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diff --git a/fall-draft 20121006.txt b/fall-draft 20121006.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5f528c3 --- /dev/null +++ b/fall-draft 20121006.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2670 @@ +### ONE ### + + +Entering the hall of breathing walls-The Oconee disappears between its banks-Los Angeles-Mexico City-Byzantine elephants choke to death in a smog-filled valley- memories hiccup-twilight of the intercellular broadcast-divided and squared with bantam jewels in the center-glittering back-lit walls-look like lava just starting to crust-pie filling eaten by rodents-1910 bankers and thieves in huddled whispers-don't get out-turn the page- disengage- + +The door is pounding. + +I live in a cottage. Athens. Georgia. 01010. + +Between. + +My head hurts. + +I was named after an imaginary boat. + +A cigarette. + +Pounding. Rhythmic thump thump. Thump thump. Ghosts dragging chains through the cellar. Which I don't have, a cellar that is. Demons maybe. Phantoms. Apparitions. No. Not those. Ghosts then. Simplicity. Razors. + +She often gives that look. But I'm never around. + +She's up there. + +I'm down here. + +It could be Jimmy. No. Not Jimmy then. Could be Dean. Dean wouldn't. Couldn't. Just ghosts. Pissed off ghosts mmaybe. Happy ghosts seeing if I want to come out and play. Indifferent ghosts, sitting around smoking, absently throwing rocks at the wall. Malicious ghosts, the ghosts of what isn't, ghosts with nowhere to haunt, haunted by a yearning to haunt. + +Chloe has a globe from the dark ages, East and West Germany, the USSR, North and South Dakota, we spin it to remember, rewind. Chloe also has a dog. Chloe's dog, tail wagging thump thump thump. A branch. An Oak wanting breakfast. A bird wanting shelter. No. + +That look, that half devilish awareness, half coy innocence, that look where I don't know what is going on in there. Or out here. In the larger world. Smaller world. Some world. I'm not sure, I don't know, but I don't think I know. + +I live alone. + +She's not in. She is never in. She is up. He is also up, but less significantly. In fact a lot of them are up. Almost everything is elsewhere. Echoes reach me down here. Someone yelling down the cellar to a third cousin sent to retrieve apricot preserves from last summer's canning extravaganza. Dull reverberations off the beams rattling the preserves ever so slightly, but enough so that every so often a jar falls and shatters in the blackness that comes after the door at the top of stair blows shut from a gust of August wind. And the slow trickle of preserves running down the sloped dirt of the cellar floor, pooling between your toes as the first clap of thunder rumbles above. + +Last night there were little blue pills from points unknown, brand name Percocet I believe. Jimmy. Yes. It was him. Known points. His little blue pills that go tickticktick when they scatter out on the glass table. We took a couple each, and a glass or two or five of Scotch, and maybe a bump of cocaine, a swooshing velvet sound on the table, and then we went downtown. Downtown. We are not uptown, but we went downtown or maybe in town. Here we are not in town, but we're not quite out either. Between then, but we go downtown. Amid the one-way streets and crisscrossing throngs of young people. Dizzy blue people stumbling on caustic sidewalks. Pills. Dizzy blue pills. Brown people or off white or cream, and maybe some mauve from the sun, but wearing their colored ribbons and threads as is customary, some delightful and brilliant colors and other dull grays, blues and taupe. The streets carved among lights and shadows and covered wagons hauling pianos or trucks with pianos. People exchanging glasses of elixir for paper tickets the way old men used to in cellar bars, rotting wood ceilings and dirt walls, roots exposed, in countries long forgotten or never known, and either way not here. The theatre is crowded, sticky bodies pressed together with scrunched shoulders and craning necks, little trickles of sweat tickling necks and earlobes until a arm wiggles loose to relieve, but an elbow here and there meeting a face, accidentally, like friends late at night under gas lamps in those countries no one can remember. Amid little grunts of pain, whispers of apology and finally finally a margin of relief, the show starts. Several of the people are wearing jeans and shirts and boots and hats. Or one of them near the back, seven bodies removed with a luxurious amount of space around her and no one daring to step into it. She is on to me. Goddamn it she knows. She is looking at me down a perfect row of misshapen, deformed shoulders, hunchbacks lined for execution or waiting for tables at a hunchback diner, or a line outside a hunchback restroom, all the shoulders and stooped backs turned just so, perfectly aligning the emptiness between so that our eyes meet and cannot avoid but meet again. She is looking to let me know that she has that look too. But she is looking at me, not with that look, but a warning look. She can use that look any time, but she won't, she can't. Only Maya can use that look with any effectiveness, but still I have to be ready. I'm sweating and cold. A writhing serpentine woman upfront, spiraling around the man with the metal chest. Metal attached to his chest. To his face. To his lips. It sounds like Paleolithic cave drawings-dueling sculptors chipping at the same stone, part horrific cacophony, and part terrifying clarity. Lights out. Bumbling darkness. + +The pounding on the door. Yes, but fainter. + +Outside is America. The down part. Down here. You can hear it in the wires. A buzz. A hum. America. Wires and cables and fiber optics and pipes and hoses and tubes. F + +Another cigarette. I could lie here all day. Lying down, remaining down. + +Outside is America. Down and out America, Up and in America. Zero, One, but then Zero again. I am indifferent to it. Why shouldn't I be? America is one. To be America you are doing something. I am not. America is growth. Then stasis. Then growth, and so on, like a cancer mutating in bursts -- a pulsar, a cancerous pulsar. There are others like me. We watch it. We like to watch. We huddle together, in small groups, holding each other because it's all we remember, mutual warmth. Every season the Technicolor cancer blooms anew, this year with violent reds and oranges and angry purples, yes purple gets angry from time to time, when the king becomes too fat for the plush velvet chair that purple has given him or he neglects his humility in private, purple gets angry like a wife. It's a cheery cancer though, purple is never mad for long and, the make up sex, oh the makeup sex. Then there is dancing and singing, girls running, silk ribbons trailing behind, a carnival, spinning pinwheels, gaudy whores in petticoats, elixirs for what ails ya, sculptures of tubing and wire to delight delight delight the whole family. Whores for the kids, pinwheels for the parents, a marvelous vision trotting into New Orleans say 1894, electrons spinning -- a bric-a-brac carnival for paranoids. The king riding high in his purple couch, the queen by his side, the actors in trail, patchwork wagon covers and barrels of mead and moonshine. The crier out front: You have never seen anything like this. Step right up. Step right up. Step right. Up. This the greatest show going. This is the greatest show in the land. This is. This is the greatest show in this county. At the moment. Get your programs. Get your programs here. A hymnal for the perverts. Hey ya. + +I remember remembering. You. The other. Them. The ones on the streets blinking on and off. Christmas lights in the background -- indeterminacies. When I was young there were seven dimensions and that was weird, but Rod Serling walked us through it. Now there are twenty-six and Rod Serling is dead. + +I start the day with a cigarette because it kills you early, slowly and relentlessly. Gets me off my back and living, one, lest death come before lunch, zero. + +The pounding is over. It might have been inside. My head. + +I stumble to the kitchen, the fridge is harboring only one grapefruit. The ritual goes: cigarette, grapefruit, shower and shave, croissant or bagel, coffee and another cigarette. Later or earlier, depending on where you are exactly, I came to sit in a barstool in the lobby of the theatre. She was gone. She did not use that look, but she could have, or she did and I didn't notice. The show was over, the Christmas lights were filtering out. Flickering. That was the bar. The Flickering Bar only it was a theatre in one room with all the ghosts of rats imported from elsewhere because it wasn't old enough to have its own rat ghosts, just a couple of rats that had their own theatre up in the balcony where no one goes anymore. Glittery mugs foaming, slick ice spit back in rattling glasses, crunching gravel or sawdust in the street. There were Christmas lights flickering, they were not people, they were lights. Some of them I knew. Jimmy. That was how I got there. Stumbling down alleys and rolling in garbage. Jimmy, he is familiar. He has no dog and no globe. Not difficult to sort out. We drove home. Up. But not all the way, just surfacing perhaps, but still in the water, level and floating between. We were here or at Chloe's house, I don't know. There is not much difference. Fifty yards between them, but dense jungle, vines and trees and dead wood, lots of rodents and birds, one dumpster. They are worlds apart really. + + * * * + +Everyone I knnow is deranged. Jimmy is a lunatic, one of the last great lunatics. Maybe the last one. I don't know. He paced about the room like a caged cat gesturing, gesticulating, gestating and hatching forth the most marvelous rants ranging from the workings of internal combustion engines, to the trajectory of a rocket headed for space. It approaches a point, passes by scorched like Icarus, and continues on. Everything is going for Jimmy. No stopping no waiting no inertia. Always on. Just one giant phallic object screaming its way out of gravity until it blows a giant hole in the atmosphere. Nothing was left when he finished; he swallowed the whole world, a fantastic thing to listen to, an inversion of Jonah and the whale, phrases connecting to one another to hint at gargantuans of thought that unravel and remind you of what might have been or maybe even was. Ideas come out of him at thinking speed with no real care for how they are arranged or whether one leads to the next, tangents appear and he runs them down, pureeing with shrill incisors and grounding sinewy shreds with pulpating molars. His voice itself often has a staccato quality, chopping and pounding the air. He blasts it out of his chest in radiowave bursts and suddenly the bottom drops out and he shifts to soft sighs and pants... wheezing sorrow. He coughs some at the end of long sentences when he runs hard after the words, tracks them down with such enthusiasm that he can't hold them anymore. You can see it in his eyes-the words are an atomized blizzard of fallout, lust and hunger. + +Maya should have been there but she is up there. Way up. There are little ups and downs and bigger ones you see, gradations of up and down, but still up and down, rising and falling, heaving and thrusting and sighing, later smoking, but those are just words. + +Dean writes a lot. Letter in my mailbox. Not many people do that. But more will. Email. The return of the letter. Dean writes a lot about the sex he is having. Jimmy talks a lot about the sex he is having. Chloe talks a lot about the sex she isn't having. Sex is all there is really, and it's enough, it's more than enough, it's all there is. And food. But most of us don't talk about food. + +Dean is writing a letter. He has been writing a letter for some time now. He wants to know about things for his letter. He wants to know what I know. He wants to know about pre-natal psychology. He wants to know about venomous fish. He wants to know about nanomachines. He wants to know what lies on the other side of the great divide. I don't know about any of these things, but he tells me and then I know what he knows, but I'm not sure if I know about the things themselves or just what he knows. Jimmy is also a writer. I don't know what Jimmy writes. I've seen him with lists. I know he writes lists and he once made signs for work. He writes signs. Perhaps other things as well. Chloe writes in her journal. One spiral bound notebook a month. On the thirty-first of the month or thirtieth sometimes and once a year on the twenty-eighth, she shuffles down with a spiral notebook and we build a bonfire with fallen tree limbs and she burns the spiral notebooks. Always the next morning I get up and dig through the ashes looking for a scrap or two. Cotton candy, I found in February. And, but I guess, in March. April was particularly rich, this is the last time, it said. But May and June there was just the charred coil of wire, stretched and distorted by the heat. + +Maya writes letters. I get letters. Several a week on good weeks. But Maya does not have to write, she chooses to write. She could just use the look, but I can't see it. So she sends it in cuneiform and hieroglyphs. Sometimes she too writes about sex, but not always. Often she writes about hunger or longing or walking or resting. Mainly she calls, but it's that look I love, that look that could be a bad movie I'd still watch. + + * * * + +Most of the time I am Sil Hawkard. When creditors or landlords are calling I am no longer Sil Hawkard, I morph. People who want things from me find that I have just stepped out. I am often just stepping out. I'll be right back. Just going for the papers. I come from a long line of steppers-out-for-the-papers, gypsy strands of DNA, whorish blood crawling over the eastern European hills looking for a place to call home. I am a mongrel by birth. I have olive-brown skin and no culture. I have hazel eyes but not many friends. I am five feet ten inches, but I lack cohesiveness. I weigh around one hundred and fifty pounds, but I am often unaccountably heavier. I live in self-imposed exile, but I was born in exile, so I'm used to it... comfortable even. I haven't the slightest idea how I got here; I only know that I have been here as long as I can remember. + +I'm not sure that you care about this sort of thing. I'm not sure that you should. I'm not sure if I should tell it or not. There are various schools of thought which say different things. I have gone to most of them at one time or another. One in particular stands out because of the bully with the harelip who was mad because he had a harelip and took it out on the rest of us, even the girls. He nailed their pigtails to desks and stuffed the boys in trashcans. A terribly abusive wretched little kid, he will ascend the bell tower just a few days past twenty-two with a scattergun he will steal from under his father's porch and he will rain down death with his box of shells and eat two Snickers bars as the SWAT team moves into position on the rooftops of nearby buildings. He will be crying when the bullet hits him. But I still won't know what I shouldn't say. + +
I'm always window shopping, perhaps stepping in to try on a shirt or two or some pants or whatever snags your eye, but never buying anything, just looking and feeling the textures of fabric rolling between your fingers. Dragging silk or lace or satin over the back of your arms to feel the chillbumps shiver down your spine. But noncommittal when the clerk smiles and unsure whether to tell her about the lipstick on her teeth or to just move on. And usually deciding to move on until one day when maybe you don't, maybe you grab her arm softly and say excuse me miss, and hand her a tissue, you have some lipstick on your teeth. And maybe she blushes and demurely turns to wipe her teeth, but thanks you and then smiles with soft, creamy teeth. And you smile back when she hands you the tissue. + +I was born out of time. I had intended to be here at the beginning, but I didn't make it. In the beginning, if there was such a thing, there were no words, only phantoms wandering forested mountains. That's where I would like to have come into the show. There were enormous mountains back then, around here it would have been the tail end of the Appalachians, bigger than the modern Himalayas. Monkeys and lemurs and men in funny hats. I would have made something different. But I didn't make it in time. Still, don't ever let them convince you that you were thrown out of anything, no, it's still here. Hidden from casual glance, camouflage netting, but if you look long enough and at the right angle, you will find it. Right where you left it. + +I started as a thought, a complex, vivid thought in my mother's head. The night before I was born, my mother dreamed that she and my father were sailing through the Panama Canal. The jungles cackled with lemurs while my parents drifted silently through the moonlight. It was a particularly vivid dream, the sort that tugs at your sleeve while you're trying to drink your morning coffee. When her contractions began the next day, the dream was still in my mother's mind, lulling her, a welcome memory to alleviate the growing pain. I was a tough one; I had no interest in entering this world. In the end, they cut me out. As she faded out under anesthetic, the dream grabbed my mother and led her off again, it had something to say. She looked up at my father who was holding her hand, smiling as his face faded into a tropical night sky. This time they were sailing around the Cayman Islands. Shorelines sparkled in the distance, throngs of tourists were carrying candles along the shoreline, a procession was in progress, my mother turned the till and a puff of wind drew the boat along following the line of flickering candles. She would never say where they led. Whenever she told the story a far away look would come over her eyes she would murmur to herself, tuck the covers around my chin and get up to go. She did tell me that the last thing she saw before coming to was the stern of another boat, the Silmond. + +I was born in the midst of a fierce tropical storm, one of the worst on record in southern California. The recovery room that my mother was given had a broken window and she came down with pneumonia. Once, when I was about five, I heard her tell someone that I was born on a boat in the middle of a hurricane. Tall tales abound in my family. Chloe once told me that she could see clouds in my eyes when I was thinking. When I got mad she claimed they flickered like tiny thunderheads, but I can't vouch for this observation. I don't look at my reflection very often; half of my left eyebrow is missing. It had a disastrous meeting with a windshield. They were introduced by a telephone pole on highway 10 somewhere in New Mexico. For a while I was very self-conscious about it. I used to apply Rogaine to it every morning, but it never helped. I stopped looking in mirrors. + +For a long time I wandered about aimlessly. Solving crimes in my spare time or shooting large automatic pistols with some friends on a porch outside of Wichita. I dreamed of living in a book without a plot. We shot holes in four by eight sheets of plywood, sometimes at random and other times trying to create patterns with the holes. Often the patterns looked random and the randomness smiled or frowned in distinct faces. + +I grew up in Los Angeles choking on money and diesel exhaust. It was embarrassing. From the time I was old enough to dream I dreamed of leaving, but I didn't really leave until I was nearly thirty and missing half an eyebrow. + +I remember driving down a dirt road in Arizona; I couldn't have been more than five or six. I asked my father if we could drive through a magical time warp. The way I envisioned it happening, the road would suddenly just disappear, my father and I would crash into a giant cactus, we would be unhurt, but the car would be destroyed and steam would hiss out of the radiator, there would be an incredible silence, a huge overwhelming moment where we would just sit in shock, listen to the hissing steam, not believing what had happened. We would drown in disbelief, but then that would give way to endless possibility; it would just be us and an uncharted, virgin planet. My father smiled at me, but there was a jaded sigh in his eyes. We traded our magic for science, skepticism for precision, no trade backs. We eroded the mountains for strip mines, the forests were clear-cut for timber, and the men with funny hats destroyed by small pox and syphilis. The phantom dreamers all packed up and headed on down the line to some other universe just a few tracks over from ours. What's left is America. One, zero, one. I can't march, but I used to wait with hope. There was a moment or two of naivete, but now the old nuclear foreboding has returned with gusto. Now we nervously finger magazines in the doctor's office waiting for the test results. + +The cottage I live in is a dump. The roof is rotten from termites; an extended family of rats lives in the ceiling panels. The walls are paper-thin, insulated with spider webs. I scavenged for furniture. I found a couch and then one day another appeared in the dumpster so I grabbed it too. The tenants before me left a bookshelf, which still has nothing on it. I've been here six months and I'm still living out of my suitcases. The sink leaks, the toilet never flushes, and there's a two-foot square hole in the middle of the living room wall. My landlord was nice enough to tack a scrap of screen over it, "keep out the 'squiters," he said. He also hired me to maintain the cottages in exchange for rent, which might explain their dilapidated state, though I do try to fix things. For the other tenants anyway. If nothing happens then nice living quarters are unnecessary. + +She showed up the last night I was in LA. I was working. It seems appropriate. Around eight o'clock, still light out, Maya sauntered through the yawning doorway. She wore a Mona Lisa smile, a turquoise shirt and tight black pants. She ruffled her dyed black hair and asked if she could have a large coffee. Her voice would have stirred the Marquis de Sade from his grave. I gave her an extra large and didn't charge her for it. I felt compelled to quit the job to have a cup of coffee with her. Later that night when I crawled out of her bed and dragged myself home, I knew that something big was coming, the way old men with trick knees can sense the storm before it arrives. Her lack of nuclear foreboding was addictive and enchanting. She smiled like nothing was wrong. She has that look. I felt like it was all going to be okay. Maya left for New York the next day. I arrived in Athens a week later. + + +### Two ### + +This morning the world is farm-fresh. The faceless men from a Twilight Zone episode I remember have assembled reality to perfection -- thank you Rod, it meant so much. They work feverishly all night long hauling in raw materials from the Future and building the Now. They have no identity save the ability to create. + +A new manicure from early morning thundershowers adorns the streets and houses, everything is freshly washed. Athens lies in the hilly, forested region of north central Georgia, and on days like today, after a morning thundershower, the heat steams the rain back up into the air. Everywhere is a soft fog like an overgrown patch of Argentinean real estate. Everything feels tropical and sweltering. + +The door bursts open, no pounding at all, a streaking out-of-focus but still recognizably human shape rockets across the room with such speed that a second or two elapses before it cools and condenses into the recognizable form of Jimmy. He flops down on the low-rent chair to a cloud of feathers screaming out the side of the velveteen pillow. They waft in the still air and slowly swan dive through the thermal of nicotine that hovers near the floor. + +"You should open a door, Sil. It's smoky in here." + +"Someone was knocking." + +"Knocking?" + +"Yeah. About an hour ago. When I first got up. There was a pounding on the door." + +"Huh." + +"I couldn't open it." + +"What if it was me?" + +"I wasn't ready yet. I had to load." + +He snickers, or maybe its more a giggle it's hard to tell. It involves an index finger brought to the lips, luxuriantly hovering over them and a downward stare as if perhaps sharing a private joke with his feet. Sometimes the whole ritual is accompanied by a slow shaking of head, but not just now. Jimmy's eyes are focused at some point beyond the floor, as if he can see right through the plaent and is admiring the Pleiades rising up over the southern hemisphere right about now. He is nodding and repeating yeah with Buddhist intent. + +"Do you remember anything about last night?" + +"It was noisy. And glittering." + +He practically doubles over shaking his head and laughing, "as long as I'm not the only one having some blank spots." + +Blank spots are normal, or so I tell him, but really there is nothing blank, colors, rolling colors. Sounds. + +I pour myself a pint glass of water and flop down on the couch. + +Chloe strolls in a few moments later, dog in tow, right in the middle of the silence that follows Jimmy's restoration of sense in the universe. Chloe has thin lips like 1965 white walled radial TA's fresh off the showroom floor, painted red to match a rising coronary sun. She suffers from arthritis at the tender age of -- too many cigarette years spent clutching darts and nervously twirling hair around her naked ring finger. She's wearing jeans and cowboy boots. + +I am very popular in this compound because I have the only shade. I am several measurable degrees cooler until about three in the afternoon when, trees or no trees, the air is on the edge of barking flames. So mornings happen here. Not that I mind the heat. The heat is tolerable, it's the oil that bothers me. The humidity expels a continuous slick of grease from the pores, as if cellular oil tankers were constantly wrecking all over your body. + +Chloe throws my legs down on the floor and sits down on the couch and proceeds to tell us about the rest of her date night before. Chloe loves bad dates. She prefers to go out with men she finds both visually disgusting and mentally challenged. This one had a tattoo of a chicken on his calf that jiggles when he flexed it, which of course he showed her in the middle of dinner by standing up and putting his leg on the table. This leads to lengthy discourse in the lack of shame among our species, which Jimmy rejects. After a while he leaves to work on the Falcon. + +I close the door behind Jimmy and pour myself another glass of water. + +"What should we do today?" Chloe lights a Camel. + +"Try to take over the world." + +"What would we do once we took over?" + +"I don't know." + +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. "What we should do, is 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." + + * * * + +It's huge and it looks like nothing. Just tiny flecks of color dissected into purposefully nonlinear shapes. It's maddening. It looks like nothing and it's everywhere. All over the porch, scattered on the kitchen table, and some still in the box. There are baggies with tape and cyptic markings indicating things about what will go into the baggies. There is a taxonomy of chaos at work here, a kind of organization forming out of the primordial color -- flecked soup of cardboard. It will still look like nothing when it's fully assembled, when the taxonomy has made the inevitable trudge from system to working explanation, and this of course delights Chloe to no end. Even when it's done we will have to sit back and stare at it with out -- of -- focus eyes to see what it is. + +We are sitting on the edge of the porch and it is behind us. Looking at it was giving me a headache. We haven't said a word. She gets up and goes to the fridge for beer. + +"What did you do today?" Chloe gives me a beer and sits back down. She straightens the hem of dress across her knees and rubs at some unaccounted for redness on her elbow. + +"Nothing. Played myself in backgammon." + +"Did you win?" + +"I'm not sure. It's hard to tell." + +Annie is running circles around the tree with her characteristic antelope bounding. Dogalope. She seems to believe she has treed a squirrel. Chloe twists the cap off her beer and throws it at Annie. She swallows and leans back away from me studying the phrenology of my close-cropped scalp. "Don't you get lonely dating someone in New York?" + +"I guess so. I mean it wasn't always that way." + +I drift off watching Annie huffing and digging at some sort of rodent hole. + +"Yeah I know. But you could move there." + +Whatever is down the hole has become a quest. Perhaps a rabbit. Maybe a gopher. Or some other burrowing type animal I've never heard of. + +"No. I can't afford it. Besides, I like the woods." A moment later I change my mind. Actually it was always this way. Or was it? If it was then is it? If it is then was it? + +A cascading silence ebbs in. Crickets. June Bugs. Cardinals. Squirrels. Mosquitoes. + +Chloe is talking about the first astronaut to orbit the moon. The first person to escape. Before the war started. + +"You know what the first thing the astronaut said the first time the orbited the moon? He said 'well, it's pretty gray.' It's pretty gray, Sil. It's pretty fucking gray. This asshole orbiting the moon says it's pretty fucking gray. Fuck him." Chloe wraps her hands around her legs pulling them tight to her chest and rests her cheek on her knees. + +"He had an impoverished imagination." + +"Life is a collision of imagination and observation Sil. He fucking failed." + +"Maybe." + +"No Sil. 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." + +After a while she adds, "I'm thirty now and I already know I'm not going to do anything with my life. I think I'm the last woman on the moon and I'm waving off the lander. Go home. I'm staying. I like it here. It's comfortable. It's fucking gray." + +After a while I follow her into the kitchen. Annie trots behind sniffing invasively at my butt. She looks down at me with eyes I don't remember. "You know I once cried so hard I swallowed a moth." + +I sit down at the table and try to ignore the puzzle pieces screaming at me in tinny squeals: we all fit together. We all fit together. We all fit together. + +Chloe is chopping shallots with more force than is necessary, I can see her tricep flexing as her arm rapidly minces the shallots. "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 now." She stops cutting and turns toward me. "You know those huffing snorting kind of sobs that women have when they're really upset? Hyperventilating sobs." She briefly demonstrates and ends up snorting like a warthog with emphysema. It's tragic and not a little bit funny. "And 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." + +Her attention returns to the shallots. "I had a strange childhood I think." + +"How do you know?" + +"I've never seen an '80's movie I related to? I don't know really I just get the sense that I was bit off. Or I am a bit off." + +"For instance..." + +"My childhood?" + +"Yeah" + +"Well, let's see. I used to kidnap cats." + +"Kidnap cats?" + +"My parents wouldn't let me have a cat so 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 my parents 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 my parents wouldn't know whose cat it was and they would have to post signs, found: cat. That sort of thing, so, you know, I would have the cat for longer. 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." + +"Yeah you know maybe that was the Texan coming out. Got to steal animals... I don't know. But one time after my parents had posted 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, when we were kids, was a lot of money. 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. I was pretty good at casing the 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 parents caught on." + +"What'd they do?" + +"Bought me a cat." + +"Smart." + +"Yeah, but by then I didn't want one." + +It's then that I decide Chloe is a shallot among onions. We head back outside whhere there is a rare breeze in the afternoon. We eat spoonfuls of tuna tartar on toasted bread crusts and sip now warm beer. We sit under the tree away from the screaming puzzle, on what passes for a lawn. Here and there are tufts of grass, but mainly it's dirt. + +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. 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's wearing a greasy, oil-stained jumpsuit, but it's hard to make out amid the cloud of dirt and dust surrounding his thin frame. He stops sweeping and coughs. 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 digested reborn. 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. + +The evening is turning slowly turning to an Octavio Paz night, where the sky speaks Spanish and covered with surly stormclouds, doubly purple and floating in front of a Navaho sand painting stretched across the ceiling of the world. + +Lightening strikes somewhere to the north and Jimmy suggests we take a drive in the Falcon to try out the new four-barrel carburetor. + +On the walk back from the river I was 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. Even Jimmy says he can't remember what living in New York was like and he's only been back a year. + +The Falcon roars. 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. + +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. + +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. 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. + +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, 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. + +There was a woman, 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. + +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 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. + +It's near dark and another lazy thunderstorm drifts in from the southwest. The twinkling light shining above and then the dirt driveway. Shifting to park. The keys slide from the ignition. + + +### Three ### + +I saw Dean. his place is wreck. You know he's living + + +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. + +"The only one I know for sure works is this Dylan album." He pulls out Blonde on Blonde. + +"Never heard it." + +"Really? Shit man. This is perhaps the greatest album ever made. I mean I might say that if I were the sort of person who said such things. Of course it's not true, but it is. Possibly. You have got to listen to it." + +"No record player." + +"Oh I have it on CD. Remind me." + +As we unload the furniture Jimmy talks about Bob Dylan. When Jimmy is on a roll, it's best to just settle in and listen. He doesn't talk, he orates. There is no space in the conversation, no silence into which you might interject your own thoughts. Nor is there any discussion until he finishes the initial thought, and by the time you've let that one sink in, he's off on another. Eventually they pile up on each other, an enormous anthill, and you can only stand back and admire the scurrying echoes of his verbal architecture. + +He has the history of Dylan seemingly wired to his tongue. He knows things about Dylan that Dylan doesn't know. He can do the same thing with jazz musicians that were dead before either of us were born. + +"That album man, you have got to get that one...." He gives me this intense look as if my very life depends on it. "Whew. Man. It's the most amazing thing you have ever heard...again, if I were prone to making definitive statements like that, which I'm not. But, still it's incredible, a man at his most honed, unselfconsciously sharpened point, pure honesty, just telling it the way it is, and you know it is because you've been through the same things in your own life, or you can see them coming down the road. Ya know? It's Dylan just laying it all out on the table and you know that he's been there because you've been there too. That's what I'm trying to say. We've all been there and that is the underlying thing on the whole album, I mean fuck the music -- well no, because it's great too -- but you know what I mean? Sad -- eyed lady of the lowlands... you have got to hear that man, you have got to hear that song." We put down an enormous toolbox in the middle of the living room. "And the images, man the fucking images, you can't fake images with that kind of power. They aren't just words cleverly strung together, it isn't some bullshit cleverness strung out on a hook, lying in wait for some beret to bite or anything of that sort. To sing what he does, whew, man," he blows a long slow exhale of admiration. "You have to feel it. You have to fucking feel it. Otherwise..." + +"Otherwise you wouldn't feel it." + +"Exactly." He smiles eyeing the toolbox, "I think I'll just use this as a coffee table. Is that too white trash gearhead? To have a toolbox as a coffee table? I broke up with what's her name you know. She's crazy. Or I am. There was something crazy about us. It didn't work. The point is if I have a toolbox as a coffee table I'm going to stay single, that much is clear. But is it going to hamper my getting laid? Is it a little too much? Do I need to soften the room a bit? Something that will make a woman more at ease? + +"Chloe won't be over." + +"She's not over now. She hangs out at your place. She only comes over here when she's out of weed." + +"I don't think having a toolbox in the middle of your living room will effect your getting laid at all. I mean, if you actually get a girl back here, I'd say she's already into you. Or she's too scared to run." + +"Hey now." + +"I just mean, you know, when you drive in here at night... hell I expect to get killed every time I come home. Its all dark and foresty back here. We all live in the serial killer's house. Think about it, Jason started in cabins in the woods. Every late night skinnemax movie has one of these places in it." + +"Hey maybe we could make some cash letting low -- budge films shoot around here." + +"Maybe. But the point is you're better off going to her house anyway." + +"Yeah." + +We drink beer and unload furniture. Jimmy keeps going back to Dylan every time we're standing at the tailgate because the record is sitting on top of the box and he avoids the box in favor of much heavier, bulkier items. A glass table for the kitchen. A bookshelf in one corner. An antique pinball machine with the tilt alarm blinking stupidly as we half drag half carry it inside. He rediscovers the album every return trip. But Dylan is only the launch pad, there is only so much one can say, from there he slings out along the Saturn line shouting down echoes of the view. His eyebrows arch up when he tries to talk and lift something at the same time. When he's not carrying something, his arms dice up the air trying to drive his point home. His voice leads out the door down the steps and back to the album. + +"I'm telling you, you have got to hear that album. I can't believe you lived this long without hearing that album. But it's not just an album. It's a verb, an act in which the artist connects with the audience and transcends this kind of stale artificial reality that says we're all separate and individual and what not. We're hung up on this individuality kick you know, the freedom to do your own thing. You only go so far. Your mind maybe infinite but your body is not. That's the essential mystery maybe. And we need community to go further. And I don't mean some West Virginia hippy crap kind of community. I mean meaningful relationships with other people. And not just like -- minded people, because that's the clause that's often at the end of that line. You need to know people you hate. People that make you cringe. People that stir violence in you. You need them. You need them because you are them. Them is you. Ugly and sweet." + + + + + + + + + + +Maya has a picture of me. A picture of me which she routinely photoshops with various outfits stolen from other pictures. She dresses me as a cowboy, as a superhero with a mahogany colored cape, as a handyman with a tool belt after I fixed the leak in her sink last summer, as a prizefighter in the ring with Ali after I got thrown out of the Incandescent for beating up the bouncer, as a eurotrash tourist to remind her of my obsessive habit of taking pictures of garbage, in buckskin fringed pants for the time I dragged her off to the mountains to club her and have my way with her, as she requested, the fire crackling with the sizzle of dripping fat from steaks, as a marine for my protective move when the potato exploded and the white hot chunks covered my body instead of hers. She had been using a picture she took of me lying in bed. We were running late to one of our rich daddy dinners with her possibly rich daddy who lives in a mysterious state of fabulously wealthy poverty. Other people's money tastes better. + +She was doing her impish young artist act and I was playing along, but trying to reverse things. I have a very peculiar look on my face, one I have never seen before. I have lecherous eyes and my body is a clumsy anticipation of movement. She took the picture the instant before I leapt out of bed and wrestled the camera from her + +"My turn." + +"Who said anything about turns?" + +"Take off your clothes" + +"You're unbearable." But. Licorice lips part, half -- moon, and she begins to disrobe -- trickles of silk and lace sliding down smooth shale arms, rivulets of rye whiskey piling on the floor -- nipples like soft serve. + +"What -- no panties? The pile is incomplete." + +"You haven't even kissed me. Shouldn't you be making some kind of move?" + +"Move?" + +"Yeah. You know seduction, game, something...?" + +"We're too old. Just take off your panties." + +"Why?" + +"Cause your pussy's tired of being caged in panty prison. Its been locked up for too long, it's like Nelson Mandela -- end apartheid. End Apartheid!" + +"Nelson Mandela? My pussy is Nelson Mandela?" + +"Yes Nelson Mandela. Now take off your panties and let that pussy make a speech." + +And she did. + +Of course I don't have the photographs. + +But tonight. After more purring and roaring and a little more drunken careening on the down trip, we are up here. Home again. And there is new email. A photograph of me taken across a table, a checked cloth and jar of syrup apart, I can see her smiling, though it could be any table, any syrup, I can see her smiling, a detached mouth hanging from the lens, a little nymph hanging off her teeth as the shutter whispers. + +And here I am all pixilated and dressed in black with a Jesuit wide brim hat. Give me a new religion. + + + + + + + +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. + +Chloe disrupts the indie rock calm of the Manhattan. She sashays Saturday night with glittering toenails wrapped in heels with more strap than is necessary -- excess is best -- and the nearly unheard of skirt. Heads turn as heads do whenever the door slams shut behind someone, but then heads snap back to whatever they were doing lest the girlfriend across the table in the paint stained overalls detect a pique of interest -- the girlfriends' glitterless scornful glares -- you bitch you tramp you whore you porn -- enjoying feminism -- destroying carnivore... + +"Damn girl." Jimmy shits bolt upright when Chloe comes over, "you be looking fine tonight." + +Chloe turns red. "I hate this town sometimes. In New York I'd be getting stared at for looking like a librarian." + +"No trust me Chloe, New York couldn't miss you tonight. Or maybe New York is missing you tonight." + +Our friend Jason the bartender, pulls up a chair and looks Chloe up and down. "You are aware of course that you're upsetting some carefully constructed mopishness here." + +"No shit. Sil and I were just about to water down our drinks with a tear or two and suddenly it's a fucking party in here. I mean good lord Chloe I think I might want to sleep with you." Jimmy murmurs the end of his sentence, the top of his half raised bottle and then quickly puts it to his lips before anything less leaks out. But his head tilts to side, eyebrows shoot up and it's plain to see that it's only a joke if Chloe wants it to be. + +Her head sinks down a touch and she sighs like someone suddenly exhausted. + +"Or play with your breasts or something." He adds after swallowing. + +"Jimmy if you are a good boy maybe someday you can play with these babies." She juts her chest out and then bounces her breasts for effect. + +Jason the bartender is a mixture of aghast and unbridled lust. "What about me?" + +"Actually you have a far better chance than Jimmy, who I was actually lying to just then. And now that I think about it Jason, I'm lying to you too in hopes that maybe you'll bring me another drink." She sucks her straw playfully. + +He sighs. "Anybody else need anything?" He leaves to retrieve another round. + +"So why were you about to cry in your beer boys?" + +"Same reason you dressed up like that." + +"But come on its satanic anagram night... you have to dress up for anagrams..." + +"Right. I had forgotten about that little adventure..." + +Jason returns with three more drinks. "What little adventure?" + +This is the part where Chloe is supposed to explain it very innocently, and Jason is supposed to giggle or at least smile, but Chloe hesitates and Jimmy jumps in with a cover story -- our anagrams are of dubious legality you see, not to mention ethics or taste or any number of other things. + +"Oh we were just talking about going up to some of the party bars and turning it up a notch... there was some discussion of dancing." Jimmy manages to get this all out without a smile and then glues the beer to his lips and takes a long, probably too long, pull. Jason looks unconvinced, but he buys in. + +"There's a good DJ tonight at whatever Mean Mike's is now." Most people in Athens refer to establishments by what they used to be before the scene took a dive -- with bars coming and going with the semesters, it's hard to keep track of what things are called. The Manhattan on the other hand soldiers on. "You know next week we're having Moroccan night... Ya'll should come. I was skeptical at first but it seems like it might actually be fun. Gonna clear out the tables... get a bunch of pillows and some hucas and maybe even a belly dancer." + +Jimmy hunches over in concern, "ya'll aren't going bankrupt are you?" + +"No. Not yet. But it's definitively geared toward avoiding that." + +"You know what you really need to do is implement the plan." Jimmy tilts his bottle as if toasting some abstraction. + +"You love your plan don't you James." Jason weaves slightly in his chair he has a habit of doing what Chloe endearingly calls the body laugh. He wears a blank smile and almost imperceptibly rotates his torso without moving anything below his hips. It's a subtle but brilliant laugh, it makes entire rooms spin with him. Fake candle lights that have been fake flickering above our head suddenly leap out of the wall at me and start a conga line with their arms on each others' backs, kicking their legs out to alternating sides, clogging to the beat of Lola. And then he stops. + +"Hey man, I'm telling you, bikini bartenders will draw in a hell of lot more people than Moroccan night or whatever." + +"Not if I'm the one in a bikini." + +"Hey Jason don't under -- estimate yourself. I'd be in here more if you wore a thong." Chloe crosses her legs and grins at him. "But you know this is one of the few towns in the world where sex doesn't seem to sell." + +"Girl you be talking crazy." Jimmy screws up his forehead into the self -- conscious knot he favors when he attempts to propel himself out of his skin color and into the rainbow world of rants. His arms come up from his sides, called into the service of emphasis, and he launches into a diatribe, volume escalating as he takes off. "Just cause ya'll aren't trying to sell sex does not, emphatically does not, mean that it wouldn't work if somebody in this town had the balls to do it. Look here, all you gotta do is have one night a week with Kelly and Brittany in bikinis -- or better yet -- no offense to them -- you know I love them -- they're my girls -- but recruit a couple of girls from the club and get them to serve wearing bikinis and this place will be fucking packed," He stands up and sweeps his arm across the room, "I mean look at these guys," he lowers his voice, waves to friend, "these guys are desperate for half -- naked female flesh. They can't go down to the club because they'd loose face, but damnit they want to see naked women, and they'll settle for half, everybody wants to see half naked women, half naked women want to see half naked women... I'm for real Jason. And I know what you're gonna say it'll draw in the wrong crowd and that will alienate the cool people and whatever, but shit you only do it one night a week and that pays for the rest of the nights so it can just be a good bar and not end up bankrupt. Or you know what you could do..." he pauses for a minute and studies the conspicuous bamboo thrones chairs -- king square backed, queen triangle -- as if suddenly mulling over their significance. "What you could do is start a backroom game... Cards man. Get a couple of poker tables, maybe a blackjack table for the amateurs, girls in bikinis serving drinks and making the rounds with the cigarette trays... man that would be so fucking cool and of course you just charge twenty bucks for entrance and keep it real low -- key. People would pay twenty dollars to sit in on a nice backroom game. Shit ask Sil people are fighting to get into our game -- am I right Sil? -- I mean that's what's wrong around here there isn't enough corruption -- everything has been sanitized and made PG and damnit the people want R. Fuck it man the people want X, but they can't come out and say it. I mean ferchristsakes you can't even serve on Sunday -- what the fuck is that about -- it is the twenty first century isn't it? Sometimes I'm walking around downtown on a Sunday night and I have to pull out my checkbook and double -- check the year... This town, this whole fucking country is begging for sex, corruption and debauchery. Of course I have to add the caveat that we don't need the racism and sexism and all that shit, but really have we gotten rid of that? Shit man try working construction for a few days, those mutherfuckers are every bit as racist as their daddys' were, they just whisper the jokes to each other now... and the sexism well I guess you could argue that my bikini bartenders idea is a touch sexist, but shit I mean the line between exploitation and enjoyment is a dicey one and frankly I think it would be a good idea to have you in a bikini as well, Jason. Maybe you should just hand them out at the door, everybody could be in bikinis and we could all just sit back and admire each other as the over -- sexed, lecherous, debaucherous, and damn good lookin monkeys that we are." Jimmy sinks back down to the cushion -- finis. + +"It is a plan." Jason deadpans. + +"See I like the end where the men are in bikinis... I'm an equal opportunity lecher." Chloe giggles at her own wit. + +"Yeah, but," I do a quick survey of the room and then look down at my stomach, "are you sure you want to see a bunch of fat skinny guys in bikinis?" + +"Fat skinny guys?" Jason looks at me quizzically. + +"People like you and I, who do not, as our lean mean Jimmy over there, work construction or otherwise exercise and have the dreaded slightly pot -- bellied body of the fast skinny guy. Scratch being the one who actually caused me to notice the phenomenon." + +"Sil you are not fat. Have some respect. How do you think it makes people who really are fat feel when you say you're fat?" Chloe looks at me crossly. Her sister is over -- weight. Everyone we actually know is over -- weight, only strangers are fat. + +"You're missing the point. I'm not saying I'm fat. I'm saying I'm fat for a skinny guy. It's a very important distinction." + +Jason heads back to work,, pausing briefly to look at his profile in the mirror hanging between the throne chairs. He looks back at me and smiles and pats his stomach. + +"Besides a little stomach is sexy. I wouldn't worry about it until you have handles." Chloe folds her legs up under her, sitting Indian style and lights a cigarette. + +Jimmy, who has been silent for a few minutes, suddenly seems to snap back from where ever his mind has been. "Man I was just thinking about something or other... temporarily lost track of where I was and then I noticed Chloe and for a split second between synaptic firings I thought goddamn who is that?" + +"Jimmy lay off. I let you get away with it for the novelty, but you're bordering on annoying now." + +"Chloe you're lookin' so good I'm thinking maybe we should go for a ride..." + +"Alright." She downs the rest of her drink in one long suck. "Yeah let's go for a ride." + + + + + + + + + + + +It's heaven. No other way to say it. Complete with feathers, though here they are carefully stuffed. Only he -- whose -- name -- may -- not -- be -- uttered knows what divine substance they put on top of this mattress which, in other ways, resembles the one I have, although it's unlikely this one was left behind by a man moving to Australia. This one was purchased in all its consumer glory at some star -- spangled mattress dealer -- probably in Atlanta -- probably by parental units desperate for some way to dispense love to the daughter who is not following the plan. + +Whatever the case, the soft billowing pillow -- top is the perfect thing to lie on, with your head hanging off the edge, after tying a few on as Jimmy puts it. We three are fallen dominos lying head to toe such that Chloe and I are separated by Jimmy's feet. Chloe has shed the skirt and strappy shoes in favor of sweatpants and converse. We are waiting. Waiting for the witching hour when all satanic things stir and muck about rearranging letters and such. Which is why we have all recently taken an internet quiz to determine which Norwegian Death Metal Band we are. On the stereo...may the good lord... shine a light on you...make every song... your favorite tune... + +Darkthrone: Without religion there would be no kinky sex. + +Enslaved: Without that strange Norwegian phrase which you didn't understand anyway you wouldn't be Darkthrone. + +Darkthrone: Like you know one way or the other. The point to this whole thing -- considering tonight's adventure -- is that, in spite of mocking religion and yes being somewhat condescending toward it, without it half of the kink in this world would not exist. And like you said at the bar, there are those that think a totally healthy approach to sex would be a good thing, but personally I think it's a little boring. And I think religion deserves some credit here and there. The soft brush of the whip... [a descent into laughter] + +Enslaved: Maybe. And Chloe, I have to say if anyone is having kinky sex it's Sil and Maya. You know they're freaks... + +Darkthrone: Freaks? What do you mean freaks? + +Enslaved: I mean you know they into some freaky shit. I mean come on. Look at the guy. + +Cradle of Filth (aside): Jimmy laughs what I take to be a knowing laugh though I haven't the faintest idea why he proposes to be knowing. Mark Twain pointed out that, not only are humans the only animal capable of blushing, we're the only animal with the need to. + +[M: Why do you want to fuck me in the ass so badly? + + S: Because it won't go in. If it went in easy, all pornstar style, I'd be bored with it. Maybe. After twenty or thirty times + + M: You want to go to a forbidden place... + + S: Yeah I guess. Do we have to analyze it? I guess your ass is like Kubla Khan and shit. + + M: (laughs) + + S: I want to dine on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise.] + +Darkthrone (evaluating): Is it true Sil? Wait, actually, I don't want to know. + +Cradle of Filth: I have no idea what he is talking about. I own no whips. + +Enslaved: Yeah but does your girlfriend? + +Cradle of Filth: Of course. I mean why would I have them? She never comes down here and that whole thing can be embarrassing at random luggage search. + +Darkthrone: Why is it that she doesn't come down here. + +Cradle of Filth (after too much silence): I'm not sure actually. To tell you the truth, at first I didn't care because I love going up to Manhattan, but lately I have been thinking about that. + +"Sorry. I wasn't trying to make you feel bad... I just assumed there was some good reason." Chloe sits up and turns to leans against the pillowed wrought iron of her headboard, she rests her legs on Jimmy's and lights a cigarette. + +"Sometimes you can see the proverbial writing and just stare at it until it's meaningless letters and never read what it says." No one responds to this thought and I sit up and study Chloe's bedroom. Somewhere in here Noah turned the helm to its final unknown destination and abandoned ship. My own bedroom suddenly feels cold, hard and inadequate. Chloe's bedroom is colorful and soft, full of pillows and comforters and enormous mattresses buttressed against the mythology of the pea. The enormous candles and antique perfume sprayers feel loved, if they were in my bedroom they would look deliberate, items for sale in a junk store. Here they are transformed in the waves of candle light that break across the mottled crimson walls. Above the dresser pinned and peeling back from the wall is a portrait of William Blake. The conjunction of ceiling and wall is interrupted by a string of tiny blue lights causing the wall to fade from crimson to purple to the blue ocean of ceiling. Even Maya's bedroom lacks this kind of continuity, her antique hat rack draped with boas and chemises and nightgowns has always seemed slightly out of place -- posing for a photograph. The only thing in my bedroom that means anything to me is a bag of rocks, a leather pouch I got at a tourist stand in New Mexico filled with the small stones they pulled out of what used to be my eyebrow. After that I started periodically adding rocks, pebbles really, to the pouch, pebbles that had never been a part of me. When I die I want the mortician to put them all back in my skin. + +"Shall we?" Chloe stubs out her cigarette. + +Suburbia three A.M. We have left the relative cool of Chloe's bedroom for the sticky streets of Athens. + +"You think god wants to hang around heaven with a bunch of christians? How much fun is blind acquiescence? I mean look at celebrities, that's the closest thing we have to godheads right? So? Look who the smart interesting ones are always hanging around with... need I call to attention RS? I mean when you see him around town who is he with? People that don't give a fuck who he is... People that have know him long enough to know he's just another guy with personal problems. God wants to sit around with atheists and have a decent discussion. He wants dialogue. If he actually exists that is." + +"Uh, hold up a minute, you lost me." Chloe shakes her head side to side as if it's going to clear up the bottle of wine her brain is swimming through. "Who is RS?" + +"Resident Rock Star, slightly shortened..." Jimmy's voice has the faked patience of one explaining geometry to a sixth grader. + +"Oh right. Sorry. Wasn't down with the lingo." She starts walking again. "But wouldn't it be pretty stupid to be an atheist and sitting in the same room with god?" + +"Maybe. But what does it take to be god? I mean is god all -- powerful because he just is? Or does his power come from people believing in him? In other words wouldn't god be most threatened by, and therefore interested in, those who would or do deny him the power to exist? I guess my idea of an atheist isn't someone who doesn't believe in god, but someone who isn't willing to accord him the power he demands. So in that sense, no I don't think it would be stupid... the world is a self -- created phenomenon. And so is god's power." + +"That's actually quite beautiful Jimmy." Chloe lets us pass her and then comes running up behind Jimmy and jumps on his back. "You make me want to be an anarchist." She kicks her heels against him and they take off down a long sloping hill that leads toward the graveyard. I walk alone through the darkness. + +About a year ago Chloe decided that the propoganacid of Southern churches had eaten enough useless holes in her brain and she was going to fight back. She enlisted Jimmy and I in her efforts and now every Saturday night -- after consuming copious amounts of alcohol -- we go out and rearrange the letters on the signs. Last Christmas was my favorite. It was the same church we're going to do tonight, we changed JESUS IS THE REASON FOR THE SEASON, to SEASON THE FETISH, USE FOR REASON. We had a left over H several R's from another church on the other side of town, which Jimmy thinks is cheating, but he's outnumbered. Season the fetish was up for three days before anyone at the church noticed or bothered to change it back. It feels good to see your words in a marquee, luminous and two feet high. It feels even better to rid the world of banality, however small and insignificant a gesture it might be. Tonight's objective is PRAYER WORKS, which is going to be altered to GET YER HORSES, which is exactly the counter -- intuitive kind of dissidence that Chloe loves. I thought, as long as we're adding letters, why not go with FUCK YER HORSE, but we agreed to no obscenities. + +To get to this particular sign we have to pass directly through the church's cemetery, Cemeteries are best at dusk when the ghosts are just getting up, still sleep -- eyed and prone to making noises, whispers of wind when there is no wind, rustles of grass where no animal is running, fingers scraping headstone marble, covered in lichens and half obscured by leaves, readable now in the moonlight ...died 1910...died 1947...died 1892...died.... + +Chloe and Jimmy are crouched silently behind a crypt, monstrous and out of place, a monument to the arrogance of a bloodline hiding behind the name Fortson, streets, parks, probably a non -- profit agency for the advancement of southern quilting.... But it does make for good cover in our situation -- dead Fortsons stacked on the other side of the concrete wall we lean against, unwittingly aiding and abetting the bored anarchism of fast retreating summer nights. Bodies, perhaps nothing but bone now, the last remnants of human debris having been sluffed off, skin and fingernail bits dusting the bottom of the worm eaten fabric liners, only bones, worn out and no longer needed, encased in wood or fiberglass or some polymer designed to spare the living the thought of what mess must be left after eighty years of decay. Synthetics, each the highest technology of its day desperately trying to hide the one inevitability we know, the failure of the organic in the field of permanence and yet even in death unwilling to return to organic origin, separate even in our rotting, still useless and detached. In myths we hide in the sky, Orion, the Pleiades, the Horsehead Nebula, clusters bloated with grandparents, great aunts, uncles from the revolution, tragic children in ribbons blowing pinwheel constellations, rotating galaxies, black holes of bitter pious old men, neutron stars for lonely celluloid fatales, dressed in silver and longing, but knowing all the while that the scaffolding is wood and fiberglass and workmanship. Constructs of carpenters and architects, city planners and funeral directors, sawdust and sweat from the living. + +A quick game of rock/paper/scissors sends me scrambling up the terribly exposed grassy hill toward the sign, sweaty palms gripping the extra letters. + +Prayer may work but you better get yer horses just in case. + + + + + + + +At home I put in Jimmy's cd and stare at the phone. Maya. The phone. Bellsouth a bastard son of Bell labs. Maya all tangled in wires and switches and routers and gates and filters and then there she is. Maybe. No way to really know for sure. A voice. Flattened and dribbling out, amplified by more circuits and switches and more zeros turned to one and back again, but always one or the other. This to a background of mumbles and rasps. Mr. Dylan doing his naivist. The reverberations of something ancient and universal, perhaps a touch overwrought, but warm nonetheless. More zeros and ones and lasers and laboratory genius to span time and space. Not tonight. Only flesh will do tonight or the imitation of flesh through some archaic means. I want to hear you on an old crystal quartz, tinny speakers and Roosevelt having just signed off, a commercial for Burma Shave and Murray's Cream and then Maya, warm soft lips pressed to the silver screen of the condenser, to be able to see her, headphone clasped to one ear, just from the tone of her voice, the background rustle of sateen skirts and flower embroidered cashmere... To drive home a Model A, fedora cocked back, suspenders loosened, flowers wrapped in yesterday's newspapers... smile my way home to some Indiana farmhouse and find her waiting at the end of the dirt road, jumping on the running board and kissing the length of the driveway, holding her widebrimmed hat with one arm, the other wrapped around the rearview, lips suckled to mine and just keep driving and driving make wide open circles through rows of corn and elms and maybe a straight unbroken line as far as the eye can see, we stay like that clear through to the badlands of Wyoming... + +I turn out the lights and walk in the bedroom. Mr. Dylan continues to... well it's not 'sing' is it... he makes up for it somehow... with shear will. Gut and will. Turning on the fan by the window, movement in my peripherals makes me jump back. Trapped between the helterskelter outside screen and the window is the most enormous, grotesque cockroach I have ever laid eyes on. It's over two inches in length and possesses a magnificent pair of wings, which click against the window as it tries to free itself. Hideous mini -- arms extend from its head, enormous pincer -- like implements that dredge up classic sci -- fi monsters and celluloid nightmares of a thousand shapes and sizes, the auxiliary limbs are scraping at the liquid sand, a futile attempt to construct a glass pyramid or escape its condition or maybe one leads to the other. The screen which traps him against the window does not actually fit the window; it was too tall so I simply wedged it in place, knowing full well that this sort of entomological invasion would not be stopped by my makeshift buttress. Some instinct has driven him upward to the top of the window where the screen is closest to the glass. I watch him struggling to find an escape. You need to go down I tell him. I tap the glass and try to herd him on a downward path, but this only goades him to attempt flight, tearing his wings against the screen. They flake apart, crumbling piecrust wings sliding softly down the windowpane. And your saint -- like face and your ghostlike soul, Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you... Mexico City: the blind beggars gouge out their children's eyes upping the pity ante and reach into those pockets a little bit deeper. Irony the petty buttressing of a child's sandcastle against a cresting tsunami, the last ditch architecture of those unused to confronting the raw, the unpitted, the full size ear of corn, the olive pre -- canning, the reek of half fermented cheese, too far gone milk, rancid butter, the raw and its tendency toward, its preference for, the rot. Somewhere there are great piles of children's eyes, some horrifying physical monument, empty eye sockets through the sticky haze, the red and white tattered woven blankets on which the beggars sit, old women starving in the shadows, the gasoline sunrise in Guatemala, cresting over the decomposing bodies of mass graves...flying right out of gaping empty eye sockets. Something to stop the leaks. Something that feels like it will never die but is transient, malleable, and divinely human. Something holy to sift through our garbage and find the discarded gems languishing on piles of steaming filth. No one goes down anymore. Everything at once delicate and obscene and the phone unplugged. + +Lying down on the bed, back against the wall, cigarette between the lips, ashtray cradled on the stomach... There is a pounding again. Indistinct, from far off, the beating of wings in the distance -- wind working the leaf -- chimes, water on the percussion and our very special guest this evening, please give him a warm welcome...all the way from Peking on the back of a butterfly... the same temperature as the sun...crowd goes wild... But it all serves as clutter to hide the silence, the darkness just outside the careful window, the translucent edges of Dylan's nasal protest, between the safer glimmering of distant windows, Jimmy's windows, vaguely Chloe's, voyeur glimmers, other safely walled eyes watching the darkness but unable to bear it on the skin, the dreadful doubts and opposition held at bay by the baptismal liquid, fire roasted sand to keep us from having to...But the beating of wings, the distant rumble of was -- it -- only thunder, or something more watching in the shadows our cartoon lives, zoo exhibits behind glass...There are rumors. And bones. Bones of the roman churches -- stronger than any prophet's stuttering murmurs -- bones that never turned to dust, preserved and immobile to make you wonder, did their owner only step out for the papers? Did a whole culture step out for the paper together? Do the ghosts of mass graves congregate together to huddle and hold to watch the fearful show carry on without, huddled all together, hoarse voices in the shadows decided to make it impossible to leave -- don't think that because you never pulled the trigger you're innocent -- as if culpability required action -- to get clear of this you see... cacophonous sine waves, disarrayed, and carrying in our wake the sewage of useless entrails falling from the butcher's block. Men in black robes and others in white coats all singing glory glory hallelujah around a glowing metallurgic altar. Ambulance sirens wailing as they round the corner... faces fade into the road, beaten, bruised and swollen. Others watch from distant buttes spattered in blood, endless blood; rivers of blood running down the chopping block as the butcher frantically dices ever smaller... roasts into steaks, into filets, into shish -- ka -- bobs, into hors d'oeuvres, into mashed paste, pate, and finally only watery blood, running off the block and out into the street gathering speed as it moves over hills, lifting up, pooling in the great valleys and lapping at the butte shores as they dance naked around bonfires.... Geysers of blood sprout from a ground that can no longer contain itself; blood bank employees hang hoses into the street and collect a year's worth before they drown in it. Towns and cities are swallowed whole, the blood oozes down from the north, from the land of the bleached -- skin cave dwellers, trickling over the Mediterranean drowning the Elysian Fields and then the Nile runs red. Africa is laid waste and the oceans swell and wash over Canada and America. Tidal waves of blood a thousand feet high and moving 200 miles an hour fueled by the energy of a comet that lands in the midst of the riparian blood -- world and blows it all back out into space, powders all life into a fine dust that settles over everything, over the mountains and valleys and oceans, and the remaining rivers of blood, until what is left is absorbed into the heart core of history leaving behind fresh cool water that pools and settles slowing to a gentle meander, out to the sea, shiny brown bodies glistening from the humidity, from the endless sweat that pours off...the sky was screaming a cerulean sound... I want to be baptized, to be held down under the muddy red water until I can no longer hold my breathe and inhale the murk in desperate gulps...the metallic taste enveloping me...and never go to sleep. + + +### Four ### + + +Vague vulgarities -- nothing so meaningful -- all this around us -- disassociated translucent film from the dentist X -- ray -- orgonomic sunshiny day -- rats creeping across the ceiling in bibelot herds -- rattle of bones -- do -- make -- say -- think -- sweat -- buzzing -- insects -- + +fumbling -- cigarette -- lighter -- flame -- inhale -- exhale. + +What is that far off hideousness? That infernal twang drifting out of the otherwise solemn jungle? It's leaking in between the chinks of rotten caulk around the window. Or maybe it has always been in here just waiting for the right moment to switch itself on. All it needed was that last little E that it found this morning under the curious lichen clump that has sprung up around the toilet, one little E and it's on -- one. No I have to get out of bed and find a Z and R neither of which are where I thought I left them, just an empty plastic bottle with a peeling sticker...leve... V is so close to Z but right now I need a Z and V's just won't cut it. Soldier heavily to the fridge. Pour tall glass of water. Consume without breathing. Pant for a moment. Wait, stop. The twang is gone. Must have been a Z or two in that water. I like to think its all H's and O's, but ground water is unpredictable. Liable to be most anything lurking in there and the carbon filter of the Brita is a good defense but some things, like Z's, are damn sneaky. + +Most likely it was Scratch. He is convinced he can play the banjo he got from his mysterious absentee girlfriend, who, from what we gather, is somewhere down there. How far is inconclusive, though Jimmy claims its Costa Rica. But that could just be an assumption he made because with Scratch everything ends up in Costa Rica sooner or later. + +Scratch is the poorest millionaire I've ever met. Like most people I met Scratch because of a bad set of directions. This morning Scratch looks part lunatic, part sage. He is sitting in the tire swing in front of his house, a wistful look on his face; he reminds me of a potatohead toy with a pasted on goatee and slightly askew lips, eyes that look out of order, screwed up and glinting earnestly. He's stripped to the waist with his T -- shirt wrapped around his head like a turban. He's hunched over plucking at the banjo looking a touch toward the dwarf end of the spectrum, though he would be some freakish dwarf who tipped back one too many rBGH laden pints -- He's six feet tall and going bald -- but with his butt hanging down his legs appear foreshortened and silly swinging a couple inches off the ground. + +Scratch is a self -- inflicted nickname, but sometimes you have to do that to avoid something much worse coming your way, pre -- emptive strike. Harm reduction the Pentagon calls it. I always figured the name came from the way he itches his head when he's trying to find the words he needs, or the way his hands wipe over his face when he sits back on the couch. It's like he's making sure he still has skin. + +Scratch's house is not technically on the same land as mine, I have to traverse the outer edge of the ridiculously large chunk of land that a poor unsuspecting yuppie thought would be a good investment. Technically, Scratch has told me, the yuppie owns everything within about ten feet of the back of my cottage, but he put his fence in about a hundred yards further back, which means that I can cut around the back of my house, drop down in the gully and follow it for about a half mile and I come to Scratch's doorstep. This is the long way around but it's easier than marching across the yuppie's back lawn, tangling with his dogs and pregnant wife. Scratch and his banjo are high on the yuppie's to do list. + +"You're late." He barks when I hear me. + +I sit down on his chopping stump. "Late night." + +"Girls?" He sets down the banjo. + +"Does Chloe count?" + +"Does Chloe count? The gem of Athens? For you no. For me no. For everybody else...." He ducks under the top of the tire and leans back arms extended. He emits a long groan that doesn't quite cover up the crackle of vertebrae. + +"The gem of Athens...? Scratch do you have a thing for Chloe?" + +"The appreciation of beauty is my life Sil. Chloe is second only to Leah." He pulls himself back up and ducks under the top of the tire again. He hesitates for minute and then executes a weird, but graceful bodyvault from the tire swing, landing on his left leg, right one hovering just off the ground. He lowers it slowly and smiles at me. "Eh? Pretty good for a guy that fell fourteen thousand feet huh?" + +"Graceful as ever." I shiver whenever Scratch mentions the accident. + +"Where is our beauteous one this morning?" + +"Dunno. You woke me up with the banjo... I didn't go over there. Jimmy did say he had to work today though." + +"That's okay you'll do. It's not that hard. Just need someone to hold the bottles." + +Jimmy weaseled the spare bottles from Five and Ten. They weren't watching when he installed the air conditioning in the kitchen. They were busy vomiting from the heat of summer afternoons, compounded by ovens, rangetops, a dozen burners, an open grill, a sanitizer, the thermometer below his ladder was spiked at 130º and people were trying to cook. He slipped out with a case of red table wine -- 3.99 a bottle at the store. Perhaps they did see him and just figured drinking them would be punishment enough. + +Scratch has a habit of muttering things under his breath. At first I figured it was just an eccentricity of age and I paid little attention, but I quickly learned that these half -- heard fragments were the real gems. + +"How's that?" I have, after much rehearsing, come up with a series of open -- ended questions for extracting repetitions of his cryptic mumblings. Asking "what" all the time frustrated him and stalled our friendship until Chloe pointed it out to me. She was also the one who informed me that Scratch was fabulously wealthy. + +"Oh," He says waving his hand dismissively, "I was just thinking about blind pigs." + +"Blind pigs? Is that some southern kink?" + +He chokes on barnacles again. "No, actually I don't think it was regional, but maybe. I dunno. Blind Pig was a name... or actually I think it was the password maybe... it was either what you called or what you said to get into a speakeasy during prohibition. I was just thinking perhaps I should institute a password for the game... blind pig came to mind." He claps his hand to his forehead, fingertips on his hairline, and slowly drags them down pulling his jaw and stretching his cheeks until his fingers reach his chin. "Come on I got a new sculpture." + +Two things assured our friendship after our first curious meeting in the gully. The first was Ford trucks, specifically 1969 Ford trucks which he owns and I covet, and the second was a penchant for shooting pieces of wood, though, admittedly, Scratch's shooting is far more beautiful than anything Dean and I ever created. At some point in the distant past Scratch embarked on an artistic endeavor he calls Stump -- Shots, which involves him finding fallen trees, chain sawing off the body, leaving the intact stump, and then blasting away at them with a sawed off shotgun full of rock salt. The forest is dotted with these weird pockmarked carvings of his. His newest is a birch stump about two hundred yards past his house. Six months ago, far too early in spring for electrical storms, the tree was nevertheless hit by an errant bolt of lightening, which also fried Scratch's lamps, toaster, iron and chandelier -- the sum total of his electrical devices -- and split the tree neatly in two. This tree however, did not fall down, or rather it did not fall on its x -- axis, it fell straight down into itself. Scratch thinks there was a nail or bolt or some kind metal in it that grounded the lightening about four feet off the ground. Whatever the case, it blew apart a section of the trunk and the rest of the tree fell straight down onto the spiked, fragmented stump and stuck there. Somehow it manages to continue living, and so Scratch has been sculpting the jagged extrusions that spike out from the trunk. Some of them are four feet long and over a foot wide. Today's project is on the mossy north side of the trunk a curving, open -- wound looking protuberance that Scratch takes aim at and blasts away. Scratch and the shooting are also high on the yuppie's to do list. + +After the second shot he absently unhinges the gun and studies his work. "Kinda looks like that barrier island area off Belize doesn't it?" + +I nod, unwilling to admit I'm not that familiar with the coast of Belize. + +"Or a reclining woman. Course that would be a Degas girl..." Chuckling ensues followed by a thoughtful pause while shoving more cartridges in the gun. "Isn't it strange that our ideal of female beauty couldn't get laid to save her life a few hundred years ago...? Kinda makes you wonder about the source of your desires huh?" + +"Not really, Scratch." He turns toward me as if I have undercut some profundity he has been waiting all morning to distill. "I mean I know my ideals are cultural hand -- me -- downs... everybody know that, but what does that mean?" + +"See all ya'll have all this information and no understand of what it means. Those of us who came to these conclusions for ourselves don't have that problem." + +"Okay then old man, what does it mean?" + +"Nothing." He raises the gun to his shoulder and laughs pulling the trigger. The salt completely misses the target and scatters through the undergrowth wagging branches and puncturing leaves. Scratch can't stop laughing. He points the gun straight up, pulls the trigger and takes off hobbling back toward the house. There is a split second in which I am profoundly disoriented and then I take off after him. + +I pass Scratch about fifty feet from the house and spy Chloe swinging in lazy circles on the tire swing. She looks up, startled by our ruckus approach. + +"Are you okay?" + +"Huh? Yeah why?" The sad truth is that a two hundred yard run is desperately stretching my physical capabilities. I bend over hands on my knees greedily sucking humid air. + + "Well I heard the gun and then you're running..." + +"Oh no. It's cool. Scratch was just overemphasizing a point." + +Scratch lopes up laughing and out of breath. "Everything is wonderful Chloe," he manages between pants. He collapses down on the chopping block. Sweat trickles down his face. "I got a letter from Leah yesterday... She said to tell you hello and many thanks." + +This is clearly some element of Scratch's life that I am not privy to. I can't stop myself from thinking it's sexual. Some personal confusion between the sexiness of secrets and the sexuality of my friends. I know it's not sexual, but yet it feels sexual -- clandestine, vague, whispered -- everybody is having an orgy but you. + +"That's nice of her. Tell her I said it was nothing." Chloe closes the book in her lap and jumps off the tire. "Are we going to do this or what?" + +"Yes yes." Scratch lumbers to his feet and limps off toward the door. "Come on you two..." he hollers over his shoulder. + +"Have you ever had mead?" Chloe asks as we walk inside. + +"No." + +She drops her voice to a whisper, "it's very sweet." She sticks out her tongue. + +"I can't stand the stuff myself." Scratch grumbles having heard Chloe's whispers. + +"Then why did you make it?" + +"It's fun." He drags two enormous clear jugs out from the shadowy recesses of his pantry. His house is dark enough that he probably could have left them in the middle of the living room and they would have fermented just as well. The musty linen draperies of the bay window are perpetually drawn shut and what light that does filter through is diffused to the point of seeming confused about its role in the room. It feels extraneous and steps lightly around the upturned walnut stump on whose roots an abstract glass shape is precariously balanced. Delicately now against the cedar walls -- not wood paneling, actual cedar, splinters and all -- slinking along the far wall, edging over the couch, meeting with its cohort that took the other wall and had to navigate a collection of books that shames many Oregon libraries, teetering in decayed peach crates, collapsing against each other until it's hard to tell whether they are holding up the books or the books them. Light sneaking over the cracked spines and curled paperback covers, under the watchful eyes of Alfred Stiglitz and Georgia O'Keefe who've been waiting in the recesses between the crates where the light was not expecting them, where once there were indeed crates in their place but now in lustful ambush Alfred and Georgia groping after the light in ways that make the light uncomfortable and anxious to be off and there it is... its glowing brethren from the other wall...the two sides meet up like Victorian gentlemen, blushing, but tipping their stovepipe hats, as they nearly bump into one another in the brothel hallway, and then it's a hasty retreat to the kitchen window where they slink back out into the afternoon sun. + +Above the couch is a shelf of bric -- a -- brac photos mostly of buildings and a handful of people standing in front of stoves or arms extended holding plates of food. There is a clipping of Scratch dressed sharply in a chef coat and checkered chefware pants smiling on the cover of Food and Wine magazine. Separated by an antique bird cage complete with a stuffed finch Scratch calls Mabel, are another collection of photographs of people standing in front of airplanes, some smiling, some looking a touch nervous. One small picture in a frame whose borders are decorated with notes from the crescendo of the fourth movement of the ninth symphony is a rather terrified looking Debra Winger with her arm bravely wrapped around Scratch's waist. + +Hung prominently above the shelf and never escaping comment by first time visitors is a giant picture of Scratch buck naked save the parachute on his back, plummeting toward the out of focus grey -- brown desert below him. + +Chloe is stacking the bottles in rows on the kitchen table. Scratch is attaching what looks like surgical tubing to the rubber stoppers at the mouth of each jug. The mead is a tawny amber that looks archaic against the antiseptic stainless steel table. I lean up against the monstrous stove, complete with rangetop and massive ceiling vent, which Scratch took out of the kitchen of his last restaurant. + +"The secret," Scratch says pinching and squeezing the tubing down in the bottle, "Is to make sure you don't get the bottom inch or so into the bottle." + +"Is that the bad part or something?" Chloe sets down the last bottle and sinks into a chair. + +"Well, personally I don't think any of it is that good, but yeah the bottom is what you really don't want." Satisfied with the work he heaves the jug up to the table thumping it down on a six -- inch stack of newspapers. From my vantage point, the far side of the jug reflects a skewed convex headline -- better things are coming. + +Scratch commences sucking until the mead is running into the first bottle by means of miraculous suction. Once in Mexico I saw a bus driver use the same method to retrieve gas from a taxi, which came rushing out faster than he had anticipated and exploded out the sides of his swollen cheeks. He had the presence of mind to put the hose into the jug before turning green and commencing the vomit. Scratch just coughs and his eyes puddle up. + +"Whew... Damn." He gasps and spits in the sink. "Still needs a week or two." He cracks the primitive icebox and retrieves a carton of orange juice. "Not that bad though. He drinks straight from the carton and smacks his lips "not bad at all with a chaser." + +There comes a far off lowing sound that tickles my leg. "What the hell...?" Scratch sets down the carton, "Is there a cow out there?" + +"No. Sorry, that's my phone." I dart out the back door into the caustic white of afternoon. I have to squint and feel slightly dizzy as I answer. + +"Sil? It's me." Her voice crackles with digital lust, but all curl and Q's flattened to hiss. The treetops are swinging around me, the bleached dry sand crunching under my disoriented stagger. + +"Maya? What are you doing?" + +"Well," she giggles, "I was just calling to tell you that I'm at home and I'm naked and lonely..." + +I try to find something to say, but standing in the middle of boring midday sun of Scratch's backyard nothing comes. Somewhere thousands of miles up from here Maya is naked and wanting me. I have an urge to bolt into the woods and not stop running until I get to her or far enough away from her that I'm full circle to her. + +"I have my hand on my pubic mound..." + +She breaks through my awkward silence. "Ick. Don't say pubic mound." I shake my head as if she can see me. + +"Why?" + +"I dunno it sounds like something Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders are going to come charging up... bayonets glinting and whatnot..." + +"Kinky. I like men on horseback... Can you be my cowboy this afternoon? We haven't done that one yet." + +"I can't right now. I'm kinda in the middle of something." + +Her voice thins out, no longer clipped by compressors, simply flat. "That sucks." + +"Can I call you later?" + +"What if I said I have my hand down inside my panties?" + +"I thought you were naked." + +"I am. Except for my panties." + +"How many times do we have to..." + +"You know you like it when I say panties." There is a pause. "I want you to say it and then I'll let you go." + +"Okay. I like it when you say panties." + +"That's what I thought." The line goes dead. + +I shoot a glance back toward the house, but if they heard my end of the conversation, I'll never know. The door is open but the darkness inside is impenetrable. I don't care anyway. Or I don't want to care. I walk back inside and they are sitting on the couch drinking Pabst. + +"Maya?" Chloe arcs her eyebrows. + +"Yeah" + +"Of course it was," Scratch laughs and looks at me with a mischievous green jello glint in his eyes, "who else calls him on that phone?" + +"Every now and then my dad calls." This sounds lamer than I intended. They say nothing. "Mead all bottled?" + +"Yup. Be ready in a week or two." Scratch seems over enthusiastic about it as if incredibly relieved to be out of an awkward silence. + +I stare at him willing the awkward silence back. Scratch sits forward on the couch wipes his hands vigorously up and down his face and retrieves a tupperware container from the coffee table. He sits back resting it on the crest of his fat -- skinny -- guy belly. Out of it he produces a bud of marijuana and pair of scissors, which he uses to trim off a few leaves and buds. As he begins to roll a joint, the light in the room seems to perk up. It starts to pool around him, enveloping his body, wrapping it like a mummy. He leans forward again for the remote, and, after a bit squinting and face rubbing, the speakers emit a gentle finger -- plucked guitar sound crawling all the way from Nebraska across the hand woven Mexican rug on the floor. Soft eighth notes tiptoeing through the room, jumping on the table to a scatter of ash and dust and errant leaves of weed, but steadily and with direction and purpose, heading for Scratch. A corporeal mosaic forms around him, sound and light interwoven... and I haven't smelled anything in while... drawing to him, a film running backwards, a battery being charged, the book shelves are leaning in... this is how Stiglitz and O'Keefe were found... the plants bending to the Scratchtropic influence, leaves fanned out in hopes of some future expulsion, some radiation, some giving back, the necessary exhale to this massive huffing and huffing of all available resources, stalk gone turgid bracing for the future force of it... knowing that when he finally lets go, when he talks his voice will be a howling wind peeling off glacial peaks, ducking over the pitiful bottling company and its liquor store displays carving valleys in a single blast the sound following afterward in a wake. Or. Maybe it will leak out slowly, in the way he moves, steady and deliberate, he will mumble or whisper echoing the wind beating the roof, and whole Serengetis of meaning are lost in the silence of his hand. He saves them for later. He eats them when he is alone. His mouth is a microwave. He re -- heats, re -- charges his words under his tongue, little kernels of corn erupting as he chews them around in silence, mashing light and sound, wave and note, oceans and deserts.... He goes to talk to himself and nothing but popcorn spills out. + + + + + + + + + +"Why is it that you don't come visit me?" Late April we're lying in bed, hooked and crooked around the rumpled clothing and sheets which are scrunched down to pillowcase size and bunched between her legs. A leather boot is trying to crawl up my ass, and I head it off by rolling on my side which sends Maya's head up off my chest just as I reach the end of my question. They are shooting a movie on the street downstairs. It's a what's -- his -- name action vehicle. Every so often we here "action" and "cut" over the ambient discord of Sixth Avenue. + +"You know my life is here in New York... this is where I need to be right now." She speaks with the conviction of any recent immigrant. She has absorbed the vertical velocity of ninty -- nine story buildings. She wants that cinematic sweep from the Bronx to the Fire Island breakers, sketching indigo and pulsing with the semen of six million teeming... old grade school jokes about the depth of the vagina and length of the penis and the resulting imbalance that yields six hundred feet of virgin pussy just outside the window and everyone, every man woman and struggling model in this city believes it's out there, just waiting for them to push through the Hymen Tunnel and into the unfurrowed promised land. "Anyway, you were the one who said we needed to have our own lives. I thought independence was 'the most important thing' to you. You know you broke my heart when you left LA." + +"When I left LA? You're the one who got on an airplane the night after we met." + +"For a month Sil. I came back and then you left for god knows how long it's been now... I'm starting to think that I must have some alienation abandonment issue with my father because I sure seem willing to... nevermind what does it matter? All this is past and conjecture and meaninglessness... you're here another forty -- eight hours and this is how were going to spend it?" She sits up on her elbow and looks accusingly through the dissolving plume of cigarette smoke. + +"No it's not. I just wanted to know why you never come down to visit me. I'm not asking you to move in with me or to drop your life or anything. I just thought maybe you know... we could spend some time together in my world." + +"You act like I'm some kind of high maintenance city girl." She flicks her ash out the open window. "I came down there four months ago Sil. I like your life down there. I had a good time, but right now there are so many things going on it's just crazy... I barely have time to drop everything and spend time with you this week." + +Busyness. Flickers and flashes, action and cut. Subways storming the bridges, greedy tendrils, roots clawing up out of the ground. "You act like I'm some kind of backwoods hick. You know I lived in LA for over twenty years... Forget it. I like New York. I like coming to see you here. I like to get away from Athens every now and then. Wait. Did you say you think you have abandonment issues with your father?" + +She giggles. "The thought has occurred to me. I mean I live in a city with no shortage of bachelors and I'm with you... I mean I'm in love with you, that's why I'm with you, but I'm just saying if someone else, some outsider were looking at my life what would they think." + +"Did your father abandon you?" + +"No. But he was out of town a lot." + + + + + + + +It's difficult to tell how long we have been this way. For some time I have been able to hear the mead. It's a long low moan, a lovesick bovine moan, some final protest of sugar against the decay into alcoholic oblivion. The jars gently rattling as if patiently rocking a crying child, running fingers through hair It's alright now, it won't be that bad thoughtful but meaningless, perhaps secretly thinking to themselves that they would like to crawl up in a ball and let the springworks go like a Panama City hotel on fire. Through the primordial haze now a light penetrates, the first rays after the nuclear winter of the comets, just three mammals around to witness. And of course a fourth to break the spell with style. + +"Godamnit what the hell is going on here?" I can see Jimmy's silhouette in the doorway or at least I am aware that the silhouette in the doorway must be Jimmy, but I can't really see anything, the setting sun is not afraid of Scratch's house at all, it's Roman red pushing through the door in search of Christians for hungry kitties... none in here you sick fucks... + +"Sil, there are cowboys on the roof. I cannot work with cowboys on the roof. I can't get the cowboys off the roof." Jimmy again. He is insistent on this communication thing... great gods in heaven he has turned off the music... Jesus what is this noise...its...its...punk rock. Time to give in. Straighten up. Fly right. Bathroom. Close door. Drain. Zip, for the love of god do not forget to zip and even more important -- damnit should have thought of this first -- tuck, but its okay the tucking appears to be ingrained. Ah yes, there it is, water on the face, down the gullet, engage in some Scratch -- esque face wiping. Alright. Now how was that? Why are there cowboys on the roof? Who put cowboys on the roof? + +"These mutherfuckers are crazy," Jimmy is pacing, "I can't fucking deal with cowboys on my roof. Stupid fucking south Georgia hicks.... Red. Man I tell you these are some red mutherfuckers." He smiles. "I mean shit it's kinda funny I guess, but damn. I just can't work with them around. And they're wearing cowboy boots... who the fuck," he extends his arms incredulously, "wears cowboy boots on a slick, tar -- papered, forty -- five degree slope?" He gestures toward the tupperware, "Scratch you mind if I roll one?" + +"Help yourself. What are you doing to the house with cowboys on the roof?" + +"I'm supposed to be putting a porch off the back, they got these steps... it's about six feet off and sloping downhill so I gotta run out some joists from the floor beams...you know through the wall and then built a little screened in deck and ninety degree turning stairs... pretty complicated carpentry you know? I mean not really it's all brute force shit, but I can't fucking work with goddamn south Georgia redneck cowboys clomping back and forth on the roof all day talking about niggers and whores and dripping tar all over my joists -- what is wrong with these people? Have you seen cowboys on roofs before? I have never seen a cowboy on a roof." + +"No. Never seen a cowboy on a roof... you're sure they were cowboys?" Scratch hobbles to the icebox and grabs a six -- pack. + +"I mean... I guess. They had the boots. They had the hats. The had the twang. They drove Chevy trucks... + +"'Nuf said." Scratch smiles at me. "Well smoke that and try not to think about it." + +Can you feel the fingers in your hair? Try not to think about it... there is nothing in the closet... do you want me to open it? For the love of god no. Don't open it. I'm not thinking about her. It. I'm not thinking. Heel -- clicking there are no cowboys on the roof... there are no cowboys on the... there are no cowboys at all. + +"The mead's all bottled? Yeah? How long?" + +"Well normally two weeks in the bottle, but I had to gulp a little getting the siphon working and think a week will do." + +"Won't the fermentation create pressure? I mean won't it burst the bottles?" + +Jesus. That low moaning again. Maybe it's a groaning, maybe it's not the decay but the pressure...we want out... we never asked to be fermented. The original recipes call for ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus on certain grains. We left that out. Most of us never get over memories salted with distance and snapshots kept in ghosted albums on dusty shelves anyway. Fermentation is the slow breakdown of structure over time. Help! I'm melting! The sugar in honey is slowly changed by the acidity of the citrus. It's like snow melting from and ground up by the heat and decay of last falls leaves. Eventually there would be only a thin shell of snow, were it not for the cataclysm of the sun crashing down on the other side. In the end, sweetness becomes mead. Yellowed photographs crumble. Bedsheets stain and crust. Old Fords too long in the driveway choke and sputter charcoal, engine chaises rust, valve seats loose their youthful bounce... even your bones turn brittle -- unless you fall out of an airplane first. + +Chloe slowly sits up and reaches for a beer. "Just take the next couple of days off, wait til the cowboys are gone." + +"Oh I took the next two weeks off. I mean no point in putting down a nice deck and then having tar dripped on it." Jimmy lights the joint and exhales slowly. He offers it around but gets no takers. "Solo? Alright. I need it." + +The cave -- like silence returns for a minute or two. Jimmy seems to create some sort of energetic opposite to Scratch's vacuum, neutron stars orbiting each other. Jimmy smokes the joint about half way down and then gently taps it out in the ashtray. He smiles for minute and then decides to share. "Okay so this isn't like something I normally do, but it had interesting results so I'm gonna share... After getting hot tar dripped on me for the millionth time I went inside to see if they had some solvent or something right? Well nobody's home. I holler around for a bit and then I think fuck it... forget all about the tar -- which, as it turns out comes off pretty easy with tar -- off -- start snooping around the house. It's one of those old houses off Boulevard, but the couple that owns it are nuevo -- rich... you know Scratch, saucing it up with the Truffle oil like it's ketchup?" Scratch grimaces and nods. "So at first I'm digging through the medicine cabinet for anything interesting, actually I lifted a couple darvocets..." Jimmy giggles. + +"Jimmy that's horrible." Chloe with her mock angry voice. "Can I have one?" + +"Yeah sure, but wait... It gets much worse." He bends forward laughing and then scratches the back of his head and screws up his face as if building courage for a new level of confession. + +"Did you sniff her panties?" Scratch beams like a jewel thief passing on the secrets of the trade. "You sniffed her panties didn't you?" + +Jimmy falls off the edge of the couch laughing. "Yeah. I did." + +"Jimmy!" I can't believe..." Chloe grabs a magazine, roles it up and starts swatting him on the head. + +"Wait! Hold up ya'll!" He rolls out of Chloe's range. "Damn girl... Look I know it's fucked up..." backward glance at Chloe, some attempt at suppressing laughter. "Damn... But you know, I was standing there in the bathroom when the idea occurred to me and to tell you the truth I started laughing the minute I realized I was gonna do it. It's just one of those things that you never think to do, I mean unless your actually fucked up enough to get off on that sort of shit, but most guys, like myself, A) never have the opportunity to do something like that and B) when they do have the opportunity to do that don't think to do it... cause you know it's not like I wanted to get off on it... I just wanted to know..." + +"James William Miller..." + +"Oh come off it Chloe. You're not my mom. You wanted a pill damnit. I stole the pill. I mean suppose the woman was in pain and needed those pills... that's all fine and good, but sniff some panties and you're all pissed? Don't get high and mighty with me. Besides you've sniffed a few jock straps yourself haven't you?" + +"Actually no. I haven't." Chloe crosses her legs and glares at him. But then a smile breaks over her face. "But I have stolen underwear from a few guys because I wanted to have a souvenir." + +"See I knew it. But you have totally distracted me from my original point, which was the magazines... No not those magazines, damn ya'll are some repressed mutherfuckers... National Geographic Magazines..." Jimmy inches by Chloe and sits back down in the middle of the couch. "I sat there reading National Geographic for like two hours, well, actually not reading just leafing through looking at the pictures. But after two hours of that I started wondering about everything I know...Do you ever get the feeling that tribal people sitting around swatting flies or sticking sticks in anthills to get grubs...or is that monkeys? I forget, whatever, but do you ever start to suspect that perhaps these people are leading much fuller lives? Look at the eyes of the people in National Geographic sometime and tell me you don't start to wonder if perhaps we have missed the point of life entirely." No one says anything, his voice gets quieter, "and in some weird way I think that's why I had to do it, even though it's a reversal of cause and effect, I had to do it because I need to be that close, not invasive, though we perceive it as such now, but think about it, smell... smell is the original identity, the animal scent, the recognition of one's fellow creatures. I smell you and therefore you are not me and then, I mean goddamn, that's what opens the door to everything." + +"You think we'd all be better off sniffing each other?" + +"Scratch I'm serious here. I think that the reason we're so distant from each other is that we've walled ourselves up. We got hung up on the threat response -- you are not me and therefore I must guard against you -- rather than the hey how you doing response that I see in other animals. I mean Chloe, Annie sniffs crotches right? It's her way of understanding... of knowing." Scratch hands Jimmy the joint which is once again burning. He takes a long drag and speaks as he exhales, "I'm not saying we should sniff each other's underwear, I'm just saying that's the kind of closeness we're going to need if we're all ever going to get along in this world. Well, that and the collapse of the whole religion and nation -- state concepts, but I think those are inevitable in a world with the kind of closeness that I want." + +Scratch takes the joint back from Jimmy and stares intensely at him for awhile taking little hits of smoke into his lungs in quick succession. "When I go Jimmy, I want you to come." + + + + + + + +"It's beautiful isn't it Sil?" Maya in her painfully stylish charcoal overcoat, the recent dry chill rustling them, a few falling off here and there. Thanksgiving in Central Park, playing frisbee and watching the cirrus turn pink and lavender and now tightly hugging against the faint but persistent breeze. "But kind of sad too don't you think?" She shivers and pulls tighter. "Did you know leaves aren't their true color until they die? I mean the leaf is green because the tree give it chlorophyll and stuff, but then when the tree stops, then the leaves reveal themselves." + +"That's a depressing thought." + +"Maybe. But it's beautiful too." She has a wistful look of absolute satisfaction with the world that makes me uncomfortable. + +"The leaves are the tree though. The tree is the leaves. They aren't separate from each other. They don't exist in some vacuum. We're the ones who are seeing them as separate." + +"Maybe. But if that's my perspective then isn't the oneness just yours?" + +"Perhaps." We start to walk back across the fields toward the subway. "But we monkeys seem to be the only ones with this overly acute sense of self. I mean if you set aside the usual way of thinking about it couldn't you say that you and I are in fact one entity?" + +She smiles. "That sounds great and all, but we're not. Especially not us. I'm here, you're down there." + +"Maybe our loneliness is in failing to see that we aren't apart at all. Maybe loneliness and longing are just the result of some isolation from ourselves. Maybe if we stop breaking things into pieces based solely on our own distortions and isolation, we would see through this parts/whole dilemma... we'd see something interconnected, a kind of ever -- evolving beauty of process -- poetry through motion, through seeing the through." + +"But we are separate Sil. It doesn't matter how eloquent you want to get about. The leaves still die every year." + +"How do you know they die? Changing color could be only the beginning for the leaves. The leaves don't die because they're still part of an ongoing process. Thinking of brown leaves as dead is only our misconception of what life is. Or even if they do die, everything that dies comes back. These leaves lying there on the ground, breaking apart into food for the tree, soil nutrients, that sort of stuff... It gives the trees the material to produce new leaves for a new year. Are the new leaves actually new? In a sense, the dead brown leaves are climbing back up the trunk of the tree and emerging out of it green again." + +"Maybe. I kind of like that idea. The leaves fall for the tree so it can survive the winter and then help it grow in the spring.... But the tree is still never going to fall for the leaves." + + +### Five ### + +Trust bed -- eponymous arrivals -- perishables -- wild honey -- summer's by the sea -- here comes the argument -- geography's ants -- implications -- dissemination -- the grid -- through which -- an ideal world gains -- increasing the frequency -- clear endless borders -- the sound has so much body -- dum dee dee der der dee -- becoming -- oom duh oomp -- unbecoming -- click de clack de clack de click de clack oom dee oom dee oomp -- + +The hum the hum the fingers the beat the whining dance the drip drip drip tick tick tick here they come spilling out the sand the pills the time the mold on the tortillas the notes dripping down the speaker cones treble to middle to bass the electric whirl of fans exhaust turbines the spin of molecules the carefully calibrated smoothness of glass the sterility of architecture the depression of low -- lit mornings walloping the darkness into submission the glare the piercing of sun on distracted fingernails doing something doing something not right now doing something. + +It has been some time. + +But the pounding remains. + +And the letters keep on following me. + +Perhaps they are building something. + +And the clicking. + +And the far away fingers clicking. + +That could well be the finish work. + +Molding. Rain gutters. Lightening rods. + +Click click click amplified butterfly wing strokes slowed down, sine waves elongated for closer study zoom in zoom in zoom in zigzagging diggy diggy da momenoff. Chaos is not you see. There are patterns repetitions, beats underlying beats, polyrhythms diving in and out over and under the more obvious backbeats. This is not in time, not in time as we are accustomed to it, out of time, very nearly out of time, but the pattern repeats, waves join and harmonize the tick tick tick blends to the drip drip drip, one wonders if they weren't always the same thing.... Have you not noticed the shplocks? The shplooks? The dings? The clacks? The toings? The tongs? The sprongs? Sounds that work by committee? Sounds that need umlauts...? Diphthongs...? Tildes...? + +Things are always as they have ever been but somehow incredibly difficult -- what seemed simple in the end, to get their, to get where? Oh yes the molding. The finishing touches that soften the architectural foxfires. Stamps of individuality hiding the corners, ramps for the windup toys -- fate death dream decay. The decay. The little green growths on the end of the day, the shower a blacker shade mixed with red, different sorts you see... more molds than people when you come down to it. Spawning spreading, eschewing organization, a kind of atonal repetition of function without regard to form. This means something right? It all means something right? This turning on, turning off, repetition of the beat, the caged smoke crawling up the walls from cigarettes and the ashtray says you been up all night like the man on the radio said it would say? Slaves to the pattern, to the beat, the rhythm of blood and circuitry now inexplicably mixed and unable to synchronize without each other. The simultaneous march of time and faucets and showerheads -- this will be good come winter you know -- clicking their way through time the variable, the frequency modulation of life. + +Outside is. Haven't been there lately. + +Mainly it's the hum. The whine. The sound of speed. Spinning. The hunch of my back seen from afar trying to get the fucking mold off the fucking tortillas and the hum that won't stop and I love it I want to crawl up in and become it I want the murmur of lips going mmm mmm mmm do do do da da da hmm. Hmm. Tick tick tick all over the table again. Blue and white and pink. Boys and girls and indeterminacies all playing together between the ketchup and syrup and butter and mustard and half full glasses of water with dust and strange protozoa floating on the surface, some so large you can see them with a magnifying glass, which is right there by the bills that haven't been paid, sticking out from under the magazines I haven't read and held down by the mustard as evidence of last night's hamburger. + +Oh yes. Last night -- they were red and pink and blue and subversive and locked up. But we freed them, we did, Jimmy with the double helix reflection of throbbing candles in his eyes, spilling them everywhere. The last of them. Chloe in her silk pajama bottoms, legs tucked up under, and the walls leaning in and the windows gone convex to get a better view, everybody wants to see this, everybody is down for the spill, the collision of chemical surfaces, the cohesion of colors not found in your more academic theories... The backbeat is the thing, the tick tick tick. That's the approaching point, the coming nonesuch... The room had organ tones, the kind of fullness that only an organ can convey, we're sitting on the inside of an organ, stops and levers heaving and sighing, the rush of air, sucking in the windows, chairs and couches bent forward, leaning over on their knees and then the low exhale, the groan, but here it's something difficult, something in B flat, but still upbeat, punctuated by a muffled, distorted snare beat, a bass drum with a fresh head on it, flat and claustrophobic, swallowing the echo before it gets a chance to breathe and then the sucking in again, the stops pulled out for a c -- chord, the upper arch, the melody note of an atonal progression. + +It was after the enchiladas. + +I like mold. In small qualities. When baked it always has the potential to form some mind -- altering substance, which is not something I want, but it would be interesting you understand... Food should be an adventure fraught with peril lest it become routine, shoveling coal into a furnace. And neither of them mentioned a moldy taste, though I noticed it a little here and there, gave everything a more organic, perhaps whole -- grain, sort of flavor. Dean would have lost it, gone on a hippie exterminating rampage, but he remains up there, sends long metalic letters, whole grain remains unmolested. + +The mold was eclipsed by the beat. By the melody. By the claustrophobia. By the tick tick tick. Hold up. Slow that moment down a touch. Maybe to a tock tock tock or even plong plong plong like a cue ball in slow motion striking the two ball with a crack slowed down to an explosion, and then reaching in to grab them, but here Chloe seems to be moving in reverse as if the film just reached the end of the reel and some lazy attendant -- James didn't you work the projectors for a while? -- has just hit reverse rather than rethread for a rewind. Yes Chloe is not picking them up, she is re -- putting them in her mouth, they have always been in her mouth. They came out to have their moment to let the windows and wall bend and breathe in jealous gasps and then back in they go where they have always been. Everything woozing back into Chloe, gulping air, drinking in the claustrophobic air returning to where it always was. And the windows draw back in horror as if to say I can't believe you've played the tease, we always knew you had it in you, but here? Now? Like this? To give. And then take away. So cold so inhuman so... wait when is your birthday? We know chart people, we have suspicions about you.... September is it...? Yes, thinking you have it all in balance, eh? Well have you ever noticed that the scales are tipping? Yes seems that they aren't quite balanced when their in your hands eh? Not quite balanced... + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + +Dean junior can be lured to the surface for food. But otherwise he remains alternating between castle and treasure. I found out from Melissa that he would not last long at all in the ocean. He is a fresh water fish. I had a glass yesterday. It was a little stale, but definitely not salt water. Melissa says not to drink it anymore as it has strange chemicals in it. But this morning I had another glass. It was almost fishy. + + + + + +I have the hiccups and my leg is ringing but otherwise it's a statuesque day. Today I think we should all play harmonicas and live in sun -- faded slate -- gray shacks without indoor plumbing. Everything leaving all at once in all directions. Would your life seem more meaningful in duotone? A kind of warm brown wash to color your eyelids like the thunderstorms, flash flooding down the Rialto, right by that house on the sharpest bend of River Road, that one with the mailbox perpetually down, victim to countless corrosive glasses of gin? My mailbox has been down for some time. On the edge of autumn where the last fireflies still tango in time changes and the hush that comes after the last beat drops and you stumble it down the line to the head -- hanging hour at which all regrets are cashed for last minute glimpses in cruel reflective toilet water, here we -- and the beat is dropping into slate -- gray outhouses where we sit waiting for the paper, the news the leaves of grass that we used to use. + +Eventually I will answer my leg. It will be Maya. We will talk amongst ourselves. Try to batten down the hatches of our hopes and fears, but it won't work for either of us. She will hang up and go for a walk around the east village, stop in St. Marks and read a few more pages from a Rilke biography and then down Delancy for a couple of drinks at sakdlfjkj where the hipsters will shoot pool and drink Brooklyn Lager because that's what hipsters do, and Maya will push the ice around in an empty glass of Vox and stare out the window at the people that aren't walking by and dream of couples huddled close against the cold, but it's August and it isn't cold. Then on the way home she will stop in at Rice and have some of that curious black grains with stir -- fried vegetables and maybe a gelato from the place next door for the long walk back to the Village. And I will eat the last of Jimmy's pills and feel pretty good until dinner time at which point I will go for walk and end up at Scratch's house where he will serve me some strange couscous and tofu dish because he considers tofu the last culinary challenge of his nearly complete culinary career, after which he will swear that as soon as he masters the art of tofu, invents his one perfect dish, he is closing up shop and heading to Costa Rica. He will mock my posture, but in a good -- humored way. Jimmy will stop by and hatch a plan. It will be a grand plan. It might even involve motorcycles and bandits. Chloe will be suspiciously absent. + +Later I will find myself at home. I will smoke idle cigarettes and pour myself a glass or two of brown liquor and dream of someplace I could go and be surly. + + + + + + + + + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + +Melissa is at work. I think she is beginning to tire of me. I am a drain to her. But with her working all day, who is going to look after Dean Jr.? I feed him every morning and evening. Just after she leaves and just before she gets home. I didn't plan it that way. At first I just noticed that my days began and ended with feeding Dean Jr. + +Every morning while I am asleep she opens all the curtains and draws the blinds in the bedroom. I think she is sending me a message, but I don't understand a word of it. All I know is that every morning I have to let down the blinds again, draw the curtains and drop a few little gray -- green pellets in Dean Jr.'s tank. It takes a while for the food to be consumed or to settle to the bottom, between the florescent pebbles -- why are his pebbles florescent? Are there florescent peddles in streams? Are there actually florescent rocks out there, and I have just been too blinded to see them? It's usually well into the afternoon before I can have my first taste. + +The water is getting musty. I suspect it's fish shit, but I don't like to think about that. I prefer to taste it as the essence of fish. I have acquired a taste for it. Tap water no longer excites me like it used to. I get no thrill out of turning the knobs anymore. I went across the street to a flea market yesterday and bought a ladle. I keep it hidden under the bed so Melissa won't find it. I have taken to covering the tank with an old black shirt. The water level hasn't dropped noticeably yet, but I want to establish a pattern before she gets suspicious. If she finds the ladle I plan to tell her it's a sexual thing. I think I'll tell her I like to have my balls ladled while getting head. She can't find out. If she finds out she'll kick me out. + +I wish you could see him Sil. The way he stops moving entirely. He rotates one of his swivelly eyes upward and watches me as I dip and ladle in and draw it up to my mouth. He knows. He understands. We have moments during the day. He will catch me doing silly things and laugh his mouthy little laugh. Or I will lie down on the floor and crawl over so that he can't see me and sneak up around the side of the tank, wedge my head between the tank and T.V. and pop up suddenly to surprise him. It startles him a little, but I think he's come to expect it a little now. I'll have to think of something new. I don't want him to get bored with the routine. + + + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + + + +I don't think you should worry about me Sil. Things are winding down here. I'll be coming down soon; I just have to stick this thing out with Dean Jr. I have to see it through. Melissa is suspicious definitely. And I did check. The only fish to human transference I could find was from eating the fish -- worms and stuff like that. I'm not really in a bad way. It's just the process of ending that intrigues me. I always have to stay to the bitter end just to see if everything wraps up the way I thought or if there is that last minute twist we all love, that unexpected moment. + +This weekend was fun. Melissa had to go to a conference in Atlantic City. Of course I brought Dean Jr. I put him in a tupperware bowl for the train ride (I had a hard time trying to think of reason to bring my bag to the bathroom so I could open the tupperware and give him a fresh dose of oxygen -- water gets stale -- he can use up all the oxygen in the water -- did you know that? I didn't, but the girl at the pet store told me that. She gave me her number too, but I think I threw it out. Luckily I hadn't shaved, so on the train I told Melissa I was going to shave and I brought my bag and gave Dean Jr. some air. Maybe he could have made it all the way, but I didn't want to risk it. Anyway I came back unshaven and forgot that shaving was my excuse, and Melissa stared me down real ugly and then it hit me and all I could think of to say was that there was no hot water. I know she went later and checked and of course there probably was hot water.) + +I lost fifty dollars at the blackjack table. + + + + + + + + + + + +"So he's coming down again?" Chloe is cleaning up the back of my neck with the clippers. Already I feel slightly cooler, but this is a feeling that will pass shortly. + +"Seems that way." + +"Did he say when?" + +"No." + +"Huh. You know Sil, I still don't understand what you're doing here. And I understand even less why Dean is coming down again. You know I'm still trying to get out of here..." + +"Yes, but you were born here. Everyone is trying to get out of where they were born. But to tell the truth, I'm not entirely sure why Dean is coming down." I consider mentioning the aquarium drinking, but decide against it since he and Chloe have had only the briefest of encounters in the past, and it might, well, color her opinion of him some unsavory shade of disgust. "I think maybe he's coming to get out of the living situation he's been in with his girlfriend and such, but knowing Dean there is probably a good deal more to it than that." Chloe is staring at my head in a distracted, unsettling way. "What?" I turn slightly to look her square in the eyes. + +"Um, I think your ears are a little lopsided." + +"What?" + +"Well at first I thought I was messing up the back of your neck, but it's clearly straight and yet, when compared to your ears, it still looks slightly lopsided, so I think maybe your ears aren't quite even." She smiles. "Sorry." + +"But the hairline on the neck looks okay?" + +"Oh yeah it's fine." + +"Well that's all I care about." + +"Okay. Well then you're done." She switches off the clippers and brushes off my neck with an old t -- shirt. I run my fingers over the remaining eighth inch of hair on my scalp and come away with an unsettling mixture of sweat and hair clippings. + +"You might want to take a shower before you go out." + +"Yeah I plan to." + +"Are you going out tonight?" + +"Maybe. What are you doing?" + +Chloe's face grows slightly flushed as she sits down beside me on the porch steps. "I have a date." + +"Bicycle Man?" + +"Lord no." She turns her head, "why? Do I look that hard up?" + +"No. He's just my favorite." + +"Really? I would think he might be slightly intimidating... at least Jimmy seems slightly intimidated, or defensive of me, or something when he's around." + +"Why? Because he could snap Jimmy and me in half like a toothpick?" She chuckles slightly. "No I like him because he is totally non -- threatening. There is no chance in hell you would ever want anything more out of him than sex. He represents no threat to our friendship so for me he's the least threatening. But that's not why I like him. I like him because he doesn't mind being called Bicycle Man. Anthropology Man just never seemed to really accept the name, every time we called him that he would get this mortified look on his face and remind us of his name, like we were calling him that because we had forgotten his real name. What was his real name?" + +"Robert." + +"Oh yeah, Bob, see I knew there was a reason we called him Anthropology Man..." + +"Scratch dubbed him that because Bob told him some long story about being in Costa Rica and going to all the Indian ruins or whatever." + +"Really? I always thought he was an Anthropology professor or something?" + +"No. He owns a construction company. Or landscaping company... I forget exactly." + +"But you're not going out with him either huh?" + +"No. He's engaged now. I'm going out with The Professor." + +"Oh god Chloe. Again?" The Professor is, naturally, a professor, though his diminutive statue and total lack of problem -- solving skills set him apart from the more familiar Gilligan's Island variety. We took to calling him the professor because none of us can ever remember his name. And because he's well, such a professor. He tries hard to be cool, you can see it in his eyes, he wants to scream, but he can't, or if he does, it comes out a murmur, a stumbling awkward line that usually only reveals him for the overeducated mousish man that he is. He seems genuinely concerned with things like literature and poetry, but only because he is involved in them, he is good at them, he lacks the natural enthusiasm of Jimmy or Scratch. He would have written the poem, but never dared to touch the plums. Unlike the famous professor on that deserted isle, he can't seem to make a radio out of coconuts to broadcast distress signals with. I don't even think he could crack a coconut open, much less transform it into something usable. He's New England. Coconuts are obtained in cans at specialty Asian Markets which always share a wall with some sort of adult video establishment because the Asian community understands the needs of white New Englanders. He has pasty skin, anemic eyes, and a disgusting habit of carefully evaluating risk before proceeding. He's more or less dead, and frankly, he scares me to death. He's so far gone he's never coming back, and he's only a year or two older than me. Chloe seems genuinely smitten with him. But then again he is the first person Chloe has dated, at least in the time I've known her, that has a functioning mind. He has a certain depth, however bookish and ill -- formed it may be, that Chloe needs, but is afraid of being attached to, of becoming dependant upon, of needing. In his twisted way he does have an element of danger to him that Chloe no doubt finds irresistible -- he's married. + +"I know it's horrible, I know I'm doomed to live through some horrible karmic payback for all of this, but really I think I'm in love with his mind," She claps her hands on her knees. "It's the first time there's something more than just attraction. I'm not even really attracted to his body. I mean he isn't bad looking you know, but he's kind of...well... he's short. But I'm not going to swallow a moth for him, already promised myself that. There will be no moth eating." + +"It must be wonderful for him to live out the fucking the babysitter fantasy + +"Stop Sil. There will be no mocking in my presence. And that isn't how it started. We met because his younger daughter is in my class..." + +"Fucking the third grade teacher fantasy... see this goes way back...." + +"That's enough Sil." She brandishes a cigarette and threatens to burn my arm. "It wasn't until we were already friends and he had moved out of the house, that his wife asked if I would watch the girls." + +"He actually moved out?" This surprises me, but somehow endears the man to me. "Wow. I wouldn't have thought he had it in him." + +"He caught his wife with her personal trainer or something cliché like that. He had to move out. But it made me more comfortable knowing that he didn't do it for me or because of me... it didn't have anything to do with me. I wouldn't want him to do it for me. But won't say that I'm not glad it happened -- is that selfish of me?" + +"Selfish? No I don't think so. But you are walking into a minefield Chloe." I run my hands over my head in a manner reminiscent of Scratch. "You Chloe, who professes to detest entanglements... I mean... you couldn't find someone more entangled if you tried." + +"I know, I know." Her head slumps dejectedly. "But it's important to me Sil that you understand I didn't plan this. I didn't go into it like a naïve little girl, but I certainly didn't want to split up his family and so far I haven't. And part of me even hopes that he and his wife will get back together..." She lets out a long sigh. "Even if that will be the end of my relationship with him." + +"She has no idea? I mean she must not if she asked you to baby -- sit." + +"I can't tell. Maybe she does, but it's not like he and I have even had sex... we just talk. We talk kind of like you and I talk, and we care about each other... and we've had plenty of opportunities to have sex now that he's living at The Downtowner." + +"He's staying in a motel?" + +"Yeah. See, I don't even think he wanted to move out. He's been in the hotel for two weeks now and not only have we never had sex, but he hasn't even picked up a rental listing or anything. Besides, I love their daughters and I have to provide them with some modicum of female sanity lest they turn out to be like their mother... She actually drives all the way to Atlanta to buy organic vegetables... I mean, do you see the... never mind... it just disgusts me." + +"Yup. I mean never mind the hypocrisy, we're all hypocrites, but some of us are at least aware of our hypocrisy..." + +"I know. That's what I'm saying. This woman is insane. I mean she was fucking the personal trainer or something and into organics and asks me to baby -- sit three days a week so she can go to yoga, meanwhile her family is disintegrating around her, her daughters are closer to me than her and she seems to think its just a phase in her marriage or something. And the worst part is she's a black belt in jiu -- jitsu or shuiru or some horribly obscure form of martial arts and could probably kill me in less time than it would take to form the idea of killing me." Chloe shivers and leans her head on my shoulder. + +"And you're fucking around with her husband..." + +"And I'm fucking around with her husband..." + + + + + + + + + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + +I don't know why Sil. I know it's disgusting. I don't even like doing it, but I have acquired a taste for it. I can't stop now, it bookends the days. Melissa has been yelling an awful lot lately. I'm not sure what she yells about exactly because I don't hear it. It's over. I gather that much. Presumably she wants me out of here. I do try to stay tuned enough to distinguish a date or something equally real, but usually she stops yelling after a while and we fuck like angry teenagers. She found the ladle yesterday. She didn't even ask what it was for. She was already yelling and picking up my clothes and throwing them in the hamper, and she reached under the bed and pulled out the ladle and just set it on the nightstand. After the yelling we were having sex, and she asked me to slap her ass with the ladle, so I did. I got tired after a while and couldn't have sex and operate the ladle at the same time and so I just sat on the side of the bed, and whacked her ass until she came. Or I think she came. This morning her ass was black and blue, but she acted like it never happened. + +Dean Jr. is running out of water. He seems to know what is happening. I vomited twice yesterday from the drinking. I don't know for sure if I can finish. I went outside today for the first time since Atlantic City. It's very hot out, Sil. Is it hot there as well? I'm disappointed in myself. I can't seem to finish. And just this afternoon while I was out I bought a bottle of water. I cheated Sil. It was so clean and pure and tasteless. Not the slightest odor of fish. How do they get all the fish taste out of the water? Think how many fish are in streams... even weird blind fish that live way underground in caves and water tables... so many fish and yet when we get a bottle of water from the store we never taste them. But they're there. It's their water. We just borrow it. We take it, we filter it, we use it, we piss it out, we flush the toilet, we filter it again and then we send it back to the fish. We never even thank them. At least I don't know of anyone thanking them. + + + + + +From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net> +To: sil@kali.org +Subject: + + + +It's over thank god. I drank the last inch this morning by sticking my head in and sucking it up with a straw. Dean Jr. flopped around on the florescent gravel for about an hour or so. And then he was dead. I gathered up my clothes and put them in the suitcase. It took me most of the afternoon to find my car. I'll see you soon. + + + + + + + + + + + +"It's not bad." Jimmy sounds surprised. "I don't know that it's all that good, but it isn't bad." + +"Yeah. It's not the best I've made, but it's not the worst either." In a display of startlingly bad posture, Scratch is slouched down on the couch, cradling a ceramic mug on his stomach. He groans, props his bad leg up on the arm of the chair. "Fall is coming. This Indian Summer thing is always the first sign, and lucky me, I get to feel it in my bones." His lips curl sarcastically, and he takes another sip of mead. "The humidity's dropped anyway." + +Jimmy lights a cigarette and exhales in the too -- fast manner of people who don't actually smoke. I stretch my legs out and lie back prone on the floor, staring up at the tapestry ceiling. "Where's Chloe?" + +"Out to dinner with the professor..." Jimmy exhales too hard again. + +"She's been here what? Ten years?" Scratch shifts himself and lies down now occupying the entire length of the couch. "She knows how small this town is, how long does she think she can keep this on the down tip when they go out all the time?" + +"I think she believes that as long as they don't have sex they aren't doing anything that needs to be hidden. Or at least that was the impression I got." + +"He's obviously still in love with his wife. Guys like that are always going to stay in love with their wives because they don't have the imagination to move beyond it -- not saying that's a bad thing mind you -- just that he's going to go back to her, and Chloe is going to be left holding on to something that was never there." Scratch sits up and rummages around in his pockets to produce a small bag of weed and some rolling papers. He tosses them at Jimmy and lies back down. "You've met him haven't you Sil? Am I right?" + +"Probably. But then I didn't think he'd move out." + +"He had to move out. He didn't want to move out, but the script dictated that he had to move out. Wwhen you walk in on her, you have to move out. You don't even want to usually. Everything right then becomes very surreal, but your options at that point are pretty much murder or move out. I think he did the right thing. I mean, it was the personal trainer right...?" Scratch laughs heartily for a minute and it's not until I see the smile spread over Jimmy's face that I remember Scratch was a personal trainer for a while. "Yeah it's never anything more than sex with the personal trainer." + +"Did you ever..." + +"No. Never did. I've always figured that there are so many wonderful single women in the world there is no reason to get involved in that sort of situation. Not every guy chooses to move out you know.... Not that it wasn't offered.... I guess, and maybe this is just me inventing excuses for Chloe because she is our friend, but I guess for women there are less ideal single men. In this town anyway." Scratch accepts the joint from Jimmy. "I still think it's a bad idea." + +We lapse into silence as they pass the joint back and forth. There is the sound of tires on gravel and the slamming of car doors. + +"Oh, by the way, Dean is coming down." I sit up again. They don't response to this news. I follow their eyes out the window where the last glow of sunset silhouettes what appears to be Chloe and The Professor walking down the path toward my front door. There is a knock at the front door. A sound so rare it takes me a minute to grasp what it is, but Scratch is already yelling come in. + +Chloe opens the door and walks in with a faint ducking motion that is immediately nervous and timid, two things Chloe rarely seems to experience. She seems to be, rather than just nervous, nervous about being nervous. Scratch bounds off the couch and is shaking hands with The Professor and hugging Chloe before I can even move. Jimmy is hurriedly crushing out the joint and steps over me to shake hands with The Professor. When the daze finally lifts I here Chloe saying, "...and you remember Sil." + +"Yes. Yes I do. How are you Sil? Nice place you have here, like camping kind of..." + +"Yeah thanks." I stand up finally. "Come on in, have a seat." + +"Is that pot I smell?" The Professor sniffs suspiciously as he and Chloe sit down on the couch next to Scratch. Chloe is in between them, and The Professor places his hand on her leg and she puts hers over it. "Man. It's been years since I smoked pot." + +"Well here you are Professor..." Scratch extends the half smoked joint to him, and Chloe turns roughly the color of a Cardinal at the mention of the word professor. + +"Oh no. That's okay I don't think I should..." + +Scratch's hand snaps back, and he cocks his head to the side. He shrugs, thrusts the joint between his lips and fumbles with my Zippo for a minute before producing a flame so large it nearly takes off his eyebrows. He chuckles and leans back on the couch. "Well the least you can do is indulge in some of my homebrewed mead here." He picks up the bottle and pours a little in his ceramic mug and passes it over to The Professor who takes a sip and proclaims it, "a little on the sweet side, but good." + +"Wait, did you call me professor? Please don't do that, only my students call me professor..." + +"Well you are a professor aren't you?" Scratch screws his face up into his potatohead stuck on smile look. + +"Yeah I am, but..." + +"Well that settles it, Professor." Scratch grabs the bottle and takes a long pull. "Can you make a radio out of coconuts?" + +"Excuse me? Oh yeah. Uh... I don't know, I've never tried." + +"Sil do you have any coconuts?" + +"No." + +"Damn." There is laughter and merriment, and everyone seems to think The Professor is being a good sport and a likeable guy and I keep staring at his hand which is resting on her knee, no, actually it's a little bit back from her actual kneecap, it's at the end of her thigh, it's right about where muscle gives way to tendon, the last extension of conscious control, he's right there at the edge and he's laughing and now he's taking the joint from Scratch, now he thinks he's one of the gang so why not and he's inhaling and laughing and everybody is having such a good fucking time and we're all in on this aren't we? We're all friends aren't we? We all fucking fit together don't we? + +"So how's this thing with your wife?" An ugly pallor of silence casts itself across the room. The Professor seems unable to speak. He stutters and mumbles something about not wanting to talk about it. Jimmy is curled into a ball in the chair trying not to burst out laughing, and Chloe is staring at me with visions of disembowelment and meat -- cleavered penises dancing across her pupils. Scratch takes a long drag and holds it. + +"Never mind Sil," Scratch begins talking as he slowly exhales "he's had a few to many nips of the mead." Scratch rubs Chloe's back. She gets up to leave and The Professor follows mumbling things about nice to meet you and you... + +The door closes behind them, and we listen to footsteps disappear into the night. No one says anything until we hear the sound of car doors. "I think that went well." Scratch grins. + +"That was fucking amazing." Jimmy lets loose his pent -- up laughter, pent so far that he seem to be spitting a bit in the midst of it. "I've never seen someone stop having a good time in that short... damn Sil. That really was brilliant." + +"Of course you know Sil," Scratch eyes me thoughtfully, "tonight's the night they actually have sex... you've driven her into his arms, you know that, right?" + +I shrug. "It's what they wanted isn't it." + + +### Six ### + + +This is the room -- these days run away like -- treasure chests of pomegranates -- nightfall on the savannah -- we had no idea -- be more like the ocean -- visualize action -- all that is waiting -- the problem -- understanding at the expense of ambiguity -- pulling in the shells -- red plumes of blue -- something to move -- turbulent somnobulist in the air -- this is the room -- + +Something strange is amiss, hitting its pointed beak on the roof in time to the squirrels scampering feet, up there with the fallen limbs of pecans and maples and the disgorging of wings, cardinals and warblers and wrens and somewhere way up there, really up, straight fucking up, canadian geese in the marshmellow tuffs and syrupy blue ether -- feathers raining through the pecans and maples and little Leda, wiping an impish grin on the back of her hand, tosses the club amidst a great splash of feathers that billow around her, listing slowly to the ground like gentle warm snow, -- this is the room where we are waiting. + +Perhaps Jimmy is not waiting. + +Perhaps I am the only one waiting. Watching the scenery out the window of a train car still sitting in an empty railyard. Everyday the same scene, but hoping for motion. + +Jimmy and I are just making some headway on a bottle of Scratch's and there it is -- another train car pulling along side ours -- the innocuous blue -- green tint of Dean's soda -- can sedan pulling to a rickety halt on the rutted driveway. I go the window and watch as he gets out and sets down his battered suitcase. Dean has wings, but they're black and someone has swallowed all his halos as if to say there is only pleasure with pain, only balance in contradiction. I've seen him dine on buddhists, put bullets through honeydew and mix gin with the Khan's famous after dinner treats. Dean was miscast. Given the wrong physical build, some paper work mix -- up on the way down, departmental records secretary spills the coffee, papers snowing off the edge of desk some requisition order slides under the filing cabinet where it's still gathering dust and Dean gets here looking like an underweight Dempsey. He's done well with it though, he's grown into into it in spite of himself. + +This morning he's wearing his trademark pin -- striped suit and fedora with his hair greased back like it's 1957 and he's slightly ahead of his time. He scratches his head and surveys his surroundings, craning to inspect the treetops and sapphire twinkles of sky poking between leaves. Then he puts his hat back on and marches down the driveway. He looks like an enemy of the people, but only as a tag, a tag they would give to Dillinger or Mitnik, a tag that belies the warmth of men who know the odds and aren't putting any money on the table. They look best as a smiling Xerox on the post office bulletin board, never a sketch, never a half remembered glimpse, no Dean would do it all in broad daylight, the sort of criminal that is no longer permitted. There's a glamour to that sort of crime, crime which may steal, or destroy, but never does any real harm. An innocent criminality that got lost somewhere along the way, a formal criminality, an innocence that makes you believe that crime is as noble an art as any. + +He looks like something from a tall tale told by a drunken leprechaun tugging at your coattails in a Dublin alley. But Dean is a darker sound than most, one with a heavy backbeat, something bass driven, with accordian melodies. The innocent criminal and lighthearted formality can collapse like bellows and exhale a different man, a heartbreaking melody then, dark and heavy -- a gypsy song or a curse -- half -- muttered words. One day in New York City.... But even in the watery darkness of Dean's quiet moments the formalitity and innocence remain in little things, like words, always aeroplane, juncture, sonombulist, never airplane, time or zombie, or his clothing, always suits, antiquated, out of style, yet fitting on his wiry frame, always a zippo, never a bic, or his near reverant love of silence and thought. You can see thoughts folding in on themselves behind his eyes, train wrecks he will never describe for you, locked forever in a half curl of lips or rise of an eyebrow, entire railyards with meticulously inlaid switching systems with cars to carry you as far as Bangledesh or as near as the very stop your own train is pulling into just now, and yet he remains gulping in the silence, the beauty of saying nothing. I have seen Dean vanish, become so silent, so still that he disappeared right in front of me. + +Everything is always on or off, there is no mediocrity or in between state -- everything or nothing at all. When he drinks, and Dean often does, his eyelids droop slightly and his head teeters about on the end of his neck, but just when you think he's skunked, he'll snap to and ask you about something you casually mentioned two weeks ago, wanting to know the finer details of your off hand remark -- razor sharp. + +He doesn't knock, artificial formality is not his style. He moves through the door with more grace and sense of comfort in his surroundings than I can manage after four years. Jimmy and I sit silently waiting while Dean carefully lays the battered suitcase on the dining table and fishes out and lights a cigarette in one long fluid motion. He exhales and breaks into a broad smile. + +"Sil my old friend," he walks around the divan and clasps his arms around me, "you ought to unpack... it will be good for you." + +"I will my friend. I will." + +We do not pat each other on the back. Eventually he pulls back, and, still grasping my shoulders, says, "You look well. You look marvelous actually." His attention shifts to Jimmy who, realizing he's next, has risen off the couch, glass of mead still in hand, "James... Good to see you." + +While they embrace and clap each other on the back, I walk into the kitchen and grab Dean a glass and pour him some mead. + +"Mead huh? Never had it." + +"A Scratch specialty. It's not bad actually." Jimmy takes another sip as if to encourage Dean along. + +"Scratch? Is that a person?" Dean flops down on the couch with his glass carefully raised and counterbalanced to avoid spilling. + +"Scratch was discovered shortly after you left. You'll love him." + +"Not bad. A little sweet for my taste but not bad." He sets the glass on the table and smacks his lips. "And where is Little Miss?" + +"Sil pissed her off last night... Maybe you can retrieve her and assuage the feminine irk" + +Dean's smile droops to a frown and he cocks an eyebrow at me. + +I shrug. "Long story. Married people were in the house." + +He winces. "Things are falling apart in my absence.... Fear not my friend. I'm back to save the universe." The smile returns, and he reaches again for the glass. "Get's better the more you drink..." He raises his glass and Jimmy and I follow, clinking our glasses against his "to a new dawn in the dark night of the soul..." + +His toasts are always twinged with a melodramatic glamour that makes sense only after you have raised the twelfth one and come to see that, far from artifice, melodrama is the last glimmering of false hope, the desert hallucination of shimmering water that turns out indeed to be the water, shimmering and half -- eclipsed by date palms. + +"Okay man... hey let me get one of those..." Dean hands him a cigarette, and Jimmy lights up and exhales with his non -- smoker aggressiveness. "So lay it on me... What have you been up to?" + +Dean signs and lights another cigarette off the cherry of the former. He looks over at me with a twinkle on the corner of his lips. "When was my last email...? Oh yes. Okay that was a few days ago." He rubs his goatee ruminating on the elapse of time. "It's pretty vague... wait, hold on now, a couple of snapshots are developing. I remember looking up from a formica bar at thousands of blinking lights, like getting off a Ferris wheel and realizing that it was still and the rest of world is what's spinning." He nods to himself as if pleased with the recollection. "I have an image of an alley, two dumpsters labeled United and a cocktail waitress with extracurricular monetary schemes. I remember trying to buy cigarettes from this old man with a tray around his neck and I had no money, so he gave me a pack provided I left the building. I'm just not sure where the building was... Virginia maybe...? + +"Yes. Yes it was somewhere by a river, I remember the smell and empty bottles floating in the water. Yes. I put them there. I drank them and then I lobbed them into the river and watched them bob around and list over on their sides and then they would slowly fill up with water and sink. But a couple of them righted themselves before they reached that critical mass, or equilibrium, or whatever, and they just floated off with the current..." + +"Right," Jimmy interrupts impatiently, "but I meant up in Brooklyn... How did the city treat you?" + +"Oh that part. Well let's see. I never really got a job. I mostly sat around the house smoking... let myself be a fucktoy for Melissa... naturally that wore thin after a while... I worked for two weeks tending bar at one of those Williamsburg joints that doesn't close... Working class place, where the night shift comes in around eight AM and wants to get ripped after work... So I did pay rent for a couple of months off that, but then I got fired for tapping the till... So I went back to being a fucktoy... I had a fish, but he died... + +He pauses and stares intently at me. He starts to sit back and cross his legs, but then changes his mind and jerks to his feet. He paces a circle around the coffee table and then goes into one of his abstract -- theoretical rants. He stops pacing to light a cigarette, the smoke maces him and he squints for a minute, rubs his eyes and lurches off again. + +"Do you remember, when we were living out in LA, how it seemed like everything was so important and everyone had something they were working toward, but we always knew there was nothing and never would be? Well it's the same thing... same types of people, same types of jobs, ... everything exactly the same... except for the houses... I love the brownstones, take that over stucco any day, but it's pretty much the same sorts of people, the same caricatures that they present... real people mind you and plenty of interesting ones, though too many jogging and pushing baby strollers and that sort of nonsense... on the whole sharper than most in OC or LA, but not really all that different when it comes down to fundamental things like outlook on life, or maybe what I mean is lack thereof... plenty of shock at the notion that I don't want to work. I remember at this one party, one of Melissa's more yuppyish friends cornered me and started grilling me about what I did and all this stuff and I kept hemming and hawing and whatnot... finally she says, 'well what do you really love?' 'Everything,' I said. Absolutely everything. Except for onions and insects... and work. I hate work. I don't want to work. I want to absorb. I want to breathe in and out and understand. You know... run of the mill stuff. Anyway so Brooklyn was a lot like going back to LA, but with better restaurants. Not that I had expected it to be different, but the thing is, I've changed so much that I couldn't relate to it anymore. Couldn't even get that old superior amusement out of it.... I kept losing track of time... time is very important in that city. Never seems to be enough of it or something, everyone's trying to find it, the only place you can forget about time is in the parks. I would take wonderful naps in Prospect Park every afternoon. I got into letter writing. I spent most of my days writing letters to Sil and some folks on the west coast... I would find myself moving my fingers over the keyboard... I realized that I was playing it like an instrument, that the keys were what I was paying attention to, not the words or even the screen but the rhythm of the keys as my fingers danced over the..." He sighs wearily and crushes out his cigarette. "Who's the gimp?" + +Out the front window we can see Scratch hobbling along with a pack on his back and what looks like ten or fifteen plastic shopping bags clutched in each hand. Jimmy bounds outside to help him. + +"That, is Scratch." I smile at Dean. "I sort of thought that perhaps you wouldn't want me to share those emails with anyone..." + +"Yeah maybe so." He sits down on the throne chair. "I've been feeling much better by the way..." His voice is swallowed by a bellowing laughter and Scratch limping through the doorway with Jimmy just behind him holding the screen open. + +"Sil," he barks my name like a director unsure of his actors, "you're having a party. We forgot to have a summer solstice party, so, damnit, were having one now." + +"Okay. Should we wait for the autumn equinox?" + +"We haven't got that kind of time." He heaves the bags up onto the dining table. "Beside who knows when that is... just doesn't have the ring of summer solstice. Autumn Equinox is very awkward to even say, let alone have a party for. This is going to be an Indian Summer party if it really must have a name. But damn it, you better get on the horn and call yer friends cause old Scratch is putting on the chef coat and it's feeling like grilling season..." He then reaches into one of the bags and extracts from it a starched white, double breasted chef coat and begins to theatrically pull his arms through the sleeves. That accomplished, he snaps the collar smartly to his neck and shrugs several times as if adjusting his body to the coat rather than the other way around. He drops the theatre display when he notices Dean. "Hey...You must be Dean... how ya doing? I'm Scratch." + +They shake and Scratch mumbles something about not really being this weird most of the time, which Jimmy vehemently denies, assuring Dean that Scratch is indeed always this weird. "He hit his head you know..." + +"James," Scratch is back to barking, "thanks so much for organizing these fine young lads to retrieve the double wide grill which you will find right beside the tire swing in my back yard."He dangles the keys to his truck on his outstretched finger. I leap up and grab them grab. We set off with Dean through the forest along the river trail. + +"Little different than Brooklyn eh?" Jimmy is still smoking the same cigarette and keeps stopping to inhale. + +"Hmm... Yeah... So what did you mean when you said he hit his head?" + +Jimmy laughs and then stops. "I guess it really isn't funny. He had a rather severe accident. We should probably let him tell you the story..." + +Almost and hour has passed before we get back with what turns out to be the largest barbeque known to man and takes all three of us gasping and struggling to get it in and then out of Scratch's truck. In the mean time Scratch has converted my kitchen into something resembling a Cossack encampment shortly before crossing the river to descend upon the Turks. Plastic bags are hanging in a curtain -- like semi -- circle around the sink, suspended by hooks I didn't know I had. The tiny four -- burner stove has disappeared beneath a barracks tent worth of pots and skillets, which on closer examination reveal several bubbling brown liquids with various herb clumps protruding from them. The oven door is propped slightly open and its insides are laden with skillets full of sautéed vegetables richly coated in butter or oil or some mysterious glaze made from butter and oil. + +Scratch is bent over the sink sharpening his knives. The sink has been buried beneath an enormous, two -- inch -- thick cutting board that must weight thirty pounds and came from god knows where. It certainly wasn't carried in a plastic bag. He straightens up and turns around when he senses me inspecting the stove. "Keep back." He growls. "No sampling. This is a professional operation you are witnessing here." Then he relaxes for a moment. "I think perhaps you should go up and talk to Chloe and make sure that she and The Professor feel welcome this afternoon..." + +"I sent Dean and Jimmy on that mission. If she's really mad at me then maybe I will talk to her, but I was kinda hoping it would just blow over." + +Scratch snorts and goes back to sharpening, the deft scraping of steel and stone echoing dully off the stainless steel sink below it. I pour myself a glass of mead and retreat to the couch. I flip on the stereo and put on some music. Scratch requests a deeper backbeat. "Some fucking hip hop I said... I can't cook to this morose crap... it's the middle of the day fer godsakes Sil." + +I give up and put on the radio. + + + + + + + +Mystical is bumping his way over those strange haunting Spanish guitar licks of his when I spot the entourage heading down the walkway. I can make out Jimmy and Dean in front and what looks like The Professor behind them. But there are far too many girls behind that to be Chloe. Unless she has divided into different bodies. They come through the door like a carnival troupe laughing and Jimmy starts singing the end of the song the minute he hears it. Dean breaks into an entirely inappropriate Irish jig sort of routine dragging one of the Chloes, who it's now clear is in fact an entirely separate entity named Nancy, at least according to Jimmy, who is attempting introductions over the sound of laughter and music. Nancy immediately wins my admiration by branching off from Dean's ridiculous dance into an even more spastic and disorienting careening series of movements, managing to draw a reluctant Professor into the routine. She stops abruptly, laughing as the professor continues with an awkwardness that, unlike Nancy's, is not faked. "There you go Professor." She claps and scrunches up her face and unleashes a voice that is one -- part British nanny and one -- part Shirley Temple "Oh you're sooo fabulous Professor. Run with it baby." + +Scratch is momentarily spellbound and ceases his ceaseless movement as if stuck on pause by the touch of an unseen remote. Suddenly the ground gives way beneath him, and he hobbles forward to hug everyone and then gently shoo them outside. I climb up from the couch and move the speakers around to that they face outside. + +Jimmy has already lit the grill, and everyone is gathering chairs around the fire pit. + +"Let's burn something Sil... this is so great... You have a fire pit in your front yard... We have to have a fire." Nancy's enthusiasm is contagious, and before I can protest, she and Jimmy have disappeared on a wood gathering expedition. + +Dean takes off to get beer. The mead is not to his liking he says. By the time he returns there is an alarmingly large pile of wood next to the pit, and Jimmy seems to have every intention of setting it on fire. Chloe is generally ignoring my presence, though The Professor has been making small talk and seems to want me to understand that he is not holding against me whatever it is that Chloe might be. + +Conversations swirl in little whirlpools, like dust devils circling the yard, joining together in tornado, and then breaking off again. Though Jimmy and Nancy distinguish themselves with voices that rise in volume and enthusiasm like long rolling tidal waves finally making the beach, crosshatching and threatening to drown us all. + +Chloe retreats and is standing by the doorway wearing a blue spaghetti strap dress, shaking her head slowly as she eats carrots and listens to Jimmy ranting. "Oh come on," I can hear him saying though I am trying to catch her eye at the same time, "there is no conspiracy..." his voice momentarily is swallowed by thumping bass and then returns, "...enlightened, wealthy, uber -- powerful people living lives of extraordinary decadence at the expense of shmucks like you and I...." + +The radio sings "hell was a place I knew long ago/is where I am/ is where I was/ is where I don't want to be/hell was a place I found by mistake..." + +"There was a rainbow and we drove right under it and looked up at it... I swear we were right in the middle of it." Nancy's eyes get wider as if to emphasize the truthfulness of her story. + +"I don't think you can be in a rainbow...." + +"No one cares what you think Dean." She exaggerates, rolling her eyes and turns her around toward Chloe and the other girl. "We were in a rainbow weren't we?" They both nod. + +"Fair enough." + + "You wouldn't have been able to see it unless you were at a right angle to it," Jimmy breaks off from whatever he was ranting about and dives into the perilous waters next to Nancy. + +"Ugh Jimmy. Didn't you hear what I said to Dean here? No one cares what you think... we were there. I think then that really, the authorities in this situation, would be, um, us." Her lips plaster on a sickly sarcastic smile. "Ohoh how you like that boy?" She weaves side -- to -- side imitating her dance from earlier, and Jimmy gives in laughing. + +"Scratch kicks the screen open with a thunderous crash. Every one stops talking and turns toward him. He sniffs the air for moment and disappears back inside and returns carrying an enormous tray of meat. "It's grilling season," he bellows. "Let the grilling begin." He enlists my help in carrying the tray over to the frill and the rest return to what they are doing. I follow Scratch back inside and he sits down for a moment. + +"Can I bum a smoke from you Sil?" + +"You serious?" + +"The only time I smoke is when I cook. When I was actually running the restaurant I was a two pack a day guy and for some reason every time I actually cook, I mean cook for a half dozen or so, I have to smoke." He accepts the cigarette and inhales deeply. "Been almost a year since the last one." + +He smokes about half and puts it out and returns to cooking. I sit on the couch watching the rest of them talking and goofing around with Annie in the yard. Jimmy and Chloe break off together and head toward the house. She goes straight into the kitchen to investigate Scratch's cooking. I can hear ingredients being listed over the thump of the bass. Jimmy is making gestures and such that seem to indicate he wants me to talk to Chloe, but actually I have lost all urge. He sits down beside me on the couch. + +"If she wants to be mad, who am I to deprive her of the satisfaction?" + +He shrugs and nods. + +She steps back from the kitchen chewing a haricot vert and smirking at Scratch's scrambling figure darting back and forth, stirring pots, now tossing a pan of braised beans, now whisking an emulsion..."You know Scratch in your life you've spent more time in the kitchen than most women. You might as well be pregnant by now..." + +"Yeah," Jimmy stands up to pour more mead, "and those clogs you chefs wear mean you're basically barefoot." He laughs. + +"Your point being..." Scratch's head pokes around the corner and glares at him. + +Jimmy shrugs, "You'd make a good wife...?" + +"What I am doing here James is art. You build things out of wood and call it art. Well, I build things out of food and call it art." + +"Hey take it easy Scratch." Jimmy is a little taken aback "I was just trying to make a joke. Everyone knows there are lots of great male chefs." + +Chloe groans. "Does it have to be like that?" + +"What? Almost all the great chefs are men." Jimmy stares at her blankly. + +"Oh god." + +"What? They are. I mean almost all the ones I see on the Food Network are. Don't get all feminist on me Chloe." + +"Oh this isn't feminism James, this is just pathos. You're pathetic. You force women to be these domestic servants for god knows how long, then just to prove you could do it better, you create this elitist snobbery around the very same thing when you do it." + +"Hey I didn't do any of that. And I'm not gonna feel guilty for it. History is a rubbish heap of wrongs Chloe... we've all heard this one before...." + +"Have we?" I try to warn Jimmy off with eyebrows, but he ignores me and soldiers on. + +"In essence, yes. Very familiar pattern here... the dominator culture... the repressed... the horror. The horror." + +"I don't know man, patterns are in the eye of the beholder. Patterns are misleading. Lots of times we think they indicate order, but they don't necessarily. They only indicate patterns." + +"Yeah, but patterns within disorder implies a kind of order, wouldn't you agree?" + +"No. It depends on what you mean when you say order. Order as an inherent discoverable phenomenon is fiction..." Chloe storms outside and Jimmy and I watch as she sits down next to The Professor, her back toward the house. I continue watching her as Jimmy and I carry through our conversation, which by now, neither of us cares about. + +"Imposing order seems to work for certain reducible things... But I think patterns simply imply something outside the disorder is trying to make sense of it.... It doesn't have anything to do with the order or meaning of real nebulus thing. It has to do with us. Not the other... Where one person can find the pattern 'Jesus is the reason for the season' another person finds 'season the reason. Bake for twenty minutes' + +Jimmy's voice is flat and distracted "You know as well as I do that those are not anagrams drawn from the same set of letters..." + +"Okay sure we keep spare letters around for times when we want them, but isn't that just a further example of that fact that the order isn't there... we invent it?" + +"Touché. OUCH!" + +"FUCK!" + +Scratch slaps us both in the side of the head with metal turners. + +"I understand that all that was some misguided attempt to make Sil look good there, James. But I thought maybe a good crack on the head would remind you morons that Chloe isn't as stupid as you two can be." Scratch looks as close to mad as I have ever seen him. He thrusts a pitcher of sauce into Jimmy's hand and a brush into mine. "Now go outside and baste the chicken... And for the love of god keep the sauce off the pork. I didn't soak it in brine for twenty four hours to have goop all over it." + +Outside the Professor is trying to coax Dean into some philosophical debate. "So what are you saying? That we can make a difference or that we can't?" + +"Neither." Dean lights a smoke. "I have nothing to say on that one because once you start debating that you have already digressed out of life and into the realm of ideas. Ideas are just words, words are just abstractions all you, no offense, do -- good intellectuals are missing the point. Yes, life could use some tinkering, it certainly isn't fair, but the problem isn't recycling, it isn't pollution, the problem is you and I and the solution is individual and has to be dealt with on that level. As long as you ignore the individual and focus on the abstract you not only miss the problem, but you delude yourself into thinking that you can find solutions for everyone." + +"Oh God," Chloe cuts in with an exasperated voice, "you would think by now with the number of times we have failed to change things that we would be able to look ahead, put two and two together, and stop even talking about this crap." She shakes her head. + +"Well yes, that's what I'm saying," Dean points to her with his cigarette. "Everyone has to face up to himself or herself first. And don't pull any psychological mumbo jumbo on me either because there will never be enough therapists to go around until we realize that we are our own therapists, and our own patients and that all the solutions we will ever need are already there in our own brains." He stabs his index finger into his forehead. "And as long as you are going to approach the world as, on one hand, a concrete thing in front of you, and on the other, some fanciful, abstract set of possible solutions, you are never going to realize that the power of words is not in the words themselves, but in what they can create. I mean, come on Professor, you know your surrealists I'm sure, what do think they were saying...? That the world is fanciful? Well sure, but lets scratch the surface a little shall we? Want it to be a better place? Try being a better person. Try thinking with your heart instead of your head. Your imagination can do things we haven't even dreamed of yet. And that's where all our ideas and solutions and future problems will come from. And I don't mean just the dreams you have when you're sleeping. I mean dreams... love, hope, the true work, all these are products of the imagination, all of this, everything around us, even each other, all springs from the interplay of our imaginations...." + +"Yeah but Dean, most people just want to be happy..." Jimmy is yelling in my ear as he swabs chicken breasts with barbeque sauce. "People don't have the time or energy in their lives to think or talk about the kind of complexities you're talking about." + +"Sure they do. We do. What makes us different than anyone else?" + +Scratch swings the door open again with the same silence -- inspiring crash. "What makes us different is that we know how to have a summer solstice party long after summer solstice is past." + + + + + + + +There are whirls of color balanced on theories dreamed from the Fibonacci sequence, balanced on the harmonics of a root two rectangle... a salad like a dancing lady from a Toulouse -- Lautrec poster advertising the greatest carnival of all in some Parisian back alley, the girl's skirts all atwirl and sucking on a bottle of sodium pentothal... eyes circle the table in blurs of mead settling on the green of the haricot verts in just about the place that fanciful Italian would have placed them, and yet Scratch probably doesn't know Fibonacci's name or even if he does the coincidence is a dance of intuition and formal logic hand in hand, skirts atwirling, painted faces glowing, the mirrored windows and the laughter three stories above where the madam is stringing her stockings across the open sliver of sky that you can see when your head flies back, heavy with absinthe and the dizziness of the endless spiral... and if we hesitate it is only of a desire not to disrupt, to preserve the golden garden, but damn if that isn't one fine looking apple over there by the pork and its honey gastrite accompaniment, and now the gold rush is on, down the alleyway come the miners and it's all the dancing girls can do to get up on the steps of the doorways before the stampede of miners comes clamoring down the cobblestone, greedy hunger in their eyes... dividing amongst them the finest of both homely honesty and Parisian fantasy... met here on a table of modest proportions... giggling girls in petticoats pretending modesty and impropriety while gold -- rush ruffians wreck havoc on what was once a peaceful alley. + +Outside. Dirt and folding chairs. Chairs open. Chairs close. Mandibles move up and down. It's inescapable. And it tastes so good when it waltzes between the lips, the way the honey sweetens the front taste buds, and the camisole meat dances backward as the slight bite of mustard hits the sides of the tongue and a street band strikes up something in the key of G, something anyone can move to, a hypnotic dance that even cartoon animations moving frame by meticulous frame, can replicate and your eyes roll slightly back as you swallow, crescendo and then here comes the augment... + +Mead. Or in Dean's case beer. Sweetness piled on thick with no shame. Gluttony. Fucking in the streets. On the roads. In the middle of the interstates. Everything drawn out of the alley into the open night air, and by the time most of us have finished eating, the sun is gone and night fast approaching. Nancy is petitioning for the fire, which Jimmy obliges and they embark on a ritual of twig snapping and branch breaking. Dean and I attempt to put my kitchen back in some semblance of order. He carefully wraps all the leftovers, intuitively realizing that this is all the food we have in the house and we had better make it last no matter if the camisole turns to chamois. By the time we finish and look outside a volcano has erupted in the front yard. + +While some people might throw a few sticks on the ground, strike a match and call it a fire, Jimmy has other ideas. Jimmy has approached the thing more from an architectural angle. He is back with that famous Italian and his wonderful spirals. This is no fire, it's more of a pyre. It's the kind of thing pagans used to dance around in the woods. It's the kind of thing the Romans used to heat the great palaces with, back in the days when fire meant life. It's the hissing, raging swirl of motion that makes you want to understand it, to be able to recreate it at any moment. It's alive, that much is obvious, but more importantly, Jimmy has given it life, he has set it in motion down that spiral path ever -- increasing. He appears to have started with the remnants of the bamboo fence that I noticed earlier in the pile. Bamboo burns hot and fast and explodes as it does. He has combined it with fallen limbs of oaks and pecans and then reassembled the elements in a drip sandcastle formation that is flooded inside and out by a ferocious roaring sound that twists itself up, turns blue, then red, then yellow and disappears into the lower branches of the pecan tree, singeing the leaves and causing them to fall. It's fantastically loud, and it's sending flames over eight feet into the air. + +He and Nancy are the only ones even close to it. They are both still feeding yet more wood into the already excessive heights of flame. The Professor looks downright terrified by this spectacle and is clearly re -- evaluating what sort of madmen he has fallen in among. Even Scratch looks mildly alarmed, but he isn't saying anything. Dean heads straight for the woodpile and begins to throw more logs up on the top. Jimmy and Nancy have moved back from the heat, but Dean seems unfazed. He keeps at it until the entire woodpile has been fed to the flames. Even at ten or twenty feet, the heat is nearly intolerable and clearly no one is in control of the fire. Nancy runs inside and turns down the stereo and emerges from the house with two fresh bottles of mead. Jimmy retrieves the remaining chairs and he and Dean even carry the couch outside offering it to Chloe and her friends. We sit around listening to the roar, in awe of Jimmy's creation. Every so often, as the wood burns down, we draw our chairs closer. + +"We used to have fires like this out in Humboldt..." Scratch rubs his head, and Dean perks up, glances over at me and nods. + +"You lived in Humboldt?" + +"Yeah back in the late seventies I used to go out there in the spring... some friends of mine had a regular crop... then in the fall I'd pack it into a VW bug and haul it back here to sell to the college kids... ya'll are lucky... man, back then, there was nothing to do in this town..." He drifts off into some private world for moment. "Yeah Humboldt was something back then, maybe it still is, I dunno, but back then growing was part of the economy, nobody messed with you. The car dealerships would put up billboards advertising 'harvest specials' on trucks and 4X4's. It was hilarious. But why was I telling you this? Oh yeah, the fire, man out the middle of the redwood forests we used have huge bonfires and big parties... all the growers would get together after harvest..." + +A silence momentarily settles over us, but Jimmy interrupts it, asking Scratch to tell the thump story. "You don't want these people to leave tonight think you just limp for no good reason do you?" + +Scratch snorts. "Like I was handicapped by some fate of nature rather than my own stupidity?" He sits up and straightens his pants. "No I guess we wouldn't want that." + +"I didn't notice you limped." Nancy leans forward in her chair and inspects Scratch's leg. + +"That's sweet of you to say my dear, but it doesn't put your powers of observation in a good light. So yes, I do limp. And I limp because I'm missing about an inch and a half of bone in my left leg." He lights up a joint and passes it to his right. + +"Okay so as you might have guessed I used to cook for a living. I started doing that in LA back when I was your age probably, maybe a little younger, but anyway, I worked in some nice places and developed a bit of a reputation... I got to the point where some friends and I were able to put together a catering company, and we worked movie sets because that was where the good money was at." + +"What movies did you do?" + +"Oh shit, lots of stuff that never saw the light of day, but we eventually did get some big ones, Reality Bites was probably the biggest and definitely one of the worst, I should have given them more protein on that set. But the thing in Hollywood is that the money isn't necessarily in the big productions, those things have tight fixed budgets, and if they run over their budgets they cut things like catering so we actually tried to avoid them except when we thought it would be a good resume builder. + +"Anyway in the course of a few years I became friends with Debra Winger, who honestly is one of the nicest, sweetest women I've ever met. So as time goes on I get tired of the business end of things and I was bitching to her about it one night and she offered me a job making good money just cooking for her. A personal chef basically. So I sold out of the catering company and was going to work for her... + +"Now the other thing you need to know is that I was an avid sky diver. We used to go all the time. Pretty much whenever we weren't working we were jumping out of airplanes. So when I sold the company my friends decided to have this big party for me out in the Inland Empire... Dean and Sil know where that is, but the rest of you just have to imagine a big, dry, grassy area where LA stores its smog during the day... So there was this community house out there that we sort of crashed at when we weren't on location or whatever... the key point being that it was in the middle of nowhere and it had a barn with a corrugated metal roof. So we decided that about half of us would jump and try to land at the house and the other half would stay behind and cook." + +At this point Scratch stands up and hobbles toward the fire and turns around facing us. "So I was the last jumper. It was a perfect afternoon. Nice and warm even at fourteen thousand feet. Everything about the day was just lovely... and I know what you're thinking and no the 'chute opened fine, just like it was supposed to, everything was great the whole way down..." + +Scratch looks around to make sure everyone is edged up on their seats. He stalls everything from this point on to build it up because we can see from his obviously twisted, scarred kneecap that something goes horribly wrong at some point, but Scratch likes to amplify the suspense. + +"Well, about a hundred feet off the landing, everyone else is already down. Most of them in the yard though a couple are down the street, but they're all down and I'm kind of half steering half watching them pack up their chutes and half thinking, in the very back part of my brain, at some level I don't normally pay attention to, that something is not right. The first few guys are in the yard and the last three are spread out down the street." + +He pauses to take a long drag. + +"What this tells me is that there is a nasty gust somewhere between me and the ground. And that is the last thought I remember half -- forming. Three months later I woke up in a hospital." + +He passes the joint on. + +"What happened is that I started to drift and I tried to correct, but something in the way I moved and the way the wind was blowing... one in a million kind of thing... one of those variables that you don't get to control." Dean is wincing and Chloe puts her hand over her face. Jimmy gives a little ironic laugh. "Anyway," Scratch continues, having built it up enough, "basically the 'chute twisted and the gust caught me about twenty feet above the ground and threw me into the extended edge of the barn's corrugated metal roof. The tops of my ankles hit the edge of it square on at about forty miles an hour." + +He looks down at his legs. + +"It cut almost all the way through to my Achilles tendon, smashed my ankle joint to smithereens; understand of course, I don't actually have any memory of this.... It's just what people have told me, people who were there.... They're not sure if that's what did the knee too or if the knee was from the truck I landed on," Scratch chuckles. "Lucky for me, after I got dragged free of the roof with my feet flopping behind me, the 'chute caught another gust and blew over the house. I fell two stories and went right through the front windshield of a pickup truck." He laughs heartily. + +"And that," Scratch looks over at me with a green jello twinkle in his eye, "is why I don't walk quite right." + +"Jesus Christ," Dean exclaims, "I can't believe you lived through that." + +"Well that makes two of us... and I'll tell you, I don't remember it happening, but to hear my friend Dave tell it, it sends chills down my spine. He saw the whole thing, he was the one that drove me to the hospital... they were afraid to move me so I was half hanging out the windshield of the truck all the way to the hospital." + +Scratch leans back, wipes his hands over his face and sighs deeply. "It just sounds so funny to me you know? There's times when I think I might have made the whole thing up... like I never did cater films, never lived in Hollywood, never went sky diving, never knew Debra Winger, never did any of it... I've been lying the whole time and I just made this stuff up to impress you guys." He trails off. But his story is true. He showed Chloe and I pictures of his ankles. The reconstructive surgery and use of sheep tendons was very experimental at the time, and Scratch is actually in the medical books as a case -- study complete with horrifying photographs. + +The fire has subsided to levels that might be considered normal. After a while The Professor announces he is leaving. Chloe gets up to walk him out, and Nancy and the other girl take the opportunity to walk back to Chloe's house where they are staying. Scratch mumbles something about age and he enlists Jimmy to help him carry things back to his house. When everyone else is gone. Dean stands up and announces he is going for a walk. + +I just keep staring at the coals, imagining they are little cities seen from a great height. I get lost in architecture. The fire. The road. The echo of words settling at the departure of their speakers, slowly winding down in familiar spirals. The architecture of language paints these pictures and somehow, despite the fact that they exist only as vibrating air, they still exert influence over everything in reality. Dean, for instance, is going for a walk down the road. Road is very specific, it is not a street, it's a road. The word road has specific connotations. The Empire State building is not on a road, the mansion on the hill is not on a street, and Rue Montapassat is not Montpassat drive. Street is a clean simple word, inspiring clean simple lines, right angles, mirrored super -- smooth surfaces, liquid sand... Drive is more suspicious, stucco and suburbs, but neglected suburbs, remodelled track homes straying from their architect's intentions. Lane's are ambiguous, they can go either way. But the word road winds, switches and curves around in your mouth. Its jaw -- stretching vowels inspiring things like graded dirt, bumpy potholes, fallen -- down mailboxes, sagging porches and bullet -- riddled stop signs. Streets always have people walking down them, roads do not. But tonight they do. Tonight Dean is walking down a road. Tonight he is walking and listening to trees, perhaps even talking to them. + +The fire is only glowing embers, echoes of its once towering self, fallen silent and the sound of the crickets roars in over my thoughts. Neanderthals. A glowing fire in a cave, wrapped in the warmth of bearskin, wondering what it would have been like, to have been there -- have I been there? Have we all been there and just don't remember it? Is it the very fire that kindles the imagination? The fire crackles, and an opposable thumb grasping for more fuel, a twig, a branch. An idea is born, the night sings. The same crickets, cicadas, and hooting night owls fill the air -- the distant sound of dawn. Was there music? Drumming? Chanting and singing filling the night air for miles? + +"Everybody gone?" the voice startles me and I have to turn around before I realize that it's Chloe. + +"Yeah. I think those girls are at your house or something..." + +"Yeah. They're old friends from Atlanta." + +"Oh." + +She is standing beside my chair arms crossed, looking down at her foot, which she drags back in forth making an arc in the dirt and leaves. "Where'd Dean go?" + +"Uh. He said he was going for a walk..." + +"Lets go find him." She tugs on my sleeve until I stand up. + +We walk out and down the dirt driveway trading kicks on pecans and pinecone sized rocks. + +Finally I decide to deal with it. "Chloe, look I'm sorry if I pissed you off, but damn I was just asking him a question." + +She doesn't respond at first. "That's the worst apology I've ever heard." And then she giggles, "but since I was never mad at you, it's okay." + +"I got the impression that you were." + +"What from Scratch and Jimmy?" + +"Partly. But also because you seemed to be avoiding me." + +She laughs. "I wasn't avoiding you..." + +"Seemed like it to me..." + +"I wanted you to rise above it." She stops and rolls the rock under her shoe. + +"Above what?" + +"Above the fact that Jimmy and Scratch were telling you that I was mad at you. And it did actually piss me off for a minute that you let Jimmy try and dupe me into some sympathy thing." Her leg rises up behind her poised to send the rock scattering into the tree. "Jimmy is a sweetheart and I wasn't mad at him for trying I was mad at you for thinking I would buy that shit." + +"Yeah," my head droops involuntarily, "sorry." + +"That appology I like. I forgive you." She begins to giggle again. "You guys thought you were so clever... I couldn't let you get away with that." She turns slightly, and kicks the rock about twenty yards straight down the road, and we both instinctively take off after it. + +We come up over the rise in the driveway, and there is Dean, head thrust back, neck craned, inspecting the uppermost limbs of a pecan tree or perhaps the sky. + +"Hey kids." Dean's voice is near a whisper. + +Chloe's instinctively drops her own voice as she walks up beside him and tilts her head back to stare upward with him. "Why are we whispering Dean?" + +"I don't know, but it seems like the right thing to do." + +"It does, doesn't it?" + +I hang back a bit and watch them staring upward trying to resist the temptation to do likewise. It's very hard to watch someone watching something without instinctively bypassing them to see what it is they are watching. + +"You know you want to Sil..." Chloe's head never turns. + +I give up and stare upward at a sliver of moon. The soft white glow reveals phantasmal basket spider webs poised in the upper branches of the trees. The baskets baskets are errie and enormous, silohetted against the star -- specked sky, they are beautiful, almost alive, waiting to crawl across the trees, dodging glitters of moonlight and disappearing into the purple blackness of shadows. + +"Okay my neck hurts." Dean turns and reaches in his pocket for a cigarette. I gesture and he hands me one as well. The dancing flame of the lighter momentarily blinds me. + +"How long have you been doing that?" + +"Dunno." He takes a long drag. "So um, can I ask you guys a question? Well, I was asking around about jobs, you know, kinda hoping Jimmy had some work..." + +"Did the cowboys ever get off the roof?" Chloe asks. + +I shrug. + +"Cowboys? I didn't hear anything about cowboys..." We start walking back toward my house. "But he did mention something about pills...?" + +"He can get more? That greasy little weasel said he couldn't get any more." + +"Calm down Chloe. That's what I want to know. He wants me to go get them because he found out the feds or somebody are watching the guy's house and they already have his license plate and whatever... So I'd be willing to do it for a fee of course, but is he putting me on? What's the deal?" + +"Yeah he told me about the cops." Chloe nods her head. "Basically this guy he was getting them from was a pharmacist or assistant or something... anyway he got a ton of pills somehow or other and he got caught, but for some reason they can't do anything to him, I don't know this all down in a little town south of here, and it's a very small town so it's hard to really know why, but the story is that the town couldn't do anything, to him, but for some reason the feds got involved... the rest of the details are hazy but I don't think he's putting you on Dean." She jumps on his back and throws her arms around him. "Please please Dean, go get them... you get some money we get the extra pills, Jimmy makes his money, it's a win win win situation...please..." She slides off and puts her arm around his shoulder. They embrace, and then she says goodnight to me and disappears into the incandescence of her doorway. + +Back beside the fire, Dean and I sit in silence on opposite sides of the shimmering coals. I shift in my seat and lean forward, arching my back to stretch it out. Dean and I are from a different universe than the rest of them, that is, we have our own universe, one that we share with no one else in Georgia. A universe born out of many years spent sitting silent together, each respectful of the other's contemplation. It is rare to be able to sit around with someone and not have a conversation. That is the true measure of friendship, the silence in between words, the boredom between the adventures, with Dean and I it is always a light carefree silence, no matter how heavy our thoughts might become. A silence where even the cricket hesitate. An underwater silence where thoughts are mute but travel forever in ripples, expanding slowly and lapping at distant shores. I can hear Dean's thoughts like the surface of a pond roils and surges just before some enourmous creature climbs up out of it. But before it can climb up out on to the land, Chloe shuffles up in her pajamas holding a spiral bound notebook. + +Her face is shy in the glimmering, irregular dance of light that surrounds us. She says nothing, but her mission obvious and determined. One more to be consumed. Dean looks up and smiles. There is a muted atmosphere which cannot be disturbed. I nod, and she carefully spreads the notebook open atop the pyramid formed by the last two semi -- intact logs. At the weight of the pages, they finally give in and lay themselves flat. Slowly new and hungry flames curl up, reach out from beneath the glowing logs to accept this new gift, this ever so susceptible nourishment of paper. + +First a hesitant lick, but soon a more daring dance, a courting of the soon to be consumed, a slow waltz of charred hardwood floors, the ruins of some mid century dance hall... The sucking out of air, the consumption of oxygen flutters and ruffles the pages, Chloe's handwritten scrawl is visible for fleeting seconds, words leaping out of the fire, the silent tongues of Shatterack, Meshack and Abendago. There is no comprehension, only the sense that here is the truth, slowly licked up and down in long caresses of tonguing flame, turning amber and smoking with desire. + +Chloe waves and shuffles off into the darkness. In the distance there is the sound of a starting motorcycle, faintly in the background, the river -- like sound of cars on the highway. The stereo inside has long since fallen silent. Dean shifts and leans forward to stir the fire with a branch that was spared. He throws it on top. After a while orange flames are again kissing the darkness and sending up embers, messengers off into the night, fading into the blackness and disappearing, and I'm never sure if they continuing upward or turn to ash and disolve into the air. Here and there a particularly courageous or lucky one can be seen carried off into the depth of the forest by a fortunate breeze. + +Dean goes to bed leaving me alone beside the fire. A few minutes later I head inside as well. I lie down in my bedroom and stare up at the moon, trying to bath in its light, but the angle is wrong. It hits the edge of the window and refuses to come into my room. I get up to use the bathroom, but the bathroom is in shambles. Clothes, towels, magazines, books, scraps of paper and other trash litter the floor. Outside seems easier, so I return to the chill of the night. I am more than a little drunk. I sigh inwardly and pee on the nearest tree. + + +### Seven ### + + +Drip sandcastle dreams hang on a wire -- hear it on the national news -- Los Angeles still like Mexico City -- ocean of light -- hanging on by a thread -- photographs of the living dead -- electronic reality -- computer saves man -- regrets act -- one up -- two down -- five up -- squirrels scamper trees -- disappointment -- click clack -- trees -- wheels -- tuffs of white cotton -- the rumble of thunderheads -- cigarette ash -- rain holding off -- huddle around Roman fires -- the roots -- scatter cameos -- finger scrap rock -- tiny handholds -- Palisades like valley below -- roadside conversations -- we'll wait here -- morning -- cigarettes -- lighters -- flames -- inhale -- exhale. + +Everything is working. + +It's on. + +Or the talk of it is on. There is talk of it being on, or going on, or being ongoing. It's hard to say the way they circle around it. Dates come up. Things approach a plan but then the crest of on receeds, a wake of variables trailing ocean debris across the sand. And sand it will be. The plan has come that far. It will be sand and it will be foreign sand. In the background there will be the murmur of languages against the farther off babble of surf and there will pool, Scratch is insistent on pool, though none of us are sure why when there is an ocean right there, but no, Scratch must have his cabana and his pool and his divorcees. He is going on about the splendor of expatriate divorcees, loaded down with bags of money and free time and lusting after cabana boys who are reluctant because they fail to see the money tied to the sagging skin and diamonds in that are trapped in the wrinkles of bone -- shrunk flesh. + +Chloe wants mangos and papayas and passion fruit and guava and coconut necture tickled with rum to wash them down, to lounge in the warm tropical breezes that blow in from spice islands, jungle laced beaches bejeweled with palm fronds, brown skinned natives in clinking abalone necklaces walking down jungle trails, the foliage is glistening, the moonlight reflecting off the beads of water on the leaves... the chirping twilight of cricket dreams.... + +Dean isn't so limited, he believes in the whole world. We swill syrah in dark country cellars... We sit on latticed patios in the Italian countryside drinking chianti... We pick olives and play chess with the Greeks and take a ferry out to Crete... We walk the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and catch the Marrakech Express across the desert... We fly biplanes low over African savannas out to the Ivory Coast where we catch freighters to Brazil and sail up the Amazon to take Yage with the natives.... + + + + + +This afternoon the air is a harem dancer bejeweled in sequins and dripping opium honey from her succulent breasts. She slides slippery wet through the front door, traces of her slick the doorknob and the house smells of white orchids, pomegranates and peach blossoms. She weaves through handing out mosquitoes and the drifting off with gusts of a passing hurricane whose wake has left a lingering, crisp sadness, biting at the afternoon with frosty shark teeth. + +A map of central america is spread bethenth the coffeetable glass and between hands Scratch taps and points at roads and towns like a child at the smithsonian. + + + + + + + +Poker then strip club then sex scene with Maya. End. + +Chapter eight + + + + + +Cards keep flipping up and money changes hands. Brown liquor flows down my throat and my little pile of ones quickly diminishes. I had intended to clean them all of a few dollars -- damn beginner's luck. I borrow a twenty from Jimmy and then another. Not only am I not getting the cards, but also, for once in his life, Dean is. He takes hand after hand, a beaming smile lights his face each time he leans over the coffee table and drags a big pile of quarters and ones over to his end. + +Dean's in one of his expansive moods, he's feeling free and reaping the rewards of not caring about his actions. He rattles on about a book I loaned him. He has a fresh -- faced enthusiasm for the book's subject -- memes. Memes are the idea counterpart of genes. The book argues that ideas, like physical characteristic, are passed on hereditarily, but with a little more leeway than genetics. For instance racism is hereditary, it's passed down from parents to children just like a gene, so they call it a meme... It traces a lot of western thought that way, the way in which thoughts are replicated from one generation, or even person, to another... Dean is arguing that our memes, our very thoughts are not our own; we are merely replicating the ideas of our ancestors. + +"So, wait a minute now," Ulric cuts in, "in the old nature vs. nurture you're coming down on the nurture side?" + +"Well yes and no. I don't think it's either exclusively, a happy marriage of both, but that's not the point..." Dean has a puzzled look on his face and I can tell that even he isn't sure what the point is. "What I was getting at is that there is finally a language for talking about how ideas are transmitted; how the virus of language does it's work, how it moves from host to host..." Dean licks his lips in satisfaction. + +Ulric sits back in heavy thought. "Who cares though? I mean it may or may not be true, and there may or may not be ways of proving it in either direction, but none of that has on any consequence on how you live life... Oh and it's your bet there memeboy... what's it gonna be?" He gives Dean a sarcastic look. + +Dean stares him down, throws in three dollars and continues without pause. "That's where you stop though. What I want to know is how the screws turn... how you disassemble reality for someone and put it back together in a new way? Essentially," he draws long on his cigarette, "how do you make a lasting change in your beliefs?" + +Ulric grunts, "Try a thousand mikes of liquid acid...." + +Dean smiles. "I mean without drugs. Although maybe that would help me loosen up a bit... I don't know what I think about memes yet. I need to give it more thought. Besides I got this hand." With three aces, he most certainly does. + +Ulric throws his cards down in disgust and leans forward to light a cigarette. For the time being, Jimmy and I are resigned to silent losing. It suits me. Ulric takes a drag and seems to be sizing up Dean. "Alright Dean, how would you go about making a permanent change in your beliefs or should I say approach to life?" + +"Either or." He picks up the cards. "Well," Dean says shuffling as he talks, "for instance when I was in Maryland I tried on a set of beliefs to see how they fit me...." He puts his cigarette in the ashtray and slowly deals out two cards to each of us. "What I found," he says, "was that I couldn't live that so -- called normal life... white picket fence that sort of thing, but interestingly enough, I'm still in love with Alexis. I realized that in order for me to be with Alexis I had to get my shit together first and at this juncture I don't really want to do that. So the question arises why don't I want to do that? Where did I get the belief that I shouldn't do that?" + +"What do you mean by get your shit together?" Jimmy interrupts. + +Dean shrugs and lies back on the couch. "You know what I mean -- figure out what I want out of life and how I'm going to go about getting it." + +Jimmy sits up excited and starts waving his hands as he talks. "See that's what I mean when I keep saying I need to figure something out in my life. What am I going to do, that's what I keep asking myself... Do I want to be with Chloe and do that life or do I want to... you see what I'm getting at?" + +"Is your relationship with Chloe that involved?" Dean asked. "I don't mean to pry, but it seems like all you two do is fight... I mean maybe you should start exploring other directions." Dean runs his fingers through his hair, coating them with grease, and flips up three cards -- the nine of clubs, the six of hearts and the queen of diamonds. Jimmy studies the flop before answering Dean. The silence is uncomfortable, I think maybe Dean has overstepped his bounds with Jimmy and the look on Dean's face says he's thinking it too. Or else he doesn't have a hand. + +"Well see," Jimmy's voice betrays no irritation at the question, "With Chloe and I there's no growth, no forward movement of the relationship, and for a while I thought it was because I'm this ambitious person and she's not, but lately I've realized that it's me. I'm all ambition and no direction" Jimmy's eyes take on the preternatural glow that he gets when he's about to launch into one of his passionate diatribes against himself. He seems to be hovering right on the edge of illumination, but he's unable to take that last step. I know the feeling. Someday something will happen to push him up it. Or someone... + +Jimmy over -- analyzes his life, picking it to pieces, thinking he can reassemble it back to some greater whole when really what he needs is more pieces to build with. "At this point," he says, "Chloe is the one that's growing, not me." Dean nods his head and Jimmy closes his eyes and begins to speak very slowly, as if picking through the rubble of a demolished building. "I keep thinking that I'm having these grand realizations, and maybe I am, but I have the same realization everyday and I don't act on it. I need to act, to move forward so that I have something to bring to the table so to speak. And maybe it's as simple as finding a career or a job or whatever I don't know. I only know that I have to change something in me." + +Dean flips up the queen of spades and suddenly the hand takes a turn. I have the queen of hearts as a down card. They are lost in conversation and I quietly raise the stakes to three dollars. Jimmy is the only one who hesitates. + + Ulric sits up and checks his hand before throwing in his money. "See with Rose and I, we both started growing in opposite directions, and the hard part was that it was because I changed the things in me that I didn't like. Now I keep trying to change her even though I know I can't. So changing things in myself changed things in our relationship and ultimately, I now know that we aren't meant to be together." His voice drops to a tragic whisper, "But that doesn't make it any easier to let her go." + +Dean nods, "Of course not, that's a totally separate thing." He lights a fresh cigarette and cocks his head back staring at the ceiling. "People advance mentally throughout life," he goes on, "they pass through life in steps, accomplishments, experiences, epiphanies...pick a word. When two people meet that are advancing at the same rate, a bond is formed. A union of the minds so to speak." He blows smoke rings up to the ceiling clearly enjoying his role of analyst. "What happens to me is I keep advancing, sometimes speeding up, or slowing down, but usually speeding way up, and the other person is left behind. Thus there's that separation feeling at one point where you wake up saying what the fuck is going on, why am I here? For me, no matter what I do, that seems to happen after about two years..." + +The last card dealt is the king of spades. I again put in three dollars. Jimmy raises me another three and I raise him two more. He calls me and I lay down the queens and win the hand -- finally. + +"But do you think it's possible that two people can move at the same speed for longer than two years?" Ulric asks + +"Personally? No. However, my addition to that theory is that two people can move at different paces, but they still move together. In different directions, same direction, whatever, but there is still a continuity. And these two people make up the middle ground by learning from one another. If you're not learning from someone, it's hard to love them. But, more often than not, what happens to me is we move at the same pace, and then two years down the road they want to stay there, thus the huge schism." He smiles to himself for minute, "And then you meet a Muslim who makes you reevaluate... or maybe that just happens to me." He laughs. + +Ulric and Jimmy have very earnest, sad looks on their faces. I can tell Dean is enjoying his role as the teacher perhaps some good has come out of two failed marriages and three broken engagements. "See, as a relationship progresses you go from meeting in the middle somewhere to being in the middle. Once you're together as one so to speak, there is no middle to meet in and that's what chokes that life out of the relationship." He glances over at Ulric and sees the pain in his face, "Sorry, if you don't want to talk about this, I understand, and shit, look who you're talking to...like I fucking know... I mean the older I get the less I know. Or maybe getting older really isn't anything other than being alive long enough to see people's patterns repeat, terminate, and regerminate -- especially your own. If I've learned anything its that you control your position and whatever you choose is just that. Empty or not at the end of the day you face your own reflection in the toilet water, if it makes you feel better and more complete to have attachments hanging off that reflection, more power to 'ya, and good luck. I'm a narcissist, I only want to see my glowing sexy image in the off white piss -- water." He laughs at himself and shakes his head. "Love is emotional alchemy. You're trying to take things that don't tangibly exist and apply to them to so much flesh and hair. So to get back to what Ulric asked, I love her... I still do, but we aren't on the same page." Dean cracks a smile in my direction. "I can't be on the same page with someone if I'm not even numbering my pages. There's no way for them to even know who, what, or where I'm coming from." + +No one is paying attention to the game anymore. I shuffle quietly, flipping the cards from hand to hand trying to make every fourth one an ace, trying to arrange the deck to deal myself a winning hand. They are spinning words of pseudo -- wisdom, as if they actually know what they're talking about, but really they're just thinking outloud. I deal out the cards clockwise and check my hand. I have a two of diamonds and a three of clubs. I clearly know nothing. + +Jimmy starts back on his self -- depreciating rant. He wants to figure out what to do with his life. He wants direction. "I mean what's the point of coming to a realization about yourself or having some insight into your behavior if you can't do anything with it?" He asks. + +"Jesus Jimmy, you're the one whose always talking about parabolas and that sort of thing," Dean says. "You just approach that point, pass by it and move on again, what you come away with is only a glimpse." + +"But how do I turn the glimpse into a meaningful action?" Jimmy asks. + +Dean shrugs, "I have no idea. Like the genie in Aladdin said.... INFINITE POWER itty -- bitty living space." He laughs and takes a drag of his cigarette. He tilts his head to one side as if in deep thought and then, after a moment, he continues, "Well I tell you what... I've had a realization or two recently and I have to tell you gentleman that I will be leaving next week. I took my old job back in California." + +They both look up in shock. + +"Well damn. Really?" Jimmy sits up. "You're leaving us? I mean that's great man, I'm happy for you, but shit we're gonna miss you. It won't be the same without your lunatic ass around here." Jimmy throws his arm around Dean and gives him a bear hug. + +"Ya Dean, I feel like I just got to know you and now you're leaving." Ulric looks hurt again. "It's not Sil is it man? Because if he's kicking you out, you're more than welcome to stay at my place for a while." + +"No, but I do appreciate the offer Ulric." Dean flicks his cigarette in the ashtray. "I'm leaving because there's nothing here for me to do. I feel like I need to accomplish something. I finished my book, of course no one wants to publish it, but at least I did it. That's what I've been working on for the last year or two and now that it's gone I feel a sense of emptiness in my soul. Not to get too hippified on you, but it really does feel that way. Like I broke up with a girl or something. So, being in limbo, I thought why not go out and make some money? I can't do that here so I took the old job. I'm gonna live with my dad and do some saving. At least that's the plan, who knows though...." + +For a while all attention returned to the game. The sound of cards skidding softly across the table holds all the memes I need right now. Jimmy finds the map that Dean and I had been looking at earlier and he spreads it out on the floor again. He sees the red lines we drew tracing the ideal route from New York to Paris by ship and then down the Africa... + +"You going to Europe Sil?" he asks pointing at the big red dot in the middle of France. + +"Europe?" I say, thinking it over, "that's about the last place I'd go right now." + +"Really?" Ulric looks surprised. "No desire to go to France? I can see you in France Sil." Ulric is cross -- eyed from the scotch and his attempt to size me up is comical; I can't help laughing. + +"Well, I mean if a ticket were handed to me I'd take it," I say, "but it's not my first choice by any means. If I were to go somewhere I'd go to India or China, South America maybe, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica...." I get lost in private thoughts. Dean finishes dealing the hand and gets up and pours himself another drink. "Not me," he yells from the kitchen, "I gotta see Paris. I've read too many books, seen to many films... I need to set foot in Paris... live there for while... I'm working on this one guy who likes my writing... I'm trying to get him to put me up over there... the trick is going to be getting there." + +The trick is always getting there. The destination is the easy part. Play that game you used to play as a child; spin the globe and see where your finger stops it. That's the way to go. The gypsy blood in my veins makes me want to travel constantly, I can only stand to be in one place for about three months and then I have to leave... sometimes I come back and sometimes I don't. I'm starting to feel the itch again myself, the bones wanting to wander.... I have been in Athens almost six months without a vacation. I'm overdue. + +I check my down cards -- two aces. I bet a quarter. They all raise me. I stay in. Ulric throws the flop -- a queen of hearts and the other two aces. "Goddamn," Dean comments, "that's a rich hand somebody has." I smile at him. I bet a quarter and he folds. Ulric and Jimmy both raise me two dollars and so I raise them again. Dean throws out another card. More money cascades into the pot. Another card. More money. I keep raising their raises until the pot's well over fifty dollars. They call and I lay my aces with all the pomp and ceremony my little ego can manage. I rake it in. + +The thing with playing cards with your friends is that it's less about reading people than it is about good old -- fashioned luck. + +After saying goodbye to Dean and giving him their phone numbers and addresses, Ulric and Jimmy both head home for the night. "Nice fucking hand," Dean says when they're gone. "You stop to think how that happened?" He looks at me and a mischievous grin spreads over his face. I shrug. "For the record," he says, "I saw you trying to arrange the deck that one hand... but did you see me?" I have to laugh. + +Dean and I stay up a while talking about cheating at cards and friendship and the meaning of all of this.... Before turning in we embrace and say goodbye. This time I don't think I will see him again for a quiet a while. We make one final bet for the night -- we will meet in Tangiers, Morocco on September 10, 2002. No matter what happens we will be there. By the time I fall asleep, I'm already there. + + + +The strobe overwhelms the blue glow and the girls begin the writhe, ellish wirthing serpentine bodies, no longer names, no longer girls no longer human, but gliding gilded serpents, movements caught in flickers of blinging whiteness and inky blue darkness, stop motion film, hair, skin, patterns of movement until the light and the shadows beome one. In the glimpses of faces across the catwalk I can see male teeth, shiny pale faces, tongues flick here and there, pass across lips and snake back down throats, and then a blue aquarium darkness, film slowed down. Twenty four to twelves and then six and the three, advancing three glimpses at a time in stop motion time lapse, bodies appearing not far from where they were left. And you can feel her movements, a girl caught in three frame bursts, she is never where she just was always one step ahead of her body and you can it passing into your guppy mouth, snaking down your throat, swallowing swollen calves, slender thighs, choking on garters, weakened by the memory of silk and spice and crusades abandoned long ago to the darkness of continets moving and her cunt tickling across your lips, catch in your throat, a gulp of air, some scent of dark blue shadow and the stomach and breasts, hard nipples that catch on the way down and head and hair swirling across your chin, gulps of cool blue shadow, down, all of it down, drink all of it down, blue and white and flesh and to see it from above... pictures spread across the floor. Sitting cross -- legged in the near darkness of late night shadow and gaslamp glow, light and shadow becoming one across the bedroom floor, giant shadows cast across a series of black and white photographs all taken from above. And you arrange the faceless heads in a half circle around the one, the one with the legs careening out from under the birds -- eye view of blond and cinnamon and cardemore. Out of focus and caught in flight, she moves in orbits, she holds a key and the knob is turning, light and shadow, digital and analog... the pictures caught in gusts, blowing up in little dust devils and then here onstage, whirling and weaving between her legs, circling under skirts, tugging at stocking and garters, caressing soft brown skin and disappearing into corset shadow, tugging electric nipples, still rising in ever widening circles up to the ceiling and disappearing through it, returning to the vantage point of origin, the vanishing point, right there on the horizon of what just happened and what hasn't yet,. And she takes you by the hand and leads through the beaded curtain of the doorway with hinges still attached, but door and knob and key long since vanished in to some murky ocean memory, a current welling toward the back, toward the corner, and into the shadow, the absense of light, a finger curling, something to follow, a motion trail, a wake of smoke enveloping you in octopus shadow, tentacles reaching out and pulling you into a chair where you are tied to watch. + +If you were to see this from a long way a way flickering light on a screen to reveal ashes flying off your skin in trumpet blasts... but you cannot, you will not, it is not. There are only the hurricanes to stir the coffee and bend the telephone poles, to warp the voices of far away, to call up secrets that are sleeping in dazzling peace behind a doorway far up from here, so high up that the knob is just out of your child arm stretch, but how wonderful it is just to see it floating there, out of reach and beautiful, glistening in this light, this artificial sun of closing time. + + + + + + + +I go in the bedroom and lock the door. + +Outside. Falling leaves clink against the windowpane like broken china dolls. A half moon breast is visible through the clawing twig -- arms scratching at the void. I'm thinking of Maya and the first night we spent together. Later, after we had coffee. I walked her to her house. I remember the smell of Jasmine or Frankincense or Myrrh, a beautiful pungent odor that wafts through this world all the time -- you catch it in the fall air, tangible but just barely, it hangs on the edge of the known and unknowable. + +I open the window and study the frosted -- flake remnants of Kudzu crisping on the vine, under the bushes, under the trees, under the stars -- a stale brown rug slick with freezing rain. The faint light of Jimmy's window silhouettes a branch and its remaining leaves, the hangers, the ones who won't let go -- car crashes, heart attacks, train wrecks. The light looks warm -- toward the light coma -- stumbling, blind -- eyed memory. + + And then she kissed me. There was the taste of hot cigarette smoke on her tongue; I caught it greedily the way plants grow to the sun, drawn by the familiar. She tasted like orange blossoms or smelled like them or felt like them, powdered sprinkled orange blossoms. They were in her eyes, the smell came out of her eyes and then she opened them and stared at me for a while hanging on the edge of my lips. Enormous arcing eyebrows of perfume. + +The steady erratic pelting of rain sounds like a thousand drunken crystal goblets pelting a Russian fireplace, Cossacks dancing in circles, Dostoyevski dreams. Bearskin rugs. No fireplace -- hearth. Gas lamps. And powdered crystal sprayed on a stone floor. + +Earlier a letter: I'm on the limp dehydrated grass of Central Park, gnats swarming under this tree. I have gnats for you Sil. The shade seems hotter than the actual sun. Perspiring. Parched. And yet all my discomfort disappears when I read these carefully typed pages -- read in full -- twice. You are my own private breeze. + +There was no word, no sound, just lips resting together, sticky, warm, honey kiss. We went inside and sat on the couch talking for a while. We went upstairs and lay down on her bed. She rose up in tight leather pants out of a sea of flowering colors -- Jasmine, Sunflower, Scarlet Sage, Rocket Larkspur, Lupines, and Butterfly Weed. There were rollicking colors everywhere in my mind, indigo and vermilion, violet, lavender, and softer tones, pastels and baby's -- breath -- white. + +It's a toy scene -- Russian hearth, nutcrackers dancing, plastic soldiers huddled in the dark shadows of vines. A steady backbeat thuds through the wall. The living room has rhythm. Little percussive grunts and muffed squeals accent and fill. 4/4. Marching toward climax. + +I'm working at Garden on the Green... sold my soul for the table scraps... another hireling. on a smoke break. Armed with pen and paper to defend the travesty of wanting to feel loved. The lake is spiked with moonly light, sharp and jagged on thousands of ripples. Once -- there is the kiss, then the cycle becomes inevitable. Nipples turn to jagged granite and everything pools and secretes as if waiting for sensual annihilation -- a mingling and mangling of identities. A death of one? Or both? A devouring and subordination? No -- a polarizing rather -- a balance of two integrities, charging electrically, on with the other, yet with centers hard as diamonds -- like stars. Do you feel loved? Do I? + +She grabbed a handful of my hair and held it, her lips bit at my neck. I could feel heat panting in my ear. Her smooth breasts pressed softly against my chest. She rolled off me, pulled her pants down and climbed on top of me. She swayed there for a few seconds, murmuring to herself. She bird -- picked at my belt, peeling the husk from a coconut and then in one gruff movement she fished out my cock and squeezed it with the tips of her fingers. Her lips pressed together and she leaned her head against it and closed her eyes. It was then that I heard the bass fading in and the sharp tap of a snare drum, and I felt her tongue circling. + +The cat girl enshrouded in black lace accented with a notorious red feather boa rises to one elbow -- need a ray of hope -- from where she has been reclining on a velvet divan. She cocks her head lazily and after a yawn full of boredom and nastiness, calls for another martini.... Do you think that when you want everything you're dangerously close to nothing? I wanted to thank you for feeding me the inspiration to question, if only for the insatiable taste of a question... + +After a few minutes I pulled her up to my lips. A devouring insubordination amid the tumbling slow -- motion sound of shattering glass, falling leaves, splintering moonlight, distant living room backbeat, icy rain crying into hail...Water pouring in through the ceiling, sleet and hail collapsing back to water, rivulets on the window, pelted kudzu pulling the stars under. Her nipples like soft puffs of rain sliding down my tempered, glass fingers. The roof gives way, the ground opens up and the earth will swallow us one day. Its better that way. Inverted love carry you up on the way down, riding tidal waves, tiny moon sheared ripples across centuries and continental drifts and shifts and up and down and over. Carry me to the mountains, to a cave on a wind -- howling ridge, rape me like Lilith. Glaciers receding. Gnats swarming out of the caves. Fecund warm diseases licking there way up your spine. Its okay. Its necessary. The rainsleethail still tickles desire. The snapping snare drum echo of time oozes through the walls. Pop pop -- pop pop -- pop pop -- feel you more the less you know. Cossacks setting up camp in a deserted farmhouse and Fyodor calls for another martini... One more drink for the diseased, one more sleep, one more lover until your up with the sun .and the acrid burnt smell of sidewalk. + +Sticky tapioca squirting thick on stomachs and breasts. + +Reach over and grab a pack of cigarettes off the floor. Pull one out and light it. + +Lilith had to go. Nothing was left to the imagination and so he sent her away. Or she left. Packed her suitcase and caught a clipper -- ship to where the continents were shifting. Wrote letters and fell in love with a man in the sky. Went blind staring at the image. + +Look at her now. Pass her the cigarette and wonder how this happened -- tangled up in metaphor and cool blue love -- diving off the shores of lost continents. Walk naked to the kitchen and pour another glass of vodka or whiskey or water or wine or change one from the other on your proud way back to the bed. + +She has an earthy ethereal mixture to her skin, makes her seem at once detached and warm. Her lips purse teasingly around the filter of her cigarette and eyebrows arc off gray -- blue eyes, dyed black hair tussled atop her head. Blue -- gray eyes clouded with the same thing you can feel, something trance -- like -- consummate excitement. She puts the cigarette to your lips and you inhale deeply. + +Later: dream about staring at the sun. + +Waitress #34 misses you. + + + + + + + + + + + + + +Eight + +Starts with tapping at the window, ends with this section which itself needs to end with Jimmy and Chloe all bleary eyed... hell yes we're going to new york Dean has pills with a street value of fifteen thousand dollars on him I'm going to new york.... + + + + + +The faceless monster -- power -- no one person -- group -- control everything -- multi -- headed monster -- biting itself -- information potential exists -- attacking heads -- destroying itself -- end times -- space and word alone -- unsettling thought -- dependency -- things start to think -- how do you draw the lines then -- where does the word go -- in the beginning -- sure -- what about at the end -- + +Morning -- I am standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette. Fall is playing with Winter in the front yard. I'm watching the near freezing rain pelting through the trees. A strange thing has happened in Dean's absence -- I no longer need sleep. For two weeks now my brain has not stopped running in loops. It refuses to rest. It used to take an alarm to inspire movement before noon; now I wake up at five in the morning and stare at the ceiling. This morning I have decided to admit defeat. I am up before sunrise. I am watching the sun poking over the horizon to the east, where the storm has not yet hit. There is an infinite sadness to the way the trees glisten in the light. The gleaming raindrops look like a miniature skyline, buildings at night, little twinkling windows, like Manhattan seen from Williamsburg. Reflected microcosms glitter off falling leaves, reds, browns, and oranges, sparkling like the abode walls of a pueblo -- New Mexico or Old. + +In Mexico City back alleys -- soot -- covered adobe walls -- dark eyes peer from shadowy doorways. It's late in the evening, warm orange smog -- light paints the sky and suffuses the city with an alien glow. The air is brisk, but not freezing. You run your fingers along the crumbling walls like a child, dragging at the chips of loose plaster and looking up absently at the sky. Nothing separates you from the peering eyes, the doorways and the tables littered with scraps of food retrieved by boys selling Chiclets in the streets downtown. Beans, slops of meat, ground dog bone, porridges boiled cheap over smoky wood fires. Stalks of plants grow here and there in the tiny yards between buildings. Chilies hang drying in the eaves. Second story railings are a riot of sapphire, indigo, vermilion and emerald; the smell of sage, rosemary, and cilantro wafts out open windows. The flat roofs feed the dripping ceilings, rain gutters leak to water plants hanging from the rafters and balconies. The plants suffer through life, gasping in the ozone and covering over with smoggy dust. The pavement turns to dirt farther out, and is eventually overgrown by trees on the slopes of the mountains. This is the one street, the street, the mainline artery running through and carrying the heart of the matter of matter. This is how it goes and goes and goes. Marching in twos, little children jump and play in an alley off to the right. Two blocks north they are digging up the newest pyramid in the Aztec caper and the ghosts are swimming through the ether. You can see their pallid shadows sailing across the crimson glow of the sky. The ghostly, billowing sails catch century old winds tugging them like clipper ships through the Panama Canal. Phantasmal chatter fills the street like lemurs cackling in the jungle. + +Your fingernail catches in a chip of plaster still clinging to the wall. The ghosts light up against the clouds, climbing and dancing in the sky. Priestly ghosts offer still -- beating human hearts up to the gods, clamoring at the silent sky and then turning to look at you. Look what we have done. Here is my heart... eat... it is good. Take, this is my body... Mysterious ceremonies carried out amongst a cacophony of meaningless gibberish; indistinguishable figures twist and turn and carve until there is an order and meaning to it all. The priest drives his blade into the chest of a sacrifice, splitting the sternum in one smooth blow. Out comes the heart and in a delicate pirouette the priest turns, pauses, looks for an instant, and then screams, hurling the bloody heart down the side of a pyramid. The gods give an empty laugh. Splattering, lopsided, bounces carry the heart to it's rest in the dirt, under the floorboards of time, the telltale heart beating under the pavement of centuries. The archeologist's pick finds the priest's sacred knife as a token reminder, wrapped in muslin or gauze, mummified at 17,000 feet atop Machu Pechu in Peru, or here, rotting in the middle of the street. The children in the alleyway laugh and play. Their language is like pancakes, laid out flat and easy to hear, smeared by syrupy tongues. The priest smiles sadly down at the watching masses, realizing that he will be dust under the boots of centuries and no one will know what he knows. + +We think we will wake up. We think there will be a point at which everything is made clear. The whole world will transform itself into a crystalline diamond plateau on which all the answers are self -- evident and you will understand. Your feet will be light as air. You will dance over the diamond floors and glide in perfect, truthful bliss. You will dance quietly to the sound of Frank Sinatra crooning about autumn in New York.... But the image will fail you; the crystal will crack and shatter in a million diamond drill bits, piercing your flesh as you scream deafly, in silent agony. + +We think that we will wake up. There is vast machinery purporting to wake us up. There are religions, sciences, methods, prayers, and wheels of karma and darma. Men hang from crosses. Men flagellate themselves on mountaintops. Men twist into pretzels on street corners. Men proclaim the illusion of the world. Men offer salvation. Men sell trinkets for distraction. Men teach meditation techniques. Men douse themselves in gasoline and burn before our eyes. Men crawl on their knees because their legs have been amputated to keep us free. Every path to enlightenment has been tried. Every shriek has been screamed. There are fifty thousand roads diverging in the woods and they all lead nowhere. + +There are no gates of heaven, but there are gates to heaven. There isn't a hell, but there is hell. There are no sins, but there are sins. There is no love, but there is such a thing as love. No one is there, but everyone is waiting. You are feeling overwhelmed, paranoid and misunderstood. You want to think that you are not alone. You want to band together, to bond, to hide out, and to mark yourself with primitive lingual tattoos, so that the angel of death will pass over you in a momentary lapse of reason. You don't understand what is taking so long. You don't understand why, if things are possible, they don't happen now. You want to know when the synergy of life will reach out to your neck of the woods. You want to go out. You want to be with your friends. You want to go out Friday and you want to go forever. Forever back or forever forward, somewhere into that brave night, that tired, old, bored allegory. You know you bought into a lie, and you know you're perpetuating it. You know that everything is a lie, but it all means something. Did I say you? I mean me. + +I am hungry, restless and deeply confused. I can smell the streets of Mexico and remember the beat of Aztec heart -- sacrifices. It courses through the house, driving me mad. I pace the living room like a caged cat, circling in big arcs that bend strategically at the vortices of two ashtrays. The afternoon is a priest hearing confession, masturbating to the maid's obscene tales as she drags them out in full regaling detail. There are only us now, you and I. If this has meaning then it can only be that we are we, and I, I, and you, you, and us, us. + +I see Maya. I see Dean. I see Sean and Katherine, Jimmy and Chloe, Ulric, Scratch, and everyone I have ever known. I think of how much all of us have suffered and how great the sorrow of the earth must be. So immense a thing as to defy imagination, to smash metaphors to bits and completely eradicate the word. To render words trite and useless. I feel it come on in a terrifying rush. Adrenaline floods my veins, my heart speeds up, beating so fast that it feels motionless. My palms coat with sweat, my skin flushes, and for the first time I am afraid. I fear for my life. I fear death and what it could bring. I fear the voices I hear. I fear the growling and singing and whispering and chattering of the dead. I look out the window fully expecting the Aztec shaman to be standing there, holding up my heart, smiling. I smell something. The smell hits me like a sledgehammer, there is something blood curdling familiar about it. It is the smell of death. The smell of my death. You can get it without dying, you can smell it lurking around the corner and feel it closing in on you. Death is a thick smell, a reminder that the body is temporal and hangs by a thread, liable to snap without a moment's notice. + +The Tibetans claim demons will prey on you as you enter the gates of the afterworld. Those who don't know where they are, the ones that came in on bus wrecks or an earthquake, they don't stand a chance. Neither do those that never realized what is going on in this life. The ones who refuse to let go of the uniquely human games, the politics, the barter system, the Madison Avenue rewrite department, the beggarly, sickly creatures, the religious, the lawmakers, the law upholders, the money greasers, the shit in the wind who have forgot their human roots -- that human is humility. Arrogance grows like a cancer, breeds with money and mutates, until the body turns rigid and crusts over with hubris. Their bodies are stiff prisons of hatred that can only be escaped when the winds blow in the atomic smell of death, scorching them clean -- salvation. Steady...wait 'til you see the whites of their eyes... the end of history. Everything has an ebb and flow, surges come in waves. There is nothing to be saved from except yourself. + +Smoking filterless cigarettes, listening to the voices trailing in from the neighborhood around me, voices from the cottages up the hill, voices of wheels winding down the road, voices leaves in the wind, voices of rain pelting the ground, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound, the trigger behind the motion. Dancing eyes, hungry and spiral with giddiness... I throw out the tired old man mind. A blur of images, swirling words, sounds, smells, miraculous warmth, crawling embers on the flesh... Digging, keep digging. We're all great tunnelers, mining after the beautiful, but now I see the ugly creeping in around the edges, the black on the starry night. Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges. Digging fast and furious: tunnelers. Roots and the little blooms -- the moment -- the purity -- the wavelength -- the transitions burned like hydrochloric acid onto memory film. Scar tissue that will never go away. + +I'm in the middle of an afternoon drink when I notice the rainbow in the kitchen. At first I think it looks wrong because of bad indoor lighting, but then I notice that it's a reverse rainbow, the spectrum in the opposite order -- purple on top. I watch it from the couch for a while, but as it begins to fade, I get up, walk to the kitchen and sit down underneath it. I lean back against the wall and light a cigarette. The sun shifts and the rainbow disappears, replaced by a simple, clear, beam of sunlight, that strikes the wall about eight inches above my head and climbs slowly, but noticeably, upward. The cigarette dangles in my hand. I watch the thin trail of smoke separate into two shades of gray. One is light and salient, like clouds wisping across the summer sky. The other is darker, a somber thundershower in the evening -- carcinogenic tars. They separate in the relative darkness near my hand, rise up, and then explode into the light. There is visible burst where the particles of smoke suddenly pitch the beams of light back to my eye. An explosive nanosecond that happens so fast that by the time you notice it, it's long gone past. The two trails of smoke swirl and mingle gradually, dancing through the sunbeam like two girls in the dark corner of a nightclub. The ominous blue stream wears a black leather corset, laced tight in the back. It moves boldly, stiffly, constrained in ribbed fabric. The ethereal gray stream wears a silk robe with embroidered Chinese designs. It moves feathery soft and loose, seductively spinning in the light. As they continue up toward the ceiling, they lose their distinction and disappear into the chaos. Cloud patterns bursting in spring skies, a gurgling stream circling around rocks, the leaves of an aspen tree seen from a distance, the movement of migratory herds, the rise and fall of the Nile over millennia, the smoke from a cigarette... Everything has a pattern. The pattern has a pattern, which forms a fabric where time pools like a glacial lake. It tickles off slowly, minute by minute, second by second, but the reservoir always remains the same. + +I am falling into a whirlpool of time. It consumes me and spins me around the room. I am dripping off the precipice into the dark unknown. I have to run to smooth the change... feels slow motion... diving... hit the water like a torpedo... the waves slip out in a circular arc. My eyes smart from the smoke. Body electric, fluidly suspended in time, carried slip -- slow, up into the magic of the beyond. Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova. It atomizes and re-forms as the cool wave hits the skin, smooth blue skin. + + +### Eight ### + + + +### Nine ### + + + +Cut below and use for drive with + +jimmy and Chloe + + + + + +Nine + + + +I have to start moving, and start moving right now. It's around nine. I throw some clothes in a bag and drag them out to the car. I start the engine; it coughs and sputters to life. I go over and say goodbye to Jimmy and Chloe. "When are you going to be back?" He asks. I don't know... "Where are you going?" She inquires. I don't know... "How are you getting there?" That I know... + +The engine hums. I keep it at fifty miles an hour. I can hear the noises of the individual pistons pulsating in controlled, rhythmic, patterns. The wind roars around me, but I don't hear it. There is only the steady purring of chaos harnessed, slipping through the air, sliding across the land. Over hills, valleys, and mountains, across bridges, rivers, and railroad tracks, through cities, towns and farms, under rain, sleet, and hail-the open road. The road goes on forever, scorched by the burning sun, it chaps and cracks, bleeding headlights like shooting stars or comets. No one ever drives quite like I have in mind-road as in nowhere-never ending dreams. + +It's a beautiful little country road, a peaceful Georgia night, I haven't seen another car for hours. I have no idea where I am. The back of my mind is in New York. It's dragging the rest of me with it. I have the passing thought that hearing the roar of the engine over the rush of the wind might not be a good sign, but I like the way it sounds. It gives the car an organic quality. Faintly, in the background, the sound of classical strings set to the pulse of a techno beat-the ancient modern, the archaic revival. I eschew the interstate in favor of two-lane blacktop. I am in no hurry to get anywhere. I just want to drive. To drive long distance is to meditate; there is nothing to do, nothing that requires any more than the animal function of the brain, the hard-wired instinctual circuits that I don't control anyway. The creative mind, the thinking mind, is free to roam the open road. I avoid interstates. They gloss over the details; they are wide and fast with no time for minutiae. The fabric of life is thinnest in the middle of an interstate highway. I trade speed for peace, convenience for time, and cold comfort for risk. I hang my arm out the window, and let it go limp to bounce with the wind. + +Just outside of Gordian, South Carolina, a canopy of oaks and red elms arch over the road, a dizzying rush of treetops sprays overhead. I slow down to thirty, set the cruise control and lean my head back. I'm gliding under the canopy, looking up at a fantastic blur of moonlit leaves. Silver swords cutting up the sky, sleek, and motion blurred. It looks like a high-speed film montage where you can almost tell what things are, but they move too fast to fully comprehend, always lingering just beyond the threshold of recognition. I feel myself lying on my back in a canoe sliding along the banks of the Amazon... They're not leaves at all, they're signposts, clues to the mystery, and every bit the key. + +A boarded up fruit stand-boiled-peanut vendors-an ancient downtown of false storefronts-it's impossible to tell if the inhabitants are asleep or deserted long ago. Go where the money is... it's a universal migration from here to the interstate highway. Human culture always following after it's own inventions. Eight hundred generations, six hundred and fifty thousand spent in caves, wombs, and incubators, hydroponically fed dreams from underground rivers. Then the dreamer woke to create a world with electric can openers, shrink-wrapped by a haggard thirteen year old girl in between enduring her uncles' assembly line gang rapes.... All this for that or all that for this? + +The air behind me holds the tragedy of fall turning to winter. It offers backseat driving tips, whispering softly in my ear like a barroom parrot hissing the mimic of the voice-box smoker ordering another scotch on the rockssss. I stop for gas. I am higher in elevation; it's colder here. I put on my jacket and start the pump. I walk up the street to look at the old buildings. Faded, worn paint is shedding off the brick-framed buildings in giant sheets like lizard skin. I step back and admire the chaotic structure as I light a cigarette. Old advertisements are stapled to a board at crazy, maddening angles, pictures of cans, black eyed peas, peaches, moon pies-faded and whitewashed by years in the sun. Across the street a window reads: Ace Appliance Store. I wander over and put my face to the glass. I see televisions, radios, washing machines, drying machines, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, microwave ovens, convection ovens, alarm clocks, computers, headphones, video games, laser disc players, DVD players, record players, compact disc players, cordless telephones, wireless phones, digital phones, cellular phones, two way radios, short wave radios, car stereos, home stereos... Tons and tons of stuff. Endless stuff out here in America. I crush out my cigarette and walk back to the car. In the back seat is my single bag. I have four shirts, two pairs of pants, two pairs of shoes, socks and underwear, toiletries and a laptop computer. I don't have any stuff. + +Feeling weary and defeated, I follow the signs to the interstate to find a motel. The interstate isn't here for you and I. No one built this road so we could drive on a convenient, straight, fast thoroughfare. It's wide and straight because Eisenhower was an army man. He wanted a way to move tanks, land fighter jets, and transport troops about the country. Should the need arise.... Driving it takes the rest of the wind out of my sails. I pull off at the first motel I see, plunk down my $40 to a sleepy looking attendant, and pass out for the night. + +I dream that I'm in New York, living with Maya. Everything is wonderfully happy. I am lying in bed and she is on top of me, arms extended, back arched. Her face is perched above mine, blond locks framing a warm, joyous smile... and then something changes, she rears her head back and laughs like Satan when Hitler rolled into Hungary. My body is stiff as a board; she picks me up and heaves me out the window. I scream as I fall, but I don't hit the ground or wake up. Eventually I stop screaming. I keep falling and falling. A sickening feeling overwhelms me-vertigo-I can't see the ground below me. Eventually I turn over and look up. Maya's face is still clear, leaning out the window, as if I had not fallen at all, but only hovered just below her balcony. She is smiling again, but now it's a sad, crestfallen smile. I realize that she never threw me, it was my imagination. I jumped. She is crying because I am gone. I have made a tragic mistake. Floating in mid air, body wracked with sobs, I am overwhelmed by the realization that I will have to live the rest of my life with this mistake. There is no way to undo it-only move forward. I wake with a start. + +It is just before dawn. I fumble for my cigarettes and light one. The dream leaves me feeling depressed and angry with myself. I smoke grimly, scowling at the walls. The room is nondescript, a common dresser, an ordinary mirror and two generic paintings hanging on the wall above my head. It feels like a prison cell. The acidic insides of my stomach gnaw at the fleshy walls begging for eggs, bacon and hash browns. I get up and look out the window; it's nowhereville, faceless buildings, ordinary landscaping, and second-rate views of the cold, insensitive freeway overpass. + +I pull on my pants, light another cigarette and flip on the morning news. People are cheating, stealing and dying all over the world. Glitter-faced entertainment hosts parade in fashionable clothes for my amusement. It's the same blue world. Nothing ever changes inside the box. Its comforting and horrifying at the same time. A cheap coffeemaker languishes on the bathroom counter, it seem energized the minute I turn it on. It rattles and gasps and makes gurgling noises as if waking from a long slumber. The television drones out the latest and greatest pop music as chosen by the careful market research groups at MTV. It's a terrible desolate scene this room, but it makes me happy. It is not nearly as bad as the dream landscape. + +Around ten I check out at the front office. I skim the newspaper as the clerk prints out a receipt. According to the newspaper, Washington DC is the most violent city in the country. In the hills around Sarejevo, land mines still blow off limbs as a brutal reminder of the never-ending price of war. In India and Palestine the same religious zealots continue fighting the same wars their ancestors fought. In Madagascar eighty-five percent of the forest has been clear-cut for timber, the soil washes uselessly into the sea. In Washington State fifty four percent of the population still thinks clear cutting is a good idea. Sixty-five percent of the population of Zimbabwe has AIDS or HIV. Such happy things in the morning. + +In Burma a Shaman is praying and wondering how long until the monsoons arrive to heal the parched farmland. In Tangiers a dying old man in a hospital bed is think about the American junky that used to buy groceries from his father's store. + +The road leads up into the capital. The tourists are thick as Florida sand fleas. The streets, the very concrete and asphalt beneath me, are laughing at all of us as they bear the silly game on their back day in and day out. + +I make my way out of town and start heading north again. My plan is to spend the night in Jersey and tackle New York tomorrow, but maybe I ought to just keep going. Maybe I ought to skip New York. Maybe I should just drive right on up to Maine, and then Canada, and then whatever is north of Canada; drive right into the arctic sea and jump out at the last moment. Maybe build an igloo, live off polar bear fat and never see anyone again. Maybe find the little hole that leads down into the hollow core where the dark-skinned survivors of Atlantis took refuge... + + Day fades to evening, fades to night. The ancient mistress hunger sings her siren song around nine and I stop at an all night diner in Pennsylvania. I sit in the corner and order up a plate of grease. Hard formica counters rise out of cold, concrete floors, scuffed and worn from trucker boots, treading season after season across the threshold, into the orange glow to rest the weary eyes. It calls up visions of lost highways, long gone past, dredges up images, blurring them together. Passing seasons traced out in the ark of headlights dragging across concrete freeway miles. + +There aren't very many people in this diner-a couple of truckers with ten-gallon hats, belt buckles, extend-a-bellies, and the requisite butt cracks. There is a thin, old man in a booth-the sort of man that's thin, and old, that you would expect to find in a diner booth. Three waitresses linger behind the counter. One is cooking on a giant grill while the other two gab and stare at their fake pink fingernails. As I get up to go to the restroom, I notice another man next to the truckers. He's a westerner. He has an extra-wizened face that can only be acquired by spending some time in the desert. I figure him for a Texan. He looks like he has been around the block. I notice him because he glares at me. His eyes challenge me as I walk past. I stop on my way back and spin a few tracks on the jukebox. Willie Nelson floats across the room, burying the ghosts of highway noise-the freeway semi-trailers flinging themselves through the night, headlights pulling the past into the future.... Lazy houseflies crawl up the wall reminding me of Ben's Broasted Chicken. + +I was headed up to the Tahoe area back in my hiking days. I went by way of the back road, 395, a rickety operation that gives you fantastic views of the eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada. About three-quarters of the way to Tahoe you pass through Bishop. It's a logical place to eat. The only place really. There was a roadside dive called Ben's which advertised broasted chicken and corn on the cob for two dollars a plate. I wanted to know just what one did to a chicken to make it broasted. I ordered some up but I hardly ate, the enormous, lazy flies that crawled up the column next to my table distracted me. I can't recollect the chicken, but the flies were slothful, indolent creatures that didn't move when you swatted at them. They just gave up and died. I may have been the first person to swat at them. They might not have known what death was; they might have had free run of the world their entire lives. I might have created a fly culture myth of the grim reaper-the broaster. + +I try to put it all together, the passing seasons, the glaring Texan, and free-spirited flies squishing under the thump of newspaper. The Texan keeps craning his head and looking over at me suspiciously. Perhaps my fingernails are too clean, or my clothes not stained enough, to merit his respect. By the time I finish eating and light a cigarette, the truckers are gone. The thin old man evaporates leaving a trail of smoke. It's just me, the waitresses, and the Texan. All the sudden the Texan stands up and coughs loudly. The waitress, who had been grilling burgers, turns around and comes out from behind the counter. As their eyes meet, his face melts from a suspicious glare to a warm, loving smile. They hug and kiss each other and say some sort of goodbye. I see his face over her shoulder as he hugs her; he has a tender look in his misty eyes. He is no longer a glaring, suspicious stranger, but a simple, weather-beaten man escaping into the arms of a soft, plump waitress. He catches me staring at them; he smiles at me and rubs her back. For a flashing second everything in the world seems perfectly fine and sensible. They kiss again and he walks out the door without turning around. + + + + + + + +Nine + +Get rid of Chloe and Jimmy start letter to chloe thing put Dean on an airplane for Costa Rica. + + +### Ten ### + + + +ten + + + +All points bulletin-universe in retreat-wasteland poets die of heartache-epiphany-no spacemen-detour-dinosaur bones churn under wagon wheels-future excavated-time bound memory-never happened-non-event-heart beats-broken timepiece-lonesome thoughts- stave off chill-to be free-red white blue disease-surrender-blazing failures-defeat-set free- Christ-Joan of ark-Gandhi-Montezuma-world paused-infinitesimal second-watch them fall-nothing but continual drumming-beating through African congas-you alone-get your life preserver-cut out the poetry-cut to the main artery- + +Manhattan goes helter skelter the minute I emerge from the Holland Tunnel. The first thing I encounter are detour signs, which send me uptown when I want to go across town. Everything is moving too fast. I'm used to walking the streets, not driving them. Street signs whip past in a blur. I look in vain for a landmark, something I recognize, but I see nothing. Every street I try to turn on is blocked off or a dead end. Finally, at some length, I get across to the Lower East Side only to find myself heading off the island on the Manhattan Bridge. I encounter more detours in Brooklyn. I'm completely lost now; I roll down the window and ask an old man with a tuba for directions back to the bridge; he plays me a guttural song. I manage to make it back into Manhattan, but this time I end up way down by Battery Park. My frustration is mounting. I decide to admit defeat. I pull over somewhere in the financial district and call Maya. After her initial shock wears off, she gives me directions and I set off again. But the minute I get back in the car, the streets are all jumbled up in my head. Did she say Houston or Canal? Was it West on Houston or East on Canal? Was it right on Essex and past Delancy? Or was it right on Essex left on Delancy? I pull over again about ten minutes later and call her back. She laughs and tells me I'm closer this time, even headed in the right direction. I just haven't gone far enough. Maya promises to come out and flag me down. I'm exasperated by now, Manhattan was not designed with cars in mind. I feel like I'm driving in a maze at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I can never see more than two blocks ahead. I drive right by Maya, but luckily I see her jumping up and down in the rearview mirror, and I flip a U-turn. I park in a loading zone in front of her building and get out to drop off my bag. I am frustrated and angry. + +Snow is just starting to fall on the icy blacktop. The street is already a sea of snow, slush, salt, and ankle-deep puddles from earlier storms. Maya is wearing a long, black, down parka. Her hair is tucked under a knit hat and she has on wool mittens. She smiles at me and comes running up to give me a hug. I rudely brush her aside. She balks and slowly, nearly imperceptible slides toward the curb. She draws up and crosses her arms. "you aren't even going to give me a kiss?" I want to find parking I want to get rid of the car I want to make the lights stop flashing I want to turn down the noise I want to make the cars slow down I want to paint lanes in the street. I want to kiss Maya in a dream, running into her arms, a celluloid reunion, the hero and heroine see each other at a distance and start running. To Have to Hold, and yet one brush something closer to The Shining has emerged. I apologize and give her an obligatory hug and kiss. + +I lug the suitcase upstairs and Maya goes with me to park the car, lest I get lost walking home. She is miffed at me. She has a hurt expression on her face, but we struggle onward trying to pretend nothing is wrong. To cheer her up, I tell her that I think I'm going to stay. Her face breaks into a smile, "Are you going to live with me?" + +I tell her I am. "Now and forever," I say, thinking as I do that I've said that before. Twice. + +"God," she exclaims, "I have been waiting to hear that for two years now. I can't believe you're actually here." She cups her hands around my face. Her eyes are younger than in my lantern lit memories. Her mittens catch in my stubble. She leans over and we kiss. Her nose and cheeks are icy cold, but her lips part and her mouth is warm. Our tongues circle each other, the light turns green, a car honks. + +We find a temporary parking spot two blocks over and we run home through the falling snow. When we get in the apartment I finally pick her up in my arms and for a little while everything is perfect. We kiss and start ripping each other's clothing off. Clothes fly about the room, covering furniture and floor. We fall in bed naked and groping. + +Later, we sit in bed smoking cigarettes, resting. She is naked, legs crossed, wearing a red feather boa around her neck. Her now blond curling locks are ruffled from sex. She puts the filter tip to her lips and softly takes a drag. She smiles at me. "Sil," she says, "are you sure this is what you want?" I nod and look at her eagerly. She looks at me with a face I don't recognize. + + "You're going to need a job up here," she says. "New York's expensive, are you sure that's what you want?" + +"I only want to be with you," I say, but the word job forms a black cloud over my head and panic sets in. I start to see myself wandering the streets of New York penniless and insane, begging for food in alleyways. I drag harder on my cigarette, but the fear is already rising up the back of my spine, it lodges at the base of my brain. This is New York; New York is not a cross-eyed dream you had even though it seems that way the minute you leave. This is real, steel and breathless concrete real. There is rent to be paid and food costs a fortune. My savings is nearly depleted. I have to find a job. My heart speeds up at the very mention of the word let alone the action it entails. + +"I think I have job you might like," she offers. "We need a graphic designer at the agency. You would be doing comp card layouts... You know how to use PhotoShop right?" + +"I could do that," I say thinking that I probably can't. but the job searching panic I feel means I always take the first one offered. I never stop to think whether or not I will like doing it. Having a job relieves the stress of having to find a job. There is no job as bad as needing a job. + +I start kissing her again. Her mouth becomes a warm sanctuary and I climb right in. My hands stray to her breasts, her ass, and then, cupping her face in my hands, I lay her back on the bed again and kiss my way down to her smooth cunt. + +We stay up until the early morning hours exploring all the nooks and crooks of each others bodies, making sure that we remember them, that we know them in the biblical sense. Maya falls asleep around four; I sit up smoking and thinking what a great thing this will be. I am going to stay in spite of the panic. I fall asleep with visions of perpetual happiness lodged in my brain. But in the back of my mind, a spellbinding feedback loop begins to start spinning, softly, slowly, round and round. + +When I wake up Maya has already gone to work. The note on the pillow says that she wants to meet me for lunch, but it is already past the time she wants to meet. I jump out of bed and call her. "No big deal," she says, "I got busy anyway. Let's meet in half an hour." I hang up and walk around the apartment for while, getting a feel for it. It's an absolute dump, but Maya had already told me that many times on the phone. She is merely subleasing it. The real owner is in New Orleans. Maya's friend, the permanent resident of this place, has the absolute worst taste I have ever laid eyes on. + +Maya has done her best to get rid of the atrocious ornamentation that filled the place when she moved in two months ago. The closets are choked full of the girl's knickknacks, shoes, purses-the girl had twenty-seven purses, and those are just the ones she left behind-and of course clothes. Awful punk rock memorabilia-posters, patches, buttons, record covers-is stuffed under the couch, along with the rest of the girl's abominable artwork and decorative trinkets. But even still, the furniture itself is enough to send you into fits. Chairs are held together with twist ties from last year bread bags, antiques the girl called them when Maya first looked at the place. The living room is dominated by a pink couch that was probably red, maybe even nice, in 1932. Opposite the couch, where one would have expected a television, there is instead a massive chest of drawers dominating the wall. The bedroom is so small it can hold only the bed. In the living room, against the wall and between the windows, is a table, well chewed by some mangy dog. And the dog, ah the dog... I see a picture of the dog on the refrigerator; it's the kind of Tijuana mutt that no one in their right mind would actually let in the house. The psoriatic mutt has left behind double its weight in shedding, little clumps of ratty hair and flakes of dead skin are everywhere. The worst part of the place is the Persian rugs. All three of them look like centuries worth of Persian kings and queens have danced countless nights, and maybe even played a few games of polo, on them. + +I go in and start the water for a shower. At first it's nice and hot. I get in and lather up my hair, but then just as I am going to rinse the soap from my eyes, the water turns frigid and I scream in shock. I prance to other end of the tub, trying to escape the icy claws, but the tub is too small to escape. Soap burns my eyes. I slip and grab out for something to hold onto. I accidentally pull down the shower curtain, trip on the tangled mass and fall on my ass right in the middle of the ice-cold stream of water. I fumble frantically with the knobs, turning off the cold water, but before I can get the knob for hot turned off, a scalding blast of hell hits the back of my neck. I scream again and jump out of the tub. + +I rinse my hair in the sink and put a cold towel on the back of my neck to sooth the burn. I sit down on the cold kitchen floor, naked and defeated. I light a cigarette and try to believe that the world is not marshalling all it forces against me. Eventually I get dressed and go out to meet Maya. + +Outside the air is a Moroccan dagger stabbing at the tiny slivers of my exposed flesh that my scarf fails to cover. I round the corner at the subway station and a blast of wind goes right through all my layers, as if I have on nothing at all. Maya and I have a late breakfast at the Waverly. I mention nothing about my disastrous shower. Instead I pretend to be eager to start work. Money, I am thinking, must make money. It turns out that there is nothing for me to do yet, so I go home to take a nap. + +I walk in the door wanting to do something-clean, rearrange, douse with gasoline- anything. But every time I set about to do it I become overwhelmed by the scope of what needs to be done. I give up before I lift a finger. The excess of trinkets and knickknacks drives me up the walls and makes me claw my way across the ceiling like a terrified cat. The same horror starts to carry over out into the city when I go for an evening walk. The cold just adds to the overwhelming din and confusion of the city. There is too much, everywhere there is just too much. Too many shops selling the same things, too many restaurants serving the same things, too many people screaming hollering for cabs, too many honking horns, too many yelling kids, too many roaring trains, too many buildings, to many smells wafting in the street, too much garbage, too much slushy snow, too much sound and sight and noise.... I walk in a stupor. My body is in shock; sensory overload has shut all my circuits down. I am not ready for this. This is not the summertime New York that I know where everything is a shining celebration, everything is warm and inviting. The city I thought I loved has turned to a hideous leviathan, baring it's teeth and snarling at me. + +I meet Maya later for dinner and already I feel like the whole city is against me. We go out for sushi and, as if to prove that New York has no love for me, I come home with food poisoning. Instead of making love, I spend the night retching my guts up in the toilet and talking to the mouse that lives behind it. Maya checks on me periodically to make sure my fever doesn't increase. I put on smile for her, string of vomit running down my chin. I look in the mirror for the first time in ages. My eyebrow is still missing. My hair is turning grayer. I wipe the vomit from my lips and drink from the faucet. The water hits my churning stomach and I realize I have made a mistake. I pitch forward, and stagger back to the toilet. The mouse scurries out of the way, into the wall. The mouse is my only friend, cousin to the rats in my ceiling back in Georgia. + +I spend the better part of two days alternating between lying in bed and hugging the toilet bowl like it's the son of God. + +Eventually I get better and start to try working on the composite cards. I am supposed to lay out photographs, create a design for them, and then pass them along to the printer in Brooklyn, named Lenny, who doesn't like me because he wants my job. This is all I know. I have no experience and not even the vaguest understanding of what I'm supposed to do. I know the basics of the situation, that is, I know how to use the computer program, but I don't know what to do to the cards to make them look good. I've never even seen a real composite card before. Maya gives me some tips and pointers. I look at lots of magazine ads and try to copy them, but the photography I have is subpar. Everything I do looks like a two-bit hack job, which, of course, it is. + +Maya and I are both working for a woman named April, the master of ceremonies for the Real North Modeling Agency. April is in her early forties, her hair is a red mane and she has an infectious laugh. She has managed models before for big companies I've never heard of, but Maya assures me they are a big deal. Somewhere along the way, April decided that she wanted more control, so she is starting her own agency. I meet her for the first time in a midtown steak and drinks type of place. I take one look at her and my heart sinks. She's insane, you can tell by the the way her lips move and words come out but no meaning accompanies them. I smile a lot and try to match her hair brained enthusiasm. She doesn't listen very closely to what I say. She keeps asking me what South Carolina is like even after I tell her repeatedly that I'm from Georgia. I can't decide if it's some sort of insult or if she genuinely doesn't hear me. Maybe she thinks there's no difference. Maya has the utmost respect and faith in April. She assures me that April is a good woman and that she really knows what she's doing. I really can't say because I don't have a clue what April or I are really doing. I know what Maya is doing. Maya is the director of new faces, she finds the models. She works around the clock and she isn't even getting paid. She and April exist day to day on the money they get from signing up new models. April and Maya start going out for drinks every night. I prefer to sit at home. + +They talk about renting a space to run the agency out of, but in the mean time all five hundred models have Maya's phone number. They call the house at all hours of the day. The phone rings during dinner, during sex, while we're trying to take bath, as we're walking out the door, as we're walking in the door, as I'm working on the computer, as I'm trying to fall asleep... And when we don't answer the phone they hang up and call Maya's cell phone. Maya spends so much time on the phone that I have to go out and get a cell phone just to be able to talk to her. + +Maya has left the building, metaphorically speaking. I hardly ever see her and when I do, she's on the phone the whole time or we're running from one errand to the next. We eat together and we sleep together, but beyond that she is out of the house and I'm stuck at home staring at a fuzzy flat screen populated by smiling idiots from Ohio with clichés in their eyes. She has found something in her life-direction. For Maya, something is happening, something that I'm not a part of. For the first time we start fucking. In the old days we had great sex. Sometimes nasty sometimes sweet, but we never fucked. We start fucking. Great pornstarstyle fucking. Hair pulling ass slapping heart attack fucking. It's the best sex we've ever had and it scares me to death. Afterwards I sit in the kitchen thinking how strange it is to have break-up sex before you break up. I'm an optimist though so I ignore the implications. + +After a few weeks a routine forms. Maya leaves before I wake up. I get up and meet her for breakfast at the Waverly. Then she goes back to work and I go home to work on the cards. I sit at home staring at a computer screen. I remove skin blemishes, correct photographic errors, lose weight when it's need, reshape faces, re-color eyeballs, reshape and enlarge eyes, slim butts and enlarge breasts... everything in advertising is a lie from beginning to end... Part of it makes me sick every time I sit down to work; the other part has fun chasing clever rationalizations around the feeble nether regions of my atrophied conscience. The sad part is that I actually like the people. I like the models-as people I mean. They are all good people, sure their vain shallow and think they look a lot better than they do, and sure most of them will never be Rhodes scholars and sure you could have a more interesting conversation utilizing a telephone pole and decent imagination, but it's not their fault. they work in the modeling industry its their job to be vapid and intellectually feeble. Their the sagebrush at Los Alamos, scorched without knowing why. + +Maya gets home nights around nine or ten and talks of nothing but models. Everything we do has became models, which are good, which are bad, what stage of production they are in, how well the business is doing, what more needs to be done... models, models, models. Nothing else. There are some vague and ill-conceived attempts on my part to express the growing jealousy I feel, but to no avail. I begin to be increasingly hurt by every word coming out of Maya's mouth-not one of them has the slightest acknowledgement of my existence. In the past when Maya and I had spent time together we were the center of each other's lives and now that we are finally living together we are farther apart than we have ever been. One morning decide to walk home from breakfast and on the corner of Bleeker and McDougal I pick a bundle of sagebrush and start burning it whenever Maya walks in the door. + +The job only makes it worse. Every time I sit down at the computer to work on retouching the images I am reminded of how miserable things are. I stare at the faceless models and they stare emptily back at me from the screen. I can hear them laughing at me, flaunting how much more important they are to Maya. I am descending into a hellish nightmare of self-doubt, whirling around an abysmal sense of worthlessness. And I'm losing my sense of humor. I stare at the photographs for hours trying to figure out what the hell to do with them. + +The phone rings and suddenly I have the brilliant idea to clog the line with an Internet connection. I get a reprieve from the incessant ringing. Out of habit I checking my email and find that Dean has been trying to get a hold of me for two weeks. I email him my new phone number, but make no mention about the state of things. He too is in a terrible state, almost as bad as I am. He quit his job after only a month back in LA. He fled back to DC where he has taken up again with Alexis. He claims in his email that he is only staying there because he has nowhere else to go, but we both know that isn't true. It's quite a document, the email he sends, it starts without even an introduction. "I fear normalcy in any shape. Anything that has been agreed upon by enough people to actually be called 'normal' is something I am not interested in. Primarily, because in my assessment of the world's population, you could fit the intelligent peoples of the earth on the head of the proverbial pin. You said once, while I was staying with you, that 'a genius only knows he's a genius if he's surrounded by idiots.' After my brief return to LA, I concluded that I am in fact a genius by simple default, everyone around me was a grade A moron. I will always be grateful to LA for showing me that there was place where I could surround myself with millions of examples of what I try to destroy in myself.... The niche I attempted to carve out, or should I say that the niche society attempted to carve out for me, fit about as well as an airline seat does a five hundred-pound man's ass. My parameters lie outside the curriculum of everyday thought.... I have now decided that genius must find a societal outlet for at least one thing they create -otherwise they are doomed... The good things that happen are a flood of orgasmic joy and I cling to them. I don't believe in depression. Depression is a tag put on someone who is 'positive' impotent... When it comes to having faith in a positive future I'm as limp as a seventy-year-old porn star. Positive things happen occasionally by the flick of a flint, but counting on them is time I can no longer waste. Let it all come down. Expect the worst and you'll relish the best. Expect the best and you'll wallow in pain. So I went looking for the worst. I came back here to DC to be with Alexis.... In truth I have been enjoying myself, but that feeling is fading fast... I heard from Jimmy that you were in New York so I wanted to send you this ASAP. I may need to spend a little time on your couch in the near future. The money I had is nearly gone so I can't get much farther than New York at this juncture." + +I feel woozy. I lie down to take a nap but I can't sleep. I lie there like a somnambulist, staring at the wall thinking of nothing. Maya comes home at ten and finds me in the darkness. My fever is back and my lungs are clenched up tight as a boxer's fist. I hack and cough all night long spitting chunks of brown phlegm in the sink. I can't sleep. By morning dark rings have formed under my eyes. I look and feel exhausted, but I still can't sleep. The anxiety attacks return in the midst of my illness. I am feverish, coughing, sniffling, sneezing, and contending with a racing heart that seems intent on pounding right out of my ribcage. I forget to log on to the Internet and the phone rings incessantly. I hear the neighbor's television through the walls. The mouse is scratching at the ceiling. I hack up blood into a tissue. My fever climbs to 103 degrees. Giant moving cranes roar and screech across the street. The bleat of construction vehicles in reverse is ceaseless. The phone is still ringing; the room spins in circles around my head. Maya is no where to be found; she hasn't returned my phone call. My stomach growls, I am starving, but I can't bring myself to eat. There is no food in the house except grapes anyway. I flip through afternoon talk shows watching 'fat women and the men who love them.' The phone rings again and I can hear Maya's voice on the machine, but I'm too weak to get up and answer it. + +When my cell phone rings, I assume it will be Maya. I desperately want to hear her voice, but when I answer it, it turns out to be Dean. + + "Sil! It's good to hear your voice." He sounds frantic. "I'd love to chat but I don't have the change... got a cell phone huh? Did you read my letter? I hope it's all right, I bought a train ticket for tomorrow morning... I'll be in the city around noon. Can I hang for a couple of days until I can find some cash and get out?" + +"Sure Dean. You're always welcome..." I am thinking of how to phrase the situation. The last thing in the world that I want to add to an already desperate situation is another desperate person. "Great," he says before I can get a word in edgewise, "see you tomorrow." He hangs up without giving me time to fully explain things, but I figure that's his mistake not mine. + +Morning finds me still feverish and shaky, but I get up anyway. I meet Maya at the Waverly for breakfast. I see her off to work and head uptown to meet Dean. I stagger along in a feverish nightmare. Gargoyles and fiends stalk me from shadowy buildings. They prowl the streets in mobs. Their claws ripping and tearing everything to shreds. They hide around corners; I lurch across the street. They leap from cabs and busses, claws extended, teeth bared, trying to rip me limb from limb and drag me down with them into the fiery pits of the underworld. The world moves in stop motion film, blurred out of focus and intent of tripping me up as I walk. Things that aren't there keep darting in my peripherals and I can here Mayan priests, the chiclet boy, fiends, demons, and phantoms growling and chattering in the shadows. + +Dean is sitting on a bench across from the newsstand in Grand Central. He looks haggard from lack of sleep and excessive facial hair. "Sil..." He looks up weakly. + +"Dean..." I sound like a weather beaten sixty-year-old man. "It's almost noon, you want a drink?" + +"Ya," Dean tries to smile, " that might raise my spirits." + + We head across the street to a bar. I keep my head down to avoid the devilish creatures swooping down from above. We sit down at the bar and order a couple of beers. Dean takes off his coat and slumps his head down on the bar. "Things are bad back there. She doesn't even know I'm here. Neither does my job." He raises his head when the bartender sets down the beer. "But none of that matters a wit," he sighs. "What's wrong is what's always been wrong, and what that is remains an absolute mystery to me. Did you read my letter?" + +"Of course. Always such cheery words you send." + +"Yes, well, you know how much easier it is to write than to talk. Anyway, I meant most of that stuff. I'm lost and alone. He stares at his haggard reflection in the mirror behind the bar. "Do you ever feel that the whole world has turned against you?" + +I want to say that I do, that I feel it right now, but the boy with chiclets is glaring at me, calling me a worthless gringo and kicking my leg under the counter. I lie to Dean and tell him that he's alone. I tell him that things will brighten up. I tell him that the world is getting better. The Mayan priest throws his head back and laughs hysterically. + +"No it's not," Dean shakes his head. "The world is getting worse Sil. It's never going to get any better. This whole country is certifiably insane. I have to get out of here somehow. I think maybe I'll go to France." He lights a cigarette and groans. "Oh god, what the fuck am I talking about? We both know I'm never going to France." He laughs ironically and drinks down his beer in one long gulp. + +I light a cigarette. I blow the smoke back behind me. The boy with the chiclets goes into fits from the smoke. He runs out of the bar and comes back with giant growling, snarling beast in tow. It has alligator eyes and long fangs dripping carnage. Its leathery hide is covered in warts. It snorts and shakes its head. It looks at me and licks it's lips. The boy laughs. The Mayan priest comes over and rubs its head. + +The bartender brings Dean another round of Guinness without being asked. He is listening in on the conversation. Everyone is listening in. A crowd of half-decomposed bodies lines up at the end of bar groaning and moaning and waiting for Dean and I to be put in the gallows. They drag a guillotine out of the bathroom. They are screaming for our heads. The priest whispers in our ears, when the blade falls, get up and run, get up and run, get up and run... I can hear them placing bets on how far our headless corpses will run. + +Dean turns and claps his hand on my shoulder and looks intently in my eyes. "Sil," he says, "I want out of this nightmare." + +I consider it for a moment. Get up and run, get up and run, get up and run... "I got news for you Dean, there is no way out." He turns away from me, "you can't do it, you have to walk through the nightmare to come out the other end." The priest doubles over in fits of laughter and the little boy throws his chiclets out in the crowd. The ghastly decomposing figures clamor over each other trying to get at the gum. They rip each other to shreds; shrieks and howls fill my head. I start to shake. + +Dean drinks his beer in one long gulp again. He motions to the bartender for more. "Fuck that," he says angrily, "I'm gonna find a way out. And who the hell are you to say that anyway?" He looks at me with fire glowing in his eyes. "Where do you get off telling me that? I thought you would be the one person who would understand where I was coming from?" + +I shrug my shoulders and sigh deeply. "If you want to go, you just go. It's that simple, you don't have to debate it with yourself; you don't have to get approval; you don't have to ask; you don't have to plan. You go out for the paper one day and you don't come back. You book a flight, a boat, a train and you just go... like we did last time. I just don't think it's going to help." + +Dean is silent. The room is spinning around my head. Lights streak from the motion. Faces stretch out sideways and take on hideously evil dispositions. Time speeds up. I am thrown forward. The fabric of reality is ripping and I'm falling through into some other place-some great inferno of perdition. I run to the bathroom and splash water on my face. I feel like drugs are coursing my veins, but none are. My heart is beating like a jackhammer. The priest is staring at me from the mirror. He lifts his blade to my eyebrow and pushes it against my flesh. I feel a sharp pain and bead of blood begins to form. The thin rivulet runs down my cheek like a tear. The mirror wobbles and shakes. The priest leaps forward driving the blade into my head. I'm too weak to scream. + +I come to on the floor. An old man is shaking my shoulder. He asks if I am okay. I stand up uneasily and look in the mirror again. There is a cut on the scar of my eyebrow; I must have hit my head when I fell. I thank the man, and he leaves, shaking his head. I wash off the blood and put a paper towel to my head to stop the bleeding. I open the door and step back into the bar. The priest is gone, so is the chiclet boy and all the rest of the hideous, clamoring monsters. Halfway across the room, I stop and study Dean. He is staring emptily at the mirror behind the bar. I notice for the first time Dean, as he really is, I feel all his dilemmas as if the net of synchronicity is merging us into one single entity. It occurs to me that he may be right. Perhaps he should run again. + +"Dean," I say as I sit down. "If it makes you feel any better, my life is at the bottom of a toilet bowl too. I'm losing Maya. I can't stand the thought of it, but it's already too late." I finish my beer and order a couple of shots of whiskey. + +"Shit Sil, I'm sorry. If I had known that I wouldn't have come up here and laid my shit on you." + +I glance over at him and do both shots myself. I order two more and let Dean have one this time. "That's not the point," I tell him. "It actually makes me feel a better knowing I'm not the only one screwing up my life. Besides I might be able to help you. Why don't we go down to the airport and book a flight? Why don't you go to France right now?" I raise my shot. Dean looks helplessly at me, but raises his shot to toast. "Let's go right now no more talk no more contemplation, no more words. From here on out only actions, pure honest actions," I throw back the whiskey; it burns down my throat. Dean does the same. I order more. And more. We drink faster and faster. + +"I can't just disappear to Europe on Alexis," Dean complains. "I have to at least call her." + +"No you don't," I glared at him, "come on let's go." He's losing his nerve. I grab him by the arm and start to drag him out. He consents and lets me pull him out of the bar, but in the vestibule he stops. I fear he will change his mind, but he only wants my assurances that I will explain everything to Alexis. I swear to him that I will and push him out into the street. I hail a cab. + +As we ride out to La Guardia International, I double-check the one potential flaw in my plan. A plan which I now see leading Dean high into the Himalayas where he can at long last gain the secret of the universe from some ancient Tibetan shaman, so old he remembers the time before Buddhism... "Hey, you still carrying your passport at the bottom of that bag?" + +Dean lurches drunkenly down and pulls the suitcase to his lap. After rummaging though it for a tedious eternity, he produces the tatter document and smiles. I sit back, but Dean leans over and drunkenly grabs me by the shirt. He gets right up in my face, "now Sil," he growls, "you promise to me that you will go to Alexis and explain the situation to her, tell her that I love her and I look forward to being with her again someday, but for now, I have to do this. You'll tell her all that won't you?" Tears are streaming down his face, from what I'm not quite sure, but I feel compelled to lie to him. + +"Of course I'll call her as soon as you're safely in the air." + +"No! You can't call, that won't work." He shakes me by the shirt. "You have to go to DC tonight and tell her in person, someone needs to be there so that she has a shoulder to cry on." + +The thought of Alexis crying on my shoulder sends homicidal shivers down my spine, but I agree just to shut him up. + +It takes about forty minutes to get to the airport. I shove some cash through the window like a madman and I jump out of the cab, dragging Dean behind me. I steer him straight to the Air France desk. I leave him to the side and step up the attendant. "I need a one way ticket to Paris," I say proudly, "on the next flight." + +She looks the two of us over and seems to be trying to decide whether or nor we are serious. I pull out my wallet to encourage her on. She types something in the computer and then smiles at me. "I have a few seats on the one o'clock," she says, "but its already started boarding, you'll have to hurry." I smile at her and demand that she sell me one. She seems flustered by my enthusiasm and urgency. + +"How much?" I ask as if it's unimportant. + +"One person," She hesitates and I glance over at Dean. He is slumped down sitting on the floor with his hands in his face. "It's going to be eleven-eighty with taxes and airport fees," she says. + +"Done," I smile, whip out my credit card, and hand it to her. + +"Can I see the passport of the travelling party?" She looks at me triumphantly as if she thinks I will have overlooked this detail. I grab it out of Dean's hand and shove it under her nose. While she runs the credit card I start Dean in the direction of customs. I run back to finish up the paper work. He is through customs by the time I come over with the ticket. I hurry him down the concourse, thrusting the ticket in his hand. I give him the rest of my money. It's only about two hundred dollars after I take out return cab fare for myself, but at least he'll have a few days to figure something out. He'll probably hate me in about three hours when he sobers up at thirty five thousand feet over the Atlantic, but it'll be too late by then. At the entrance to the ramp I stop and give him a hug. We hug for moment, the way straight men are not supposed to hug in an airport concourse, and then I turn and march out without looking behind me. I'm not sure if he'll go through with it or not, but either way I figure as long as I don't see then he'll always have gone in my mind. + +I go outside and sit down for a cigarette. It takes a few minutes to find a cab that won't mind my nicotine habit, but eventually an Islamic looking man motions for me to hop in. It's a spectacular feeling that sweeps over me as the cab emerges from the Lincoln tunnel. The sky seems immense and wide open, as if imported from Montana. The first rays of orange are painting the tops of the skyscrapers and the whole world seems turned upside down and shaken. Loose change clatters on the sidewalks as worldwide pants are emptied and all the hopes and dreams of eight hundred thousand years fall down on me and pick me up on their shoulders. I feel boundless, timeless and completely, utterly divinely free. I feel like I am the one on my way to Paris. + + + +### Eleven ### + + +Eleven + + + + + +-reductive and mechanical-world gains grid-microscopic speck of immensity-deep space bubbles-twinkle like gin-elaborate effigies-the bare essentials-negatively charged collisions-moving on a crowded street-a stubbornly persistent illusion-the trouble is-you see it don't you? + +The phone. Ringing. The phone is ringing. The phone is not ringing. The alarm is going off. The alarm is not going off. + +Dean is gone. + +Fumbling fingers twisting a flint of happiness. Inhale sharply. Feel the pain in charred lung tissue. Where is Dean? Where is Jimmy? Where is Maya? + +I get up and crush out the cigarette in the Persian rug, letting it burn a good size hole in the exposed padding once covered by luxurious threads. I feel better already. The steel bars masking the window do not bother me. The whine and bleat of the cranes is symphonic. Dean got out. Dean is free. I have realized it. The computer comes to life. I open Photoshop and try to work. The disks from yesterday's shoot are sitting on the table along with a note from Maya. It's a terse reductive note. Here's yesterday's discs. Dinner? Informal poetics. + +Last night I passed out before Maya got home-realization slipping through an intravenous drip-questions spring up and are dismissed. Dean got out. I throw in the discs and open up the first set of pictures. Three girls carrying shopping bags and laughing in way that real people never do, but seems to make sense to real people when they sit down and thumb through magazines. Shop. I make you want to shop. I make you want. Things. Things you can't have. + +I put in the next disc and my heart crashes. + +All the precious irreverent little bytes still wafting in the glory of Dean's departure are instantaneously expunged from my information superhighway all skittering. There is an older thing than computers, a scaly viperous thing, a part of the reptilian brain that remains in touch with the more up to date mammalian one. They communicate along the lines of the old show-the string to tin can trick. Simple and effective. The reptilian brain is slithering slow behind the scenes making sure that the worst is being avoided, even as the mammalian brain seems intent on seeking out the most serosanguineous reality tunnel around. + +A face is staring at me. A face swelling significantly out of an ocean of monotonous faces. Disc two contains a face I know. An Athens face. A face that has no business being in this part of my life, a separate face. Judah is staring at me. Judah with his rooftops and roughhewn tables and Cuban dreams is here in New York on my computer. There is no way that this disc could contain a picture of Judah. It is impossible for him to have been at yesterday's modeling shoot without Maya mentioning it. + +Unless. + +Unless the bitten apple on the front of the disc is not just a brand symbol. + +My heart gets the three-fingered salute and after running a hasty hard disc scan, restarts with minimal data loss. + +Except. + +The priest is back and has a battered suitcase with ancient Pan Am and Trans World emblems plastered on it. He leans over my shoulder to get the scoop on this latest development and launches into a hysterical, uncontrollable, post-orgasmic fit of laughter. + +You are so fucked. + +Spring Street. Coat buttoned tight, scarf catching involuntary nose drip, feet skating on icy concrete and the old Jewish tailors huddle on the crooked, half-spiral steps whispering Yiddish, smoking cigarettes and decoding the cabalistic name of god which they plan to evoke in swirl of incense, candlelight and chanting in some universe just three doors down-unmarked entrance in an alley. Waiting for the F train to Broadway, a fat junkie woman with a stroller shivers and rolls her eyes at me. The priest marches up and down the platform, hunched slightly, like Napoleon contemplating strategic moves, hands behind his back, twirling a menacing blade, long, curved and enlarged at the front. The better for splitting my dear. + +Roaring sounds, squeals, heart attack brakes, suicide doors open. Two street kids huddle in the corner of the car arguing over Delotid stolen from an uptown pharmacy where the old neighborhood druggist is losing his sight and easy prey to opportunists-forgets that two boys came in and only one is in front of him now asking for drugs for the the hiv, what is the hiv? The boy laughs. They dash out the door and into the station, all the way to Brooklyn and then back, but only one Delotid. The priest looks at me and smiles, gesturing to the boys with the engorged tip of the scythe. Necessity is mom, where is dad? + +Door opens at 125th, in come the dealers and out go the boys. These are dangerous types don't you know. Black hearts. Black skin. Even the priest is silent. I stare them down. One nods. "buds?" I smile no. TV has these images. It told you all you needed to know. Just another show. My eyes are bleary from staring at the screen its all too much and there must be someone on this train. Stand up. Walk to the next car. The priest holds the door as I stumble through. + +"You talk too much" + +"Stupid old fuck" + +"Get your piles out" + +"This is my car you coggy old fucker" + +Two bums half heartedly pushing each other, bustling in the back and a prim woman in a business suit on her way to the Bronx, the north Bronx, out of the city and sure he keeps telling her we'll move soon, just as soon as I put together this next deal, you know Charlie says he can move this stuff and she spends her nights chain smoking at the window thinking of home in Baltimore and the last time she had an orgasm. A thin old man with newspaper folded under his arm uncrosses his legs and motion to me to sit down. + +"Going uptown?" + +"Yes" + +"Lots to do uptown?" + +"I think maybe. Yes." + +"Be careful. These aren't safe neighborhoods you know. Make sure you know where your friends are." + +"Thank you." + +The terror of wheels flogging metal rails. Nothing personal. Stop. Lurch. Complete stop. The priest motions for me to get off. I follow him reluctantly. There are some things that are better left alone, but you never do. You can't see? Get on a plane. Get out while you can. Echoing voices. A little Puerto Rican boy tap dances on a tattered sheet of cardboard. The Mayan priest pitches him a nickel. Gee thanks mister...wrong fucking century asshole. I can't help but laugh. This is so fucking stupid but I can't stop. These are bad neighborhoods you know. Outside again, the projects, enormous brick edifices erected on minimal budgets with zero inspiration. We thought of that you know the priest interjects, zero, the Mayans, the nothing thing. Try that one on. + +Some things are too horrifying to look directly at, some things scorch the eye before the brain can react and force you to turn away. These are the horrors, the pains, the absolute zero of emotional tolerance. Zero. Nothing. The absence of all. The void. The space between. Zero. These are the things I want-to see the things I can't bear to see. I see Judah. I see his curly eyes glazed with alcohol and Cuba. An entire fucking island and millions of people tiny little dreams in his eyes. But not people just words, Spain, Neruda, sugarcane, wood tables, old men playing jazz, pounding out beats on drawers pulled from bedroom armoires. Words. Zero. Judah has never been to Cuba. Zero. Never been to Spain. Zero. Been to the bottom of bottle dreams and talking gibberish, meaning astray, ashtray, lost his way. Just making it up as he goes. Did we ever sit on the roof? Did I make that up? Did we climb that precarious fire escape rusted ladder to the top, did my feet almost slip on the way down; was the building two doors down really burnt out, charred, roof sagging like leprechaun dreams under the weight of mythical bridges? Did Maya come to Athens that spring and were we walking by the patio of the Flicker Bar where Judah was having drinks with some friends? Did I call out to him and ask him to come over and meet Maya? Did we chat briefly, Judah too drunk to see? Did Maya casually mention that he was cute? Did I know then what I know now? + +Yes my memory constructs all that as having happened and yet. And here, standing at the entrance to a building I haven't entered in over a year, my mind is wallpapered with the image. Stacked on infinite repeat and it won't go away. It is a needle raked over an already festering wound. A porcupine administering morphine to an amputee still feeling the absent limb. The endolithic articulation of zero. + +This won't hurt a bit. + +Nuclear buzzer shatters fragmented reflection before I remember the door is open. The door never locks. Here we are not lying until you are inside. The antechamber where Judah's dull amplified voice is echoing off tile mosaics and sets the Jamaican landlord's crazed dreadlocked lakdsjflkasdjf into a frenzy, it throws its body against the downstairs door, snarling and growling undog noises. The hair on the back of my neck curls and retreats back into the follicle. Down periscope. Dive. I streak up the stairs lest the nearly mythical predator somehow loose itself from the bounds that hold it to this mortal coil. Behind me the priest scrapes his heart carving blade against the orange chipped paint of the door to further antagonize the beast. + +Judah is already opening the door as I bound the last stair. His face wears a look of feigned surprise trying to hide the fact that he has been waiting for this moment ever since. I will not give, nothing is wrong. + +"Sil! Holy shit. What are you doing here?" + +"Judah! I came to see my old friend Judah." I advance on him, arms extended and we embrace, clapping each other's backs hard. Too hard. + +"Come in come in. I was just doing some recording upstairs. I thought maybe you were John coming home from work and I was pissed off thinking he had forgotten his key again...." + +"Ah, recording. Music? + +"Ya drums" + +"Tribal drums? African drums? That sort of thing?" + +"Uh... not exactly.... So why are you in New York?" + +"I came up to be with Maya." + +"That's the girl you were dating?" + +"Uh huh." I follow him into the kitchen and he offers me a seat at the kitchen table. I glance around and surmise that little has changed since my last visit. The one talented member of this living arrangement has added a few new painting to the living room wall. Strange stained glass looking paintings that are catching the last glow of the sun in such a deliberate way that I realize he must have purposefully painted them and then hung them at exactly that spot on the far wall of the kitchen so that they would catch the light exactly as they are right now. + +"Yes Judah. The girl I have always been dating. As long as you have known me. Longer than you have known me." + +"I thought you guys broke up." He picks up a bowl of roasted peanuts and I can't help but see the inescapable southern upbringing coursing through his veins. He peels back the soft shell and pops one arrogantly in his mouth. + +"Is that why you fucked her?" + +He pretends like it comes out of nowhere, but we both know it didn't. We both know it's the only reason I'm here. + +"Excuse me?" + +"Don't try to bullshit me Judah. It's unbecoming. At least be quick on your feet... I was drunk... I'm sorry... it just happened... you know how it is... these are the phrases of carefully constructed cinematic excuses that you have to choose from. Come on man... 'excuse me'? That's the best you can do? You and your Neruda and your Cuba and all your fucking bullshit and 'excuse me'? That's the fucking best you can fucking do?" + +"Calm down Sil. You want a beer?" + +"No I don't want a fucking beer you asshole. I want a story. And it better be a really fucking good story." I can feel my eyes darting about the kitchen, dishes in the sink, purple cupboard door open, dishrags on counter, trash overflowing bottles, refrigerator covered, magnets and pictures, disarrayed pots on stove, framed Charles Bukoski holding beer on wall opposite oven, bread atop fridge, two bananas and a mango ripening in a wire basket hanging from the bottom shelf above the window that looks out onto a brick wall three feet away, and the priest hands me the blade. "Actually, yes, I would like a beer," I run my finger along the edge of the blade, a tiny rivulet of blood appears accompanied by a dull far off ache in my fingertip. I wonder absently if such a thing could permanently alter the identification of my fingerprints. + +Judah retrieves two Coronas from the fridge, along with a lime, all of which he carries awkwardly over to the table, setting one beer in from of me and another in front of the empty chair he presumes he will sit in. He turns around and rummages through a drawer, presumably looking for a knife, but I chop the lime in half with a loud thwacking sound that causes him to stand bolt upright and look at me wide eyed. I smile, wipe the blade clean and put a sliver of lime in his bottle and then one in mine. I twirl the blade on the tip of my finger. + +"Sorry. Bought it in Chinatown. This is the first chance I've had to use it." + +"That's quite a knife..." + +"Ya it is isn't it? So about you fucking Maya...?" + +"Look Sil. Shit. I'm sorry. I thought you guys broke up. I didn't mean to. I was drunk. She called me...fuck." His face has a look of sorrow on it but I'm not buying. Regret is cheap-from here to Hanoi. "Sil... to be honest... when she called, I didn't know who she was talking about...you know she said this is Maya, a friend of Sil's... I had forgotten all about you. It didn't dawn on me until the next day." + +His voice sends me reeling. + +"I mean. Shit, I'm sorry man, but I didn't know we were that good of friends. I mean its been what-like two years?" + +"So...uh... essentially our friendship was all in my head?" + +Judah shells another peanut, pops the soft fruit in his mouth and chews slowly and deliberately. "Well, uh, don't you have to see someone, you know... hang out with them in order the be friends with them?" + +I see Dean in Paris pissing in an alleyway three sheets to the wind. I see Jimmy in Athens bent over the falcon engine tinkering with the carburetor. I see Scratch in Miami ogling a divorcee. I see Ulric behind the drum kit that holds the world together beating out the rhythm of now. + +"No. No you don't. That would be an acquaintance, which it seems you and I are. Acquaintances. It seems that friendship is too advanced of a concept to apply here.... Or at least that's how you would like to see it...." + +"What do you mean?" + +"I can see the guilt in your eyes Judah. It haunts you. You have been waiting for me. You want forgiveness from me..." + +"I want forgiveness...?" He laughs mock wickedness. + +"Yes. You want nothing more... but you're a drunk. You're nothing but a drunk with delusions. You sit around here recording music no one will ever hear, thinking that you're some kind of forgotten genius, another overlooked Van Gogh... and believe me we all want that for you, but the sad truth is that you're not. You're a drunk. No more no less." + +Judah watching the Zapruder films dreaming of having the inside track on something that the rest of us have missed. Judah is a foreshortened life. He is not Neruda, he is not Cuba, he is a man who reads poetry by candlelight because he knows it is how you are supposed to read poetry, he dreams of Cuba because it is where he cannot go. Cuba is not a place at all to Judah; it's a concept. It's all empty talk, a tumbleweed caught in the grill of a 53 mercury, not even that, in the grill of late 70's pinto, liable to blow the fuck up the first time something rams him in the ass. + +I can see him buried to the hilt in her warm depths with that stupid drunken Neruda grin on his face. Perhaps we could go up to the roof. Perhaps he could walk in circles while I sit on the brick ledge that separates his building from the next. Perhaps all of Manhattan is behind me and Judah will pace in circles to excuse poor behavior. Perhaps he will tell a story of an out of blue phone call, a meeting for drinks with that slithering slug April. Perhaps he will model-waving his bottle of corona as he talks of drinks-martinis extra dirty three olives and then the stumbling subway ride home. Perhaps its was one of those nights when I waited by the phone for Maya to call. Perhaps it was the night Scratch blew through. Perhaps the priest will laugh-taunting me. Perhaps he will kneel behind Judah, crouch on all fours. Perhaps the punch will come for Judah, perhaps my good natured honesty will have disarmed him. Perhaps the punch is centered square in the solar plexus and is followed by the full weight of my body. Perhaps there is an indeterminable second in which Judah will teeter and try to throw his foot back to regain his balance, but a heating vent will be in the way. He will spin off balance, stumble and disappear over the edge. I will run to the edge of the building and look down. His body will be contorted in a distorted, inhuman shape, a pool of blood already forming under his head. I will glance around to see if anyone might possibly have seen us. I will feel a rather extravagant calm. I should be panicking, but I won't. I'll feel relieved, beautiful even. I'll gather up the bottles I touched, glance around to see if there are any other items which might lead one to believe that there was second person present. I'll smooth over my footprints in the rooftop gravel. I'll climb down the ladder and onto the fire escape, glancing down at Judah's body and taking care to wipe away my fingerprints. The pool of maroon below will run toward the fence, dripping out the spaces between the white pickets. I'll climb back in the window and methodically ransack his room, looking for my phone number or Maya's, but taking care not to mess things up. I'll gather up my things, carry the bottles downstairs and place them in the neighbors trashcan. I'll walk out back and examine the body. I'll put my hand over his mouth, but before I can feel a breath I'll notice the bits of mashed skull and what I think are brains lying several feet away-clearly there will be no breath. This man is dead. His eyes are still open, they wear a slightly shocked expression, but there is something else there, a Mona Lisa smile, as if laughing at some inner joke. I'll want to stomp that smile right off his face. I'll want to feel the satisfying crunch of bone under my foot, I'll want to squish his brains, to smear them about the yard. Instead I'll rise and walk out the front door. A roommate will find him. Judah is a known alcoholic. He's also the only smoker in the house. He frequently goes up of the roof to drink and smoke. It will be a no brainer, an open and shut accidental death. His blood alcohol level will tell the story. An intern from the Bronx observer will be dispatched to the scene, he will take a picture of the legs protruding from beneath the yellow tarp. The headline will read: Youth killed in Drunken Mishap. No question will ever be asked because this story is perfectly believable. My story is far fetched, irrational, and difficult to believe. Who would do such a monstrous thing? As I leave I will notice some boys playing basketball at the court across the street. I will sink my hands deep in my pockets, smile up to the sky, take a resonant breath and walk on. People are murdered everyday in the Bronx. Drunk people falling off rooftops are not a cause for alarm. I wish I could say that I would be haunted by images of Judah. I wish that I could say I would feel guilty, but I know I will not. Judah is right, our friendship was all in my mind. And he, bless his nearly departed soul, already got out. His death will be a mere a formality to mark his passing. + +The wheels of the BDFQ begin the screech halfway down the stairs, I jog the rest of way and dart through the door at last minute, sliding into a seat facing an old man whose face is half obscured by a down-turned fedora. I jerk my sleeve out of the door and sit down opposite him. He glances up at me clears his throat and mumbles to no one in particular-these things happen you know. The woman seated next to him raises her eyebrows at me. I smile and shrug. Who is to know the idiosyncrasies of other people? + + + +The bar is really more of a lounge, but a lounge in the worst New York hipster sense of the word. The street front consists of tacky two story glass windows designed to make sure that those on the outside feel left out and sense their lacking chic, which turns up the volume of self-satisfied panache playing on the black turtleneck turntables that spin giddily from table to bar to toilet and back again. A woman at one of the window tables raises a thinly plucked eyebrow at me as her flighty white fingers twirl through blond curls; her white skin is tightly stretched as if approaching escape velocity, narrowly eeking out of the blackhole of her attire. Her scorn makes me smile. I turn on my loudest non-participatory amplifiers, light a fresh cigarette and open the door with trembling hands. Inside is a dimly lit underwater blue emanating from strands of twinkling sapphire Christmas lights balanced and slightly thinned by candles flickering on small tables. A hostess looks at me expectantly but I can't speak. She scowls at my cigarette and asks if she can help me. "Meeting people," I mumble, eyes ignoring her existence, scanning desperately for a familiar face. + +The back wall is lined with a series of enormous crescent shaped booths, and at the center of one, surrounded by a horde of male models, I spy Maya and April, giggling in each others ears. Maya catches my eye and waves me over. She tries to introduce me to the men-boys really- surrounding her, but I don't bother to acknowledge their flaccid hands. A couple I recognize having digitally liberated their complexions from acne scarred childhoods. One of them gets up and pulls over a chair so that I can sit next to Maya. Maya and April are talking emptily of big plans. Big buildings with big offices, big name photographers shooting on account for big name clients, big money going around the world, Frankfurt to Paris, Milan to Cape Town,, New York and back. I stare at April's teeth as she talks. Her pretension chokes the air with gasping hoarse laughter. Black boutique blouse with matching runway toss-off pants she dress like she spends too much time dressing. Her forty year old teeth dripping pinot grigio, held in place by a Miami-tanned hide hanging from cheek bones that all the retouching in the world wouldn't subtract a year from. Must have been boom years-gone bust to land her here. Gone bust in the warm Florida a sun, tarnished the red-gold mane and she had to split. Why I'm not sure, but I suspect it would have something to do with these big puppy-love dreams ringing her head like penny dreadfuls. April's unwarranted arrogance lectures like a cockstrong teenager sermonizing on the ways of the world and what you need to do to succeed. One of the models is wearing a t-shirt that reads: no day but today. And April's pinot grigio is half empty, her vulture eyes already search for a carrion waiter to flutter eyes at secure another free glass because she hasn't the money to buy a drink. She wants to be rich so badly it makes her smell-wouldn't know Rothschild from gutter port and can't buy either. + +Maya's lips purse around a thought, but then her head leans back and shakes-disengage turn the page, working hard for some distant reward in white picket tomorrowland all the while convinced: no day but today. She wants me to share in the dream conversation. I'd sooner chew my leg off-sauté my ambivalence. I am in no hurry. She gives up on me for bit but like a flea-riddled canine just can't let it go. + +"What did you do today Sil?" Maya leans in, stabbing at some form of intimacy, but it feels forced to me. I am not fun. I am the thing that must be dealt with at this table, in this bar, in this city. + +"I realized that you fucked Judah behind my back," I smile and take a sip of scotch. + +It would be a relief to see some sort of reaction, to see the color drain from her face, to see a look of horror in her eyes, but there is nothing. A sarcastic curl lifts her top lip off her teeth and she lowers her eyes at me, "this is neither the time nor the place." + +"The proper form calls for indignant protest at such an outrageous accusation and then the time and place bit." I cross my legs and feel an unhealthy calm descend upon me. I light a cigarette and lean back to blow smoke in April's face. We lock eyes and scornful little daggers spit out of her pupils. My heart is racing in spite of the pills, but everything is beautifully clean and calm. The air is sterile, too full of ozone, it sucks up my cigarette smoke and filters it faster than I can drag more into my starved lungs. The room smells like the science fiction future-barren and callous. It feels perfect. The first dawn after the nuclear holocaust. + +Maya turns her back on me and whispers something to April. I wish that I had a Moroccan dagger or scythe with which to carve this place, these people, carve their bodies into apocalyptic sculptures, monuments to the futility of arrogance. To leave them alive to carry on their shallow existence in these blanched white bodies, but with deep heineous scars the wounds left by the day the words returned to act upon them. I survey the room and realize that the words aren't coming back justice is down the hall blindfolded, gagged and bound, being fucked in the ass by a lonely old man and loving every minute of it while the play masks laugh and cry at the sight of it all. + +I feel righteous and holy. + +I want to vomit on myself. + +I want Mexico City. + +Waking to static on the radio, fat man singing in the shower next door, paper thin walls. The pain is chipped and peeling, lingering in cobweb corners. Mattress with no sheets, stained by countless faceless visitors. Get out of bed and shave with cold water and dull razor, cuts bleed. Outside cadaver weather, smoky haze obscures dawn, stumble down Calle de la Plaza. Your head hurts. Machine gun guards seal off banks. Tomorrow the man in the pinstripe suit will walk in shooting and not stop for days. + +Both agents wearing cheap black suits and stained white shirts, rings of sweat visible when they lift the cups to their mouths. Gristle mouths, swollen lips, spit flies as they talk. + + "Now you understand..." + + "You understand nothing about our country..." + + "You can't possibly hope to..." + + "We are trying to use the utmost discretion..." + + Not hearing a word, looking off the balcony at the shanty town below. Constructed on an old landfill site. The men are still talking. One hand washes the other. A little girl in tattered t-shirt drags a stick in circles about the dirt driveway. + + In America she is millions of miles away. Jerking camera visions, clipped images of sidewalks, men in ragged army coats begging for change. The agents ask for papers, identification, passport still stuffed in the mattress. Leaving. They follow at a safe distance. + + "Understand that the matter may well come to trial señor..." + + Streets spinning with cars, a dizzying sound. Street urchin selling chiclets, you wanna good time mister? eh? no? + + Last time, board room door all closed, sealed up lies. The agents are still trailing behind. Pulse racing-open the door to the hotel. Three whores in gaudy lipstick wait in the lobby. Pass. Lie down. Feverish dreams. Radioman selling something in Spanish, bursts of static mixed with dream. Malaria epidemic in the Quarter two years ago. Same room, different hotel. Same agents still here. Standing in the corner. One crouches down, smoking at the foot of the bed. In America she is a million miles away. + + "Sir why do make this hard on yourself...?" + + "You must let us help you..." They smile gold teeth. + +Nausea without warning. + +There is always warning. It has all been said. She just laughs and pretends and smiles and tries so hard for a Breakfast at Tiffany's cleanliness. The kind of posturing with no accounting for severed limbs, atrocities at all, arm so carefree with its gentle flicks of ash, kissing cigarettes for soft cinedramatic inhales, all-knowing and never acknowledging the prehensile origins. She is smugly young. She has always been smugly young. We are all smugly young. But not you. You have been so old for so long that delusion and illusion and artifice are transparent in the tips of lotioned fingers, Lubridermed against chapping winds. She falls apart with every drag. + +I skip the subway. Overground. Stepping lightly on grates, slender metal held up by the wisps of subway air. Wind blows through the morgues and into the streets, lashing ice, snow, tongues, voices-everything is beautiful everything if fine. This is the time. This is the place. + +But. + +Nevermind. + +I want that hotel Bob Dylan lived in. I want to walk in the room and kick his teeth in. Bob Dylan hasn't got shit on me. Mutherfucker couldn't sing worth a damn. All my favorite singers couldn't sing. Kick his fucking teeth in. Stomp his head to mush. Fuck Bob Dylan. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Fuck Bob Dylan. It's in way he sings the power and resonance-horseshit. Its all horseshit. Posturing. Affecting. Jeff Mangum-let Jeff Mangum kick Bob Dylan's teeth in. Jeff is in his prime. He is now. Bob is over and done. Fork stuck. Roasted. I want that hotel. I want those teeth. I want them to rattle in a pouch that I carry on my belt, tied with leather straps and I pull them out in bars and tell the story of How I Kicked in Bob Dylan's Teeth. Jeff Mangum is in an aeroplane over the sea and he is on his way to kick Bob Dylan's teeth in. + +I want my money back. I would like to return the following items for a full refund: One set of teeth (lost rattling quality), one tongue (no longer working, cat got), two year subscription to Tomorowland (gift), one heavily used Persian rug (symbol kind of shaky from the get go), one organ donor card (no one buying), one nation (under god), one lamppost (working, caustic light on a street begging for a Bogart darkness-huddled, but cheerfully bitter), and one young girl (no longer young). + +I can forgive everything. + +Room 319. No Bob Dylan. No top hat. No Jack Kerouac (kick his teeth in too for good measure). No guitar. But it a beautiful room and it should be since the money was April's. I want to go shopping. I want a new suit. Designer shoes. Kiehl's shaving cream. Seven bottle of scotch. Greater self understanding. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward Jeff Mangum. + +Judah said: We spent all the time talking about you. + +I said: Why. + +Judah said: Because she loves you. + +I said: Nothing. + +She is crying when I call. I can't cry. I want to cry. I want to feel. It's awkward. I should not have called. I should have gone home. I should give Bob his teeth back before he tries to gum that steak. This is how I hurt. + + + + + +Maya and I meet for dinner at a Brazilian restaurant in the village. We both quickly get quite drunk on fruity cocktails. I don't want to tell her I am leaving until later. I don't want to spoil the evening that way. Maya is apologetic. I feel apocalyptic and out of control. I am funny. I am attentive. She is exuberantly telling me all about the agency for the five thousandth time, what they had done today and what they still needed to do tomorrow and in the future. I am enthralled with her teeth. I want to dream about her teeth. Her baby teeth falling out. Her adult teeth coming in. I want to dream the history of her teeth. The Rum is warm and friendly and she is very happy and we are forgiving each other for something or other, it isn't important. I interrupt her to tell her about Dean. She can't believe he actually just got on a plane and left. The whole thing is starting to sound surreal to me too, a dream I had-Dean's teeth flying to France, rotting on cheap wine and the chewing the rind because he is a polite traveler. But when I try to charge dinner on the credit card, the reality of his departure comes roaring home. I am sitting on almost three thousand dollars that I'm giving to April tomorrow. Maya pays the bill. As we walk home through Chinatown, I tell her that I have to leave. I feel like an absolute fool. I try to explain that I can't be in New York right now and that I can't do the job and that I don't know why-but above all it has nothing to do with her and certainly nothing to do with Judah or even Bob Dylan. + +Her eyes fill with tears, but she keeps saying that she wants me to do what I need to do. She's lying. She wants me to stay. I can see it in her eyes, she desperately wants me to stay. Late at night I feel her get out of bed. I hear the broken chair squeak and the flick of lighter. She is fumbling absently with the twist tie; her nails pick at it making a sound like a harp. + +In the morning there is a note. I want to spend more time with you, will you meet me for lunch? I gather up my things, drag them down stairs and pile them back in the Maxima. Upstairs I sit at the kitchen table and smoke a cigarette. I crush it out on the Persian rug. + + +### Twelve ### + + + + +Twelve + + + + + + + +I wake up just before dawn with tears streaming down my face. I can't remember the dream, but I know it was horrible. All I retain is a vague sense of foreboding. I get up for a glass of water and notice that Dean is still asleep on the couch. I go back in my room and lie in bed for a while. It dawns on me that I am probably not at the bottom yet-I am still falling. I start thinking about Los Angeles, where I began. I see those I love stumbling in self assured darkness. At the time I thought it was sad, but now I see beauty in it. For once I'm not thinking of books or words of wisdom; I undergo no introspection, analyze nothing... I see only the people. They are standing in the streets rummaging for yesterday's newspapers in a kaleidoscope of garbage. I see Dean's cigarette droop between his lips and burn a hole in his favorite shirt. I see his sister doubled over in laughter and shaking her head at me. I hear the beat of Dean's headphones over the drone of freeway miles. I see the mattress lying in the middle of the sidewalk when I needed a place to sleep. I see my high school sweetheart sitting down for dinner with her family. I see my wife's tears stain the pillow of our bed. I wrap my arm around Maya in the corner booth of the Harbor house café-no food for days. I feel the warmth of the sun and squint at the glare from the ocean. I swerve to avoid a tumbling boulder only to hit anther skid off the road coming to rest in front of a sign: CAUTION FALLING ROCK. Everything is just as it should be and I know it will never look the same again. I am gone from there and even if I return, something remains forever gone. I stumble back to bed, wiping the tears from my eyes. I fall to my knees staring up at the ceiling fan rewinding... + +The beginning that started with endings. The end of the century-1999-a crash-landing year skittered off the runway and exploded in the grandstands, a year that chased itself atop railroad cars like the Pinkertons after the James Gang in old western films. Los Angeles was a thirty-one year long slow motion crash. Three recollections rise out of the nauseating sautéed cacophony. They are the sound of Dean typing, the sound of disjointed and constantly arguing voices-from the television and from Sean and Katherine-and the feeling of vomit that was so sudden I nearly choked on it. + +After my wife and I split up, I moved in with Dean and his sister. The three of us got along as if I were part of the family. It's the only living situation I've encountered where I actually spent time with my roommates. We were tight, we did everything together, we survived Sean and Katherine together and later we moved to Athens together. The trouble started when the lease on our apartment expired. We were desperate to find somewhere to live. Why we chose Sean and Katherine's place, I still don't know. In hindsight, I suspect it had more to do with Dean than anyone. Dean had a strange little thing for Katherine, I never understood it, she wasn't his type. Katherine was beautiful, face like an angel, but she was a full figured girl with auburn hair; Dean liked waifs with blond hair... Katherine had ambition and a real job; Dean liked strippers and waitresses... Katherine was homely; Dean liked class and glamour.... But, as the man said, there's no accounting for taste. + +Sean was two years younger than me and about two inches shorter with the barrel-chest build of a swimmer. He swam every morning and worked as lifeguard all afternoon. He wore his hair closely shorn so it would stay out of his eyes in the pool. He perpetually reeked of chlorine. He and I lived together right after high school, in a trailer park of all things. We were very close back then, but eventually I got married and moved on with my life-you can't live in a trailer forever. Katherine entered his life shortly after I left and he moved out of the trailer park too. They lived together in an enormous old house that they shared with three other girls. It was the only house in Costa Mesa that predated 1950. I always wanted to live in it after I got back from my first trip to Athens because it reminded me of the South-though it didn't have a porch, just a cement stoop. Sean and I saw each other from time to time, but I rarely made any effort to talk. Sean represented a part of my life that I wanted to avoid, but when their roommates moved out and the three bedrooms were suddenly available we jumped on it. The plan was to stay a while until something better could be had, better turned out to be three thousand miles away. By the time Dean, his sister, and I moved in, I hardly knew Sean at all. By then I was more fond of Katherine, but I only got close to her one night and by then it was too late. + +Most of all what sticks out was the sound of everything-the typing-the television-the constant fighting-Los Angeles humming in the background. The mad clicking of Dean's flying fingers was always present, ticking off the seconds in feverish bursts. Dean never stopped typing, it was a furious noise, he would pound the keys and nod his head to the headphones. He drowned out the world to escape it. He drowned out his own fingers. He never realized the force with which he pounded the keys... dispatching mad telegraphs, electrostatic love notes spitting out like lizard tongues... flung on wires to Maryland where another pair of fingers responded. The thing itself, so-called love, was flying back and forth over the wires -maddening. Dean had just met Alexis on the Internet, they spent hours on instant messenger-love in ones and zeros. + +To tell the truth, I remember the television more than the people. Throughout all of the madness that ensued, the television reigned-we never tuned it off. Dean's sister and I stationed ourselves like zombies before the one god and it's eerie blue aura. The outside world was pandemonium-wars in Europe, trade deals in Mexico, sex scandals in Washington... what filtered in on the TV was reflected back all around us, cold, insensitive, innocuous suburban delight... detachment... Douglas Copeland's nightmares. It wasn't just us. The perpetual warm blue glow of television emanated from the windows of all our neighbors' vinyl sided endura-homes-guaranteed to last a lifetime or your money back! The television was a great luminous third eye... I could never decide if we were watching it, or if it was watching us. It presided over the world with the indifference of God. Every house glowed blue light, the streets bathed in its iridescence, cobalt sidewalks and sapphire lawns under midnight purple skies-everything glowed blue. Blue noise hummed softly and in the background, blue people stumbled about their lives. Turquoise silhouettes danced in kitchen windows and cerulean shadows lurked in open garages. The blue was grating, irritating, got under your skin like the flesh eating virus, boils sprung up bursting to reveal slick teal puss oozing from the open sores. In the background, faint at first, but then growing in decibels, was the maddening chant of the newsman and the Maytag man and all the talking heads of television disembodied and floating in the sky, singing choruses.... + +The sound of Los Angeles was deafening. Waves of music, horns, engines, electricity, spinning warbles of neon lights echoing the asphalt dreams of sanity. The whole city was a deafening roar. Vibrations spun off the turn of espresso handles, the pull of yogurt machines, the spinning of laundry mats, the ring of cash registers, the click-clack of skateboard wheels on the sidewalk, the roar of surf, the thump of landing gear, the clang of trash cans in the alley, the rattle of the homeless people's shopping carts, the chopping of the Chinese cook's knife atop the trash can, chunks of chicken fat accumulating on the floor; all of it whirled in a hurricane melee reverberating throughout the Los Angeles basin. The smoggy air offered no resistance to the pealing clamor. It carried it about, still as a tomb, withholding comment on the meaning of it all. Los Angeles is cancer-the insidious beat of death. + +Dean's sister and I were sitting on the couch, television blaring to drown out the sounds of Sean and Katherine fighting. They never stopped arguing. Dean's sister shifted uncomfortably in her seat and I looked over at her. We both sighed and then laughed. We were thinking of the old house, of the old times, we didn't say a word, we didn't have to, it was in our eyes. Asshole! Bitch! Motherfucker! Stupid bitch! Dick! -These were the punctuated words we could hear above the television, but by then we were used to it. Dean, as I said, kept to himself; he was in the other room, headphones cranked to ten, blissfully going about the business of falling in love. His sister and I were the ones that had to see the door swing open and Sean ducking with his arms clasped over his head. The shoe hit the wall above the couch and then Katherine's voice roared in anger. On the television Chandler was broken up over Joey moving out and that mousy guy that's always 'the other guy' in movies, was moving in. Homoerotic jokes stuck like flies to vellum walls. + +The shoe hit the wall above us and tumbled down between us. I looked at it; I looked over at Sean. He was standing in the dining room crying; he looked like a tortured animal pleading for it's life. I looked at the television-it was trying to sell me deodorant. Then Katherine emerged from the same direction as the shoe, also crying and looking like a tortured animal begging for it's life. Sean fell to his knees and grabbed her legs as she walked by him. They looked like the cover of the movie Vacation where Chevy Chase is standing proud and defiant while Beverly De'Anglo clings to his knees. I wanted to laugh great peals of bitter laughter, laughter sinking into the floor, into the walls, up to the roof. The place reeked of suppressed bitter laughter, mine, Dean's, his sister's, the studio audience, the children of the war in Kosovo. I looked at Dean's sister to see if she saw the humor in it. Her eyes met mine and they twinkled as she took a drag off her cigarette. I smiled and she started hacking and coughing smoke. A bit of spit flew out of her mouth and she tried to stop it, to regain some composure, but it was too late. The madness was upon us, it all started with the shoe. + +Katherine's sobs quieted to weeping; Sean still had his arms around her legs. She was trying to kneel down, but he wouldn't let go so she just lay down on the floor weeping on her arm. He crawled over her body and knelt by her head. He tried to put his arms around her, to hold her, but she was indifferent. Her head rested apathetic against his knees, her eyes had a thousand-yard stare. Mascara ran down her cheeks leaving a black tail of tears. I felt helpless. "Are you guys okay," Dean's sister ventured half hearted. Sean nodded. Katherine just moaned a low growling sound that vibrated the wood floor and sounded utterly inhuman. Sean looked over at me for help, but I pretended to be engrossed in the television. I stole sideways glances to make sure that they weren't going to hurt each other. Sean stood up and Katherine's head dropped listlessly to the floor. They flip-flopped emotionally and now she clutched at his legs. Sean had a defiance to his posture that looked wholly artificial and it occurred to me that he ought to have remained on the ground. He ought to be begging, not to Katherine, but begging God to give him his humility back. + +Sean was cold, calculated psychology, distilled out of textbooks, until it fermented in his soul and all the vital organs of his body were filled with poisonous effluvium. The chasm between the idealized and the realized versions of his life built up tension inside him. Katherine had become the way he released it. Sean was a flood of meaningless gibberish that he had internalized and now it bounced endlessly about like knives thrown in a vacuum. His soul was soaked with formaldehyde, preserving him eternally, choking out all feeling. He had lost all traces of humor and ran from his life madly chasing after an invisible spirit that he thought would somehow enlighten him, give his life the meaning, the purpose, the joy that it lacked. A problem that could be solved, that's all Sean wanted from life, something to which he could point and say "See it is all better now.' He was convinced he had all the answers for everyone around him, but he had none for himself. He had no use for whole people, just the ragged, torn edges of the pages-preferably dripping fresh blood, new wounds to cauterize and in the process open old ones. He poked at Katherine's soft emotional scar tissue, inducing hemorrhages to leech the life out. Like the Marquis he stood bleeding, asking-was good for you? His idea of life was crumbs; the confetti strew about after the parade passes. Christ all the way. Quick, get us a tree, somebody make two boards... hurry before he loses the courage and does it himself. Christ was on a suicide trip; he'd have gone with or without the Romans... how else do you end a story like that? I wanted to punch Sean. I wanted to make his nose explode and rain blood over all of us. + +The news came on... Peace talks continued in Kosovo today with both parties saying that progress was made, but meanwhile fighting continues in the countryside where sporadic violence and snipers continue to take their toll on the morale and hope of the people who live here.... + +And then there was silence, an editing snafu at the station. The television went blank. Katherine was still weeping. I heard the air rushing out of my lungs with an asthmatic hiss. Sean was breathing hard. Dean's sister was holding her breath. In the other room the tapping stopped and Dean came teetering through the kitchen. He stopped in the doorframe, slightly hunched, holding a beer and squinting his eyes.... "What?" + +There was peace between the news of Kosovo, Katherine's mournful sobbing, and Dean returning from the bathroom, pausing again like a half-cocked gun, squinting, observing and withdrawing. The sound of fingers tapping reached us again, the television cut to commercial and the cartoon man wanted me to buy his paper towels.... + + + +Two weeks later the war was over, rich people's financial interests were secured and Katherine and Sean had patched things up. Friends' reruns had come and gone with dinner and Katherine was cuddled up on Sean's lap. She was serene and beautiful that night because she fucked Dean in the closet of her office that afternoon. Sean was happy because he thought that he was the one making Katherine happy. He was so happy he was trying to fuck her in the chair right in front of us. They started making out when the television said the war was over. Dean, his sister and I tried to ignore the dry fucking session going on next to us, but secretly we were all for it. It was a nice change from the constant fighting. Katherine had his pants down, but was sitting in his lap to conceal the fact. When the television got quiet we could hear sound of lips mashing together and little grunts and groans escaping from them. Then Sean's little half-chubbed dick poked out from under Katherine's mini skirt like a miniature cobra. Dean and I both noticed it at the same time and we started laughing hysterically. Sean reached down and tried to tuck it back under Katherine's skirt, but the thing had a mind of its own. Dean, his sister and I figured it best to vacate for a while, so we headed to the bar. Sean and Katherine went at with increasing intensity. + +Down the street at the bar, the talking head from CNN was telling us that the people were safe and the world was somehow better, but I knew nothing had changed because the fingers were the thing that held it all together and they kept at it every night. I thought of the presidents and tyrants of the world celebrating, just like they did when the war started... The man behind the counter wanted to know what I wanted and the girl in the booth behind us wanted to know why I hadn't noticed her yet-everything was spiraling out of control. + +War in Kosovo. War in our streets. War in our houses. War in our heads. Nothing will ever come of it-save death. And the Mexican urchin selling Chiclets for the dead says no good, no bueno, your pictures sanitized, worth no words. Wouldn't give you ten words, worthless gringo words don't mean shit. No good no bueno, not worth the blood they're written in. The blood of all peoples not yours, not your peoples in your death camps, your slave labor factories, your assembly line gang rapes.... + +Gotta keep that in house, screams the commander in chief. Yes must remain forever sealed in baby pissshitguts. No, that's not true. No comment. No need for comment, I will not dignify... somebody cut to shots of smart bombs... Couldn't get fifty words for those now gringo-over exposure-sanitized-nobody buying. Same old stinking shit. No Good. No Bueno. Gringo go home in a thousand languages, in a million words. Why don't you crawl back in your cave get your tail so far between your legs it goes half way up your ass? Words can not hurt me... + +But have you heard the words? Watch out for the bloody words, sharp words that hang in the air like knives and when uttered returned to slit the throat of their speaker. If every word you have spoken returned to act upon yourself would you survive the experience? Situation getting sticky, humid like vaporous blood hanging in the air... The urchin stands in the middle of the street preaching...In the beginning was the word and the word was made flesh by a cacophonous blast out of heaven's pearly cum-stained ass creating the father, the son, and the holy spigot ... spigot drains all gringo excrement away from gringos and into our countries, our cities, our homes... Follow me to the holy spigot and we'll show them the bidet of death, constructed for gringos, to flush out gringos, to show them all what you do behind closed doors. Can't close them all -we have our technicians as well and they're getting to be better than yours. We got the money rolling in. + + The little street urchin with the chiclets was at the bar now, he couldn't be shut up, hawking wares for death, little powders, potions, and peppers hanging from his arms, but the CNNhead said all was well, justice was served. The television was close circuit captioned for the hearing impaired. The little boy was adamant -no captions only pictures for the blind. The rustling of paper behind boardroom walls sends him into fits.... I gotta picture for you... I go on vacation in your country, go to hear senators speak, but all doors are closed, all sealed. So I gotta fiber optic and fed it in from the roof, show all the senator's mad with sexual lust, blood thirsty, clamoring for war and stealing souls and bodies and driving them off wherever they see fit. There are thousands of them now, a chorus of little brown boys singing, chanting like Benetine Monks.... The boys are chanting to the beat of drums... I got pictures for you gringo... pictures you hear? The commander in chief of the NATO forces in Europe was fucking a small refugee boy in the ass, the boy cried for his mother. The general laughed, 'your mother's down the hall boy. She's busy with the president of Germany right now, but maybe later you'd like to lick his cum off her dead face...?' And you say ban those words. Tear them right out. Snip snip. Can't say that-war a snuff film for the rich. Ya wanna spoil all their fun...? + +A tape rolls and we hear behind the boardroom doors: "We gotta step up the bombing chief, the public's losing innarest in us," screams the staff officer running in circles jerking off and slapping his ass until it turns a bright purple. And with all seriousness, General Jesse Helms pauses to reflect: "I remember a time when life was good. No one got in our way. Why in Europe, under Patton, I musta raped twenty thirty little boys and a handful of nuns too..." He smiles, lost in memory... "But God hath given us these trying times." "Yes it is a bit hard to get cunt these days isn't it," mumbles the chief of state as he strokes his wife's cock...." Yes dear start a war. Get me some cute refugee boys. I so love snapping their necks when I'm coming," she growls affectionately. "That's it gentlemen were going to war," the president stands and ejaculates on a map of the world, "Kosovo it is," he says as his thick oatmeal consistency sperm all but covers the former republic of Yugoslavia. + + You like? You like, no? Too bad. You can't have those words, too strong. I get power, you give me power, I steal power from you, too expensive to buy it. I get power and you get pictures and maybe I tell you how to cure it? Eh? Eh? Eh? + +The man behind the counter turned off the TV and we left. By the time we got back to the house the coffee table was on its side, the lamp was broken, glass all over the floor, an enormous dent in the plaster wall, but the television remained undisturbed. We sat down on the couch and I flipped idly through the channels. Sean and Katherine's screaming voice float through the bedroom walls. Words were disembodied and floated in the air looking for a throat to slit. I heard Katherine screaming... + +-What do you want from me? I try so fucking hard to love you. You say you don't want me, and then you want me back, and then you tell me to go again.... WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT? + + -I want you... I want... I don't fucking know what I want. Why are you always harping on what I want? Why can't we just live and exist and be... like Sil and Dean and every other fucking person on this planet...why can't we just be happy? Why do we have to have these issues...why do we have to have these things to work on? What are these things? What the fuck is going on around here? When did this start? + + -What do you mean? What are you talk... + + -WHAT DO YOU MEAN 'WHAT DO I MEAN?' You know what I mean, this! All of this... look at us... + + -Why are you bringing Dean and Sil into this? Why do you have to live up to some manly ideal that you think they embody? I got news for you, they don't embody shit! The two of them would be living in a goddamn dumpster if we hadn't let them move in... + + -Why does this have to be about my friends? Why is it a problem? I asked you if it was alright for them to move in here and now you say it's not?" + + -It has nothing to do with them.... It's you I'm talking about. You say we used to be happy, we used to not be like this, we used to 'just live' as you put it. + + Police said the suspect was dressed in a business suit and may be armed/ Do you have time to cook a meal every night in the midst of balancing/ So this guy comes up to me/ guaranteed to last a lifetime/ + + -Katherine, what the fuck are you talking about? + + -This indecision... this fucking shit... + + -My indecision? My fucking indecision? And who, pray tell, FUCKED SOMEBODY ELSE? Who is indecisive? It's not me. I know exactly what I want. I want to be with you, but you won't let me just be. You question my every fucking move, want to know my every thought, every feeling. Don't you ever not have a feeling? Isn't it ever just a blank page of white with little blue lines? Little fucking blue lines and not a word? Not a fucking thought in sight? Do you ever get that? Or is it just constant fucking emotional input from the far fucking reaches of the earth all pouring in your precious little heart? Your heart that occasionally seems to feel the need for some other guy's DICK?! + +-Yes, Sean, I made a FUCKING MISTAKE, and I said I'm sorry. I'm as clueless as you are.... You know sometimes, in the midst of this insanity, I think that I see and feel you loving me, but you won't let me in... + +-What are you talking about? + +-You won't let yourself be happy and love me. I can't figure out if it's because you're scared or because you just don't have a fucking clue. Do you even care about me? Or am I just some sort of ornament that you have been pursuing over the last four fucking years because it happened to interest you and now... + +-Fuck you. + +-Fuck me? No FUCK YOU! I don't know if I was some whim, something you wanted to try on in the dressing room and then when you thought it was out of style, you could just hang it back up on the rack... I'm sorry, I want to be with someone who isn't fucking clueless about how they feel about me. You can't decide if you want me or not. You said fifteen minutes ago that you forget about sex sometimes. How is that supposed to make me feel? + +-I just meant that I have such a good time talking to you, that... oh what the fuck, what the fuck do you know about love? + +-Jesus Christ! Okay, I don't know anything about anything and neither do you, but that doesn't mean anything, right? If nothing you say means anything, how am I supposed to feel when you say you love me? IT DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING! + + -No that's not what I said. Everything means something, it may not make any difference, but goddamn it all means something. Who you fuck, who you eat dinner with, what time you get up, what kind of fucking bombs they drop on everyone, the jails, the murders, it all fucking means something. All of this, everything that is happening, it all means something. Maybe none of it matters, but it all means something goddamn it! I just don't know what it is. I just need some time to figure out what the hell I am, what I am doing, what this life is, we're all trying to figure it out. I don't fucking know what I want, okay? I can't give you some pat little answer that's going to explain exactly how I feel. Some days I want to be with you and some days you drive me up the fucking walls.... + + Researchers have concluded that including a glass of wine with your regular meal may actually increase your life span/But Jim, we can't just leave them here/We're tiny we're toony we're all a little loony/the initial results indicate HIV/We will be appealing your case/Mr. president a girl from Arkansas is on line two/Did you or did you not ?/The White House denies/Tide gets your colors looking brighter/Guaranteed to last a life time/I'd like to buy a vowel/What is-the Serengeti? + +-Oh great! Fucking great, now I drive you up the walls! + + -Why the fuck do you focus in on the negative? See, that's what I'm talking about. I say that some days I want to be with you and some days I don't and why do we have to get into the days I don't? Because little fucking alarms go off in your brain... ehew I drive him up the fucking walls? This must be explained. There is a reason for this. This is what needs to be fixed.... Has it ever occurred to you that I must just want to be alone some days? Has it ever occurred to you that I can love you without liking you every now and then? + + -You're such an asshole Sean. + + -Fuck you! I said I love you. You dumb fucking slut.... + + -You don't know what love is! You're a little child... + + -You're a cold bitch! Don't you have any feeling in that dried hard little cuntheart of yours!? + + -Do not call me a cunt! + + -I didn't call you a cunt! I said you have a fucking hard little fucking CUNT HEART! + + -Fuck you! You wouldn't know what to do with a cunt anyway! + +There was the sound of skin striking skin-a sickly slapping, stinging, slicing, horribly thin sound. The unmistakable sound of hatred and self-doubt bring itself into the world like an airborne virus. + + -I'm sorry... I didn't mean to hit you... + + -Then how the fuck did you HIT ME? How can you not mean to hit someone? There is no such thing as ACCIDENTALLY hitting someone, that doesn't happen nooneaccidentallyhits anyone youmeanttohitmeyou FUCKING PRICK! + +There was the sound of crashing porcelain and electricity popping and the light streaming under the door disappeared. + + -Oh that's FUCKING great! You stupid bitch! + +There was a dull thud followed by a low moan and Dean and I looked at each other. By the time we turned on the hall light and opened the door they were wrestling on the floor. Katherine jumped up to run for the bathroom knocking down Dean and forcing me to jump on the bed to get out of her way. Sean went out after her. Before we could stop him, Sean grabbed Katherine's arm, dragged her kicking and screaming across the floor and threw her out the front door. She was wearing only a thin nightgown. It was February and raining and they were in hysterics. Tears streamed down Sean's face. He managed a thin, strained smile as he collapsed against the front door. Dean and I just stood there unsure what to do. + + "She really fucked some guy this time," he muttered. I tried not to move or show any signs that might have given it away, obviously Katherine had left out a few details. + + "The BITCH FUCKED SOME OTHER GUY," He yelled at the door but there was no answer. "You hear me you dumb bitch? I hope you fucking freeze to death." His voice trailed off into mumbles. "I hope his cock keeps you warm out there!" He screamed, pounding his fist against the door. A male voice from somewhere outside yelled "shut up," and Sean cracked the door and yelled, "fuck off," at the unknown man. "Jesus Christ," he muttered to himself. + +He smiled stupidly at us and Dean went over and helped him to his feet. "Fuck man, what am I doing?" He straightened his shirt with one hand and used the other to steady himself against the wall. He came over and sat down on the couch. "What did you do?" he asked looking at me. "Did you do this? I mean with your wife, you loved her, and she left you, and now look at you, you're fine, what did you do?" He asked. His face held an expression of absolute wonder. "How did you fill this hole that I feel growing in me? Do you just harden yourself? She thinks I'm already hardened because I pushed her out the door, but that wasn't the hard part of me that was the raw nerve endings.... That was me trying to find love or fight love or something." He stared up at the ceiling and I followed his gaze, the fan was spinning slowly, indifferently, like a tape recorder rewinding. "That was my love for her that pushed her out the door." He said. + +"Uh, no it wasn't," Dean interjected. + +"Oh, but it was," Sean smiled depravedly. Dean just shook his head. "The cold, hard, + +part of me," Sean went on, "is the part that will go over there in a couple of hours and talk to her. The hard part of me is the part that will make love to her later." He stopped and scratched his head "You know, the horrible thing about losing love isn't that it makes you hard, it's that you realize or you start to realize that love can be lost...." He wore the serene face of a philosopher dispensing wisdom. + +"That's what is tearing me up right now. There is no sacredness to love like they want you to believe, and once you realize that love can be lost, once you know that this can happen, it's doomed to happen again. I will never again be able to look at someone and see a relationship that doesn't end. I know now that for every beginning there is an ending already written." He shook his head in disgust and then started sobbing in despair again. "Oh god," he cried, "how the fuck do you get out of this? How do you find hope again? And even if you do, what do you do when it's dashed yet again?" + +He got up and went to the door; he opened it and looked outside. Then he shut it again and started laughing; it was distorted sickly laugh. He no longer looked human; he was a caricature of human. He laughed like the power drunk maniac. "How many times can you do this? Is there a limitation to the number of times you can have your heart broken?" The serene face of the philosopher returned and he retreated into the abstract world where he felt comfortable. "Is it like one of those Lithium batteries that never recharges all the way? It starts looping back until there is nothing and then right when you think you have it, oh I underst...WHAM! And then it's gone, you're gone, the thing is gone." He smiled a thin, taunt, smile. "She really hates me now doesn't she?" He looked up at Dean and I. Neither of us spoke. Dean shrugged, but I was rooted to the spot with horror. Horror at the thought that this caricature exists in all of us, that none of us would stand up to the death camp marches of our personal lives. I felt weak and woozy. + +"And the horrible thing." He went on, "is that somewhere deep down I wanted her to fuck that guy, whoever he is. It doesn't matter. God I want a whole gang of giant-cocked porn stars to gang fuck her through eternity if that's what it takes for me to feel something. I'm not feeling anything anymore; the only time I feel anything is when I hurt her. Then I feel hate. I feel her hating me, but when she's not hating me I don't feel anything. I don't feel loved." + +He was on the floor weeping with his hands over his face. I tried to move him, but he punched wildly, lashing out at nothing, landing a solid blow on my jaw. Out of anger, I kicked him in the ribs, but he made no protest. I grabbed him by the hair, slammed his head into the door and threw him to the side. I went outside and slammed the door. My head felt light. I became very dizzy and I leaned over the planter and threw up in it. It was still pouring rain. I slumped down in the vomit and mud and lay there for an eternity sobbing quietly for myself, for Sean, for Katherine, for the whole world. I began to shiver so I stood up. I stepped out from under the stoop and lifted my head up, letting the water wash the vomit and mud from my face. I began shaking uncontrollably and then as the shaking subsided, an eerie sense of calm descended upon me. + +I set off to look for Katherine. She didn't go far. She was next door sitting on the neighbor's couch; the neighbors were in bathrobes, obviously woken up by the screaming. The woman sitting next to Katherine held her, rubbed her back and rocked her gently back and forth on the sofa. Katherine looked like a scared child. She was shaking like a leaf. The man came at me with hate in his eyes, but I quickly explained my innocence. Katherine looked up and told him not to hurt me. She put her head down between her knees. "What's wrong with him Sil?" She asked. "Why is he doing this? I am good to him aren't I?" I didn't say anything and she looked up at me with glistening red eyes, pleading for some kind of answer. I just nodded my head. "I shouldn't be putting up with this," she went on. "This is bullshit, I can't keep doing this.... What the fuck is wrong with him? What's wrong with you, with all of you?" Her eyes filled with hatred and burned through me. Black tears ran down her face. "There is this thing in me that can't let go, can't admit that I'm wrong about him," she sniffled and wiped her cheeks. "And all of you, you're so damn sure that your little feelings and your little emotions have to be so goddamn right. You think that you can just pull them down like shades over the whole fucking world." She was yelling now, glaring up at me with wild eyes. "Every emotion, every thought, every fucking little thing can be broken down and analyzed and dismissed with some cynical diatribe that you think is so witty and fucking funny... goddamn all of you!" She jumped off the couch and lunged towards me. Her arms hit me square in the chest and knocked me down. She landed on top of me and taking the wind out of me. I heaved for breath and tried to get out from under her, but she went limp and I didn't have the breath to move her. She lay on top of me and great sobs wracked her body. Her tears burned on my neck. Her sobbing frame trembled and shook. After a few seconds I caught my breath and I put my arms around her. She nestled her head into my neck. + +Her voice dropped to a hoarse whisper, "I'm sorry I didn't mean to hurt you." She raised her head and looked in my eyes. I put my hand on her head and stroked her hair. "He makes me sick," she said. "I make me sick for letting myself be involved with him. I can do better than this, if this is love... this... this... fucking..." She climbed up off me and sat back on her ankles. "This is not love... I don't know what I'm doing. Do I have to be the strong one here? Do I have to be the one to walk away when I'm the one being hurt? Why is it always me?" She wiped her eyes again. I thought about my wife and I realized Catherine was right, women are always the ones who have to cross the final threshold. Sean didn't want her, but he kept pulling her back. His ego couldn't let go. He went right back in like a rat pulling the lever in the control studies that Philip Morris wakes up sweating to in the middle of the night. + +I pulled Catherine to her feet and put my arms around her. We held each other for what seemed like a long time. I heard someone clear their throat and, realizing that two other people were in the room, I apologizing profusely and thanked them while I guided Catherine out the door. We sat down on the stoop of our house and stared out at the rain. We both had our legs tucked up under our chins and Katherine rocked back and forth slowly while she talked. "I had sex with Dean." Her voice was flat and even as if ordering food from a drive thru window. I told her I already knew. She nodded and a painful smile passed her lips. "And I don't know why I did," she stared at the ground. "I just wanted to feel close to someone," tears welled up in her eyes. "It doesn't mean anything, right?" + +I told her it didn't and she leaned her head on my shoulder. "And I know Sean has fucked around," she went on. "I know he fucked around in Europe, but he won't admit it. That's the thing that makes me so fucking mad is he won't admit it, and why? Why? Because if he admitted that then he'd have to face up to the fact that he's as weak as I am. Now he can call me a slut and make himself out to be better. That's all I am to him, this thing against which he can measure himself, this thing..." She stopped for a moment. The rain pelted against the concrete driveway, chipping away on a geologic time scale. The sound roared in protest. + +"Do you know what this is doing to me? I'm losing my mind..." She looked me in the eyes. "I'm not going to go nuts over him. I knew I should have run away right after we made love for the first time... I should have just run, because now I'm here and he's throwing me out the door in my fucking nightgown..." I put my arms around her and she started to cry again. Her tears were warm on my arm. She thanked me for listening to her. I told her to wait for minute while I went inside to make sure Sean was under control. + +He and Dean were smoking a cigarette on the couch. Dean's sister was in the chair dispensing wisdom that sounded like it would have solved all of Sean's problems, but Sean, being a man can't hear a word that she's saying, just like women can't hear a word that men are saying. The whole so-called battle of the sexes could be stopped if only there were an interpreter around that could translate. Solve the riddle. Translate the emotion and feeling into logic and predictable precision, and then back out into the chaotic no-mans-land of feeling again. Some guru, some pygmy, some monk, some alien that can add it all up and give us some kind of answer. But the aliens aren't coming. + +Sean glared at me and said, "Get the fuck out of my house." I shrugged and asked Dean and his sister if they were coming. The three of us left. We gave Katherine a ride to her friend's house where she could stay for the night. She and Dean stood beside his car in the pouring rain and kissed lightly like friends; he wiped a tear from her eye and got back in the car. The three of us rented a room for the week at local motel. Dean's sister fell asleep the minute she laid down. Dean and I went and got coffee to steel us against the insanity. I remember leaning against Dean's car gulping lukewarm coffee, the rain had stopped abruptly and dry winds were already whipping the clouds away. It was a Santa Ana wind. Dean threw his cup into the vacant lot and it blew in little circles, round and round in eddies of wind-miniature tornadoes. + +At the end of the week we left Los Angeles for Athens. We stopped the second night in Arkansas where I had a very strange dream, I dreamed in third person, I was being forced to watch. I dreamed that I saw an aborted fetus hanging out of Katherine. It was covered in shiny afterbirth with the umbilical cord still attached; the cord was just dangling out of her. I saw Sean with scissors, trying to cut it while Katherine screamed tried to stop him. A doctor took the fetus and threw it in the incinerator; the furnace flared and was silent as a slaughterhouse. Then they were in a windowless room. Katherine lay naked on a table, spread eagle as Sean circled her holding a blunt, tubular object. It was black and plugged into the wall. Words passed like water though a screen. Sean stood next to her with the cattle prod, walking slowly in circles around Katherine. A symphony started up. Marching bands... fingers tapping... tapping... violins... rhythm of kettledrums... and his arm raised up. He was floating, watching, choking on gasoline-napalm sores that seared off his tongue. Flames licked up his body. The air was hot and thick like the worst humidity, his scorching flesh sizzled. A little red light came on to signal that the cattle prod was fully charged. In front of him was Katherine, beautiful, serene. Her arms were restrained above her head. His face twisted into a sick smile. The symphony reached a feverish pitch with the clash of horns and strings and drums and Sean looked into Katherine's eyes and watched her pupils dilate. And it fell; his arm fell, the cattle prod fell, her body went rigid and she shot up off the table as if suddenly turned into a stiff board. He kept his eyes locked on her as she collapsed back onto the table. I saw something flash through them and I felt a tremor in my gut. Then big uncontrollable sobs wracked Sean's entire body and he fell on his knees and curled up in little ball on the floor. He lay like that for a while, until the sobs worked themselves out. A lone lunatic flute solo floated over the scene. Katherine got up and began to undress him. She started by unbuttoning his shirt. When she undid his belt she reached down and rather gently held his rigid cock as she eased his pants down over it. She stood embracing him tightly with her arms around his neck, and she pulled herself up and then slid down on his cock. Sean fucked her but she couldn't feel it. Her cunt was a burnt, charred hole. She couldn't feel anything and then the strings returned and the crescendo built again.... She laid him on the table and spread his legs, restraining them and then his arms. She stroked his cock hard and teased him by biting his nipples. All at once her eyes went black and she thrust the cattle prod into his balls... Sean was blown up off the table by ten thousand volts of electricity. He didn't even feel his cum splash on his face. He landed back on the table, his scream a violin, an inhuman screeching wail. + +* * * * + +I go into the kitchen to make myself some coffee. Dean is gone. The house feels empty. There is a rainbow in the kitchen. I notice disinterestedly that the house is a mess, that my knees hurt and that I am in unquestionable poor physical condition. In the shower I marvel that I once thought that that was the bottom, but that was someone else's bottom, that was Katherine's bottom. I dry off and walk back into the kitchen. I dig around for food. Got to get behind the mule every morning and plow... + + + +### Thirteen ### + + + + + +Thirteen + + There's a cure in sight-soul unease-suspension wires-wink and smile-windblown newspapers-advert scrapes-sardines in a kipper snack tin-abandoned train station-wind rips dirt off the road-sagebrush where it belongs-the songs of Solomon-tumbling along the melody lines-voice echoing-everyone walks with unshakable self-confidence-pretend to be unafraid-This isn't you-This isn't me-what do you talk about when you talk about love- + +I regret leaving the minute I get out of the Holland tunnel. But I knew I would. I regret coming. But I knew I would. I regret that I regret. But I know that I will. + +I stop for gas on the Jersey turnpike and almost turn around. I can't decide what would make me a bigger fool, trying to correct the mistake or trying to live with it-or drinking heavily and ignoring the question altogether? + +I drive the interstate straight through to Athens. I get to the cottage in the early hours of morning. I go to bed and don't get out of it for a week. + +I try to maintain things with Maya; I call her all the time. I smoke cigarettes and stare at the ceiling for days on end. I cry. I punch the concrete wall. I agonize over the poetry of it all. I am the apologist. I write a long letter to April explaining how bad I feel about stealing her money, but half way through I notice that its more about how much I enjoy having her money. I throw the letter in the trash. + +I am positive impotent. + +After a few weeks, Maya stops returning my calls. + +Maya is gone. + +The Mayan priest and his demonic escorts hold court daily in my bedroom. He has taught me how to master pain. He tells me that mastering pain puts you next to the gods. The snarling creature is always outside the door. I am scared to leave the house. I go out for food and nothing else. Waves of nausea overwhelm me whenever I think of Maya. The priest says this will pass. He tells me that everything will pass. But I knew that it would. + +It's the middle of the afternoon and I haven't gotten out of bed. Torturous visions of Maya making love to other people are crackling through my head like static on an AM radio. Jimmy knocks at the door and I reluctantly let him in. I haven't seen anyone since I got back. I have been hiding out. I tell him the whole story and make him swear to never repeat it. He's losing his job, and overall seems to be about as depressed as I am. He insists that we go out and get a drink. I reluctantly accompany him to Five and Ten. After a couple shots of whisky and a few beers, the priest is nothing but an incoherent mumble and the repulsive visions of Maya taper off. + +I drink more. I don't stop. Eventually Jimmy heads home and I walk downtown. I end up passing out in the alley behind the Flicker Bar. Morning finds me covered in garbage and smelling like a dead fish. I catch the bus home to take a shower. The boy is selling chiclets in the living room; the priest is siting on the couch. Giant eels circle around his feet. The priest has constructed a giant labyrinth around the couch, extending out past the coffee table. Ten foot long serpentine beasts circle through the labyrinth, gnashing their teeth and hissing at my feet. I quit the house for Five and Ten. Several nights in a row I wake up in the midst of plastic garbage bags. I regret the intense happiness I feel. Alternately I feel like a sponge wrung dry, discarded like yesterdays newspapers. I love the pain. + +Weeks turn to a month. Just like they always do. I feel nothing. But. Yes. One day the eels get loose and in an effort to destroy them I burn everything I own in the fire ring. The billowing black smoke draws Jimmy over. He stops short in the driveway and stands back, watching me mutter and curse as I drag everything out of the house and into the fire. I burn my books, my furniture, my heirlooms, my artwork, and most of my clothes. Jimmy helps me get the mattress in the fire and then he heads off to buy me some alcohol. We sit around the rest of the afternoon drinking and smashing the bottles against the living room wall. Then we start in on the plates, then the glasses, then light bulbs, then clay pots. We wrap towels around our hands and punch out the windows. There is pile of glass several inches deep and several feet wide, extending out from the wall. Dean would have loved it. + +At the end of the night, just before he leaves, Jimmy mentions that he is concerned about my mental health. I assure him that I share his concern. He offers me the use of a cabin that his family owns. He says it's situated on a hill overlooking the surrounding area, he says you can see downtown glowing at night. + +I vacate the cottage the next morning. Jimmy gives me a map and a key. I am going deeper into retreat. I stop at the liquor store and stock up. I buy fifteen bottles of scotch, a case of canned beans, five dozen eggs, six pounds of bacon, and ten cartoons of cigarettes. I ask for polar bear fat, but the pimple-faced clerk says they don't have any. + + The cabin is quiet and peaceful; there is no stereo, no phone, no mail, no running water. It's a single room with a sliding glass door in the back. There is a kerosene stove, an icebox, and a pump handled sink against one wall. To the side there is a dilapidated old couch and a tiny forty-watt lamp. Jimmy brings out a table and few chairs. Everything is coated with in a layer of dust and smells of mildew. In the cupboard above the sink I find a jar of moldy, fermented fruit and a key to the outhouse down the road. I sit around drinking, smoking and wallowing in self-effacing pity. I have a nervous tick in my leg that makes it bounce incessantly, but the priest and his host of fiendish consorts can no longer find me. I am not a pretty sight, but at least no one is watching. The cabin is on an outcropping overlooking the hills. The leaves still cling to the trees, the hills are a riot of color. Everything is hanging on to some slender thread of life, shuddering at thought of deep winter chill. Everything except for one charred, lightening struck, tree about two hundred yards down the hill. Its craggy blackened remains disrupt the otherwise pastoral scene. The tree is my best friend. Everyday I sit on the back porch, drinking scotch and staring out vacantly at the tree. Trying to make it mean something. A burnt charred tree. Lightening, careless matches, smokey the bear ads... But. It looks like lightening. As hot as the core of the sun. I can do this forever. + +Jimmy and Ulric come out to visit me and bring provisions. I give them wrinkled twenties stained with manicured fingerprints and Lubriderm. + +Today Ulric tells me that his girlfriend has left him. He is broken up over it, but he says he is too busy to deal with it. + +I'm happy for him. + +"Ya I can't really say I miss her. I have more time, I don't have to call anyone when I show turns into a late night party or something you know." + +"Oh I know." I pass him the bottle and we drink in silence. We drink like prospectors, like miners, like forty-niners. We drink like breaded men. We drink the way whisky was meant to be drunk. We are so ridiculously male. + +"Next time you come will you bring me some dip? Or chewing tobacco? Or something really manly-Drum? + +Is that all you want for Christmas?" + +"Shit Christmas?" + +"day after tomorrow" + +"Jimmy, damnit. Why haven't you mentioned this?" + +Jimmy shrugs. "You're not religious." + +"You're right. Well then yes bring me some dip, some snuff, some chaw, some Drum and another case of whiskey and I'll give you double what its worth and we'll consider that a holiday exchange." + +"Sounds good." Ulric laughs. + +"We thought maybe we'd come out for new years..." Jimmy looks at me as if waiting for me to okay this idea. + +"Its your house man. I'm just stealing it." + +They make plans. I hear Chloe's name mentioned. But I keep thinking about a book I read years ago, Things Fall Apart, by somebody or other. In it thing fall apart. But I had expected that when I bought it. + + + + + +A new year is dawning. We barbecue chicken and talk about old times. I enjoy the nostalgic sense of everything ending; it's a step up over sardonic heartache and confusion. Over dinner, Ulric tells us he is moving to Florida to do some recording. His band is under contract to produce their second album by the end of next summer. Jimmy is moving to Boston to go to law school, and out of nowhere, Chloe announces she's going to Europe in March. I tell them all about Dean and Paris. I tell Chloe to look him up. It is the end of the gang. I am to be the sole straggler. + +It is quite a feast they bring out, chicken, greens, and corn on the cob, a real southern meal. In the center of the table is an enormous pile of well-gnawed bones with little chunks of cartilage and caked nuggets of barbecue sauce clinging to ends. Jimmy and Chloe are polishing off the last two pieces of chicken. Ulric is gnawing feverishly at a nearly naked corncob. I'm sucking on the ice from my empty glass. You wouldn't have even known it was New Year's, except for the box of illegal fireworks that Ulric brought back from a trip to South Carolina. Jimmy leans back in his chair and works his gums over with a toothpick. Chloe takes some plates and walks back inside the house. I watch her dress swirl about her knees until she disappears through the sliding glass door. + +They all want to cheer me up and they all have their own little patented methods for it. Ulric favors humor, Jimmy the big picture, and Chloe just tries to listen. "Well, I know it does no good to say it," Jimmy shrugs, "but I have to anyway... there's plenty more of them out there." Jimmy has said very little else since I returned. He seems to believe that I need a little mantra to occupy my mind. + + Ulric leans over and lightly smacks him in the back of the head. "Oh brilliant man, that really helps...." Ulric takes a big gulp of his drink and set his glass down hard with a clattering noise. "Oh Jesus I'm sorry, I forgot about the glass table," he smiles sheepishly. "I think the alcohol is a little ahead of the food right now." + +It's a beautiful Georgia evening, unseasonably warm, probably in the fifties. We all have on light jackets, but no one's cold. We're on the back deck, overlooking the descending hills which, after three or four miles, surrender to the urban sprawl of Athens. With the binoculars Jimmy brought out you can see the two tall buildings of Athens poking out of the treetops. + + Jimmy is clearing the scattered remnants of chicken off the table; Ulric and I smoke. Ulric stands up and goes over to the box of fireworks. He rummages around, talking to me in the process. "You can come down to Florida with me when I move, stay a while if you like. I got some friends I could introduce you to... maybe set something up for you. I could get you work that's for sure. Keep you busy." He smiles at me and pulls out an enormous three-foot long skyrocket. + +I shrug and say maybe. Chloe comes back outside and sits down next to me. She puts her hand on my knee. It feels heavy and foreign, but I stop bouncing my leg. + + Ulric tosses the rocket back in the box, picks up some sparklers and sits back down at the table. He lights one of sparklers and twirls it around making phosphorescent figure 8's in the air. His expression is serene. Chloe goes inside to help Jimmy. Shortly after, Jimmy comes outside again and sits down. There is a smear of lipstick on his cheek and Ulric throws a napkin at his face. Jimmy blushes and wipes it off. The sparkler fizzles out and Ulric sets the burnt stick on the table. He coughs and mutters something to himself. He fumbles in his pocket for another smoke. + + Chloe brings out a fresh round of drinks. "I baked a pie," she says, "it'll be warm in a few minutes." She pulls her chair over and sits down between Jimmy and I. + + "What I'd really like to know...." Ulric leans back in his chair and takes a long drag off his cigarette before continuing. "What I'd really like to know," he begins again, "is what happens to all this, well, call it 'love,' that I still have trapped in my heart? I can't express it, can't get it out, but eventually it goes away... where does it go?" + +"Wilhelm Reich said it builds up tension and eventually leads to cancer." I chuckle and reach over the table and lift a cigarette out of Ulric's pack. + + "That's great Sil, that's exactly what I wanted to hear." Ulric coughs as he exhales + +"Well if it makes you feel any better Ulric, none of his colleagues believed him." I say. "He died disgraced and in seclusion." I light my cigarette and then a sparkler. + + "Of cancer?" Ulric smiles at me. + + "I don't know." + + "But you know what I mean, I mean, after a little while its not the person you cry for feel bad about, it's the fact that you don't really care about the person that bothers you- right? I mean getting over someone is easy, getting over the fact that you got over them is the hard part" + +No one says anything. Chloe straightens her dress over her crossed legs. I hand her the sparkler. She waves it about like a paintbrush, filling the air with glittering designs. Jimmy narrows his brows and eyes us all like a scolding mother. He sets the binoculars on the table and I snag them. I watch Ulric's mouth through the binoculars as he smokes, his lips are chapped and they crack revealing enormous fissures when he smiles. "What the hell are you looking at Sil?" + + "Nothing. You need some chapstick." I was thinking about something Maya had said on the phone one night. I'll always love you, you always be in my life. I want to be the one you call when your old and you pull the winning hand in bridge.... + + "You okay Sil?" Chloe has an anxious look on her face. + +I nod, take a deep breath and try to laugh. I put the binoculars back up to my face to hide the excess of fluid that suddenly appears in my eyes. Downtown I can see the leafy tops of the birches and elms. I imagine the clamoring of already drunk crowds moving from bar to bar shouting happy new year, but there is nothing, just trees listing in the gentle wind. + +"This is stupid," Ulric says. + +"Let's talk about something else," Chloe sits up and crosses her legs the other way in her chair. The sparkler burns down in her idle hand. Her attention has shifted to the other hand, which is lightly stroking Jimmy's head. + +Ulric slouches back in his chair and crosses his arms over his stomach. "I mean how do you do that? Just shut yourself down, stop on an emotional dime? Christ I still love girls I dated for two weeks in high school... but I don't care about them" He looks at me. + +"I still love women I saw on the street and never even spoke to." I am thinking of one I had seen at the bar last month or has it been longer? + +"Oh god, that's the purest kind of love there is," Ulric sits up excited. "That look... you're walking down the street in a crowd of people, not paying any attention to them. Then suddenly you meet eyes with some girl just by chance, pure accident, but you both know there is some connection in the eyes." He stares off at the hillside as he speaks. "A look, that's all it takes, and you recognize something in each other in that instant." + +"You mean love at first sight?" Chloe asks. + +"Well, I don't know about love," Ulric says. + +"I think what Ulric means is intimacy at first sight." They all look at me. "You don't act on it because of fear, because intimacy and strangers don't mix." My voice sounds tired to me. "You think you recognize something in them, and they in you, but you don't want to risk finding out. You don't know if they can be trusted or not. You feel vulnerable. You give up before you even start. Or at least I do, but it's not even that conscious, you just keep walking." + +"Okay, now even I'm getting depressed," Chloe says. "How about the weather? It's a beautiful day...? The government...?" We all stare at her. No one says a word. She get up to get the pie. + +The sun is an orange garnish on the edge of the horizon. Down the hill the lightening struck stump catches the last reddening glow. Jimmy and Ulric are both looking out at the hillside. Neither of them speaks; I can hear the clattering of the glass pie pan against the stove inside, the noise drifts out the door and crackles sharply in the stillness of the evening. Up the hill, a Poorwill tests it's song for the approaching night. Ulric rattles the ice at the bottom of his glass and throws his head back with it. He chews it loudly with his mouth open. + +"You know why I left?" I say to no in particular. "The crowning achievement of the human experience is getting to share those little moments with each other, the minute by minute miracle. That's the only thing that makes us human; otherwise we're no different than any other creature. We have time and time allows us memory and perspective, which allow us love, but I left because it's more powerful in hindsight. I get nostalgic for the present. Once I realize that I have to step back and enjoy it." I light a fresh cigarette and take a long swig of scotch. I pitch the empty bottle into the trees. I see Maya standing by the window in that abominable apartment. She is smoking a cigarette, smiling at me. I keep her there in my memory, but right now I'm nostalgic for the memory of her, not her. + +Chloe brings out more drinks. They are trying to keep me away from the bottles damn them. She goes back in and brings out four slices of warm apple pie with ice cream slowly melting on top of them. I take a couple bites, but my stomach turns at the sweetness. They devour theirs in silence. I rearrange mine, pushing it around like a child does with peas. After waiting a few minutes, so as not be rude, I stand up. "I'm going for a walk. I'll be back in little while," I say. + +"Are you okay?" Ulric asks. + +"I'm fine. I just need a walk." I say. + +I hear them discussing me in whispers as I walk down the lawn and out the gate-nostalgic fools. There is a faint trail from the gate leading down the hill. It's rough going outside the yard; the hillside is choked with dogwood trees and other spindly, naked shrubs. It takes me ten minutes to get to the charred tree. I run my hands over the burnt wood, smearing the dusty charcoal around on my palms. I sit down leaning my back against the tree. The sun is gone now, a blue-gray twilight is settling in over the hills. The moon is to my back, but in front down, near the horizon stars are becoming visible. The spaces between the stars aren't dark. It's a void, but it's pure white light, that's where life started, in the nothingness. We live in the spaces in between. + +I hear them laughing up the hill. I hear some distant pops and then one enormous bang, which jars me enough to look up and see the last twinkling sapphire remnants of the big skyrocket fading out above me. Little fragments of ash begin showering down toward me. I think of the tree, and the flashing cataclysm that tore it apart and set it on fire. I wonder what it looked like, the pure white light? Afterwards there is only empty silence and the gentle snowing of ashes. The world gives birth behind our eyes, not before them. Years ago Maya was staring up at the night sky. She propped herself up and kissed me. We made love on the roof... poetically nostalgic at the time. + +The fireworks show downtown commences just as the last flakes of ash settle down around me. Showers of light burst up, temporarily outshining the stars and then gradually fading to darkness, only for another brilliant explosion to take its place. As I stand up to go back, I notice a small shoot of growth springing up from between the burnt roots. I run my fingers along the ground, circling the space around it, in between the roots. The light from the fireworks fades to blackness again. I turn up the slope, walking back toward the house. Fireworks fill the sky behind me, illuminating the path with flickering bursts of light. + +I skirt around the house and go in the front door. I take a few long draws off a bottle of Wild Turkey. They are all still sitting at the table smoking and talking. They look beautiful, perfect, just the way I want to be, living in the spaces in between the temporal world. They are in the infinitude of my imagination, next to which my existence feels flat and tasteless as a junkyard tire, cracked and torn in the sun. It smacks you in the face when you perceive something in a moment that you know is not tangibly present and yet, it's there. A moment that you know will one day be a great memory, the fluid transmission of emotion across time. The hurricane of the unconscious whirls up to the surface for moment, imagination leaks into the real world, some interaction of the personal with the infinite, a stabbing at perfection transcends the ordinary moment. The world gives birth before our eyes and takes us spinning down reveries and private waterslides of imagination through the twisting spiral corkscrew of delirium. You know it in the present, nostalgia for now. + +Eventually they notice me and insist that I come with them downtown. I don't really want to, but I consent because they are still here and already I miss them. At the bar it's scotch on the rocks followed by neat bourbon. Then I have a shot or two of whiskey and start in on the beers. The clink of pool balls, conversations of foreigner and gradually we are assimilated. + +Later I ditch the gang and wander down toward the old house that Dean and his sister and I used to live in when we first arrived two years ago. Along the way, walking down Polaski, I cross over the railroad tracks. Out of nowhere I feel the urge to climb up on the cars. The steel ladder is cold as ice, and my fingers cramp before I get to the top. I balance on the metal grating, teetering drunkenly on the roof of the boxcar. The world is spinning and I decide it's best to sit down. The roof of the car is cold, so I slide back a little hatch and look inside. The darkness is impenetrable. I extend down a hand. I can't feel anything. I decide to climb in, slowing lowering myself down until my feet touch something about waist deep. I bend down and grab a handful of the unknown substance and pull it out in the moonlight-soybeans. I sit down in the darkness of the boxcar with the intention of having a rest before I walk on. I settle back, shifting about, making a seat for myself in the soybeans. I light a cigarette and look around the car; raw soybeans are everywhere around me. Maya suddenly feels farther away. She is living in her universe and I am here in mine. My illusions of her waiting for me are crushed beneath me as I sink into the soybeans. I stare up out of the hatch at the stars, lying flat on my back. The stars never judge one way or the other. They see no right or wrong, only what is happening. Everything else is an illusion of the human mind. The stars get to see now and forever. Everything is just as it should be. The soybeans absorb me and take me into their presence as the father greets the son. You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow. The night sky fades into dream. + + + +### Fourteen ### + + + + +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. + +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. + +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. + +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." + +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. + + + + |