Basil Episodes
some very short stories by
Brock Taylor
Aikido – Transference of Energy
Basil awoke with an image of two half moons floating in his mind. When he opened his eyes it didn’t disappear. He reached under the covers, found his wife, and slid his hand onto her buttock. She rolled away from him. “Ah Christ,” her voice was muffled by the pillow, “I feel like a train wreck. Get me some aspirins, will you?”
In the kitchen he put on the coffee then returned to the bedroom to dress. Sitting on the bed tying his shoes the image returned, two half moons swelling to the surface, water streaming into the dark gully between them. He glanced at the lump under the blankets then walked out of the apartment, down two flights of stairs and rested his ear against Magda’s door. Hearing nothing he rapped gently, then after a few seconds opened the door with the key she’d provided him some months before for just such emergencies.
She wasn’t home. The bedroom, with its unmade bed, smelled stale. Sylvester rubbed against his leg. In the refrigerator Basil found an open can of cat food. He forked it into a bowl under the window then washed the utensil and left the empty can soaking in the sink.
By the time Pyrex and caramelized coffee exploded like birdshot in his kitchen he was blocks away grinding ink, the paper already prepared. The bamboo brush, plump with color, released its cargo when he touched it to the paper, and it spread to the size of a silver dollar, then the line tapered quickly in perfect symmetry as he drew the brush down then arced it around to the left. One half moon in a single stroke that would, he knew immediately, imply the second.
He raised the brush from the paper and held it, trembling, as he squinted at his work. A huge sigh escaped his lips but failed to reach his awareness. He continued his scrutiny as his left hand groped blindly about the worktable for cigarettes.
March, 2004
Todos Santos
Jeep Falls Asleep
Once in a long while Basil takes a week off to go to a Zen sesshin or a Vipassana Buddhist silent retreat. The idea is that you sit on a cushion for eight or ten hours a day, sometimes more, and meditate – follow your breath and settle into no-thought or at least less-thought. He supposes it’s good for him, but the reason he does it is as wrong as the sits are long, as misguided as his knees get sore. It is to maintain his self-image as a Buddhist. You just can’t call yourself a Buddhist if you don’t do these things, or so he thinks. Completely stupid, but there you go.
So there he was one evening, part way through the last one-hour sit of the fourth day of one of these things. He had given up noticing his aching knees and the tingling of his sound-asleep feet. He was in what he thinks of as The Zone, the place he wants to be, in which his mind is very still and he is deeply aware of the air moving into and out of his lungs, the steady clip of his heart, the occasional croak of the frogs as they warm up for their evening serenade.
Basil’s friend Jeep was sitting across the room. Rather than sit on a cushion like the rest of the group, he has a tiny bench that his calves fit under so he kneels fairly comfortably. The guy sits like a Samurai, never moving a muscle for the entire hour. As Basil sat there that evening, in a sense truly out of space and time, he gradually became aware of another presence, the pleasant, rhythmic sound of snoring. This is not unheard of at these retreats, especially at the end of a long day, but still, it brought a smile to Basil’s lips and he slowly raised his head and sought the responsible party. He was surprised to see that Jeep had moved – he was not on his little bench - but seated in a chair, and, sure enough, his chin was on his chest and he was evidently fast asleep.
Basil continued to survey the room to see if anyone else had noticed, and was surprised to see that things were quite different from when they’d begun meditating. For one thing, the master had shed his formal robe and was sitting in his undershirt. He supposed that it had gotten warm. Basil realized and savored the fact that he was in the sub-aqueous languor that he remembers from his scuba diving days, where perception is sharp, but all motion, even thought, has slowed to a crawl. In this slow-motion world it quietly dawned on him that the room was littered with empty cushions. Upon further concentration and scrutiny he saw that there were only men remaining in the room – all of the women had left, apparently carelessly kicking aside their cushions. Slowly he turned to look over his shoulder and saw that some of them were in the kitchen, which was strange because a) they had already eaten the evening meal and b) the retreat was completely catered – the participants never went into the kitchen.
He gave a mental shrug and returned to his meditation, but Jeep’s snoring continued and it tickled Basil’s funny bone. Suddenly Basil emitted a loud snort and he was abruptly jolted out of wherever he had been into the everyday. To his surprise he saw that the teacher was back in his robe, Jeep was perched on his kneeling bench, and the configuration of participants had returned to its appropriate coed solemnity with nary a pillow out of place. The only difference now was that everyone was looking at him, some with rebuke in their eyes, others grinning openly, the master bestowing benediction upon a prodigal son. Only Jeep hadn’t seemed to notice, but then he sits like a Samurai.
Todos Santos,
June, 2004
Cristo Salva
Basil was surprised and pleased that the photo appeared in Newsweek. A little anti-climactic a month later, but somehow it vindicated him. Well, perhaps it didn’t do that, but at least he felt a rush of righteous vengeance at the sight of it.
His purpose had only been to poke a little fun, make a hopeless, minor point to an audience that thought it had nothing to learn on the subject, not to gain notoriety – certainly not to land in a Mexican jail. How could he have known that some well-connected American photographer would have been in town the morning after his adventure?
The object of his miscalculation was one of those sorry missives built of white stones on an exposed dun hillside. This one in particular was comprised of two words, the first of six letters, the second of five, and positioned high across the minor harbor – the only access being by water. He had been only passing through, the town requiring at most an afternoon to exhaust his interest, but the cheesy Christian slogan on the hillside, plastered everywhere about the country, from official church-sponsored billboards to scrawled graffiti, had caught his attention and the obviousness of his idea made its execution a requirement, considering he was traveling without schedule, on the lam from nothing but his past. He took a room in a fleabag hotel, rented a rowboat, and began his preparations.
For the first two days he rowed back and forth across the harbor chasing dolphins, pretending to fish, just getting his bearings, planning his attack and escape, scoping out the best place to secure the boat – out of site from the town, eyeing the hillside for a safe night route. He didn’t want to risk a daytime practice ascent. At a hardware store he found a miner’s headlamp and on the second night sometime after twelve made a practice climb to the site. It took him almost an hour to pick his way up the steep slope through the cactus and rubble, following, as best he could in the dark, the route that looked easiest from the water.
The letters were about twice the size he’d estimated – about twenty feet tall and ten feet wide, and based upon a grid, basically like the digit ‘8’ – two squares stacked one upon the other, but, obviously, with only the segments required for each letter. Some of the white-painted boulders were too big for him to easily move. He would need a bar of some kind to lever them out of place. A bar and a good pair of gloves. Still, he figured it was doable, and the moon was on his side, a thin crisp that night, but waxing, so the sooner the better.
He set out at ten the following evening and without using his headlamp arrived, short of breath, at the site by eleven-thirty. The first letter was the ‘S’ and it needed to be changed into an ‘M’. It had a horizontal bar at the top that connected on the left with a vertical, then below that another horizontal, then a vertical on the right, then at the bottom another horizontal – a squared-off snake. He moved the boulders that formed the top horizontal and made them into the top right vertical. The bottom horizontal he moved to be the lower left vertical, thus turning the ‘S’ into an ‘H’. The remaining horizontal he turned into a small ‘V’ hanging from the top of the two verticals to the mid-point. He was short a few rocks which he stole from the top part of the next letter, an ‘A’, that he knew he didn’t need there. Basil looked at his watch. An hour and fifteen minutes had passed and he was already drenched in sweat.
Next was the ‘A’ that needed to become a ‘U’. This was easier. The ‘A’ was boxy, like the ‘S’ – basically an ‘H’ with a horizontal bar at the top. To change it into a ‘U’ he just needed to move the center horizontal to the bottom and remove the rest of the top horizontal. That took him half an hour. It was two o’clock.
The middle letter was going to be the most work: an ‘L’ into an ‘R’. The left vertical would remain. He moved the lower horizontal of the ‘L’ up into the diagonal foot of the ‘R’. Still he needed to make its top box. He had half a horizontal left from the ‘A’ he’d just turned into a ‘U’, and he could steal almost enough from the next letter, a ‘V’, to make it work if he spaced the stones out a bit. An hour and forty-five minutes, and two crushed fingernails later he rolled the last boulder into place. Quarter to four. The sun didn’t rise until after six, but dawn commenced before five, so he figured he had about an hour left. Impossible to finish and get back across the water in the dark.
He had stolen all of the upper rocks of the fourth letter, the ‘V’ to make the ‘R’. All he needed here was an ‘I’, and he figured he had just about enough left, but they all needed to be rolled uphill to form the single centered line from the base of the ‘V’.
It was four-thirty when he moved to the last and easiest change: an ‘A’ to an ‘O’. Just a matter of moving the crossbar of the ‘A’ to the base. Still, it was light and he could plainly see the town when he started down the hill.
So, his Spanish wasn’t the greatest. He actually knew that the last letter of MURIO required an accent over it, but he was out of rocks and out of time, and didn’t think it was perhaps quite necessary. But the locals figured it must have been some dumb gringo who’d blasphemed on their hillside because whoever did it obviously couldn’t spell and even the juvenile delinquents in town were educated enough to get that right.
So, by the time Basil was buying his bus ticket at noon that day, the boat rental guy and the hotel keeper had put two and two together and come up with Basil. The American photographer laughingly took the shot on his guided tour of the docks and never even heard of the unfortunate perpetrator, although that news came out a couple of weeks later in the Tucson Sun under the headline “Topolobampo, Mexico: American vandal sentenced to time served, deported.” Local officials explained that it was the embarrassment caused their town by the photographer, who made such a big deal about it, that most upset them. Otherwise they’d just have made him fix their sign and kicked his ass out of town.
Todos Santos,
July 2004
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