Fiction, by its very definition, is a lie. Many lies contain at least a nugget of truth. Some lies are mostly truth. At other times the truth can be mostly lies. If you don't believe me, go ahead, call me a liar.

"You know what? Nobody knows really what's going on. I don't, but I know some stuff nobody else knows. I'll tell you if you promise not to tell anyone else, I might get in trouble. Just because a kid tells you something that doesn't mean that it isn't true. Kids know what's true and what isn't, and I think grown-ups know too, but they would rather believe in a lie when the truth gets too scary."

-The boy

The boy wasn't much different from most kids you might meet, except he could whittle better than any other kid he knew. He could whittle your likeness out of an old stick, or make an animal from a discarded 2x4 end that looked as if it were moving. People encouraged him to do this and told him "you will be a famous whittler someday". Did he believe them? Of course he did. Why shouldn't he?

The boy's parents both worked during the the day, and when school was out there was a series of women hired to be there in the house to take care of things and keep an eye on him. Most of these women would send the boy outside to play or direct him to read or watch television. One, at least, stole small valuables from around the house and sold them to supplement her income, blaming their disappearances on the boy. Another took an exceptional interest in him, and set about to teach him things that she felt he would need to know to make it in the world. Did he need to know these things? No, probably not.

During the time the boy was growing up his country was at war with another country far away. It seemed to him that all the different women who took care of him in the afternoons had someone close to them that was invoved somehow with the war. Once he went to the home of one of them (the Stealer) and she showed him a photograph of an older boy in a military uniform. "It's the first time he's ever been away from home." she said, her voice cracking. She asked the boy to sit on her lap and she held him in her arms and sang a song he had never heard before. Then she must have gotten embarassed because she suddenly became abrupt and sent the boy outside to play in the afternoon shadows of the oil refinery that bordered her yard. Years later the smell of a refinery would always bring back that day with the rocking chair and the tears for the lost boy in the uniform, and the first real encounter with the terror and helplessness that confronts most of the inhabitants of this world.

The boy met the woman who he would remember as the Teacher after his family had moved to another city, away from the bricks and snow and refineries and in a warm climate near the ocean. This new place had several large military bases nearby and now the boy came in contact with more people who were involved with the war. It seemed like everyone who wasn't on the way there was just returning or waiting for someone else to come home.

The Teacher was waiting for someone. Her husband was another older boy in a uniform. He had left her to be in the war and fly back and forth from a base on a small island to a base in a big city and drop thousands of pounds of bombs on the people who lived in between. It was likely that he had never been away from home before either.

One afternoon the boy was whittling an elephant from a broken broom handle when he heard strange noises coming from the next room. He opened the door and looked in. The room was very dark and it was hard to see anything inside. As he opened the door, a band of light moved across the room. When the light hit the bed, he could see the woman sitting up quickly, yelling "get out!" He did so. Unsure of what had happened, the boy went back into his room. A few minutes later the woman came in and sat down next to the boy. She seemed very concerned with what the boy had seen, and asked lots of questions. After a while she relaxed and then asked the boy " Have you ever seen a naked lady before?" He hadn't and told her so. "would you like to?" she asked. Not understanding the full consequences of his answer, he told her that he would. Would he answer the same way again if given the the opportunity? Yes, probably so.

That day the boy saw a naked lady for the first time and began to learn about things that he had never even thought of before. What things? Sorry, but you will have to guess, the boy promised not to tell anyone. But he was never surprised by anything that anyone suggested or by anything he saw in pornographic movies or magazines later in his life.

The woman was an inventive teacher, and didn't confine the boy's education merely to sex but felt obligated to include an entire philosophy of life, possibly passed on to her in her youth by some kind soul. "Never trust anyone" was her maxim, and though this surely was an extension of "never tell anyone" she also seemed to believe it, as she applied it to any level or form of interaction. Also, she showed the boy pictures of horrible atrocities from the war and told him that her husband enjoyed his work and would do the same to him if he ever found out what they had done. She reinforced this at the end of each "session" with the same basic exchange, starting that first day and continuing with little variation throughout the next few months: "You're never going to tell anyone about this are you? Are you? The boy would shake his head no. "Ok, then get out out of here." The boy would go out of the room and she would slam the door behind him. For years the boy believed that exchanges of intimacy would always lead to the other person suddenly "coming to their senses" and demanding his immediate disappearance. When he was older he would always try to leave before his partners awoke to avoid this occurrence.

His lessons continued, Pearls of wisdom included: "you are a bad person now, some people really are good, but not you. You can't ever go back to being a good person again...Some people can hide their badness so well that they seem like good people, and that's the best you can ever hope to do...You're so ugly, you're lucky I let you touch me...Never ask for anything that you really want, if someone finds out that you've got your heart set on something, then they can make sure you don't get it...Look for the bad in everything and you can always find it." Did he believe these things? Of course he did. Why shouldn't he? But the boy refused to believe this: "There is no such thing as love, if someone says they love you, they are out to trick you or hurt you for sure. Never tell anyone your feelings, if you're fool enough to care about anyone and they find out they can be mean to you and you won't even know it until it's too late." Why didn't he believe this? He was in love with his teacher, of course.

Then, like all good students, the boy graduated, and with a little help from fate, he began to believe all his lessons. This day was the same as any other, with one exception. The boy was going to tell the Teacher that there was love in the world and that he knew it because he loved her. He told her this, and that he wanted to run away with her, so they could be together always. How did she react when he told her this? She laughed and laughed. Why shouldn't she? Then she said this: "You know, I think you're right. Lets run away together tomorrow as soon as you get home from school." The boy was so happy that he could barely contain himself. He watched the clock and when the last bell finally rang, he ran all the way home, where he found his Mother. "Hi honey, I won't be working for a while, so I can be here with you in the afternoons now." The Teacher, she explained, had been fired, since she was no longer needed. " But I thought that she had told you all this yesterday. She said that she wanted to tell you herself." "I guess I forgot." the boy mumbled as he went out in the back yard. Inside his head was a black tornado, and his whole body felt like fire. "She's probably still laughing" He said to himself. Then he thought he might get sick, but he didn't. His eyes began to tear up, but he didn't cry. He knew that crying would show how he felt and then others could take advantage of him. He believed everything that she had told him now, he believed it with all his heart.

The boys family moved again, but not before the boy had gotten into trouble for stealing and other devious activities (his idea) with friends who subsequently would be unable to play with him "My mom says you're bad" they explained. He was also involved in an embarrassing incident with some other neighborhood children which caused him to keep his new knowledge a secret from then on. He decided to take up smoking, since it seemed like a bad thing to do. He developed an interest in crime and criminals and taboos and banned behavior of all kinds, and read all he could find about these subjects. He discovered that there were people who were far worse than he could ever imagine being. He also became aware, through the newspapers and television, of a movement of people in his country who seemed to be truly good, even though most people ridiculed them. They wanted to stop the war. They told everyone that they should love each other, that they shouldn't eat animals or throw garbage on the ground, that woods and open spaces were more important than progress and cities and cement, and that people were more important than money. The boy thought that all these things were good things He decided to act this way to try and hide his badness. The boy also learned about what was then called "free love "and "the sexual revolution" which was providing a way to remove guilt from sex. These theorys became a tremendous relief to him.

Then the boy's interests converged when someone who had decided to be truly bad convinced some people who were pretending to be good that good and bad were actually the same thing. He told them they should quit pretending and be as bad as possible, just to prove that they could do so and get away with it. The boy read about them for months in the newspapers after they were all caught. "They should never have trusted him." thought the boy. Time and again he would see this pattern occur, both during his own lifetime and throughout history: huge groups of people would put their complete confidence in someone or something to relieve them of the strain of trying to detemine who or what to believe, then be happily led into horrible fates or talked into commiting unspeakable acts. No one was going to con him into anything like that, he could come up with his own ideas.

The new city was in the east, but not anywhere near where the boy had lived before. The new school was in an urban system, much larger than his previous schools, and except for the usual "Let's fight the new kid" problems, he got along ok. He still whittled although he found it difficult to complete his projects. But he kept at it, leaving half carved, imagined masterpieces around the house to be thrown away.

The boy began to experience an overwheming loneliness, he wanted human contact, but unless someone else initiated it he had no clues as to how to make it come about. The incident with the other kids had done more than make him careful, it had also made him realize that perhaps his experiences were unique. Maybe he had been tricked into being bad, and that he shouldn't do the same to anyone else. later he learned that there were lots of girls who were eager to learn the things he knew, and plenty of kids who were already happy to be bad, and they always accepted him with open arms, even though he felt like an outsider in any group.

Before long, this feeling of disconnection extended to the entire human species, and the boy began to entertain thoughts of suicide. Finally, he mentioned this to his parents who apparently felt unqualified to talk to him about it, and took him to a Child Psychiatrist, telling the boy "You can trust this man." The boy almost laughed, but he didn't. He let the man ask him lots of questions, then told him nonsensical lies or responded vaguely until the the man repeated the key questions enough times for the boy to figure out the answers the man wanted to hear and give them. The boy never told the man about the Teacher, or what was really bothering him, and he never found out what the man told his parents, but when he left the man's office that day he was taken to the locked ward of a large hospital. Was the boy surprised by this turn of events? No, why should he be? Never trust anyone, that was his motto.

The boy spent two weeks in the hospital, but it seemed like a much longer time to him. Partly because he was still really just a kid and also because of what happened there. He came in close contact with several dozen insane people of all ages, and after studying them decided that the thing that set them apart from everyone else was their almost total unpredicability. No one had the slightest clue as to what they would do or say next, and they couldn't be expected to follow any kind of logical pattern, but each did follow an illogical pattern that could be discerned upon closer examination. The boy talked to these people, who knew what it was like to be disconnected from the rest of humanity in reality, and concluded that he was relatively sane, but he decided to do some research -just to be sure. Insanity became another subject that would hold his interest.

One night the boy was shaken awake by an old woman who asked "Do you know the way to the Jericho Road?" shocked into silence the boy did not respond, then the woman became more demanding, her strange face leaning over him, inching closer. "Show me! You got to show me to the Jericho Road! You got to show me!" That was when the boy met his Friend. Friend was a night orderly on the floor. He took the woman out of the room, then came back and talked to the boy. Friend was very nice to the boy, and told him he would be back to check on him from time to time and make sure he was allright. He also gave the boy two red pills and told him to take them so he wouldn't have a bad dream about the old woman. Friend told the boy he would bring him pills every night, and he did. Did the boy take the pills? Yes, of course. Why shouldn't he? He was in a hospital.

The boy slowly awoke from his drugged sleep in pain. He was strapped face-down to a table in a room he didn't recognize, and there was a tremendous wieght on his back. The boy was fading in and out of consiousness but the pain kept waking him. Then he heard voices. "Goddamn it he's awake" said one.Then another voice, the voice of Friend, said "Shut up and watch the door." Soon the pain ceased and the boy felt the weight lift from his back."Friend is that you?"asked the boy. "Now we're in for it" said the other voice. "No we aren't" said Friend, "Hook him up" "what?" "Come on, hurry up." Then the boy felt something rubber being stuffed into his mouth and something cold being rubbed on either side of his head, and everything exploded in a burst of blinding white light.

The boy didn't remember this last episode until nearly a year later, after he had eaten two large capsules of mescaline. The boy would never remember coming home home from the hospital, or enrolling in a new school, but there he was. His memory was like a dis-assembled jigsaw puzzle, he hadn't really lost anything; he had all the small fragments and pieces, but couldn't form a clear picture of the whole. These concepts wouldn't occur to him until later. At that time, he was only aware of an underlying sense of despair.

That winter, when he came home from school each day he didn't go outside. He no longer whittled. It seemed that whatever pleasure that he had gained from this before was also fragmentized. He liked to read science fiction books, and spent a lot of time watching television. He also developed an interest in old silent comedies that he checked out from the library and showed on a wall in his basement using an 8mm projector. Good things seemed to be happening to him too. The new school was a progressive school, unconventional and innovative, and the students there all seemed to know about the values that he had earlier wished to emulate. The students at the new school seemed to like him and he was able to relax around them a little, thinking that he had found good people. Were they good people? Yes they were. They were indeed.

The people at the new school continued to be nice to the boy (to his complete and continuing amazement) and taught him about "the good life." They told him about the differences between natural and processed foods, and about organic and inorganic materials, and that it was ok to be different. They also liked smoking marijuana and shared it freely. The marijuana did an amazing thing for the boy -it renewed his interest in whittling. After smoking, the boy felt a need to whittle, and once he started could lose himself in the doing, and be completely at peace.

The day that the boy took the mescaline was a regular school day. It was very early spring, still a little cold out even in the daytime. The boy had never heard of the concept of "set and setting" regarding psychedelic drugs. He bought the caps in the park that morning from a dealer who prided himself on being "burnt-out."When the boy asked how many to take, the dealer told him "I always eat two". "Good enough" thought the boy, who swallowed both capsules and headed into class.

The first rushes of the mescaline hit the boy about twenty minutes later, causing him to ask to leave class to go to the restroom. On the way down the hall, the hallucinations overtook him. The hallway appeared to telescope out into the distance, then it began to twist and buckle. The boy summoned a burst of good sense and went into the nurse's office and claimed that he was sick and needed a ride home. He knew that if he said that something was wrong with him before people started asking, any bizzare behavior on his part would be attributed to his "sickness", and that once he arrived at home there would be no one there for several hours, his mother would be at work until five, and he didn't need anyone to take care of him after school anymore, since he was now eleven years old.

After the boy was dropped off at home, he went into his room and lay down. The wood paneling seemed alive, a painting of a waterfall on his wall came to life before his eyes, he could feel the wind and spray from the falls, the cowboy by the side of the water made coffee over a flickering campfire. Smiling seemed to involve every muscle in his body, and every sound had a new richness and resonance. Then these effects became gradually less overwhelming and the boy closed his eyes and saw the image in his mind of the disassembled puzzle, its pieces spinning independently on an undulating field of changing colours. Soon, the pieces began to interlock. The boy seemed to be watching his mind at work. The pieces went into place one by one with increasing speed until the boy could see, all at once, a vivid pattern that was the fully restored picture.of his memory, but this was just the beginning. The past was clear to the boy now, as a whole, but also seperated into individual incidents, each with it it's own meaning, yet all interconnected. The laughing face of the teacher appeared, and he saw her in a whole new light, her sadness and desperation clear to him for the first time. Then the face of Friend and the night in the shock room came into sharp focus along with all of it's horrible implications. Then these things faded out and in their place was the beautiful image of a bird. The boy could see the entire bird clearly from all sides at once and suddenly felt an urgent need to whittle it. Whittling was never so pleasant for the boy, the same serenity that he felt after smoking marijuana was increased tenfold. For the rest of his life the boy would see these visions, which would spontaneously appear in his head in their entirety, of animals, or people, or just about anything, then try to reproduce them from memory.

This was a new beginning. He was ready to try and be happy. When a kid from across the street signed him up for a paper route as a joke, (he had begun to aquire a reputation as a wierdo among his old playmates during his absence) he saw it as a gesture of kindness and took the route, returned to the neighborhood as a "regular" kid, and gained a new popularity by turning all his old friends on to marijuana and psychedelics.

Was the boy "cured"? No, but at least he had his puzzle back in place, and had traded suicide for a desire to live, to experience absolutly everything he could, albeit with an almost total disregard for his own safety in his efforts. He would start over, and not even think about what had happened before. Was he ready to trust anyone? No way, why should he? He had successfully supressed his emotions (or so he thought), and would keep his secrets to himself. Of course, in reality he had only replaced suicidal thoughts with suicidal tendencies, and he was headed for "a life of crime and depravation"; a wild luge ride into the darkness, but enlightenment is a slow process -walking on water wasn't built in a day, it's been said. Besides, he was still going to be a famous whittler someday.

Jeff Huch

Stan Russell, SKR International, Stan Russell, SKR International