Now, with six decades on this planet behind me, I’ve let go of so many self-limiting ideas. But in 1995 I was forty, an age that, it seemed to me at the time, should have meant mature self-assuredness and material success, neither of which I possessed. On paper, it all looked good: I was self-employed in an interesting field; I had been married seven years to an attractive woman and had an adorable four-year-old daughter; I lived in a condo on the Hudson River, had two cars, a cute Cairn terrier, and a handful of smart, creative friends. 
 
The truth is, things were not working out well. Cate and I had been fighting a lot lately, and at the root of it was the cliche I hated to admit: money. Our business was really not pulling its weight, and when I say "our business," it's really just a euphemism for "my business." Except, of course, when it was profitable, then it was "her business." We had started our production company two years before we got married, so it had had a nine-year run, more than enough time, in her view, to be a great success: fortune, fame, no worries. Instead, we operated out of two small rooms in an industrial building in a slum neighborhood, we barely covered our bills every month, and we had already surrendered, after exhausting every other option, to the necessity of sending our kindergarten-aged daughter into the maw of the Jersey City public school system.
 
Cate’s full name was Catherine Anne Cross, “two saints and their symbol,” she said. She came from a prominent central New Jersey family, generations of Catholic lawyers. A rebellious streak sent her in the direction of the arts and she became a skilled graphic designer. We met when I hired her to design some animation sequences in the first film of the educational series that launched our business, and in fact carried through our first two years. It was called "From Knights to Masons: the Legacy of the Templars, Alchemists, and Rosicrucians.”
 
Together, we fell down a rabbit hole of ancient mystery and modern romance.
 
One of our research sources was the 1677 alchemical masterpiece Mutus Liber, or “Silent Book,” which is a series of mostly wordless illustrations by someone called “Altus.” Cate borrowed its visual style for some of our film graphics. The densely symbolic images show a man and a woman laboring together through a series of mysterious activities: gathering morning dew on bedsheets, wringing out the liquid, distilling it, mixing its components in various combinations… but why? 
 
Because, we learned, dew stands for dreams. Dreams also arrive in the night and, come morning, must be delicately captured and analyzed. Dreams are the materia prima, the lead-like raw material that must be worked with to advance toward philosophical gold. In other words, enlightenment: beyond lucid dreaming into full astral travel, even triumph over death.
 
And there’s my name, Ben Rose. Rose, I discovered, is a pun on the Latin word for dew, ros. So... rose = dew = dreams = astral travel = eternal life! Everywhere in the ancient texts are illustrations of roses.
 
The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, 1459 was a book that actually appeared in 1616 and chronicles (or fictionally invents) the mythical character who founded Rosicrucianism—where Rose and Cross come together as the symbol of a secret society of Christian mystics and magicians whose existence stretched backward in time to the Knights Templar of the Crusades. And then subsequently, forward in time to the foundations of Freemasonry, with its secret rites and rituals that some writers claim are in use today by the shadowy power-elite who actually rule the world. 
 
But on the other hand… no sooner was The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz anonymously published than a guy named Andreae claimed to be its author and famously called it a "ludibrium"—a plaything or a trivial game. In other words, a fiction. A hoax.
 
Did he give it that label to cover up an actual secret cult of immortal mystics? Or did his silly confabulation accidentally create a new reality in the superstitious minds of foolish humans, and roll on down through the ages to us, as if it were actually meaningful? Which of course would make it actually meaningful, by its sheer momentum.
 
Cate and I reveled in this stuff. Do ancient esoteric texts have some strange erotic power? We laughed, we found reasons to work late, we touched each other too much. We joked about having our own “chymical wedding”—instead of the mystical marriage of soul and spirit, we wanted the merging of flesh. Before a month was gone we found ourselves in bed together, even discussing business partnership. And our union seemed cemented by fate with the serendipitous creation of a business name that mirrored the work we had begun, the work that carried us through our first two years: Rose-Cross Productions. She crafted an elegant logo based on medieval Rosicrucian imagery but streamlined, both contemporary and esoteric. The computer revolution in commercial art was just beginning. She jumped in and mastered the digital tools right away, and, between the two of us, she was always the leader regarding current technology.
 
Cate was slim and athletic with auburn hair usually kept boyishly short, for no fuss. I was attracted to her agile mind and ready laugh, and, I confess, to a convoluted undercurrent of dark passion that would show itself sometimes as a sardonic lift of one corner of her mouth, other times as dish-breaking rage, and still other times as full-on erotic ecstasy.
 
Our wedding day was truly one of the happiest of my life, despite its location. It took place at her parents’ lavish home in the green, hidden part of New Jersey. They spared no expense. In the years after that, we tried and mostly succeeded at staying out from under their influence. Early on, Cate made it clear that our financial struggles were to be our own, the history of our family, not hers, and I loved her for that. But life can be exhausting, and parenthood shakes up the deepest of romantic convictions. We were worn down by the struggle to stay afloat, and I was anticipating that any day now she might suggest that we accept her parents’ standing offer for help. I was dreading that, because to be beholden to those people was the last thing I wanted. I say “those people” because they were a dynasty of ruthless corporate attorneys married to ladies who lunch, and I couldn’t stand them. Cate’s father and two brothers patronized me in the worst way and I knew that as they teed up on the seventh hole or puffed on their Cuban cigars at the club, they wagged their heads and sighed tsk-tsk about poor Cate marrying such a loser. 
 
Fuck ’em.
 
 
© Brent Robison 2019
 
This story is an excerpt from the novel Ponckhockie Union by Brent Robison, Recital Publishing 2019.