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+
+Fourteen
+
+Wake up-chew-swallow-regurgitate-newborn-you are free-to the bottom-cast yourself-sunrise on Cyprus-blind woman-something out there-one thing ignored-existence is love-smell it in the air-those who came before- preternaturally alive- moves you out of bed in the morning-carries you out the door-gives courage in moments of weakness-attacks conceited strength-quiet evening-walk under Alder trees-autumn light-scratches at the door-lost cat- forlorn hound-it's the only reason you're here-
+
+I don't hear anything; I'm sound asleep. I don't feel anything because the soybeans are shifting anyway. What amazes me is that it's so quiet it doesn't wake me. You would think something as big as a train would be loud when it starts moving, but it's not. I passed drunk and by the time I realize I'm moving, it's a done deal. No backing down. I figure I'll ride to Atlanta and then take a bus back, but the train doesn't stop in Atlanta. In fact it doesn't stop until Memphis. I take one look around and decide I'm better off going all the way to California. Somewhere in the plains, I get a fever, delirium tremors. I shake uncontrollably and fear returns as I sit huddled in the corner of the dark boxcar. The Mayan priest comes back to preside over my death. I see marching columns of the dead bearing down on me. Shadowy, decomposing skeletons, hunks of chewed flesh clinging to the limbs, rattle bones and chatter teeth in the blackness. The priest dances in the corner shaking his death rattle and waving brightly colored feathers around the horrific skeletons. His arms swoop through the air and calls up the legions of the dead. Acrid smoke fills the boxcar and I start to choke, the smell of burning sulfur fills the air. The priest is wailing and fluttering his arms as more and more decomposed bodies fill the boxcar. The thick smell of death hit my nostril. It's a nauseating smell, my empty stomach recoils in horror and I retch involuntarily, trails of spit heave out and run down on my chin. I hear the chanting of legions, get up and run, get up and run, get up and run... The bodies are enveloped in smoke and I can no longer clearly see them, I hear a voice, a child crying. Out of the haze of acrid smoke steps a boy. Tears are running down his smudged face and he walks over to me with a box in his arms. Would you like to buy some chiclets meester? I kneel beside him and he smiles sadly at me. The boy selling chiclets sits down and says that he is sorry, that he does not want me to go. He tugs at my leg and his eyes go wide with terror. There is a horrible shrieking sound and the priest emerges out of the sulfuric fog, blade raised, his teeth chattering. I try to stop him, the boy covers his face, but it's too late. The blade rams home into the boy's throat. Gurgling sounds escape his mouth. The priest shrieks and twists the blade down, snapping the boy's sternum and splitting his chest open. The priest reaches in and rips out the boy's beating heart. He holds it out and turns toward me; his eyes are glowing embers. I shrink back in horror and stumble to my feet. The hatch lifts up and I  climb up out into daylight; the priest is grabbing at my legs. I stand on top of the train, teetering in the icy rush of wind. We are pulling alongside another train. I carefully walk to the end of the boxcar and wait for a flatbed to come along side. I see the priest's feather headdress poke up out of the boxcar. He sees me and disappears below for a moment. He comes shooting up and out, landing a few feet from me. The train next to this one is much slower. I try and estimate the difference in speed, calculating when to jump. The priest charges at me, knife extended, a blood curdling scream echoes across the plains. I jump. I land on a flatbed car. A jarring pain shoots up through my legs and I pass out.
+
+I come to with a hand shaking me. 
+
+"Hey kid wake up."
+
+I open my eyes to a tiny bunk and take in a grisly, bearded, old man with heavy creases in his brow.
+
+"Jesus Christ son... at least you're alive." He shakes his head from side to side and turns away from me. I sit up and hit my head on the ceiling. He turns around and chuckles. "Low ceiling there kid, you're on a train, remember?"
+
+The pain in my head gives way to dull, throbbing ache in my leg. I look down and notice that it has been splinted. The old man is watching me. "I was a medic in the war," he offers. "I splinted it up for you, but you need to get to a hospital." He pauses and scratches his salt and pepper beard, "what the hell were you thinking?"
+
+I shake my head. 
+
+"Well, here's the deal kid, we'll be in Denver sometime tonight and I can give you a lift down to the hospital, but until then, you'd best get some rest. There's some Delotid in this chest over here." He reaches in a toolbox and throws me a bottle of pills. "That'll cut the pain," he says.
+
+He opens a door and I catch a glimpse of whirling lights and strange glowing computer screens. He closes the door leaving me alone in the room. I take one of the pills and lie back down on the bunk. Almost immediately a warm tingly sensation sweeps over me and everything fades slowly to black. 
+
+I come to again under the glare of white lights. I am lying on a bed; men in white coats are standing over me. A tube is sticking out of my arm. A woman is standing at the end of the bed dressed in a black gown with a veil over her face. I can see her thin lips moving. I pass out again.
+
+This time I come to in the bunk. I sit up and look down at my leg. It's wrapped in an air brace. I slowly ease myself up on my elbows and swing my legs out, gingerly stepping down on the good one. I hobble to the door and open it. I step into a room filled with blinking lights and flashing screens, the old man is sitting on a stool staring out the window. He turns around and looks at me, "so you're up huh?" He extends his hand, "Joe."
+
+I shake it and tell him my name.
+
+"Sil? That's a new on me. How's the leg?"
+
+I shrug.
+
+"The doctors said you should take it easy for a while."
+
+"We already went to the hospital?"
+
+"Oh yes, last night. You don't remember? That Delotid must have done a number on you. They set your leg and then I was trying to leave and you started screaming and babbling hysterically," he laughs. "I signed you in, so they let me sign you out. I figured you needed a quiet place to come to your senses so I brought you back here."
+
+He pours me a cup of coffee out of an old thermos and I hobble over to the window. Outside is a blurry rush of trees and rocks. There are patches of dirty, old, brown snow tucked back in steep ravines. 
+
+"Rocky Mountains," Joe says.
+
+I nod. After a while I finish the coffee and ask Joe if I can go outside.
+
+"Not the brightest idea in your condition, but ya sure." He slides open the side door and I step out onto a narrow metal grating. I steady myself against the cold steel of the engine compartment and, using the handrail as a crutch, I hobble back to the rear. After making my way around two more engines I come to the flatbed car that I landed on. I gingerly step over the coupling, trying not to look down at the dizzying blur of train tracks. I stretch out on my back and stare up at the sky. I dig through my pockets and find a half a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of unknown painkillers. I swallow one dry and chase it with a cigarette. 
+
+The train is not moving very fast, maybe twenty or thirty miles an hour. Towering snow covered peaks lean in on all sides. The air smells of pine forests, occasionally I catch a whiff of industrial scents from the engines, oil, fuel, and exhaust. I take a nap basking in the sun. I wake up under a canopy of Douglas furs and ponderosa pines. The air smells of needles and sap, there is a pinecone lying next to me. 
+
+I walk back up the engine and talk to Joe for a while. Joe is a rustic, agrarian man. He looks about sixty, he may be younger, but the years have taken their toll. He has piercing blue eyes. His skin is rough, like rawhide, tanned from a life spent outdoors. He keeps talking about the war, by which I think he means the Second World War. He has a wife in Utah somewhere and two daughters, both married, living back east. We spend the better part of the afternoon trading stories. His words come out in growling whispers, just loud enough to hear over the noise of the wheels and the engine, but without yelling or even appearing to raise his voice. He talks with the rhythm of the train, we go around a bend and Joe goes in on the beach at Normandy. We start up an incline and Joe moves out west after the war. We roll through a tunnel, Joe falls silent mid sentence, and when we emerge back into the blinding midday sun he starts up again without missing a beat. I guess, for Joe, when you're underground, it is best not to talk.
+
+I begin to see a pattern emerge out of his stories. Joe is the kind of man that inhabits the backwater towns of this country, ornery you might say, but he is not ornery. He is simply inhuman, like me, which is to say that humanity has no hold on Joe. False modesty, false politeness, and false pretense have been shed like dry useless skin. Joe hails from somewhere older, livelier and healthier. His ancestors are the men who lived beside ponds and didn't write books, who held court with the mysteries of the universe and never say a word, who know what life has taught them and have no use for anyone else's ideas about morality, reality and humanity. I don't say much. He should have had me arrested back in Denver, or at least dumped me at the hospital, but he didn't because he felt it wasn't right. Joe doesn't seem to care at all what the rest of the world is doing; he simply lives his life and is content with that.
+
+I step outside for a cigarette. The hood of the engine, or what would be the hood if it were a car, has a four-foot wide piece of metal grating on top of it. It makes an excellent seat and allows me to lean my head back against the window and enjoy the scenery. I light a cigarette and throw an old army surplus sleeping bag around my shoulders. It's February, I think. The air is biting cold. I let my good leg dangle off the side of the grating. We are doing about fifteen miles an hour I would guess, climbing up over the continental divide, or at least as close to the divide at these tracks get. Joe slides door open and hands me up a bowl of chili. I eat it greedily, watching the sun set in front of me. 
+
+I am thinking of Dean, wondering what his fate is... I am thinking of two years ago when we arrived in Athens, his hair was jet black, greased back, in a fashion that was at once a 1950's greaser, and not. He looked as if he were completely at ease in his own skin. We both had on suits, not expensive ones like we wanted, but ones handed down or purchased at thrift stores. I think of a photograph that I took at a bar in Los Angeles years ago. Dean was in the same pinstriped suit, carefully greased hairline framing his face, making it stand out, luminescent in the midst a black background. His eyes were laughing, but the lips barely curled, something intangibly wrong was lurking under his skin and bones. Another from the same night caught Dean unawares, as he leaned against the wall and watched the crowd. His arm was blurred, lifting the ever-present cigarette to his lips. All around him was the swirl of women's hair, the exited waving arms of men; it was all a faceless blur. In the middle there was Dean, standing still like a hummingbird.
+
+As night falls, the wind picks up, howling through the canyons and whipping through my sleeping bag. We start to head downhill, picking up speed. I hobble back inside to warm up. Joe brews coffee and asks me if I like it. I shrug and tell him its fine. "Just wondering," he says smiling at me, "it's decaffeinated... I'm Mormon you know." He gives me a look as if this is his greatest hoodwinking surprise. I raise my eyebrows to encourage him; he looks like he needs to get it off of his chest.
+
+"You know a lot of my friends were pretty hard on me for converting. They were downright pissed when I got hitched in the Tabernacle," he chuckles ruefully. "I tell ya, Mormons may have some strange beliefs, but on the whole, they are some of the best people I've ever met. Sure it's a little ridiculous, their bible and all, what with zebra's running around here -imagine that! Zebras! Here!- and I don't think the old Mr. Young really carried those gold tablets under his arm... and why god called himself Moroni I have no idea." He nudges me in the shoulder. "But in spite of all that ridiculousness, which really is no more ridiculous than the Catholic's eating wafers, or Jew's giving things up once or twice a year... it's all ridiculous when you think about it objectively." He stops for a bit and ponders his own words. "I'll tell you what I have noticed having a Mormon wife, and a lot of Mormon friends. They build real communities. They're good people at a level that is very basic; they know their human roots. Your average Catholic will walk by the poor bum on the street and give him a nickel or a quarter, but your average Mormon will invite the man to their home for a meal, offer them a shower, and of course, give them a little counseling on the true church of God." He nudges me again. "But when a man's belly is full and his body clean, he can listen to that sort of nonsense. I don't believe a word of it, but I took the vow because it made my wife happy and I would do anything to see that woman smile." He pulls out his wallet and extracts a faded, creased photograph. He hands it to me and I see a plump, smiling woman. Her cheeks are ruddy and she looks about fifty, maybe older, but I can tell that she was once very beautiful, and still is for that matter. I nod and smile, handing it back to him.
+
+We talk a while longer. I try to elicit some sort of wisdom from him, but Joe is not the type to give it out. He knows what he knows, and he knows what he knows because he learned it the hard way. Words mean nothing. Joe helps me back to the rear engine, shining a flashlight along the grating while I swing between the railings. I sit up in the bunk for a while, skimming through The Book of Mormon. I notice the Mormons have ignored the Anazazi in their rewrite of history. I fall asleep with vision of Zebras running across the Utah desert.
+
+I wake up before dawn, not having slept much, but that isn't out of the ordinary these days. It takes me a minute, after climbing out of the bunk, to find my balance and reorient myself to the sensation of movement. I stretch and yawn greedily, like an insomniac. Outside the eastern sky is pale green, not long until dawn. My precarious journey to the engine is rewarded with the smell of bacon, eggs, coffee and biscuits. Joe smiles his craggy grin, in the electric lights his teeth are yellow and stained from coffee and cigarettes. He hasn't always been a Mormon I note. 
+
+"I was just going to blow the whistle to let you know that breakfast is served." He smiles at me. He hands me a cup of coffee and I thank him, wrapping my freezing hands around the warm ceramic cup. "Sleep well?" He asks.
+
+"Yes I did," I lie. The truth is that my life is all knotted up in my head and I have yet to untangle it, but I feel silly saying that to Joe. I realize suddenly that I think too much. I try to sip the coffee, but it is still too hot.
+
+"Here," he hands me a plate full of greasy bacon and eggs with two biscuits perched on either side. We go out to the front of the engine and eat in silence. All around us the sky is a color show. The green begins to fade, replaced by the first crimson rays reflected on the bottoms of the wind carved clouds. I'm chewing on the last piece of bacon when the first direct rays of the sun strike me. I close my eyes and we welcome each other across the ninety-three million mile void. I open them to a squint and turn around. Behind us lie the Rocky Mountains. In front lies windswept eastern Utah, an endless sea of brown grass dancing like senoritas at the town fiesta. To our north there is the Escalante wilderness, which contains the La Salle Mountains, and the largest uninhabited area in North America. To the south and west lies Canyonlands National Park, the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers, and somewhere, a tiny speck of a town called Moab. The end of the line for this train.
+
+"They'll load quartz and sand mostly, bound for Memphis," Joe talks between mouthfuls of eggs. "But, whatever the case, I want to invite you to my house to have a home cooked meal with my wife and I. She's a real looker and great cook too." He laughs and nudges me in the ribs. "She was a beauty queen in high school. She was Miss Hoboken and might have been Miss America if she hadn't decided to give the whole thing up and go to college," he raises his eyebrows to accent the significance of these things. "Course I'm glad she did, because that's where I met her." He laughs.
+
+I hem and haw, thanking him for the offer, but not agreeing to it just yet. I head back down to do the dishes. I splash cold water in my eyes in the tiny bathroom and study my face in the cracked tarnished little mirror. The scab from where I cut myself in New York is nearly gone. I lean in closer and my jaw drops. I notice that around the scab, where the old scar tissue has been torn open again, little hints of hair have started sprouting back. I stare at them in amazement. I run my fingers over them, trying to encourage their growth.
+
+I smoke a cigarette outside while Joe calls into the Moab station. After a while he climbs up to tell me that the yard will be empty when we arrive. Today is Sunday, he informs me, and this is Mormon country, nothing happens on Sunday. Joe says that I can stay on the roof of the engine so long as he is down below. That way anyone watching will think that I am Joe. So I sit, letting the wind hit me in the face, sunning myself across Utah, land of Mormons-for now. One day I suspect the Tabernacle will fall; the religion will dwindle and disappear like every other, but for now they reign over God's last great piece of land. What a land this is here. The tracks are heading down into the canyon country. The desert sky is immense, it threatens to swallow the whole landscape. Tufts of white clouds float lazily across the blue background.
+
+Soon we are on the mesa tops, cruising at thirty-five miles an hour, heading toward The Big Switch, as Joe calls it. The Big Switch is apparently the only non-computerized part of the journey. Joe will have to stop the train, get out and actually throw the heavy iron handle to switch us over to the track that heads down to Moab. Once he drives the train past it, he will stop again, walk back, and switch it back so that the next train can pass on by. It remains manual because most trains do not stop in Moab anymore, most of them pick up a few cars that have been hauled up or just don't even slow at all. We're going back in time, to the days when, if you wanted something happen, you had to do it yourself.
+
+We hit the big switch around two o'clock. I talk Joe into letting me stay behind and throw it back so the next train can go by. It takes about ten minutes to move ours out of the way and then I throw the switch. It makes a piercing metallic screech and then slides back to let the next train pass. Part of me wants to leave it, to sidetrack the whole world down to Moab for a great gathering of trains, but I know it would only get Joe into trouble. I walk back up to engine. From here it is only about half an hour down into the canyon that the Green River carved long ago, where the empty loading yard waits. The desert plain is silent and peaceful. The gravel crunches under my feet. I feel like the only living thing in world. I decide that I will go out into the desert, go camping for a night. My life feels stripped clean of baggage, everything is falling away like great sheets of burnt skin, revealing shiny, pink, newborn flesh beneath the crusted surface. 
+
+It's four in the afternoon when I say goodbye to Joe and head down Moab's main drag. My life is like Utah, laid bare in the afternoon sun. Harsh and forlornly beautiful, the canyon walls lull me, spreading out my thoughts like the dotted Juniper trees, creosote bushes, and gnarled, twisted trunks of the mesquite that cover the landscape. 
+
+I go the bank and withdraw the last of my money. I eat lunch at a Mexican restaurant in an old adobe building. An ancient, wizened, Navaho woman serves me beans and handmade flour tortillas. I watch her as I eat. Two smudge-faced Indian girls, maybe four or five years old, help her stir an enormous pot of beans. The girls watched me intently, silently, with enormous liquid brown eyes that seemed irrigated with understanding. As the old woman wraps up my leftover tortillas and beans in foil, I try to absorb all the sights, sounds, and smells of her strange hobbit-like universe. The secret of life is revealed as beans and tortillas seen through the eyes of a child. 
+
+Next door is a mountaineering shop. I go in and ask around for a ride up to Canyonlands. I get one from two hippies, rock climbers. They seem out of place and foolish after the old Navaho woman. They are wearing the fashions of earth first and other environmental activists who share a fetish for Kakhi's, Tevas, Tofu, and flat tasteless foodstuffs. They mock a young couple in an SUV while we sit on the porch. The radical tree camping, pottery-making, hemp-weaving, Dave Foreman-worshipping, mushroom-eating, toms of Maine-consuming, hippie-environmental-social-consciousness-raising, guitar-playing radical of the outback is essentially the same as the BMW-driving, Starbucks-drinking, software-writing, technology-worshipping, juice-drinking, spa-loving, health club-hopping, sandals-wearing, dog-walking, family-raising, white picket fence-building, church-attending, drug-abstaining, yuppie, evil consumer, destroying the world, capitalist pig. One uses Tom's of Maine and the other Crest, but we're all still fundamentally lost.
+
+My hippie climber friends stop at the supermarket for trail mix and candles. I opted for steak, beans, potatoes, and a bag of chemically enhanced briquettes that will light with the butt of my cigarette. It's just a matter of taste. I request paper bags and roll them down so the hippies won't abandon me for not being one of their own. I ride in the back of their VW bus, which turns the half hour drive from Moab to the east entrance of Canyonlands, into a two hour long crawl. As we switchback up the canyon walls to the top of the Mesa country, the hippies tell me their story. They're both college students on a semester long vacation. They are astonished to learn that I didn't vote, that I never have and I never will. They ask if I'm disillusioned or bitter. Strange question to ask a stranger. I tell them none of it matters one way or the other. I'm just trying to live. I light a cigarette and let them do the talking, and they do, all the way across the grasslands right on into the campground. 
+
+Finally we arrive and I escape their refrigerator drone into the peaceful silence of the campground, picking a spot at the opposite end of the loop from my sandal-shod friends. I proceed to build a fire in the light of the fading sun. The afterglow licks across the thunderheads to my back. Sizzling fat drips into the fire. It takes quite a while to cook the enormous side of beef bought. I kneel down beside the fire on the old sleeping bag that Joe gave me. I'm thinking of the woman I have never been able to see, staring at that well in Cyprus. She's there, she's always been there and now for the first time I realize who she's waiting for. I feel an effluence of enthusiasm; a taproot breaks through the dry soil and is swamped with underground water. I pull the meat off and through it on a paper plate. I sprinkle on salt and devour it with my hands. My plate is stained a greasy Moroccan-pink color. The potato swims in the greasy blood, trailing it's own gooey mixture of butter and pulverized potato flesh like a tanker ship leaking crude oil in the pristine sanctity of the ocean. Damn good food.
+
+I finish the steak and potato. I save the beans for breakfast. I toss the plate in the fire and rinse my hands in the faucet near the entrance. Walking back I absorb the grandeur of the desert. It requires a careful tuning of the eye to detect beauty and life out here, like waking up in the gutter of a trash strew alley behind a bar in Athens, or noticing that the smog lifts slightly, almost imperceptibly, off the mountains in Mexico City everyday around seven o'clock. Life hangs on even in the toughest spots, like a juniper tree, alone, clinging to the side of the canyon wall. It's able to exist in the slightest, most overlooked, fissure, surrounded by a monolith of compressed sandstone, which yields nothing, there is only the one tree. That this tree could be able to survive is miraculous, but that I should be here, that I should be right here, in this place, at this moment, staring at this tree, is truly miraculous.
+
+Pregnant memories swell up, miraculous moments, like when the light of the sun breaks through the sullen clouds of an afternoon thunderstorm and hits the steeple of an old church just as you come up over a crest in the road. You catch them when she stirs at night and tosses her hair so that so that it falls across your face with the delicate odor of peach blossoms and perfume mixed with the earthiness of her warm breath. You hear it when the crescendo of thundering drums climbs up out of the ninth symphony and lodges in the back of your brain, sending chills down your spine. Some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment. Every one of us has moments of transformation when we feel, if only for a mere second, that something larger than the present is in the sky or the music. How long must ancient man have wondered 'where do these feelings come from?' He must have ruminated over this for centuries and finally he invented language in order to describe how he felt to other domesticated monkeys. With language that great caveman Thak separated us from the entire animal kingdom. Not by virtue of communication, for any one who has ever observed even the simplest of animals, knows that they communicate. Thak gave us something entirely different, a means of creating memories. He forever severed us from time. 
+
+But memory has a price, it creates belief. Out of memory came dissention, other monkeys did not agree Thak's feelings. Time moved on and more voices from more and more places were heard and the general became divided and localized. Those that believed one explanation tended to associate with only those that agreed with them, they had their gods, and they were the only gods, the others, on the other side of the proverbial river, lacked THE TRUTH. 
+
+Today there are more gods than ever and even less comprehension of godliness. All of this dissention has not in anyway helped us to understand that initial question-where are emotions coming from? All the philosophizing rants of all the arrogant monkeys can not answer the simplest of questions: who am I? Where is this vitality teeming from? What is emotion? What the hell is really going on down here? Why? 
+
+The wonder and amazement that greeted our forebear's is lost for us. We have explained it away, dissected, mapped, catalogued, and miniaturized it. Unable to comprehend the universe we carefully construct a replication that could be understood. We ignore all the rest, saying in essence, that anything not comprehensible to the human mind does not exist. But it does. Maya knows what I am thinking before I say it. The light continues to pour through the clouds onto steeples, rocky pinnacles, and the front porch of a now vacant cottage in Athens. It is time we floated our way back up to the surface of the pond. Time to start over, to assimilate rather than dissect, to feel rather than speak, to live rather than abstract....
+
+What good is knowing without feeling? Those moments when I am confronted with the essential mysteries of my life and yours, all of our lives, are not something that can be taken apart. I can not break it down, understand the smaller bits individually, and then hope they add up to the same thing I started with. If we stop taking things apart for a minute and just breathe in slowly, one breath at a time, it will flood the hatches and buoyantly draw us up to the surface of things. Not many people do. We have found a distraction, which eases the anxiety that unanswered questions provoked in us-ourselves. We wrote a lullaby called God and put ourselves to sleep. 
+
+	Only an egocentric monkey would dream of being able to understand the orbit of the planets let alone the vastness of all existence. Only a very confused and disoriented creature would throw himself into a corner and examine every little microscopic piece of dirt without first discovering what a monkey was. Herman Hess once said that the only job of man was to find the road that led back to himself. But we, being the tragic creatures we are, doomed forever to a life lived in melodrama and confusion, seldom do such things. Seldom do we celebrate love or transcendence. At our best we celebrate the by-products-music and art. At our worst we record those who were farthest from themselves, the emperors, kings and queens, generals, bishops, monks, people who led the most perverted and hideous of lives. We have created a cult of worship to our egos, to the things that we think are so unique about ourselves at the inescapable expense of the things that we have in common. There are very few lovers rattling around in the tomes of recorded history, we haven't paid too much attention to them, or to what they knew, our editing is slanted in favor of violence and destruction. We have driven ourselves mad in the midst of a garden of delights. 
+
+But fear not, the subconscious mind is in the act of creating... always and forever.... It is creating even the conscious mind. Everything that you think you are is a dream that some other part of you is having. Only next to god are all the political games that divide men stripped away out here you arrive naked and proud. Only then do you see every man and woman as your ally and your love, only scorched clean of the petty differences of race, creed, and belief, do we draw together huddled in fear of insanity which we ourselves have wrought upon each other. Forged and smelt in the dry heat of rock furnaces, the charnel ovens brew alchemal liquid, souls fuse, combinations arise, the experiment of which we are all part, continues onward. No hope save love. No cure, but love and death and then, Quien Sabe? 
+
+The final rays of sun disappear, the chill of night settles in. I take my fresh pack of cigarettes and wander down to the edge of the canyon. I sit with my legs dangling off a rock that's perched on the rim and extends out into space. All around me there is nothing but air and under me only a brief moment of rock and then more timelessness we call air. 
+
+The internal merges with the external, the timeless with the unique. I go roaring back through memories of childhood, selves that I was truly, but am no longer today. I see all the marauding personalities, which have governed this thing called I. I cast off all doubts. I am ready. A thousand faces pass like the jerky photomontages of Man Ray, each pair of eyes radiant unto itself. Delicately, in the corners of a stray glance, I catch the recognition of understanding in other's eyes. Only love brings us any closer. 
+
+I watch a feast of thoughts and personalities coming together for the first time, yet dining like old friends. It's a reunion, a chance to catch-up on where each has been, what has happened, and what they have felt. It turns to a smorgasbord of love, but there is endless debate, dissention, and rising voices. A circus dine roars around my head, the wave crests at cacophony and breaks over me leaving only silence. Silence that carries on its back a poignant nostalgia for the past and a calm understanding of the future. I touch for a moment the void, the nothingness into which you must cast yourself if you wish to tap the source of everything. Riddles that once seemed ridiculous to me are solved with simplest of maneuvers of truth. They gleam like diamonds. In the blinking, blank-look of the deer just before impact, there is understanding, the look of recognition that it is all nothing. No thing. What do I want out of this life? Nothing. Nothing at all. I understood suddenly and with sharp focus the difference between understanding how something works and understand what it is. I see that even the void of understanding is not the end, but only a means to something else, which would also be yet another means, until the final thought was had and the conversation between self and the other ceases forever, wedding them together.  
+
+And the two shall be joined as one. A net was cast over the side of the ship and the wheel turned starboard to trawl the giant net through the waters of the past. It plays out in slide show fashion. Endless images of my own arrogance play themselves onto the back of my closed eyelids like a cinema of embarrassment. I go to myself, as stranger might go, out of pity, to reach down a hand and help myself up. And then love flows through me and makes everything hyperreal and tactile, as if feelings were rock and trees. Desert silence is the answer to the endless question of the universe. The transitory nature of my own existence is illuminated and I am washed with feelings of warmth and celebration. The embarrassment fades and is replaced by the sheer hilarious joy. My own folly falls along side the folly of all those I have ever know and ever will know, a giant heaping ball of laughter. Coiled up tight like yarn, batted about by the kitten of the universe, it dances nightly behind the moon, all our selves playing as children, endlessly. 
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+The moon rises from the east; I watch in silence. My life unfolds behind my eyes. I watch memories I had no conscious knowledge of, like a father watching his son play in the yard. They start off recent memories, of Maya, of Dean, of Jimmy, of moments shared with each and then it races backward, to college classes, high school girlfriends, playground friends.... Until I am in utero listening to my mother's heart beating steadily. And then farther back to a point of no consciousness, other stories unfold-genetic memories. I see the light of the fifteen-century breaking through the night, hitting church spires and scorching the brass coffers of foreign temples. Wild and scenes from Arabian Nights appear with silken tapestries, women's arms entwined in gold bands; and then sagas of Hassan I Sabbah, all the wisdom seekers of the Fertile Crescent. I fade into a background of Egyptian palaces. I am carried about by the wafting fragrance of spices and silk from the orient. There was a warm glow of light at the end of hallway that slowly, as the eyes adjust, reveals itself as a temple of splendors. The walls are adorned with rugs and woven tapestries in designs that act out the living myths of the sun gods. The floor is blanketed in pillows and a sweet incense smoke floated in wafts of Jasmine and myrrh. In the center of the room slightly elevated on steps was an alter upon which lies a beautiful and naked goddess, a statue, an answer, a testament to any question that you might ask. In her silence I swim the thalassic of sorrow and joy in placid, caressing laps. I learn infinite things, make them finite, knowable. I build great castles, great monuments, great societies, great people, and tear them all down again to start over. I live a thousand lonely, huddled nights, from bearskin to tapestries, to the silk sheets of Manhattan penthouses. I climb every mountain peak, slide down the scree and talus slopes, and meet with pharaohs and voudans, with Moses and God. I hold a billion women lovingly in my arms and give birth to a trillion children through all history's wombs. From Sarah to Satan, all fill themselves with my nourishment. A spiraling double helix of love corkscrews all about my mind.
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+She is waiting by the fountain, in the park, just outside of the town in Cyprus where I have never been. I watch her sit for hours, staring at nothing, or so it looks to me. She wears a black dress with a matching veil. Her eyes are fixed on the pump handle of the well. She sits motionless with the quiet smile of a woman in rapture, a woman in private, mysterious thoughts. I see Maya's face in the background, in that indeterminable second after where everything is. I see the source of my unhappiness, being so overwhelmed with consciousness of myself I lost myself. Everything is laid unequivocally bare in the austerity of that truth, the contradiction finally fades. All things are true and not true all at the same moment, a place indescribable, incommunicable precisely because it exists below the refinement of words. It is too raw to be explained in words, it must be devoured with the intensity of an animal ripping at its prey. I feel it for what seems like an eternity. I remember coming back to fire in dazed kind of trance like state that held me like a loved one returned from a long voyage at see. I want to feel this always to live in this mindscape-whole world be damned. 
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+I eventually fall asleep in a huddled pose beside the fire; I sleep fitfully under the starscape dreaming of the Mayan shaman riding a silver gelding, like Icarius, out of the fiery sun-gilded gates of hell. The Shaman swerves and bears down on the I that is me with menacing intent, jolting the dream element awake and into a sleepnonsleep trance on the isthmus of reality. I am bewildered, but not afraid. He growls and leaps at me, but I stand my ground. He rattles bones and conjures hideous demons, but I don't move. He stops and smiles at me. He clasps his hand over mine and leads me outside. We are on the corner of dusty street in Cyprus, pedestrians are frozen in time, nothing moves save the Shaman and I. Not a breath stirs, there is no wind, we are in a vacuum. The shaman motions for me to sit on a fallen tree and he pulls out a cigarette. He lights it and inhales. From the smoke of his cigarette there emerges a pattern, loose at first, but then it begins rapidly organizing itself. He keeps smiling at me as he smokes. The smoke it still, it hangs in the air. He's about half way done with the cigarette before I recognize that the smoke is turning to the ghost figure of the woman. She steps out of the smoke and sit down beside me. She has a face of smoke and mirrors, more beautiful than any human face could be. I have to squint to look at her. She smiles and a thousand angel trumpets blast. She takes my hand in hers. She stands and leads me across the street to the town well. She leads me right up to the edge of it so that I can look down into it. I can't see the bottom. I grow afraid, but she squeezes my hand again and I relax. Slowly at first, scenes begin to appear in the well. Opulent scenes play themselves out for us. I see great Persian empires laid out, expanding and retracting, moving across time in slow molasses-like motions, cities where the sun stands still and bow to monstrous creations of the mind, horrifying and seductive at the same time. Like ancient Tibetan art, there is no distinction between the province of my mind and the province of my body. Women swim in south china seas of ambient warmth, moving in playful erotic motions, cresting like dolphins. Creatures of all forms walk streets of ancient origin; I see cobblestones and whitewashed buildings with European wrought iron balconies. Tapestries hang out from the window beckon the passersby to climb up into untold pleasures of body and mind. Everything is beautiful beyond the limits of imagination. The woman turns and wraps me in her arms, her lips never move but I hear a voice say, "see, I love you."
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+I wake up several times during the night and put more wood on the fire. It's freezing when I get up at dawn. I do jumping jacks and run in circles to warm myself up. I realize I don't have can opener for the beans so have nothing for breakfast. I decide to walk back to Moab. I take the road most of the way in case the desert or fatigue should get the better of me. About half way there, around noon a young couple in a camper picks me up. They drop me off just outside of town, on the banks of the Green River. I go down to the shoreline and sit down for a while. I smoke a couple of cigarette and spend some time without thinking of anything. My mind is completely blank. Dean is gone, Jimmy and Chloe are leaving, there is nothing for me in this world to return to. I feel free of everything. I kneel down by the edge the Green River and lean over a pool of still water to washing my face. My reflection stops me. I sit on my knees, staring at my face, as if meeting it for the first time. My eyebrow has completely grown back. I run my fingers through the thick black hair. My reflection smiles up at me.
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