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diff --git a/ch1/cuts.txt b/ch1/cuts.txt index fc929fe..b16a976 100644 --- a/ch1/cuts.txt +++ b/ch1/cuts.txt @@ -6,21 +6,7 @@ Silence. Chloe's head collapses back when she laughs, and it's a guttural laugh, but high pitched and her left arm twitches a little when she really gets rolling, but right now it doesn't because she only chuckles and then her head snaps back forward. "Yeah I can see that. But I was thinking maybe we could get a jigsaw puzzle or something." -"" -"We should get a jigsaw puzzle." - -"Frustrating. Very very frustrating." - -"But fun because you're struggling." - -"Maybe." - -"Well I'm going to go to get a jigsaw puzzle and you're going to help me with it." - -"Okay, but I'm not going to the store, florescent lights scare me." - -"I understand. I'll be back in a bit." Blinking fire flies -- twenty four frames per second -- do da do dada -- roosting -- hear we go again -- charred steel drooping -- sniffing -- bagpipes wheezing -- stuttering the future -- glistens and sparkles by design -- can you hear -- the morning line -- the polyphony -- new everyday -- falling off your tongue -- was it good for you? @@ -105,27 +91,6 @@ Jimmy reads like James Joyce wrote. There is nothing to say. Do you realize that Scratch used to sing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" when he was hunting around the fridge for coffee grounds. The "fridge" was an old icebox that Scratch had found on the side of the road and patched up. When he drank too much and passed out before sundown, he'd forget to restock it. The melted remnants of yesterday's block of ice would eventually force open the door and the bag of coffee would go sliding across the kitchen floor, skittering to all kinds of strange places. "You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" Scratch used to sing when he looked for the bag. 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..." He would do this little dance, all crooked and insane. I lived with Scratch for a while after Dean left. He had a bad knee that made his dancing comical. I used to sit there and watch him do that hypnotic, crooked little dance of his. He would start gyrating at the knees, flopping his arms about while he sang. The first time I saw him do it I thought he was having a seizure the way he convulsed wildly about. In India they teach that dance to snakes and, in the sewers of America, cockroaches feasting on radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own. Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare, they sit quietly underground. We go about our lives while they are learning that dance, passing it on to their children, teaching them how to use it. One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation... devour the president raw as the live internet streams feed the blood soaked scene. The cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation... "Behold I am." He will dance and spin and enchant... the numbers will explode. Scratch was one of kind. Later I found out the line is a Tom Waits lyric. -I am sitting outside the café smoking and sweating. It's two days hotter. Jimmy pulls up in the Falcon, all grinning like he's getting away with something. He is freshly shaven; he looks like a Unix cultist. He has close shaven hair and thick framed, black, sixties style glasses, but he's more gearhead and really he's neither geek nor gearhead. He revs the engine a few times before getting out. He's wearing a greasy, oil-stained jumpsuit and racing gloves. He leaves the motor running and sits down at the table with me. - -I have been occupied with trying to reconstruct Jimmy's descriptions of Williamsburg and Brooklyn in my head, trying to assimilate a whole city from them, trying to put Maya in them, but she won't fit. Unfortunately, Up There will have nothing to do with Down Here, they dance and dance, but Up There can never get her hands into Down Here's pants. I give up. Even Jimmy says he can't remember what living in New York was like and he's only been back a year. I've never lived there, just a handful of visits, weeks here and there, but I'm moving someday. I try to picture Maya running down the street to greet me-her with that Breakfast at Tiffany's smile. - -"I installed a four barrel carburetor after I left your place the other day...increased power," he grins at me, but the grin fades to a sheepish curl. "You want to get some lunch?" - -It's nearly dinner, but maybe that's only time speeding up. There is a plethora of food not five feet from where we are sitting, but I want to go for a ride in the Falcon. The custom headers he installed last week make it roar like a primordial beast-something slinky and covered with scales that crawled out of the Ford plant back when great steel dinosaurs ruled the land. A beautifully sleek environmental nightmare in the midst of disposable soda cans on wheels. Jimmy wants to drive. Heads turn at every corner, herbivores gawking at the revving, roaring carnivores with a mixture of admiration, envy and fear. The Falcon howls from a standstill to breakneck speed, the force neatly ashing my cigarette in the process. The impenetrable jungle across the road steams like a freshly washed beggar, thick kudzu itches at elms and maples. The Japanese revenge on the Americans who chased them around the South Pacific jungles. War stories are always set in jungles this century-New Guinea, Cambodia, Guatemala, Columbia; soldiers march in jungles, hacking vines, contracting microbes unknown. Sultry jungles that should have steamed up history with lovers, sweaty and exhausted, but instead turned to horror and death, and still stink of centipede nibbled bones. Rot. Blurs of grass waving in the wind of cars ahead, shopping centers, mini malls, open fields, bovine genetic research centers next to botanical gardens followed by apartment complexes. The homogenized sanitized landscape of America. I long for the desert, the candyland Gaudi imitated, to roar across the dinosaur bones of Utah, the sandstone caverns harboring the remains of a drip sandcastle youth. - -I see you standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the bedroom into the courtyard of your building on Minetta. I watch you from the bed languishing on stained white sheets. You are wearing nothing, leg propped up on the sill, standing and swaying slightly to the beat of a thick base drum. Your flesh is soft milk froth; you walk back to the stove and light a cigarette off the burner, swinging your ass to the music, mainly for my benefit. Do not worry Maya. I am not so far away as memory, I will come to the city soon, but it must be the right moment. Be on edge; be aware. I am letting you grow inside me Maya; I am incubating you for a little while longer so that when you hatch it will be like stepping into a cage with lions, no club, no gun, only naked and trembling. - -Jimmy is heading out of town, down farther, we pass signs for the interstate, and he turns in the opposite direction. Neither of us speaks, the stereo does not work. There is only the rush of humid air. The wind carving in violent eddies around the side mirrors, a primitive whistling tune, the first amplified song-telegraphs heard in the distance, coming from far on the other side of the rockaway-wind blasting down ancient conifers and cycads, dusty meteor backdrafts carving fresh sandstone into parabolic arches that begin far below the surface. My oldest memory is of walking down a trail in Canyonlands National Park. I am singing a song as I walk, but I'm not really walking, I'm on my father's shoulders. He is walking and I am singing a song with him and my mother. We are hiking down from the mesa tops to the Green River, I can see the clumped fringes of the junipers, smell fecund woodrot and fresh desert air, feel the bruised and sullen thunderheads in the sky above me as I bounce and sway with my father's lurching downhill gait, but I can't make out the words or identify of the song. I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all. Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and tone the past with the palate of the present. Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in a hazy, brown, discolored way, but it's not the smog-scenes of dust, carbon excrement overlaying each other-a photomontage of choking, exhausted skies. In flickering stills, twenty four frames per second, here and there a frame or two missing, little glitches...jagged cut to a subway shot, brown faces black hair ... lay on top an image of pyramid excavation, digging up to solve the Mayan Caper... years ago, you understand... she was standing right next to me and then...a warm, sweet smelling cab and my father said, "Hey, look-a Kentucky Fried Chicken," a kaleidoscope of disappointment and guilt... the shock of fried chicken. Everything focusing into the sun; burnt in fantastical visions-not fear in the sense of a threat, much worse, a lingering in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that haunts indefinitely, then fades again in the face of day to day activities-it's all going to stop someday. - -It's a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once, stone still, shell-shocked, and stuck in the middle of an enormous red rock arch in Canyonlands. She was paralyzed on a narrow strip of sandstone, a fragile bridge hundreds of feet in the air. The digging hooks of unbridled terror had burned into her brain and created a spellbinding feedback loop that forbade her to move. It's a fear that anchors your mind back in the primate body because you feel, you cannot rationalize it away. It rips you out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange space where there is only you. I watched her stuck there, unable to help herself, no doubt staring at the four-hundred foot drop-off on both sides of her and the meager four-foot wide sandstone arch that held her frail existence in place. Suspended in mid-air, she saw herself for the first time the way we are: naked, cold and deathly afraid. - -"Here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, but definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken," the cab driver smiles crooked piano key teeth, gold caps and black octaves over moist gums that crawl down hiding the strings. He sternly advises against eating there. - -It's near dark and another lazy thunderstorm drifts in from the southwest. The clouds are somber and premature darkness closes over the world. Could easily be the Northeast-New York- Brooklyn-fall-the East River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people-onlookers too drunk to remember what they are there to look at. They lurch out of bars and bounce against doorways like grenades rolled out on the street. Inside the steel doors, a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse rhythmically-her breasts pool salt onto my tongue. Her flesh is hard and metallurgic, turning brittle under my hands. The fear is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers, up celestial heights, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, hovering like 1910 bankers awaiting the thief. The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired connections to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life. Cool hard water distills in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a collapsing supernova and I am cast down a tube, a tunnel, endlessly falling, clattering off the walls, building speed in a vacuum with no terminal velocity. Reach out for limbs, for human hands to catch me.... Scream and there is no sound; settle in, the twinkling light shining above. Surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim... the taxis in Times Square... An auburn haired girl I loved in seventh grade... Radio broadcasts of unknown origin pulling down the multiverse's own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static, pure unadulterated signal, and, through it all, ash keeps falling. Fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane. Whitewashed ceilings hanging low and ominous.... Bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an insurmountable mountain of tires, wounds agape, thick clumps of oil leaking from his mouth. And the autistic child pointing at you, laughing, unable to fathom how you cling to your definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who.... breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Cold fusion dreams of the anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen. The continual settling of dust weighing down...the Mayan priest laboring slowly up endless steps.... Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo. Squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter. It's a wonder ...that they aren't transparent by now ...that evolution did not anticipate the advent of the opposable thumb.... The unopposable domination of the thumb, leading to an insect superiority, mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies ...darning needles, sewing shut your lips. Shit from the sky. Taxman comes for your baby. Unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing personal, just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auschwitz on down the line. The puncture wounds... Only taking orders you understand, just doing our job from Independence on down the line. A sad money grubbing hunter gathers up his children and thanks his gods they are his and he their god. Only taking orders you understand. Got a family to feed. - -And then the dirt driveway. Shifting to park. The keys slide from the ignition. The last crackle of radio. Pop. Hiss. Silence. Open the doors. Crush out the cigarette. End transmission. - - * * * diff --git a/ch2/ch2.txt b/ch2/ch2.txt index 6016f1f..5c27ac0 100644 --- a/ch2/ch2.txt +++ b/ch2/ch2.txt @@ -140,4 +140,44 @@ It's then that I decide Chloe is a shallot among onions. We head back outside wh Later we take the dishes inside and head off to the river. After a few cookie-cutter suburbs and a quick duck along the side of a house, sneaking over the back fence, heaving the dog and all, a shortcut Jimmy found a few months back, we join the river trail. Annie is fifty yards ahead darting about sniffing, endless sniffing, there must be a whole universe of smell that we never experience owing to evolutionary prioritizing, specialization, some such idea, certainly there seems enough to drive her insane with smell lust. We stick to the trail along the river's edge, walking absently, single file, paying little attention to each other. About half a mile's walk from the bridge where the road crosses the river, there is a rocky outcropping that juts out to the middle of the Oconee. Ever since the first warm days of spring we have been walking down here and lying on this rock, shirtless, basking in the sun like pink fleshy lizards. It's beautiful here, trees in bloom, sun warm and bright, air thick with river humidity, birds chattering in the bushes. Dragonflies flit in the middle of the sun -- drenched stream; water striders dart about in pockets of glassy water stagnant from the sheltering rocks and fallen tree limbs. It is nothing but beautiful here, except that it's ugly. The old growth forests are gone, the river polluted with old tires, plastic baggies, and pesticides, and the sky choked with dirty brown haze and crisscrossed by streaking jet contrails. Still if you lie down and close your eyes, listen to the water and the insects and the birds and carefully edit out the cars back on the bridge, it sounds Mesozoic. It sounds inviting and warm. Careful editing. It's something you learn from film or television, you know just when to turn, just when to cut, just when to fade out, when the sunset imperceptible begins to wan, when the moment has reached apex, when the crescendo is tapering, and you turn away, spin the dial, change the channel. The couple is standing on the bluff with the setting sun behind them, maybe it's a tight shot, their faces two stories high and her moist lips backlit by a heart attack red in the sky, gentle purple clouds between their lips. The circle swooping pelicans and power lines and passing cars have been excluded from our view, or maybe it's a medium shot, from the waist up, them leaning on the black iron railing, the tops of the bluff in the distance keep your eyes from drifting off into the curtains, they draw you in, and the heart attack and the purple, she purses her lips so you know they are wet, inviting, soft. Maybe it's a long shot, they are smaller yet, only shadows now, happening against a background of pelicans and power lines and foreshortened cars passing in front; they are background now, noise around the edges of the scene, and yet they pull you forward, you demand the camera move in, you want it so badly, you want to be closer, you want to move in microscopic close-ups, the pores of her skin, the follicles of his stubble, the cracks of lipstick, the oil in their glands, the beautiful flaws they must have. Maybe they are shot from a boom, from above because you are better than them, you know their isolation is illusory, you sense them as you sense a computer is on the instant you step into a room, and you never forget that light is projected, your imagination drifts to dust in the beam, floating particles, they are part of the story too, because it is the same story, it is the only story, the only story there will ever be, the only story there is, forcing you to take it all in, to see everything -- polluted and pure in one breath without looking. And Maya, where are you breathing? I am coming to you in a sweeping pan. In a long, low-flying, forward-looking shot that sweeps in, skimming over the Bronx, tenement bricks and children playing in empty lots, a bottle rocket shoots up and away, and across the river in a blink, the coughing brownstones of Harlem, then straight over the park, panning down with no foresight now, blindly buildings pass faster and faster and then sweeping up, screaming higher up and slowly falling over, a barnstorming backward loop and then diving down in jerky frames of cloud, distant skyscrapers, and a close up falling, down the bricks of a building fourteen stories high to the window on the north side of the third floor. And she is backlit by the evening sun reflected in the mirror, and it is too bright to see clearly, she is a shadow and then we move up again, gliding now like a bird, a falcon, a peregrine falcon roosting among the high rises of Wall Street, setting off hunting, skimming the wires and cables of the Manhattan Bridge, down Flatbush Avenue over the fire escapes of Seventh and First where one day, years from now, it might all make sense, dipping down to see the soft caressing bars of the railing where we will play games in the hot sun and laugh and not know what has become of ourselves but like where we come from, from these long running memories that look beautiful in the dark velvet draped room where no one is looking as the camera sweeps out now, over Coney Island, the lapping waves, and then finally the mouth of the river and only the endless rippling of sea, skimming closer, swells merging into one continuous mass that screams the same story again. We all fit together. We all fit together. We all fit together. + * * * + +Jimmy is sweeping his porch as I stroll up, his thin frame lost in a dusty cloud. He stops and coughs a minute or two. The haze settles a bit. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on the inside of his shirt. He is covered in dust with eyes ringed lemur white. Jimmy is a carpenter. A post -- graduate carpenter because sawdust is more complex than the simple stuff of library shelves. Sawdust is soft tallow, a malleable tonic, and open to further disintegration, wood chips from rough planing, smaller particles expelled from whirling blades, the sugary whisper of dust expelled from sandpaper. Libraries have only one flavor of dust. Human debris. Tiny flecks of shedding skin accumulating around the glacial increase of perfect -- bound knowledge, the decay of people, slowly falling apart in alphabetic lives. Sawdust is the evolution of form. Termites eat sawdust. Destruction and digested rebirth. Jimmy builds things with his hands. Sometimes pocked, slapshod things, framing and roofing to restore dilapidated houses. Once he spent two weeks digging in the crawlspace of a cinderblock shotgun house, thinking the whole time it was going to fall and squash him with the cockroaches and rats that scurried over his legs. His more exciting projects are the highly skilled woodworking ones -- the gorgeous black walnut wine cellar he built last fall. He took me over to see it when it was done, sanded down to 220 grit, satin and specular, obsidian. It lives in the basement of a restaurant owner. It harbors vintage grapes from around the world behind its temperature -- controlled, walnut -- framed, glass doorway. There is a vacuum fan to suck out the dust and a once -- a -- week maid to free those particles too stubborn for wind. + + + + + +It is one of those Octavio Paz nights where the sky speaks Spanish and looks surly, doubly purple its usual self, and the stars are a Navaho sand painting stretched across the ceiling of the world. Serpentine eels wiggling around in the electrical storm of the mind. Lightening strikes somewhere, a thought in an architect's head, suspension bridge wires, wink and smile. + +The Falcon roars. It is our fading youth, but not middle aged or mid -- twenties crisis sort of fading youth. Such things having come and gone with the uncomfortable realization that nothing ever happens. Tall buildings are raised. Then razed. You go on. You don't want to. You want it to be painful, you want it to be so fucking gloriously painful it makes you cry. But it doesn't. And even if it did, what then? Space changes. Time fluctuates. But it plods on, the purr and growl of cylinders roaring, then settling, then roaring. In the intermittent silence of shifting gears the questions loom, perhaps it is all a lie and you are alone, perhaps the questions are only slow, insidious dribbles of propagandacid trickling from your oil filter, leaving thick meaningless splotches on the asphalt, a slow drain needing only a new filter. Perhaps you are sitting in the machine, on the machine, perhaps the machine is you, the acceleration an extension of femur to tibia, to talus, to phalanges and fading slowly from flesh and bone to leather and rubber, and then metal rods, a cable snaking through the firewall, an exposed and surprisingly flimsy extension from mind to throttle in one unbroken line, room for silence only in the space between sole and accelerator. + +Downtown. The Manhattan. We are in the Manhattan. There are drinks on the table, drinks poured in the mismatched helter -- skelter collection of glasses used to transfer the goods into the service. Jimmy is talking, no longer his animated self, a brief pause, his second wind will kick in soon. He is saying things quietly. Excuses I believe. Excuses for the excuses that have grown weary of dragging around. He feels nothing is getting done and he knows why. It isn't going to get done. Lullabies. Turn the page. When you look in his eyes, his moving lips, they look just like yours, how you imagine yours to look, how yours must look when you spit out your own excuses for the excuses that are excusing things you perhaps ought not to have been trying to do in the first place and you wonder if people look at your teeth when you talk or do they look at your eyes with the arrogance of complacency and contentment, watching smugly as your teeth begin to fall out, and you chew them, bleeding gums, torn lips and chunks of tooth choking back the words. + +And all the while the shuffling of indie rock feet scuffing from door to bar, the awkward brush of corduroy pants, the stealthy screaming fibers of too tight t -- shirts stretching to meekly collect drinks and shuffle off to a corner table. But we are in the corner table. We have your corner table. You are in the open now. You are exposed. All of you. We're staring at you. Do you feel on stage? Isn't it what you've always wanted? The thing too dangerous to be dreamed, the thing you have denied yourselves for so long. Slouching, weepy -- eyed, meekly waiting to inherit? This is what you want. We are giving you the opportunity. You are seizing it, I can see it in your hunched shoulders, the semi -- permanent curvature of the spine developed from too many years spent bending over thrift store racks, record bins, eyes squinted from reading the imprints of limited edition vinyl. You will come here soon. Soon the filters will spring leaks. Thick warm liquid will begin to ooze out, cigarette breath grow hotter, hearts sputter, and you will want to feel, you will want so fucking bad to feel. But it doesn't come. It is leaking out from under you, crumbling from the inside. Violent smugness is leaking from drinks, hazardous waste collecting and pooling, seeping across the floor. + + + + + +Jimmy pulls up in the Falcon, all grinning like he's getting away with something. He is freshly shaven; he looks like a Unix cultist. He has close shaven hair and thick framed, black, sixties style glasses, but he's more gearhead and really he's neither geek nor gearhead. He revs the engine a few times before getting out. He's wearing a greasy, oil-stained jumpsuit and racing gloves. He leaves the motor running and sits down at the table with me. + +I have been occupied with trying to reconstruct Jimmy's descriptions of Williamsburg and Brooklyn in my head, trying to assimilate a whole city from them, trying to put Maya in them, but she won't fit. Unfortunately, Up There will have nothing to do with Down Here, they dance and dance, but Up There can never get her hands into Down Here's pants. I give up. Even Jimmy says he can't remember what living in New York was like and he's only been back a year. I've never lived there, just a handful of visits, weeks here and there, but I'm moving someday. I try to picture Maya running down the street to greet me-her with that Breakfast at Tiffany's smile. + +"I installed a four barrel carburetor after I left your place the other day...increased power," he grins at me, but the grin fades to a sheepish curl. "You want to get some lunch?" + +It's nearly dinner, but maybe that's only time speeding up. There is a plethora of food not five feet from where we are sitting, but I want to go for a ride in the Falcon. The custom headers he installed last week make it roar like a primordial beast-something slinky and covered with scales that crawled out of the Ford plant back when great steel dinosaurs ruled the land. A beautifully sleek environmental nightmare in the midst of disposable soda cans on wheels. Jimmy wants to drive. Heads turn at every corner, herbivores gawking at the revving, roaring carnivores with a mixture of admiration, envy and fear. The Falcon howls from a standstill to breakneck speed, the force neatly ashing my cigarette in the process. The impenetrable jungle across the road steams like a freshly washed beggar, thick kudzu itches at elms and maples. The Japanese revenge on the Americans who chased them around the South Pacific jungles. War stories are always set in jungles this century-New Guinea, Cambodia, Guatemala, Columbia; soldiers march in jungles, hacking vines, contracting microbes unknown. Sultry jungles that should have steamed up history with lovers, sweaty and exhausted, but instead turned to horror and death, and still stink of centipede nibbled bones. Rot. Blurs of grass waving in the wind of cars ahead, shopping centers, mini malls, open fields, bovine genetic research centers next to botanical gardens followed by apartment complexes. The homogenized sanitized landscape of America. I long for the desert, the candyland Gaudi imitated, to roar across the dinosaur bones of Utah, the sandstone caverns harboring the remains of a drip sandcastle youth. + +I see you standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the bedroom into the courtyard of your building on Minetta. I watch you from the bed languishing on stained white sheets. You are wearing nothing, leg propped up on the sill, standing and swaying slightly to the beat of a thick base drum. Your flesh is soft milk froth; you walk back to the stove and light a cigarette off the burner, swinging your ass to the music, mainly for my benefit. Do not worry Maya. I am not so far away as memory, I will come to the city soon, but it must be the right moment. Be on edge; be aware. I am letting you grow inside me Maya; I am incubating you for a little while longer so that when you hatch it will be like stepping into a cage with lions, no club, no gun, only naked and trembling. + +Jimmy is heading out of town, down farther, we pass signs for the interstate, and he turns in the opposite direction. Neither of us speaks, the stereo does not work. There is only the rush of humid air. The wind carving in violent eddies around the side mirrors, a primitive whistling tune, the first amplified song-telegraphs heard in the distance, coming from far on the other side of the rockaway-wind blasting down ancient conifers and cycads, dusty meteor backdrafts carving fresh sandstone into parabolic arches that begin far below the surface. My oldest memory is of walking down a trail in Canyonlands National Park. I am singing a song as I walk, but I'm not really walking, I'm on my father's shoulders. He is walking and I am singing a song with him and my mother. We are hiking down from the mesa tops to the Green River, I can see the clumped fringes of the junipers, smell fecund woodrot and fresh desert air, feel the bruised and sullen thunderheads in the sky above me as I bounce and sway with my father's lurching downhill gait, but I can't make out the words or identify of the song. I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all. Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and tone the past with the palate of the present. Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in a hazy, brown, discolored way, but it's not the smog-scenes of dust, carbon excrement overlaying each other-a photomontage of choking, exhausted skies. In flickering stills, twenty four frames per second, here and there a frame or two missing, little glitches...jagged cut to a subway shot, brown faces black hair ... lay on top an image of pyramid excavation, digging up to solve the Mayan Caper... years ago, you understand... she was standing right next to me and then...a warm, sweet smelling cab and my father said, "Hey, look-a Kentucky Fried Chicken," a kaleidoscope of disappointment and guilt... the shock of fried chicken. Everything focusing into the sun; burnt in fantastical visions-not fear in the sense of a threat, much worse, a lingering in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that haunts indefinitely, then fades again in the face of day to day activities-it's all going to stop someday. + +It's a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once, stone still, shell-shocked, and stuck in the middle of an enormous red rock arch in Canyonlands. She was paralyzed on a narrow strip of sandstone, a fragile bridge hundreds of feet in the air. The digging hooks of unbridled terror had burned into her brain and created a spellbinding feedback loop that forbade her to move. It's a fear that anchors your mind back in the primate body because you feel, you cannot rationalize it away. It rips you out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange space where there is only you. I watched her stuck there, unable to help herself, no doubt staring at the four-hundred foot drop-off on both sides of her and the meager four-foot wide sandstone arch that held her frail existence in place. Suspended in mid-air, she saw herself for the first time the way we are: naked, cold and deathly afraid. + +"Here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, but definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken," the cab driver smiles crooked piano key teeth, gold caps and black octaves over moist gums that crawl down hiding the strings. He sternly advises against eating there. + +It's near dark and another lazy thunderstorm drifts in from the southwest. The clouds are somber and premature darkness closes over the world. Could easily be the Northeast-New York- Brooklyn-fall-the East River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people-onlookers too drunk to remember what they are there to look at. They lurch out of bars and bounce against doorways like grenades rolled out on the street. Inside the steel doors, a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse rhythmically-her breasts pool salt onto my tongue. Her flesh is hard and metallurgic, turning brittle under my hands. The fear is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers, up celestial heights, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, hovering like 1910 bankers awaiting the thief. The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired connections to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life. Cool hard water distills in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a collapsing supernova and I am cast down a tube, a tunnel, endlessly falling, clattering off the walls, building speed in a vacuum with no terminal velocity. Reach out for limbs, for human hands to catch me.... Scream and there is no sound; settle in, the twinkling light shining above. Surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim... the taxis in Times Square... An auburn haired girl I loved in seventh grade... Radio broadcasts of unknown origin pulling down the multiverse's own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static, pure unadulterated signal, and, through it all, ash keeps falling. Fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane. Whitewashed ceilings hanging low and ominous.... Bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an insurmountable mountain of tires, wounds agape, thick clumps of oil leaking from his mouth. And the autistic child pointing at you, laughing, unable to fathom how you cling to your definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who.... breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Cold fusion dreams of the anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen. The continual settling of dust weighing down...the Mayan priest laboring slowly up endless steps.... Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo. Squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter. It's a wonder ...that they aren't transparent by now ...that evolution did not anticipate the advent of the opposable thumb.... The unopposable domination of the thumb, leading to an insect superiority, mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies ...darning needles, sewing shut your lips. Shit from the sky. Taxman comes for your baby. Unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing personal, just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auschwitz on down the line. The puncture wounds... Only taking orders you understand, just doing our job from Independence on down the line. A sad money grubbing hunter gathers up his children and thanks his gods they are his and he their god. Only taking orders you understand. Got a family to feed. + +And then the dirt driveway. Shifting to park. The keys slide from the ignition. The last crackle of radio. Pop. Hiss. Silence. Open the doors. Crush out the cigarette. End transmission. + diff --git a/ch3/ch3.txt b/ch3/ch3.txt index c0bf132..5c32286 100644 --- a/ch3/ch3.txt +++ b/ch3/ch3.txt @@ -1,6 +1,35 @@ Slice life like bread gets stale faster -- music gets rid of voice -- guitar retires -- faster newer smaller stuff -- emotional plague hits west coast -- thousands lost -- Mayan caper inferred -- ancient city found -- new reality tunnel finished -- down the driveway -- next to the old rabbit hole -- heads on tails -- significantly more anxious -- needed every day -- sweeter than this -- -Jimmy is sweeping the porch as I stroll up, his thin frame lost in a dusty cloud. He stops and coughs a minute or two. The haze settles a bit. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on the inside of his shirt. He is covered in dust with eyes ringed lemur white. Jimmy is a carpenter. A post -- graduate carpenter because sawdust is more complex than the simple stuff of library shelves. Sawdust is soft tallow, a malleable tonic, and open to further disintegration, wood chips from rough planing, smaller particles expelled from whirling blades, the sugary whisper of dust expelled from sandpaper. Libraries have only one flavor of dust. Human debris. Tiny flecks of shedding skin accumulating around the glacial increase of perfect -- bound knowledge, the decay of people, slowly falling apart in alphabetic lives. Sawdust is the evolution of form. Termites eat sawdust. Destruction and digested rebirth. Jimmy builds things with his hands. Sometimes pocked, slapshod things, framing and roofing to restore dilapidated houses. Once he spent two weeks digging in the crawlspace of a cinderblock shotgun house, thinking the whole time it was going to fall and squash him with the cockroaches and rats that scurried over his legs. His more exciting projects are the highly skilled woodworking ones -- the gorgeous black walnut wine cellar he built last fall. He took me over to see it when it was done, sanded down to 220 grit, satin and specular, obsidian. It lives in the basement of a restaurant owner. It harbors vintage grapes from around the world behind its temperature -- controlled, walnut -- framed, glass doorway. There is a vacuum fan to suck out the dust and a once -- a -- week maid to free those particles too stubborn for wind. + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + +I have a fish tank. Melissa bought it, but I have it. It's here right in front of me right now. There is a fish in it. We put it in yesterday. Melissa named him Dean Jr. Dean Jr. has a plastic castle and a plastic treasure box. He's swimming back and forth between them. He never goes anywhere else. It's like every two seconds his memory expires and he has to go back and see what these damnable things are that he just swam by. Or perhaps its merely that I feel that way, swimming through the city, by the castle, by the rocks, by the crumbling pink stones in the park. We once had gills. I don't mean eveolution, I mean I think we once had gills. Atlantis isn't a mythical city that sank into the sea, it was always under the sea. We lived there, we swam by, and abscent of memory swam by again. A sort of daze. + +I envy you down there, you don't have to swim, you can merely sit. The water is still. Or that's how I imagine it. The surface of the pond, not yet distrubed by the ripless of what is emerging below. You are higher up, in the sunlight filled waters near the surface. Down here things are not well, the memory is fading, senility is survival. + +I finished a novel the other day that you would like. A hungarian author Lazlo Tikos, the book is Midnight. He has another, Dawn. But it's difficult to come by. So is Midnight actually, a friend of mine in the city happens to be the translator so I read an early draft. It's a very strange convoluted story that I don't want to ruin, should you decided to read it (the packagge is one its way to your house), but there was + + + +It made me think, should I set Dean Jr free? I don't think he would last long in the ocean or the sewers, though he's not really worth eating. Perhaps he would survive in the sewers, like the aligator pets that go to large and flushed down the tiolets by enough distrate owners, fearful that the once cute beasts would now eat the children they were purchases for -- you can imagine, those reptile eyes, old, pre-Cambian thoughts lurking down there, a level we perhaps remember on some levvel, some dark spot of our own genentic makeup still carrying markers, the primordial fear that comes from staring at any nearly unblinking creatures, but especially one that's covered in scales and has a flickering tongue that tastes information in the air -- it's similtaneously so forgien and so familiar as to be distrubing, a familiar memory that won't die, like the smell of blood drying in the grass or + +And so down the toilet for poor pet aligator caught up in a fade it neither wanted nor understands, but then the revenge of the sewers where the pet becomes what it was always meant to be -- king. It could be the same for fish I believe. The scales are the same, the + + + + + + + + + + + + In the process of building things, Jimmy goes in and out of many people's houses, under them, on top of them, and once, accidentally, through one of them. He sees an endless variety of lives revealed in collectibles, faded magazines, dolls, signs of defunct companies, pictures of children, vacations, friends, works by artists known and unknown, technological gadgets galore, and once, accidentally, his own contribution to an otherwise ornate living room -- a ceiling, a fan, and a Jimmy deposited by gravity on a nice wooden coffee table covered with miniaturized food which had been set up for a dinner party. Jimmy invades people's lives. But they invite him in. And pay him for the invasion. Sometimes they pay him in things rather than money. Today he came home with a truck full of castoff furniture he has accumulated over the last several months. He has been storing it in his parents' garage, but now he is taking the plunge toward permanence, toward admitting residence. His truck is piled high with heavy objects, a sofa, a table, several chairs, a pinball machine recovered from his parents garage, and boxes of records that are too scratched to play. |