The Tale Of The Queso Coon

The room was massive beyond any necessity, it’s ambition and detail intended to convey a sense of great history, intelligence, taste and power.  Derrick-sized columns of leather-bound books looked down with indifference – their columnar leather-boundness seeming to say, “We are indifferent.”  Rare and unusual books were held in impenetrable crystal cases under lock and key.  The rarest of books did not exist at all and the most unusual were printed on air in a made-up language used by fairies.  Some were illustrated.

The dark-stained oak walls were nearly obscured by scores of gilt-edged paintings by the Old Masters such as Van Dick, Der Kunt and Runny What-His-Name.  The only modern art was a little wall-mounted conceptual number  that looked  like an ordinary light switch.   The ceiling, a magnificent one-color fresco depicting God’s lack of existence crowned the room with ironic glory.

Throughout the hall, extending almost to the edge of human vision, furnishings of such size and richness both assaulted and sated the senses with fabulous and uncommon wood and fabrics from the four corners of the globe.  Here:  a gentleman’s grouping of wingbacks made from silver and gold brocade stretched over black amazonian mahogany.  There: a boat-sized settee designed by Hitler.  Here: a desk of dimensions so unreasonable it begs utter insanity to describe it fully, so it must be sufficient only to note that it had a guest room.  There: an air hocky table.  Here: an original custom DuMont television with a sixty-ton black-and-white picture tube that emited so much radiation it could only be watched from the confines of a lead bunker over two miles under the earth.  Even so, death is absolutely assured.

And underneath it all, a single rug that kinda tied it all together. Or maybe it was carpet.

Dr. Charles Foster of Wellington, Ohio had been dead and buried for years but the daily business of running his estate and land had gone on uninterrupted like the seasons, as was his wish.  During the many years since Dr. Foster’s passing, this room, this estate, this glib insult to Jehovah Himself, was empty save for it’s army of servants and tradesmen, who’s toil would have been familiar to the slaves that lived in the shadows of the Pyramids. The grounds of his vast estate were tended with great and earnest care.  His sprawling Xanadu flower gardens met springtime with a melee of color and fragrance that shamed away the icy insistence of winter.  Through glorious summer, deep green lawns were mowed and edged with military precision. The whole of the estate was framed for miles by a dense forest of oak, birch, sycamore and dogwood that gave up offerings of pink, gold and fire on the sacrificial altar of autumn.  And – you know, it was a rug. There were tassels. Carpet does not have tassels.

The art, the books, the grounds, the furniture and carpet (or rug – it’s so hard to say) spoke eloquently for an owner that the inevitable progression of decline and time had forever silenced.

Until today.

Since the first spark of dawn, the private airport was buzzing with jumbo jets  and helicopters.   Foster’s own six-lane superhighway was alive with the streak and scurry of hundreds of jet-black limos.   Anyone who mattered at all in this world was drawn here: kings, presidents, illegitimate banana dictators, titans of technology and industry, drug moguls, mafia dons, sitcom stars and those who exist in utter obscurity, behind veils and layers of influence, wealth, or rarely, intelligence.  Each so familiar with putting their hands to the swords and levers of power, these breathers of rare came together with awkward humility, hands raised in supplication, hands out, receptive, hopeful.

It took over sixty years.  For over sixty years, the most brilliant minds from the disciplines of law and business toiled to this very fruition, some having labored exclusively on this project alone for their entire professional lives.  One man, a clerk known only as Jiggles, was born on Foster’s estate. From the moment of his birth henceforth he did nothing his entire life but change toner cartridges among the horrid, endless banks of Xerox machines that hummed day and night like the engines of an oceanliner, churning out thousands of pounds of paper  that could not be regarded as anything less than legal masterpiece.

The last time a lucky guest drew in, with awe and dread, the totality of Foster’s estate was during his epic thirty-day funeral during which the Korean war was suspended so that Truman and other world leaders could attend.  North Korea’s Kim Il-Sun and American general Douglas “Weepy” MacArthur shared a counterfeit B-29 piloted by Joesph Stalin himself, taking them all the way from a secret airfield near the 38th parallel.  The in-flight movie was an incomplete print of “All About Eve” dubbed into Mandarin.  All agreed the movie was soft on communism but for very different reasons.

Today all speculation would end.  The scope and sheer intellectual force of Foster’s legal team would bring to certain finality the division and disbursement of his unimaginable, nearly boundless fortune.  At the far end of the hall, a full-sized fiberglass replica of the Papal Basilica of Saint Peter unfolded itself with a deafening whine of massive hydraulics, like a giant pop-up book made for the unruly children of unholy gods.  Assembled and excited amongst the brain-ruining opulence, voices that usually commanded were hushed.  Eyes that regularly regarded wars and executions with glacial detachment, were soft and wide, focused on the magnificent dais built from the original spire off the Empire State Building (after that monkey knocked it off), which rose majestically from the unfurled Basilica.

A ragged gasp was torn from every throat as is became clear who it was that presided over this assembly of such import and scale it would beg the envy of Olympus.  It was carpet.  Settled.  Absolutely.  Earlier in the day someone said, “Hey – this is really nice carpet.”

The rich air swelled as a familiar voice fell from a thousand loudspeakers hidden throughout.  A firm, intelligent voice.  A voice that exuded compassion and cruelty in equal parts, poet and warrior in Gemini embrace.  No accent could be attached and yet one could not help but hear the crisp vowels of a New England boarding school, the round consonants heard on the tongue of a simple midwestern plowman, the loose cadence of a cowboy’s drawl and the naive accessibility of a California idiot.  And more.  And none.  This voice was the abyss into which once looked and saw nothing but one’s self as originally envisioned by creation at the moment when the universe was born and there was nothing but potential energy, nothing but the highest aspirations for the birth of time.

He spoke, saying, “I am Dr. Charles Foster.  Though dead for many years I am able to speak to you all one last time through the application of both technology and dark art.  I will not live again for very long, so we will address the matter at hand with alacrity.  You have been called here arguably to know the contents of my will.”  He gestured to a platform suddenly lit like day with brilliant carbon-arc Fresnels.  On the platform, resting like the baby Savior on an elegant fold of royal blue velvet:  the sole copy of his will.  From a distance, as most were able to view it, the will appeared to be no more than a few typed pages held together with a single chrome-plated staple.  And it was nothing more than this.

The throng murmured, shushed and shrugged like extras in a courtroom drama.  What could this mean?  Does just one among us receive the light, like Mazda of Zoroaster?  Such a thing would make the beneficiary the indisputable ruler of earth.  Would the fortune be divided equally?  Even for the wealthiest, a teenaged girl that lipsynched ridiculous songs about “dreams coming true”, this small, small fragment of Foster’s wealth would more than double her worth.  But this could not be – the document was so small.  Well, then.  Was it worse that that?  Had Foster  bequeathed the whole ball of wax to some fucking charity or cat, perhaps, an act of lunacy unmatched since Nero had appointed a horse to the Roman senate?

Foster silenced the crowd with a nearly imperceptible arch of one eyebrow.  Dead or not, he still had it.  He continued.  “You are here to witness and participate in an event that will  fundamentally change  the world.  Calendars will be reset.  Today is year zero.  I am a new Shiva, the destroyer and rebuilder!”

A moan rose above the room like wisps of smoke.  And more.  And more. It was the sound made in the wink before birth and the hollow space at death. The sound built up, layer upon layer as the scales of illusion fell and troubled souls were released from the burden of self.   The moan became as a choir of angels bound into  a single voice with no purpose but to praise eternal unchanging love, infinite knowing and the immutable perfection all that exists.

Foster’s voice held steady and strong like a flag flying high over a fire-ravaged battlefield.  “Today, you will withdraw Excalibur from the stone of ignorance.  And for you it will be nothing less than a key to it all, a key to the absolute, elemental and indivisible.  Today I will tell you the Tale Of The Queso Coon.”

http://www.artmound.com/mounds/10-12-09_02/index.html