"See." The white walls grin triumphantly.


Silence.

Chloe's head collapses back when she laughs, and it's a guttural laugh, but high pitched and her left arm twitches a little when she really gets rolling, but right now it doesn't because she only chuckles and then her head snaps back forward. "Yeah I can see that. But I was thinking maybe we could get a jigsaw puzzle or something."


""

"We should get a jigsaw puzzle."

"Frustrating. Very very frustrating."

"But fun because you're struggling."

"Maybe."

"Well I'm going to go to get a jigsaw puzzle and you're going to help me with it."

"Okay, but I'm not going to the store, florescent lights scare me."

"I understand. I'll be back in a bit."

Blinking fire flies -- twenty four frames per second -- do da do dada -- roosting -- hear we go again --  charred steel drooping -- sniffing -- bagpipes wheezing -- stuttering the future -- glistens and sparkles by design -- can you hear -- the morning line -- the polyphony -- new everyday -- falling off your tongue -- was it good for you?





"You were in high form. I think you scared the shit out of Scratch."

"Nah. That man ain't scared of anything least of all some punk ass kid like me." He pauses for a minute. 

"You know what I remember him saying at some point? He was talking to Chloe about something...I dunno... they were having their own side conversation and I was saying something inane to you and I remember hearing him say to her 'I do the best I can not to worry about things. Summers days are here. I have never known where I'm going, but here I am.' It blew my mind. Some people could have said that and I would have slapped them, but from him... shit. He hates poetry because he's living it."

"He hates poetry?"

"Yeah that's what he said. I just kinda looked at him. I went over to his bookshelf and there was William Carlos Williams. I didn't say anything. I just pulled it off the shelf and read the famous one...no way was I going to read something cleverly obscure... he's too old to stand for that kinda pretension..." Jimmy jumps up and grabs the William Carlos Williams sitting on my table. He flips through it for a minute and then reads aloud.

"This is just to say"



"I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox



and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast"



"Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet 

and so cold"

He smiles at the page, it's in on something, caught in some private joy and his shoes. Jimmy reads with neither the amateurishness nor pretension that have driven poetry readings to the far corners of New England. His voice is a plum. He swallows, "do you realize that that poem is everything I've ever wanted and never found?" He tosses the book back on the table and doesn't say anything else.

Jimmy reads like James Joyce wrote. There is nothing to say. Do you realize that that poem is everything I've ever wanted and never found? We sit in silence. I put my feet up on the coffeetable and am embarrassed by the noise.

"Are you drinking wine in the morning? In this heat?"

"It's not that hot in here."

"Yes, but at some point you will have to face the outside world where it is hot."

"I guess. But it's not wine. It's water."

"Oh. Well, if you get some wine tell me, I'd like to have a glass."

"But it's over a hundred outside."

"Sil it's wine. We all have our weaknesses. You really shouldn't put water in wine bottles, it teases me in uncomfortable ways that force me to confront yearnings and desires my young mind tries desperately to avoid. I went to catholic school you know." Impish smile. But she didn't really. She just likes to say it and then smile impishly.

"Have you ever heard Jimmy read?"

"You mean like read out loud? No. Do people still do that?"

"Yeah some of them. You should hear him some time."

"Okay. I will" She turns sideways and throws her legs up on the arms of the couch. Chloe is as tall as I am and she occupies the entire couch. I take refuge in the chair.




®			®			®			®



Scratch used to sing "you got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" when he was hunting around the fridge for coffee grounds. The "fridge" was an old icebox that Scratch had found on the side of the road and patched up. When he drank too much and passed out before sundown, he'd forget to restock it. The melted remnants of yesterday's block of ice would eventually force open the door and the bag of coffee would go sliding across the kitchen floor, skittering to all kinds of strange places. "You got to get behind the mule every morning and plow" Scratch used to sing when he looked for the bag. When he invariably found the coffee lying in the farthest crack, he would squat down and scoot it along the floor over to the table, laughing and singing "...every morning and plow..." He would do this little dance, all crooked and insane. I lived with Scratch for a while after Dean left. He had a bad knee that made his dancing comical. I used to sit there and watch him do that hypnotic, crooked little dance of his. He would start gyrating at the knees, flopping his arms about while he sang. The first time I saw him do it I thought he was having a seizure the way he convulsed wildly about. In India they teach that dance to snakes and, in the sewers of America, cockroaches feasting on radioactive waste have begun to learn it on their own. Like terrible creatures from a Kafkian nightmare, they sit quietly underground. We go about our lives while they are learning that dance, passing it on to their children, teaching them how to use it. One day a properly evolved cockroach will crawl out of a sewer drain just as the head of state is stepping to the podium to address the nation... devour the president raw as the live internet streams feed the blood soaked scene. The cockroach will scurry to the podium, strain himself to an upright position and address the nation... "Behold I am." He will dance and spin and enchant... the numbers will explode. Scratch was one of kind. Later I found out the line is a Tom Waits lyric.

I am sitting outside the café smoking and sweating. It's two days hotter. Jimmy pulls up in the Falcon, all grinning like he's getting away with something. He is freshly shaven; he looks like a Unix cultist. He has close shaven hair and thick framed, black, sixties style glasses, but he's more gearhead and really he's neither geek nor gearhead. He revs the engine a few times before getting out. He's wearing a greasy, oil-stained jumpsuit and racing gloves. He leaves the motor running and sits down at the table with me.

I have been occupied with trying to reconstruct Jimmy's descriptions of Williamsburg and Brooklyn in my head, trying to assimilate a whole city from them, trying to put Maya in them, but she won't fit. Unfortunately, Up There will have nothing to do with Down Here, they dance and dance, but Up There can never get her hands into Down Here's pants. I give up. Even Jimmy says he can't remember what living in New York was like and he's only been back a year. I've never lived there, just a handful of visits, weeks here and there, but I'm moving someday. I try to picture Maya running down the street to greet me-her with that Breakfast at Tiffany's smile.

"I installed a four barrel carburetor after I left your place the other day...increased power," he grins at me, but the grin fades to a sheepish curl. "You want to get some lunch?"

It's nearly dinner, but maybe that's only time speeding up. There is a plethora of food not five feet from where we are sitting, but I want to go for a ride in the Falcon. The custom headers he installed last week make it roar like a primordial beast-something slinky and covered with scales that crawled out of the Ford plant back when great steel dinosaurs ruled the land. A beautifully sleek environmental nightmare in the midst of disposable soda cans on wheels. Jimmy wants to drive. Heads turn at every corner, herbivores gawking at the revving, roaring carnivores with a mixture of admiration, envy and fear. The Falcon howls from a standstill to breakneck speed, the force neatly ashing my cigarette in the process. The impenetrable jungle across the road steams like a freshly washed beggar, thick kudzu itches at elms and maples. The Japanese revenge on the Americans who chased them around the South Pacific jungles. War stories are always set in jungles this century-New Guinea, Cambodia, Guatemala, Columbia; soldiers march in jungles, hacking vines, contracting microbes unknown. Sultry jungles that should have steamed up history with lovers, sweaty and exhausted, but instead turned to horror and death, and still stink of centipede nibbled bones. Rot. Blurs of grass waving in the wind of cars ahead, shopping centers, mini malls, open fields, bovine genetic research centers next to botanical gardens followed by apartment complexes. The homogenized sanitized landscape of America. I long for the desert, the candyland Gaudi imitated, to roar across the dinosaur bones of Utah, the sandstone caverns harboring the remains of a drip sandcastle youth.

I see you standing in front of the bay window that looks out from the bedroom into the courtyard of your building on Minetta. I watch you from the bed languishing on stained white sheets. You are wearing nothing, leg propped up on the sill, standing and swaying slightly to the beat of a thick base drum. Your flesh is soft milk froth; you walk back to the stove and light a cigarette off the burner, swinging your ass to the music, mainly for my benefit. Do not worry Maya. I am not so far away as memory, I will come to the city soon, but it must be the right moment. Be on edge; be aware. I am letting you grow inside me Maya; I am incubating you for a little while longer so that when you hatch it will be like stepping into a cage with lions, no club, no gun, only naked and trembling.

Jimmy is heading out of town, down farther, we pass signs for the interstate, and he turns in the opposite direction. Neither of us speaks, the stereo does not work. There is only the rush of humid air. The wind carving in violent eddies around the side mirrors, a primitive whistling tune, the first amplified song-telegraphs heard in the distance, coming from far on the other side of the rockaway-wind blasting down ancient conifers and cycads, dusty meteor backdrafts carving fresh sandstone into parabolic arches that begin far below the surface. My oldest memory is of walking down a trail in Canyonlands National Park. I am singing a song as I walk, but I'm not really walking, I'm on my father's shoulders. He is walking and I am singing a song with him and my mother. We are hiking down from the mesa tops to the Green River, I can see the clumped fringes of the junipers, smell fecund woodrot and fresh desert air, feel the bruised and sullen thunderheads in the sky above me as I bounce and sway with my father's lurching downhill gait, but I can't make out the words or identify of the song. I just have the fuzzy outlines of it all. Memories shrouded in gauze and muslin, filters that color and tone the past with the palate of the present. Mexico City: I remember Mexico City in a hazy, brown, discolored way, but it's not the smog-scenes of dust, carbon excrement overlaying each other-a photomontage of choking, exhausted skies. In flickering stills, twenty four frames per second, here and there a frame or two missing, little glitches...jagged cut to a subway shot, brown faces black hair ... lay on top an image of pyramid excavation, digging up to solve the Mayan Caper... years ago, you understand... she was standing right next to me and then...a warm, sweet smelling cab and my father said, "Hey, look-a Kentucky Fried Chicken," a kaleidoscope of disappointment and guilt... the shock of fried chicken. Everything focusing into the sun; burnt in fantastical visions-not fear in the sense of a threat, much worse, a lingering in the back of the mind occasionally eliciting a paralysis that haunts indefinitely, then fades again in the face of day to day activities-it's all going to stop someday.

It's a fear that leaves you like a woman I saw once, stone still, shell-shocked, and stuck in the middle of an enormous red rock arch in Canyonlands. She was paralyzed on a narrow strip of sandstone, a fragile bridge hundreds of feet in the air. The digging hooks of unbridled terror had burned into her brain and created a spellbinding feedback loop that forbade her to move. It's a fear that anchors your mind back in the primate body because you feel, you cannot rationalize it away. It rips you out of the very fabric of collective reality and propels you into strange space where there is only you. I watched her stuck there, unable to help herself, no doubt staring at the four-hundred foot drop-off on both sides of her and the meager four-foot wide sandstone arch that held her frail existence in place. Suspended in mid-air, she saw herself for the first time the way we are: naked, cold and deathly afraid. 

"Here in Mexico City there is no Kentucky Fried Chicken, maybe Kentucky Fried Cat, Kentucky Fried Dog, but definitely no Kentucky Fried Chicken," the cab driver smiles crooked piano key teeth, gold caps and black octaves over moist gums that crawl down hiding the strings. He sternly advises against eating there. 

It's near dark and another lazy thunderstorm drifts in from the southwest. The clouds are somber and premature darkness closes over the world. Could easily be the Northeast-New York- Brooklyn-fall-the East River slips by without a sound, the streets corral throngs of people-onlookers too drunk to remember what they are there to look at. They lurch out of bars and bounce against doorways like grenades rolled out on the street. Inside the steel doors, a reserve of surplus energy is released in muscular spasms that pulse rhythmically-her breasts pool salt onto my tongue. Her flesh is hard and metallurgic, turning brittle under my hands. The fear is slowing slipping out of her, out of the sewers, up celestial heights, among the eagles, the screaming eagles, hovering like 1910 bankers awaiting the thief. The tape is endless, looping across eons, cultures, genetic hardwired connections to the galaxies, interstellar abbreviations of life. Cool hard water distills in my mouth and then she falls from my arms like a collapsing supernova and I am cast down a tube, a tunnel, endlessly falling, clattering off the walls, building speed in a vacuum with no terminal velocity. Reach out for limbs, for human hands to catch me.... Scream and there is no sound; settle in, the twinkling light shining above. Surrendered eternity forever to remain here now and then the light goes dim... the taxis in Times Square... An auburn haired girl I loved in seventh grade... Radio broadcasts of unknown origin pulling down the multiverse's own information superhighway at a genetic tilt, coming across the galaxy without static, pure unadulterated signal, and, through it all, ash keeps falling. Fragments of history written on burnt paper and cast about in a hurricane. Whitewashed ceilings hanging low and ominous.... Bubble-headed figures crawling like the Michelin Man across an insurmountable mountain of tires, wounds agape, thick clumps of oil leaking from his mouth. And the autistic child pointing at you, laughing, unable to fathom how you cling to your definitions. Must delineate between abnormality and those of us who.... breeding like rats unconsciously conscious and aware of our disorganization. Cold fusion dreams of the anarchist are breeding in the minds of the oilmen. The continual settling of dust weighing down...the Mayan priest laboring slowly up endless steps.... Kevlar definitions constructed to make a better shampoo. Squander your paperbacked slavery bills. After all these years Tide still gets your socks whiter. It's a wonder ...that they aren't transparent by now ...that evolution did not anticipate the advent of the opposable thumb.... The unopposable domination of the thumb, leading to an insect superiority, mating rituals stolen from a textbook on damselflies ...darning needles, sewing shut your lips. Shit from the sky. Taxman comes for your baby. Unpaid balance. You understand. Nothing personal, just doing our job. Same as the next guy. From Auschwitz on down the line. The puncture wounds... Only taking orders you understand, just doing our job from Independence on down the line. A sad money grubbing hunter gathers up his children and thanks his gods they are his and he their god. Only taking orders you understand. Got a family to feed. 

And then the dirt driveway. Shifting to park. The keys slide from the ignition. The last crackle of radio. Pop. Hiss. Silence. Open the doors. Crush out the cigarette. End transmission.



										* * *