The Balance of Good and Evil Came Out Wrong

In the late eighteenth century free thinkers tried to explain religious phenomena in terms of solar activity. They followed the course of the Sun through the day, night, and dawn. It is in the twilight zone that Venus and Mars can be seen with the naked eye.

I stayed a week in Bang Saen and did some research. I remember reading that the rainbow is a symbol of the altar of Jesus and Christianity. I use italics because this is not a book about one religion and the rainbow is probably a symbol of something that a lot of us feel in our hearts and might call a belief in God or faith, whether or not we wish to name an organized religion. In other words this is not a story of an orthodox conversion to religion or anything of the sort. It is not a fanatical promotion of the death of four billion people.

I got an internet connection and started doing some pretty heavy research.
I was making progress daily. I sat in the twilight intentionally on many mornings on the balcony of the tenth floor and looked out at the sea. I had a view of the sea from two sides. I was in a corner condominium … intentionally.
That is where I met her. Her name was Inana. I didn’t know her name or of her existence while on the island. I wasn’t waiting in the twilight to meet her. I was writing and enjoyed writing in the twilight.
It was in Bang Saen, where I was searching for the source of fate and faith, that one day after sitting in the early morning twilight I found the name of Inana.
I think she found me. Later I would read of the existence of a kingdom in Sumeria long ago that was since corrupted by men. Its I.D. had perhaps been stolen by men wanting to pose as God for their own material benefit. I’m not sure if any current religion can claim to possess a totally legitimate I.D.

The first of my associates on the sign—the top of Tower Two — well that was before the sign came down to become “Window Corporation” — in the beginning for a while it was “Window and Associates”, but that was before I killed them. The first one, that one I stabbed in the back … another was done with a modem ... we’ll get to that in a bit. Another I paid to have done as things were getting hot. The remaining died in one of those strange boating mishaps occasionally read of where I was the only survivor. I thought once that I killed one in an alley behind a bar on Elephant Island, but now I’m not sure of that. He came back. And to think it all started with the one liner — a psychopathic computer programmer plots to kill four and half billion people. If only it ended up as simple as that. It didn’t. After I met CHarLie it became much more than that. And now I find myself looking deeply within myself and thinking that good writing is telling the truth. And in the end, I plan to do that. It is not a simple thing to be insane and write a book. At least I have a lot of help. At least four in my head. Talk to us together and then try to get back to shore alive. I hear the song of Sybil. Written in ancient days in Mesopotamia. She’s crying to be heard and if you hear Sybil speak out there in the surf … swim with her for awhile, but then make your way back to shore with the knowledge and yearning and a piece of mind at peace. She’s crying though … listen to her story. I wrote it down. I did. Sybil speak to me … tell me more … my Sybil, my Sybil, my Sybil … before Hollywood takes me more … Sybil, tell me a story. Please Sybil … I don’t want to misunderstand. Come to me I beg of you. Sybil….


Tick…tick…tick… “Hey Charls, this is CHarLie speaking now, don’t worry the ticks are gone.” That voice was terror enough, but one morning on Elephant Island as Charls had just been ready for a new day, CHarLie appeared in person. It was more terrible than he had dreamed. CHarLie made it clear to him that the tick was counting down days to Armageddon. Eventually, another voice asked him to try to reverse the process already on the edge of no redemption.

Charls didn’t like politics and now someone he respected was asking him to be President (And he thought it was God) in November of 2012—even said that fifty years old was about the right age. His resume would be accepted by the people. The tail had wagged the dog too long. It was time for a younger generation.


Plan B—Termination of Life on Earth

by Jack B. Wily




Some people walk along the edge. On one side is the best of sanity; on the other is just plain wrong; but, those who walk on the edge have the best view of the shifting sand and if they walk to one side of the line on occasion, it is to be expected. It is the outcome that becomes important then: what remains when they are done. For awhile he thought he would never teach again, but now it had become more of a desire to step away from something to get a better look at it…he wasn’t sure he would ever see his girlfriend again. Of course, at this time he wasn’t sure how much of humanity would be left when the water receded.


A baby born moments ago. He takes a lot of steps before reaching out of childhood and grasping at straws of adulthood.
His father, in awe, gazes at an aurora—a radiant glow makes him feel as if he is standing at an alter with God. He understands a lot of things he thinks, but this creation of life he cannot answer.
He sees a body in a casket, no semblance of life; immediately, he knows the answer. It is clear; someone has died. The aurora is not there. It is not clear.
What has left he calls the soul.
There are billions of stars and six and one half billion people that radiate life at birth. Each of them dies.


It is a clear night in Sunnyvale, California when thirty-five years in the past he stands in the grass and his father tells him under the expanse of bright stars that those stars are a source of wonder. He looks up at them and perceives they are moving away from him like pricks of light in rising dough. Damp dew that will turn to frost covers the green blades of a cold dark lawn interspersed with fallen pine needles, and father and son breath breathes out as fog. It was a cool respite from chatting and sipping beer at the kitchen table. Lately he had been besting his father at chess—his father had taught him.
He is older now; heading for L.A. In earlier days he’d return to Southern California from these trips to see his father and, for a few days, inform his mother that he missed his dad. It is a familiar pattern these days, repeated by many.

The sun rises at five, thirty-five years later over the Gulf of Thailand. He will be fifty in another year. He has a son who misses him and is missed by him.
It was a long day and at the end of that day there are two and a half billion people and billions of stars. Meteorites arc in the sky as they did yesterday. It was a plan Charls put together.
A lot of the souls were incarcerated in cubicles and workspaces and watched over with electronic devices. They are gone; some of them may never have been there — souls stolen before their bodies left, souls left unasserted in the beginning of the end, in an evil plan, any good intentions that ever were, gone wrong.
Charls thinks at dawn of an evening long ago, as he and his father drank beer in the kitchen and a child is raped on the lawn. They did not hear a sound. In the background a TV was broadcasting another Super Bowl and drowning out the sounds outside that were crying in the night.


Many years later still, Charls…

(He has remembered that Charls is the name his parents gave him when he was born—before they changed it to Golem I mean—but that’s a complicated story, and one for later—and then again by now he has remembered a lot of other things as well.)

…rocks in a rocking chair. Rocking and waiting. He is waiting for death to take him. His is a previously tortured soul.
It is January first, for him a day he remembers not in celebration, but with fear and in trepidation. It is on that day that the four and a half billion people disappeared as he watched on a webcam a child reaching out for help. That child told him that no one at home was moving—not even an iguana.
It’s eighty-five degrees and dark. It won’t get much cooler even in the middle of the night. He sits on the porch of his bungalow on Samed Island and looks at the sky. It is clear. He is done remembering. He writes a final note and wraps a package he hopes will be delivered. He knows now what has happened; yet, he clings to the belief that no one in Washington has the right to determine fate and whether or not there is a God.
He addresses a letter to Colonel Pot who in some strange coincidence is visiting the island. He hasn’t told him much of the story—maybe a word now and then. Now and then, he sees now, are very important words. Now and then can be construed as a philosophy—something akin to the feeling of lightness and the philosophy of Nietzsche.
He considers the idea that Pot is supposed to be dead—killed by a bus while trying to kill Wicket. The bus hit his tuk-tuk after he splashed Wicket on the Marbunkrong department store in Bangkok. How is it that he is still alive? He’s never been able to kill off a character, even in a story. Then again, Golem (remember—Golem—Charls—Golem—Charls; for much of his life Golem doesn’t remember his name was ever Charls, but we know now) knows he never killed anybody. He burnt a bunch of bungalows down. But the chick that caught fire was not seriously burned. Why is it now that he is being blamed for killing them? Jack, well he wrote it all down when the shaman left town and while he was around. Sure that’s the words. In the whole story he smoked five joints of marijuana and two sticks of opium. But the whole story consisted of fifty years. What crime had he committed? He did not feel guilty. Even Jack is a character Golem created to narrate the book. (Golem, Charls, Jack…later you will meet a Wicket and a CHarLie…do not confuse CHarLie with (Golem, Charles, Jack, Wicket) or on the other hand, is CHarLie an integral part of them all? Is evil part of the universal plan, scheme of things.
… To make it even tougher, there are times when Jack disappears and Golem takes over in his own voice and point of view. From the beginning Golem wanted his own point of view. Then again, there’s an old man, but we won’t know him until he’s old and not much before the end. But after all, someone must have put pen to paper and told of what could or did happen. And what better person to do that than an old man who saw through it all and could put words on paper. An old man who had been Charls, Jack, Charlie and them all. An old man who didn’t like the plagiarism that he saw. An old man who knew the difference between right and wrong. And isn’t that what this story is all about—the difference between right and wrong? – like a simple balance in an ATM. Is the balance between good and evil positive? Is greed wrong?



It may have been that Golem thought they were trying to kill off Santa, and he couldn’t say ho ho ho to that — no Santa loving person can … a PC world has made a ho a woman who accepts cash. As a child Charls never realized that when Santa said ho ho ho, he was requesting a service. He had seen Santa in a child’s eyes, through a lens that enables one to see such things, and death of spirit when a child was told there is no Santa, and he rather figured that there is a Santa for people who believe, and he did not believe anything was real in this world, if not for the belief of people in it. The day there was no belief in the spirit that world would simply die.



None of it would have happened if the two-person team from the Iguanian government had not walked into his Tower 2 office at eight am on a Monday morning and tried to confiscate ashtrays out of a cabinet in his private office.
Such a simple, stupid stunt—
At eight am he had been at work for three hours. As the man stepped between him and his desk and demanded access to the locked cabinet, Charles hit him just above the upper lip, causing him to sail over the desk and into the filing cabinet. Of course it wasn’t just that. It was many things…the death of a friend…people shot with assault rifles…maniacs all around…a government with a pc mind in an un-pc world…a lot of things, but sometimes one straw breaks an iguana’s back, or in this case leads to the construction of a plan.

It was on that day that Charls started contemplating the creation of a plan. If the government wanted to play with him; he’d play with them. He set out to show them who was good and who was evil. He knew they’d get the point and see—that difference between good and evil. It bothered Golem at this point in the story—this difference between Good and Evil. He thought a lot of people figured there was a lot more evil now than then, in fact, it seemed that each year this remained apt…now than then. This year than yesteryear, than the year before that. Good and evil, good and evil—we know both, Adam told us, Eve showed us, God made us believe, but… was this what He had in mind?



Diary Entry

It was after the conversation in the hammock and knowledge of plan B that I considered the balance of the following equation and started to wonder if the result was a positive quantity. I even scratched the equation on the berm of the beach this morning and examined it and poked around it with a stick. The tide was coming in and it would soon be gone. Yesterday I saw on Guano News that a woman had set fire to her three children in the closet of the master bedroom. The sky, forever more beautiful, reflected off the silica in the sand and tiny sparkles appeared around the etching.

Good — Evil = Some positive quantity of good

I’m not sure how long I looked at the words; I was in the habit of using the tides and sky to measure time. As I stood, stick in hand, ripples of water moved up the shore and the letters started to fade.


Colonel Pot sat with one hand on his iguana, fidgeting in his chair in the police box as if perusing a user’s instruction booklet and looked at the author’s note that the old man told him in his letter should be inserted in the beginning of the book to shed some light on a complicated story, and wondered again what had happened along the road—what did Golem find? The door of the police box opened and he quickly shut his desk drawer and pretended to be playing a computer game. He was worried that he may have played a role in this other game and praying that he could get rid of any incriminating evidence, and why was his newly acquired iguana peering at him? – again.