I know this place.   

It’s almost a relief to be here again; no sharp edges, no sharp toothed and jagged corners to leap away from.  And without benefit of alcohol, even.   

I dig one handed through my gym bag and pull out a CD by a Canadian band; Headstones.  Jase gave it to me.  He’d teased me that it was the soundtrack of my life.  The Saga of H. Cooper Finn.   

Sometimes, coming from Jase, I’d liked that.   

But not now.  

 I slide the music into the Mustang’s CD player and punch it gently forward to number 10.   

She’s disconnected she can’t connect

She’ll kick a chair away with a rope around her neck

She’s burning yeah she’s burning

-- And she intends to burn--

If life were like the movies we could all listen to the music and know when that guy in the hockey mask is about to hack his way out of the basement with the chainsaw.   

We’d know when it was a really stupid idea to trust the hitchhiker, when it was idiocy to believe the nanny we’ve hired is going to do anything even remotely pleasant, when we might want to re-think driving too fast without our seat belt fastened in the rain.  

 The music would tell us before the head impacts the windshield, before the knife bites flesh, before the hollow point rips intimately between ribs.   

So tired I can hardly stand

Don’t know what to make of it

Just would like to freeze awhile 

Everything would be much easier if God had laid off on the fucking Lamentations and consented to inspiring his prophets to writing something useful and coherent.  Something along the lines of a screen play perhaps.  With an appropriate sound track.  Then we could study our lines and be prepared and just fake that look of dismayed shock.  The daggers could be collapsible; the bullets all blanks.  And we could listen to the music and know when we should be afraid.  

                                                                  ******

Scene 813,912,706 in the life of Cooper Finn

(Takes place on staircase invoking attempt at moving upwards, reaching, climbing, and Heaven and Paradise references obvious.)

Cooper attempts to gain entrance for an almost selfless reason.   Turned away at the last moment due to imperfection, inherent character flaw.  Character should be furious that underlying emotion of Desire to Rescue is not ascribed to her; angry and embittered that her attempt at nearly selfless motivation not recognized.

Legaspi (representing goodness, cheesily indicated by blondeness combined with height and fair complexion) positions herself on stairs to prevent Cooper’s journey upward. 

Cue ominous music indicating Cooper is now the Villain of this scene.  (Close ups indicating Legaspi’s naivety; focus in on wide blue eyes.) 

Cooper arches and wags an evil brow into the camera before she viciously snaps the bones in Legaspi’s wrist representing wanton violence and Everything We Loathe.   

(Audience gasps)  

Weaver enters back stage left, crutch/sword in hand.  (Note character’s red hair indicating passion and strength.) 

Music swells; sobbing violins and deep throated cellos to cue this is Our Heroine.   

Cooper slinks off stage left, banished from paradise, cursed, as spot light hones in on Weaver and Legaspi. Music swells to rapturous crescendo as Our Heroine Solves Everything.   

And they live happy every after…   

And it’s never really The End.                                          

                                                             ***** 

See how much easier that would be?   

We’d all know what to do and who to be and what to expect next.  We’d play that scene hearing that music and we’d flip ahead to see what happens and be relieved someone was actually sitting there reading, striking the keys, making sense of it for us.  

We’d never be standing on a staircase and banished or hunkered sick and bleeding in a bathtub thinking we cannot go on because we’d have read the next scene and known we can because in Chapter X we’d be Happy Ever After.   

We’d actually be able to believe in Happy Ever After.   

The dealings done this thing is stacked

Won’t be too much longer now ‘till we collapse 

Jase had this deep belief in Something More, in Something After.   

He’d never had it drilled into him from religion or church, it was just something he believed because he said it made sense.   

There is nothing chaotic about the organization of the Universe, he’d told me.   

When a thing, a being, a living creature is stripped down to its most essential molecules what lies spread there beneath the lens and the light is order and one rule re-writes itself again and again on every level;  life exists even when it is too infinitesimal to see.  

 You can slice it and divide it and splice it to something else and there is still something alive in your specimen, still something squirming and spinning and searching for its kind beneath the eye of its god.    

Everything is alive in some way.  Everything.   

I want to believe this now because I need very much for him to be alive someway, somewhere.  I can’t bear the thought of a world without Jase in it.  I don’t understand how the sun comes up each morning, how the stars still hang in the sky each night without the miracle of him to keep them in their place and glowing.   

And there’s little left of me here but teeth and tissue

It’s so hard, so hard to be cautious

When you swim this close to the bottom

All we collect is ourselves and abuse

I’m not surprised to find myself turning the Mustang between the entrance gates of a cemetery. 

Now I’m stitching up those wounds

Just trying to tie my shoes

I could hurt you past believing 

 I park the Mustang beneath a tree and wander out between the headstones.  It’s comforting to me, the way they line up so solemn and solid, so orderly.   

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ 

Sometimes I wonder why people are so leery of the dead; the living are much more dangerous, more volatile.   

If you wake me when it’s done

I won’t tell anyone

You won’t even detect a smile

I got a million lies

To sew up those alibis 

I find a likely looking spot and stretch out on the grass, putting my hands behind my head and look up at the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the tree.   

I’m whistling in the dark

For tonight there are no stars

Maybe I’m just scared of being 

I am very carefully not thinking.  I can’t.  I don’t dare.   

There ain’t no time for heart love and honour

That ship left & I wasn’t on her

Now I smile and I wave from the dock

And we both know that we sunk that ship with rocks 

Jase used to tease me about my obsession with making things make sense.   

I want cues and I want rules and I want people to abide by them but let me dance and skip between.  There isn’t enough of me to spread to both; the person who abides and listens and the person who belligerently disregards.  

 I’ve had to choose.   

I chose law enforcement because I want to orchestrate order from the chaos I see.  I want to “enforce” period.  I want to stop people from hurting, from killing and maiming one another and from being just stupid.   I want everyone to mind the rules.   

At the same time I want special permission to not have to.  I want to trace the lines for others to stay between while I dash brilliant colored sweeps outside them.   

It’s not a very comfortable place for a law enforcement officer to exist but it is an avid breeding ground for undercover officers where so much is pretend and make believe and acting.   

Jase had been so grounded always that he had never felt that lure of drifting off into the realm of some persona he had created.   And I had never really been anyone and found it merrily convenient to reinvent myself each job, each assignment and had not noticed for a great while that somehow the pieces of the people I made up were clinging to me, hanging on, migrating through my personal seasons.   

Because the truth is, there has never really been a Cooper Finn.  I have collected bits of what other people told me about who they saw when they looked at me and I have pasted and tacked them on so brilliantly they now think those bits are me.   Call it acting, make believe, pretend; call it social engineering. 

It’s just another way to live a very complicated lie.  

Once in a great while I stumble across someone who peers in and dismisses 90% of what they see as bullshit and those people terrify me.  They’re dangerous.  They know.   

Cooper Finn is a charade I’ve been acting out for thirty four years.  She’s a mask I laid permanently over my own flesh and bones, a character in the monstrous role playing game called “life”.    

I’m too quick and wary for even those who decide to make the unmasking of persons their art form.  I can look a hundred Lt. Fords in the eye and calmly say whatever it is they need to hear to make them check the little box that says I can go back out into the field because I am A OK, 100% up for my job.  I could probably take on thirty Legaspis and except for some mild moments of panic which I would carefully hide, be fine.   

I can’t do jack shit about Weaver though.   

She looked in and she saw immediately; liar, fake, manipulator, con-artist.   My chameleon-like qualities are wasted on her; my brilliance at adaptation and conformity and the dazzling energy and charisma that carries me through life are useless with her.  Equally as useless are my excuses that these are the very things which have enabled me to survive.   

Yet she had somehow liked me anyway, even knowing.  She has detoured Legaspi the blood hound off my trail when she could see I was too exhausted to maintain the façade.  She has taken a position somewhere on my side of the line drawn in the sand more than once.  If not for her and Jinny I would have gone to the hospital and had my stomach pumped and more than likely faced serious job repercussions.  If not for her I would have spent the entire day at the Wharf under Deluge de la Knuckles.   

Even today, knowing Jinny lapsed however badly she did she was not accusing or judging me.

Weaver was ready to give me the benefit of the doubt.  And what had I done?   

I’d gone in and been me.   

You better run before you become yourself.

END OF NINETEEN