The Devil May Care, but I Do Not – Kenan Meral
February 15, 2026
“I remember the morning sky. The lacerate clouds. It seems to me that God’s idea of the world is akin to a monarch butterfly’s idea of choosing its directions. That in the Creator’s random appearing choices, it would be absurd to imagine a butterfly moving incorrectly. Certainly the Creator and His creation are acting in accordance with nature, so, as are the wind-blown leaves, as are the constellations, as are all of nature’s disordered appearing creatures—the thunder and the lightning are neither blunders, neither are the heavens, neither are the sunlight’s assertions through a butterfly’s wingspan—so it must be the case that all of these details, no matter how grandiose, no matter how particular, are in every which way correct.”
– Lectures on Natural Philosophy and Aesthetics (Eaves, 1979)
When I was younger, I had an older brother and I always wanted to follow in his footsteps. For most of my youth and into my teenage years, I watched him strive. In my eyes, it seemed as long as I could follow in his pathway, I could do no wrong.
As my brother approached career age, he decided that he wanted to be some sort of writer or a journalist. My parents were hard on him. Still, he was not prone to error, which benefitted them a quiet confidence that he would succeed in whatever became of his goals. To some degree, I think it intimidated them. Sean was adamant that he would not become a professional like my mother, so he reached after my grandfather’s lodestar. The harder they fought to whip him into line, the more adverse the outcome.
In the autumn of the year 2000, Sean applied to the University of Washington. Upon acceptance, he enrolled as a freshman journalism major. For two years he worked at the university newspaper, and after a promising summer internship with The Washington Post, my brother went into his junior year with more confidence than I’ve ever seen. Every once in a while, when he’d come home, he’d show me pictures he took. One image that really impressed me was of him summiting Mount Rainier. Sean told me he was working on a novel and that his creativity had fountained out of him. Everything seemed to be going well until September of 2002. Sean Eaves went missing on a road trip. My brother was last seen by a gas station cashier, filling up his tank before heading out on the highway north toward Callanish into the Olympic Peninsula. To this day, I don’t know if he died or if he is still alive. Nobody knows.
In their grief, my parents began to take it easy on me. I was the only apparent son. For a little while, whenever the profession of writing came up they would get tremendously angry, but they got tired of fighting it. They said Sean was going out to visit an old friend of our grandfather’s, a guy named Ernest Mahler. What’s unusual about Mahler, is that he is the author of famous memoir titled My Upbringing in the Gast Society. Grandfather Roy didn’t talk about him, but we knew Mahler had it really bad growing up, so I never asked. Because he was a distant family friend, we figured Mahler couldn’t have been a culprit in Sean’s vanishing. My parents said there was no evidence to accuse him. Though as I grew older, the suspicion clung to the back of my mind.
When my time came around, I applied to several different colleges, including the University of Washington. I was accepted to all of them. On the condition that I did not attend Washington in particular, my parents offered to pay for the first two years of my education. That is, as long as I enroll anywhere except Sean’s alma mater. I disagreed. There was a path forged for me which I could not relent against: It was that of the writer. I chose journalism for more practical purposes, but remained literarily inclined.
Over the course of the next several semesters, everything I was writing was centered around grief, was centered around my brother’s works, and involved mastering them. They needed to be prepared for memorialization. Sean’s final pieces were fictional compositions, inspired by the life of Ernest Mahler and the looming shadow of the infamous cult leader, Alexander Gast. I didn’t know how much time Grandpa Roy had spent out with Mahler. All I knew is that our grandfather would go out often to the Pacific Northwst after his discharge from the military. Sean wrote that our grandfather was drawn to The Gast Society out of an interest in their occult ideals, and their untimely ending.
One day, I bought and read a copy of Mahler’s memoir. I was surprised to see the influence it had on my brother. In Mahler’s book, I learned all about the Callanish Massacre. As federal agents stormed the compound, Alexander Gast ordered his men to fight to the last bullet. Gast organized a final ritual sacrifice, culminating in the house fire deaths of almost two dozen women and children. The Gast Society, and the massacre at Callanish, was interpreted by influential sociologists and political philosophers as a microcosm of life in Nazi Germany, particularly near the end of World War II. Mahler’s work became an artifact of foremost case study concerning cult tragedies prior to the latter half of the 20th Century. His memoir was influential in the understanding of mass propaganda campaigns and totalitarian political culture. Mahler’s work had been read by everybody from Albert Camus to Hannah Arendt. Copies of My Upbringing in the Gast Society were found in the personal libraries of celebrities ranging from John Lennon to Marlon Brando, to men as infamous as Jim Jones and Charles Manson. Why all these details coalesce serve to paint a striking portrait of why my grandfather was so fascinated. It possessed the makings of a perfect story. So down this rabbit hole my brother went.
For a couple of years during college, I tried to suppress any urge to get to the bottom of my brother’s passing. I didn’t want to disturb my family landscape by pockmarking whatever remained of our solitude, by going and digging up bones. Though the truth gnawed at me. I’d occasionally have nightmares about Sean. My parents said this was considered to be a “normal” phenomenon of grieving. In the winter months, I’d get very sick. These horrible fever dreams would transpire and Sean could come to my bedside in my state of delirium. In the dead of February he’d beckon me, always telling me we had work to do. Sean’d remind me from the grave about his accursed novel. Then when my fever would break I’d do my best to forget it all.
For the latter half of my experience at the University of Washington, my wish to commemorate my brother had enamored me. I took my whole junior year to learn how to write decently, then another year to gain editing experience. I’d made some good friends in the writing program meetings I attended, namely one Sam Maynard. Sam’s father Theodore was an editor at a well respected press, and after enough time, I was able to sit down and talk with Sam’s dad. I explained to him my circumstance. Mr. Maynard told me he was interested in reading Sean’s writing.
That May, I graduated. In the summer I worked two internships. A one month stint at Politico, and a four week position at The Washington Post as a coffee boy. Then in October, Theo Maynard told me the head editor of Proteus House was interested. The following April, my older brother’s book was a go for print. He’d be happy to see his dream accomplished. Somehow, I hoped he knew.
***
One day after dinner on a walk by a creekside, it sank in that I was tired of writing. While strolling by this rivulet near my home, I realized this year my passion had waned substantially. With its wane came a casual drought in my creativity. The features of the creek ceased to reach out to me and I’d stopped thinking about everything I was looking at in words. I wish it wasn’t like this. I know a beautiful phrase is like sunlight emanating off running water, where good words roll with a sonorous coolness. In my writing I made songs, plucked prefixes and strummed suffixes, playing the poetry of words’ old meanings. It came naturally. Smashing words together, contracting and extracting meanings with freely combined phrases—that joy was not lost on me. I loved language. Will love it, always. I don’t know why, but today I felt like I’d gotten everything I needed out of words. I felt as though I had snapped out of an infatuation. That if literature’s stream-of-consciousness is at all dreamlike, I’d been asleep by a creek for far too long. To put it plainly, I felt that I was seeing everything as it truly exists for the very first time.
In retrospect, it wasn’t just one awakening event, or one occurrence which spurred my decisive turn away from writing, but a slow realization that everything which is good in the world, which I knew to appreciate, is already made perfect, and that I gain a greater joy in participating in communion with them automatically. For me, writing contained a spiritual element. My writing echoed a drive to confession. When I stopped, it wasn’t that I didn’t have anything to confess anymore, rather I began to appreciate a reality I knew so little about. Another thing, at the age of twenty-three, I knew I would only get to be very young for a little while more. This frightened me.
In the evenings, I still enjoyed reading. Reading is this “other communion” where writers deploy words as a means to memorialize life, making this shared dream a thoroughfare across time. Reading is a weird way of communicating with the dead, and writing is a method to compose an epitaph. I figured, I am alive now, and there’s no point in trying to capture what I already possess. Life, that is, because I am alive right now.
I remember typing out the last thing I wrote on my computer a year since my graduation. My final sentence arrived in the form of an often stolen question, “Now that I’ve enlisted myself in the forces of youth, what is there to be done?” When I postponed my writing career, I decided that my body would be best deployed in the service of aims that are the most difficult for a man opposite of my age. The thought was brief, but I tried to imagine the impossible wanting of a man of eighty-three. My grandfather was that age when he passed. As my reference point, he had a hard time climbing stairs. After some time staring out of my window, up at South Mountain’s serrated horizon, my heart settled upon climbing.
My buddy Sam still lived in Washington State. I intended to visit him in the summertime. Now that I’d decided that I would like to climb, we figured it would be a fine idea to make a trip to Mount Rainier, to try and summit its peak. Me and Sam talked that spring. Before, we’d merely jostled the idea around, but it had never come to a serious head. Sam told me it would be the best to venture out in mid-August, when the wildflowers bloomed. That time of year is when the least rain fell in the Pacific Northwest.
My good friend Sam was a non-fiction writer. He was working on a book about fringe religious organizations in America. The story of the Gast Society lured him right in. It is said that the group had been totally expunged after the truth was uncovered that they were performing ritual human sacrifice. It was rumored that several Callanish survivors went underground during World War Two. This last remaining follower, Ernest Mahler, was just a boy before the outbreak of the war. Now he was approaching his nineties. Sam and I had made a friendly compact, that if he joined me in my journey up Rainier, I’d help him document his meeting with Mahler.
***
I remember a great many details driving away from Seattle where Sam lived. There are so many to name, though what I remember most vividly are the star-dappled tree-crests. Also how the roads became sparingly used the closer we drove to Rainier National Park. There were families of hikers, and campers numinous, humanity in groupings from small towns, reducing to diners, to fewer coffee huts, and then a tent or two. Sam and I were very eager to stake our claim as outdoorsy incliners. I remember in Seattle, looking across the Puget Sound, it is possible to see Mount Rainier in the distance. Sam said for newcomers it is often a shock to see Rainier and at first mistake its peak for the highest cloud in the horizon. When I saw it, it didn’t seem like a true location. Though the closer we drove, that reverend mountain morphed from a myth into a holograph, into a picture into a statue, into something eternal. That this rock of rocks had something to teach, appeared as an inspiration to self-schism, where the higher I’d climb, the deeper I’d plunge into the core of some essential Truth.
We parked late in the morning. I was surprised to see the amount of visitors. Our plan was to sleep overnight in Sam’s van then make our trek out before dawn. Inside Rainier National Park there was a restaurant and quite a few hiking trails. The longest trail was a seven mile hike up to the base of the glacier, where nearly everyone turns. We decided to conserve our strength for tomorrow, so instead we walked around to get a look at the blooming wildflowers, and discussed our plans for the ascent. Then we got dinner at the restaurant near the camper park. We talked about a variety of things, most importantly, the book Sam was reading about the Gast Society. He was excited to tell me as much as he was learning.
“What were you able to find out?” I asked.
“They were founded by a fellow named Alexander Gast. No surprise.”
“I guess if you’re starting a cult, you might as well name it after yourself.”
“Apparently his father’s name was Gerhard, who was reputedly of relation to a family of composers. Young Alex wanted to be a playwright, but failed.”
“Does that book say anything about this Ernest guy?”
“Mahler served in Korea. Then after the war he worked as a firearms machinist. In the late ‘50s, his memoir hit it big. The story made him something of a Seattle celebrity.”
“I’m guessing he didn’t like the attention.”
Sam nodded.
“A couple months after his book’s publication, he moved across the Puget Sound. Occasionally, he’d host guests who really wanted to meet him, but besides that, Mahler lived alone.”
I was sipping from a beer can slowly, looking around at the alpine scenery as the evening approached. We paid our tab then made our preparations for the hike up the next day. With our technical climbing gear and our camping supplies all packed up, we went to sleep and prepared our initial journey up to Camp Muir. I was laying on a cot on the van floor below Sam. I heard him snoring above me on a shelved mattress. For the first time in a while, I went to sleep excited, knowing that I was doing something right with my life.
The next morning we started up Rainier’s established hiking trails. I noticed the wildflowers spanning wherever glacier water flowed. Where the waters ran, meadows sprung up to make a holy locale out the mountain’s composure. Their florets were small, though supernumerous in their bright blues and golden reds. These colors made them effortlessly attractive to bees. On occasion, marmots would rut through the flower’s gauntlet. The critters would stumble with their own efficiency to get to positions on sunning rocks. What I took note of most prominently was Rainier’s extremity, and how upon my arrival, such a place felt like an otherworldly impossibility. I would climb upon it for a day, and shutter at a contradiction I observed in my brother’s prose.
Sean wrote, “I believe the world is a hiding place of sublime objects, of which until their immeasurable being is brought to the forefront of our eyes, the true nature of even the largest mountains appear completely occluded in plain sight. Once it becomes comprehensive that a complete understanding of such a terrain is actually impenetrable, we shove off a frame of logic and conjoin with the land. We matriculate into a sort of communion, where what is known and unknown becomes a useless formality. The sublime is a sensory eclipse of God’s awful creative power. When I was on the verge of my best work, I concluded that madness is the mind’s total dissolution into the world. I believe it is merciful that the world bustles so, and that we are not constantly harangued into confrontations with such beauty. I know it to be true that he who has such a knowledge of beauty is laden with a kind of darkness of day.”
I wondered about this while initiating my path up the stellar-glacier—where the terrain of the mountainside becomes so bright, that the path we walk becomes a journey risking snow-blindness. Watching Sam climb, my changeling friend jutted out goat-like with a devil-may-care athleticism. He made the likelihood of injury appear an unheard of anomaly. I didn’t believe it at the time. From rock to rock, Sam sprang with a bounding lightness. I was certain he’d trip but his balance was impeccable. It took me some time to catch up with him as he careened up edges. My boots needed to be broken in. After several hours of hiking, I could feel the skin of my heels being worn down. Then finally finishing a vertical slog up what appears to be endless rocks and snow, we made it to Camp Muir before nightfall. Sam helped me set up my tent. I was too tired to get a good view of my surroundings, and by the time I landed in my sleeping bag I fell asleep instantly. It was important to get our rest if we wanted to leave early and make it in time for the sunrise on the summit.
We woke up around midnight. After a breakfast of granola bars and some dehydrated coffee, we changed into cold weather gear and attached crampons to our boots. The climbing conditions and the climate were harshened by an increased altitude, and the mountainside blackness. I was amazed that I was going to be finishing whatever was left of this climb in the dark, but I trusted my highly experienced friend. There weren’t many other people. Seven or eight first timers, and two guides. We had headlamps equipped. Sam lead and I followed up this blue-gray terrain of rocks and ancient ice. The only other sign of humanity was in the skies overhead—an airplane mimicking a red star shot at a meteor-caliber. I stared at it from my surreal altitude, watching it blinking, blinking, blinking, and trailing faintly gaseous. The plane went over the horizon, carrying my prayers for dawn. The sky blued out the higher we drove, sometimes halting to skirt around a crevasse, or to breathe. At these heights, the wind slang hoary and with each passing gale, cold ghosts charged through us, stealing something. At the summit, the sun rose holographic, enchanting a heaven-dream, like watching a mercury-inkwell spill across the bottom lining of an illuminated, though unfinished manuscript page, waiting to have upon it scribed the Handwritten rhythm of a fearful Psalm. After an hour, the dawn sun rose looking like an aperture into God-knows-what. What a day. What more do I need say? Why can’t my mortal sustenance be but mere breath and snowdrop?
On my way down the mountain. It began to resonate. At the time, I didn’t know it yet, but a fatality was riding toward me.
***
We were driving northwest now. Mahler lived in the deep woods, out in the Olympic Peninsula.
As Sam steered, I was peeling a page back in Mahler’s book to an excerpt describing the night of the massacre. In his writing, Mahler employs a strange poetry to detail a childhood rite of passage which was intensely formative to him. This was a process Gast engineered to initiate boys into manhood. The peculiar thing about Mahler is that he never wrote in such a way where what had occurred in Callanish ever read like a disdainful event, or that he was mournful or even traumatized by what he’d seen. Mahler didn’t enjoy talking about it much, and not because his reluctance was a cause of sorrow. What Sam, and prior biographers suggest, is that Mahler does not want to risk outcasting himself further by speaking in a matter-of-fact way, or to exile further himself and say that there were some aspects of cult-life which were deeply satisfying to him.
What was more horrific was Mahler’s descriptions of his relationship with his “valkyrie bride.” According to Gast’s worldview, the valkyrie brides were selected women whose social responsibilities meant engendering a young male with a proper moral hygiene. This included raising him to sexual maturity, and when the day of his rite of passage arrived, this also included taking the youth’s virginity.
Mahler writes:
“That May morning I awoke to a green-smell, bright and fervent. The previous week had been nothing but flurries in the evenings, making the moonlight fall in disjoint pixels.”
(I had wondered if this untimely and futuristic detail was more the fruit of Gast’s teachings, or of Mahler’s own stylistic break. Regardless, I kept reading.)
“In the evenings leading up to May Day, we endured a test of faith by praying on broken glass for hours on May Day Eve. The pain was sharp, but we learned to transmute our smarting wounds into “something to succor.” Then we’d break our fast at midnight. While eating our dinner we’d receive instruction. As was tradition the night before the ritual, the valkyrie brides recited the words of Alexander Gast. “You will not always be this strong. You will not always be able to bear the weight of your body with all your strength. In fact, I would be terrified if I were not able to rise to the occasion of my youth. If you do not, I promise you, years and years from now, you will look back in horror as you watch the poetry of your strength slough off your bones. You will watch your youth dissolve and you’ll hate yourself for not wielding it.” Nobody said anything. After dinner, on our way to the foreboding ritual, we stood in a circle around the wicker man. Torches lit up the ceremonial grounds. We watched three different women receive tablets on their tongues. Then we received ours. The honor bestowed upon these three women required them to either enter the wicker voluntarily, or by force. There was one lady who was so old, she had to be carried like tree-stump to the burnsite. One young woman who was very beautiful would go kicking and screaming. Then a very, very young woman, and I regret to use that phrasing, but those were their words for her, would be lead hand-in-hand, into the wicker. Then, they set the thing alight.
That night, our innocence stood trial. Out of respect for the lost I will not be going into morbid detail, but as you can imagine, this upbringing made a mold of my mind, casting whatever was poured into a strange shape, fit to wield for aestheticization. I’ll never forget the night they took us all. The valkyrie brides got us very intoxicated. I don’t remember it well, though that May morning I awoke again to a vernal aroma. The spring’s oncoming brilliance. If that night’s details must be provided, for the sake of posterity, I remember nothing but flurries. I laid on my back. The world spun. It hummed and strobed. I looked upward under the black sky as the last bits of my innocence dissipated like spring snow. This is the way these people kept the “Old Ways” going, I suppose. It was my time.
That afternoon before I had a moment to reflect on what had happened to me, the government men made it out to Callanish. A gun battle ensued. On the comedown from whatever drug they supplied us, one of the women gave me a pistol and a crash course on its handling. She told me to use it on any man I didn’t know. I tossed it. That day they took the boys, or recently-made-men, away from the compound. I found out half of them were enlisted to fight the Japanese no more than three months later.
During my questioning, the police were trying to get information on Gast. I told them I met him in person several times. He very rarely talked to us. Though when I was a boy, his funereal appearance struck my instincts so much so that I knew I was looking at an incorrect man. His sullenness and his high-pitched voice and the jerkiness of his movements led me to consider that after all these years Herr Gast was the victim of a demon’s ventriloquy. Later on in my twenties I found out that his tremors were caused by Parkinson’s, but that portion of his identity never locked into place as sympathetic piece during the solving of the puzzle that was the man. He had a screwed up way of looking at things. It was a worldview that seemed fair at first because he taught us the brutality of nature during these rituals. More or less, I learned about nature’s general apathy through deer hunts with my koryos, another pagan term Gast loved.
Even when I was young I was skeptical of the things he’d teach, because what is nature really? Isn’t it just another word for everything? I know people seek to draw a moral reality from it, though when applied to human beings, I don’t see a single thing to learn from our observations, but that’s a discussion for another book.
For this work, and for all of my previous efforts, I’ve been finding more and more that the people reading me were artists, most frequently writers themselves. Initially, it felt discouraging. It was unusual because I believed that my words had a destiny among normal people, whatever that meant. This hope was a pretender’s imaginings. There was this fellow named Roy Eaves, who’d stop by my neck of the woods. He possessed a kind of animal magnetism, though he was not necessarily good at speaking to people. He was not even a congenial man, but you’d read his work and suddenly his way of breathing even had a gravity to it—the allure of a vortex.”
***
When we pulled up the dirt road to Mahler’s plot of land, we drove about five minutes through some woods and came to a reasonably sized cabin fit for one man. I noticed there were electric generators, a garage, several sheds, and then at last I noticed Mahler, sitting there on his porch, in his proud self-sufficiency. We were introduced at shotgun point.
“Maynard and friend?” He shouted out.
“Yes sir. I’m Sam Maynard and this is my colleague.”
“Hello Mr. Mahler, my name’s Calvin Eaves.” I enunciated clearly.
Mahler was hard of hearing.
“Eaves you say? Eaves by chance of Roy Eaves kin?”
“He’s my grandfather.”
“I’ll be damned. Come on in.”
We talked for a while about what life was like out here. Sam was video recording for his article and for general posterity. Mahler began asking me about my family. I was taking precautions to keep track of his every reaction. We talked about my grandfather and about Sean.
“I’m sorry to hear about your brother. Truth be told, I didn’t find out until your grandfather told me.”
“My grandfather knew you well. He was inspired by you, so I hear.”
“Roy Eaves was a man of the aesthetic life. Not in a way that comes along often, and not in the frustrating manner of the frilly decadent, or a bourgeois faggot. These guys who say they “live for art.” You know the type? They’re under-socialized pussies, who’s mommies never let them out to play, so they become accustomed to toying with high-concepts. Eaves was well versed in their type of art-speak, but you gotta be if you wanna succeed in that realm. Roy was different. One time Eaves wrote me in a letter. He said, and I quote, “I worship beauty in the old fashioned way, that same manner in which men used to worship eldritch deities. That if I were called upon to make any sacrifice, a life, mine or any other, or even all life, and that it would be for a cause of sufficient beauty, then we must prepare a sacrificial altar to accomplish beauty as our aim’s commandment.” Obviously, we had a serious respect for one another’s work. In the Seventies, Roy would come out to Seattle to visit me when I was still living in society. We’d exchange copies of manuscripts and pieces we’d been working on— mostly corresponding through letters, or the occasional telephone call, talking about things we’d been reading, or criticizing one another’s work. It was a fruitful relationship. Though what I think Eaves was really interested in was my childhood, which to be fair, was everyone’s interest in me. If you knew anything about me at all, it’s for my memoir. Which is the reason why you two young men came all the way out here to visit me today.”
“We have a history in a way, but your youth is more compelling than mine,” I said.
“I guess it was fate. My past too is some sort of vortex with its own gravitational pull.” There was a lull in the conversation. Sam flipped a page in his questionnaire notepad. “Mr. Mahler, you wrote, and I quote: “Something I’ve since had a difficulty in apprehending is the answer to the riddle of the aesthetic experience I achieved the night before the massacre, and why my search—a blundering through darkness and confusion—has elucidated nothing more true than the realization that my life’s pathway is as alien to me as the landscape of the Labyrinth of the Night.” This is a mysterious quotation to many readers. What does it mean?” Sam asked.
“Maybe I’ll answer that in a roundabout way during our conversation.”
“Fair enough. Mr. Mahler if I can ask you one more question, do you believe you were under the intoxication of any particular substances the night of the ritual?”
“I don’t recall what they gave us for sure, but I remember feeling remarkably calm,. You’d suppose I’d be tremendously anxious, but actually I was very calm. Ecstatic.”
Mahler then laughed, as if somebody told an unexpectedly poor joke. Then he looked at me very closely.
“You have his nose, if you are not lying.” Mahler stated so after about another minute of dead air.
I showed him my license, to prove my name. “What a strange world we live in?” Mahler said. “Did you attend his funeral?” I asked.
Mahler nodded.
“Then we must’ve met before. When you were just a boy.”
“I don’t remember the day well.”
“That day sticks with me.”
Mahler seemed uneasy because he could tell we were trying to suss each other out, to make sure our details coincide, and that mistold memories were not interpreted as lies.
“Yes. Your grandfather’s funeral. It was an impeccable thing. On the walk from my hotel to the cemetery, where he was buried, there were two young men, gravediggers covered in clay-dust and muck, fencing one another with the shaft ends of their spades. They were swinging their shovels around, rifle-tossing them into the air like parade masters, or jabbing each other’s ribs, then laughing. I laughed too. Then they walked on over the hill into the heart of the cemetery until I could not see them, but still hear their jester’s commotion, until we could not even hear that, then by and large, the ceremony was complete. I didn’t watch the casket get lowered, though all the while, even in that cemetery, my brain began the process of the recreating life’s iconography. People say all the time, that funerals should be a celebration of the deceased’s legacy, but nobody has the wherewithal to be so iconoclastic in the days after a person dies to say it is truly over for him, and that we should betray our own precious vitality. I don’t believe in affording the dead the luxury of a ceremony to mark the burial of lost time. To occasionally have the selfish lust for life, to even disrespect the dead—now this is a secret restraint I’ve long prayed to lose.”
“What do you think we should do with dead people then?” I asked.
“I liked the way the old Aryans handled it. Their towers of silence. You should look into them. The people we now know as Zoroastrians, built tall open air structures to expose their deceased to the elements and be done with them. Your grandfather and I made a trip to one such monument outside of Kermanshah, Iran, in 1975. Roy wanted to go. We became acquaintances in Seattle during one of my book readings. He was in town. He asked me if I wanted to go out for drinks. Told me he was a professor of aesthetics and that he wanted to know more about my story. So we went out another night and after a couple beverages, we found that we saw eye to eye on a great many topics. Then over the years, we became good friends indeed.”
“What did you find out there in Iran?”
“We found out exactly how death should be treated. In those towers, bodies lay circular with their heads set toward the pit of the tower, and believe me it is truly an open air tower of death, populated by intense decay and a rotting smell where carrion-eating animals come and indulge. There are even nests of vultures who begin their lives hatching in bone-nests, then going on to make a living off death. I admired that. I have photographs from your grandfather. He took most of them.”
Mahler went over to a bookshelf, opened a cabinet and withdrew a scrapbook, unveiling this gory assemblage. He showed me one picture. From a promontory point of view, my grandfather photographed the bodies arranged in a meridian, where the dead lay in various states of decay, sometimes with eyes agape. One deceased, a nude male corpse, his jaw ajar to make a toothy black bowl for a vulture to devour his tongue. In the picture, he’s upward facing, I know he’s gazing into the ultimateless, looking past my grandfather taking the photograph. It feels as though he’s looking me by proxy.
“Roy was a strange man for sure.”
Mahler laughed again.
“We agreed that this way of handling death is better than antiquarianism. You know how grieving people are. They become fixated on little objects and the deceased’s belongings, whatever affects and possessions remaining from the dead. These become vulgar leftovers. Fighting over inheritances and heirlooms. They become icons of degenerate reverence. Another idea Gast held, which I liked in particular, if I may be so bold, it’s the idea that a man is meant to be burnt with all of his possessions. Anything I accumulate is mine and mine alone, and after I’m gone, anyone alive clinging to these affectations of grief really are not done any good in preserving the past. The happy news, Mr. Eaves, is that I am still alive. So these things are my gifts to give.”
Mahler handed me the scrapbook, containing my weird birthright.
“Also take these, they’re letters I held onto from Roy. The rest is, the rest.”
“Eaves you know one thing?”
“What’s that Mr. Mahler?”
“You’re tremendously different from your grandfather. Not that it’s a bad thing. Just from talking to you I can tell you have a telescopic view of the world. What’s different about you and Roy is that your grandfather’s eyes were kaleidoscopic. How fascinating. Ancestor and descendant, with their perspective split in two, by a parallax view of the same star. Descendant gazes upward and if he stares for a long enough while, the star’s flickering nature becomes clairvoyant, so does its night journey, and soon with enough knowledge, the pattern of the star’s voyage becomes readily predictable—then all of the moving parts in the night sky can be disintegrated, and reassembled systematically, because he has reasoned it so. Though the light of the moon and light of a fire are likewise illuminating, they oppose, the telescopic eye’s vision is expansive, the kaleidoscopic is not so. As with Roy, everything he saw at once mystified him—entranced him. Despite his fanciful affectations, he learned that he knew nothing about the world he was living in, and by viewing our skies as such, whatever is enchanted becomes a little bit more unknown. After all, a kaleidoscope is a tool for unknowing. In the end, these are the only two ways of seeing things proper.”
“If I am the way you described me, I’m looking at the past and learning that I knew almost nothing about him?”
“You’ve never read any of his works?”
“I haven’t.”
“He was a great man. An underappreciated one at that.”
Sam sat and talked to Mahler for a little while longer. Eventually, he asked him technical questions about the cult, but I wasn’t listening. Quite frankly, I had little else to say, and I began to look inward. It began to make me thoroughly uncomfortable. I was finding out about my grandfather, and not just as a man I reminisced about harmlessly. All my mother’s little tidbits about him were laconic details you’d list to appease a child. Finding out the ways you do not love your ancestors feels like a method for meeting them on equal footing. That evening, I loaded a small box of scrapbooks into Sam’s van. These books are parcels full of Eaves family memories recollected.
Just like my grandfather’s books, I never took a crack at the pages of his photography because they intimidated me. The past glaring back. I believed it was my right to let it go. It wouldn’t pass. I hoped these memories would exhaust through an entropy of neglect, now history was coming back headlong to haunt me through fate-networks. I knew my grandfather was a morbid man who’d let death interrogate his response to his search for meaning, but I never knew to what low levels his grotesque intrigue sank. I let Sam take a crack at the Roy Eaves’s collected works while I drove, and now I’m getting feedback. Not only feedback, but criticism which makes me feel personally responsible.
At a roadside restaurant, Sam got pretty drunk. His loose lipped remarks were landing like dropped knives.
“Man you come from a fucked up family.”
“You don’t say.”
“I mean, do you think your grandfather actually believed everything he wrote?” “I didn’t read a lot of it, so I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”
“That you can transmute yourself into literature, for one?”
“Sounds like bullshit.”
“Your mother said so. That’s what he was after in the preface.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Why didn’t you say you knew Mahler?”
“I didn’t, personally.”
“Your mom edited the second edition of his memoirs.”
“My mother tried to convince me of a lot of strange things about my grandfather growing up. That we could project ourselves down the generations, if we got good enough at different things. Writing, whatever.”
“I didn’t know about that.”
I started speaking in a hushed tone.
“I had an older brother. He disappeared out there on a trip. I don’t know what he was doing.”
“Where do you think he went?”
I shrugged. Then I waited for a moment to consider what Sam would say about my next question.
“Do you think Mahler was acting unusual while we were there?” “Unusual composes the essence of the man.”
“I mean, when I told him about my family.”
“He seemed gracious to see you.”
“Hm.”
“Do you think he had something to do with your brother’s disappearance?”
“I think he wasn’t telling us a lot of things.”
“There’s no evidence to suggest your brother was actually killed right?”
“Sean’s car wasn’t damaged, and there was no sign of injury or any struggle when the vehicle was discovered abandoned.” “I should go back tomorrow.”
“We will.”
“I want on go on my own, it’s personal.”
After some driving around, we parked for another night at a roadside stop overlooking the ocean. I couldn’t rest. There at the Pacific’s brink, blue storm clouds with underslung lightning. They resembled jellyfish, wandering. Earlier in the day, I was awestruck by the beautiful clouds, who tranquilly trawl across blue clarity in bushels of Christ-white cyclamen. They change into dubious impressions, tranquilizer grays, colors concealing things. Then as the day drones into night, these same clouds shout hexes and cast psychic slashes in the sky’s mind. All the while, the memory of my brother matched the weather’s evolutions. Sean was close. He couldn’t have died. I knew it. Mahler knew it too. I had a dream that night, and woke up startled in the morning because I could’ve sworn I’d seen him.
The next afternoon, I knocked on Mahler’s door. He predicted my coming. This time he left his gun propped on the chair. I was curious at his trusting me.
“You’re back. Can I get you anything? Coffee?”
“That sounds alright.”
“Come on and sit down.”
Mahler’s body odor had seeped into every piece of furniture in the place. It reeked elderly, that he’d spent too much time alone. In his cabin, there are knots in the wooden planks in the walls mimicking his eyes.
“What do you need?”
I was analyzing Mahler very closely. I was trying my best to keep my guard, but a shot of adrenaline had filled me with anxiety. He got up to make me coffee.
“When did you meet my brother?”
“I met him when your Grandfather came out to visit. We went hiking all together on several occasions. Then Sean and I would get together for a meal every couple of months.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t know you wanted me to say anything, to be honest.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not. Sean was a good man. I thought Sean would’ve told you these things already.” I looked at Mahler. There was information he was hiding.
“What do you know?”
“Calvin, you’re not going to like what I am about to tell you, but it’s the God’s honest truth, and I’m only telling you curtly because it hurts me. Your brother committed suicide.” A trenchant pang blistered me.
“You have to forgive me for saying it so frankly. Out here I experience a kind of loneliness that makes me adversarial to kindness. Your brother didn’t want anyone to know.” Out of instinct I went to reach for the shotgun on the couch. It was unloaded.
“Now what good would that do?”
“What did you do with him?”
“That’s something you would’ve done well to ask your grandfather, if he was still alive. He believed there was something artful to our rituals. You know, you Eaves are a peculiar race. I’d never seen a group of people so prepared to sacrifice it all, just to explore a moment of transgression. Your grandfather was an iconoclast. He needed to prove it to himself, to delve into the darkest experiences, to cast his spell of beauty over any misdeeds, thus breaching into the wilderness of forbidden liberties. In Vietnam, he never told me what he did, but whatever went down over there must’ve latched onto him. It came back home, and became a part of you. Your grandfather offered your brother to our society’s spectacle, as a specie of entry into the medium-making of… anything taboo, whatever is unclean. Sean did not suffer. He was awake but in his state of intoxication, his impending fate must’ve felt blissful to him. It is in Roy’s nature to smash illusions about immorality. But I have to confess, your brother got away. He escaped. We looked for him everywhere. He’s out there in the world.”
“If you keep screwing with me I’ll kill you.”
“I’m ninety-two years old, and I have a feeling you’re going to either way. I have nothing left to lose.”
I dragged Mahler outside by his tufts of beard and throttled him. This wisp of tow. If I could thrash the old man hard enough, it would expel some truth.
“You killed him. I know you did.”
I’d wind up my legs and deliver blow after blow.
“We didn’t.”
“Who is we?”
“Your brother is alive. He’s out there. The betrayal must’ve been too much for him. Figured he couldn’t trust anyone.”
“How many people did you sacrifice?”
“One every year.”
“And you would’ve done me too.”
“Who knows if you even want to live? That’s the problem with every young person. We have to force you to be strong. You’ll waste it otherwise.” “You’re a nightmare.”
“Go fuck yourself and get it over with.”
Watching Mahler writhe, a genuine contempt for the elderly arose in me, a contempt for those feeble old men who have nothing to offer but hatred emergent of their decrepitude. Mahler fainted from the abuse, cursing me. I beat him further and I left him to die.
I took Sam’s van back to a restaurant where he was waiting for me. Then we drove back to Seattle. I crashed at his apartment.
The next day we spent a little time together before I flew back home. Sam took me to eat at Pike’s Place Market for dinner, then drinks. That night, we went for a walk. In the distance, I could see Mount Rainier again, the mountain my brother had summited, a mountain which’d became an undead peak of salted earth, quietly illuminating a haunted destination, reminding me of a place I strived after, but could never truly reach in my imagination. That mountain is certainly as far away as the moon is tangible to me, as far away as the previous moment. In this manner of speaking, Rainier as I desired it, is equidistant to the entirety of the past, where all lay beyond encased in this quality of irretrievability. Still this mountain, this moon, this memory of my brother, cast a faint beam over my shoulder. I’m walking. The lightplay of the past is guiding me, casting the movements of my foreshadow, fleeing me, dictating my path. I was convinced after all these years of confusion, my evidence of virtue, is my fidelity to camaraderie. This pain was mistaken proof that I could save my missing and heroic brother.
Still, Sean, wherever you are, you are my mystic martyr. The night grows long. The moon hangs over our heads, glimmering downward upon us in equivalency. My silhouette is slimmer than when the night began. As my shadow becomes undetectable, so too does my pathway to you. Sean, the darkness is only natural, and the mountain has no preference for whether or not it is seen or is invisible, so I convalescence in this darkness, which makes no appeals and leaves me with no choice but to walk on completely concealed.
So I must be relieved of my duties then, and pray our paths cross. You are the one who I cannot see, but the one person I love, and the one who is now nearly as imaginary to me as God is imaginary, but I love you both and I would give everything at the drop of a hat for you, if need be. It is my faith that you are behaving the way God intended. Know you share a kindred spirit. For now my brother, I may only pay you tribute through this secret message. I need a sign. I pray you’ve been handed over to a world of mystery.