A Short Story by Kinesava

I wrote this story about nine years ago based on a dream. For reasons I’ve never understood, I have dreams that have nothing to do with anything I’m familiar with when I’m awake. I think some of them make good stories, so I write them. I was reading some of my older work today and re-discovered this one.

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“Another damn rejection!”

Jaxon stared at the form letter in his hand, disgusted that he paid the postage on the SASE that enclosed it. The postage paid envelope was the only reason he had anything at all to show for a carefully crafted inquiry he had sent to the publisher. “This is ridiculous!” He was a published author in the highly respected journals Authentique and Thrust. He didn’t have rent money to show for it but they were huge in the poetry world.

Jaxon knew his idea was a winner. This time he wasn’t trying to peddle his poorly understood, but barrier breaking poetry to an ungrateful public. This time, he had discovered another artist greater than himself. He wanted to write about him and show the world what they should be seeing.  

Jaxon was bewildered when he found out that so little had ever been written about the great Reganegade. The man was a giant! A towering icon of post-sophistique art. A man whose work completely encapsulates the tiny circles of lesser artists and gave meaning to the search for significance.

Jaxon’s mind snapped back to the day he first discovered what had been written about the nomadic and exploratory life of Reganegade. Tracing the twists and turns in that life wasn’t easy. No one seemed to know exactly who he was. In the weeks Jaxon had invested in searching, writing letters, calling friends – instead of earning some money to live on – he found people who said they knew him. But their experiences almost overlapped and seemed impossible. Some claimed that they helped him move his art to a new studio. Others said he had been their lover just a few months later and half a world apart. Still others – and this is what really got to Jaxon – wrote anguished essays about how they found sponsors and grant money to build the museum in the scenic hills of Marche-en-Beauraing to house Reganegade’s magnificent collection of work. The monumental Montagne! was there. It was his testament to his life’s work at the very center of the museum. It was an announcement to the universe itself! It was Reganegade’s final validation of his genius dedicated from himself to himself; an unashamed acknowledgement of his vision; a forthright icon to conclusively show the depth of his imagination and perception. Only a paragon of expression like Reganegade could create a rock of revelation; such a bold manifesto as Montagne!

The buzzing in his ear told him his phone was ringing. It was his ex, Julius. Damn! He could hear Julius leaving a message after he ignored the ring.

“You mo betta be pickin up, you white pile a supercilious dog shit! I ain’t takin’ this much mo. I want the chile support this month or the law gonna be on you ass. I know where you work!”

Julius knew no such thing. Jaxon didn’t work. Or at least he hadn’t worked recently. Recently, he had been working his precious new discovery. He needed to get this done before somebody else jumped on it. That’s why the rejection letter in his hand made no sense.

For a moment, Jaxon’s mind slipped back to when he first met Julius. Julius was irresistible when they first met. Julius was laughing with friends at the bar that Jaxon frequented when he had some money back then. His perfect white teeth stood out like pearls against his black skin when he laughed. Julius was slim, beautiful, witty, sensitive, sexy … Jaxon was in love the very first time he saw Julius. It was a whirlwind romance and they were married a week later. After that, Jaxon got serious about life for a while and held down a steady job replacing windshields in cars. Julius already had a job as a receptionist in a law office where his good looks paid off for the firm. Before long, they had saved enough money together to put a down payment onto a condo.

To seal their commitment to each other, they decided they needed a family. They visited the family planning clinic and signed a contract with a surrogate mother named Brooklyn. She was just the right shade of tan to be half way between Jaxon and Julius. The clinic arranged to have Brooklyn inseminated with a mixture of sperm from both of them so the father would be the little wriggler that got to her egg first. It turned out to be Julius, but Jaxon was deliriously happy for them both when their beautiful daughter Aaliyah was born. The name meant “exalted” in Hebrew. Neither of them were remotely Hebrew, but that didn’t matter at the time.

Jaxon didn’t understand why Julius turned so mean and sloppy as soon as Aaliyah was born. Now that they had a family, Jaxon wanted to express his joy in his art again but Julius accused him of just being lazy and irresponsible where their baby girl was concerned. Julius said that Jaxon would hide out in the library where he could get free Internet just so he wouldn’t ever have to deal with something as nasty as a dirty diaper. As Aaliyah got older, Julius got fatter and wasn’t slim and beautiful anymore.

As so many great artists have discovered, pain is the fertile soil from which great art springs. Jaxon finally found his voice and wrote beautiful, insightful poetry. Some of it was published in Thrust – The World Journal of Poetry. But when Julius found out that Jaxon had contributed financial support to Thrust instead of helping to pay for Aaliyah’s tuition at the charter school, Julius threw him out. Or Jaxon left. Actually, both happened at the same time.

Their marriage then became a ménage à trois: Jaxon, Julius and the state child welfare office. Since Aaliyah was living with Julius, the state ruled that Jaxon had to pay child support. His life became sheer hell – especially after Aaliyah turned into a slut at about age fifteen. The last time Jaxon saw her, she screamed at him that he could wallpaper his cardboard box under the bridge with pictures of her having sex as soon as she turned eighteen and could get paid for it. Her words hurt. Jaxon had only been homeless a few times and had never lived in a cardboard box. In fact, when she screamed that lie at him, he was actually living in a room with a bathroom in a singles apartment block. Besides, he never looked at porn of women and he certainly wouldn’t be interested in any involving Aaliyah.

The final straw was when that whore Brooklyn moved in with Julius. Jaxon tried to get child welfare to notice, but they could never document the cohabitation. Julius claimed the female undergarments around the place were his. They were even the right size and fit perfectly. Jaxon pointed out to child welfare that DNA proved that he was no relation to Aaliyah. But in the honeymoon right after she was born, he had signed adoption papers.

The rejection notice was still in his hand and he flushed the unwelcome flashback out of his mind. This would not do. The problem was that he just didn’t have enough information to make a convincing case to a publisher. He had managed to locate a series about Marche-en-Beauraing and the Reganegade museum written by Gustav Aurtur Cornet, the rising sun of the exciting novo fascist rejectionists of Catalonia. But just as Cornet was going to describe experiencing Montagne! itself … the series ended with no explanation. Others had written vignette’s about portions of Reganegade’s life but Jaxon couldn’t find anyone who had written anything close to a complete biography. The failure to pay homage to the most magnificent figure in art of the 21^st century was a cultural crime that cried out for redress!

Jaxon knew what he had to do. He had to go to Marche-en-Beauraing in Belgium and experience Montagne! for himself. He would be the Moses to lead the world to Reganegade’s promised land. This was the time for carpe diem. Julius and his whore girlfriend Brooklyn could find out about it when his biography of Reganegade and Montagne! conquered the world of literature and art.

There were two main problems. He didn’t have any money and he didn’t have a passport. But he knew where he could find both!

When he was up against the wall, even just needing something to eat, Jaxon would often work for Nosh Runners. It was a business that profited from vulgarians sucking the teats of capitalism who were too busy taking money from everyone else to even leave their offices high above the streets. Nosh Runners traveled the elevators with insulated boxes of food. Lennie Schwartz, somebody Jaxon had known since childhood, owned Nosh Runners and was making almost as much money as the people in the offices. He let Jaxon eat for free when he worked and paid him by the hour. The thing that Lennie didn’t know was that Jaxon knew where Lennie kept the cash receipts and he also knew that Lennie kept his passport in the same metal cash box. Jaxon never did anything with this knowledge, saving it for a time when he would need it. This was that time.

Lennie and Jaxon looked so much alike that they might have been twins, especially since they both hated to waste time and money shaving so they both had straggly brown beards and hair that had gone too long between barbers. Lennie looked like that in his passport photo too.

Lennie usually went a whole week before he deposited his cash receipts. A week’s receipts at Nosh Runners would last a couple of months in Belgium, even after he paid for an airline ticket. He knew he could do this exactly once and get away with it for at least a while. He would pay Lennie back when his biography of Reganegade was published.

Three days later, Jaxon was standing in front of Reganegade’s museum at Marche-en-Beauraing. It was a lot smaller than he expected, especially since he knew that Montagne! was inside. The museum was built into the side of one of the largest hills and Jaxon decided that most of it must be inside the hill. What he could see must be just the entrance.

The first question to answer was just exactly what all of Montagne! looked like.  The pictures on the Internet showed a giant stone mountain bearing scenes from Reganegade’s life sculpted into the rock. Just like a real mountain, it rose into the air until the peak showed Reganegade literally ascending into the ether of the universe. No one wrote that Reganegade rose into heaven. That would have implied a god of some sort and Reganegade’s art had graduated far beyond that kind of simple mythology. But the scenes carved into Montagne! were all different. The few bits of background in the Internet scenes made it clear that they were simply photos from different sides of Montagne! Jaxon could never discover what the entire thing looked like. He would start his biography by documenting all of Montagne! It would be a fitting frame for the life of Reganegade since all of the scenes were from his life. Montagne! was like Whitman’s Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” It was Reganegade’s statement that “I am, that I am” – like God speaking to Moses from Mount Sinai. As Jaxon walked up the manicured cobblestone path to the entrance, he felt like Moses approaching Mount Sinai to see the face of God.

A wizened old crone sat behind a ticket window at the entrance. The posted entrance fee immediately told him why so few people visited the museum. At this price, he wouldn’t be able to visit more than two or three times before he blew through even the money he took from Nosh Runners.

“Can I take pictures inside?” Jaxon gestured to the new camera he bought as soon as he exited the airport at Brussels.

“Sure! Take all you want!” Jaxon was surprised. He didn’t really expect the old crone to even speak English. At best he expected to hear the barely understandable Walloon accent that he had been struggling with since he arrived. Instead, the old crone sounded like she lived in Ohio.

“Thanks!” Jaxon slid an impressive pile of cash through the window and got what looked like a theater ticket in return.

Turning the cardboard rectangle over in his fingers, he asked, “Will this ticket let me leave and enter again later?”

“No problem! Enter as often as you like. Use the same ticket.”

That made the entrance fee a little more reasonable, but not much. Jaxon reached for the bar to open the massive entry door and found that it moved smoothly and easily. No one was even there to check the ticket. As his eyes adjusted to the light inside the museum, he wondered whether he should have asked if the ticket was good for more than just one day. But that didn’t matter now. Either it did or it didn’t and now all that mattered was Montagne!

The museum was much bigger on the inside than it looked from the front. In fact, it was massive. Seven hallways radiated out from an entry court lighted by massive windows above the doors. Paintings, sculptures, even personal items from Reganegade’s life lined the walls or were perched on pedestals or featured in alcoves. Here was a portrait Reganegade had painted of the Emperor Li Zicheng of China. There was his personal hairbrush. Just down the hall was a walrus tusk from Alaska on a pedestal, carved personally by Reganegade in the style of the Inuit of Greenland. Jaxon found himself part of the way down a hall that he couldn’t actually remember deciding to follow as he was attracted from one objet d’art to the next until he was in a rotunda with a sun-like light fixture at the peak. Nine hallways radiated out from the rotunda. He gazed at the artificial sun above him and then picked the hallway that would have been at about three o’clock on a clock face. The price of admission was looking more and more reasonable as he thought about the massive investment that it must have taken to build the place.

After traversing three more halls and two more rotundas, Jaxon finally arrived at the Kabba of his Hadj – Montagne! It was worth everything he had sacrificed. Like its mountain namesake, it rose four stories into an enormous room. Jaxon couldn’t imagine where Reganegade found such a massive stone to carve. It must have been here already and they built the museum around it. The scene carved into the stone directly in front of him was Reganegade in Egypt, contemplating the pyramids. He took his time and carefully lined up a portrait of the scene with his camera. Next, Reganegade was in India, an elephant reared up in front of him. Jaxon photographed that too. He walked around the base shooting photos of what seemed like an infinite life of experiences. Artic wilderness in this scene and the onion domes of St. Basil’s in Moscow in the next. The base of the sculpture was easily fifty feet in diameter and Jaxon eagerly anticipated returned to the scene in Egypt so he could start documenting the next tier of scenes above it.

After about thirty carved stone panoramas, he started to wonder what was going on.

He checked his camera. There were thirty-one different scenes. Each one was eight or ten feet across. Thinking about his high school math, he remembered “pie times the diameter” and after thinking about for ten minutes or so, he decided that at eight feet each, there couldn’t be more than twenty scenes around the base. So why were there thirty-one? He looked at the scene of Reganegade and the Gateway Arch at St. Louis in front of him now and then carefully photographed it several times. He turned around and photographed the exhibit in the hall opposite too. A display of jade jewelry crafted by Reganegade was displayed in a case on the wall. Then he started walking clockwise without stopping to photograph anything. After ten minutes, he knew he must have walked around Montagne! several times without seeing the Gateway Arch at St. Louis again. He started checking the hallways as he walked around but no display of jade jewelry was ever there.

“Amazing!” He said to himself under his breath. “Reganegade isn’t just god like. He is a god and Montagne! is infinite!” This was news he had to break to the world. Not only was Montagne! his Kabba stone, he would be Reganegade’s Muhammad. He rushed down the hall to find the entrance. After two hallways and a rotunda, there was Montagne! again. He rushed down another only to find Montagne! after a few more hallways. He retraced his steps but found only more exhibits that he had not seen before.

… … … … … … …

Aiden was bored. Life in the Chevy Chase house with his parents was OK. It was better than the military school they had him in before, but it didn’t put much life into life. Flipping through a coffee table book, he saw this picture of an amazing sculpture in Belgium called Montagne! Instantly, he knew that he had to see it in person.