Cherry's eyes could stop a philosopher in his tracks. The categorical imperative would founder there, thesis, antithesis and synthesis fall apart and existentialism vanish. Cherry's eyes are a priori eyes.

Cherry's father died in childbirth. Born in a natural hot-spring, Cherry swam to land more fish than child. Her father reached in to lift her out, and in the moment of touching his heart stopped, or as Cherry's mother liked to say, his heart started and Cherry's father was born in childbirth, his love too big for his body.

Melon on the other hand, was born fully formed and hungry, with reservations on the next flight out. Tattooed on his left eyelid were the words DO NOT DISTURB and on the right, PLEASE COME IN.

"It's interesting," (this is Melon speaking)" when seeing is clear there is nothing, and whenever something is seen I forget myself into existence."

Everything Melon does is an expression of his duality, while Cherry is all she does. Listening, breathing, blood pumping, feet touching, bread baking. Melon sees it as one person doing many things at once, but Cherry says juggling is a peculiar attempt by the left brain to deceive itself into thinking it's right.

Melon's hobby is bridge crossing. Whenever he went to a new location he would visit every bridge and ride or walk across, meditating on its purpose.

Cherry, on the other hand, had a less metaphysical pastime. She got her kicks from discovering where twentieth century western civilization's repressions, alienations and disconnectedness were surfacing. In deep lakes, like the Loch Ness monster, in the wilderness, like Big Foot and remote mountain areas, like the Abominable Snowman. Cherry says "Having killed the beast, western man fills his emptiness with monsters." "Monsters are a kind of bridge." Melon mentions offhandedly. Cherry winks her left eye and Melon smiles.

Sweet Pea, where are you? Sweet Pea's picture is on every milk carton, on every weeping woman's mantel. Sweet Pea is the eternal question in many lives.....was it my fault?..... A mirror of guilt reflecting a dark bright light into the heart.

The particular Sweet Pea in question vanished on October the fourth, 1973. Cherry was baby-sitting her brother. Sweet Pea was sleeping in his crib, so Cherry was looking at leaves as they fell from the autumn trees and made the grass into a patchwork quilt. Absorbed in gold and tan, red and russet and wondering about the moment of separation, when a tree's leaves become just leaves, leaves leaving.Hours later, still entranced and enchanted, Cherry returned to check on Sweet Pea. And wondered when a brother's room becomes just a room.

Her mother, Aubergine, did not wonder this, she freaked. Screams of anger and anguish, pain and despair. The cracks in the floor boards filled with loosed emotions. Behind the refrigerator clumps of suffering gathered. At the back of cupboards too high to reach lay particles of guilt and stuck to the undersides of the peeling plastic drawer lining were the detritus of sorrow and fear.

And this is not a noble suffering. When broken glass is thrust into a heart, not even content to tear the heart out whole but rather bent on slicing it raggedly into shreds, then there is no space for nobility, no learning from the experience. There is no reconciliation between thought and feeling. To hope the child is alive but fear they are dead, or to fear they are alive in some horrific situation and hope perhaps that they are dead. Who can live with this, how can anyone see beyond this wall of pain?

Except Cherry. Cherry wondered if Sweet Pea had his own agenda. Lying in his bedclothes, perhaps a final understanding had come clear and Sweet Pea, realizing why he had been born, had begun to live his own purpose. Should I mention at this point Sweet Pea's wonderfully long ear-lobes, and the cartwheel shaped stigmata on the soles of his feet? Do we look elsewhere at synchronistic events? For example, the predicted rebirth of a Rinpoche, who on his deathday left a koan for his fellow monks to solve about his next incarnation.

Melon's blood was 10W-40 oil by the time he was forty. His saliva had the distinct flavor of Dexron II automatic transmission fluid (not Type F). His driving license instructed paramedics that in case of accident he should be taken to a repair shop not a hospital. This being the case it should come as no surprise that deciphering the cryptic clues of a deceased Tibetan lama came easily to him. That and all the crosswords.

The old Rinpoche's name had been Tenyun Su, or its closest English translation, Pickled Onion. The long dead abbot of the lamasery where Tenyun Su had been placed as a child gave him the name when the young monk had been found bathing in a vat of vinegar.

"This one," said the abbot, "will preserve the teaching, so that when men thirst for truth in the future the taste will be bitter but it will strip away the layers of illusion to reveal the emptiness that lies at the heart of all things."

This is the sort of thing Tibetan lamas say all the time to their young students as they instill the teaching, using every opportunity to hone the desire for freedom. And so the young monk became known as Tenyun Su.

As it happens Melon is the only Westerner able to read the particular dialect that Tenyun Su spoke, so we will have to take his word as to the exactness of his translation. As Tenyun Su himself liked to say, "So what if the shoe fits, unless you have only one foot you are no better off than before."

"I can't get all of the last line. It's sort of a symbol, a sound....like the sound of someone enjoying their food and humming at the same time. I don't know what it means."
"It means he's meditating with his mouth full, Melon." says Cherry, "So that's why Sweet Pea took off. I had a feeling. Now if only we can convince Mom."
"It's not without precedent," says Melon. "Gautama Buddha left home with no regrets, the desire for truth greater than the ties of blood."
"Yes," says Cherry, "but he wasn't three years old."
"Well, if my translation is accurate we don't have to worry 'bout ol' Sweet Pea, he doesn't need our help."
"No, but maybe we need his."

Aubergine had remarried after Sweet Pea vanished. Her husband was a member of the Potato family and the marriage a mistake. He was a stereotype not an individual.The living room of their home was identical to the bedroom and to every other room in the house. There was a TV in each and they were always on, regardless of whether anyone was watching, every TV tuned to a different channel and all the channels alike.

Left over fast food slowly rotted amidst a sea of dirty clothes, most of it his socks and underwear. If the volume on the TV could have been turned down we'd have heard an assortment of sounds often made but rarely documented. Farts, belches and rumblings; sniffs, snorts, grunts and scratches.

There, his clothes almost invisible in the upholstery pattern of the sofa, sprawls and snores Couch. We can be grateful this time at least that the spreading stain on his crotch is only spilled beer and not the result of incontinence as it often was. The shadows of old sweat, like tree rings, darken the underarms of his 49er T-shirt and his glutinous belly sags over his piss stained Y-fronts.

Every day Aubergine came home from her job, stood for a long moment by the front door, swallowed some little yellow pills and prayed for a miracle.

She got lucky. Couch Potato choked on a pretzel during Super Bowl XVIII. He was dead before the end of the third quarter.

Aubergine cleaned house. Not just a spring cleaning but an all-season, all-weather, I want to see my original face reflected in it kind of cleaning. Sweet Peas disappearance had splashed emotions all over her unconscious, a brick thrown into a toilet bowl full of diarrhea.

Those emotions were everywhere. Just when she thought she was done cleaning up, she'd breathe a deep sigh of relief only to catch in her nostrils the continuing smell of shit, and she'd be on her knees again, scrubbing, or high up on a teetering ladder disinfecting some almost unreachable corner.

Time and again it happened. She could never be free of Sweet Pea, never be free of herself except for a few, isolated wonderful moments that made the return to herself even more unbearable. One day, as she wiped a rubber gloved hand across her forehead, she smelled shit really strongly. It was on her gloves. It was on the scrubbing brush. It was in the soap and ammonia, the bucket. The very thing she was trying to clean from her unconscious was being spread by the tools she was cleaning with.

Aubergine collapsed, hopeless. A tsunami of tears inundated her, cleaning, clearing everything in its path, choiceless. It took her guilt, it took her innocence. It swept away her hate, it swept away her love. It left only a pure emptiness.