I decided to post the prologue to my novel. Here goes.

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Prologue

To me, it sounds like an urban legend.

One of those ludicrous ghost stories you read online, huddled around our modern-day camp fires.

Blogs.

We park our butts before glowing laptop screens and lean in closer, some alluring link sparking curiosity, underlined words tethering one person to another to another, until somehow we’re reading a 52-year-old Arkansas woman’s life story, chronicling her vegetable garden and villainous mother-in-law.

The sixteen-year old girl in Seattle who reviews TV episodes, the music hipster in Mississippi who began blogging after Hurricane Katrina, because everyone from his ruined community had dispersed. Twelve-step blogs, cake decorating blogs, adoption blogs, application to graduate school blogs, and then the weird-shit blogs. Everyone has an opinion or life story that’s got to be told, even if the tale isn’t ours:  “You won’t believe this:  last night I overheard my neighbors screaming and then…”

These are our camp fires.

As the night grows longer, the tales grow softer, deeper in their nature. We crowd around one another, legs bumping nervously, as strangers ‘out there’ question how to live, what kind of destiny to shape for their unfolding lives. Who am I becoming? Am I alone in this? This is how those who live in liminal space find each other, these blogs, electronic wings fluttering and humming vibrations that whisper, Are you out there, too?

I have no doubt that when future technology permits a harmless fire blowing out a serial port, we’ll roast marshmallows.

Ghost stories. Urban legends.

A few days ago I read an urban legend whopper, also kind of a ghost story, I guess.  I stumbled across some guy’s blog with his most recent entry titled, LOST & FOUND.

The blogger’s true name was never revealed, and like every good camp fire tale his began with the words, “I swear this is totally true. This happened to me. Well, not to me, but a friend of mine. His name is Perry.”

In a dozen or so paragraphs, the blogger summarized how one October weekend back in 1998, Perry came to believe himself a king, a lost king found at last:  King Perry, the Forgiver. Because more than a decade had passed, the blogger felt he could at last reveal the highlights if none of the specifics regarding his pal’s King Weekend.

King Weekend?

I’m less inclined to follow UFO blogs or sewer alligator sightings, no, I’m captivated instead by the insanity in how we treat each other, the urban legends of human behavior. I follow a worst house guest blog, embarrassing hook-ups blog, two different bad roommate blogs, and a few explicit blogs of gay men who kiss and then eagerly tell of their sensual adventures. I like reading quirks in others’ lives, their strange revelations and humiliating problems which make my own weird failings seem more manageable. I’ve got Wikipedia’s schadenfreude page bookmarked.

I found myself puzzled that King Weekend was capitalized, like Space Camp or a trademarked Disney cruise. I immediately googled ‘King Weekend’ and received millions of hits, which means nobody officially claimed it, branded it. How odd. To not develop your brand is a capital crime in our capital world. There are no more mysteries, our world has been carefully sliced into marketing demographics.

But.

A chance encounter at a San Francisco art gallery brought Perry in contact with a shabby tourist, some guy from the Midwest who offered to change Perry’s life. He challenged Perry to submit fully, sexually and non-sexually for one weekend, follow every instruction, obey every whim.

And in return, become a king.

Insane as it seems, Perry decided to trust this stranger, submitting to everything the tourist commanded as they journeyed around San Francisco. Included on the weekend was a flute-player from Somalia, a baby duck, and some midnight insanity on a mountain’s peak. The erotic and verbal ravishment left Perry weeping and completely undone with grief, but somehow stronger, and more fully alive. After that, Perry loved with all his love.

“All my love” is what the blog said.

I’m still not sure what those words mean.

Immediately after his King Weekend, played his cello naked in the Australian outback. A local rancher heard the cello’s funereal music echoing off an outcropping of rocks and thought that Death had come for him early, to end his lonely days. The rancher emptied his pockets on his kitchen table and walked into the desert. Instead of finding Death, the Lonely Aussie found naked Perry and he fell in love.

Perry fell back.

Perry framed a note from his King Weekend, hung it in his new Australian home, and to this day carries a copy of the same note in his wallet for the last dozen years.

Weird.

The blog shared only Perry’s first name, no details I could google. How could I know if this were true? Almost nothing was revealed about the man at the center of this tale, the tourist who helped Perry ‘remember his kingship,’ just the man’s nickname, The Human Ghost. Details about him seemed intentionally omitted.

This ghost was quoted once in this strange tale, exact words he had apparently spoken to Perry at the adventure’s onset. “Once there was a tribe of men, a tribe populated entirely of kings. Odd you may think, and wonder how anything got done with everyone making rules. Who did the work? But they were not those kind of kings…”

Perry never forgot.

The very oddest of odd details was a comment added by a visitor like me, no more than five hours prior. It read, “Many years ago, I also spent a weekend with Vin Vanbly. I remember who I was always meant to be. - King Mai the Curious.”

Curious indeed, King Mai, but nothing more than a good camp fire story and everyone loves letting the smoke get in their eyes; it just smells woodsy. And Vin Vanbly? Awfully fake-sounding name, like a cheap porn star or B-movie action hero. Hell, I myself toyed with the idea of inventing a silly king name and leaving a smart-ass comment.

The next day, a single detail nagged me, buzzing my skull while folding laundry and then reappearing later while fixing the kitchen sink:  the Lost Kings. In addition to Perry’s specific adventure, the blog explained how many of these kings had left their sparkling kingdom, getting themselves lost, living anonymously in the world of man. I could not remember if the LOST & FOUND blog specifically explained what happened to lost kings.

It bugged me.

Less than 24 hours later, I returned to that website to reread the tale, but I found no clue revealing the fate of lost kings. The odd thing I noticed, however, was King Mai the Curious’ comment had been removed. Every other visitor comment remained intact, including one promising LIVE RUSSIAN GIRLS!  Why remove King Mai’s comment and leave the web spam?

The tale couldn’t possibly be true. It’s not possible.

Three days have passed since I first discovered The LOST & FOUND blog, and I find myself staring at the screen late at night again, not quite able to let go. What happens to lost kings?

I’ve got to know if this really happened, if any of Perry’s tale is true. Even though I do not believe in this King Weekend business, I find myself making a decision, steeling myself to breach the anonymous internet for confirmation. While trying to talk myself out of this course of action, I simultaneously refine exact wording for a little white lie, a vague little bluff to learn more. Using a fake yahoo email account, I type a short note directly to the blogger instead of leaving a website comment. “This is going to sound weird, but I think I know the guy you called The Human Ghost. Vin Vanbly, right? He took me on a King Weekend, too.”

I know it’s stupid to care enough to even bother, but this camp fire piqued my curiosity.

I’ve got nothing better to do anyway.

I mostly just surf the internet these days. I don’t go out much, just to grab eats from the restaurants that don’t deliver, mail in my Netflix DVDs, or buy the essentials. I don’t contribute much to the real world and I might worry about that more, but the real world doesn’t seem to care that I’m not very engaged. I guess I’m not a desireable market segment. I don’t know when it happened exactly, but I’ve kinda given up on ever finding a boyfriend or lover. Maybe that’s why Perry’s story struck me. How did he make it happen?

I blog late at night, sometimes asking, am I alone in this? Are you out there too?

Within half a day, I receive a reply from Perry’s blogger friend. He explains that he called Perry in Australia who is delighted to make meet another Found King. “And just to confirm,” Perry instructed his blogger pal to type in the reply, “Of course, pease describe the way Found Kings sometimes greet each other?”

Shit.

There might be thousands of words, phrases, secret code words like, “grease monkey blow torch” or something absurd like that. A King Arthur genuflect seems outdated. “Your majesty…” with a sweep of the arms feels…well, too ‘Desperate Housewives.’ Probably they want money or a Pay Pal account number for some outlandish scam. But in case this fucked-up tale is not entirely fucked, I choose a simple lie which I hope might prolong the conversation.

“With respect,” I type. “That’s what Vin taught me. You treat each other with honor.”

A day passes with no reply, then another. On the third day of silence, it’s clear that King Perry knows I lied.

Spooky.

“Once there was a tribe of men — a tribe populated entirely of kings. Odd you may think…”

No.

No, it’s a lie. There are no kings. It’s not that there aren’t good men around, sure there are.

But you don’t appoint yourself a king and then believe it, let that special knowledge guide you to do things you would never do, live in a way that you had only dared to dream but required some missing light, something golden that needed to shine out of you so that you could step up to meet that future life!

It’s not possible.

But who is Vin Vanbly?

And what happens to a lost king if he doesn’t get found?

Does he just stay lost?