path: root/tomorrow/ch11/ch11.txt

Eleven





-reductive and mechanical-world gains grid-microscopic speck of immensity-deep space bubbles-twinkle like gin-elaborate effigies-the bare essentials-negatively charged collisions-moving on a crowded street-a stubbornly persistent illusion-the trouble is-you see it don't you?

The phone. Ringing. The phone is ringing. The phone is not ringing. The alarm is going off. The alarm is not going off.

Dean is gone. 

Fumbling fingers twisting a flint of happiness. Inhale sharply. Feel the pain in charred lung tissue. Where is Dean? Where is Jimmy? Where is Maya?

I get up and crush out the cigarette in the Persian rug, letting it burn a good size hole in the exposed padding once covered by luxurious threads. I feel better already. The steel bars masking the window do not bother me. The whine and bleat of the cranes is symphonic. Dean got out. Dean is free. I have realized it. The computer comes to life. I open Photoshop and try to work. The disks from yesterday's shoot are sitting on the table along with a note from Maya. It's a terse reductive note. Here's  yesterday's discs. Dinner? Informal poetics. 

Last night I passed out before Maya got home-realization slipping through an intravenous drip-questions spring up and are dismissed. Dean got out. I throw in the discs and open up the first set of pictures. Three girls carrying shopping bags and laughing in way that real people never do, but seems to make sense to real people when they sit down and thumb through magazines. Shop. I make you want to shop. I make you want. Things. Things you can't have.

I put in the next disc and my heart crashes. 

All the precious irreverent little bytes still wafting in the glory of Dean's departure are instantaneously expunged from my information superhighway all skittering. There is an older thing than computers, a scaly viperous thing, a part of the reptilian brain that remains in touch with the more up to date mammalian one. They communicate along the lines of the old show-the string to tin can trick. Simple and effective. The reptilian brain is slithering slow behind the scenes making sure that the worst is being avoided, even as the mammalian brain seems intent on seeking out the most serosanguineous reality tunnel around. 

A face is staring at me. A face swelling significantly out of an ocean of monotonous faces. Disc two contains a face I know. An Athens face. A face that has no business being in this part of my life, a separate face. Judah is staring at me. Judah with his rooftops and roughhewn tables and Cuban dreams is here in New York on my computer. There is no way that this disc could contain a picture of Judah. It is impossible for him to have been at yesterday's modeling shoot without Maya mentioning it. 

Unless. 

Unless the bitten apple on the front of the disc is not just a brand symbol. 

My heart gets the three-fingered salute and after running a hasty hard disc scan, restarts with minimal data loss. 

Except.

The priest is back and has a battered suitcase with ancient Pan Am and Trans World  emblems plastered on it. He leans over my shoulder to get the scoop on this latest development and launches into a hysterical, uncontrollable, post-orgasmic fit of laughter. 

You are so fucked.

Spring Street. Coat buttoned tight, scarf catching involuntary nose drip, feet skating on icy concrete and the old Jewish tailors huddle on the crooked, half-spiral steps whispering Yiddish, smoking cigarettes and decoding the cabalistic name of god which they plan to evoke in swirl of incense, candlelight and chanting in some universe just three doors down-unmarked entrance in an alley. Waiting for the F train to Broadway, a fat junkie woman with a stroller shivers and rolls her eyes at me. The priest marches up and down the platform, hunched slightly, like Napoleon contemplating strategic moves, hands behind his back, twirling a menacing blade, long, curved and enlarged at the front. The better for splitting my dear. 

Roaring sounds, squeals, heart attack brakes, suicide doors open. Two street kids huddle in the corner of the car arguing over Delotid stolen from an uptown pharmacy where the old neighborhood druggist is losing his sight and easy prey to opportunists-forgets that two boys came in and only one is in front of him now asking for drugs for the the hiv, what is the hiv? The boy laughs. They dash out the door and into the station, all the way to Brooklyn and then back, but only one Delotid. The priest looks at me and smiles, gesturing to the boys with the engorged tip of the scythe. Necessity is mom, where is dad?

Door opens at 125th, in come the dealers and out go the boys. These are dangerous types don't you know. Black hearts. Black skin. Even the priest is silent. I stare them down. One nods. "buds?" I smile no. TV has these images. It told you all you needed to know. Just another show. My eyes are bleary from staring at the screen its all too much and there must be someone on this train. Stand up. Walk to the next car. The priest holds the door as I stumble through.

"You talk too much"

"Stupid old fuck"

"Get your piles out"

"This is my car you coggy old fucker"

Two bums half heartedly pushing each other, bustling in the back and a prim woman in a business suit on her way to the Bronx, the north Bronx, out of the city and sure he keeps telling her we'll move soon, just as soon as I put together this next deal, you know Charlie says he can move this stuff and she spends her nights chain smoking at the window thinking of home in Baltimore and the last time she had an orgasm. A thin old man with newspaper folded under his arm uncrosses his legs and motion to me to sit down.

"Going uptown?"

"Yes"

"Lots to do uptown?"

"I think maybe. Yes."

"Be careful. These aren't safe neighborhoods you know. Make sure you know where your friends are."

"Thank you."

The terror of wheels flogging metal rails. Nothing personal. Stop. Lurch. Complete stop. The priest motions for me to get off. I follow him reluctantly. There are some things that are better left alone, but you never do. You can't see? Get on a plane. Get out while you can. Echoing voices. A little Puerto Rican boy tap dances on a tattered sheet of cardboard. The Mayan priest pitches him a nickel. Gee thanks mister...wrong fucking century asshole. I can't help but laugh. This is so fucking stupid but I can't stop. These are bad neighborhoods you know. Outside again, the projects, enormous brick edifices erected on minimal budgets with zero inspiration. We thought of that you know the priest interjects, zero, the Mayans, the nothing thing. Try that one on. 

Some things are too horrifying to look directly at, some things scorch the eye before the brain can react and force you to turn away. These are the horrors, the pains, the absolute zero of emotional tolerance. Zero. Nothing. The absence of all. The void. The space between. Zero. These are the things I want-to see the things I can't bear to see. I see Judah. I see his curly eyes glazed with alcohol and Cuba. An entire fucking island and millions of people tiny little dreams in his eyes. But not people just words, Spain, Neruda, sugarcane, wood tables, old men playing jazz, pounding out beats on drawers pulled from bedroom armoires. Words. Zero. Judah has never been to Cuba. Zero. Never been to Spain. Zero. Been to the bottom of bottle dreams and talking gibberish, meaning astray, ashtray, lost his way. Just making it up as he goes. Did we ever sit on the roof? Did I make that up?  Did we climb that precarious fire escape rusted ladder to the top, did my feet almost slip on the way down; was the building two doors down really burnt out, charred, roof sagging like leprechaun dreams under the weight of mythical bridges? Did Maya come to Athens that spring and were we walking by the patio of the Flicker Bar where Judah was having drinks with some friends? Did I call out to him and ask him to come over and meet Maya? Did we chat briefly, Judah too drunk to see? Did Maya casually mention that he was cute? Did I know then what I know now?

Yes my memory constructs all that as having happened and yet. And here, standing at the entrance to a building I haven't entered in over a year, my mind is wallpapered with the image. Stacked on infinite repeat and it won't go away. It is a needle raked over an already festering wound. A porcupine administering morphine to an amputee still feeling the absent limb. The endolithic articulation of zero. 

This won't hurt a bit.

Nuclear buzzer shatters fragmented reflection before I remember the door is open. The door never locks. Here we are not lying until you are inside. The antechamber where Judah's dull amplified voice is echoing off tile mosaics and sets the Jamaican landlord's crazed dreadlocked lakdsjflkasdjf into a frenzy, it throws its body against the downstairs door, snarling and growling undog noises. The hair on the back of my neck curls and retreats back into the follicle. Down periscope. Dive. I streak up the stairs lest the nearly mythical predator somehow loose itself from the bounds that hold it to this mortal coil. Behind me the priest scrapes his heart carving blade against the orange chipped paint of the door to further antagonize the beast.

Judah is already opening the door as I bound the last stair. His face wears a look of feigned surprise trying to hide the fact that he has been waiting for this moment ever since. I will not give, nothing is wrong.

"Sil! Holy shit. What are you doing here?"

"Judah! I came to see my old friend Judah." I advance on him, arms extended and we embrace, clapping each other's backs hard. Too hard.

"Come in come in. I was just doing some recording upstairs. I thought maybe you were John coming home from work and I was pissed off thinking he had forgotten his key again...."

"Ah, recording. Music?

"Ya drums"

"Tribal drums? African drums? That sort of thing?"

"Uh... not exactly.... So why are you in New York?"

"I came up to be with Maya."

"That's the girl you were dating?"

"Uh huh." I follow him into the kitchen and he offers me a seat at the kitchen table. I glance around and surmise that little has changed since my last visit. The one talented member of this living arrangement has added a few new painting to the living room wall. Strange stained glass looking paintings that are catching the last glow of the sun in such a deliberate way that I realize he must have purposefully painted them and then hung them at exactly that spot on the far wall of the kitchen so that they would catch the light exactly as they are right now.

"Yes Judah. The girl I have always been dating. As long as you have known me. Longer than you have known me."

"I thought you guys broke up." He picks up a bowl of roasted peanuts and I can't help but see the inescapable southern upbringing coursing through his veins. He peels back the soft shell and pops one arrogantly in his mouth.

"Is that why you fucked her?"

He pretends like it comes out of nowhere, but we both know it didn't. We both know it's the only reason I'm here.

"Excuse me?"

"Don't try to bullshit me Judah. It's unbecoming. At least be quick on your feet... I was drunk... I'm sorry... it just happened... you know how it is... these are the phrases of carefully constructed cinematic excuses that you have to choose from. Come on man... 'excuse me'? That's the best you can do? You and your Neruda and your Cuba and all your fucking bullshit and 'excuse me'? That's the fucking best you can fucking do?"

"Calm down Sil. You want a beer?"

"No I don't want a fucking beer you asshole. I want a story. And it better be a really fucking good story." I can feel my eyes darting about the kitchen, dishes in the sink, purple cupboard door open, dishrags on counter, trash overflowing bottles, refrigerator covered, magnets and pictures, disarrayed pots on stove, framed Charles Bukoski holding beer on wall opposite oven, bread atop fridge, two bananas and a mango ripening in a wire basket hanging from the bottom shelf above the window that looks out onto a brick wall three feet away, and the priest hands me the blade. "Actually, yes, I would like a beer," I run my finger along the edge of the blade, a tiny rivulet of blood appears accompanied by a dull far off ache in my fingertip. I wonder absently if such a thing could permanently alter the identification of my fingerprints.

Judah retrieves two Coronas from the fridge, along with a lime, all of which he carries awkwardly over to the table, setting one beer in from of me and another in front of the empty chair he presumes he will sit in. He turns around and rummages through a drawer, presumably looking for a knife, but I chop the lime in half with a loud thwacking sound that causes him to stand bolt upright and look at me wide eyed. I smile, wipe the blade clean and put a sliver of lime in his bottle and then one in mine. I twirl the blade on the tip of my finger.

"Sorry. Bought it in Chinatown. This is the first chance I've had to use it."

"That's quite a knife..."

"Ya it is isn't it? So about you fucking Maya...?"

"Look Sil. Shit. I'm sorry. I thought you guys broke up. I didn't mean to. I was drunk. She called me...fuck." His face has a look of sorrow on it but I'm not buying. Regret is cheap-from here to Hanoi. "Sil... to be honest... when she called, I didn't know who she was talking about...you know she said this is Maya, a friend of Sil's... I had forgotten all about you. It didn't dawn on me until the next day."

His voice sends me reeling.

"I mean. Shit, I'm sorry man, but I didn't know we were that good of friends. I mean its been what-like two years?"

"So...uh... essentially our friendship was all in my head?"

Judah shells another peanut, pops the soft fruit in his mouth and chews slowly and deliberately. "Well, uh, don't you have to see someone, you know... hang out with them in order the be friends with them?"

I see Dean in Paris pissing in an alleyway three sheets to the wind. I see Jimmy in Athens bent over the falcon engine tinkering with the carburetor. I see Scratch in Miami ogling a divorcee. I see Ulric behind the drum kit that holds the world together beating out the rhythm of now.

"No. No you don't. That would be an acquaintance, which it seems you and I are. Acquaintances. It seems that friendship is too advanced of a concept to apply here.... Or at least that's how you would like to see it...."

"What do you mean?"

"I can see the guilt in your eyes Judah. It haunts you. You have been waiting for me. You want forgiveness from me..."

"I want forgiveness...?" He laughs mock wickedness.

"Yes. You want nothing more... but you're a drunk. You're nothing but a drunk with delusions. You sit around here recording music no one will ever hear, thinking that you're some kind of forgotten genius, another overlooked Van Gogh... and believe me we all want that for you, but the sad truth is that you're not. You're a drunk. No more no less."

Judah watching the Zapruder films dreaming of having the inside track on something that the rest of us have missed. Judah is a foreshortened life. He is not Neruda, he is not Cuba, he is a man who reads poetry by candlelight because he knows it is how you are supposed to read poetry, he dreams of Cuba because it is where he cannot go. Cuba is not a place at all to Judah; it's a concept. It's all empty talk, a tumbleweed caught in the grill of a 53 mercury, not even that, in the grill of late 70's pinto, liable to blow the fuck up the first time something rams him in the ass.

I can see him buried to the hilt in her warm depths with that stupid drunken Neruda grin on his face. Perhaps we could go up to the roof. Perhaps he could walk in circles while I sit on the brick ledge that separates his building from the next. Perhaps all of Manhattan is behind me and Judah will pace in circles to excuse poor behavior. Perhaps he will tell a story of an out of blue phone call, a meeting for drinks with that slithering slug April. Perhaps he will model-waving his bottle of corona as he talks of drinks-martinis extra dirty three olives and then the stumbling subway ride home. Perhaps its was one of those nights when I waited by the phone for Maya to call. Perhaps it was the night Scratch blew through. Perhaps the priest will laugh-taunting me. Perhaps he will kneel behind Judah, crouch on all fours. Perhaps the punch will come for Judah, perhaps my good natured honesty will have disarmed him. Perhaps the punch is centered square in the solar plexus and is followed by the full weight of my body. Perhaps there is an indeterminable second in which Judah will teeter and try to throw his foot back to regain his balance, but a heating vent will be in the way. He will spin off balance, stumble and disappear over the edge. I will run to the edge of the building and look down. His body will be contorted in a distorted, inhuman shape, a pool of blood already forming under his head. I will glance around to see if anyone might possibly have seen us. I will feel a rather extravagant calm. I should be panicking, but I won't. I'll feel relieved, beautiful even. I'll gather up the bottles I touched, glance around to see if there are any other items which might lead one to believe that there was second person present. I'll smooth over my footprints in the rooftop gravel. I'll climb down the ladder and onto the fire escape, glancing down at Judah's body and taking care to wipe away my fingerprints. The pool of maroon below will run toward the fence, dripping out the spaces between the white pickets. I'll climb back in the window and methodically ransack his room, looking for my phone number or Maya's, but taking care not to mess things up. I'll gather up my things, carry the bottles downstairs and place them in the neighbors trashcan. I'll walk out back and examine the body. I'll put my hand over his mouth, but before I can feel a breath I'll notice the bits of mashed skull and what I think are brains lying several feet away-clearly there will be no breath. This man is dead. His eyes are still open, they wear a slightly shocked expression, but there is something else there, a Mona Lisa smile, as if laughing at some inner joke. I'll want to stomp that smile right off his face. I'll want to feel the satisfying crunch of bone under my foot, I'll want to squish his brains, to smear them about the yard. Instead I'll rise and walk out the front door. A roommate will find him. Judah is a known alcoholic. He's also the only smoker in the house. He frequently goes up of the roof to drink and smoke. It will be a no brainer, an open and shut accidental death. His blood alcohol level will tell the story. An intern from the Bronx observer will be dispatched to the scene, he will take a picture of the legs protruding from beneath the yellow tarp. The headline will read: Youth killed in Drunken Mishap. No question will ever be asked because this story is perfectly believable. My story is far fetched, irrational, and difficult to believe. Who would do such a monstrous thing? As I leave I will notice some boys playing basketball at the court across the street. I will sink my hands deep in my pockets, smile up to the sky, take a resonant breath and walk on. People are murdered everyday in the Bronx. Drunk people falling off rooftops are not a cause for alarm. I wish I could say that I would be haunted by images of Judah. I wish that I could say I would feel guilty, but I know I will not. Judah is right, our friendship was all in my mind. And he, bless his nearly departed soul, already got out. His death will be a mere a formality to mark his passing. 

The wheels of the BDFQ begin the screech halfway down the stairs, I jog the rest of way and dart through the door at last minute, sliding into a seat facing an old man whose face is half obscured by a down-turned fedora. I jerk my sleeve out of the door and sit down opposite him. He glances up at me clears his throat and mumbles to no one in particular-these things happen you know. The woman seated next to him raises her eyebrows at me. I smile and shrug. Who is to know the idiosyncrasies of other people?



The bar is really more of a lounge, but a lounge in the worst New York hipster sense of the word. The street front consists of tacky two story glass windows designed to make sure that those on the outside feel left out and sense their lacking chic, which turns up the volume of self-satisfied panache playing on the black turtleneck turntables that spin giddily from table to bar to toilet and back again. A woman at one of the window tables raises a thinly plucked eyebrow at me as her flighty white fingers twirl through blond curls; her white skin is tightly stretched as if approaching escape velocity, narrowly eeking out of the blackhole of her attire. Her scorn makes me smile. I turn on my loudest non-participatory amplifiers, light a fresh cigarette and open the door with trembling hands. Inside is a dimly lit underwater blue emanating from strands of twinkling sapphire Christmas lights balanced and slightly thinned by candles flickering on small tables. A hostess looks at me expectantly but I can't speak. She scowls at my cigarette and asks if she can help me. "Meeting people," I mumble, eyes ignoring her existence, scanning desperately for a familiar face. 

The back wall is lined with a series of enormous crescent shaped booths, and at the center of one, surrounded by a horde of male models, I spy Maya and April, giggling in each others ears. Maya catches my eye and waves me over. She tries to introduce me to the men-boys really- surrounding her, but I don't bother to acknowledge their flaccid hands. A couple I recognize having digitally liberated their complexions from acne scarred childhoods. One of them gets up and pulls over a chair so that I can sit next to Maya. Maya and April are talking emptily of big plans. Big buildings with big offices, big name photographers shooting on account for big name clients, big money going around the world, Frankfurt to Paris, Milan to Cape Town,, New York and back. I stare at April's teeth as she talks. Her pretension chokes the air with gasping hoarse laughter. Black boutique blouse with matching runway toss-off pants she dress like she spends too much time dressing. Her forty year old teeth dripping pinot grigio, held in place by a Miami-tanned hide hanging from cheek bones that all the retouching in the world wouldn't subtract a year from. Must have been boom years-gone bust to land her here. Gone bust in the warm Florida a sun, tarnished the red-gold mane and she had to split. Why I'm not sure, but I suspect it would have something to do with these big puppy-love dreams ringing her head like penny dreadfuls. April's unwarranted arrogance lectures like a cockstrong teenager sermonizing on the ways of the world and what you need to do to succeed. One of the models is wearing a t-shirt that reads: no day but today. And April's pinot grigio is half empty, her vulture eyes already search for a carrion waiter to flutter eyes at secure another free glass because she hasn't the money to buy a drink. She wants to be rich so badly it makes her smell-wouldn't know Rothschild from gutter port and can't buy either. 

Maya's lips purse around a thought, but then her head leans back and shakes-disengage turn the page, working hard for some distant reward in white picket tomorrowland all the while convinced: no day but today. She wants me to share in the dream conversation. I'd sooner chew my leg off-sauté my ambivalence. I am in no hurry. She gives up on me for bit but like a flea-riddled canine just can't let it go.

"What did you do today Sil?" Maya leans in, stabbing at some form of intimacy, but it feels forced to me. I am not fun. I am the thing that must be dealt with at this table, in this bar, in this city.

"I realized that you fucked Judah behind my back," I smile and take a sip of scotch.

It would be a relief to see some sort of reaction, to see the color drain from her face, to see a look of horror in her eyes, but there is nothing. A sarcastic curl lifts her top lip off her teeth and she lowers her eyes at me, "this is neither the time nor the place."

"The proper form calls for indignant protest at such an outrageous accusation and then the time and place bit." I cross my legs and feel an unhealthy calm descend upon me. I light a cigarette and lean back to blow smoke in April's face. We lock eyes and scornful little daggers spit out of her pupils. My heart is racing in spite of the pills, but everything is beautifully clean and calm. The air is sterile, too full of ozone, it sucks up my cigarette smoke and filters it faster than I can drag more into my starved lungs. The room smells like the science fiction future-barren and callous. It feels perfect. The first dawn after the nuclear holocaust.

Maya turns her back on me and whispers something to April. I wish that I had a Moroccan dagger or scythe with which to carve this place, these people, carve their bodies into apocalyptic sculptures, monuments to the futility of arrogance. To leave them alive to carry on their shallow existence in these blanched white bodies, but with deep heineous scars the wounds left by the day the words returned to act upon them. I survey the room and realize that the words aren't coming back justice is down the hall blindfolded, gagged and bound, being fucked in the ass by a lonely old man and loving every minute of it while the play masks laugh and cry at the sight of it all.

I feel righteous and holy.

I want to vomit on myself.

I want Mexico City.

Waking to static on the radio, fat man singing in the shower next door, paper thin walls. The pain is chipped and peeling, lingering in cobweb corners. Mattress with no sheets, stained by countless faceless visitors. Get out of bed and shave with cold water and dull razor, cuts bleed. Outside cadaver weather, smoky haze obscures dawn, stumble down Calle de la Plaza. Your head hurts. Machine gun guards seal off banks. Tomorrow the man in the pinstripe suit will walk in shooting and not stop for days. 

Both agents wearing cheap black suits and stained white shirts, rings of sweat visible when they lift the cups to their mouths. Gristle mouths, swollen lips, spit flies as they talk.

	"Now you understand..."

	"You understand nothing about our country..."

	"You can't possibly hope to..."

	"We are trying to use the utmost discretion..."

	Not hearing a word, looking off the balcony at the shanty town below. Constructed on an old landfill site. The men are still talking. One hand washes the other. A little girl in tattered t-shirt drags a stick in circles about the dirt driveway. 

	In America she is millions of miles away. Jerking camera visions, clipped images of sidewalks, men in ragged army coats begging for change. The agents ask for papers, identification, passport still stuffed in the mattress. Leaving. They follow at a safe distance.

	"Understand that the matter may well come to trial señor..."

	Streets spinning with cars, a dizzying sound. Street urchin selling chiclets, you wanna good time mister? eh? no?

	Last time, board room door all closed, sealed up lies. The agents are still trailing behind. Pulse racing-open the door to the hotel. Three whores in gaudy lipstick wait in the lobby. Pass. Lie down. Feverish dreams. Radioman selling something in Spanish, bursts of static mixed with dream. Malaria epidemic in the Quarter two years ago. Same room, different hotel. Same agents still here. Standing in the corner. One crouches down, smoking at the foot of the bed. In America she is a million miles away.

	"Sir why do make this hard on yourself...?"

	"You must let us help you..." They smile gold teeth.

Nausea without warning. 

There is always warning. It has all been said. She just laughs and pretends and smiles and tries so hard for a Breakfast at Tiffany's cleanliness. The kind of posturing with no accounting for severed limbs, atrocities at all, arm so carefree with its gentle flicks of ash, kissing cigarettes for soft cinedramatic inhales, all-knowing and never acknowledging the prehensile origins. She is smugly young. She has always been smugly young. We are all smugly young. But not you. You have been so old for so long that delusion and illusion and artifice are transparent in the tips of lotioned fingers, Lubridermed against chapping winds. She falls apart with every drag.

I skip the subway. Overground. Stepping lightly on grates, slender metal held up by the wisps of subway air. Wind blows through the morgues and into the streets, lashing ice, snow, tongues, voices-everything is beautiful everything if fine. This is the time. This is the place. 

But. 

Nevermind. 

I want that hotel Bob Dylan lived in. I want to walk in the room and kick his teeth in. Bob Dylan hasn't got shit on me. Mutherfucker couldn't sing worth a damn. All my favorite singers couldn't sing. Kick his fucking teeth in. Stomp his head to mush. Fuck Bob Dylan. Fuck Fuck Fuck. Fuck Bob Dylan. It's in way he sings the power and resonance-horseshit. Its all horseshit. Posturing. Affecting. Jeff Mangum-let Jeff Mangum kick Bob Dylan's teeth in. Jeff is in his prime. He is now. Bob is over and done. Fork stuck. Roasted. I want that hotel. I want those teeth. I want them to rattle in a pouch that I carry on my belt, tied with leather straps and I pull them out in bars and tell the story of How I Kicked in Bob Dylan's Teeth. Jeff Mangum is in an aeroplane over the sea and he is on his way to kick Bob Dylan's teeth in. 

I want my money back. I would like to return the following items for a full refund: One set of teeth (lost rattling quality), one tongue (no longer working, cat got), two year subscription to Tomorowland (gift), one heavily used Persian rug (symbol kind of shaky from the get go), one organ donor card (no one buying), one nation (under god), one lamppost (working, caustic light on a street begging for a Bogart darkness-huddled, but cheerfully bitter), and one young girl (no longer young).

I can forgive everything. 

Room 319. No Bob Dylan. No top hat. No Jack Kerouac (kick his teeth in too for good measure). No guitar. But it a beautiful room and it should be since the money was April's. I want to go shopping. I want a new suit. Designer shoes. Kiehl's shaving cream. Seven bottle of scotch. Greater self understanding. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward Jeff Mangum.

Judah said: We spent all the time talking about you.

I said: Why.

Judah said: Because she loves you.

I said: Nothing.

She is crying when I call. I can't cry. I want to cry. I want to feel. It's awkward. I should not have called. I should have gone home. I should give Bob his teeth back before he tries to gum that steak. This is how I hurt.





Maya and I meet for dinner at a Brazilian restaurant in the village. We both quickly get quite drunk on fruity cocktails. I don't want to tell her I am leaving until later. I don't want to spoil the evening that way. Maya is apologetic. I feel apocalyptic and out of control. I am funny. I am attentive. She is exuberantly telling me all about the agency for the five thousandth time, what they had done today and what they still needed to do tomorrow and in the future. I am enthralled with her teeth. I want to dream about her teeth. Her baby teeth falling out. Her adult teeth coming in. I want to dream the history of her teeth. The Rum is warm and friendly and she is very happy and we are forgiving each other for something or other, it isn't important. I interrupt her to tell her about Dean. She can't believe he actually just got on a plane and left. The whole thing is starting to sound surreal to me too, a dream I had-Dean's teeth flying to France, rotting on cheap wine and the chewing the rind because he is a polite traveler. But when I try to charge dinner on the credit card, the reality of his departure comes roaring home. I am sitting on almost three thousand dollars that I'm giving to April tomorrow. Maya pays the bill. As we walk home through Chinatown, I tell her that I have to leave. I feel like an absolute fool. I try to explain that I can't be in New York right now and that I can't do the job and that I don't know why-but above all it has nothing to do with her and certainly nothing to do with Judah or even Bob Dylan. 

Her eyes fill with tears, but she keeps saying that she wants me to do what I need to do. She's lying. She wants me to stay. I can see it in her eyes, she desperately wants me to stay. Late at night I feel her get out of bed. I hear the broken chair squeak and the flick of lighter. She is fumbling absently with the twist tie; her nails pick at it making a sound like a harp. 

In the morning there is a note. I want to spend more time with you, will you meet me for lunch? I gather up my things, drag them down stairs and pile them back in the Maxima. Upstairs I sit at the kitchen table and smoke a cigarette. I crush it out on the Persian rug.