path: root/tomorrow/ch7/ch7.txt

Drip sandcastle dreams hang on a wire -- hear it on the national news -- Los Angeles still like Mexico City -- ocean of light -- hanging on by a thread -- photographs of the living dead --  electronic reality -- computer saves man -- regrets act -- one up -- two down -- five up -- squirrels scamper trees -- disappointment -- click clack --  trees -- wheels -- tuffs of white cotton -- the rumble of thunderheads -- cigarette ash -- rain holding off -- huddle around Roman fires -- the roots -- scatter cameos -- finger scrap rock -- tiny handholds -- Palisades like valley below -- roadside conversations -- we'll wait here -- morning -- cigarettes -- lighters -- flames --  inhale -- exhale.

Everything is working.

It's on. 

Or the talk of it is on. There is talk of it being on, or going on, or being ongoing. It's hard to say the way they circle around it. Dates come up. Things approach a plan but then the crest of on receeds, a wake of variables trailing ocean debris across the sand. And sand it will be. The plan has come that far. It will be sand and it will be foreign sand. In the background there will be the murmur of languages against the farther off babble of surf and there will pool, Scratch is insistent on pool, though none of us are sure why when there is an ocean right there, but no, Scratch must have his cabana and his pool and his divorcees. He is going on about the splendor of expatriate divorcees, loaded down with bags of money and free time and lusting after cabana boys who are reluctant because they fail to see the money tied to the sagging skin and diamonds in that are trapped in the wrinkles of bone -- shrunk flesh.

Chloe wants mangos and papayas and passion fruit and guava and coconut necture tickled with rum to wash them down, to lounge in the warm tropical breezes that blow in from spice islands, jungle laced beaches bejeweled with palm fronds, brown skinned natives in clinking abalone necklaces walking down jungle trails, the foliage is glistening, the moonlight reflecting off the beads of water on the leaves... the chirping twilight of cricket dreams.... 

Dean isn't so limited, he believes in the whole world. We swill syrah in dark country cellars... We sit on latticed patios in the Italian countryside drinking chianti... We pick olives and play chess with the Greeks and take a ferry out to Crete... We walk the dusty camel choked streets of Morocco and catch the Marrakech Express across the desert... We fly biplanes low over African savannas out to the Ivory Coast where we catch freighters to Brazil and sail up the Amazon to take Yage with the natives....





This afternoon the air is a harem dancer bejeweled in sequins and dripping opium honey from her succulent breasts. She slides slippery wet through the front door, traces of her slick the doorknob and the house smells of white orchids, pomegranates and peach blossoms. She weaves through handing out mosquitoes and the drifting off with gusts of a passing hurricane whose wake has left a lingering, crisp sadness,  biting at the afternoon with frosty shark teeth.

A map of central america is spread bethenth the coffeetable glass and between hands Scratch taps and points at roads and towns like a child at the smithsonian.







Poker then strip club then sex scene with Maya. End.

Chapter eight 



 

Cards keep flipping up and money changes hands. Brown liquor flows down my throat and my little pile of ones quickly diminishes. I had intended to clean them all of a few dollars -- damn beginner's luck. I borrow a twenty from Jimmy and then another. Not only am I not getting the cards, but also, for once in his life, Dean is. He takes hand after hand, a beaming smile lights his face each time he leans over the coffee table and drags a big pile of quarters and ones over to his end.

Dean's in one of his expansive moods, he's feeling free and reaping the rewards of not caring about his actions. He rattles on about a book I loaned him. He has a fresh -- faced enthusiasm for the book's subject -- memes. Memes are the idea counterpart of genes. The book argues that ideas, like physical characteristic, are passed on hereditarily, but with a little more leeway than genetics. For instance racism is hereditary, it's passed down from parents to children just like a gene, so they call it a meme... It traces a lot of western thought that way, the way in which thoughts are replicated from one generation, or even person, to another... Dean is arguing that our memes, our very thoughts are not our own; we are merely replicating the ideas of our ancestors.

"So, wait a minute now," Ulric cuts in, "in the old nature vs. nurture you're coming down on the nurture side?"

"Well yes and no. I don't think it's either exclusively, a happy marriage of both, but that's not the point..." Dean has a puzzled look on his face and I can tell that even he isn't sure what the point is. "What I was getting at is that there is finally a language for talking about how ideas are transmitted; how the virus of language does it's work, how it moves from host to host..." Dean licks his lips in satisfaction. 

Ulric sits back in heavy thought. "Who cares though? I mean it may or may not be true, and there may or may not be ways of proving it in either direction, but none of that has on any consequence on how you live life... Oh and it's your bet there memeboy... what's it gonna be?" He gives Dean a sarcastic look.

Dean stares him down, throws in three dollars and continues without pause. "That's where you stop though. What I want to know is how the screws turn... how you disassemble reality for someone and put it back together in a new way? Essentially," he draws long on his cigarette, "how do you make a lasting change in your beliefs?"

Ulric grunts, "Try a thousand mikes of liquid acid...."

Dean smiles. "I mean without drugs. Although maybe that would help me loosen up a bit... I don't know what I think about memes yet. I need to give it more thought. Besides I got this hand." With three aces, he most certainly does. 

Ulric throws his cards down in disgust and leans forward to light a cigarette. For the time being, Jimmy and I are resigned to silent losing. It suits me. Ulric takes a drag and seems to be sizing up Dean. "Alright Dean, how would you go about making a permanent change in your beliefs or should I say approach to life?"

"Either or." He picks up the cards. "Well," Dean says shuffling as he talks, "for instance when I was in Maryland I tried on a set of beliefs to see how they fit me...." He puts his cigarette in the ashtray and slowly deals out two cards to each of us. "What I found," he says, "was that I couldn't live that so -- called normal life... white picket fence that sort of thing, but interestingly enough, I'm still in love with Alexis. I realized that in order for me to be with Alexis I had to get my shit together first and at this juncture I don't really want to do that. So the question arises why don't I want to do that? Where did I get the belief that I shouldn't do that?" 

"What do you mean by get your shit together?" Jimmy interrupts. 

Dean shrugs and lies back on the couch. "You know what I mean --  figure out what I want out of life and how I'm going to go about getting it."

Jimmy sits up excited and starts waving his hands as he talks. "See that's what I mean when I keep saying I need to figure something out in my life. What am I going to do, that's what I keep asking myself... Do I want to be with Chloe and do that life or do I want to... you see what I'm getting at?"

"Is your relationship with Chloe that involved?" Dean asked. "I don't mean to pry, but it seems like all you two do is fight... I mean maybe you should start exploring other directions." Dean runs his fingers through his hair, coating them with grease, and flips up three cards -- the nine of clubs, the six of hearts and the queen of diamonds. Jimmy studies the flop before answering Dean. The silence is uncomfortable, I think maybe Dean has overstepped his bounds with Jimmy and the look on Dean's face says he's thinking it too. Or else he doesn't have a hand. 

"Well see," Jimmy's voice betrays no irritation at the question, "With Chloe and I there's no growth, no forward movement of the relationship, and for a while I thought it was because I'm this ambitious person and she's not, but lately I've realized that it's me. I'm all ambition and no direction" Jimmy's eyes take on the preternatural glow that he gets when he's about to launch into one of his passionate diatribes against himself. He seems to be hovering right on the edge of illumination, but he's unable to take that last step. I know the feeling. Someday something will happen to push him up it. Or someone...

Jimmy over -- analyzes his life, picking it to pieces, thinking he can reassemble it back to some greater whole when really what he needs is more pieces to build with. "At this point," he says, "Chloe is the one that's growing, not me." Dean nods his head and Jimmy closes his eyes and begins to speak very slowly, as if picking through the rubble of a demolished building. "I keep thinking that I'm having these grand realizations, and maybe I am, but I have the same realization everyday and I don't act on it. I need to act, to move forward so that I have something to bring to the table so to speak. And maybe it's as simple as finding a career or a job or whatever I don't know. I only know that I have to change something in me."

Dean flips up the queen of spades and suddenly the hand takes a turn. I have the queen of hearts as a down card. They are lost in conversation and I quietly raise the stakes to three dollars. Jimmy is the only one who hesitates.

 Ulric sits up and checks his hand before throwing in his money. "See with Rose and I, we both started growing in opposite directions, and the hard part was that it was because I changed the things in me that I didn't like. Now I keep trying to change her even though I know I can't. So changing things in myself changed things in our relationship and ultimately, I now know that we aren't meant to be together." His voice drops to a tragic whisper, "But that doesn't make it any easier to let her go." 

Dean nods, "Of course not, that's a totally separate thing." He lights a fresh cigarette and cocks his head back staring at the ceiling. "People advance mentally throughout life," he goes on, "they pass through life in steps, accomplishments, experiences, epiphanies...pick a word. When two people meet that are advancing at the same rate, a bond is formed. A union of the minds so to speak." He blows smoke rings up to the ceiling clearly enjoying his role of analyst. "What happens to me is I keep advancing, sometimes speeding up, or slowing down, but usually speeding way up, and the other person is left behind. Thus there's that separation feeling at one point where you wake up saying what the fuck is going on, why am I here? For me, no matter what I do, that seems to happen after about two years..."

The last card dealt is the king of spades. I again put in three dollars. Jimmy raises me another three and I raise him two more. He calls me and I lay down the queens and win the hand -- finally.

"But do you think it's possible that two people can move at the same speed for longer than two years?" Ulric asks

"Personally? No. However, my addition to that theory is that two people can move at different paces, but they still move together. In different directions, same direction, whatever, but there is still a continuity. And these two people make up the middle ground by learning from one another. If you're not learning from someone, it's hard to love them. But, more often than not, what happens to me is we move at the same pace, and then two years down the road they want to stay there, thus the huge schism." He smiles to himself for minute, "And then you meet a Muslim who makes you reevaluate... or maybe that just happens to me." He laughs.

Ulric and Jimmy have very earnest, sad looks on their faces. I can tell Dean is enjoying his role as the teacher perhaps some good has come out of two failed marriages and three broken engagements. "See, as a relationship progresses you go from meeting in the middle somewhere to being in the middle. Once you're together as one so to speak, there is no middle to meet in and that's what chokes that life out of the relationship." He glances over at Ulric and sees the pain in his face, "Sorry, if you don't want to talk about this, I understand, and shit, look who you're talking to...like I fucking know... I mean the older I get the less I know. Or maybe getting older really isn't anything other than being alive long enough to see people's patterns repeat, terminate, and regerminate -- especially your own. If I've learned anything its that you control your position and whatever you choose is just that. Empty or not at the end of the day you face your own reflection in the toilet water, if it makes you feel better and more complete to have attachments hanging off that reflection, more power to 'ya, and good luck. I'm a narcissist, I only want to see my glowing sexy image in the off white piss -- water." He laughs at himself and shakes his head. "Love is emotional alchemy. You're trying to take things that don't tangibly exist and apply to them to so much flesh and hair. So to get back to what Ulric asked, I love her... I still do, but we aren't on the same page." Dean cracks a smile in my direction. "I can't be on the same page with someone if I'm not even numbering my pages. There's no way for them to even know who, what, or where I'm coming from."

No one is paying attention to the game anymore. I shuffle quietly, flipping the cards from hand to hand trying to make every fourth one an ace, trying to arrange the deck to deal myself a winning hand. They are spinning words of pseudo -- wisdom, as if they actually know what they're talking about, but really they're just thinking outloud. I deal out the cards clockwise and check my hand. I have a two of diamonds and a three of clubs. I clearly know nothing.

Jimmy starts back on his self -- depreciating rant. He wants to figure out what to do with his life. He wants direction. "I mean what's the point of coming to a realization about yourself or having some insight into your behavior if you can't do anything with it?" He asks. 

"Jesus Jimmy, you're the one whose always talking about parabolas and that sort of thing," Dean says. "You just approach that point, pass by it and move on again, what you come away with is only a glimpse."

"But how do I turn the glimpse into a meaningful action?" Jimmy asks.

Dean shrugs, "I have no idea. Like the genie in Aladdin said.... INFINITE POWER itty -- bitty living space." He laughs and takes a drag of his cigarette. He tilts his head to one side as if in deep thought and then, after a moment, he continues, "Well I tell you what... I've had a realization or two recently and I have to tell you gentleman that I will be leaving next week. I took my old job back in California."

They both look up in shock.

"Well damn. Really?" Jimmy sits up. "You're leaving us? I mean that's great man, I'm happy for you, but shit we're gonna miss you. It won't be the same without your lunatic ass around here." Jimmy throws his arm around Dean and gives him a bear hug.

"Ya Dean, I feel like I just got to know you and now you're leaving." Ulric looks hurt again. "It's not Sil is it man? Because if he's kicking you out, you're more than welcome to stay at my place for a while."

"No, but I do appreciate the offer Ulric." Dean flicks his cigarette in the ashtray. "I'm leaving because there's nothing here for me to do. I feel like I need to accomplish something. I finished my book, of course no one wants to publish it, but at least I did it. That's what I've been working on for the last year or two and now that it's gone I feel a sense of emptiness in my soul. Not to get too hippified on you, but it really does feel that way. Like I broke up with a girl or something. So, being in limbo, I thought why not go out and make some money? I can't do that here so I took the old job. I'm gonna live with my dad and do some saving. At least that's the plan, who knows though...."

For a while all attention returned to the game. The sound of cards skidding softly across the table holds all the memes I need right now. Jimmy finds the map that Dean and I had been looking at earlier and he spreads it out on the floor again. He sees the red lines we drew tracing the ideal route from New York to Paris by ship and then down the Africa...

"You going to Europe Sil?" he asks pointing at the big red dot in the middle of France.

"Europe?" I say, thinking it over, "that's about the last place I'd go right now."

"Really?" Ulric looks surprised. "No desire to go to France? I can see you in France Sil." Ulric is cross -- eyed from the scotch and his attempt to size me up is comical; I can't help laughing.

"Well, I mean if a ticket were handed to me I'd take it," I say, "but it's not my first choice by any means. If I were to go somewhere I'd go to India or China, South America maybe, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica...." I get lost in private thoughts. Dean finishes dealing the hand and gets up and pours himself another drink. "Not me," he yells from the kitchen, "I gotta see Paris. I've read too many books, seen to many films... I need to set foot in Paris... live there for while... I'm working on this one guy who likes my writing... I'm trying to get him to put me up over there... the trick is going to be getting there."

The trick is always getting there. The destination is the easy part. Play that game you used to play as a child; spin the globe and see where your finger stops it. That's the way to go. The gypsy blood in my veins makes me want to travel constantly, I can only stand to be in one place for about three months and then I have to leave... sometimes I come back and sometimes I don't. I'm starting to feel the itch again myself, the bones wanting to wander.... I have been in Athens almost six months without a vacation. I'm overdue. 

I check my down cards -- two aces. I bet a quarter. They all raise me. I stay in. Ulric throws the flop -- a queen of hearts and the other two aces. "Goddamn," Dean comments, "that's a rich hand somebody has." I smile at him. I bet a quarter and he folds. Ulric and Jimmy both raise me two dollars and so I raise them again. Dean throws out another card. More money cascades into the pot. Another card. More money. I keep raising their raises until the pot's well over fifty dollars. They call and I lay my aces with all the pomp and ceremony my little ego can manage. I rake it in. 

The thing with playing cards with your friends is that it's less about reading people than it is about good old -- fashioned luck. 

After saying goodbye to Dean and giving him their phone numbers and addresses, Ulric and Jimmy both head home for the night. "Nice fucking hand," Dean says when they're gone. "You stop to think how that happened?" He looks at me and a mischievous grin spreads over his face. I shrug. "For the record," he says, "I saw you trying to arrange the deck that one hand... but did you see me?" I have to laugh.

Dean and I stay up a while talking about cheating at cards and friendship and the meaning of all of this.... Before turning in we embrace and say goodbye. This time I don't think I will see him again for a quiet a while. We make one final bet for the night  -- we will meet in Tangiers, Morocco on September 10, 2002. No matter what happens we will be there. By the time I fall asleep, I'm already there.



The strobe overwhelms the blue glow and the girls begin the writhe, ellish wirthing serpentine bodies, no longer names, no longer girls no longer human, but gliding gilded serpents, movements caught in flickers of blinging whiteness and inky blue darkness, stop motion film, hair, skin, patterns of movement until the light and the shadows beome one. In the glimpses of faces across the catwalk I can see male teeth, shiny pale faces, tongues flick here and there, pass across lips and snake back down throats, and then a blue aquarium darkness, film slowed down. Twenty four to twelves and then six and the three, advancing three glimpses at a time in stop motion time lapse, bodies appearing not far from where they were left. And you can feel her movements, a girl caught in three frame bursts, she is never where she just was always one step ahead of her body and you can it passing into your guppy mouth, snaking down your throat, swallowing swollen calves, slender thighs, choking on garters, weakened by the memory of silk and spice and crusades abandoned long ago to the darkness of continets moving and her cunt tickling across your lips, catch in your throat, a gulp of air, some scent of dark blue shadow and the stomach and breasts, hard nipples that catch on the way down and head and hair swirling across your chin, gulps of cool blue shadow, down, all of it down, drink all of it down, blue and white and flesh and to see it from above... pictures spread across the floor. Sitting cross -- legged in the near darkness of late night shadow and gaslamp glow, light and shadow becoming one across the bedroom floor, giant shadows cast across a series of black and white photographs all taken from above. And you arrange the faceless heads in a half circle around the one, the one with the legs careening out from under the birds -- eye view of blond and cinnamon and cardemore. Out of focus and caught in flight, she moves in orbits, she holds a key and the knob is turning, light and shadow, digital and analog... the pictures caught in gusts, blowing up in little dust devils and then here onstage, whirling and weaving between her legs, circling under skirts, tugging at stocking and garters, caressing soft brown skin and disappearing into corset shadow, tugging electric nipples, still rising in ever widening circles up to the ceiling and disappearing through it, returning to the vantage point of origin, the vanishing point, right there on the horizon of what just happened and what hasn't yet,. And she takes you by the hand and leads through the beaded curtain of the doorway with hinges still attached, but door and knob and key long since vanished in to some murky ocean memory, a current welling toward the back, toward the corner, and into the shadow, the absense of light, a finger curling, something to follow, a motion trail,  a wake of smoke enveloping you in octopus shadow, tentacles reaching out and pulling you into a chair where you are tied to watch.

If you were to see this from a long way a way flickering light on a screen to reveal ashes flying off your skin in trumpet blasts... but you cannot, you will not, it is not. There are only the hurricanes to stir the coffee and bend the telephone poles, to warp the voices of far away, to call up secrets that are sleeping in dazzling peace behind a doorway far up from here, so high up that the knob is just out of your child arm stretch, but how wonderful it is just to see it floating there, out of reach and beautiful, glistening in this light, this artificial sun of closing time. 







I go in the bedroom and lock the door.

Outside. Falling leaves clink against the windowpane like broken china dolls. A half moon breast is visible through the clawing twig -- arms scratching at the void. I'm thinking of Maya and the first night we spent together. Later, after we had coffee. I walked her to her house. I remember the smell of Jasmine or Frankincense or Myrrh, a beautiful pungent odor that wafts through this world all the time  -- you catch it in the fall air, tangible but just barely, it hangs on the edge of the known and unknowable. 

I open the window and study the frosted -- flake remnants of Kudzu crisping on the vine, under the bushes, under the trees, under the stars -- a stale brown rug slick with freezing rain. The faint light of Jimmy's window silhouettes a branch and its remaining leaves, the hangers, the ones who won't let go -- car crashes, heart attacks, train wrecks. The light looks warm -- toward the light coma -- stumbling, blind -- eyed memory.

 And then she kissed me. There was the taste of hot cigarette smoke on her tongue; I caught it greedily the way plants grow to the sun, drawn by the familiar. She tasted like orange blossoms or smelled like them or felt like them, powdered sprinkled orange blossoms. They were in her eyes, the smell came out of her eyes and then she opened them and stared at me for a while hanging on the edge of my lips. Enormous arcing eyebrows of perfume.

The steady erratic pelting of rain sounds like a thousand drunken crystal goblets pelting a Russian fireplace, Cossacks dancing in circles, Dostoyevski dreams. Bearskin rugs. No fireplace -- hearth. Gas lamps. And powdered crystal sprayed on a stone floor.  

Earlier a letter: I'm on the limp dehydrated grass of Central Park, gnats swarming under this tree. I have gnats for you Sil. The shade seems hotter than the actual sun. Perspiring. Parched. And yet all my discomfort disappears when I read these carefully typed pages -- read in full -- twice. You  are my own private breeze.

There was no word, no sound, just lips resting together, sticky, warm, honey kiss. We went inside and sat on the couch talking for a while. We went upstairs and lay down on her bed. She rose up in tight leather pants out of a sea of flowering colors -- Jasmine, Sunflower, Scarlet Sage, Rocket Larkspur, Lupines, and Butterfly Weed. There were rollicking colors everywhere in my mind, indigo and vermilion, violet, lavender, and softer tones, pastels and baby's -- breath -- white. 

It's a toy scene -- Russian hearth, nutcrackers dancing, plastic soldiers huddled in the dark shadows of vines. A steady backbeat thuds through the wall. The living room has rhythm. Little percussive grunts and muffed squeals accent and fill. 4/4. Marching toward climax.

I'm working at Garden on the Green... sold my soul for the table scraps... another hireling. on a smoke break. Armed with pen and paper to defend the travesty of wanting to feel loved. The lake is spiked with moonly light, sharp and jagged on thousands of ripples. Once --  there is the kiss, then the cycle becomes inevitable. Nipples turn to jagged granite and everything pools and secretes as if waiting for sensual annihilation -- a mingling and mangling of identities. A death of one? Or both? A devouring and subordination? No -- a polarizing rather -- a balance of two integrities, charging electrically, on with the other, yet with centers hard as diamonds -- like stars. Do you feel loved? Do I?

She grabbed a handful of my hair and held it, her lips bit at my neck. I could feel heat panting in my ear. Her smooth breasts pressed softly against my chest. She rolled off me, pulled her pants down and climbed on top of me. She swayed there for a few seconds, murmuring to herself. She bird -- picked at my belt, peeling the husk from a coconut and then in one gruff movement she fished out my cock and squeezed it with the tips of her fingers. Her lips pressed together and she leaned her head against it and closed her eyes. It was then that I heard the bass fading in and the sharp tap of a snare drum, and I felt her tongue circling. 

The cat girl enshrouded in black lace accented with a notorious red feather boa rises to one elbow -- need a ray of hope -- from where she has been reclining on a velvet divan. She cocks her head lazily and after a yawn full of boredom and nastiness, calls for another martini.... Do you think that when you want everything you're dangerously close to nothing? I wanted to thank you for feeding me the inspiration to question, if only for the insatiable taste of a question...

After a few minutes I pulled her up to my lips. A devouring insubordination amid the tumbling slow -- motion sound of shattering glass, falling leaves, splintering moonlight, distant living room backbeat, icy rain crying into hail...Water pouring in through the ceiling, sleet and hail collapsing back to water, rivulets on the window, pelted kudzu pulling the stars under. Her nipples like soft puffs of rain sliding down my tempered, glass fingers. The roof gives way, the ground opens up and the earth will swallow us one day. Its better that way. Inverted love carry you up on the way down, riding tidal waves, tiny moon sheared ripples across centuries and continental drifts and shifts and up and down and over. Carry me to the  mountains, to a cave on a wind -- howling ridge, rape me like Lilith. Glaciers receding. Gnats swarming out of the caves. Fecund warm diseases licking there way up your spine. Its okay. Its necessary. The rainsleethail still tickles desire. The snapping snare drum echo of time oozes through the walls. Pop pop -- pop pop -- pop pop -- feel you more the less you know. Cossacks setting up camp in a deserted farmhouse and Fyodor calls for another martini... One more drink for the diseased, one more sleep, one more lover until your up with the sun .and the acrid burnt smell of sidewalk. 

Sticky tapioca squirting thick on stomachs and breasts. 

Reach over and grab a pack of cigarettes off the floor. Pull one out and light it. 

Lilith had to go. Nothing was left to the imagination and so he sent her away. Or she left. Packed her suitcase and caught a clipper -- ship to where the continents were shifting. Wrote letters and fell in love with a man in the sky. Went blind staring at the image. 

Look at her now. Pass her the cigarette and wonder how this happened -- tangled up in metaphor and cool blue love -- diving off the shores of lost continents. Walk naked to the kitchen and pour another glass of vodka or whiskey or water or wine or change one from the other on your proud way back to the bed. 

She has an earthy ethereal mixture to her skin, makes her seem at once detached and warm. Her lips purse teasingly around the filter of her cigarette and eyebrows arc off gray -- blue eyes, dyed black hair tussled atop her head. Blue -- gray eyes clouded with the same thing you can feel, something trance -- like -- consummate excitement. She puts the cigarette to your lips and you inhale deeply.

Later: dream about staring at the sun.

Waitress #34 misses you.













Eight

Starts with tapping at the window, ends with this section which itself needs to end with Jimmy and Chloe all bleary eyed... hell yes we're going to new york Dean has pills with a street value of fifteen thousand dollars on him I'm going to new york....





The faceless monster -- power -- no one person --  group -- control everything -- multi -- headed monster -- biting itself -- information potential exists -- attacking heads -- destroying itself -- end times -- space and word alone -- unsettling thought -- dependency -- things start to think -- how do you draw the lines then -- where does the word go -- in the beginning -- sure --  what about at the end -- 

Morning --  I am standing in the doorway smoking a cigarette. Fall is playing with Winter in the front yard. I'm watching the near freezing rain pelting through the trees. A strange thing has happened in Dean's absence -- I no longer need sleep. For two weeks now my brain has not stopped running in loops. It refuses to rest. It used to take an alarm to inspire movement before noon; now I wake up at five in the morning and stare at the ceiling. This morning I have decided to admit defeat. I am up before sunrise. I am watching the sun poking over the horizon to the east, where the storm has not yet hit. There is an infinite sadness to the way the trees glisten in the light. The gleaming raindrops look like a miniature skyline, buildings at night, little twinkling windows, like Manhattan seen from Williamsburg. Reflected microcosms glitter off falling leaves, reds, browns, and oranges, sparkling like the abode walls of a pueblo -- New Mexico or Old.

In Mexico City back alleys -- soot -- covered adobe walls -- dark eyes peer from shadowy doorways. It's late in the evening, warm orange smog -- light paints the sky and suffuses the city with an alien glow. The air is brisk, but not freezing. You run your fingers along the crumbling walls like a child, dragging at the chips of loose plaster and looking up absently at the sky. Nothing separates you from the peering eyes, the doorways and the tables littered with scraps of food retrieved by boys selling Chiclets in the streets downtown. Beans, slops of meat, ground dog bone, porridges boiled cheap over smoky wood fires. Stalks of plants grow here and there in the tiny yards between buildings. Chilies hang drying in the eaves. Second story railings are a riot of sapphire, indigo, vermilion and emerald; the smell of sage, rosemary, and cilantro wafts out open windows. The flat roofs feed the dripping ceilings, rain gutters leak to water plants hanging from the rafters and balconies. The plants suffer through life, gasping in the ozone and covering over with smoggy dust. The pavement turns to dirt farther out, and is eventually overgrown by trees on the slopes of the mountains. This is the one street, the street, the mainline artery running through and carrying the heart of the matter of matter. This is how it goes and goes and goes. Marching in twos, little children jump and play in an alley off to the right. Two blocks north they are digging up the newest pyramid in the Aztec caper and the ghosts are swimming through the ether. You can see their pallid shadows sailing across the crimson glow of the sky. The ghostly, billowing sails catch century old winds tugging them like clipper ships through the Panama Canal. Phantasmal chatter fills the street like lemurs cackling in the jungle.

Your fingernail catches in a chip of plaster still clinging to the wall. The ghosts light up against the clouds, climbing and dancing in the sky. Priestly ghosts offer still -- beating human hearts up to the gods, clamoring at the silent sky and then turning to look at you. Look what we have done. Here is my heart... eat... it is good. Take, this is my body... Mysterious ceremonies carried out amongst a cacophony of meaningless gibberish; indistinguishable figures twist and turn and carve until there is an order and meaning to it all. The priest drives his blade into the chest of a sacrifice, splitting the sternum in one smooth blow. Out comes the heart and in a delicate pirouette the priest turns, pauses, looks for an instant, and then screams, hurling the bloody heart down the side of a pyramid. The gods give an empty laugh. Splattering, lopsided, bounces carry the heart to it's rest in the dirt, under the floorboards of time, the telltale heart beating under the pavement of centuries. The archeologist's pick finds the priest's sacred knife as a token reminder, wrapped in muslin or gauze, mummified at 17,000 feet atop Machu Pechu in Peru, or here, rotting in the middle of the street. The children in the alleyway laugh and play. Their language is like pancakes, laid out flat and easy to hear, smeared by syrupy tongues. The priest smiles sadly down at the watching masses, realizing that he will be dust under the boots of centuries and no one will know what he knows.

We think we will wake up. We think there will be a point at which everything is made clear. The whole world will transform itself into a crystalline diamond plateau on which all the answers are self -- evident and you will understand. Your feet will be light as air. You will dance over the diamond floors and glide in perfect, truthful bliss. You will dance quietly to the sound of Frank Sinatra crooning about autumn in New York.... But the image will fail you; the crystal will crack and shatter in a million diamond drill bits, piercing your flesh as you scream deafly, in silent agony. 

We think that we will wake up. There is vast machinery purporting to wake us up. There are religions, sciences, methods, prayers, and wheels of karma and darma. Men hang from crosses. Men flagellate themselves on mountaintops. Men twist into pretzels on street corners. Men proclaim the illusion of the world. Men offer salvation. Men sell trinkets for distraction. Men teach meditation techniques. Men douse themselves in gasoline and burn before our eyes. Men crawl on their knees because their legs have been amputated to keep us free. Every path to enlightenment has been tried. Every shriek has been screamed. There are fifty thousand roads diverging in the woods and they all lead nowhere. 

There are no gates of heaven, but there are gates to heaven. There isn't a hell, but there is hell. There are no sins, but there are sins. There is no love, but there is such a thing as love. No one is there, but everyone is waiting. You are feeling overwhelmed, paranoid and misunderstood. You want to think that you are not alone. You want to band together, to bond, to hide out, and to mark yourself with primitive lingual tattoos, so that the angel of death will pass over you in a momentary lapse of reason. You don't understand what is taking so long. You don't understand why, if things are possible, they don't happen now. You want to know when the synergy of life will reach out to your neck of the woods. You want to go out. You want to be with your friends. You want to go out Friday and you want to go forever. Forever back or forever forward, somewhere into that brave night, that tired, old, bored allegory. You know you bought into a lie, and you know you're perpetuating it. You know that everything is a lie, but it all means something. Did I say you? I mean me.

I am hungry, restless and deeply confused. I can smell the streets of Mexico and remember the beat of Aztec heart -- sacrifices. It courses through the house, driving me mad. I pace the living room like a caged cat, circling in big arcs that bend strategically at the vortices of two ashtrays. The afternoon is a priest hearing confession, masturbating to the maid's obscene tales as she drags them out in full regaling detail. There are only us now, you and I. If this has meaning then it can only be that we are we, and I, I, and you, you, and us, us.

I see Maya. I see Dean. I see Sean and Katherine, Jimmy and Chloe, Ulric, Scratch, and everyone I have ever known. I think of how much all of us have suffered and how great the sorrow of the earth must be. So immense a thing as to defy imagination, to smash metaphors to bits and completely eradicate the word. To render words trite and useless. I feel it come on in a terrifying rush. Adrenaline floods my veins, my heart speeds up, beating so fast that it feels motionless. My palms coat with sweat, my skin flushes, and for the first time I am afraid. I fear for my life. I fear death and what it could bring. I fear the voices I hear. I fear the growling and singing and whispering and chattering of the dead. I look out the window fully expecting the Aztec shaman to be standing there, holding up my heart, smiling. I smell something. The smell hits me like a sledgehammer, there is something blood curdling familiar about it. It is the smell of death. The smell of my death. You can get it without dying, you can smell it lurking around the corner and feel it closing in on you. Death is a thick smell, a reminder that the body is temporal and hangs by a thread, liable to snap without a moment's notice. 

The Tibetans claim demons will prey on you as you enter the gates of the afterworld. Those who don't know where they are, the ones that came in on bus wrecks or an earthquake, they don't stand a chance. Neither do those that never realized what is going on in this life. The ones who refuse to let go of the uniquely human games, the politics, the barter system, the Madison Avenue rewrite department, the beggarly, sickly creatures, the religious, the lawmakers, the law upholders, the money greasers, the shit in the wind who have forgot their human roots -- that human is humility. Arrogance grows like a cancer, breeds with money and mutates, until the body turns rigid and crusts over with hubris. Their bodies are stiff prisons of hatred that can only be escaped when the winds blow in the atomic smell of death, scorching them clean -- salvation. Steady...wait 'til you see the whites of their eyes... the end of history. Everything has an ebb and flow, surges come in waves. There is nothing to be saved from except yourself.

Smoking filterless cigarettes, listening to the voices trailing in from the neighborhood around me, voices from the cottages up the hill, voices of wheels winding down the road, voices leaves in the wind, voices of rain pelting the ground, a masterpiece composition of harmonized waves, sound, the trigger behind the motion. Dancing eyes, hungry and spiral with giddiness... I throw out the tired old man mind. A blur of images, swirling words, sounds, smells, miraculous warmth, crawling embers on the flesh... Digging, keep digging. We're all great tunnelers, mining after the beautiful, but now I see the ugly creeping in around the edges, the black on the starry night. Van Gogh and his goddamn ear always creeping in at the edges. Digging fast and furious: tunnelers. Roots and the little blooms -- the moment  -- the purity  -- the wavelength --  the transitions burned like hydrochloric acid onto memory film. Scar tissue that will never go away.

I'm in the middle of an afternoon drink when I notice the rainbow in the kitchen. At first I think it looks wrong because of bad indoor lighting, but then I notice that it's a reverse rainbow, the spectrum in the opposite order -- purple on top. I watch it from the couch for a while, but as it begins to fade, I get up, walk to the kitchen and sit down underneath it. I lean back against the wall and light a cigarette. The sun shifts and the rainbow disappears, replaced by a simple, clear, beam of sunlight, that strikes the wall about eight inches above my head and climbs slowly, but noticeably, upward. The cigarette dangles in my hand. I watch the thin trail of smoke separate into two shades of gray. One is light and salient, like clouds wisping across the summer sky. The other is darker, a somber thundershower in the evening -- carcinogenic tars. They separate in the relative darkness near my hand, rise up, and then explode into the light. There is visible burst where the particles of smoke suddenly pitch the beams of light back to my eye. An explosive nanosecond that happens so fast that by the time you notice it, it's long gone past. The two trails of smoke swirl and mingle gradually, dancing through the sunbeam like two girls in the dark corner of a nightclub. The ominous blue stream wears a black leather corset, laced tight in the back. It moves boldly, stiffly, constrained in ribbed fabric. The ethereal gray stream wears a silk robe with embroidered Chinese designs. It moves feathery soft and loose, seductively spinning in the light. As they continue up toward the ceiling, they lose their distinction and disappear into the chaos. Cloud patterns bursting in spring skies, a gurgling stream circling around rocks, the leaves of an aspen tree seen from a distance, the movement of migratory herds, the rise and fall of the Nile over millennia, the smoke from a cigarette... Everything has a pattern. The pattern has a pattern, which forms a fabric where time pools like a glacial lake. It tickles off slowly, minute by minute, second by second, but the reservoir always remains the same. 

I am falling into a whirlpool of time. It consumes me and spins me around the room. I am dripping off the precipice into the dark unknown. I have to run to smooth the change... feels slow motion... diving... hit the water like a torpedo... the waves slip out in a circular arc. My eyes smart from the smoke. Body electric, fluidly suspended in time, carried slip -- slow, up into the magic of the beyond. Echoes abound like a caged sun gone supernova. It atomizes and re-forms as the cool wave hits the skin, smooth blue skin.