In Chapter X. DanJillian Jay is still dissociating from his centipede trip and manages to glimpse the dual nature of his own soul: Jay is what remains after the collision of Dan and Jillian. With this understanding, Jay demands Jango Skyy send him to the afterlife. Next chapter he’ll be face-to-face with Anihilato, completing the narrative arc started all the way back in chapter A.

I want to talk about another book I read; it feels like more retroactive inspiration. Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge markets itself as an anthropological account of the author’s training in the 1960s under don Juan, a native Yaqui spiritualist, although critics claim the story is fictional. Personally my guess is it’s a heavily fictionalized narrative based on a few real events. (I’ve got no doubt that Castaneda has taken some interesting drugs, for instance, but no real don Juan has been found.)

If that’s the case, Castaneda cleverly presents his work as genuine anthropology to rope the reader into an intriguing exploration of mysticism, then pulls the rug from under the audience with fantastical elements just barely in the realm of plausibility. Maybe this approach betrays the culture it claims to present, but it’s a hell of a ride; it forces the reader to share the protagonist’s increasing paranoia regarding reality.

Throughout the book and its sequels, Castaneda (allegedly) takes powerful psychoactive drugs under the direction of don Juan, a brujo or sorcerer. These drugs include peyote (called Mescalito), datura (Jimson weed or yerba del diablo, devil’s weed), and psychedelic mushrooms smoked from a pipe (humito, the little smoke). The drugs are often personified: Mescalito appears to Castaneda as a humanoid, while the other drugs are called a sorcerer’s allies. These aren’t drugs to mess around with. Datura in particular causes hallucinations the user can’t even differentiate from reality. Check out this reddit thread from r/drugs where someone takes datura, then posts “Google.com how normal again stop now” as if struggling to end their existential cognitive agony. I’m glad I can read other people’s accounts of drug use, because I’d never want to put myself through anything like that.

While the altered states of consciousness Castaneda experiences obviously relate to Akayama DanJay, in which characters smoke crickets and eat centipedes to visit the afterlife, The Teaching‘s real strength is in the relationship between Castaneda and don Juan. I want to take inspiration from this relationship for the banter between Jay and Jango.

Don Juan is a man of mystery. Throughout the narrative it’s impossible to tell if his lessons actually relate to ‘reality’ as we know it. Castaneda seems impatient with don Juan’s inability to explain these lessons with words, while don Juan seems impatient with Castaneda’s insistence on using words at all. This clash and Castaneda’s slow understanding of don Juan’s lessons produce the narrative tension.

Don Juan wants to teach Castaneda the same way don Juan was taught by his ‘benefactor,’ of whom we hear very little. This teacher-to-student transmission of knowledge—knowledge which cannot be contained in words—seems to originate from the time of unrecorded history.

In Akayama DanJay Virgil Jango Skyy leads a monastery on the main island of Sheridan. Although in principle he’s subordinate to Virgil Blue, Virgil Blue turns out to be a pile of centipedes, so Jango is obviously in control. I like how this combines don Juan’s mysterious benefactor with personified visions of drugs like peyote: Jango passes his teachings and his centipedes to Jay simultaneously. The transmission of knowledge is transformed into a more direct emblem.

When Jango isn’t teaching with centipedes, he’s teaching with words which only seem to complicate things. Jango tells the story of meeting Faith as a time-traveling white fox, which denies the easily-understood-but-incorrect notion of linear time in favor of the impossible-to-understand-reality of toroidal time. This story profoundly affects Jay. Jay is a photographer, perhaps to cope with confusion regarding his identity; he remembers being Dan in the afterlife, and tries to make sense of reality by putting it in pictures. When he hears Jango’s story, Jay’s belief in a concrete reality begins to falter. By the time Jay meets Virgil Blue, he’s not even looking for the truth. He just wants to hear what’s there to be heard. Reality can’t fit in a photograph any more than it can be understood in words. Jango’s impossible story convinces Jay to accept reality as an illusion formed by subjective sensory experience.

Although I haven’t read any hint of this in Castaneda’s work, I suspect finding a pupil is a natural step in the life-cycle of the brujo. Don Juan was student to his benefactor, then takes Castaneda as a student to become a benefactor himself and complete the cycle. When Jay promotes Jango to Virgil Blue, he’s ending the succession of Virgils by completing their cycle with a closed loop. As Virgil Blue, Jango will send Dan to become Jay. The relationship between teacher and student, here, has no loose thread, signaling the beginning of the end.

In Castaneda’s second book with don Juan, A Separate Reality, don Juan discusses the art of seeing. Beyond merely perceiving objects subjectively, a sorcerer can see the world as it really is. I notice parallels between this notion of seeing and trivialism, the tongue-in-cheek philosophy that ‘everything is true’ because truth and falsehood are fundamentally undefined. “It doesn’t matter to me that nothing matters,” says don Juan. Asks Castaneda,

“Do you mean that once a man learns to see, everything in the whole world is worthless?”

“I didn’t say worthless. I said unimportant. Everything is equal and therefore unimportant… All things are equal and by being equal they are unimportant… [A man of knowledge] knows that his life will be over altogether too soon; he knows that he, as well as everybody else, is not going anywhere; he knows, because he sees, that nothing is more important than anything else. In other words, a man of knowledge has no honor, no dignity, no family, no name, no country, but only life to be lived, and under these circumstances his only tie to his fellow men is his controlled folly… But there’s no emptiness in the life of a man of knowledge, I tell you… Everything is filled to the brim, and everything is equal… Upon learning to see a man becomes everything by becoming nothing. He, so to speak, vanishes and yet he’s there… Nothing is any longer familiar. Everything you gaze at becomes nothing!”

This notion of “controlled folly” nestles perfectly into Akayama DanJay. The way I understand it, controlled folly is how someone who realizes that nothing means anything continues living life in the face of nihilism; you know you’re meaningless in a cosmic sense, but you’ve still gotta get groceries and stuff.

Anihilato, the monster which calls itself Master of Nihilism, wields nihilism like a sword when it claims to obliterate people’s souls. The tactical response to this is controlled folly: “You’ve obliterated me, but here I am. Before you thought to vanish me, I was already vanished. I’m vanished right now, and yet I’m here. Obliterate me and I remain as I was before.” Suddenly you can’t be obliterated because you never existed in the first place. Jay becomes Master of Nihilism precisely because he’d never call himself that, because he knows there’s no reason to do so. Of course, Anihilato can’t obliterate souls at all. It puts them in eggs, or eats them and adds them to its bulk.

Coincidentally, don Juan describes seeing a person as like looking at an egg. Not just an egg, but an egg with strings coming in and out of it. Akayama DanJay‘s eggs and worms suddenly seem more relevant than ever.

Now that I’ve read Castaneda’s work, I’d describe Akayama DanJay as The Teachings of Don Juan crossed with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann by way of Christian epic poetry. That’s a weird tagline, but a fitting one which hits all the major notes of my peculiar niche. A tagline like that helps me remember the tones and themes I want to express.

I think this is the first commentary which is longer than the section it’s commentating on. I hope it was worth the length! See you next week.

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In W2. Leo Ascends we watch Leo, the drug-smuggler with a swastika tattoo, get goaded into eating his own fingers before Nemo eats the rest of him. Nemo, the first man and the first Virgil Blue, has apparently eaten a host of undesirable characters, and diluted them by munching every Virgil Blue, himself included.

I’d like to reiterate that Leo doesn’t represent Republicans, or conservatives, or Libertarians, or whatever. If you asked Leo, he might call himself those things, but that’s because Leo would call himself anything if he thought it would upset someone. Calling Leo basically anything is falling for Leo’s con, because Leo associates himself with controversial imagery as an excuse for why no one likes him.

Some might say it’s contradictory for Leo to simultaneously embrace the racism, misogyny, antisemitism, and symbolism of fascism alongside small-government (or no-government) ideals. That’s correct. Leo thrives in hypocrisy! Leo represents a desire to separate people into two groups: an in-group which is protected by the law but not subject to it, and an out-group which is subject to the law but not protected by it. That’s how he can denounce taxation as theft even while literally stealing centipedes, ferry fares, and passports. His notion of personal responsibility evaporates the instant it inconveniences him. He can feel victimized by any action taken by another, while excusing his own actions as exercises in freedom. Take a look at this:

(I believe I saved this photo from r/trashy, a subreddit devoted to sleaze.) First notice the Gadsden flag (with pot leaves added for good measure), which borrows the snake symbolism from Ben Franklin’s “Join or Die” cartoon below to represent America’s determination to secure independence. Beside flies a German swastika. On the face of it, this is a heap of contradiction: the Gadsden flag is currently associated with the Tea Party movement, which calls for a small government, while the swastika demands a powerful government to smite whatever is ‘infecting’ the nation.

But this hypocrisy is by design. While cooler heads dissect their contradictory statements, the fascist builds concentration camps. In this context, the “don’t tread on me” snake is reminding the government to tread on the out-group in service to the in-group. (Zooming in, it appears the pot-leaf Gadsden says “don’t tread on weed,” but Nazis weren’t fans of weed, if I understand. Such is the plight of pick-and-choose authoritarianism.)

I’ve already used snake imagery, briefly. Jango and his brother Jun watch an anime about a giant robot whose every limb is a dragon’s face, echoing the “Join or Die” image above. The combining dragon-robots, in their fiction-within-fiction, were necessary to protect Earth from cosmic threats. Lucille’s Galaxy Zephyr isn’t snakelike at all, because the Enemy Hurricane isn’t an outside threat; it was made by Akayama. If anything, the Enemy Hurricane is an overgrown boa constricting the universe. It secured power, and now endangers others to maintain that power. In a position of power, any action is justifiable as self-defense.

Leo justifies his actions with the invisible hand of the free market. The phrase comes from Adam Smith, who mentioned the hand in passing as a metaphor describing how self-interested actors in competition can contribute to public welfare. Some economists downplay the hand’s power to cope with monopolies or in unregulated markets, and someone like Leo might exploit the phrase to justify ludicrous transgressions of human decency like sweatshops with hazardous working conditions. Just as the Enemy Hurricane claims to have saved every human worth saving (‘coincidentally’ just its original pilots), Leo recontextualizes victims of his fallout as responsible for their own suffering. He’s an atheist and proud of his atheism because there’s nothing else interesting about him, but he still has a “shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out” conception of morality and economics.

If Leo represents any political alignment, he’s a sovereign citizen. The sovereign citizen movement is widespread and takes many forms, but its crux is the notion that if a person doesn’t ‘consent’ to citizenship in their home-country, they enjoy all the benefits of citizenship, but none of the drawbacks. The typical image of a sovereign citizen is a person with no driver’s license driving drunk in a car with no license plates. When pulled over, they insist they were not driving at all; they were ‘traveling,’ which is totally different! Why would they need to obey traffic laws when they aren’t a citizen, but a ‘freeman on the land’ subject to no one? Likewise, Leo marches into Sheridan with a fake passport because he thinks he’s above such pedestrian rules.

The most irritating aspect of the sovereign citizen movement, in my eye, is how it comes a hair’s-breadth from profundity. As a trivialist I’d agree (in a cosmically broad, abstract, pretentious philosophical sense) that government and legality are mass hallucinations sustained by usefulness and inertia. But the sovereign citizen movement isn’t content with that: many sects claim birth certificates are secret contracts which the clever can exploit to receive cash from the government they denounce. Sovereign citizens might enter legal trials with reams of frivolous claims which nonsensically ‘debunk’ the authority of the court. It’s less of a political affiliation and more of a conspiracy theory stating rules don’t apply if you know the magic words. Leo doesn’t buy into the invisible hand of the free market out of economic anxiety. He worships it as a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Leo’s also an incel. The notion of an ‘involuntary celibate’ arose from good intentions: a support group for lonely people feeling self-conscious about their virginity. It’s evolved into a hate-group (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) responsible for at least four mass murders in North America. Leo’s never murdered anyone as far as we know (though he’d excuse any murder aligned with his ideals), but he’s a bitter misogynist who hopes to have sex with his underage stepdaughter. He “bought” her mother, which suggests less of a mail-order-bride situation and more of a non-consensual, less-than-legal trafficking exchange.

Compare Leo to DanJay. Dan bemoans his lack of luck with ladies because Beatrice isn’t interested in him. He naively kills himself for Beatrice’s sake and gambles his soul for hers. When Dan is reborn as Jay, he finds everything he needs inside himself.

Compare Leo to Nemo. Nemo has no parents unless you count a cosmic-horror and a bird-monster. He’s chaste, having produced his children by ejaculating on an egg. He’s totally self-contained—almost literally, in eating himself alive.

When Nemo realized he couldn’t keep eating people’s fingers in polite company, he retired above the clouds where he can peacefully practice devotion to the Biggest Bird. Leo follows Nemo to the clouds seeking ‘freedom,’ but doesn’t realize the sacrifices required since Leo’s notion of freedom includes immunity from, and power over, all exterior forces. Leo trusts the invisible hand of the free market to buoy him to this lofty, impossible position. Nemo perverts this trust by goading Leo into eating his fingers, softening his ego for consumption. Who can Leo blame but himself? No one controls him, least of all the quadriplegic Nemo. Leo demonstrates his power and his freedom by self-destructing. In his fervor to prove himself, his own body-parts join the out-group of entities acceptable to destroy—nay, demanding destruction.

Leo’s rolled into Anihilato, King of Dust. Anihilato is every aspect of humanity we’d like to ignore, but to recreate Earth’s life, it can’t be swept under the rug.

See you next week.

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PS. Nemo with no limbs is reminiscent of Boddhidarma, a 5th or 6th century monk who supposedly brought forms of Buddhism from central Asia or India to the far East. Legend has it Boddhidarma retreated to a cave and sat in meditation until his arms and legs atrophied. If you watch much anime you might recognize his image in this object, a Daruma:

I think Nemo’s nod to Boddhidarma is appropriate. Boddhidarma often mentions the emptiness and meaninglessness of life, the self, and even Buddhism. When Emperor Wu of China asks how much divine merit he’s earned by building temples, Boddhidarma says “none.” Here are some excerpts of the conversation from websites Zennist and MonkeyTree; I don’t know if these are highly regarded sources for this sort of thing, but Akayama DanJay certainly isn’t, so whatever.

“Being a temporal matter it is in no true sense meritorious. True merit as such resides in the pure buddha, the seed of salvation within us which by inner revelation becomes true merit. Measured against that, these things can only be evaluated as transitory.”

The emperor asked his next question, “What then, is the essence of Buddhism?”

Bodhidharma’s immediate reply was, “Vast emptiness and no essence at all!” 

Leo tries to impress Nemo with his worldly wealth, but Nemo knows this world and its wealth are meaningless. Nemo even knows the afterlife is empty, in the sense it’s not the “real” reality where Lucille fights in a giant robot. Nemo’s unique vantage point lets him see existence as mere coincidence without intent.

Jay, seeing all this in his centipede hallucination, can only arrive at the same conclusion.

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In W1. Leo Climbs we watch Leo, the drug smuggler with a swastika tattoo, climb the main island of Sheridan to steal centipedes. On his way he relates to a bird, then betrays it. He’s not exactly a nice guy.

I don’t have anything in particular to discuss this section, so I thought I’d explain what I mean when characters in Akayama DanJay talk about time as a torus. I can’t explain too thoroughly, though, because one reason I describe time as a torus is to inject plausible deniability into my time-travel. I can’t be inconsistent if no one knows how it’s supposed to work!

In the “real” reality Akayama says time is linear. To produce the eternities, the two sub-realities in which Earth’s population is reconstructed, she “[wraps time] in a circle and [revolves] it” to make a hollow donut of time, Lucille’s Wheel. Wikipedia has a nice photo:

We can see the torus is made by taking the red circle and revolving it along the purple circle. If the direction of the red circle represents Earthly time, time in the realm of Sheridan, then the direction of the purple circle represents Heavenly time, time in the desert of the Hurricane Planet. That’s why dead characters tend to disobey our Earthly notion of time; the afterlife moves perpendicularly to us.

When Dan dies, his life-force ceases following the red circle and follows the purple circle. When he’s kicked out of reality, he’s booted into the interior of the Wheel. Then he returns to circling the ‘handle’ of the donut as Jay.

Faith’s path is more complicated. She lives on Earth, in the red circle, until she dies and follows the purple circle. Then she’s ushered into the Mountain, into the torus’ interior. From there she can appear anywhere in time and space, which she demonstrates by visiting Virgil Jango Skyy as a fox around the time of her own birth. As she wraps Beatrice’s wing around the Wheel, she’s securing the torus. She meets Anihilato, then visits the red circle to see Jay and returns to the afterlife satisfied. Eventually she meets Dan and takes him to Anihilato.

Finally, Nemo sees the torus in its entirety. He was born before the Wheel. He’s immortal, so his earthly life spans the whole red circle. Akayama tells him that when he dies he will enter the afterlife in one contiguous piece instead of decomposing into worms, so his life spans the whole purple circle, as well. Along the way Nemo absorbs other souls from the circular cross-sections beside him.

Anyway, that’s my rationale for the aggressively non-linear structure of my story.

But time’s not the only dimension. If the Earthly reality and the desert of the afterlife both have three spatial dimensions plus time, then there are eight dimensions total. An eight-dimensional hyperdonut is complicated enough to let me hand-wave concerns for sensibility. I can pretend my story makes sense, and dismiss worries about the authenticity of my time-traveling fox, by reminding readers we’re in the weaponry of a giant anime space-robot fight. I think that concept’s cool enough to grant me some leeway.

Keep eating your worms.

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In Chapter V. The Plan Professor Akayama, currently called Nakayama, the Heart of the Mountain, reveals an element of her plan which warps our understanding of the earliest sections of the story. She anoints the first man Nemo with a new title: Anihilato, King of Dust. His incomplete understanding of Akayama’s intent led Nemo to eat his followers’ fingers until society rejected him. The centipede-person who ejected Dan from the afterlife is all that remains of Akayama’s humble servant after he absorbs all Earthly disobedience.

An important notion in Akayama DanJay is that titles don’t make someone who they are. Dan turns into Jillian turns into Jay (and briefly into Jadie and Leo). Leo is Henry. Nemo is Virgil Blue and Anihilato, King of Dust. Akayama/Nakayama is the Biggest Bird and Heart of the Mountain. While names might change how characters interpret one another, they don’t change the characters themselves.

On a related note, I’d like to talk about the title of my story.

What’s a story’s title supposed to do? There are loads of listicles on the subject, and for the most part, they highlight these values:

• A title should be memorable and catchy
• A title should interest readers by telling them what the story’s about
• A title’s acronym should be distinct and attractive in case people use the acronym to discuss the story online

Currently the title is Akayama DanJay. It’d be tough to change that now, so late in the game, as I’d have to get a new website and make new art. But if I compiled a final draft I could totally change the title, and I probably should.

As the working title for a passion project, Akayama DanJay is acceptable. Personally I think it’s catchy, but for anyone who speaks no Japanese, it can be intimidating and hard to remember. I like how the only vowel is “a.” The title doesn’t convey anything initially, but over the course of the story it should dawn on the reader that the double-character DanJay emerges from Akayama’s machinations. The acronym, ADJ, is nice and striking.

When I first conceived of the narrative, the working title was Whence Came Jay. It’s more explanatory, telling potential readers that this is the story of a person named Jay discovering their origin and their destiny, but Whence is a clunky word. Its acronym, WCJ, has a W in it, and W is equally clunky. It’s the only multi-syllable English letter! I don’t like it.

At the moment my idea for a final-draft title is either Bright Mountain DanJay or Red Mountain DanJay. Either way this is more memorable for English speakers (my goal is to limit myself to Japanese words which dweebs have gleaned from anime). It more clearly declares the story to be the tale of DanJay, a person from the Mountain. If you don’t realize DanJay is a person’s name, you can at least understand the Mountain part of the title. The acronym, either BMDJ or RMDJ, is pretty good, although BMDJ sounds like a scatological techno artist.

Regardless, I’ve got time to think about it. I’ll tell you if I come up with something better.

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In L4. The Magic Circle Jango instructs Jay to eat a hallucinogenic centipede, in continuation of all the phallic imagery we’ve seen so far. Back when Jay smoked powdered centipede he woke up in the afterlife. Now he’ll experience the centipede’s full potency, but that’s a reveal for next week.

In this section Jango reveals that the mysterious masked figure, Virgil Blue, is just a pile of robes around a centipede bush. The real Virgil Blue retired decades ago in the same manner as every person to take the mantle of Blue: walking above the Sheridanian clouds never to return.

This explains why Virgil Blue never speaks or moves. It doesn’t explain why their silent speeches are so engrossing, or how they spoke to Jay, but I’m happy to chalk it up to magical realism. (Alternatively, maybe just smelling centipedes can give you a contact-high. Jay was in an enclosed space with the Virgil for an extended period before he heard the mask speak.)

J. J. Abrams, the mind behind LOST and the Cloverfield franchise, has a narrative idea called a mystery-box. A story keeping a secret can engross its audience; just owning a box with a question-mark on it “represents infinite possibility,” says Abrams. “It represents hope. It represents potential.”

Compare this to the idea of “the magic circle.” Says Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, quoted from this Wikipedia article,

All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.

Fiction is a space where literally anything can happen. Many fictional worlds follow certain rules for the sake of narrative consistency, but these rules are largely self-enforced by the storyteller and often disagree with the rules of our reality. When we engage with a story, we cross into a magic circle and accept an alternate mode of existence.

In this context, a mystery-box is a rule in a narrative reality which is hidden from the audience, but which impacts the story. The audience is left to speculate at the hidden aspect of the narrative reality until the eventual reveal.

An unfortunate drawback is that if the reveal of a mystery-box’s contents contradicts the established rules of the fictional universe, the audience might retroactively judge the earlier parts of the story. They’ll say, “you didn’t actually have a plan at all—you just enticed us with the idea of a satisfactory answer.” Perhaps worse is a mystery-box whose contents don’t live up to the expectations. I don’t mean to pick on J. J. Abrams, but I recall people being disappointed with the ending of LOST for technically explaining everything but with a narrative “meh.”

So when I reveal something, I hope it answers the reader’s questions in a way which makes them more engaged with the story, not less.

This section of Akayama DanJay opens a mystery-box with the removal of Virgil Blue’s mask. Virgil Blue being a centipede bush answers some questions (why are they immobile? why are they silent?) while raising others (why is the mask so engrossing? why did Jay hear the story of Nemo?), which I hope encourages readers to come up with their own answers and imbue the imagery with thematic meaning.

If Virgil Blue’s silver mask represents Truth as solid as the moon, then the reveal of centipedes implies that Jay’s hallucinations will reveal the Truth of Akayama DanJay. We’ve seen Dan. We’ve seen Jay. Now that’s see Akayama’s side of things.

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In L3. The Last Meal Jango extends an invitation to the group: he had prepared an initiation ceremony for Faith, but since she’s dead, he’ll allow them to experience the ritual for themselves. In this section Jay has his last meal before leaving to visit Jango, and he helps Dan take off his shoes.

Christ imagery walks a fine line between ‘neat literary device’ and ‘eye-rolling, cringe-worthy self-masturbatory style.’ Remember how in Man of Steel Superman would occasionally float around with his arms out? It was visually striking, sure, but maybe a little on-the-nose. In the third Alien film, Ripley falls into molten metal with her arms out to save humanity from the xenomorph-queen inside her. The symbolism is pretty obvious.

On the other hand, Harry Potter‘s Christ imagery is veiled enough that most people read about the boy who lived, died, and lived again without considering the Crucifixion. Some Christians say J. K. Rowling intentionally mirrored Christianity; simultaneously a few Christians say Harry Potter exposes children to witchcraft and the dark arts of black magic, so the true narrative intent remains ambiguous. I don’t personally know if J. K. Rowling wanted Harry to evoke Christ, but I’m sure she at least realized the implications of Harry’s resurrection and wrote with them in the back of her mind.

The double-character DanJay has already been reborn. Dan died in a furnace and was reincarnated as Jay. His first life was plagued by anxiety, guilt, and low self-esteem. His second life, who transcends death, has a more laid-back worldview because of his experience.

Dan, who echoes Dante from the Divine Comedy, represents a mortal every-man. When he met the Master of Nihilism Dan gambled his soul for the sake of all sentient beings, but for selfish reasons: he wanted to be with Beatrice and naively assumed he had to save her. Dan wasn’t ready yet, and he was obliterated. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of nothing, he was reborn as Jay.

Jay is pretty mundane for a Christ figure; he performs no miracles (unless you count being born as Jillian and transitioning to assert a masculine identity as an act of transmutation) and he manifests no divinity. But he does buy Dan a bunch of fish sandwiches and pints of stout, and he helps Dan come to terms with the death of Faith and Beatrice. I occasionally specify where Jay appears in a line-up from left to right when he’s sitting at a table, like we’re looking at The Last Supper. In this section he takes off Dan’s shoes, like Christ washing his disciples’ feet. Dainty Dan, who hates to touch dirt, cannot remove his grass-stained shoes on his own. Jay is selfless enough to help him. After all, a lifetime ago, Jay was Dan himself.

If Dan is the mortal every-man, the implication that mortals need Jesus to cleanse them of sin is pretty obvious and too generic a message for Akayama DanJay. The fact that Dan and Jay are the same person takes the Christ imagery in a surreal, but mundanely humanist direction. Dan judges himself to be guilty; he’s always dirty. After ‘killing’ Beatrice and Faith, the only person who can really cleanse him—the only person who can convince him of his worth—is himself, Jay.

Humans carry faith wherever we go. Worthiness is internal. Now that Jay understands this, he’s free to cross the magic circle.

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In L2. The Interview with Virgil Blue Jay sits alone with the mysterious Virgil. Virgil Blue’s engrossing silver mask resembles the moon, and like the moon, Virgil Blue represents the ultimate truth, silent but solid. Blue refuses to speak to Jay, even after Jay asks a question three times, until Jay writes “”. This seems to provoke the Virgil, who tells Jay to drop the pen. When Jay promises not to speak or listen, Virgil Blue tells him the story of Nemo, the first man in the religion of Sheridan.

Nemo, the first man, received the title Virgil Blue directly from the Biggest Bird who created the world. Granted immortality, Nemo gradually grew crazed and began to demand harsh asceticism from his students, even eating their frostbitten fingers and toes. Nemo realizes he’s not in proper mental condition to teach anymore, and agrees to retire. He declares the next Virgil Blue and walks above the Sheridanian clouds, never to return.

Asceticism is severe self-discipline often applied in a religious context. Practitioners avoid pleasure to seek spirituality, whether that spirituality is flavored as Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or something else.

The term ‘austerity’ can refer to strenuous tasks an ascetic might impose on themselves. The word might conjure the image of a guru lying on a bed of nails, or a monk self-flagellating, but the prevalence of some of these practices has probably been overblown and sensationalized by popular culture. Nevertheless, the mere fact that these ideas have influenced popular culture shows their power to command a viewer’s attention. Self-destructive religious fervor strikes a strange chord.

Nemo eats his students’ fingers. There are a few religions (mostly cults) where amputations are included in rituals. For obvious reasons, these cults don’t exactly have new applicants knocking down the door. (Compare this with religions popular in the West whose histories had to overcome the somewhat imposing hurdle of circumcision.) Nemo realizes that his immortal mind has drifted so far from normality that his very presence threatens his religious institution. He retires above the permanent cloud-cover on the Main Island of Sheridan.

Religions change over time. If Nemo had demanded total control of his congregation, he would soon have no congregation. The Sheridanian religion outlives its immortal patriarch’s reign. But Nemo still remains: every generation, he returns to the dreams of the Blue Virgil, and he eats their dream-bodies to force them into retirement. Even if Nemo spares the junior pupils severe austerities, he demands each Virgil Blue maintains this strict protocol.

When religions remove difficult aspects of worship in order to expand their congregation, those difficult aspects can remain. Religions have splintered between groups who accept lax interpretations of scriptures, and groups who demand stringent orthodoxy and authenticity. When Nemo’s doctrines grew too beastly to follow, those doctrines were not totally abandoned. He merely carried them above the clouds, where ordinary folks would not be subjected to them. His practice remains in the cultural subconscious and the literal subconscious of Virgil Blue, the only mortal capable of withstanding the brutal rituals.

At the same time, Dan chews his fingers when he’s anxious. This mundane action relates to Nemo’s ritualistic amputation. The highest religious practices are extensions of the most human habits.

Maybe we’ll see what’s beyond the clouds. Not for a while, though.

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In L1. The Expected Visitors Dan, Jay, and Bob visit Sheridan Cliff-Side College to learn about the Virgils—only to find the Virgils waiting for them. As Jango says, there are no coincidences: Virgil Skyy and Blue have come to see Faith, who has visited Jango on three notable occasions. The gang must tell them that Faith died only days ago when she was struck by lightning.

An anticlimax is the opposite of a climax. Instead of an impressive capstone, as in a climax, an anticlimax has a series of events concluded by an unexpected and often disappointing ending. Perhaps a problem which seemed imposing is solved in a trivial manner. (Think War of the Worlds, where the horrible aliens are totally weak against the common cold, you guys.) Maybe an obviously upcoming event is averted, or a mystery has a lackluster twist ending.

Anticlimaxes can pull the rug out from under an audience, so they power some nice jokes. Listen:

A traveling salesman is caught in a storm and must stop at a farmer’s house. The farmer says, “you can stay in the guest room—but so help me God, if you touch my daughter, I’ll string you up and let the hogs eat you!”

So, naturally, during the night, the salesman gets curious and knocks on the door to the daughter’s bedroom. He opens the door to see that she’s in bed with another traveling salesman. The first salesmen shuts the door and says, “gosh, I must be in the wrong joke!”

A traditional set-up, which begins many classic jokes, is suddenly sunk by a fourth-wall break. An anticlimax can make people groan or laugh, or even reconsider the structure of a narrative.

Akayama DanJay is no stranger to anticlimax. Recall Faith’s obliteration at the hands of Anihilato; in the next section, Dan saved her in a staring contest. Then Dan was obliterated, too, but he just woke up as someone else. On one hand, letting my characters off the hook this easily might wreck any sense of conflict or danger in my story. On the other hand, these anticlimaxes present the ineffectiveness of death and even obliteration in the story’s setting while (hopefully) intriguing the reader. It also warns the reader to fear bigger threats, like The Teeth that Shriek.

This week we see another anticlimax: just before they arrive at the college, Jay gets a phone call regarding visitors he did not expect. This primes the reader for a surprise, which I fulfill when Virgil Jango Skyy greets Jay in the hallway. Then Jango further delays the anticipated gratification by telling the group a story with no obvious importance, and then reminding the reader of Faith’s three visits.

Then all is revealed: Jango is impressed with Faith’s peculiar appearances, and wants to take her as a student. Dan, Jay, and Bob have to tell him Faith died days ago. Jango came all this way for nothing. The moment fizzles.

But why? What does an anticlimax accomplish in this case?

Well, first, I hope it’s a little funny in a macabre sort of way.

Second, storytelling coincidences which help the protagonists are often considered “cheating,” while coincidences which get the protagonists into trouble are fair game. If Jango had appeared just to help Dan and Jay and Bob, it would be flimsy storytelling. Instead Jango appears to look for Faith, and Dan and Jay and Bob have to break the bad news. I hope that this anticlimax gets me off the hook for my “there are no coincidences” style of bringing characters together.

Third, because I get to bring characters together on a dime like this, I get to accelerate the plot and catch the reader by surprise. Next week, Jay interviews Virgil Blue.

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In K4. The Return Faith demands an explanation from the Biggest Bird, the creature who rules the afterlife. The Biggest Bird lets Faith visit reality, where she meets Jay, bringing us up to speed with the previous chapter.

Again, I’m running out of topics for commentary. I can’t spoil too much about the afterlife, and there’s only so much to be said about non-linear storytelling. So this week, I thought I’d talk about the distribution of male and female characters in Akayama DanJay.

In ‘reality’ most of the characters are male. DanJay, Jango, Michael, Bob, and Leo have more narrative importance and screen-time than Faith, Beatrice, Eva, and Lilly. Meanwhile the afterlife is ruled by a giant bird who seems more maternal than masculine, while worms—thinly veiled phallic imagery—struggle to become worthy of joining that bird. The story-within-a-story, LuLu’s Space-Time Acceleration, has primarily female leads in Princess Lucia and her daughter Lucille. Akayama DanJay‘s mortal plane is generally masculine and its alternate realities are more feminine. If you believe The Da Vinci Code, ancient Christianity featured divine femininity; certainly The Divine Comedy where Dante seeks Beatrice can be read this way.

The double-character DanJay bridges genders and dimensions. When Dan was obliterated, he was reborn as a two-year-old girl named Jillian; Jillian reasserted a masculine identity when they took the name Jay. Jay straddles mortality and death by visiting the afterlife and meeting the dead.

Jay watches Dan’s struggle with death, anxiety, and femininity. After his father’s suicide, Dan obsesses over his fantasy of ideal love, Beatrice, who has barely a passing interest in him. When he accidentally smokes centipede and goes to the afterlife, Dan is a gnashing pile of teeth which decomposes into ten thousand worms. A tangled pile of worms is an obvious image of frustrated masculinity. It’s this frustration and anxiety which keeps Dan from the Mountain.

Faith and Beatrice immediately enter the Mountain after their deaths, as symbols of femininity. In fact, Beatrice is barely more than a symbol (which I guess is somewhat fitting in a Divine Comedy allegory). If Beatrice is the purest, most unattainable vision of love possible, then Faith, who returns from death to tell the tale, is mankind’s only chance to unite with that vision of love. Through Faith, the unattainable is attained.

But also lurking in the afterlife is the largest worm, Anihilato, a massive, overgrown phallic tumor. Anihilato refuses to join the Mountain and in fact claims to own all sentient beings. The Biggest Bird seems to accept Anihilato’s existence and even integrates it into their cosmology: they say, “When I find worms I cannot swallow, I know Anihilato will eat them for me.” In an otherworldly sense, the Biggest Bird keeps Anihilato because the concentrated masculine energy is sometimes necessary to open stuck jars.

In another section I said that fundamentally speaking, gender is just a thing humans made up. The only reason I can talk about masculine energy and feminine energy is because people know those words and understand what I mean. I can say Anihilato is masculine despite calling it an ‘it’ because it’s phallic and muscular and aggressive. I can say the Biggest Bird (or the Heart of the Mountain, or Bug-Bird) is feminine despite calling them ‘they’ because they encompass maternal aspects, having birthed the Islands of Sheridan and the matriarchal birds who live there.

The afterlife in this story is therefore divided by the Biggest Bird and Anihilato along generally engendered traits. Only DanJay, whose dual life has shown him a little bit of everything, has the potential to integrate those opposites.

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In K3: The Antlion Faith ventures into the desert and steps on Anihilato, the forty-limbed centipede-person. Back when we met Faith for the first time, she mentioned this meeting! The afterlife’s timeline is an unconventional one.

Once again, I find myself running out of topics for commentary. There’s not a lot in this section I haven’t already discussed. So, I thought I’d discuss something I cut when I wrote this new draft.

In the exploratory draft I wasn’t sure what should happen to Faith in the afterlife. To compensate, I added another character to take up narrative space: a turtle who dispensed fortune-cookie wisdom. He didn’t do anything, or mean anything, and he only appeared because I wanted to fluff up the word-count. But including the turtle did make these sections easier to write, so even though I removed him, he was an integral part of my writing process. Like a bay-leaf added to soup, the turtle was intended for removal before serving.

I notice writing-crutches like that turtle in my first drafts fairly often. If I haven’t planned what should happen next in a story, I might introduce a new plot element just to keep me writing until I figure out where I’m going. When I write the second draft, I should know roughly where the story ends up, so I can omit characters and events which I know to be extraneous. The turtle helped me write Faith’s introduction to the afterlife and her confrontation with Anihilato; once those events were more fleshed out, the turtle was no longer necessary. Anything not necessary to a story should probably be removed.

That writing principle is what I call “writing like a salty egg.” Let me explain:

How do you balance an egg upright on just a few grains of salt, as few grains of salt as possible? You might try to stick two grains of salt under the egg and hope they support its weight, but you won’t have much luck.

But, you can easily balance an egg upright in a small pile of salt. Then you can blow the salt away, and the only remaining grains are those needed to hold the egg. This is the preferred way to balance an egg on a few grains of salt, if you ever find the need.

In writing like a salty egg, I try to overwrite until I know my narrative game-plan. Then I remove everything which serves no purpose. The turtle’s wisdom was given to another character, the Heart of the Mountain. The companionship Faith once found from the turtle, she now finds from the white wing. Hopefully my story will still stand after being pared down to its most important elements.

Another example of this comes from Dan Wakes Up. In that section, Dan awakens as a toddler named Jillian after his soul is eaten by the Master of Nihilism, Anihilato. Jillian’s parents tell Dan his name is Jillian and tuck him back into bed. That’s complicated enough for one section.

But in my first draft, I didn’t know that. I thought Dan/Jillian needed to see something important, to start a story-line involving Jillian’s family. As I rewrote chapter B I realized Akayama DanJay didn’t need that extra story-line, and I removed it. But at the time, writing that story-line gave me narrative momentum and kept me writing words on the page. It wasn’t a waste, even if I later decided it was unnecessary.

Anyway, thanks for reading my rant about turtles and eggs and all that.

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