Douglas Cole has published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly; as well anthologies such as Bully Anthology (Hopewell), Coming Off The Line (Main Street Rag Publishing), the Bindweed Anthology, and Work (Unleash Press).

He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician.  He also edits the American writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia.

In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival and was twice selected as a finalist in the New York Metropolitan Screenwriting Contest. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Six times for a Pushcart and seven times for Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com.

Douglas Cole has published six poetry collections and the novel The White Field, winner of the American Fiction Award. His work has appeared in journals such as Beloit Poetry, Fiction International, Valpariaso, The Gallway Review and Two Hawks Quarterly; as well anthologies such as Bully Anthology (Hopewell), Coming Off The Line (Main Street Rag Publishing), the Bindweed Anthology, and Work (Unleash Press).

He contributes a regular column, “Trading Fours,” to the magazine, Jerry Jazz Musician.  He also edits the American writers section of Read Carpet, a journal of international writing produced in Columbia.

In addition to the American Fiction Award, his screenplay of The White Field won Best Unproduced Screenplay award in the Elegant Film Festival and was twice selected as a finalist in the New York Metropolitan Screenwriting Contest. He has been awarded the Leslie Hunt Memorial prize in poetry, the Best of Poetry Award from Clapboard House, First Prize in the “Picture Worth 500 Words” from Tattoo Highway, and the Editors’ Choice Award in fiction by RiverSedge. He has been nominated Six times for a Pushcart and seven times for Best of the Net. He lives and teaches in Seattle, Washington. His website is https://douglastcole.com.

A Mean Reversion

Russell, the hungry little toad and a new man at the firm, a new member of his division, was breathing down his neck. But Russell was a numbers man only, no panache, no flair, and Jones knew this. No class, all clothes and that nasty way of finishing people’s sentences for them. Here he comes, all gloat and aftershave.

            Hey, Jonesy, how are the little old ladies treating you?  His teeth were large and white.

            I suppose you’ve been trying to cover all the losses from that dip on Friday, haven’t you, Jones said.

            I’m saying buy, buy, buy. Its bargain basement Monday right now, buddy. Even the small fry can take a bite. Put the geris on it.

            Jones thought: Russell never actually looks at you. He’s always looking around for another place to be, another soul to suck. One drink by mid-day, Jones thought. One drink. He said, Ride out the wave, is that it, Russell? All illusions? Smoke and mirrors? Reality lies in the imagination and we’re in it for the long haul? A snake biting its own tail? He lifted a collegial fist and noticed that it was shaking. Did Russell catch that?

            Yeah, Russell snorted, right. And he was already moving away before the last word fell from his mouth. 

One drink.

            The office was like a slow-motion reel of grainy paper figures curling up under a heat lamp. The nausea crested and fell. Jones kept his office door open, but just barely, so he wouldn’t appear to be hiding, which he was. Business, business, business. He read his messages. A meeting was scheduled for 2:30. Who meets at 2:30? People like Russell. One drink. And it will have to be just one.

By eleven Jones was out the door. He went out to the fire-exit stairs and lit a cigarette. The steps were littered with old cigarette butts, most of them his. The smoke went in and down and gave its mild narcotic nudge. The stairs were covered with pigeon shit, and the pigeons huddled on the ledges just inside the window casings with their disintegrated meshing. He opened the door and looked back down the hallway. No one was there. He went down the stairs.

            He moved through the bright glittering spring light air. The people were on the move, and the sidewalks were crowded with their energy. He put on a pair of dark glasses and felt comfortably invisible. 

One drink.

            He slid into McCormick’s and took his place at the bar. The smooth dark wood of the bar counter caught the light and gleamed like a holy altar. A few others were drinking at the other end. A few more sat in the booths. One couple had the look of an illicit rendezvous. The young woman bartender, familiar but nameless, came down to greet him. Her light brown hair was pulled back so tight her skin seemed smoothed to a high-tension sheen, her nose a precise little avian blade, her eyes like two black stones in an otherwise bright, white eggshell face. What can I get for you, she asked. Even her speech was a quick, sharp snap.

            Johnny Walker Black on the rocks, he said. And she was already turning, already in the process of making it before he realized what he had said, that he had responded automatically, that he had not even ordered food and would not order food and would order another drink as soon as the first one was done and would force himself not to finish it too quickly, although he was already regretting that he had not ordered a double.

            By the second drink he had reclaimed his soul with interest and clarity, and it struck him that even his body had begun to find its edges, its line, yes that’s it, the form has been obscured by too much tension or a lack of the correct tension, and this, this is the defining fire, all energies properly distributed throughout the limbs, the blood moving at its proper pace, chambers of the heart diastolically filling, systolically contracting and sending the blood on its way. He could feel it happening, and it pleased him. If only he could sell this smile. And he said, aloud, Ah, the machine is at its work again! although no one was near or paying any attention to him. The few at the end of the bar did look over, and so he continued, lifting his glass: To the heart, of course.

            Can I get you something else? the bar tender asked.

            Yes, please. Another. And he held up and rattled the ice in the otherwise empty glass. While she fixed it, he followed the idea further. The heart expands to take in blood, and this action is called diastole. This is also, in linguistics, or poetics rather, the lengthening of a syllable for poetic effect, as in I suppose a line like: And there the king is but as a beggar, although I think the elimination of the word ‘as’ would be much more concise. I suppose it is added to make the line align to the correct number of syllables, but there you are again, back in the numbers. Line align, ha, I suppose therein is an internal example, a hidden gem as it were.  There must be a name for that specifically and not just under the umbrella of the broader poetics. And no neologism, although I’m not opposed to those. Where would we be without invention? But back to the original line: isn’t it much more interesting to say, And there the king is but a beggar! Yes, now that has power! Concision at its work. Systole, too, has both the meaning of the heart’s contraction and a shortening of a word, not unlike elision or the slurring together of words or the syncope of eliminating vowel sounds as in, In the beginning how the heav’ns and the earth rose out of chaos. See, do you hear that? Heav’ns. Heav’ns. He laughed. It sounds like a stifled slur, doesn’t it? And he exaggerated, Innn the beginnnning how the heav’nnnnns…

            She placed the drink before him. He still had the other glass in his hand. You’re kind of happy, aren’t you? she said.

            What are we without joy? God gave us drink to show that He loves us! He put the glass down and swept up the other in one smooth motion, lifting it in pontific decussation. Blessings, he said, blessings to us all.

            Through the tilt-a-whirl streets, the cartoon people, the long shadows of the buildings climbing up among the lengths of their brothers like a creeping death or an incipient shame, through tourists with heads bent back to view the facades and the second story entrances into mid-air’s nothing but what was once imagined with grandeur but was then abandoned, where a street would have been but then never was because the regrade never reached its promised level, such are the products of proposals and city planning and investments, through beer garden chatter and waves of perfume, through arguments and harangues and honking horn traffic where he was the only vital creature in the congregation, Get the hell out of the street you idiot!, he kept his hand aloft to them all, the patron saint of cyclones, and to all in his stumbling humble awkward blind benediction, blessings…

            He heard great turbines working down below the street. He felt alternate waves of heat and cold coming in cross currents from the four directions. He walked on tiptoes balancing on the thin wire of the sidewalk. He chose a direction, in this case any direction would do, and he walked. He kept on walking, and the motion was in its own way a sobering act of repetitive choices, footfalls through a throng of blurs that became more and more distant as his own breath increased and the sound of his own breathing rose up in his ears until he passed from that whirlwind whiptailing behind him and was finally able to focus solely on his footsteps and his breathing as behind him he heard the sound of a ferry horn and one lone seagull’s diminishing cry.

As jones steered his way through the palm fronds of a few ideas that wanted to surface but kept diving back down into the undertow of his brain, appearing just for a flicker of a moment like seal heads poking their eyes through the surface of the water and looking directly at you, really seeing you in that way that makes you think they are in fact thinking about you and considering your position there and your proximity and possible threat or ineptitude in the smooth deep waters with your little spider legs, he came upon an opening. It was that time of day that could be any time of day. Why, what have we here? he said. A carved aperture in the ground had opened up before him, cut like an incision in a cadaver, bloodless and clean, and while he had the feeling he had seen this before, had he seen this before? He had seen it before, there below him like something worker men were at, say, laying subway track or sewer lines, but there was nothing of the sort going on here, now. No, this was of an entirely different nature, something out of the science fiction books, a gateway, yes, that’s just what it was, just that, down into…he leaned out over the hole, weight balancing precarious, rocking back and forth with a delicious thrill of catching the fall, because down below there were hints of acetylene and smoke and hook lights and miner’s caps, but not the kind of apparatus that was up to regular street work, or maybe he saw a glorious obsidian river, a sip of which brought the perfect blend of light and oblivion, the blissful hippocrene once again if only he could reach it and take that luscious sip, and yet again it was changing, a thing of change both peristaltic and reptilian, ouroboros with scales of mythic wonder, upon which scale panel are you, dear shadow? More indeed riverlike and flowing and bobbing to the surface with emergent horses heads, whole horse carcasses it appeared in fact boiling in with lamppost and pick axe and bricks and tents and timber crunched and splintered and poking up like cactus spines, why yes in fact he had stumbled onto the very portal that stands between the unfettered spirit and the pineal entrance to the skull’s cathedral, the foyer of limbo full of the discarded thought and memory and life detritus jettisoned when the soul makes its perennial leap from one narrative branch to another and comes up shaking mitred locks and gawping with primordial bewilderment traveling through the arctic mind-bath of death’s cotilion. Ah what a marvel! What a blessing! What a beast to behold! The kind of thing that inspires the shakers and the riders and the babbling seers of the tribes and the scribes in caves scribbling their visions for the holy cantors to sing out to hungry congregations. And why shouldn’t he be given this gift that it was, the revealing, the Sator Square, the palm at the end of the mind? Come at last! Hadn’t he made his sacrifice?  Been making it daily in the construction of sandwiches and the lave routine of hand and face, the examination of metric tables, the bustle and beehive tremble, the spin and clatter of the laundromat in apocalyptic white blear afternoon spin cycles, the barroom susitations and prescriptions and confidentials of yes yes, and oh, yes, listening like a priest, singing like a goat, holding court, holding secret, holding infirmary’s head like an apple to the mouth of sad Adam stuck at the threshold of dull Eden and wanting to cricket-leap out of the thicket of monotone…? A flesh. Ah, hidden desire. The cauldron of the human mind. Yes? And here before him now it was all opened up. And not in desert but in city center he stood, yes, verily at the navel itself. The very oracle, the well of conclusions and visions down which one was cast to scream the mollusk mutton of the clutterbrain, dragged like a sponge through the human day and decay and the mind at large with its static groaning of all the minds’ prayerful and baleful complaining and begging and here so too Jones knew he was called upon to add his barbaric yawp into the rich earth ear and add to all the bilious conversation chatter and empty rattling on and on and so he opened his mouth and unleashed….Hallafactiouslatoranimockery I’ve been for you and you you see and me inside your blind bedroom feeling for a light feeling for a day feeling for a way back to the child in the all body cast and casket tree high above among the wisteria limbs and mystery winds and swaying haven’t I? The game afoot with rules cooked up by a zookeeper or a circus clown, the ground of acid bath to touch, each grass blade sharp as glass and cured with curare…oh, no…swinging down so close those blades brush like tongues against my hair, like an acrobat, like a hero…yes, a hero, that’s the very thing, pursued by the animus antihero so loveless in his game and quest but oh so ingenious! Hidden in rags and stupefaction. Outguessing and outflanking at every turn. How does he do it? It’s maddening. It’s unfair! He must have a map ve van’t see, after all, a mirror behind my head so he can see every card I hold, every diagram. Why did you do that? Rig the game like that? Give that creature access to every thread of thought and jurisprudence over every impulse. Dangling oh why yes like a marionet like a toy like a doll strung up over a campfire with sad plastic features melting into hideous globular and oh so gloriously beautiful and revealing truth to behold! Why make him in my image like that so I have to shatter the mirror to get out of the mess, the scene already changing as I fly right through the snapping jaws and the closing doors, your mad laughter following everywhere I go, nibbling at the nerves, biting at the toes, headlock in my dreams so I must gnaw through my own arms to get away! Madness! Who conceived this sort of thing? Why? Why that kind of charade is this? Pain like a payment, like a passport into a country of dream makers who can only repeat the sorrows and sufferings they’ve been through life after life so that we spiral and fly on the tornado’s wings with farm house clap clattering and shutters flying off like burnt skin, good mother brisket knitting her charm into a pair of guillotine eyes and sending us off on a forced march through jungle path classroom corridor and feudal trench row, through blow torch fields littered with the dead and small town swept with sickness and company debt and anonymous foundry lives, through screaming, atomizing, disintegration knowing…knowing it’s happening while it’s happening? Patient on the table without an anesthetic? And then the outer drifting observer disembodied and looking in all directions and especially down at versions of myself so that I am not myself and think why, I never was, never could have been after all, and after all it was all an illusion? Really? That’s the great awaking? Just to dive back in and do it all again in another warped personality because I have to stand on the deck of the sinking ship and throw life preservers overboard to all of the bluing sinkers with their shock faces and hands of ice so frozen they can’t even take a hold of the rope, is that it? Sing your praises well and true and all the way, merrily merrily and say why yes man is born of woman’s womb and lo and so and here we go and knife blade to the neck, pistol to the forehead, it doesn’t matter who has a hold of it, the reign of terror is the reign of terror is resin bubbling in amber with a fly wide-eyed trapped and mouthing, Pleeeeease heeeeelp meeee, it almost makes you laugh, shrinking down to the head of a pin with all the rest of the bumbling angels, the house cat swiping at your head like the great reliever come to liberate you from all that dread you carried around like draft papers, like homework, a kid in school sitting down to a test and looking around and knowing, knowing sure as judgment that the scrambled questions shifting on the page are moving targets, and I have no answers! I have no answers! It’s radicals! It’s reciprocals! It’s a beast in a cage! It’s the hypotenuse leg! When in doubt, sit and stare moodily across the room or out the window. Heh heh. He laughed a bit, expunged, expelled, outcast and free. And what did the oracle say? What answer returned from the whirlwind?

He looked up. A small crowd had gathered around him. Tourists. Children. People with backpacks and shopping bags were looking at him. A few were smiling. A few looked like they were getting ready to call the police. A few were pointing and talking to each other. Did someone take a picture? What was he saying? Yes what was he saying? Had they heard all that? Ooh, he felt his face on fire, and looking up he saw the wolves and the rattle snakes and the vipers all bending down from the tops of the buildings. The sky was an open mouth.  A storm was brewing. Had he started that? The thoughts in his head were turning in the same direction as the spiral of clouds above. Surely, this could be no coincidence. He must have stirred up the heavenly gamelans and tapped into the engine of the great Macroprosopus. There would be consequences, without a doubt. He had better prepare himself. What are you looking at? he said, and he spat and snarled at them. Animal noises came from his mouth, it seemed, not the words he thought he said. Grunts and squeaks. He had brought that up from the depths. He had not fully re-arrived, recombined, reconstituted and amalgamated back into his human form. The fur on his hands stood up and he swiped at the air. The people backed away. What do you want from me?

We’re here for the tour, someone said.

What?

We were told to meet here for the tour.

What tour?

The underground tour.

We’re supposed to meet in front of Doc’s and the guide would start the tour. This is Doc’s.

Jones looked up. The bulb lights were on, spelling out the name: Doc’s. Why, it’s broad daylight, he said. Someone laughed. 

Are you here for the tour?

No! Jones said, then he took a deep breath. What tour is this?

The underground tour. The underground city.

Oh! Jones shot right through the fuzzy screen and shook his head and cleared the clouds. It all came back in bites. And it was all beginning to blur as it formed. But he knew, he remembered. The underground city! Yes! No, I’m not here for that.

We thought this was part of the tour.

Me?

Yeah.

Funny, what you were saying, someone said. It was funny.

This was not what Jones expected. With both hands, he pressed against the top of his chest and pushed downward, smoothing the material of his coat. Then he cupped his hands over his mouth and with his fingertips rubbed his closed yes, then pushed his hands back across the top of his head, smoothing out the hair and resting his hands at last at the back of his neck, turning his head from side to side. Well, he said. No, indeed, I’m not here for the tour, and I’m afraid the show is over for now. This was after all simply a preamble to your journey. Caron shall be here shortly, and your tour will be a most fantastical, historical lesson! Invigorating. Stimulating. Truly, an eye-opener. Chuckles and laugher rippled through the little crowd. 

But I’m afraid, Jones said, that I must now take my leave of you, and he conjured up a smile. He looked down and tapped the ground a few times with his toe. This seems to be holding, he said. A few more people laughed, and he bowed slightly, took a deep breath and went about his day.