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1


She is tightly stitched in cloud. Returning again. Collapsing inward, from the warm belly up, rising out of the swelter of underworld night, a silver-scaled blindfish in the mouth of a watery serpent, thin cocooned body wrapped in sticky, fibrous light, peeling muslin and gauze, with scarlet flakes of skin like milky stars screaming across the night sky. The bending cottonwoods mark the wind crawling out of canyons and rocky stream beds to snag autumn's last leaves, plucked and shivering down into puddles of rainwater spilled from leaf choked gutters, running down to rivers to sea to night to the moss slick depths of winding subterranean swells, the rumble of rising waters, boulders smashing bank and bone, swallowing shoots of sallow and debris, the drowning. Starbursts and flashes in parallax at the edges of the horizon where the sun sinks and a streak of cloud paints waning purple across the western skyline. Claire stood at the basement window trembling, arms crossed over her chest, a cigarette clenched between her fingers. The color drained out of the day like bleached laundry on the line, an ebb tide of evening light retreated across the gravel parking lot chased by the shadows of a train descending into a tunnel, plumbing the unknown depth of rock and sand beneath the well-lit fixtures of day. Claire took a drag and watched a canyon wren hopping on the ground in front of the window, its watery black eyes pausing from time to time to take her in, a breathe, a shadow, a movement, the dry salt of cheeks pressed together. She could feel the cold stillness descending just beyond the smudged shelter of glass, a tuft of wind ruffled the wren and in a black streak it disappeared into the sky. The day seemed to suck in on itself, a collapsing uncertainty, like so many passenger pigeons, limping, broken-winged and exhausted, returning home on foot. The afternoon shrunk into night, pulled in reserve what remained, hunkering down in canyons and valleys, a laughing wind among the willows waiting out the night. Claire's cigarette continued to burn, but she did not smoke it. She turned away from the window and sat down against the wall, opposite Jimmy.

He stared directly into the gray-green pools of her eyes, noting the saline scales clinging to her cheeks, but he did not see anything he recognized, instead there lay only a thick absence, sewn like cobwebs choking juniper boughs. "Does this help?"

"Help?" Claire turned away from him lay down on the floor and watched the thin gray ribbons of smoke drift up from her cigarette toward the asbestos ceiling where the smoke spread out, billowing in all directions as if suddenly robbed of purpose, drifting aimlessly now across inverted fields of thread and fiber, plaster and silence, a ghost wandering up out of the building leaving behind a body of ash.

Jimmy sat back against the wall, one leg drawn up studying his fingernails, slowly trying to work the packed bearing grease and smoky motor oil from under them. After a while he gave up on his nails and reached into a greasy paper sack and extracted a boiled peanut which he shelled in one smooth motion extracting the flesh and flicking the husk into a metal waste-bin to his right. "It's not a question of helping is it?"

She ignored his question. "We're going to be shut down aren't we?"

"Probably."

"Then was it pointless?"

"Probably. Maybe? I don't know." He eyed her suspiciously unsure of what to say. "You should ash," he said finally, sliding the aluminum can toward Claire with an ear grating screech that continue to echo about the room long after the waste bin came to halt next to her arm. 

Ignoring the involuntary shiver down her spine, Claire distractedly flicked her cigarette toward the can, arcing a spray of ash which splashed against the side of the can and dusted down, a trail of unattached white flakes fell like dead skin left behind, floating down from some unseen body already departed but reminders, remembrances still settling on the soft angora fibers of her sweater, the skin you couldn't escape, the dust on the shelves, thin layers of everyone coating the world in a barely discernible varnish.

"It feels like... Jimmy, I need..."

He looked at her as if waiting for the thought to be continued, but she did not indulge him. He returned to his peanuts.

Claire hooked a bit of her reddish hair behind her ear and watched Jimmy as he ate. He began to talk in an abstracted, detached manner that she found tedious, speaking as if the words were merely ideas, had no value themselves but what a listener might attach to them. She was still caught between the two worlds and had trouble understanding why he couldn't see that every word had a meaning, that language was not an abstraction but the very thing that constructed the world he lived in, the world she was slowly returning to wondering -- is it possible to live mythically?. We sew each vital stitch, but not without doubt; a cell cannot survive without each constituent part, this is why Darwin suffers his thumb. She remembered the colors mainly, in these re-entry moments -- the color removed from light, able to stand and dance on it's own like some synesthesia of sight and motion, vision and touch, such that, like remembering the image of a sleeping loved one long after they are gone, something inside you wanted to burst outward with an indescribable and joyful sadness, a complete and total synthesis of opposites, with none of the bore of happiness, no hackneyed sentiment, without cynicism, without skepticism, where the sun alights your every nerve and you know that for what seems like the first time that you exist, really exist. She thought suddenly of something her grandmother has once said, *once something dies, you can't make it live*. But lingering in this boundary land it almost felt like you could raise the dead, like perhaps you have and you simply don't remember it. Here the pieces seemed, if not to fit, to at least possess a cohesive integrity that could connect the disparity of the clothes and the body, the ship and the sea, the rain and the flood, wave over wave under, so much movement and still so still, as if the sky filled your skull. "A realization of the imagination," as Sil had said. Sil had also once remarked that the danger with tapping into the vast realms of the imagination, which as he pointed out bore a more than passing linguistic similarity to the word magic, is that you might suddenly find yourself having called up something you cannot put down, a notion that continued to haunt Claire every time she returned. And yet Sil was so utterly unperturbed by the world around him that Claire found it difficult to imagine him ever truly afraid of anything, though there were whispers of something, something she had thus far refrained from asking him about -- and then one day he simply did not show up. But Claire continued, not in hopes of helping anyone, but because she couldn't let go of the feeling that this was a way back, that the continual projection outward and its commiserate return inward would allow her just once to exist outside herself, to live for one fleeting moment as not Claire but as everyone indivisible.

Down the hall from where Jimmy and Claire lounged in the dwindling twilight, in a small room lined with bulging bookshelves stuffed to the gills with a collection of scientific volumes from the usual suspects like Freud, Jung, Einstein, Darwin and Bohr as well as more esoteric tomes from the likes of Korzybski, Reich, Tesla, Leibniz and others, sat man in wrinkled slacks with a partly unbuttoned lab coat that revealed a stethoscope and a coffee-stained shirt beneath it. The man wore headphones and pounded on a keyboard in burst and stutters of clacking keys, but he stared straight ahead as if reading his words off an unseen screen over the wall in front of him, perhaps backlit by an unseen projector with glowing unseen Aeolight tubes requisitioned from the Army Air Corp cum Air Force dumping ground not five miles from this very hospital. Eschewing the tendencies of his collegues toward frazzled chaoic hairstyles, Dr Waiben's head was closely shorn which never ceased to amaze those previously familiar with him only through his works, which was admittedly a small, though devoted group. That he was the preminint scholar in his field was unquestioned, however, the exact number of competing scholars was not directly known, but assumed by most to be fairly low, which is not to say his illustrious curriculum vitae was anything to sneeze at... having studied at the prestigeous Koestler Parapsychology Unit at Edinburgh University, he briefly took up residence there, though his leaning toward applying rigourusly scientific tests to his collegues somewhat questionable methodology put him on the outs, eventually he left for a stint in Vienna, and then to Panthˇon-Sorbonne where he took up redience in the Applied Mathematics department until the student protests of the sixties, when, making the ill-advised assumption that democratic protest had a strong future in France, he had sided with the students and shortly found himself deported back to the American shores from whence he came. Having then taken up residence at the recently defunded and dispersed Massachusetts Instute of Technology's Woulden College of Parapsychology And Esoteric Electrical Phenomena (P.E.E.P), owing to his groundbreaking work in attempting to test Riech's still controversial orgone-based "cloud busting" theories (a project funded almost entirely by the equally controvserial Montasano seed company, rumored to be seeking yet another means of holding the industrial farming industry over the barrel as it were) he now found himself marroned here in the Arizona desert with the dubious destinction of being the only scientist in the country legally authorized to administer Dimethyltryptamine to a baker's dozen of carefully selected patients on the vague premise that DMT might be useful in rehabilitating certain psychological borderline cases back to what was culturally defined as workably human. How he had convinced not just the FDA, but also the stuffy starched collar suits that oversaw the budgetary constraints of the University of Arizona at Tucson that DMT was a viable research subject was something even Waiben was only dimly aware of and with the rapid approach of his half yearly report his mind had lately been trying with considerable effort to recollect the exact wording of his original Q and A with the suits.

There had been a time when Waiben was quite certain that his work was worthwhile, worthy even, despite that fact that he tended to work from a negative hypothesis which put him at odds with not only those others working in the "fringe" fields of science, who naturally disliked his sharply critical repukes of their theories, but also the more mainstream scientists who either dismissed him outright or couldn't understand why he wasted his time with theories he inevitably proved false. Lately Waiben had started to sway toward this later argument and was seriously considering retirement at the relavitely ripe old age of sixty eight, "just about a Christie's worthy vintage" his erstwhile collegue and friend from his days at the Sorbonne, Vandamire Scott quipped. "What you ought to do my boy," Scott suggested, "is get out on the lecture circuit. Quite a lot of these up and coming American Unies are only too eager to lay their hands on someone like us, *studied in Europe* they always put on the flyers." Vandameer chuckled, "You might end up in a nearly empty lecture hall down the the Humanities ghetto (perish the thought), but you'd be surpirsed who turns up... quite a number of impressionable young women who turn to 'kooky' scientific tomes to spice up there otherwise dull poetry. And you'd be amazed how the May-November romance seems to sparkle for them, at least for a night or two." Waiben dismissed the later notion as predatory ("evolutionarily necessary," Vandameer retorted) and so he sat late in the evening on a Friday typing up notes while Scott shagged his way through Conneticutt having stopped over for an extended dalliance in Watertown the details of which he was only too eager to relay during a recent phone call -- nipples like summer fruit my boy... Do you remember when your skin was taught? Good lord! -- Waiben hung up mid sentence. Which isn't to say Waiben was above the occaissional abridged affaire de coeurs himself. Lately he found himself unable to concentrate when a certain subject, Claire Bierce, was in the chair, an ever-present scent of peaches seemed to accompany her into the room, a delusion which Waiben was pretty sure arose solely from him discovering via her background forms that she orginated from the state of Georgia. Nevertheless Claire possessed an undeniable precessence, a musicality in her very movement hinted not just at a willful inclination toward the sort of devarity that men find similatneously appealing and horrifying, but also a depth of character that made you want to sink into her thoughts as if collapsing onto a feather bed to disappear into the relaxed ease of sleep. But having already lost his longtime research assistant, who protested an "inability to maintain scientific integrity when Claire is in the room," Dr Waiben was wary of his owning growing inability to do likewise, but, or perhaps, as he was only now began to appreciate, *because of* this lack of scientific objectification, Claire had unquestionably become the most valuable subject in his experiement. Hippy enthusiasm not withstanding, it was surprisingly difficult to find people willing to subject themselves to the rigors of Dimethyltryptamine. Of the forty or so volunteers who showed up at the initital public cattle call, only seventeen had passed the prescreening and of those only a dozen had returned after their first dose, which was in hindsight rather large. In the course of the next six months he had lost another to possession charges and another to Ohio, which Waiben freely admitted was the most humilating thing that had yet happened in his research career. However Claire made up for it, not just in her lucid descriptions and remarkable ability to retain organized thoughts where even the most skeptical of the others turned to jellied raving idiots, but because she made everyone around her want to continue in spite the increasing sense of futility that pervaded everyone involved, including Waiben. So it was irritating when tonight Vandameer's the skin comment had unwillingly crept into Waiben's mind as he watched Claire's face, the billowing softness of it, the slight hints of a laugh line, a crease of time only recently realized on the vast pallet of youth, and it began to consume him in a way that no skin had since that afternoon in the sun-drenched Parisian apartment when, for one strange moment, while inside a young exchange student who, one foot on the ground, one foot raised on a kitchen stool as Waiben entered her from the front, in a moment of glaze-eyed lust breathed, "you make me want to be a whore," an Arabian Nights-like celebration of decandance and depravity which might well have been the only thing that pulled Waiben's mind back from the diaphaneitous realms of feminality, where he was encountering for the first time the full force of his own soul, in the momentary and then sustained contact with her skin, so incredably hushed and enveloping, the nerves of his own skin, by comparison callous, dumb and uncouth, relayed back a sensation that hinted at the falacy of the seemingly indelable seperation of one body from the next and rather implied that there might be elastic mingling of bodies, a slipping, AEther-like permeability between everyone, as if by a passage through the core fires of sun, he had suddenly emerged in some parallel universe where the word soul had not yet been worn out.

Waiben rewound the tape and turned the page. The clacking noise took up once more, seeping past the open door, out into the submerged watery darkness of the hall.

Claire was back now. With all the depressing letdown that inevitably brought with it. She distracted herself listening to Jimmy, but the utter disappointment of satiation would not retreat that easily and she had trouble following his voice. It warbled like a finch fluttering about its cage. The clacking of Waiben's typing distracted her thoughts. She watched Jimmy tap his foot distractedly on the floor to some unheard beat, his unruly rag of brown hair and thick, black-framed glasses nodding unconsciously. She smiled, this why I come back, not for the world, but for my part of it. And then the guilt shattered her vision. She had wanted. She had wanted to tell him, but he so rarely stopped talking. Though she knew he talked during these comedown session mainly for her benefit, it did make it hard to get a word in edgewise. But she also know that the longer she waited, the worse the guilt felt. She slowly drew herself up, wrapped her arms around her legs and rocked back and forth. "Jimmy." she said his name shyly as if not wanting to disturb him. "My grandmother died two days ago..." She tried to sound matter-of-fact, but her voice betrayed her.

Jimmy sat stunned silent for a moment. "I'm sorry, Claire why didn't you..."

"Don't be sorry Jimmy, she was old, she was sick." Claire sighed, she could feel tears coming to her eyes, but she lay back down and stared blankly at the ceiling. When her inner condolances they suddenly felt empty and worthless. "Actually she didn't die, she killed herself." The tears came more freely now and she made no effort to hide her face from him. "I don't know why I didn't say anything. I thought maybe it would come up when I was..." She waited to see if he would finish the sentence for her.

He shook his head, but said nothing.

She gathered herself and looked at Jimmy pleadingly. "Well. Will you come to the funeral tomorrow?"

"Of course." Jimmy rolled down the top of the greasy paper bag and rose to his feet. "Let's get out of here. I'll let him know we're leaving," he said and walked quickly from the room. 

She listened to his footsteps padding down the hall, a murmur of voices, she thought of cranes moving slow over the marsh, ungainly long legs tucked behind them, momentarily streamlined as if just an extension of their bodies, gliding low of the reeds an cattails, the musty smell of brackish water at sunset, the first crisp of fall harking in gusts of wind. 

Claire dropped the still burning cigarette in the waste bin and slowly sat up. The chair was exactly as it had been, worn arms gone from taupe to a bruised gray, stirrups pushed to either side. The metal table, the tray of needles and potions, Benzedrine alkaloids encased in syringes, opiate derivatives still lying unneeded, a broken piece of glass tubing with burned ends lay to the side. The waxy black shelves behind the tray were covered in a grotesque ephemera of zoological oddities, reptiles in formaldehyde, a coiled rattlesnake, a horned lizard with its forelegs pressed against the glass, a scaly gila monster in beaded orange and brown faded by the glare of afternoon sun, the stuffed Toucan decaying on a broken palo verde branch, its gnarled scaly feet now held in place by wrapped metal wire. Higher up there were fossilized trilobites propped on plastic stands and the ghost image of a fern embedded in shale. She shuddered at the sight of a blind newt sitting on the top shelf its regressive eye sockets covered by a fine milky fold of proto skin. She grabbed her coat from the rack and turned to leave. She flipped the light and turned to pull the door shut behind her glancing involuntarily at the top shelf where the two-headed cat stared down at her, four accusing eyes reflecting the dusting moonlight.

In the car they didn't speak. Jimmy brought the Falcon up to speed and slid onto the interstate. Claire watched the caustic yellow glow of the city on the clouds in the rearview mirror. She smiled suddenly, "My grandmother told me once that she used to chew sand."

"Chew sand?" Jimmy fingered the locking shifter and flicked ash out a cracked window. Wind hissed in the slipstream.

"Her family came west in the dust bowl. My great grandfather was dying of tuberculosis, they brought him out on the back of pickup, seven kids and dying man."

"Sounds like a Faulkner novel."

"Yeah but my great grandfather mysteriously recovered and ran off with a VA nurse, never to be heard from again."

Jimmy chuckled, "sounds even more like Faulkner."

Claire stared out the window at the sagebrush racing by in streaks of pale green lit up by the headlights. "My grandmother said there was so much dust and dirt and grit that it just leeched into your skin, clogged all your pores... and there's her father coughing up blood on the bed of the truck... and Gamma and her brothers and sisters sitting there spitting out dust every few minutes, deaf with wind, no one talking, barely able to even see each other... let alone hear a conversation... and they rode like that for five days, all the way from eastern Kansas to here.... My grandmother told me that at some point she just decided to stop spitting out the sand, she let it collect on the edges of her lips and every now and then she'd run her tongue over her lips, draw the sand in her mouth and try to chew it." Claire laughed softly. "I'll never forget her telling me that, she was laughing when she finished the story and she said it was one of her happiest memories." Claire turned to look at Jimmy. "Imagine that Jimmy, imagine if one of your fondest memories was of chewing sand... I wish she had told me why." She turned back to the window and the tears came again. She watched them in the reflection, they rolled silently down her cheeks as if they, and indeed her own face, belonged to someone else

The streetlights gave way to the dusty darkness of a gravel road, they were enveloped in a dusty cloud, Claire rolled down the window and stuck her head outside, tongue extended laughing and crying at the same time, the wind whipped her tears off her cheeks and carried them out into the parched desert night. The dust and sand stung her cheeks and filled her eyes. She ducked back inside the car coughing and spitting. "Crazy woman," she muttered.  

The bar was packed and sweltering, sticky bodies thronged together, scrunched shoulders and craning necks, trickles of sweat were visible on necks and earlobes as Claire struggled through the crowd trying to follow Jimmy toward the back of the room. Amid little grunts of pain, whispers of apology and finally a margin of cool air from the back door. Jimmy broke through, dragging Claire behind him to fall into a booth next to a half drunk and grinning version of Sil, animated like a cartoon in the dim light of the booth. "Jimmy! Just the man I was looking for, starter died this morning I had to kick start the beast to get here this afternoon..." His voice trailed off as he studied Claire's dusty face, "What happened to you?" Claire groaned and let her purse drop from her shoulder to the cushion beside her. "I was trying to chew sand." She laughed and took the beer that Sil held out to her. He shrugged but said nothing. Sil was probably the only person she knew who never insisted on sussing out some greater explanation, or at least if he ever did so he kept it to himself. She laid her head on his shoulder. He and jimmy begin to talk of motorcycles. Claire listened half heartedly, wishing that the music would begin. It wasn't that she minded so much the talk of carburetors and fuel pumps, she even had a motorcycle herself, a gift from Sil and Jimmy who decided that anyone crazy enough to catapult themselves into the psychedelic realm of elves and aliens ought to have no trouble riding a motorcycle. And the truth was she enjoyed it, she even enjoyed fixing it since between the two of them they seemed able to scrap together only enough money to by some late seventies vintage machine that had hitherto been resting in some junkyard the two of them frequented when they went scrounging for parts. All things considered she would have welcomed a distracting conversation, but she didn't want to talk about bikes, she didn't want to talk about anything that wouldn't matter tomorrow. Beside which it was February and only Sil was insane enough to ride his motorcycle in the freezing cold nights of February in Tucson anyway. She threaded her arm around Sil's working her elbom into the warmth of his belly and thought about his curious, impervious detachment to temperature. She recalled once staying over at his house and watching him step out for a cigarette barefoot in the snow. Claire had once witnessed him dip his fingers in boiling water to retrieve a bobbing potato with apparently no pain whatsoever, just an embarrassed blush when he caught her staring, mouth agape.

Somewhere on the far side of the throng that was now backed all the way up to their both such that a row of shapely asses and thighs threatened to impinge on their drinks, a saxophone began to tune, squelching suggestively and then the kick drums thumped once or twice and the show started suddenly out of the chaos of tuning a half disernable melody began to emerge. Claire released Sil and climbed up on the back of the booth, spine arched and craned her neck trying to see over the crowd. All the shoulders and stooped backs turned just so, perfectly aligning the emptiness between Claire and the stage so that her eyes met those of the dancer onstage and cannot avoid but meet them again. A writhing serpentine figure that that spiraled around the man with the metal chest, or rather with the metal attached to his chest. To his face. To his lips. It sounded like Paleolithic cave drawings -- dueling sculptors chipping at the same stone, part horrific cacophony, and part terrifying clarity. The dancer fell to the floor of the stage and then began to rise in slow circling motions, spinning as if to slow the motion of the earth to rob it of some spped that would cause everyone in the room to suddenly sieze upon this moment as fragmentory, fleeting, but not yet gone, to sieze it and hold it and never let go. The trio had been in town for three weeks now, a long pause on a journey into something only dust and angels were really fully aware of, pausing here to pack out the Rattle Bar and Grill which had not seen the likes of such talent in all it's barren days and for which the owner, proprietor and occasional bartender Sil Hawkard had been paying handsomely. And he made sure to ply Claire with plenty of free beverages to entertain and enlarge the ever flexible nature of perception such that a certain dancer of curiously indecipherable ethnic origins who had tendencies toward the affections fay, cherry-haired young women might continue to take residence in the dilapidated guesthouse behind the bar over the increasingly vocal grumblings of the saxophonist and the drummer who understandably did not see a future for avant garde jazz in Tucson Arizona.

Later the patrons couple off in a haze of alcohol and dust from taxis circling in the drive, and the night began to take on a bruised character, like a drunk beginning to sober in a cold lonely jail cell.

Claire excused herself to the bathroom. Jimmy sat up straight and eyed Sil out of the corner of his eye, "You going to the funeral tomorrow?"

Sil nodded and sat silent for a moment as if weighing out the words that both of them knew would be next. "She wanted to tell you Jimmy," He spoke slowly and stared at his empty glass, fiddling with it. "I think she just feels strange because you're there, in the room." He looked up at Jimmy. "She thinks you know things about her that she doesn't know."

"I do." Jimmy spoke matter-of-factly as if it were a thing of no importance.

"Well, I'm just saying, don't take it personally if she doesn't tell you things sometimes, she's just protecting herself."

"You make it sound like we're lovers Sil." 

"What the hell does that have to do with it? If you were lovers she'd have told you already, it's always your friends that really hurt you." Sil smiled ironically.

Jimmy pulled a cigarette out of the pack on the table but didn't light it. "This afternoon she became her grandmother."

Sil's head snapped up to meet Jimmy's gaze, "What do you mean 'became'?"

"It happens quite a bit, she becomes other people, sometimes her family members, sometimes distant relatives I'm pretty sure she never even knew... 

"Are you going to tell her?"

"I can't Sil."

"Fuck what Waiben wants Jimmy, the whole fucking thing is going o get shut down anyway as soon as he publishes this stuff, probably even sooner. He's already skating on thin ice at with the University, once they find out that he's convinced DMT gives you access to spirit worlds or whatever shit he seems convinced it does, he's fucking finished. The scientific element'll finally go out the window and he'll pick up and move on in some other fucking direction. That's what he always does. The man is batshit crazy..."

Claire sat back down next to Jimmy and suddenly glared at Sil. "He is not."

"Claire I've known him longer than you, trust me he's batshit crazy. For the most part in a good way, but you just never know... I've always avoided delving too deep into his craziness. Frankly there's no way of telling what's down there at the bottom. I mean do you know anyone else who's fallen out of an airplane and lived?"

"He didn't fall, he jumped."

"I rest my case -- bat shit crazy." Sil slumped back and swirled the drink. "Jasmine my dear, when you get a sec I need a splash." The girl behind the bar nodded but didn't stop rinsing glasses and stacking them on the shelf behind her. 

Claire continued to glared at Sil, but on the other hand she did half believe him. Waiben, or Scratch as Sil called him -- for reasons no one seemed to be aware of save Sil -- was, at the very least, eccentric. Claire desperately wanted to ask Sil more about Waiben, but had always refused to out of pride. She knew Waiben was Sil had worked together for years, but then he had just left. Dropped the whole thing without so much as a phone call. Bought the bar and hadn't, so far as she knew, spoken to Waiben since. Neither Claire nor anyone else had ever induced either Sil or Waiben to elucidate on the situation, though neither spoke ill of the other, provided bat-shit crazy was not considered ill. 

"You look like you're going to skin me alive," Sil met her definate gaze with what he undoubtedly considered a warm, open sort of smile but which Claire found somehow intruding, as if he were listening to her thoughts.

"Naw. Market's dropped out in pelts." She took a last drag from her bottle of beer and faked a smile back at him. 

Jimmy had become sullen and quiet. He popped a handful of peanuts in his mouth and slid out of the booth. "Time for me to go I guess, you coming Claire?"

"Naw, I'll stay a bit."

"Okay. I'll see ya'll tomorrow." Jimmy walked over shook hands with the bartender and wandered out the front door. Sil and Claire watched him go.

"You finally told him?"

"Did he say something to you?"

"He asked if I was going."

"Oh." She felt a sicking pit open up in her stomach. "Can I stay with you tonight?"

"You'll have to ride on the bike..."

Sil fell asleep the minute he took off his clothes and sunk onto the bed. Claire ran the water, filling the bathtub. She slowly peeled off her clothing and stared at her body in the mirror. Her hair was stringy and dry, her face rimmed in a thin layer of dust. She sighed and walked back into the bedroom to retrieve a candle. She lit the candle and turned off the bathroom light. She turned off the water and sank slowly into the tub. The water enveloped her like an electric blank on a midwest morning, she lowered her body further into the water and slowly let her head go under. Her hair floated up and clung to the surface as the watery silence filled her ears and the rhythm of her own heart filled her ears.

She remembered the last time she had seen her grandmother. They were sitting at the kitchen table the yellow flowered curtains puffed with the first cool breeze of fall. Her grandmother asked Claire for a cigarette. Claire protested at first but her grandmother said it didn't matter anymore, she might as well enjoy what was left. Claire ended up giving her a cigarette and fished out another for herself. Her grandmother struck a match and held it up for Claire who had leaned in to light, meeting her grandmother's eyes as she did, struck at once that though the skin of her face was loose and drawn, her eyes had the same liquid brightness of a baby, the seemed to crackle with life in spite of the dying that surrounded them. Claire sat back in her chair and studied her grandmother's face as she smoked, wondering what how it looked, young and smooth, before eighty years spent in and out of the desert sun. 

Claire remembered thinking that to some people the desert was a hot wind at the gas station, something passing through and to be passed through. Others saw a sunny retreat from cold wind billowing off northern lakes; some saw it as an endless playground of sunshine, golf and hotel pools. Her grandmother simply arrived in it one day, accepted it and tried to swallow it, literally Claire realized now.

"It used to be so beautiful here in the fall," her grandmother was staring out the back door toward the mountains. "Those hills where covered with junipers and in the gullies there were enormous Sycamores and Cottonwoods that turned yellow and orange..."

Claire looked up at the hills now covered in houses. She remembered dimly, as a girl, walking in the canyons with her grandmother and grandfather, gathering leaves and looking for wizards and fairies in the shaded glades of trees, the cool moist air near the water, the dry crunch of leaves under her young feet.

"It still is beautiful, though," Her grandmother turned in her chair and flicked a bit of ash into the kitchen sink. "Claire." She stopped as if gathering something up within her, "I'm dying."

Claire lifted her head out of the rub and drew her legs up, tucking her feet under her and wrapping her arms around her knees.

What is age made of, what shape does death take as it drew nearer? Perhaps it takes no clearer shape, perhaps death remains forever a stranger, perhaps it's life that has sharper shape when death approaches. If life begins in pleasure and ends in pain is it therefore necessarily futile? Is it just an expansive joke, me being the product of endless strangers' pleasure, rooted in their bellies and born through their legs only to end in pain? And what? Along the way move to feel my own pleasure and bear out strangers of my own, slowly plodding toward the pain? She thought of Aldus Huxley and his anesthetized, hallucinatory suicide. Was that cheating? Was the pain necessary? Was it still possible to die with grace, naturally, without the infest of disease, that latter day stranger come to roost itself like so many passenger pigeons returned home? She thought of her grandmother's pain, swept up in the rising river, the boulders, she wondered if it had lasted, if it had passed quickly or never existed at all. She wondered what her grandmother had thought of, sitting there beside the river, soaked through by the rain, watching the water rise, the distant rumble of boulders beginning to move, the faint white noise of the coming flood... and then... what? Claire leaned her head on her knees and watched the candle flickering. She remembered her grandmother's eyes the moist vitality in them, the tiny universes of memory floating in a saline ether with faint but visible stars beginning to glow behind them.

		
		
		
		
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"It was a lovely service doncha think?"

Claire felt a little vomit start to migrate up her throat, but she just smiled at her aunt and nodded. Claire hadn't been at the funeral. True, her body had stood between Sil and her Aunt, but she never heard the words and just watched dumbly as everyone dropped a handful of dirt down a whole that contained some shattered remnants of her grandmother that the fire department had managed to salvage from the river a full twnety two miles from the canyon where her car was parked. Claire had spent most of the brief cemermony watching the traffic on N. Oracle speeding along as usual. Afterward everyone retreated back to their cars and as Jimmy drove them toward the foothills for the reception at her Aunt's house Claire watched a group of hotair balloons begin to slowly lift off from the small airfield on the outskirts of town. She did her time making rounds taking in condolances from well-meaning family members she knew would drive home commenting on the tattoo on her wrist, the small diamond stud in her nose, the unkept wildness of her hair, the fact that she had not one, but two men with her, the fact that she hadn't been to church since the eighth grade when James Becker tried to rape her bdhind the chapel and she broke his nose with a brick, the later detail seemingly the ony one anyone cared to remember, she smiled but she sould see the clucking disapproaval in her both of her aunts and the slightly creepy leering grin of their husbands, one of whom had tried to kiss her at his own wedding three years ago.

As always Claire used cigarettes to escape her family. She slipped outside at the earliest possible moment and sat down on the patio table to watch her young cousin. He marched up to her a plfastic fireman's hat wildly cockeyed on his head and strangely out of place with the suit he still had on. "How are you Darren?"

He shrugged and looked at her shyly. "You have a picture on your arm."

"Yes I do Darren. It's called a tattoo, it's ink embedded...

"What's it a picture of?"

Claire pulled up her sleeve so he could see the whole tattoo. "It's all the signs of the Zodiac in a circle... When were you born Darren? March?"

He nodded but kept staring at her arm. "This is your symbol right here." She pointed to Aries, which he leaned in to scrutinize closer. "You're an Aries. That means your symbol is the the Bull. Very strong."

He seemed please by this notion and Claire neglected to add that he would very likely grow up constantly falling in and out of love with a string of trailor park ex-wives spreading in his wake.

"Which one are you?"

"I'm Sagitarious, this on here, the little hook like symbol."

"Why do you have a tattoo?"

She smiled. I got drunk once and it seemed like a good idea was Claire reasoned, not the appropriate response to give a five year old, but somehow she had never come up with better one. "Why do you have a nose?"

He laughed, "I dunno, everyone has a nose... do I have a tattoo?"

She giggled and raised his shirt and begin to tickle him, "I don't know let's see..."

He squealed and ran away, circling back around, but staying just out of arms reach. "I don't have a tattoo," he said finally.

"No you don't. But you can get one some day if you want." Claire tried to picture her Aunt's face when Darren would relay this bit of information.

"Are you on drugs?"

"What?" Claire snapped around and grabbed him by the arm. "Who told you that?"

"No one. I just heard my mommy say it to daddy this morning."

"Oh she did did she? Claire sat back in the chair and pulled Darren up on her lap and wrapped her arms around him. "And what else did your mommy say this morning?"

"About you? I think she said "You're anxious."

"Do you even know what anxious means?"

"Momma said you're anxious cause you want to know bout the hertiance."

"How old are you Darren?"

"I'll be six soon."

"And your mother told you I was nervous about an inheritance..."

"No she said anxious."

"Right. Anxious. Because..."

"Because you won't be getting any money."

Darren's mother was looking out at Claire from behind the sliding glass door, she waved from behind the glass, comfortable in her air conditioned cocoon; Claire smiled and waved back stifling the urge to mouth bitch at her. Her aunt openned the door and beckoned Darren inside. He climbed off of Claire and wandered toward the door. Claire took another sip of the cheap boxed chardonney she had poured earlier, it tasted a bit like peach juice, but it was slowly having the desired effect. She stood up and wandered through the yard and out into the river gully running just beyond the back fence. There was a trail leading down in the general direction of the river and Claire followed it walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes and scorpions. A breeze had begun almost as soon as the sun sunk behind the Catalina Mountains, not strong enough to bend the stiff twiggy branches of desert trees, it moved though in whispers, puffs of air brushing against her cheek.  She thought of airports, hospitals, departure points, the shuffling of human feet moving in and out of rooms like last quiet sighs of breath. Claire watched the river and wondered vaguely what its name actually meant. It seemed odd to her that she had lived next to or around the Rialto River for so many years without ever wondering what the word meant. She felt as if she were herself a desert only recently become aware that someone had flung a river down on her. Or with desert ambivalence she had always had a river running around her but had simply never noticed it. What then does the desert make of the river? As she studied the scene that was cascading down the slope and away from the organization of the manicured patio and yard, she decided that the desert seemed to ignore the river entirely. The river was starting to flood again, somewhere far upstream three days rain had been feeding until it swelled like a Christmas ham, but ten yards on either side and it was sand again. Stagnant pink sand interspersed with prickly plants and clumps of sagebrush and Mesquite trees, ironwood her grandfather called it. The sand didn't care for the water, didn't hold onto it, didn't even try, just let the water flow right on over it, puddle and collect, run off and feed into the river. Farther in the distance there were the mountains ringing the desert, keeping watch over it, making sure it behaved in some general way. 

She could see a figure emerge from the house and begin to slowly pick its way through the cacti and palo verde up the sloop toward the rock where Claire sit. It wasn't until he was halfway to her that she recognized Jimmy. He climbed up on the rock, but didn't say anything. 

She leaved her head on his shoulder. "Can I ask you a question Jimmy? It's a stupid question, but I read it in a magazine yesterday and I can't stop thinking about."

"Shoot."

"If you were going to do something for the sole purpose of getting in the Guiness book of world records what would it be?"

Jimmy laughed. "That's easy. Land speed record. currently held by my uncle who drove a rocket powered car at 457 mph across a dry lake in Nevada."

"Seriously? I mean your uncle is really in the Guiness Book of world records?"

"Seriously."

"Huh."

"And you?"

"I would skydive from the stratosphere like that guy did a couple years ago, only, obviously, I'd have to start higher."

"Yes you would. Did you go through an astronaut phase when you were younger?"

"Not really. Maybe. I don't remember." She took out another cigarette and lit it. Jimmy snagged it from her lips and took a drag. She watched him awkwardly puff out the smoke. "You know what I read once? The first thing an astronaut said the first time he orbited the moon... He said 'well, it's pretty gray.' It's pretty gray, Jimmy. It's pretty fucking gray. This asshole is the first fucking human to see the moon close up, to orbit around it in it's own gravity and he says it's pretty fucking gray. Fuck him." 

"He had an impoverished imagination."

Her head snapped up from where it had been resting on her knee. "Life is a collision of imagination and observation, Jimmy, and he fucking failed."

"Maybe."

"No Jimmy. He failed. He was one of about thirty people that have seen the moon up close and all he got out of it was that it's gray. He fucking failed."

"You're assuming that gray meant nothing to him, but what if his mother had gray eyes and that was the one memory that came back to him when he was overwhelmed by being that close to the moon?"

She rested her cheek on her knee again and rocked back and forth for a minute before speaking. "You're sweet Jimmy. You always defend people and want to think the best about them. I love you for that. In spite of the fact that deep down you're cynical too. But you try and that's what I love about you." 

Neither of them said anything for a while. The watched the balloons drift slowly across the sky. 

"Are you okay?" he asked finally.

"I think so. I mean she basically told me she was going to do it. I did my crying a few days ago, now..." She stopped. "I can't cry around them for some reason."

"Yeah."

"You know I once cried so hard I swallowed a moth." She giggled. "I was supposed to go out with this guy. This was junior high. Maybe high school. No junior high. Anyway we were supposed to ride our bikes to the park in the evening and he never showed up and I waited and waited. I was so in love with this guy. So at about 10 o'clock I'm out on the porch-sobbing... You know those huffing snorting kind of sobs that women make when they're really upset? Hyperventilating sobs... anyway, I was chewing gum. I always used to chew gum. So I'm in the rocking chair sobbing, arms around my knees... this is so pathetic... I inhaled a moth somehow and before I realized it I chewed him right into my gum. It was crackly at first, but then more like chewing feathers. I remember running in to tell my grandmoter I had eaten a moth... I can't believe she didn't laugh at me." Claire smiled and looked a Jimmy's brown eyes shielded from the sun by a red socks hat. "I had a lot of disturbing, uh, incidents in childhood. I used to kidnap cats when I was little."

"Kidnap cats?"

"Gamma wouldn't let me have a cat. She actually told me years later that she she didn't want the cat because she didn't want to become an old lady with cats. I mean after the plane went down... I dunno. She could occasionaly be quite vain. I think she felt awkward raising me at her age." Claire stopped. Jimmy could feel her body shudder against his. He pictured her face distorting, trying to swallow back tears like she had the night before.

"Anyway," She sniffed and drew herself up laughing softly. "I would go out and steal them from neighbors... At first I just petted them you know. Then I got one to follow me home. I felt like he loved me more than his owners and I cried when Gamma took him home. I was probably seven or eight when this happened. After that I went farther from home, several blocks away where I knew Gamma wouldn't know whose cat it was and I would have to post signs, found: cat. That sort of thing so, you know, I would have the cat for longer."

"Right."

"But these cats wouldn't follow me home. Too far I guess. So I would save my lunch money and on the way home from school I'd stop at Circle K and buy myself a slushy and Moon Pie and can of cat food. Then I'd ride my bike past my house, way back into the subdivision and lure cats home by dragging the cat food on a string behind my bike. One time I pulled into my driveway with three cats running behind me."

"You were a cat rustler." This drew a laugh.

"Yeah. I guess I was. One time, after I posted a bunch of found cat signs and stuff this old lady came to our house to pick up her cat and she was so excited that I had found her cat she gave me twenty dollars -- which was a lot of money at that age -- and bells went off in my head. So then I started kidnapping the cats for profit. I mean, when I could. I tried to pick cats that looked pampered or that were sitting in front of old lady houses. You know lots of papers collecting on the porch. Beat up seventies sedans. Maybe that was me subconsciously realizing my grandmother's fears or something. Anyway I was pretty good at casing a block and finding the old lady cats. When they would come over I'd put on a cute little dress and smile and play dumb and they would give me a reward. One month I made $200. That's when my Gamma caught on."

"What'd she do?"

"Bought me a cat."

"Smart."

"Yeah, but by then I didn't want one." They sat in silence again. The balloons were higher now. AT some length Claire collapsed onto Jimmy's shoulder and sighed deeply sliding down so that her head was on his chest. "My family thinks I'm on drugs."

"Of course you're on drugs, you have a tattoo." Jimmy smiled at her and she through her arms around him suddenly punching him softly in the back. "What? your aunt already grilled Sil and I about it. Plus Claire, you do take drugs twice a week."

"That's different. And besides my aunt's been popping Somas since her car accident, that was two fucking years ago and she still acts like it's no big deal, but get a tattoo... Jesus. You know her own mother couldn't stand her?" 

"I'm sure that's not true..."

"Wait until the executor reads the will... Oh and that's another thing, they're all gonna hate me... Gamma gave me everything, I asked her not to, I even threated to give it all to my aunt if she did, but she said it was for me."

"So you have a house now and everything?"

"I guess so, yeah. I don't want it though, I can't live there without her. It would be weird. Wrong. Why do I need it? I already have everything from my parents..." She turned on her back and let her head rest in his lap. She looked up at him; his eyes were shadowed by a Red Sox hat that Sil had given him. His lips were red and seemed suddenly incredably close. She drew in a breathe, closed her eyes and slowly lifting her head until her own lips pressed against his softly. 

When they returned to the house Sil was in the backyard engaged in some sort of complex war-like game of super soaker mayhem with Darren. Sil stood in the middle of the yard with a super soaker in each hand looking not unlike the cover of Rambo firing dual streams of water at Darren who also had two super soakers, but was crouched behind a cactus biding his time. When Sil's streams fell short darren was up in a nearly identical fashion, hosing Sil down. Sil made no effort to dodge out of the way instead he resolutely pumped the super soakers building the pressure back up. Claire noted from the look of Sil's suit this had been going on for some time. She and Jimmy stepped through the gate just as Sil rose up, super soakers recharged. He half turned and faced both barrels toward them, a wicked grin crosed his face. She and jimmy both froze. "Don't even think about Sil," Claire warned. "I will not be laighing."

"This is Armani man," Jimmy added.

"Okay. Darren, the war is over, you win." Sil walked over to the table and laid down the guns. Darren tore about the yard in circles, "I win! I win I win I win!"

Sil stripped off his jacket and wrung it dry. "Not Armani," he said drily. He fished a pack of cigarette out of the coat pocket and lit one. "So Claire... Do you know a friend of your grandmother's named Ambrose?"

"No."

"Hmmph. Neither does anybody else here. Well. When we were leaving the cemetery, this man came up to me, greeted me by name and asked me to give you this." Sil produced a slightly soggy business card and handed it to Claire.

She looked down at the tattered peice of paper. "There was a finely drawn image of two fingers about to grasp the tail of a dragonfly. To the left of the drawing was a partially smeared scrawl of handwriting that read: "Call me." Claire turned the card over and read a local number. "Did he say what this was about?"

Sil took a drag and eyed her suspiciously, she blushed slightly under his gaze. "No. He just said he was an old friend of your grandmother's and that he wanted you to get in touch with him as soon as possible." Sil sat down in a patio chair. "At the time I didn't think much of it, but then when I was inside talking to your aunt about it... the fat one, what's her name again?"

"Debbi."

"Right, Debbi. Anyway I was asking her if she knew if your grandmother had any friends by that name and it suddenly occurred to me that he had greeted me by name. Granted a lot of people know my name from the bar, but I didn't recognize this guy and all the sudden it creeped me out. I dunno, maybe he just overheard someone else say my name or something... he was at the funeral. He stood in the back opposite us. I vaguely remember him. Probably he just heard you call my name... Anyway, I relayed the message. My work here is done."

"Yeah. Thanks." Claire stuffed the card in her pocket and went inside. Jimmy sat down next to Sil and bummed a drag.

"So."

"So."

"Oh fuck off man. I was out here chasing that little monster with super soakers for the last half hour. That hill might seem like it's far away, but it isn't."

"What do you want me to say?"

"That it wasn't what it looked like."

"What if it was?"

"Then you need to pay your tab."

"What?"

"Your tab at the bar. Pay it."

"Fuck you Sil. It wasn't me."

"Funny. It sure looked like you."

"Whatever man. It could just as easily have been you if you'd wandered up there."

"Mmhmm. But I didn't."

"And so what? no one else can either?"

"What happened to objectivity?"

"Is that what this is about?"

"No."

"Well."

"All right. Sorry. It's none of my business."

"Then why..."

"Forget it."

"She'll go home with you anyway."

Sil sniffed sarcastically.

The glass door slid open and Claire emerged with another drink in hand. "What are you talking about?"

"Jimmy's love life," Sil chuckled.

"Oh." Claire turned crimson and sat down next to Sil. 

"So he told you?"

"Told me what?" Sil asked cautiously.

Claire looked back and forth at them suspiciously. She sighed. "Jimmy's heart belongs to an online porn star." Claire collapsed in giggles which she tried to contain in the harsh glare of Jimmy's scowl.

"She is not a porn star. And she has a name." It was Jimmy's turn to blush.

"Oh yes, her name Sil, is Haley Wilde -- wild with an e mind you," Chloe giggled again momentarily. "So tell us Jimmy," Claire straightened her back with an audible popping noise, "does she or does she not earn a living by video taping herself having sex and then posting those videos on web?"

"She does, but she only has sex with her boyfriend..."

"Whom she claims to be much in love with..."

'...and other girls."

"And other girls"

Sil's eyebrows shot up his forehead accenting the fact that a good half inch of the left one was missing, "wait, you're in love with a lesbian who loves her boyfriend?" 

"Yeah."

"Shit."

"Shit is right." Chloe drained her glass and looked at Jimmy cockeyed. "Jimmy you're an idiot and I mean that in the best way possible." She reached over and grabbed Sil's drink. "Oh and the best part is she has a tattoo of dolphin where her pubes should be."

"Lasers. Problem solved." Jimmy waved his hand.

"You're better off learning to love it." Sil snatched his glass back from Claire and in spite of it's obvious emptiness, tipped it toward his mouth.

"I kind of already have," Jimmy smiled sheepishly.

Night drew up like the pony express, expected on time. Claire's relatives slowly trickled out the sliding glass door to reiterate their condolances and drive back to their lives, clucking along the way. As Jimmy predicted, Claire got out of the car at Sil's house. Sil stood in the drive watching the Falcon disappear in a cloud of dust down River road. Claire had already gone inside. Sil walked up to the porch and sat down in the dilapidated rocking chair left  behind by the previous tenant. After a while Claire's head poked out the door and she informed him that she was taking a shower and going to bed. He nodded. The bats were darting across the glowing, city-lit horizen. He heard the water running. Sil stood and walked in to the kitchen to retreive a bottle of Stags Leap Petite Syrah he had been saving for some time. He returned to the parch and sat down with the corkscrew. He popped the cork and took a draw from the bottle.

After a while Claire came outside wrapped in Sil's robe. She sat down on his lap and picked up the bottle. She tilted her head back and let the wine run freely down her throat. Sil watched her face. She set the bottle back down on the porch.

"Was Jimmy serious about that girl?"

"What? The porn star? Yeah pretty serious. He made me watch a few videos and asked what I thought. It was weird, like when you meet someone's new girlfriend only this was just a girl on a screen talking dirty, but not really dirty, more like cutsy dirty. And touching herself. It faded out as she was licking her fingers."

"Hmm." Sil shrugged. "Does she seem like a good person?"

"Well... I must admit there is something about her... I mean I haven't seen a lot of pornography, but she doesn't strike me as someone cut out for it, which probably means she's a decent person. And she's goregous. But I mean, she's trying to internet sex star  and she already has a boyfriend -- can you really be in love with someone that unattainable?"

"Love doesn't seem to abide hopelessness." Sil reached down and started to take a pull from the bottle of wine, but Claire stopped him and pulled the bottle from his hands. She cupped bother her hands around Sil's stubble covered cheeks. She held his face like that for a moment and then shifted her wieght on his legs and let go of his face. He reached down and picked up the bottle again. She sighed. "I'm sorry Sil. I don't know why I kissed him..."

"How did..."

"Sil. You don't exactly have a poker face. Well, actually your face is pretty good, but your eyes give you away." She lay back against him and nuzzled her head under his chin. "It doesn't matter... his lips were just there... I needed to feel them, to feel something..." Her voice trailed off into the stoic stillness of the desert night. They watched a small lightning storm on the horizen, thin little bolts zig-zaged down into the sodium glow of the city. Sil thought about something his uncle had once said about lightning being six times hotter than the surface of the sun and yet generally less than three-eights of an inch thick. 

Later Claire stood up and lightly kissed his cheek, lingering for a moment to feel the roughness of his beard against her own skin. And then she stood and disappeared inside. After a while Sil rose drunkenly from the chair and stretched his back. He leaned down to grab the bottle of wine and stumbled toward the grassy desert unzipping his fly as he walked. Leaning his head back to swig from the bottle he paused to stare at the particles of starlight sneaking through the bruised clouds. He began to piss on the grassy desert sand, thinking that you adjust your breath to the one who breathes beside you. You lie very close, still and alone.





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Sil was up with the sun fumbling in the half dark kitchen trying to find a grinder to go with the coffee beans already measured out in a cup sitting on the counter. He recalled with some amusement the apartment in Boston that he and Waiben had shared for four years, something his girlfriend as the time has considered exceedingly strange, "he's like what, sixty?" she used to say and then nothing more until Sil would correct her, "sixty-two actually." Sil used to wake up to Waiben singing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" while he hunted around the kitchen for coffee beans. At that time they still had the old icebox that Waiben had found on the side of the road and patched up. Since it did the job neither of them  thought to replace it for the better part of a year. When Waiben drank too much and passed out before sundown, he'd forget to restock the ice. The melted remnants of the previous day's block of ice would eventually force open the door and the contents of the icebox, including the bag of coffee would go crashing to the kitchen floor, skittering about on the icy water until they found their way into all kinds of strange places. "You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" Waiben would sing while he slowly gathered everything up and restocked the icebox. When he invariably found the coffee lying in the farthest crack, he would squat down and scoot it along the floor over to the table, laughing and singing "...every morning and plow...every morning and plow..." Once Sil had crept up quietly to watch and he witnessed Waiben do a little dance, all crooked and insane owing to a bad knee that made his dancing hover between pathetic and comical. He would start gyrating at the waist, flopping his arms about while he sang. That first morning when Sil saw him do it, he momentarily thought Waiben was having a seizure the way he convulsed wildly about. Later Sil found out the line was a Tom Waits' lyric.

Sil shivered as the grinder spun and he lit a cigarette waiting for the kettle to boil. He stepped gingerly back to the bedroom to watch Claire sleep. A ray of sunlight shot through the uncovered window to the right of the bed and the light slowly expanded covering first the table and then slowly worked it's way toward the white sheets where Claire lay. Her face was obscured in a swirl of crimson hair that spread out over her back and onto the pillow next to her, but her back was exposed and revealed her milky skin. Sil was struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontrollable desire to leap on the bed and ravish her, to dissolve himself over her somehow like a liguid banket of skin until he sunk into her, obliterating himself in the process. He spun quickly on his heal and retreated back to the kitchen lest he act on impulse, though he was aware on some level that he wasn't so much restraining himself as merely postponing the inevitable with the promise of the indefinite. Coffee in hand he swung open the front door and stepped gingerly out onto what had once been the porch, but now served mainly as a means to inject splinters in his cold bare feet. The truth was Sil wasn't impervious to pain, he simply ignored it. He stepped slowly over the brittle gray wood and out into the sandy yard. He lit another cigarette and stretched his back in the sunlight. He turned and looked back at the house. The roof was rotten from termites and an extended family of rats lived in the ceiling panels. The walls were paper-thin, insulated with spider webs and the only heat came from the anceint pot bellied stove that spit sparks on his living room floor every time he opened it. He sat down in the middle of the desert driveway and watched a plume of dust forming in the distance, near the highway. That would be Jimmy he decided. The only thing that brought anyone out to this godforsaken stretch of land was necessity or occasionally the desire for something that could not be eaily obtained elsewhere. Sil sipped his coffee and waited. Eventually Claire emerged from the house behind him, coffee in hand and speaking in a slightly higher than normal pitched morning voice that drove Sil to parodoxical spasms of lust and tenderness. Before he could achieve the sort of niranic state he felt the voice would one day lead him to, the phone rang. Sil continued to sip his coffee but stepped inside to listen to the machine when it picked up. A crackling voice hestitated and then begin to ask for Claire. Curious Sil walked in and picked up. The man from the cemetery greeted him once more by name and asked for Claire. Sil hesitated but leaned out the front door and handed her the phone. He wandered off to the kitchen and began making breakfast. Claire came in just as Sil slid the eggs out of the pan onto pf the black beans and tortilla's already piled on the plate. "Everything okay?"

"That man. The man you met yesterday... he asked if Gamma had ever given me a book. And old book. And then he wanted to know if it would be alright to come by my grandmother's house and look for it."

"How does he know your grandmother again?"

"He said he knew her when she was a girl, but he didn't really elaborate."

"So did you say he could come by?"

"Yeah, but I didn't say when. He said he'd call next week. He's quite nice. I can't place his accent though."

"Did he have an accent? I didn't notice."


They eat and then Sil cleans up with the stereo on and Claire fiddles with a necklace, undoing the knots and thinks about how it would be nice to hear the stereo, the songs of passing time and clatter of dishes wiped in the sink and laid up to dry in the racks, the green paint on the walls and French cafe poster over the shelf where Sill stacks his herbs.


They ate and Sil dropped her off at her grandmother's house. It wasn't until she stepped inside that the full force of it hit her, the air was stiffling, she felt as if her lungs were collapsing, a supernova of yellow kitchen walls, blue daisy curtains collapsing in on her, a bowl of rotten grapes on the counter, her stomach turned at the sunken orbs, already flakes of white mold spreading across them. She felt herself trying to suck in air and finding none, began to choke, a bit of bile in her mouth. The windows seemed to bend with caustic desert light, the glass warped and laughing at her. She felt herself gasping for air and retreated sobbing to the porch to where she spit out an orange gray bile and collapsed on the steps. "Once something dies you can't make it live," her grandmother was pulling out a dead basil plant accidentally left out and caught in a frost, it's gray wrinkled leaves made crisp crinkling sound against her skin. "It's the same with people Claire, once they're gone you can't get them back. Well, usually anyway." She chuckled lightly. Claire turned to look at her. "Everynow and then you might run across some people that do come back after they're gone the first time, but they're rare." 

Claire stopped crying and went back inside to get a tissue and blow her nose. Something about the mundanity of her mission perhaps, but this time the house felt neutral as if it no longer cared who came and went within it's walls. Claire stood at the kitchen window looking at the Sahorro cactus in the yard. She remembered planting it as a child, digging the hole with her shovel and how the man from the nursery helped them lower the small cactus in the hole, all of them gingerly avoiding the downward hooked thorns. In the twenty five years since the cactus has grown over six feet, but still somehow Claire felt, looked younger than her and she was sure would outlive her and then some.

She avoided the closets, started in the bathroom where there was only one photograph, her great grandfather in an gilded oval frame. She studied it for a while thinking how strange to see someone she was directly descended from and yet might well have been an image in a textbook, so utter without connection or reference to her own life. He looked like a statue, something used a basis for fountain sculpter, his shoulders draw up sharply, the antiquated upright posing style of the day, trapped without color on a photographs stool, cursed to yellow with age. A small crack in the photograph had begun to peel and the left side of his face was cripped white and obscured. She spent the afternoon pitching lotions and powders in a trashbag, dried out, crusted Lancome bottles, Tylenon that had solidified to a single clump, hemroidal creme that she refused to touch without the aid of a tissue, Windex and Clorox, bottles of pills and medicines long expired, a deck of cards she kept, she shut her mind down and nothing produced any emotion save a frizzled and frayed toothbrush which should have been replaced months ago and Claire remembered saying as much to her grandmother and how she had simply shrugged. Claire sighed heavily and went outside for some air.

It was well past dark by the time she went home. There were four garbage bags out front of the house, when Jimmy picked her up. They drove in silence and didn't say a word walking up Claire's steps. Insid ethe door she turned and they tore at each other's clothes.



			*				*				*				*				*



It was the first warm day in ages when Sil rode down to the campus. He parked the bike outside the science library and as he walked over toward the administrative building he took in all the girls dressed prematurely in their summer clothes and tried to remember why it was he had dropped out of college so many years ago. He lingered outside the double door for a minute listening the Waiben's voice, trying to gauge the reaction before he opened them slowly and slipped in without a sound. He stood against the wall in the back and eyed the panel, three men and two women that sat majesterial at long table directly in front of Waiben who was talking about pyscology and the breakdown of the bicameral mind, the dislocation of the voice, the I from the position of external, the internalizing of the self and creation of the ego was an evolutionary necessity, but there is much that can be learned about consciousness by stepping backward..." Sil could tell the panel was unimpressed, the large man in the center who Sil thought would have looked more fitting in mutton chops, was pouring himself a glass of water. The woman on the end tapped her Parker on a legal pad and constantly pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her slender and apparently ineffective nose. Sil slipped out and waited in the hall. Waiben emerged with a clearly beaten look on his face. 

"Syris," Sil called out as he walked out into the desert warmth.

"Sil. Was that you I heard come in?"

"Yeah."

"At least I can finish out the semester. I'm not going to, but I still get the money."

"That's good. How have you been?"

"I'm tired. And hungery, would you join me for lunch?"

The walked across campus to a small diner that served breakfast all day and Waiben ordered an omlette. Sil watched him eat and sipped a warm beer. "Do you remember Von Hock at Cambridge?"

"Was that the nut job that thought Yuri Gellar was telling the truth?"

No. That was Von Statler, you're confusing your Germans." They laughed. "Von Hock was the one that thought Alexandrian Library was actually saved and squirreled away in the vault in Venice or something."

"Oh yeah. With the grad student..."

"Corrinne. Yeah. She spoke seven languages, did you know that?"

Waiben raised his eyebrows. "Well, I did hear she was quite talented with her tongue, but to be honest I didn't take it that way."

"Very funny. No she was brilliant." Sil seemed temporarily distracted. "But the reason I ask is that." He stopped to take a sip of beer. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a cigarette.

"You can't smoke in here."

"No, you can't get caught smoking in here." Sil lit his cigarette holding it between his thumb and forefinger the rest of his hand curled over it. He took and drag and thrust his hand under the table. He exhaled down to his left and waved his hand to clear the smoke. "This is going to sound a bit crazy, which is why I'm telling you."

Waiben noticed for the first time that Sil looked slightly different, exhausted perhaps. There were dark rings around his eyes, his cheeks looked slightly sunken like someone who hasn't slept in weeks; his hand shook slightly when he reached for his beer. Waiben watched him as he talked thinking of the day, several weeks past that he had taken off his headphone and stood up from his desk to retrieve a book from his shelf and he had heard grunting and moaning. Waiben had been in academic setting long enough to know that the best course of action was to put on his headphones and go back to work, but he'd also been in academic settings long enough to not need to do anything more than that. Sil knew he realized, had probably known a lot longer than Waiben given Sil's preternatural intuition. But as he listened to Sil's story he slowly began to doubt that his sleeplessness had anything to do with Claire, nor very likely did it have anything to do with anything altogether human. At some point a familar chill passed down his spine the likes of which he had not felt in years, probably since leaving Paris.

"You think he's the Hierophant?" Waiben said finally.

"Yes I do."



segue to end with the mention of the book and Ambrose's contact info he leaves. start Romanian section.


Sil runs into jazz musicians in NEw York at some point.