Velour Beans hid deep in The Garden of Carrots in Laos. His uniform was made of unicorn fur and torn. The remnant war bombs in the wet, green Earth cornered him into a basket of worry and long-lost wonder. Code name bath and bask and the tribulations of mind grains… The gongs in the hills washed down a hollow, haunting soul from the temples above, the ones cradled in snow-capped mountain guts, the ones that sparkled in her blue eyes. Immortal blue eyes like rare crystals.

Now that memory from the times in the summer sheets, the winter comforter with its mandala pattern, the delicious smell of her lingers on the pillow, her nightshirt applied to the skin and dreams of the man with the strange name, the strange purpose, the strange reason for being and breath. The demigod of dictators and shaman.

He was looking up at the sky that moved so slowly, like a marijuana brain. He smoked an invisible cigarette. It was a deep blue sky with lacerations of periwinkle in between, where the world was rubbed wrong and raw and the windows to everything open to a parapet of princesses in flowing gowns so neatly tapered to their royal souls.

Garbage and granola, French lessons from her mouth, fingers tangled in the work-swept hair. He couldn’t get enough of her. He will never get enough of her. He was addicted to her taste and her laughter. Velour Beans was in love beyond any kind of love there ever was or is or will be again. Not even universal gods of immortality could love like that. Not even when they throw marbles and talk about Hollywood.

She clutched him tightly in the cold of a February morning. It was the beautiful crushing love of animals with true hearts. Suddenly, there was no more helicopter Laos. He had retuned from his dreams, carrot stains on his hands from all the handling and peeling and stabbing of the enemies fueled by a delusion that was a neighbor and a friend, a bad friend.

But then he thought: The enemies linger throughout history like the smell of burnt toast in the morning. A morning where a sunburst orange fog molested the hills and valleys but not in a felonious way. He wanted to write an opera about that. He wanted to write about the sky and the landscape getting heavenly humped below, but he didn’t know where to begin. (Take a step, and then another).

He needed to unclog his muddled, overcast brain of sizzling worries and frenzied dissipations left to fecundate. He tried to eat a simple man’s plunger, but it didn’t work. So, while she slept, he went out for Chinese buffet. The silver spoons were big. The sauces bright as orange blood from a capsized ox. The plate was bleached white and still warm from its time in the commercial dishwashing machine. Why did she smell like that?

Velour Beans was suddenly taken back some 30 years when he wore a white uniform in another Chinese restaurant in that other time and life. The Wongville Orchid. The restaurant had nearly burned down. He could have killed people. He was being careless with the tins of blue methanol gel used to keep the buffet platters warm. Some had spilled in the hideout room and the flames took hold like liquor on fire light. Velour Beans quickly grabbed a busboy’s dingy yellow plastic pitcher of water and threw it on the blaze. It worked. It worked. But his heart was never the same again. The stem of fear. Those rattled nerves that came about from a rough birth were always there. He would never be normal. Except in that love with the forever girl with the eyes like a primordial, clean ocean. Deep waters from a time before man soiled the Earth with greed and war and hate among the same.

To think of Laos 10,000 years ago. It wouldn’t even be Laos. There would be no arbitrary borders. There would be no remains of bombs, only bones, only chiming monkey gongs. The world would always be better off without the cruel minds of men. The guardians of the space above dropped them here billions upon billions of eons ago. They had to rid themselves of the prophesized downfall they would bring and so cast them out to the outer rim of another astral plane. The third pebble in God’s eye.

Then there was a puff of reality, like looking at her morning loved lips in the bathroom mirror, and someone shook Velour Beans’ shoulder and said, “Sir… Please bring your seat to its full and upright position. We’re beginning our last descent.”

“Vientiane?” he wondered through eyes of dreamy dust.

“Why, of course not, sir. Chicago.”

She smelled of Khao Niaw Mamuang.

END