A Mirror of Before and After - CHAPTER VII
By Frank Moore circa 1970s
I had failed my mission in D.C. I hadn’t convinced Moe to drop the store nonsense for a new, free life in Santa Fe. Depression. And the waiting between acts of the Before and After drama. I did not know when and if an act would begin to break the eternal Intermission. People, different kinds of people, kept coming in.
An interesting, unusual person would come in … a person who needed a unicorn to talk to, a mirror to look into to see their inner beauty or who just needed their minds blown a little. I never knew when they’d come. They stood out from the rest who lived their lives automatically. They, the seekers, did not fit with the housewife mothers, plastic hippies going to college to get out of the draft, businessmen who were trying to be mildly hip, spaced-out bikers or the million other roles that the human background takes.
Those individuals who live in the shallow human sea passed me by. They must live that automatic life for a while, maybe all of this lifetime. I float on and in them, this sea. My attention is not on them; it is not focused on them, not yet. I am aware of them, whether I am in the Before and After, or in Sears, or in the college cafeteria. I relate to them. I am in them, with them, I love them. But I did not wait for them, sitting sixteen hours a day, waiting. I was waiting for persons that shoot out at me from the background. Sometimes, many times, I did not know it was happening. Before I started writing this, I didn’t even think about it. But I was waiting for those people who needed me to apply the required electrical push, to send them on their way into what they had to do. Waiting for people who would do the same thing for me. Waiting, most of the time, for when another person and I could do this thing for each other at the same time. Waiting for an opening of energy between me and another person, an opening that would literally change the history of Man. Such an opening could be so absurd a situation that nobody would believe it; or it could be so small, so natural, so fast, that it was beyond us both. But this was what I waited for. I couldn’t lie down for very long, even to piss, for fear of missing energy openings. I had already read all the issues of Zap Comics and Rags, so now I just sat there under the waiting.
“Yes,” I answered Carol, “And someday could you take me to the library?”
“What do you read?”
“Everything. What do you read?”
“Mostly about God. There is nothing else to do.”
Carol looked bored. “Man has to give his life to God, and only by that can he change the world. It is getting late, and I have to fix dinner. I’d like to come back and talk some more and take you to the library. Not tomorrow, though. I’ve got to drive my brother to the air base … He’s going to Germany, and the day after, Mom wants me to go to a wedding of one of her friends, get into a dress and listen to them talk about dull things. I’d rather talk to you. I’ll be back soon.”
Carol pulled on the leash, telling Bo, shivering in the corner with fright, that it was time to go, and disappeared into the cold winter night’s air.