path: root/tomorrow/ch1/ch1-original.txt

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. Won't. Not yet. Eventually. Just ghosts. Pissed off ghosts. 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 falling buildings, 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. 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.



From: Dean O'Leary <do@morpheus.net>
To: sil@kali.org
Subject:

I have a fish tank. Melissa bought it, but I have it. It's here right in front of me right now. There is a fish in it. We put it in yesterday. Melissa named him Dean Jr. Dean Jr. has a plastic castle and a plastic treasure box. He's swimming back and forth between them. He never goes anywhere else. It's like every two seconds his memory expires and he has to go back and see what these damnable things are that he just swam by. Or perhaps its merely that I feel that way, swimming through the city, by the castle, by the rocks, by the crumbling pink stones in the park. We once had gills. I don't mean eveolution, I mean I think we once had gills. Atlantis isn't a mythical city that sank into the sea, it was always under the sea. We lived there, we swam by, and abscent of memory swam by again. A sort of daze.

I envy you down there, you don't have to swim, you can merely sit. The water is still. Or that's how I imagine it. The surface of the pond, not yet distrubed by the ripless of what is emerging below. You are higher up, in the sunlight filled waters near the surface. Down here things are not well, the memory is fading, senility is survival.

I finished a novel the other day that you would like. A hungarian author Lazlo Tikos, the book is Midnight. He has another, Dawn. But it's difficult to come by. So is Midnight actually, a friend of mine in the city happens to be the translator so I read an early draft. It's a very strange convoluted story that I don't want to ruin, should you decided to read it (the packagge is one its way to your house), but there was 



It made me think, should I set Dean Jr free? I don't think he would last long in the ocean or the sewers, though he's not really worth eating. Perhaps he would survive in the sewers, like the aligator pets that go to large and flushed down the tiolets by enough distrate owners, fearful that the once cute beasts would now eat the children they were purchases for -- you can imagine, those reptile eyes, old, pre-Cambian thoughts lurking down there, a level we perhaps remember on some levvel, some dark spot of our own genentic makeup still carrying markers, the primordial fear that comes from staring at any nearly unblinking creatures, but especially one that's covered in scales and has a flickering tongue that tastes information in the air -- it's similtaneously so forgien and so familiar as to be distrubing, a familiar memory that won't die, like the smell of blood drying in the grass or 

And so down the toilet for poor pet aligator caught up in a fade it neither wanted nor understands, but then the revenge of the sewers where the pet becomes what it was always meant to be -- king. It could be the same for fish I believe. The scales are the same, the 

									



Last night: 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-swooshing velvet sound on that table-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 still.

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. Tubes. Millions of tubes. Fading now to resistors and capacitors. Even as the hippies were sleeping with visions of sugarplums and dancing fairies singing happy happy joy joy, Bell Labs was suffering a different dream. Resistors. Capacitors. On. Off. Zero. One. America.

Another cigarette. I could lie here all day. Lying down, remaining down.

Outside is America. Up right now, but down later. One, but then Zero. 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. Too much quantum physics-interference patterns, recorded static played back in scripts-the sixties were bleak, the nineties were worse. 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. 

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 sitting 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. 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-Chloe has those. Jimmy has a girl, a girl friend, but I suspect they are more than friends. They are not friends like he and I are friends. They are something more. They hold each other very close by the fire and then often slip into darkness as if they are unafraid. But she is called his girlfriend, he calls her the girlfriend, but when she says it she is a girlfriend. And he is a boyfriend.

"I'm Brooke. Jimmy's girlfriend."

"It's very nice to meet you."

"Sil, I met you six months ago."

"Yes but it is still nice isn't it?"

"Yes. Is suppose it is. Are you okay?"

"Yes. I'm fine. Why?"

"You seem strange tonight."

Tonight seems strange too. Difficult to sort out. Lights and people. Glittery mugs foaming, slick ice spit back in rattling glasses, crunching gravel or sawdust in the street. She is holding his hand. They are walking in front of me. Their feet are in time, light-footed marching, a relaxed cadence. 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. We sniffed and snorted through the lingering sniffles of a once glorious semantic insanity. We like to talk. One or Zero... still an indeterminacy.

Jimmy is a lunatic, one of the last great lunatics. Maybe that 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 V-2 rocket dropping down on Pynchon's London. Its not a simple arc, it's a parabola, 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 across the sky until it blows a giant hole in the earth. 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.

Dean would have loved it, he gets off on it too. The words though. And it doesn't matter where they come from, so long as they are words, and maybe forming ideas and eventually stories if that is still possible. I get off on it too. We all do. But Dean is up there too. 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 just words.

Dean will come back. Dean always comes back. And then he leaves. He is here and then there. Every time there are spaces in between in which I give him up for dead, but he never dies. He comes back. Or dies a little and then comes back. He writes a lot. Not many people do that. But more will. Email. The return of the letter. The post office collapsed in conspiracy and viruses, but we find ways. Bell Labs found one. 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. Brooke has never mentioned sex to me. But she does to someone. 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 or sometimes hieroglyphs, but it doesn't translate well. 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 ex-wives 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. Outside. America. Wires. Buzz and hum. 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.

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-I'm not making this up-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. My wife used to say that 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.

I enrolled in another school where all the children were drab and gray, but they wore the finest clothing, hand-tailored in the finest European shops, slowly measured by grandfatherly old men, stooped with age and arthritis, but possessing of delicate hands worn smooth like driftwood by years of handling the luxurious linens. The boys wore three-piece suits with little button down vests and the girls wore elaborate dresses with corsets and garters and stockings. The teachers were always talking about being naked, but really they wore the finery too. I was kicked out for hugging. Hugging was distasteful to them, the contact wrinkled their finery and the production or secretion of sweat and warm mucus was frowned upon. They were sterile people, but beautiful to look at. I learned much about what you could wear or say if you chose to, but often I chose not to and this was frowned upon. One day a beautiful teacher wearing only a corset and loose skirt with a choker around her neck and thighs that whispered when she walked, asked me to leave.

For a long time after that 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 twenty-seven and missing half an eyebrow. Before we got divorced, my wife and I went on a three-month drive; it was our form of therapy. We had decided to 'work things out,' as she put it. We thought spending time alone, just the two of us, would bond us together. We crisscrossed the country looking for epoxy; from LA to Denver, back to Boise, down to Salt Lake City, through the Rockies again, across Kansas, down to New Orleans, up the eastern seaboard to Boston, then Canada, and eventually back to LA. My overwhelming memory of the trip is the warm smell of all night diner bathrooms, the sinks scratched from the oversized belt buckles of enormous putrefied trucker drivers. And then I forgot about her in New Orleans and drove most of the way through the Florida panhandle. I was eating take out steamed oysters on a nude beach when I realized something was missing. She got back to LA a week later. I was at Dean's house when a man with a star by his name asked me to sign papers. I poked about in LA for a while longer, working odd jobs, Dean and I tried to shoot holes in four by eight sheets of plywood, but the man with the star by his name came back and asked us not to. Eventually I decided to move to Athens with Dean and his sister Betty-to see if anything would happened. They lasted about a year. He went up, she went left.

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 nostalgia for the 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 and that intangible future in which all the words are perfectly prearranged and you take your place at the banquet....well... I used to want something to happen-on the far side of Bell's polyparabolic vision. I used to wait with hope. There was a moment or two of naiveté, 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. A bric-a-brac carnival for paranoids.



®			®			®			®



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 back when I was living with Dean, 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. Saves me the work. 

It was 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 could 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. Then Maya moved back to LA, and now she is back in New York. My phone bills are more than my rent, but I don't pay rent so that's a poor comparison.

This morning the world is farm-fresh. The Twilight Zone faceless men 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. Now they are hard at work on Now they are hard at work on Now they are hard at work on.... 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; all you want to do is get some sort of fruity drink and sit on the porch. That's my plan for the day, but first I want some food. 

The door bursts open and a streaking out of focus but distinctly 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 antique 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."

"So I couldn't open it."

"What if it was me?"

"I wasn't ready yet. I had to load."

He giggles his little Jimmy giggle, which 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. 

"It was good to hang out with you last night man. I was kinda feeling like we never see each other anymore. Which is stupid since we live fifty feet away, but you know with work and all... and your gig."

"Yeah. It was good. I been locked up in here for the past couple weeks." My business card says 1066 productions: we make stuff. Lately it's been light on the make and heavy on the revise. Technical Editing they call it when they outsource. All these strange words. Technical. Outsource. Mostly I sit around all day and bill people for it.

"How is the freelance world?"

"Free. And I mean that. I gotta stop doing favors. That's the problem with this town, I know too many people and can't bring myself to bill them."

Jimmy's eyes are focused on something near the Pleiades and he is nodding and repeating yeah with Buddhist intent. When I stop talking he keeps nodding his head for a minute. "So do you remember anything about last night?"

"It was noisy. And glittering."

"Okay, cool," he practically doubles over shaking his head and laughing, "cause I don't remember much of anything except that I was on a rampage."

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

"Naw. That man ain't scared of anything least of all some punk ass kid like me." He pauses for a minute. "Do you think we'll be that wise when we get that old. Have that weird sage intensity he's got? How old is he anyway?"

"I have no idea. Old enough to know what the word vagabond means."

"You know what I remember him saying at some point? He was talking to Brooke 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 bookshelf. 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.

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 the 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 and then we head for a nice apartment complex with a pool or a café with air conditioning. 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.

"James. Sil. Looking like you boys had a nice evening." She sits on the couch next to me and raises an eyebrow to encourage storytelling, but I remain silent and Jimmy mutters something about jazz.

"Oh. I see. Well. I had another bad date." 

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 flexes it, which of course he just had to show me in the middle of dinner by standing up and putting his leg on the table." She chuckles. "There is absolutely no shame in your brains, you know that don't you?"

"I love you Chloe, but your generalizations do not include me." Jimmy stands up. "I'm going to work on the Falcon."

"See." The white walls grin triumphantly.

I close the door behind Jimmy and pour myself a glass of water.

"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.

I got sick of running out of cold water in the Brita and I had all these empty wine bottles so one day I washed one of them out and filled it up with water. But that proved insufficient because inevitably, in my laziness, I didn't fill it up again right away. I have to get the funnel you know, and it's too much effort when you just want a glass of water at three in the morning to wash down the egg sarnie you fried up in a drunken, desperate, last ditch effort to not wake up with a pounding headache the next morning. Right then all you want is a tall refreshing glass of water that tastes like a French girl you once saw standing in the doorway of some terracotta apartment building with a luxurious courtyard of ferns and fig trees and clay pots full of honey, all of which you never noticed because you were transfixed by the French girl who was actually a Polish immigrant who moved to Paris just two months earlier to work for an internet design firm. That's the kind of water you want with that bacon egg and cheese burrito. Or with tomatoes and maybe potatoes too. Maybe all sorts of leftover vegetable that ordinarily might be tossed out but appear edible and even lovely to your teetering, alcohol soaked, three in the morning eyes. So I decided to up the number of bottles. This way the filling, while more cumbersome and time consuming when done, can be done with much less frequency. Two bottles sufficed until a week ago when the same tragedy occurred concerning a glass of water that this time was intended to taste like cuddling Eskimos, but ended up far too warm and straight from the tap to ever conjure Eskimos and now I have three bottles which I just refilled yesterday afternoon and so will taste however I desire. 

"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.

"What should we do today?" Chloe lights a Camel.

"Try to take over the world."

"Oh how witty." Fluttering of the eyes. "Which, when you think about it, is all we've really got. But no. What would we do once we took over?"

"I don't know. Sit back and tell everyone they're free."

"Maybe. But, don't you think we'd be corrupted by the system and we'd want to cling to our pathetic little construction of power?"

"I like to think not."

"Yeah well I don't think most people grow up saying 'mommy I want to be a despot when I grow up.'"

"I bet Idi Amen did."

"Maybe. 

"Can't you see a little Idi Amen chopping grasshoppers heads off and scheming designs on the birds while he's played outside his hut or whatever. The kind of scheming that's cute in three-year-olds." 

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."

"A jigsaw puzzle?"

"Yeah. Why not?"

"Frustrating. Very very frustrating."

"But fun because you're struggling."

"Maybe."

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

"Okay, but I'm not going to K-mart, florescent lights scare me."

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



®			®			®			®



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.