California, to buy their20drugs. I get in line. Yes, there are lines; one for coke and weed, the other for heroin and crack. My line looks the most desperate. I try to look desperate. If they think I am a cop, they will kill me. They have body guards with machine guns. The kid that is selling in my line is about 17 years old. His body guards are about 18 or 20, I don't know. They look young, too young to be holding machine guns. They wear the colors of their gang. They are all business.
Now you might be asking yourself, why would someone come to this neighborhood where he or she could get killed? Well, the story is a little complicated. Like I said I am here for my son. You see, he is a quadriplegic. He lives his life in a wheelchair. All he can do is move his head and talk. He is brilliant, though. He can figure out anything. That is the problem. When he entered high school, he started to realize that he would be forever stuck in his chair. He would watch all the kids playing sports or going on dates and everything. It destroyed him, that he was crippled, unable to even use the washroom on his own. It destroyed me seeing him like that..
So I had to do something, and heroin was the answer. He says that the drug makes him feel like he is walking. It is all in his imagination, but, he feels alive.
My time in line comes up. I do not look the kid in the eyes. I ask for four hundred dollars worth of H... I do not dare ask for more. If they know you have too much money, they will take you around the back and cut your throat. I've seen it happen. That is why I carry a gun now. He hands me a bag that seems a little skimpy, but I do not dare complain. I tuck it into my underwear, turn and leave quickly. No friends are made here. No casual banter. I walk quickly to my car.
You may be saying to yourself, "how could this man give his son drugs?" I have to explain. 12 years ago, I was at a family party drinking. My wife insisted that she should drive home. She only had 2 beers to drink. I said I was fine. I even told her I drive better when I am drunk. My 6 year old son hopped in the back. As we drove home, I must have passed out. The police told me later that they found h im 50 yards from the car. We had driven off the road, and my car flipped over. My wife did not survive. The funny thing is, is that I did not have a scratch on me.
As I pull onto the expressway, I am relieved that the first hard part is done. The second will come when I get home. For, when my son gets his medicine, he feels better. But I don't. My son always asks me to put a full shot of this junk into him, so he could fall asleep forever. I cannot do this. I know it would be better for him. Maybe he will be reborn and live a full life. Maybe he would be born to loving careful parents that would never let harm come to him. But, I can't do it. I see my wife in his face. I cannot bear to lose him. My guilt will not allow it.
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