HARAR:

TAKEN to TWIN PEAKS

AN E-NOVEL

11. "The Man Behind the Glass"

"Maintain the most total silence

"while you wait for the bird to enter the cage

"and once he's in

"softly shut the door with a quick stroke of your paintbrush"

- Jacques Prévert, "To Paint the Portrait of a Bird"

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by Edward Lacie

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Episode Eleven

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"The owls are not what they seem," is mentioned almost immediately after the theme music.

It is only after I'd kidnapped him meaning to kill him that I came up with my next scheme to promote the poetry of Greg Baysans so that I could make some money from my explications. It came about as a result of a book Baysans suggested I read. He'd just finished it and had it with him.

He'd borrowed it from Jon, the bartender at Boxx's. It was The Poet and the Murderer which I mention on almost the first page of this narrative.

It gave me the idea to invent a set of poems from which I give Baysans's poems more historical precedence, a tradition for him to be following rather than writing on his own.

Given Baysans's use of occasional cut-ups and such fascination with form, I realized that a French Symbolist poet would be just the needed example, a forefather of a literary sort.

I plan to invent a biography and also a few poems. They will be attributed to my "forged identity." 

I'll use some old rough drafts of poems of my own for a sort of starting point. I think of my never much looked at "first version of this book" - "my last attempt at poetry," the Gnome notebook which caused a breakdown in the direction of up.

I wasn't very familiar with Rimbaud at the time, so I doubt that what I wrote was about Rimbaud.

(The above statement, I've found out, is false. A reference to Rimbaud is made in the Gnome Notebook. Also, Larry, the character responsible for the line, "Don't make me go back there," is alluded to by quoting Rimbaud, "Pitiful brother!")

A new character shows up in "Twin Peaks" - a home-bound orchid grower who was on Laura's Meals-on-Wheels route. Donna has taken over the route to learn more about who might have killed Laura. The shut-in's name is Harold.

"I love you, Sheriff Truman," Albert (Miguel Ferrar) says. This is very complex, but "Twin Peaks" contains no homosexual references.

Bob used to flick matches at Leland. Bob would say, "Fire, walk with me." That's the title of the movie that appeared after the announcement that "Twin Peaks" would not return after its second season. "Fire, Walk With Me" was called a pre-quel,¹ though, not a sequel, to "Twin Peaks," so the things left unresolved at the end of the tv series remain unresolved.

I'm out of cigarettes and have to smoke some of Jim's. The one-armed man is trying to sell shoes to Sheriff Truman.

Jim Post bought me a new coat a month ago, since I'm no longer working. He's buying all the food. He got me new shoes (and I gave my old ones to Baysans who needed a pair as badly as I did). ("Leo needs new shoes," is a significant "Twin Peaks" line. I don't remember what episode it appears in.)

The one-armed man is shooting up in the bathroom of the sheriff station. He's asking for Bob to appear. 

"Are you here?"

It's eerie, like my waiting for Baysans and Poet X to stumble out of Boxx's the night I killed Poet X. I sat in my car and shivered, more from nerves than from the early April chill. I knew their pattern well enough to know they'd be out on a Saturday, drinking.

I didn't expect they'd drink till midnight that night, though. This was very much past their usual stumbling out time.

If it hasn't been pointed out well enough by this point, "Bob" is the murderer of Laura Palmer, but he seems to be an imaginary character or mythic. How can this be?

Another attempt at describing the breakdown during and after the first time I wrote: after awhile everything became a metaphor and the metaphor came to life as monsters and angels and Jesus and someone very much like Bob. I wondered at the time if I might be having an acid flashback. 

It's after 3:00 a.m. (it's five minutes to 2:00 a.m. as I retype this) and I haven't thought of e-mail for over an hour. I don't want to be traced once it's learned Baysans has been kidnapped.

What that paragraph is trying to impart is that when I wrote the first draft I was checking e-mail to see if notice had been made of the "obituary" for Greg Baysans I'd sent before leaving Seattle for Portland to kill him. 

I was born to be a stalker.

"I wasn't found out" refers to the fact that I also hacked into Baysans's website and put a notice there for maybe two days (?) that he was dead and that I, Edward Lacie, was taking his messages - Oops! That was sure stupid. But I honestly don't think it was ever taken note of. -ewl

I should sleep. Jim Post went to bed hours ago. When I worked, he'd stay up late just to rub it in. Now I stay up later than he, and he thinks I'm doing the same - which I'm not.

We're not getting along well. I should just kill Baysans and be done with it. But first I'll give my other plan, the one learned from Mark Hoffman, the forger and murderer, a chance: create back-up texts to validify current documents.

I need to invent a poet similar in style or subject to Baysans, providing him with a model.² I hereby invent, in honor of Rimbaud, a French poet who is from, say, Switzerland (where French is almost as common as German)! 

Of course, he'll be important enough to have been translated into English since Baysans doesn't read French and Baysans will need to be familiar enough with him, my false creation, to cite him as a major influence. A name: Blaise Cendrars. Does it sound French?

Trying to explain a theory of magic and dreams before being intruded on by the Son of Sam, was not, is not good writing, whether or not it was coded or if the writing was lyric, an interior monologue. Nor was it "modern" free verse.

Trying to record events as they happened, how events coincided with my thoughts, my moods, how each mirrored the other, my thoughts were fueled by my just-completed manuscript "Bouleversement" and its theme of duality.

The premise in "Bouleversement" was that all things have opposites and opposites, in their dependency on the other, equal their opposites. A notion sensed in great poetry - that time does not exist in the linear sense we perceive it in an everyday way - was also a main theme and theory I was trying to provide examples for, here and now.

Donna is talking to Laura at Laura's grave. Lara (not Laura) is showing her acting chops in this scene. And the monologue is well-written, a pleasure for an actor. No actor can save bad writing, but even a bad actor can present a great speech well because of its greatness.

She apologizes for her and James, Laura's boyfriend (the secret one of two) before her death, now falling in love. Donna walks in on James about to kiss Maddy, the dark-haired look-alike cousin of Laura.

"I only came for a funeral and look at the mess," Maddy says to her Uncle Leland as Sheriff Truman arrives to arrest him for the murder of Jacques Renault in the hospital bed way back when.

I seem to remember hearing that Sheryl Lee, who played Maddy and, in flashback, Laura, was first hired only as the face model for the pictures and the body (BM as I retype this, k.d. lang sings the word "body" as I type it) for the corpse on the opening scene beach. She stepped into a speaking role meant to be a cameo that grew into a central character.

Billy Bibbit is a patient in in go in the ward with Mc-Mc-Murphy in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

Hollywood myth or hideous contrast to Rimbaud who worked, had the right stuff, didn't succeed during his lifetime but did after that.

Cue theme music. There's the end of the episode.

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