CAROUSEL SQUARE:  First Three Pages                                                                                                

                                                                                                         MINNEAPOLIS

The first book Chitchee Chichester ever read was a Little Golden Book. The book was about a squirrel and was called: Perri And Her Friends. As from a past life Chitchee reviewed the photographs that illustrated the text when he flashed on the emerald and silver-spined children’s book. A kaleidoscopic bliss cascaded onto the iridescent grass and the rainbow gardens outside. The very act of reading symbols triggered a tiny serpent’s coil to loop around itself at the base of Chitchee’s spine. A tingle from this tickle emerged as an “I.” “I” itself became “We” and added depth to his consciousness. The empty plenty of an acorn flowered into a forest of books, outside and inside. Reading the Little Golden Book illuminated Chitchee’s mind, and the image of a candle in his mind, lighted by a book, served to illuminate the path he shone on forever. He heard the blissful song of a red-breasted robin on a berry-branched juniper tree in the backyard. For a timeless moment, the living room, with its lamp of understanding, bedazzled him, uplifted his heart, and stamped him with an unforgettable joy. So, from the womb of a book, his soul was born, and his soul became conscious of consciousness. As from a kit of unfolding proteins, from seed to consciousness (Sanskrit: चित् chit, citta), a Self-assembling Self of one Charles Chichester opened warm-blooded eyes on the observable Universe. He became conscious for the first time while reading a book about a squirrel.

Chitchee discovered later that the Austrian author of Perri And Her Friends, Felix Salten, was Jewish; Salten was also the author of Bambi, and Hitler banned his books. The little book,ֵס ֶפר , sefer, recounted how Perri the Squirrel (Perri the Rabbi?) had a rabbit friend, Danni (Danni the Rabbi?). Danni lived next door, and when Marty the Marten patrolled the woods for breakfast, Danni alerted Perri, and Perri screeched to the neighboring woods: “Chee chee chee!” That is the plot of the book.

Paisley Chichester clasped her only son Chitchee to her bosom with all her heart. She cleaned, fed, and clothed his helpless body, watched over him, pulled the poisons from his mouth, and dreamed what he dreamed. In turn he beheld his mother’s beautiful face and the caress of her eyes. Only one mother had ever been born, and she gave birth to everyone.

Young Charles is in the living room, holding open the Little Golden Book—his mother Paisley enters from the kitchen. Charles splays the book. He sits on her lap, and she sits in her Windsor rocking chair.

“Oh my goodness . . . are you reading?” asks Paisley, spindling a seven-inch 45 on the stereo console.

Wearing summer Bermuda shorts and a floral shirt—martini and Kent cigarettes on the coffee table, Paisley snuggles back into her Windsor rocking chair.

“My word, my little scholar, you’re reading whole books now. Charles, I’m so proud of you.”
“Chee chee chee!” he reads from the book and smiles strenuously.
“We will call you ‘Chee chee chee,’ from now on!” says his mother. “Chim chim Che-ree!”
The phonograph plays Doris Day singing “Red, Red Robin Comes Bob Bob Bobbin’ Along.”
“Now,” says Paisley, “it’s your friend’s turn to rock in the Windsor rocker—you have to share!”
Chitchee jumps off his mother’s lap, and falls into the arms of the neighbor girl his own age. She has bangs, sundew-red curly hair, and freckles. She wears a Peter Pan-collared, blue bell-shaped dress and she stands on crooked twigs. So close to her clematis-mouth and sparkly hazel eyes is Chitchee, she kisses him. Her kindergarten smile in the surrounding heat of summer he forever associates with Danni the Rabbit.

Ever after, Paisley spread the fairy tale that Chitchee was born, book in hand.

And then the new hire Chitchee recalled his first day (in the summer of 2009) on the job at the used book store BookSmart in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

That was the day his ex-wife Donna Jensen, who later changed her name to LaDonna DeLaVelle D’Galactica, made a scene that almost got him fired.

Chitchee strolled happily haphazardly (zigzagging to see what new stores were always opening and closing) on Lagoon toward Hennepin Avenue South, half singing the finale from Stravinsky’s Firebird. While pedestrians, bicyclists, and vehicles adjusted to the traffic lights and thoroughfares open for summer business, Chitchee, thinking of whistling that Russian tune, halted, stooped, and pocketed an acorn and acorn’s cap he particularly fancied. The cap’s intricate, minaret design—as he had seen in D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form—drew him in at once.

“Every acorn,” Chitchee prefaced himself, “has the magical ability to fetch from afar the far-fetched.”
Hot, buzzing prairie grass and petunias sugared the purpled air of the Uptown side streets. Guilds of honey bees worked like farmhands on the wild roses, hummingbirds vibed with purple lupines and gold honeysuckles, and a Baltimore oriole jostled past Chitchee’s thick, blue-black unkempt hair—a little greasy under his black beanie. Although the sun was torrid hot on the pavement and buzzed like a chainsaw, Chitchee wore a black leather jacket over a red and black flannel shirt, tucked out, black Levis, and a black T-shirt, his clothes for all seasons—Minnesota’s seasons don’t proceed in order and can all happen on the same day. Somewhere about his person he had jammed in a paperback (Mandarin: 书), so that when trapped at a boring bus stop you might catch him reading Chinese poetry—Li Bai, Du Fu, or Bai Juyi.

That guy would be reading a book on the way to the gallows pole.

He hadn’t showered or changed his white socks for the job interview, knowing he had the book store job in the book bag. He understood that the interview would follow sometime after his first day of work. And the boss understood that the new guy was nice and would make book about books,الكتب ِك َتاب, to aid the overburdened staff with their overwhelming body load.

Minnesotans detested being called “Minnesota nice.” The despised epithet produced comments of unforeseen outrage, fisticuffs with jackanapes, and indignant Aristotelian lists of refutations—so Chitchee avoided its usage and instead smiled at everyone who smiled at him, and the others too. He imagined loving everybody. He was another very public Idiot. From the sunny side of the street, he greeted the house sparrows that flew overhead. The squirrels he gave nods, the rabbits hellos. A bed of crimson-lipped tulips folded themselves into meditation. The mauve coneflowers intoxicated his cheerfulness.

So what if Minneapolis wasn’t the best of cities? It wasn’t the worst of cities; it was a Midwestern city. Brick after brick like pustak after pustak (पुस्तक after पुस्तक) told Chitchee: this is the mean average, the median, the middling middle, and The Mulamadhyamakakarika of Nagarjuna. Not so large as to lose you, nor so small as to never find you. Sure, for nine months you grew weary of winter, and some years, you couldn’t scrape together three months of summer; however, every spring the rains came roping down and the sallow willows beat their breasts with the thunderclaps, and the rain felt good enough for children to play in.

Today, all Chitchee had to do was show up on time for a non-existent interview and sell books to the circle of customers. Relax, breathe deeply he told himself, but the noise deepened. The traffic looked like loose, moving maple leaves on a brightly moving stream. Pieces of the sun had been hammered down on the hot pavement into gold sheets all the way down Hennepin Avenue. Chitchee happily yawned half-way, then terminated the yawn early. He stretched his stretches. Relaxed. He had volunteered at BookSmart in the past for free because shelving books was a delight. Shelving calmed his nerves, slowed his heart beats, and fed his browsing curiosity. He shook his arms and legs as if getting out of a hot shower onto cold bathroom tiles. And then he unleashed a downwardly-facing dog (cribbed from B. K. S. Iyengar), jumped up, saluted the starry sun, and resumed his walk. “And thus he moved more beautifully in the blue,” said one of his his favorite poets Georg Trakl on Cloud Nine. The sun’s warmth on Chitchee’s face had the aroma of sweet corn, his face a kernel of corn. Petals of sunlight lay strewn over the city’s metallic surfaces and the cars’ chromes. An enamel-white Dodge van parked across the street from BookSmart, vaulted open its back doors, and slammed them shut—changing its mind. A purple martin with a bug in its mouth landed in front of Chitchee, and Chitchee watched the purple martin startle off and fly toward a second white Dodge van parking itself clumsily behind the first. Chitchee, with bumpered eyebrows, braked in front of a flyer on a utility pole.

A marijuana cloud floated by with a minty, peony, and rosemary fragrance.

He shivered and trembled with owl-eyed, buggy eyeballs: Chitchee saw himself. He was on the flyer and he heard the suspicious police sirens’ thorny wailing. He regretted getting high earlier. He melted as in an R. Crumb comix through the cracks in the sidewalk. A bounty hunter wanted his head? Eek! He looked around in wonder and read:

                                                                       WANTED BY FBI: CHITCHEE CHICHESTER
                                For Violation of Anti-Riot Laws, Conspiracy, Intent to Distribute Un-American Literature. 

                             Chitchee Chichester should be considered dangerous because of known propensity to incite

                     violence, class conflict, and mayhem.  Capable of explosives. Last seen wearing a hijab.

“What does that mean?” thought Chitchee. “Maybe it’s a message from the future!”

Although he heard a strange click (single action?) behind him, Chitchee examined the posted photograph: a grainy, Xeroxed version of himself in Minnesota pine and birch woods. He stood next to a figure who had been cut out, but what woods? The mugshot from his high school yearbook? Click. (A cocked revolver? Hammer poised. Flash?) When Chitchee turned slowly around with his hands well above his jug-eared, eyeglassed skull, he faced Sausage Man, who had a rose of a thorny Cyranose and raspberry pimples for planets, obscuring his face. He wore a faded, shapeless, bib Oshkosh overall beneath which denim he braved a checkerboardish, black-on-white plaid flannel shirt, the top button buttoned creating wattles out of his chicken neck. Chitchee caught a whiff of his skunk ass. Ugh, sausages! Puzzled forehead creased, Chitchee watched Sausage Man, who tapped at his cellphone screen and walked away.

“Hey, man, did you take my picture?” called out Chitchee. “Hey, hey where are you going, there . . . Sausagey?”

Chitchee strode toward the foul, meaty breath in clouds, stopped, and looked at where his watch should have been (he forgot to strap it on—it usually felt like a giant deer tick sucking his blood). He looked skyward as if at a trade show for stealth bombers and guessed the correct time from the sun.

“Ja and,” said Sausage Man, parroting, winking, and blinking bluet-flower eyes a-twinkle. “And I’m going to go get me some Vienna sausages from Lunds there. And I plan to eat them too-hoo.”

Sausage Man, well everyone knows he’s crazy, Chitchee thought—I didn’t know he had a cell phone though. Chitchee hurried back to the totemic utility pole.

“Okay, this must be a prank,” thought Chitchee. “It must be the guys at BookSmart! Initiation into the hazey brotherhood of books. Must be! Last seen wearing a hijab? لا. Ha, ha. No. That ID seems a trifle mistaken . . .”

Two Minneapolis thumpers in a squad car turned on their siren and raced toward Lake Street through the red light on Lagoon Avenue. Other mad sirens chimed in with ululating red tongues of fire. Chitchee, as if tied to a mast, cupped his ears.

He ripped the sheet off the utility pole, slipped the paper into his back pocket, plucked one of his own poems (and a roll of 3M packing tape) from his black JanSport backpack, and switched in his poem:

The trees have agency, cleaving to grammars, where leaves are verbs/Present participles are running like non-binary lions that perch on/The backs of butterflies, flowers falling out of the mouths of/Grad students, who speak with a single tongue of ice/But we are the squirrels without blessings, the squirrels of Al-lah!  

“There, perfecto!”
He admired himself and read aloud the whole poem with an open heart.
“Even the haters should be turning cartwheels over that poem soon. Or my name isn’t Perri the Magic Squirrel!”
Leaving BookSmart’s front door, a man resembling Sausage Man wore a Brooks Brothers black suit (his well-ironed suit matched the expressionless look on his face), white shirt, and an almost wooden black tie. And Chitchee’s mouth opened, shaped with an unspoken: What? This new edition of Sausage Man: first impression: from pariah dog to hedge-fund investor. Is this so large a step? Even the scar above the refurbished Sausage Man’s right eye was so precisely carved as to have been ordered from Neiman Marcus. The re-packaged Sausage Man checked messages, his left hand poked the screen, and his right hand gripped the oblong iPhone 3 by his broken thumb in a crooked, vise-shaped hand. A no-nonsense, no-smile-from-me, don’t-mess-with-me look fell flat as a flapjack on Chitchee. Indeed his furry eyebrows climbed up the ridges to his intact hairline when he asked the man:

“So, how’s your sausage?”
“Have a nice day,” said he, his speech clear as the sunny water clipped by the stones in Minnehaha creek.
“Hey, man!” said Chitchee. “I’m not a National Security risk!”