Journey back to an unexpected time and delve deep into what you think you know…
Phase I – The Children of A-space
The Maker
– Issue 2 –
A small town librarian, who we will call Jill, was assisting area students with history presentations at the library where she worked. It was an annual event that the library held to showcase diversity in the New South, and local high schools chose students who prepared a presentation about someone on their family tree that provided historical context about the time and location in which they lived their lives. This is still a very popular event of the local library and to maintain the anonymity of the librarian, we will refrain from naming the library of the town in which it is located.
About five years ago, the librarian explains that the history presentations were particularly memorable because it seems that there was representation from many countries and it was truly a showcase of the melting pot that is the New South. A Korean American student presented on a relative from the Three Kingdoms period of Korean history that predated Christ. A Jewish American student presented on a relative who had died in a settlement of the Gaza Strip. A Colombian American student presented on twin uncle’s; one who had joined the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) and the other who was the victim of a landmine shortly after. An American student who was the child of Montagnard refugees from Vietnam presented on a relative who led a small militia that aided the American army during the Vietnam War.
The last to present, Jill recalls, was a Mexican American student by the name of Ivan who she was well acquaintanced with. He was good friends with an African American student named Kevin who frequented the library (he presented on a relative who was active in the protests following the murder of Eric Garner in Staten Island, New York), and they met often to discuss books. She gave them suggestions for new things to read and they explored everything from fantasy to physics. Ivan presented on his grandfather who was a Huicol Indian from Guadalajara and he practiced their religion that involved the use of the hallucinogenic cactus known as peyote. Ivan gave a very engaging overview of the traditions of the Huichol shaman and their roles in indigenous communities. It was an excellent ending to a full day of cultural history.
Jill says that she uses that year as the template for each year of the history presentations and she is more active in the selection of student presenters to ensure as much cultural representation as possible. She admits that prior to that year, she was ignorant of the true diversity of the New South and it showed her that there was much more to people than general ethnic labels like white, black, Latino, and Asian.
After the presentations ended, both Ivan and Kevin were helping Jill return the room used for the presentations to it’s normal order. She says that Ivan left first when it seemed that everything was in order; they had hung the posters that the students used for their presentations on the wall and Jill recalls that Kevin was studying them all carefully when she went back to her librarian duties. Ivan returned soon after and asked if she had seen his jacket, and after she suggested he check the presentation room, she smiled at him as he walked down the hallway that led to the room.
“He was such a kind and intelligent young man,” Jill says fondly, “I wonder where his life took him. I hope that he’s good.”
Jill says she was surprised that Ivan took so long to grab his jacket and she wondered if she could help, so she went down the hall to the presentation room and she saw Ivan watching Kevin sitting in the room with what looked to be the man from the picture of the Great Huichol Shaman, the iconic first of his kind in Huichol religion. The man was green and he had a glowing flame that surrounded him and it looked as though Kevin was talking to him. The face of the glowing shaman looked exactly like the picture of Ivan’s grandfather. She thought maybe it was a projection of some kind, but says Kevin hadn’t brought a projector and there wasn’t one at the library. Jill says that Ivan left without noticing her, she had stepped into the doorway of the bathroom and Ivan passed her with a look of awe on his face. When she looked back at Kevin, he was shaking hands with the green man, and then he disappeared right before her eyes.
“It was a crazy thing to see. And I would have thought it was a religious experience, maybe even converted to the Huichol religion, but then it was clear that Kevin had made him. He made the relative of the Korean presenter from the picture on the poster and he seemed to converse with him until he disappeared. And he did the same with nearly every one of the presenters’ relatives on the wall. I’m sure that he made them. I know that I saw it.”
Jill says that she never confronted Kevin about that day. She had wanted to ask him about it, but he was only at the library a few other times before she never saw him again. She never told anyone because who would believe the story, and then the news reports of the Maker started and she was sure that it was Kevin.
Kevin loved the library because it was a source for his creations. He got a lot of ideas from TV, but the TV at his house was unreliable and it was actually much quicker for him to learn things from books. He used the internet at the library as well and he liked to study the suits of armour of soldiers throughout history. Before his father put the fear of God into him, Kevin was sure that he would be a crime fighter and he wanted to design the best armor for himself, so he looked at everything to see which designs were the most secure or lightweight and he would practice their recreation when he was alone.
That day in the library, looking at the lives of interesting people from around the world and across time steeled Kevin in his resolve to see the world. Months later, he would set out across the country on a road trip to discover life first hand.
Dark Angels
– Issue 2 –
The first time that Ivan visited his grandfather in Guadalajara, the two got along very well. He left Mexico very proud of his heritage and with a view of the world that his grandfather told him no one else possessed. He saw it for the first time in the desert behind his grandfather’s house, and as a child, he could see it anywhere he tried. When he was daydreaming at school, he could see the energies of things buzzing inside their physical outlines. The world could become a very abstract place if he let his mind do the work, he could see his classmates as their life force and the heat trapped in the walls of the classroom that slowly radiated out. He didn’t know what he was seeing exactly, but it was a cool view to snap into, and he could shoo it away when he needed to.
But he gradually forgot this talent as he grew older, as life became more stressful and beckoned him to grow up too soon.
During his senior year of high school, Ivan spent a lot of time at the library alone reading about meditation and spiritual wholeness. He gravitated toward Buddhist tradition because it seemed to describe a sensation that he faintly remembered from his youth, when he was still in his grandfather’s good graces. He had visited Ivan’s family once in North Carolina, in the months before his graduation from high school, and Ivan was sure that he could see the part of him that he tried so hard to hide from everyone, and he despised Ivan for it. Ivan was gay, but he was not out to anyone, but his grandfather could see into his soul, and the relationship he remembered between them in his youth seemed like a fiction of his imagination. Before his grandfather left, he told Ivan that he was a disappointment.
Ivan’s family lived at the very same apartment complex where the Maker made his debut. They did not live there at that time, but they eventually moved there and Ivan lived there through middle and high school. The population of the complex was predominantly Black when the Maker was first spotted, and by the time Ivan graduated high school, it was practically half Black and half Hispanic and Latino; with the majority of that population from Mexico, and smaller numbers from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. There was a Puerto Rican family that lived in the complex at the same time Ivan’s family lived there. Among the family was an old woman, a practitioner of Santeria that she had learned on the island before emigrating to New York, and then relocating to live with her children in North Carolina. She claimed to be able to see the true world and the Gods, animal-people and people-animal hybrids that moved through the colorful veil of the true world. She lives in a remote part of the same city now, but she recalls her time at the apartment complex fondly.
“It was rough sometimes, but the children get restless. They mostly showed me respect when I was out for a walk. One boy, Ivan, would always help me when he saw me. He would carry things, or help me up stairs, he was so kind, and I watched him grow up from a little boy into a handsome man.”
She paused in her recollection and she looked troubled.
“He had some dark figures around him though, meddling with his life. I tried very hard to keep them off, I’ve made some powerful friends, but eventually I moved away and who knows what they have done to him since then. He is strong, I felt ok to leave because he was very strong, I could see it then. I know that he is alright.”
The day that the woman left the complex, was the same day that Ivan was shot. The day a man snapped and killed five of Ivan’s neighbors before turning the gun on himself. That day, a horned creature, that the old woman had sometimes seen watching Ivan from a distance, whispered into the ear of a disgruntled man and it changed him, or it amplified the hate that boiled inside him. The man lived near the complex and he had seen the influx of Spanish speakers in his community as a threat to the life he worked hard to give his family. And when he was drunk, he would wander the sidewalk to the complex and curse his neighbors for all of the ills he suffered.
The plan backfired, though, and even though Ivan was shot, it awakened a part of him that had appeared many years ago and had been tamped down by a life that was a burden to a child. Ivan realized a potential that had been passed to him by right of birth, and though his grandfather was an extraordinary man who pushed the bounds of reality as a shaman in the remote deserts of Guadalajara, Ivan was something more.
He was a constant, the son of a son of the first amazing mother and it took more than bullets to kill him.
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