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.