SUNDAY a Project Presented to the Faculty of The

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SUNDAY

A Project

Presented to the faculty of the Department of Humanities

California State University, Sacramento

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Humanities

Kyle Tolan

FALL 2015

Kyle Tolan

A Project

Kyle Tolan

Approved by:

______, Committee Chair Victoria Shinbrot

______, Second Reader Harvey Stark

______Date

iii

Student: Kyle Tolan

I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this project is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the project.

______, Graduate Coordinator ______Victoria Shinbrot Date

Department of Humanities

iv Abstract

SUNDAY

Kyle Tolan

The purpose of utilizing the novel as a basis for this thesis is to connect the

competing theory, philosophy, and, especially social criticism used in the Humanities.

Rather than applying these concepts in the abstract, the novel format allows for a more

tangible and cohesive application of such concepts. Sunday deals with a large scope of

themes, and considers each of them through the format of a first person, stream-of- consciousness narrative. The story of Sunday takes place in a fictional, hyper-satirical,

American city in which contemporary mythos and ideology is purposefully accentuated.

Ultimately, by emphasizing generally obscured power structures to the point of satire, they are brought to their universalizing conclusions. The major theme of Sunday, and by association the theme that the protagonists’ inner-monologues are most focused around, is how and why the monolithic ideologies of the present swallow the particularities of existence and impose themselves onto subjective experience.

______, Committee Chair Victoria Shinbrot

______Date

v TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface...... viii

Prologue ...... 1

Chapter

1...... 7

2...... 22

3...... 37

4...... 46

5...... 54

6...... 66

7...... 79

8...... 86

9...... 91

10...... 102

11...... 113

12...... 121

13...... 132

14...... 143

vi 15...... 150

16...... 157

17...... 173

18...... 179

19...... 187

20...... 197

Epilogue ...... 203

Works Cited ...... 206

vii Preface

The problem with analyzing the present is that it actually works on us through

socio-historical manifestations and yet we are expected to accept it as it stands precisely

because we exist in the here and now. And to do that, we must find legitimation for the

ways in which we suffer or experience discontent in a civilization that purports to be the

apotheosis of life in the cosmos. And, if we accept the existentialist’s theory of the self

as an enduring process to get back to itself, then we know that suffering is unavoidable.

At the center of present society rests the void of the self, “like the dark matter of space

you’d only feel weighing and pulling on you and objects around you, but could never see

clearly” (195). That nothingness weighs and pulls on us whether or not we turn inwards to face it. And here is where the existentialist confronts the Hegelian approach to history

and the notion of an apotheosis in reason and reality: such methodology does not account

for the experience of the self in the here and now. More than that, this prophetic

supposition of the end of history is a theoretical construction that tends to ignore

particularistic identities in favor of a mass identity as defined by social institutions.

In a way, the individual is invested, though unconsciously (or as a somnambulist,

as Justin reiterates throughout the novel), towards an apotheosis in reality (“Final

Reality” as Hegel deems it), and the individual consciousness is submerged in “a grand

unity of the ideal mind” (Carruth viii). We might blame Hegel for taking the rationalism

that began in the Renaissance era and applying it as a nearly mathematical reconstruction

of human progress or for being too hopeful that progress’s logical conclusion would be a

system that “sublimated all negative or oppositional tendencies” into a refined unity. viii What really matters here, though, is that there is a predicted endpoint; that there is the

possibility of an apotheosis in ideology, thought and, by extension, in reality; and that

then, all of human history bends towards a conclusion. This conclusion—because it

follows out of an organic process of thesis plus antithesis equals synthesis—seems so

much like something that happens to us, as an inevitable consequence of history and the

mass.

The Hegel that maintains a grip on social theory is the Hegel that treats “history

as the visible development of a logical system” and seeks “the final explanation of events” through the dialectical “relationship between ideas” (Merleau-Ponty 128).

Perhaps most problematic of all, it is this Hegel that subordinates “the individual

experience of life to the life appropriate to ideas, as to a destiny” (Merleau-Ponty 128).

And it is this Hegel that existentialists from Kierkegaard on (the first to use “existence” with our modern sense of the word) take issue with. It is this Hegel that understands

“everything but his own historical situation,” and that has taken everything into “account but his own existence.” So too is it the Hegel who, as opposed to Foucault, sets himself outside context in order to “pretend ignorance of being the product of a certain individual at a certain time” and to “judge the world’s development and declare that it attains perfection” by being “outside all situations” (Merlau-Ponty 128). And this separation between the ideals of society and the context they are borne within in gives a false sense of legitimation and ontology to those ideals. As Justin tells us, “when [history] is forgotten or expelled entirely, men seem to do everything he does for no reason at all. By the absence of context, humankind does seem to become something quite sinister” (84). ix And yet, for Justin placing “it all back into context, and man seems somnambulistic, sleep walking towards the edge of history until he falls right off” (85).

In a sense Justin is critiquing the reification of history into a genealogy that has been supposed to have an endpoint. And if Hegel’s genealogical approach to history seems all too concerned with how the mass proceeds towards an apotheosis, it becomes a problem in reality when that approach becomes another part of the process of legitimation we use to sublimate the sense of oppression inevitable in a civilization that asks us to set aside the self, or else circumscribe the self within the boundaries of a rational order. The prophetic vision of a humanity advancing toward an ideal that can be realized in some palpable form, in effect, allows society to dispel all disputations any might have against it, claiming a victory for itself and then enforcing that idea of victory upon individual consciousness.

It can be said, then, that for both Hegel and Nietzsche consciousness is a process—for both, consciousness like history and ideology is part of a genealogy that is unfurling. And is there not something similar in Hegel’s idea of a “preconscious life” and Nietzsche’s notion of an individual’s ability to “think, feel, will, and recollect” and even “act” without coming “into consciousness?” In fact, the Hegel of The

Phenomenology of Spirit seems to believe that, while consciousness may attempt to reconcile itself with the objective world, the fact that that it never reaches that reconciliation is what allows consciousness to exist and to develop apart from the unfurling of history. Of course, at the end of history it is the most perfected form of consciousness that will act as the antithesis to the most perfected form of society. But, as x Nietzsche tells us, the ideal consciousness is one not conscious of itself—we might call it

a subconscious, if we can escape the Freudian connotations—and one certainly not

regulated by social demands. Volitional existence is possible “without its seeing itself as

it were in a mirror,” as Nietzsche explains and, yet, Hegel too knows that the problem

with consciousness lies in its own conceptualizing of itself. Justin himself recalls the

exact moment he saw himself in the sort of “mirror” Nietzsche metaphorically invokes,

telling us, as he stands before the locked doors of the Church on the Hill, that he is no

longer “the child, who’d crossed this threshold intuitively and with the doors open to him,

accepted off the hands of the ushers the program for the day whether or not it was

offered” (9). What he is getting at is a time before coming “into consciousness” (or self- consciousness) as Nietzsche identifies, dissolving himself into the “sublime cacophony into something other than I; part of a whole”—that is, actuating only the “communal and gregarious utility” of consciousness. Yet, as Justin tells us of his childish self, “five years old, and the mirror turned on him…he became I and I washed him away out of shame— the holy baptism of self-discernment” (9).

This “self-discernment” is presented as a form of death: “I drowned him just to shut him up. I drowned him so no one else would have to. He’d come up for air, wasting his breath on a shout or a laugh or a sob, and I’d have to drown him all over again. He doesn’t come up for air anymore. I murdered him and now, the doors remain shut” (9-

10). What makes this event so violent is not that he is separated from the “herd,” but that he now, having come into consciousness, must learn to negotiate his actions and speech in accordance to the status quo and think—or at the very least, translate his thinking—in xi the language of the mass. As Nietzsche tells us, “the development of speech and the

development of consciousness (not of reason, but of reason becoming self-conscious) go

hand in hand.” And for Justin, the conceptualization of consciousness under the terms of

language represents irreconcilability between the autonomous-self and the one defined as

it is under social terms.

But he goes further. The development of Justin’s consciousness, having, at the

moment “the mirror turned on him,” become self-consciousness, begins with “childish egotism” that “God was listening in.” But, like society as a whole who, as Justin tells us will “one day rationalize [God] out of existence,” Justin “relinquishes [his] cognizance unto God” up until, he is alienated from God (as he is “banished from this house of God” in the first chapter) through rationalization. As he tells us, now it is a “faceless creature who judges, not unlike the God I created as a child, not unlike the conscience that overrules free-will, not unlike the panopticon teeming with incessant unblinking gazes without sockets” (79) that he narrates his existence for. In a sense, for himself and society as a whole, not unlike in Nietzsche’s version of the death of God, he is saying

“we used to talk to God, until we killed him, and now we talk to ourselves.” When the loss of “belief in God and human progress has eliminated the meaning of existence and has made human existence essentially purposeless and hence plainly opposed to reason”

(Esslin 671), the true absurdity of the ideals of human freedom—and of course, ideology

altogether—becomes pronounced. Likewise, in the context of Freud and Foucault, we

come to understand that in the place of God, post-enlightenment society enervates its own

legitimation, through individuals in a process that makes autonomy illusory, and only xii further separates—however unconsciously aware we are—our “desires from what the world offers us” (Bennet 10). And yet the death of God, and the disorientation of consciousness into absurdity, is incurred through the same conceptualizing process that gave rise to God—as Justin tells us, “that same certainty that gave [God] life shall one day kill [God]” (52).

But the death of God, for Justin at least, represents an end to the context he originally sets his “ceaseless soliloquy unto.” If “[t]he existentialist knows that the self…is present, here and now, a suffering existent,” then “any system of thought that overrides this suffering is tyrannical” (Carruth viii). And while Justin admits he has

“submerged [himself] in the viscous oil of the pit” (8) of “the nothingness that swirls beneath us,” (8) he senses that sort of tyranny encroaching on the congregation (and, later, himself). He asks the congregation of the Church on the Hill, in his stream of the thought “to prove your autonomy or else relinquish it to god.” But, of course, it is not only God that Justin takes issue with, but also any ideals that present “illusion[s] of freedom to befit [our] existence” (20). And yet, he too must admit that he lacks any real freedom, at least outside the boundaries of a solipsistic consciousness.

At the onset of his stream of thought, Justin reveals to us that his inability to adhere to the construct of time represents “a psychological disorder.” He imagines that his lateness will lead to a violent expulsion from society, confounding tardiness with the worst of all evils (as if he represents Cain in “this version of the future” where “all bad things” are conflated to the same “degree of banality”): “I’ll be denounced as the last to come…I will be marked. ‘Intruder!’ ‘Trespasser!’ ‘Devil!’ Torches and pitchforks chase xiii me to the edge” (9). In a sense, time, or at least the construction of time for utilitarian purposes, represents the first example of many social laws born out of the monolithic ideology that threatens to assail Justin’s private existence. He makes a lazy and noncommittal effort to assert his freedom over such a social construct, but only through thought, rather than any physical or effectual affirmation. “I’ve arrived late on purpose,” he feebly tells us, “how should they know otherwise? I do as I please. No, I do as I intend. I do only what I please and only how I intend” (8). Yet, immediately he admits,

“time is definite—a definite power that encroaches upon autonomy” (8). The important thing here is that it is not an explicit expression of a power structure that Justin contends with, but an internalized manifestation of it that forces him to reassess his opposition to social forces.

While Justin might believe that awareness of the social forces playing on him somehow sets him outside the mass, he is only able to go so far. Even as he considers time as something human-constructed—“If time is infinite, why try to count it as if we could measure it, as if we could tame it, clasp reigns on it, and direct it within the realm of human contrivances?” (16)—he has already admitted that by looking at it, “in the form of numbers,” on his neighbor’s watch face, for example, “time will have me. I will have reified it, given it substance and power” (16). He reveals the absurdity inherent in the construction of time for utilitarian purposes too as it makes us “insignificant in its infinite expansion, a minute detail of a creature that cannot escape the imposition of each and every minute” (16) even as we pretend to have “tame[d] it…claspe[d] reigns on it.” But even still, he cannot escape the urge to “look for it” precisely because, even as it is xiv contrived, it allows him to experience “something finite” (finite because time is “reified”

in a mass consciousness or in the social conceptualization of it) of the “infinite” that

“cannot be experienced.”

In some way, time, like the social constructs that are working on him, is an

external power that he must bend his will to. Even still, Justin senses that “time is passing… folding in and out of the space I inhabit” (16) and that temporality becomes a

subjective experience. At the Church on the Hill, he experiences time as “slowing

down,” so slow, in fact, that he hears the “banausic, distorted ticking” of his neighbors

watch. By the time he admits to have looked, it has already happened: “I look for it,” he

tells us and then, “I looked” as if to reveal how specious experience of the present really

is. In the instant we attempt to be conscious of the present, it has already passed. The

present then, is like thought, “dying to give rise to the immeasurably miniscule lifespan

of a new thought” (8). And because the past has already happened, we have no control over it. And, in that case, it seems impossible to assert any real autonomy or at least it is impossible to experience it.

But there is another aspect of time that reveals the ineffectuality of freewill, and it is one bound up in Justin’s descriptions of clichés and banality. “Clichés that go back thousands of years,” he tells us, “and we’re still playing them as though they were ultimate prophecies” (22). What Justin senses is much like Nietzsche’s Eternal

Recurrence, but on a microcosmic scale and in a society that claims that history has ended, essentially imposing the same events—the most overt of instances is a reoccurring battle between ideological perspectives—to recur. But so too—because of the repetition xv of “narratives” that either recur or are retold, and therefore reasserted, as universalizing

paradigms—does Justin see the same “silly caricature[s].” As he explains of Greyson,

“[a] thousand men just like you have already entered the annals of history, blithely

ignoring the antecedences of their own passé personality…everything you are, done to

death…the compulsion of history is to squeeze out men like you, like clockwork, every

decade” (29).

The idea here is that the development of history has been seized and made inert by a society that esteems itself at the final stage of human progress, but history and time, being infinite, cannot cease movement. And so where Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence tells us that “in infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more: it would be realized an infinite number of times” and “between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place,” (WP 1066) the city in the novel has artificially constrained the progression of history, arbitrating what “possible combinations” it sees fit. “If the world could in any way…reach a state of equilibrium, or if it had any kind of goal that involved duration, immutability, the once-and-for-all...then it would still be the case” (WP 1066) but what if just such a “once-and-for-all” is pronounced, imperiously, by society at large? Whether true in reality or not, the result of this is the stagnation of development, the process of becoming that history is given momentum ceases, and without instability of forces the world becomes “rigid, dry, dead, nothing.” The problem of human history is solved then, and in this state of equilibrium there is no tipping the scales one way or the other. And consciousness has nothing to do but atrophy. As Justin tells us, “the momentum of xvi history is finished…there are no more walls to break through…[but] we need that

momentum…so we make it up, by doubling back, and doing it all over again” (53).

Building a metaphor for what Justin perceives is not easy. For Nietzsche, time is

an unending cycle, built like a flat circle. For Justin, however, the cycle itself moves with

the “undulating expanses of human civilization.” The problem is that the cycle is

shrinking, compressed by an apollonian will to power, so that the recurrences happen

more rapidly until the circle ends at a point. That point is disorienting for human

consciousness, especially that part of consciousness that is not defined by universalistic

constructs, because it anticipates momentum (and we have to think of “momentum” as

Justin identifies it, as that imbalance of powers that allows history and human

development to continue).

But it is the pervasive sense that no particular realm of meaning has any space to

contend with the monolithic ideology that surrounds Justin that is most paralyzing. In

many ways, he has no desire to struggle with the universalistic paradigm and seems to

resolve himself, even as he is blithely and internally critical of the status quo, as a silent

consenter to the “evils” society enacts. He tells us that he is ill and cannot live without “a

tiny orange-tinged pill to be taken twice daily” but that this is why he is “inextricably

bound with this modern world… implicated in all that the state might do.” Further, he

admits “there is no amount of private ambivalence that could undo the vow or absolve me

from anything the city might do” (66). He accepts his privilege and access to what that privilege provides him (most directly, a hermetic seal of knowledge and study), even

xvii while attempting to critique the society that grants him such privilege (and, as a result, his criticisms are from the vantage of a privileged individual).

And yet, here is a character who is willing to pursue every train of thought, to follow it wherever it goes, refusing to quit while he is ahead so to speak, only to find that such trains go nowhere. In effect, he is paralyzed from acting on his critique because, in all his access to knowledge, he believes that nothing can be certain. This might make him seem like Camus’ Absurd Hero, but he goes too far with his uncertainty, to the point that he shirks away from making any real meaning of his own narrative. And though he is aware that he enjoys the privilege that only a white, straight, upper-middleclass, male can enjoy, that awareness often turns to guilt that only fortifies the solipsist reality he is trapped within. Even if he wants to break out of it, as he does at the end, he knows he is unable because he is incapable of committing even to that. His noncommittal attitude bars him from madness even, unless he feigns it, as he does in the last chapter of the novel.

It is by his sense of impotence and lack of control over the excesses of knowledge that, Justin is led to a perpetual uncertainty and an ambiguous sense of self-identity. And so to does his access to privilege, in the form of access to knowledge that then, work on his consciousness through eruptions of culpability—if the train of thought is allowed to gain too much momentum. In a sense, the “stream of mad thought” always ends with the guilt of complicity, looking back from the end of history (“the awful power of hindsight” as he calls it), in all society might do—he tells us that he’s “amassed the debt of a million billion tiny little evils” (201). And the only way to not face it is to escape the confines of xviii physical existence and become “the last man in the last world” by swallowing “it whole.”

In short, it is inescapable and the more he enacts his privilege, access to knowledge, and such “streams of mad thought,” the more that guilt encroaches on his consciousness.

And yet, through both knowledge and his privileged access to it, Justin maintains, throughout most of the novel, a complacent, ambivalent, and apathetic persona. He is, in fact, a creature of habit—a man who accepts civilization and its discontents because it offers him privileges that others are not allowed, and so, having no real reason to disavow civilization, even as he critiques it, almost always presents himself as all superego. At the end of the novel, he is unable to escape his history of habit and his life-long acceptance of the social pact that guarantees his privilege and has no choice but to feel that he is complicit in the evils that society commits. His one, singular act of heroism is to bear the sins of men and society onto his back, using the weight to add to a forward

“momentum.” But even that he cannot follow to its conclusion, whether he is stopped as he is physically harnessed by the police or as he pretends to escape his body, looking down on the world and society and its history and sins and calls it a “sensory overload.”

“From the vantage of God” he says, “from the vantage of the overhead voyeur, all the moving, shaking, mechanical whirring, undulating expanses of human civilization, it is all too much, too dense, a sensory overload, lobotomize yourself and leave it to the kleptocrats. Eek out that bit of brain that strains you with human empathy, pull it out through your nostrils and spill it on the ground” (201).

In effect, Justin accepts the end of history or, at least, accepts that there is no real way to contend with the assumed end to history and, in that case, he essentially enacts xix that end because he can provide nothing in terms of an antithesis to the status quo. Marx

and Engels tells us of the “eminently dialectical conception of the historical process, in

which certain types of progress—in terms of technology, of industry, of productivity—

are accompanied by retrogression in other fields: in terms of social, cultural and ethical

life” (Lowy 11). Justin too, points to “a version of the future where we’ve banished

progress to the realm of technology. We evolve towards the idea of a civilization that

will never be complete. It is the stagnation of the human project as we defer to

advancements of utility and productivity” (20). The development of socio-cultural life is subverted and then relieved by economic concerns (as Marx puts it, in loaded terms, a

“naked self-interest” and “callous ‘cash-payment’” (CM 222) and with it comes the absurdity pronounced by individual alienation from his labor, the deracination from old ideas of national identity, the estrangement from “the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism” (CM 222) etc. When Marx and Engels tell us that as “soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity” (GI 9)—and thus he is characterized by what he does, even as he is alienated from his product or the labor process—it seems that culture (that “sphere of activity,” much like Appadurai’s “scapes”) becomes determined by the universalizing narrative of capitalism. Even as we might attempts to assert a sense of cultural autonomy, a totalizing mythos (one that has radically redefined the ways in which men characterize themselves; in feudal times, it was by his family, his religion, his town, etc and not by his place in the sphere of labor) preempts us and we can only pick and chose (the true commodification of culture) which elements of pre-existing cultural xx concerns fit into his new reality. And so too, the world over, where “globalization

involves pressures on societies, civilizations and representatives of traditions” (Robertson

47) to redefine or reassert themselves in face of the “consumption and syncretization of

culture” (Robertson 47).

It is not always obvious to us how the mythos of capitalism and the

superstructures that play into it work on us, and it is easy to forget that there are, in fact,

valid critiques of capitalism or liberal democracy (especially in how they each function in

this day and age) precisely because these ideologies are universalistic processes that

legitimize themselves by compressing disputations into their most extreme elements. The

use of stream of consciousness in the novel is significant because, while the narratives

and myths of capitalism and liberal democracy continue to work on us unconsciously, we

might sense that some of these are narratives are wrong or fallacious. But we rarely give

it much thought and we are even less likely to give it voice because the logic of

capitalism and liberal democracy seems sound and absolute. These ideologies are

monolithic so that they can be self-legitimizing, and we are merely characters in that narrative, and to question whether it is the wrong narrative seems out of the realm of rational thought. But it might come to us, for a moment, a tiny link in a complex chain of thought.

And yet, in a sense, the capitalistic democratizing of the world has already won its victory over opposing ideologies such as Marxism, backing such an ideology against a proverbial wall, where, in its death throes, it relinquishes all contention as any sort of opposition to liberal democracy can be made extreme or radical. The “zombies, painted xxi red” that the prophet tells his audience of represents a radicalizing by way of a myth that

seeks to reassert this society’s victory over all other lines of thought. As Justin tells us of

the “radicals,” “they became defined as the darkness always threatening to devour the

city... they became the specters demanding excision” and their defeat “gave legitimacy to

the belief that we had already reached the apotheosis” (31). But as he says, “this was

years before I came into this world” and since “all brands of revolution have long since

become kitsch” (31). Yet, this great battle becomes part of a sort of rhetorical mythos

that can be reaffirmed at any given moment. That is the true power of the amorphous

ideology (though represented in the novel in extreme forms) that exist at the foundations

of American-society: it never has to prove its worth, it only has to reveal the radical

absolutes of opposing ideologies, explaining them away as either communist or fascist in

essence. This proves the victory of capitalism, liberalism, and this brand of democracy—

they have become foundational and inherent, unquestionable and intrinsically bound to

the constitution of the people who have accepted them.

What this means is that, whether or not we are aware of how a liberal-capitalistic

society acts on us, we can sense the mechanisms especially through the superstructures

that ideology has to create for itself. The mythos of the self-made man or the Horatio

Alger’s model, the image of the American-dream, the notion of a God who blesses those who work hard without complaint, etcetera are enacted upon the foundation of liberal- democracy. Capitalism consumes not just resources, but entire identities, and as it devours particularities, it reasserts itself as a universalizing force that can level the

xxii playing field, liberate men and women under the duress of caste systems, monarchies, etc.

And yet, capitalism, like all economic systems, is an amoral system. That it enacts the same sort of class distinctions it promises to dissolve—that hundreds of years after it becomes the accepted economic system of the modern world the immobility of members of a class is hardly different than it is under feudalism—is not necessarily the fault of capitalism. As Marx and Engel reveal, “in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things.” (GI 84). The issue is that we believe that this system is the best of all systems or at least the most egalitarian, whether it is because we are told it is so or because we experience the defeat of all other systems. And then we legitimize it as such, seeing in capitalism or democracy or liberalism a freedom that is not afforded by other systems, even if we must accept “the conditions of existence governing modern society”

(GI 85) without recourse. And this precisely what is signified when Justin tells us, “at the end of it all, we’ve woven all our triumphs together into the most intricate web. But we are not the spiders, we are the flies caught in the sticky bonds. And we give in to the thought that we’ll never have the strength to escape it, we roll over and wait for a fate with eight legs to bleed us dry” (187). The idea is that we hold these ideals as paradigms of human achievement, building a sociological framework around them, and then direct our lives in accordance to them.

xxiii What is most pointed in Justin’s critique of society at large is that, by an ideology

that purports to be the best form of egalitarianism, “lineages and genealogies are now

forgotten” because “the threads of history threaten to distinguish one person from the

next” (23). It seems strange that in a society that is directly opposed to socialism, that this would be the effect, yet as contentions to the ideal are dissolved and particular realms

of meaning have little sway in how liberalism plays out and, especially, how “capitalism

amplifies and is bound up with the ambiguous expression of the demand…for

assimilation and into the universal” (Robertson 101). As Justin reads the graffiti written

in French, he imagines, as a “man scoffs,” that “he must’ve been a Frenchman in a past

life…I would like to hear him say “monsieur” or even, whatever is French for ‘As god as

my witness, I am a Frenchman and can hide it no more’” (23). In a way, this is his

lamentation of the abandonment of particularistic identities for the sake of a universalistic

paradigm. He goes on to mock that paradigm or at least how it is legitimized by religion,

asking us “if [we] should choose to cling to a heritage or the timeless myths of tradition,

how should [we] feel the baptism this city itself offers?” (23). This “baptism” is, of

course, a metaphorical one, relating to the way modern capitalism, “compels all nations,

on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to

introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.

In one word, it creates a world after its own image” (CM 224). Justin further examines

that we are asked to “purify” ourselves from the past and to “drown it before God…

thrust it into the flame deluge and all will be forgiven” (23). “Forgiven” here is of course

a sardonic misnomer for “forgotten” because as capitalism “creates a world after its own xxiv image” so to must its process of homogenization be accepted, enacted, and asserted by

the people in that world it constructs.

As Justin feels the need to revel in the story of the woman in Apartment 1519 C--

because, as he tells us, she represents “the one truly mystical thing in our entire lives”—

he at once reveals the otherness of those who are able to exist in their particular realms of

existence and the commodification of that otherness. He tells us that she is “enshrined in

[her] history while the rest of us are stripped bare…she can exist forever in her

windowpane and no one can get at her” (77-78). But of course, anybody could pick up her autobiography from the local bookstore, exposing the commodity fetishism that Marx warns us of capitalism that exists as a substitute of the causal relationships involved in culture. So too is that “dull compulsion of economic relations” exposed by the way the city is duped into supporting the Jeweler’s store after his wife’s death through a simple change in the name of the store in memoriam of his dead wife.

Bound up the story of the Jeweler’s Daughter is a critique of how we, as a society, deal with Otherness. The problem is that those who are circumscribed to liminal existences are evaluated in terms of social constructs that enforce the classification of people. The city is able to conflate the jeweler’s daughter’s otherness with the abject act of murder precisely because the abject-Other represents a threat to monolithic social norms, first, and to the boundaries the ego has maintained for itself. The other, in effect, poses a threat to the universalizing forces we have accepted as the status quo.

There is an idea, that in in the jeweler’s daughter’s inability to speak—in her inability to perform in the language that social consciousness rests upon—she must have xxv some sort of relationship with the supernatural. To not exist in the realm of existence that

society deems “normal” is to somehow exist far outside it. This is representative of the

Abject-Other that Julia Kristeva presents in her Powers of Horror that is defined as that

“which disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.

The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). Because the jeweler’s

daughter does not seem to be limited—the way the rest of us are—by the boundaries that

language imposes on our consciousness, then she must exist outside the boundaries. But

to accept that there is an “outside” to those boundaries would be threatening to the

stability of consciousness unless, of course, it were to be presented in the form of a lurid

story (that, of course, must be told through the confines of the language we understand)

that can be bought, for cheap, in the local bookstore. This is, of course, why Justin tells

us that it reminds him so much of an “old gothic tale.” But what is key here is that

experience with the Other—characterized by an in-between-ness—at once challenges our assumed dualism, illuminating a beyond which has subsisted within our unconscious, so far confined by the language of self or of society. In a sense, as Kristeva has shown, the abject Other is the suppressed feminine aspect of the unconscious, not necessarily as contrary to the masculine—because such dualisms are in the act of dissolution—but because it looms in the repressed subconscious as silence.

We can, of course, relate how the Jeweler, imposing a narrative unto his daughter, uses both rhetorical language (“true justice be served”) and the language of science (his daughter is diagnosed with “congenital idiocy”) to repress that silence as it is literally and physically represented by his daughter who does not have the ability to speak. It is xxvi through the utilitarian appropriation of language as a tool of normalization that subjugates

the Other and contains it apart from the Self and society. As a linguistic function or a

socializing process, Othering or whatever we choose to call it is but a method of

demarcation that works to preserve our consciousness intact—as a “safeguard” and as a

“primer of [our] culture” (Kristeva 2). This process is made literal in the story of the

jeweler’s daughter that Justin recounts in court proceedings and through medical

diagnosis and then in the way the city so easily accepts the explanations, being

legitimized through the authority of science and legality. This is why, as Justin recalls

the story of the Jeweler’s daughter, he tells us that as, “the city became enraptured by her

account, the purity of her prose so actuated by the voice of a child, the images of innocent

youth lost to the firestorm of blame, they hardly noticed that they were each implicated in

her sentence” (76).

When the courts exhume the body of the jeweler’s step-daughter, it becomes clear how artificial yet utilitarian language really is as the Jeweler imposes the term “young- lady” (rather than “child” as she was is previously identified as) upon his step-daughter to avoid the revulsion either he or the city might experience at the revelation that “that this girl of twelve died not a virgin.” Because something as repulsive as what might have happened (but is never fully considered until it is commoditized) essentially threatens that sense of self so regulated by language and its normative social counterparts, for both the Jeweler and society as a whole it becomes necessary to, in order to uphold the rational and therefore androcentric mode of contextualizing, to resolve the discombobulation of a sensible narrative (that ends with “justice” and a maintenance of rational order). xxvii The crime that the Jeweler is implicated, seeming obvious to the reader, is less

obvious to the city because of its sheer perverseness. That perverseness—which is a

problem because, as we have said, the city is in fact implicated in, at the very least, the

misdirection of justice allowing the Jeweler to not only walk free, but to benefit off the

“tragedy”—must be repressed because “it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a

rule or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts.” (Kristeva 15) And so “an

unshakeable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace” is

to be “thrust aside” (Kristeva 16). Where at first, it is through a process of

dehumanization and otherness that rests in science and law that condemns the jeweler’s

daughter, it is through a process of dehumanization and otherness that maintains, through

an objectification, that the feminine—as represented by the widow and both of her daughter—if unconstrained by social norms, is irrational and therefore outside the boundaries of what can be understood by language and, by extension, the consciousness and social contexts that is ordered through it. Language, then, proves its own artificiality as it, generally the method in which we separate our self from the abject Other, rears its authority as one of lack. It cannot contend with the abject, so it has displaced it. This is the case of, at first the jeweler’s daughter, who is placed in an asylum. But so to is the case of the jeweler’s stepdaughter who is once viewed as “portray[ing] all the strength and beauty of her mother but none of her deficits” (72)—in essence, feminine, but in

accordance with rationality—until that narrative no longer fits and must be amended to

avoid repulsion.

xxviii What is key here are the lengths that a society that assumes itself as the apotheosis of all of civilization will go to maintain the boundaries it has created for itself, especially if those boundaries are threatened by a particularistic realm of existence. What is “Other” represents something supererogatory and therefore threatens the very idea that there should be delineated boundaries of social existence. And in that case, a person who is apart from the “herd” has no real way to communicate his or her subjective or particular vantage. In a sense, consciousness apart from social context has been made to be insignificant. Though Nietzsche tells us of the superficiality of consciousness, he believes that that superficiality stems from the attempt to communicate the phenomenon of consciousness, something that might be made up of “incomparable” “actions” of an

“altogether personal, unique and absolutely individual” sort, into something universal, as

“translated back into the perspective of the herd” (Nietzsche 354)—the problem, in essence, is that what is true of the mass, or else by what terms of “generalization” the mass has established to understand and communicate what it has negotiated to be true, is necessarily not true (or at least, only part of the truth) of self-consciousness precisely because it must be translated into the language of the objective reality it finds itself a part of. For Nietzsche then, what is sublated, in the case of consciousness, between the thesis and antithesis of separate entities, is merely what can be communicated (more than that, that part of consciousness that we can identify as consciousness is merely that part of our thoughts that we are aware of—if awareness can only be achieved through “conscious thinking” that “is done in words, that is to say, in the symbols for communication”

(Nietzsche 354)). Hegel tells us that consciousness is a problem that it creates for itself, xxix and the solution is to resolve itself in the universal and ultimate truth in a continuing

process of synthesis that sublates what was true of “preconscious life.” Nietzsche tells us

this sublation is impossible because consciousness prior to consciousness exists apart

from language and “the thinking which is becoming conscious of itself is only the

smallest part thereof, we may say, the most superficial part, the worst part” (Nietzsche

354). In that case, we have no way to escape the universalizing forces of society, lest, of

course, we are set entirely alienated from it and in case, we have no power in the

progression of society towards something better.

We can say, then, that, where Hegel’s idealism leads him to assume that we are

progressing towards a perfect unity of subjective existence and objective reality by

drawing nearer to ultimate truth, Nietzsche would say that we get further and further from

the “truth”—not to say that Nietzsche subscribes to any notion of an objective truth (and

conceptualizing “truth” as something objective is a problem in and of itself)—because we

must first reify something not meant to be reified in order to communicate it. “Becoming

conscious of our sense impressions,” means to “locate them outside of ourselves,” and we

do this by translating them into signs (Nietzsche 354). And therefore, “the sign-inventing

man is at the same time the man who is always more acutely self-conscious; it is only as a social animal that man has learned to become conscious of himself” (Nietzsche 354).

Because language, in some way, signifies objects—that is, words are the reifications of subjective “sense impressions”—insomuch that they are signifiers agreed upon “in relation to [the] communal and gregarious utility that [they are] finely developed”

(Nietzsche 354), a man, becoming conscious, must objectify himself. xxx In that case, at the “last stage of history,” should the alignment of an ultimate

truth with self-consciousness ever be attained, “man, deprived of movement, would be

like an animal” (Merleau-Ponty 129), and self-consciousness—an existent so long as it retains itself as distinct from the immutable objects and eternal truths that can only be claimed under the universal terms of society—revolts against its death in a “thoughtless inertia” (Hegel 45). Finally, turning away from “every truth…and back into itself,” self-

consciousness abandons its task in favor of the “barren ego” apart from “all the content”

and “flees the universal and seeks only an isolated experience on its own account” (Hegel

45). Here is where we leave Justin, who is not even granted the dignity of a name until it

can be given by an officious document of rational law and who once attempts to

somehow contain all the “teeming masses” and the particularities of their existence and

“translate for them” and, as a result, is “burdened by the sheer density of the world, under

a globe that is only made heavier with each passing year” (201). Abandoning his project

that left him paralyzed and in a perpetual “state of inertness,” no longer negotiating

between the realm of the particular and the realm of the universal, he escapes his burden

by seeing himself apart from boundaries of history and time and all order of paradigms,

existing “between dividing lines” as “the last man in the last world.” And as he flees into

his isolated realm apart from us, we forsake him.

xxxi 1

Prologue

Thousands of years ago, before men put a limit of a week on the construction of the universe, before the days of the week entirely—and so it could just as easily been five

thousand years prior to this day—for all intents and purposes, let us say that five

thousand years prior to this day, a five thousand year younger horizon nuzzled against

this hilltop. The slope was less defined than in its current state after men came in with

their bulldozers like chisels to a heap of marble to hollow out its belly for the

construction of a movie theater at its foot, taking care not to degrade the structural

integrity of the hill itself because the topside had already been claimed by a

nondenominational church. But let us forget about that now—five thousand years prior

to this day, when the horizon spread tenderly against the hillside and allowed itself to be

tickled by the trees and brush that have all since died hundreds of times over, a whitetail

doe, unawares of the future conquerors of humankind, contented herself upon the slight

pasture that we’ll have to imagine for now as it has since been covered with tarmac. And

as we hold that picture in our minds—that is, our doe of five thousand years past grazing

on green grass before a red-orange sunset—we might see the doe turn her nose up

suddenly, facing east perhaps, as if to mock the audacity of the men that would drive out

her lineage in a few millennia. What she really senses is the charred grass from the

season before, when creatures on two legs set fire to the overgrowth in order to revitalize

the plain, prevent devastation from a larger wildfire, and to attract herbivores with fresh

grass as the season allowed—this is, of course, as anthropologists tell us.

The doe, for her part, undoubtedly, has no idea of the creatures on two legs or their methods or their fire who, in turn, have no idea of anthropology or of the men who would spend a disconcerting amount of time studying their techniques that seemed, to them, to be quite obvious. Back to the doe who has never experienced the very idea of an idea and so relaxes her neck and lowers her head toward fresh grass and enjoys one last blade before an oval river stone strikes her upon her head.

It is a clean kill and in all honesty, it is a merciful one for in five thousand years, her particular species would go extinct and as this Sunday of five thousand years past fell into the deepest sort of night, her fur would be rung and cleaned for use, her flesh would be consumed eagerly and with thanks, and her bones would be buried out of respect. The rest of her lineage would not be given the same treatment. Some would be hunted for game when the inclination to kill for sport spread with the springtime pollen up the noses of two-legged species of another kind. Some would die, starving, as orphans. Some would cleave to the bumpers of sport utility vehicles. Some would be torn apart by wolves, driven out of their homeland by the encroachment of housing developments.

A different sort of upright creature, determined to stretch out his legs as far west as possible, and arriving on the coattails of the promise of a utopia, and who did not use smooth river stones to kill deer—for that was barbarism—this vertical creature who had the momentum of history on his side, and could look at other creatures on two legs and see that they had no real history whatsoever, and wondered why they should have the right to a motherland or a fatherland if they had no sense of a past: these are the sort of men that came to flatten the land, to dig out all order of plant life, after carefully detailing

3 it and classifying it, only to plant his own gardens, to fill in rivers only to build his own aqueducts, and to level out entire forests only to build his own bid toward the heavens.

This is the sort of man that banished an entire subspecies out of existence, on accident.

Men do a lot, in pursuit of their ideals; men do a lot without meaning to. The collateral damage of western civilization rarely makes it into the annals of the history men so cling to, and there is certainly no place for the insignificant annihilation of a subspecies of a species. Do not feel sorrow for the doe that was once struck on the head by a smooth river stone—she lived a heedless life without bulldozers and headlights and children with sticks swatting at the trees to see what beasts scurried out before them. Do not feel sorrow for the doe that never lived to be catalogued under a scientific designation only to have experts later scratching their heads, wondering if this subspecies ever existed at all or if it was merely the misclassification of an unenlightened taxonomist from an unenlightened era of Taxonomy.

Five thousand years after the fortunate death of the doe, and it is Sunday again. It is the forth Sunday in March, only a single week before the most important Sunday of this second portion of the year. It is not all that important that Easter is in a week, but we can sense how close it is to Easter Sunday by the rising attendance of the congregation at the Church on the Hill. The first portion of the year, of course, bends itself to Superbowl

Sunday, when the Church on the Hill finds attendance at its lowest. But that is another story, perhaps one we might consider in another ten months time.

If we were to keep driving on past the Church on the Hill—maybe we had missed the turn-off, or turned right where we should have turned left, maybe our GPS could not

determine which way we were facing and so we sped off in the wrong direction even as

we could see our destination disappearing from view—well, if we kept driving on, we would see the city dissolve into a different sort of frame: the roads and rows of houses would start to flatten, our gaze would reach further than we thought possible by the usual restricted vantage of a city, but most salient of all, we would start to see flags, flags

everywhere. We would see them in traffic, on bumpers and rear glass, we would see

them hanging off porches, their threads breaking off with the wind, we would seem them

on the corners off squared lawns, faded in the sun. Even those hedged lawns illustrate a

sense of patriotism, trimmed like an army sergeant’s buzz cut. But the more flags we

would see, the less chance we would have of finding a respectable Chinese food

restaurant and people here might tell us that we should never try the duck from the

disreputable “Chinopolis,” whose name had always confused elderly men hoping to find

military-style trousers and instead found themselves facing a seven foot Maneki-neko with demonic black eyes and a menacing golden fist. Thinking back to the warning about the duck, we would then, of course, have to wonder why duck was even an option on the menu, especially if no one ever ordered it. We are a civilized country; we do not eat duck, we might say. But then our curiosity would surely peak, it would pique our fancy and we would find ourselves peeking at the menu on the window of the restaurant before finally asking to be seated and demanding the Peking duck. And at the end of it, or perhaps we would never find the appetite to make it to the end of it, we would have to join in with the masses in cautioning others that no, they should not try the duck. This is fair warning: do

not go too far. Do not miss your turn and end up in the part of the city willing to give up

good Chinese food for flags.

But we will not go that far. We will stay here, for the moment, at the Church on

the Hill whose grey brick siding has been stained in waves by the mild rain, exposing a

blue tint hidden underneath a dry winter’s dust that, now, flows downward into a concrete

gutter along the foot of the wall. A muddy chemical rivulet dissipates out near the wide

glossy steps of polished concrete, a sham of marble, slick enough to break a few necks. It

might make for a short trip to one’s own funeral, yes, but the acerbic wit of death is lost on most of us and so the Church has seen fit to place a twenty by fifteen rubber mat at the steps so that members may wipe their muddy shoes before taking to the seven rungs of false marble. There had been talk of paving the entire plot of land with the tarmac of the parking lot, but most tended to agree that it would subtract from the sacredness of the church itself and some portions of the original landscape must be maintained—the leveling of the environment is what we do in other parts of the city, but not here, here we can afford to install sprinkler systems, here we can afford custom size rubber mats, here we can afford gardeners to hedge and trim the church’s personal forest and field. And so, we do not question for a second why the grass is much greener here, unnaturally green even, than it is anywhere else in the city.

At the Church on the Hill with the grass-greener-than-green and its custom made rubber mat, session began a little late—about five past the appointed time—but it is no matter for this young man, whose head just now emerges over the top of the concrete stairway, nearly half an hour past. A neat young man, a little pale, a little pink, wearing a

6 suit he would likely wear to job interviews and the like: a blistering turquoise shirt but diluted enough by a grey-wool vest and matching jacket, an obliquely striped black and white tie that might start to move like a barber’s pole if we so wanted to be hypnotized, tailored pants that accentuated the length of his legs so that he seems only half human and half grasshopper on its hind legs. He is slouched too, to the effect that his three-quarters- of-a-torso is even further diminished. As he draws nearer, we might want to detail his facial features: but he moves too swiftly, and it is difficult to define his physiognomy.

For now, we must picture him with the ambiguity of a Munch painting.

Chapter 1

Just give it a goddamn minute. It’s an illness, this always being late. It’s a

psychological disorder, this always being late. I haven’t learned that leaving the house at

the exact time I’m supposed to be somewhere half an hour away means that I’ll be half an

hour late. We were promised teleportation. How archaic is this version of the future?

But there’s nothing to be gained bursting through the door now. Lateness is indisputable.

I’m late whether it’s five minutes, half an hour, forty-five minutes. What’s another

minute?

And why should I care if I’m late? I don’t want to be here. No one wants me to

be here. I was driven toward the church on the hill on compulsion. The two black horses

of impulse led the way, dragged me out the door and through the street and up the stairs.

I tried to stop. I saw all the places I’d rather be. I saw them, passed them, and then

wondered why I couldn’t stop to enjoy them as they faded behind me. I don’t really want

to be here.

But I don’t do things on impulse. So, what was it? I need to see the world again.

I don’t see it anymore. I don’t recognize it. I haven’t recognized it in years, and the last time I felt anything familiar in it was in the days I filed in with what seemed to me like everyone in the world. All six or seven billion of us, crammed into the pews, rubbing shoulders as if we had any connection outside the church on the hill. All six or seven billion of us, fixed together by sweat and twill and cotton, to avoid falling into the chasm that reveals itself at the bottom of the present-day. All six or seven billion of us clung to the whole for dear life to evade the jowls of the pit, the teeth of the void, the nothingness

8 that swirled beneath us. But I let go. And I fell. I’ve fallen. And these people can sense it. They don’t know that they can sense it. But it shows in the sidelong looks that pause on me for too long to ignore, as though they’d only just noticed something crooked in what once seemed a straight line. They don’t know what it is, but I’ve submerged myself in the viscous oil of the pit. I leave it behind me wherever I go. All six or seven billion of them avoid me because I am an adumbration of what’s hidden underneath.

And that’s why I arrive late. The oil of the pit slows me down. My body… it feels heavy. I am intensely aware of the weight at all times.

And now, beyond a heavy oaken door dampened by a fog there sit those throngs of men and women and children who have made good upon the simple gesture of arriving on time. I need to ease my breathing, loosen my ligaments, undo the knot in my sternum that wrenches my skeleton into a bundle of brittle collagen and calcium, and shape it all together, be the upright-man with a purpose. I’ve arrived late on purpose. How should they know otherwise? I do as I please. No, I do as I intend. I do only what I please and only how I intend. But time is definite—a definite power that encroaches upon autonomy. The autonomous made automaton. Freewill is the blind choices you make between the prescribed intervals. Take note.

I might consider that later, but no, I’ve already forgotten; what is it that formed in my head and dissolved again? Dying thoughts, dead thoughts, born out of dead thoughts, and dying to give rise to the immeasurably miniscule lifespan of a new thought, that fades like a coal out of the oven and in the open air. I might remember later, but not before I pass under the archway, that ubiquitous piece of architecture that transforms an

individual into a fragment of something else. The doors are dense and the hinges are

soured by the cold of morning that still lingers, and they’ll creak and I’ll be denounced as

the last to come. I will be judged as the harbinger of the demons that live in this

unnatural mist. I will be marked. ‘Intruder!’ ‘Trespasser!’ ‘Devil!’ Torches and

pitchforks chase me to the edge. They hide their weapons under their seats for just such

an instance. ‘How do you want it? Death by fire? Three prongs in your chest? A

mound of flesh at the bottom? All three?’ Give me a minute to admire the iron wrought,

factory pressed in that manner that feigns craftsmanship. Give me another to marvel the stonework of this entrance and then another to fairly admit that it is severely lacking in genuine artistry. The deathblow of the artisan; these sorts of things can be cut up in a factory line, lasers incising based on precise measurements logged into a computer.

There is a two-dimensional rendering of the Church on the Hill on someone’s computer.

How trivial it must seem as ‘Churchonthehill.jpg.’ But what do I know? It’ll last an age.

Brick upon mortar, mortar upon brick, the blueprint of God’s house. And I am not the child any longer, not the boy free from cold aches like those that assault the hollows of

these bones of late. Not the child, who’d crossed this threshold intuitively and with the

doors open to him, accepted off the hands of the ushers the program for the day whether

or not it was offered. What an idiot—such a heedless, little, vibrant nuisance of an idiot.

Five years old, and the mirror turned on him. He became I and I washed him away out of

shame—the holy baptism of self-discernment. I drowned him just to shut him up. I

drowned him so no one else would have to. He’d come up for air, wasting his breath on a

shout or a laugh or a sob, and I’d have to drown him all over again. He doesn’t come up

for air anymore. I murdered him and now the doors remain shut. I am left to study the

monotonous details of blank stone and glossy oak, estranged from the house of God and

all who find comfort within its walls, not for murder, but for tardiness. And so, another

minute surely won’t plunge me into a deeper realm of Hell. What’s another minute?

I am trapped in stereotypy—hands pressed on soggy wood and back at my sides.

And curse these inward opening doors, meant, I’m sure, to feign a welcoming admission.

Anxiety mounts—listen for applause—and finally, my minute of contrition is up and I must face my accusers and, push, push with concerted force, a hand on each door like in the old movies, I seek asylum, sanctuary from my enemies, but no, my enemies with the torches and pitchforks, they are inside, I go into the belly of the beast, I do it on my own accord, my claim to freewill is to push this door with a sense of dramatic flair, announce my arrival, meet my accusers, I’ll hang myself, I’ll tie the knot and wriggle my own head through it and kick the chair over by myself, but now, push, damn it, I’ll hang myself with my neck tie, I’ll go out it in style, push, let me in, let me join them, all I want in the world is to be, to be and not not to be, to be like them, God, Jesus something somebody let me open the door…but I am still denied entrance. The doors are locked from the inside. There is no hope. I am banished from this house of God. He has turned me away.

I tried, at least. At least I can say I tried. What else is there for a man to do but try?

I tried and failed and now I will have to find contrition elsewhere.

“Just knock on the door, huh?” says The Voice, disembodied, from the heavens

and oh lord, I’ve finally cracked, I talk to specters now. No, it’s a rather feminine voice, it

still lingers in the air; a delicate voice; a sarcastic voice. The only logical conclusion: it

must be Mary. But Mary, why do you mock me? Knocking won’t do. It will be all the

worse, for the Devil knocks at doors, seeking invitation. They’ll spurn me for knocking.

The fist assaults me from behind, its arm darkens my peripheral, at so close a

range I see the tiny white hairs on Mary’s arm, and then, a knock (and another, and a

third). Shuddering. Her breath is on my neck. A small glimpse of Mary in a waft of

hair, a “good luck, huh” and she is gone even as I turn my head. Head cocked sideways

as one door opens. “Sir, can you try to be on time, sir.” And slipping in, nearly tripping

on the usher’s oversized and over-polished shoe, and still reeling, I must take my seat.

***

These are foreign words. It is a language you speak, you perform in, but you don’t inhabit it, not really, not fully. You know these words too well then, far too well. If you can blow hot air into the room and somehow the tongue and lips turn it into something real, you know them too well. You shouldn’t have let them tell you how to perform

Sunday mass; you’ll need to tell them this is the last time they’ll get their way. Today was to be for baptisms—there are far too many children that remain unbaptized and today was meant for them. But they go on about the people needing reminding, the complacency that stirs when they forget, drive it home, be dramatic, tell it so they’ll be talking about the mass that happened one Sunday in March all year, they say, and

12 dangling a check over your head. But they don’t need reminding, not really. The nature of the city already keeps these people from straying too far.

Ring the bell and they’ll feel hungry

It’s all very efficient

Efficiency is good

God is in efficiency.

But the distance between thought and words is widening now. Will they really believe if you don’t throw yourself into the words?

They will

You are the impeccable portrait of pure righteousness

You are too far away for any to see otherwise.

You’re much like God himself: apart from time and space, even as you languish, even if you regret your powers over men and wish to destroy the whole natural order and start over again with better pieces, no one can get at you. And because you are not at their level, what judgment can they make of you? You are beyond judgment. But that’s… that’s sacrilegious. Don’t you stand under the holy cross and compare yourself to God.

She said she would be back, the daughter you’d forgotten. She said she would be back in exactly two weeks, and it’s been two weeks, to the day. So have no doubt: you’ll see her today, somewhere. She likes to keep promises. Wonder if she’s here now.

She’s not

She wouldn’t dare that

Your wife would kill her, if she did that

Poor Laurel

She must hate the very idea that you had a daughter

Better to have a son out of wedlock

A son is easier to excuse.

Lost your place, you’ve lost your place. Take a breath; recall the last thing you’ve spoken. Picture the shape of your mouth, your tongue, until it can be no other word but this one. This one. It is this one. Hold the pause a little longer, they’ll think you’re lost in the meaning behind you words; they’ll think you’re consulting God for the strength to carry on because you’re impassioned.

Passion.

They enjoy passion.

Put your arms up and out, and push out as much passion as you can muster

Let it wash over them.

***

Listen: I am here. Look: here I am, buried under the weight of resonating

buttresses; I am under geometry so deliberate as to transfer relentless jolts of speech until they’ve penetrated my skull.

“They were crazed. As zombies, painted red, the color of blood, and they wanted to bathe in ours…”

Oh dear god, I don’t know if I can take much more of this.

“…Virus spread, the order of all hate, and it infected them so…”

What am I doing here? Why must I suffer such rhetoric? It rings in my ears, and

I don’t know whether to weep in the midst of the tremor that echoes through the halls or

laugh. Such inanity. Such nonsense.

“…As madness. And we wanted to help. We wanted to lead them to the right path, the righteous path of god as discovered by those he chose to bless in the light. We

wanted to reacquaint their minds with the reality they, in their insanity, wished to

abandon. But we could not. They would not take the food from our hands, and instead

they bit down and into the flesh of men that only wanted to ensure their livelihood.

Indeed, they wished to starve if only to excuse themselves for their atrocities…”

The torpid morning that I woke tasting, that I swallowed whole in my first breath

of the day sat in the parotid, rested there, staying quiet. But it raised up, perhaps slowly

underneath the waves of anxiety, and now it blossoms around my temples, a seething hot

shower of pulsating molecules. My head aches. A headache to end all headaches, it

seems, and I feel dizzy. I might pretend it is by the providence of the lord, that He was

touching me with the purity of light and the words of his prophet.

“…We desire what God desires: a divined utopia where all men may find solace

with their nature and with their labors and with their God. But how? How could this

ever be founded in a humanity that chews on itself? A humanity that gnaws to the bones

of the virtuous…”

In this blinding light and thundering vibrations, I might imagine that salvation had

finally found me, oh and by these nauseating words, and that my body was reacting—the

sweat in my palms, the uncontrollable fluttering of my eyes, the rising of breakfast in my

esophagus—as He shook the soul inside me.

“…So on this day, the Sabbath, we remember who we are and what me must do.

We remember all that we have accomplished by our labors. And even now, we fear the

insurrection of that blood-red disease which…”

And yet, I shouldn’t mistake a fever for fervor.

***

Lord, my husband is a good man. And if you’d only ever seen him giving a sermon then you’d probably have to think that he were a great man. But he is not a strong man. You wouldn’t know it if this were all you saw, cause’ he really seems sturdy

and that is probably why they call him the Prophet. But those are just words—words on a

sheet of paper. He does what he does because he can do nothing else. Lord, I shouldn’t

think that and I am sorry. He does your work, I know. Lord, while I have you, if you can

give him some spine to stand up to that stupid girl, then I know, just know, that he could

carry through to his full poten-shull. Maybe he’ll even give me a child of my own. And

this one won’t be a cursed de-chin-i-rate. Because, lord, I have good genes.

He says to expect her today, this evening most likely, but lord, I’ve been

expecting her since we were married. And so, I only ask to give me the strength to help

him through today. You made me strong, I know, but I need more. I feel like you owe

me this, for standing by him all this time, knowing he had a child by a different woman.

It took all of my will to not be disgusted by him. Remember him begging? Telling us “it

was long before I met you, I was a kid myself then.” Oh, what an excuse. “I was a kid.”

A kid? Old enough to know it is a sin. That’s a sin. Even I know this, Lord.

Lord, I have done something I am not so proud of. I don’t think its sin—if it is, it

isn’t written in the bible anywhere I know about. But, I did something women should not do. But I think I had to because my husband cannot be a man all on his own, so I had to make up for that. Lord, I feel worse for having to deface the good book, but we have so many copies of it at home, I felt it necessary. But like I said, lord, I feel bad about it.

***

Outside, the sun shrinks behind a fog. Again. Time is passing. And I can sense it.

Time moves forward painfully, folding in and out of the space I inhabit, daring me to

look for it—my neighbor has his watch face directed at me, I only need to glance. But if

I do, time will have me. I will have reified it, given it substance and power. It will hold

me in its vice, suffocate me slowly, squeeze at my neck, tighter, tighter, my heartbeat will slow, my senses blur. I will be aware of my place in time—insignificant in its infinite expansion, a minute detail of a creature that cannot escape the imposition of each and every minute. Counting down to something: something finite. An end? But there is no end to time. There is no beginning either. If time is infinite and the infinite is something we cannot experience, why try to count it as if we could measure it, as if we could tame it, clasp reigns on it, and direct it within the realm of human contrivances? We consider time in the form of numbers. It is mathematics derived from nature: the hours of the day dictated by the sun and the moon, the length of the years by the revolution around the sun and the passing of seasons. But maybe, we’ve read it all wrong. Maybe time does not

want to be known. And we anger it by our imposition, and so it lashes out at us, bearing

its teeth, breathing down our necks, until it finally devours us, and the doctors call it, to

the second: the victory of time. We might live forever if we’d only let time run wild.

But maybe that’s just my sorry excuse for being late.

My hand tenses forward. I catch myself reaching for the bible in the pew as distraction. I feel the blood in my skull. I taste my own breath. Heat from within reeks outwards while the young-old prophet frissons with his words; his body moves like a ragged marionette with his accentuated joints, and he seems under the control of a slew of indifferent puppeteers who, in their lethargy, cannot commit. For all the drama and spectacle, his actions never deny to me at least, that this must be the fourth time he’s performed this sermon this very morning—once at 7, far too early, if you ask me, again at

8:30 but I always avoid that second sermon as the hall is far too filled, heats too quickly, and the alchemy of sweat and perfume poison the air, a third time at 10 and I try to make it out by then, so that my day isn’t perpetually revolved around the church, and finally at

11:30. I woke too late and thus find myself here now. All the weariness of constant performance marks our dear prophet as a man quite ill—there is pallor in his face. Yet, with a flash of sweat on his nose as the fog has given in to the sun for the moment, with a holy sort of shine on his face, his forehead ripples and shrinks as he culls what is left of his energy and passion. He bears his teeth a moment; his arms widen, imposing judgment or, perhaps an unasked for love upon the endless rows of heads held up by over-polished oak and picture this: the usher with his glossy shoes taking it upon himself

to buff out the pews with Shinola; all the heads of pretty hair, bald spots, grease and parts, bows and ribbons, a single hat not far from the front.

And with another cadence of words, after the requisite and perceptible moment of disquiet before the reaction, because we are not a quick people, the hall erupts with the

rancor of applause. The children stand on their seats. The hat comes off. What about

me? My brain stuttering with the madness of a stream of thought, and by fever, its own

organism I can’t tame. Oh, what do they clap for? History, it seems, is of the order of

men, engendered by the whim allocated in his power. Whose reality is spoken in the

future, when all truth is forgotten, when all citizens are tortured and shook into believing

utterances of bygone eras shrouded in darkness, illuminating a present, by contrast, which

seems as black as ever? The Dark Age of Men, a hundred years ago or was it fifty? Or

twenty? No matter the time—The Dark Age will follow us to our graves, lest we assume

the roles of the righteous arbiters of the future and contain the disease of the past, in the

past.

It is a lie, spoken, never belied by any sort of vehemence of idealism, told in fear,

to escape the digression of complacency.

The strands of philosophy that once coexisted, peacefully even, must be

annihilated by the fear of their resurrection, the second coming of a plague which

infected the minds of the youth, of the disavowed, of the agnostic. It is central to the

derision of an ideology that originated in some foreign land, to the east (lo, the prophet is

pointing eastward now!), that it is lumped in with a sickness that attached itself to

children, in their lungs. Whatever brand of liberty might have been brought into the

walls of this city made as wretched as a three by two grave; any radiance of a new

egalitarianism washed away as we are reacquainted with Death.

Whether madness is a ship of fools taking anchor and unleashing its cargo of

idealistic idiots, or if it is autochthonous, I won’t be the judge. But I’ve seen that it

hardly matters. We must forget whatever is true about history. We must; the city must shine bright and focused, a beacon to those adrift in the tumult that surrounds us. We must tell a lie everyday, unto ourselves, unto each other, unto God. For it is not sin, to do

God’s work, even by virtue of deceit. We must do His work. We must… Melodramatic prose has infected my thoughts, it seems.

A laugh, though concealed by a sort of rapture, to tear me away from these thoughts that are a daily plague—they’ve set me apart, perhaps I relish this fact, and they force my teeth together and forbid me to move, forbid me to bring my hands together even once. No one will notice, each have been given his opiate. What am I but the statue on their periphery, just another devil to ignore? Just another reality made abject, and therefore, invisible in the margins of consciousness.

I sense the eyes of the prophet on me; perhaps he mistakes my scoff for enthusiasm. He certainly can’t have noticed. I consider a subtle gesture of some sort.

His gaze breaks my thought, as I let him make his judgment. But after a long moment, he’s turned away.

I know the game of men who have never felt the need to think and speak in anything but stringent orations. I mustn’t let it bother me.

I used to assume we knew better, that the sea of faces moved in concordance and that the magician at the front merely orchestrated its tumult for the sake of ritual, no, for the sake of sport. I would join, compelled by this sublime cacophony into something other than I; part of a whole… but, now, I know not to put credit where none is due.

Perhaps, the actors have forgotten they are acting and, now (or has it always?) their habit overrules self-awareness.

I accept men make their choices. And yet, let any of you tell me of your choice and I will listen. But how will you enunciate what you have never spoken unto yourself?

Prove your autonomy or else relinquish it to God! Slaves make meaning in moments, his ipseity is singsong, or in the grimaces of futility perhaps, and there is no illusion of freedom to befit his existence. You are beneath the slave. I wonder, do you ever dream of lifting up your arms to heaven and admonishing its presence? That’s why I always say, “go to sleep” rather than “wake up.”

I realize I’m smiling. The cacophony is in my head now, as the sum total of all strands of thought smash into one another. This must be how poetry is composed.

Where is my muse now?

But the muses are all squashed, from marble to dust, mixed with minerals and made into linoleum so that we can walk over them. They are useless in a version of the future where we’ve banished progress to the realm of technology. We evolve towards the idea of a civilization that will never be complete. It is the stagnation of the human project as we defer to advancements of utility and productivity. You are three times the man you were thirty years ago, but you will not be compensated for it and if you ask to be, they’ll

replace you with an automaton. The automaton will live your life, go home to your wife

and kids—it can’t eat, breathe, dream, it is better than you, more efficient, someone will

have to oil its joints from time to time, but it is better than you. Everyone you thought

cared for you will fall in love with the automaton that’s replaced you as from their eyes

will emanate and imprint an ideal soul onto the automaton, and the automaton not caring

either way, will except this ideal, embody it, and never be anything but.

The city is an automaton. You might assume it had free will as you watch it tense

and moan and groan—you might think that it has its own life, its own pain, and its own

reality. But it merely acts in accordance to mathematical directives. And still, we give it

a semblance of humanity. It dreams the collective dreams of all of us, turns over to the

nightmares of the children, awakens to the chirping birds and barking dogs, never having

to distinguish between degrees of sentience. All of us creatures are living in the

solipsistic imagination of an automaton.

I look for it. I looked. I didn’t mean to, but in a moment of silence, encased in a

fog of contemplation as the congregation tried to catch up with the prophet’s meaning, in

a stark disquiet I could hear the banausic, distorted ticking of my neighbor’s watch. Time is slowing down. We move around the sun at thirty kilometers a second. The earth spins on its axis at one thousand six hundred and seventy two kilometers an hour. And time is relative.

Chapter 2

The congregation is oppressively old—a bundle of faces colored by a toddler

armed with a Crayola in the shade of “liverspot.” Even the children look old, their faces

all cut up by meager lighting from overhead that collects upon the marble floor, pieced

together like a chess board, that dim light reflecting upwards to expose hollow sockets

and jagged cheekbones. Only the fat ones seem to have anything youthful about them—

chubby expressions mingled with the characteristic paleness of wealth have carved them

into Hellenistic-era sculptures of Eros, that creature of bad habits and amorality. The sort

of children that can get away with anything, swearing they haven’t been at the cookies,

with a plump hand still in the pantry—the son’s of shallow mothers, who spend far too

much time looking through opulent mirrors until they’ve bent their faces under the right

lighting and say “yes, you are Venus herself.” The kind of women who gossip with each

other at the state of womanhood throughout the city, all the while thinking how much

more beautiful they are, above the rest, knowing how little right to beauty other mortals

can claim. Clichés that go back thousands of years, and we’re still playing them as

though they were ultimate prophecies. For what do we need a prophet for if we never

free ourselves from narratives of banality?

I’ve been unconsciously stumbling along with my fellow men and women, children and their stuffed pets, and find the rain is all in my hair. My eyes dart from face to face, then from dress to architecture. I pronounce aloud the graffiti on the wall that

wasn’t here when I arrived that exclaims “votre Dieu vous deteste.” A man scoffs. He must’ve been a Frenchman in a past life. I would like to hear him say “monsieur” or

even, whatever is French for “As god as my witness, I am a Frenchman and can hide it no

more.”

A satire in bad taste (I’ve always had such bad taste)—lineages and genealogies

are now forgotten. The threads of history threaten to distinguish one person from the

next; if he should choose to cling to a heritage or the timeless myths of tradition, how

should he feel the baptism this city itself offers? Purify yourself from your past (as they say), drown it before God, and He will bless you; the sins of our fathers are not on our backs. Roll away the stone of history—thrust it into the flame deluge and all will be

forgiven. We are not men of this name or that; we are men of God.

***

Don’t smirk, child. This is not a happy laugh. It is an irritated one, and seeing

that smile is all the more irritating.

Now, you’ll have to rush home and pull on your jeans and your work shirt, on

your day off, godforsakens you on your day off. They’ll want you here within the hour,

with your pressure washer on hand and they’ll tell you how delicate the wall is, so be

careful not to chip the stone. It’s stone! You know what you’ll see if you crack stone?

More stone!

And what language is this? Italian? Don’t try to break your brain trying to read

Italian, you’ll just have to clear it off and be done with it. Then they’ll pay you more for

working on the Sabbath, so professionally—ten dollars for committing a mortal sin,

they’ll give you.

***

This city stretches from me. My feet are at the precipice. There is a fear that echoes from childhood. ‘One false movement,’ it says, ‘and you shall slip into it.’

Perhaps as a child I could’ve taken that leap on a whim. Now it is too late. I will always catch myself.

I study the hillside onto the valley of which the church casts an unwelcoming shadow. How disappointed would any great explorer be if he had made this climb to find a view of not a single sea, just a miserable ditch in the earth threatening to collapse upon itself. And still these are dizzying heights, made all the more dizzying by thinness of the air. Stimulated in body and mind, until one separates from the other (and can any one question that this is the desired effect of a church on so high a hill?), my toes continue to stretch out where the fog laps at the edge of heaven. Metallic-cold oxygen threatens to burst my lungs.

A myth: the uncultivated earth is of a composition of organic properties engendered to befit the uncivilized, degraded species, incognizant of the mechanism necessary for acculturation. We have derived from the physical processes, so perfect in their ability to propitiate the boorish yet exile him to his life of unconscious survival, our own order. In this way, by a puerile science, we have harnessed the power of the biological and contrived from it these various arteries, and joints, and shafts that form, like an exposed skeleton, the rudiments, along with boiled smog, pronounced like bold excretion trapped far too long within the bowels of the whole interest of human confinement. And if the skeleton seem made up of alchemic metals, the muscle are composed of men and cars and trains, filing and crawling, discernment in near darkness,

25 in rivulets like tissue moving to tense some part of the whole (though not today, for today is Sunday). Yet, it seems wrong to assume Nature as our prophet. Rather, our dear city revels so in its discrepancy much that the earth, as though it felt such imposition, stems away in disgust and even those areas not once treaded by man seem primed for our expansion, primed for the building of more suburbs. The earth, it seems, shall never henceforth contend with the prowess of the men of God.

A blackbird now dives into a disembodied purview. Eyes reorient themselves, as awareness resuscitates, unto the cartography. The compulsion for order and straight lines inform a strict sort of uniformity in architecture, roads mapped in a grid, so a person walking is never lost. I’ve tried, more than once, and I found myself where I began without thinking. From such a height, I could trace all routes I might’ve taken; I can draw all the paths that anyone could take. There is no reason to wander, there is little to see, and to stray too far from one’s quarter meant awareness of the distinct variations in existence. They have their place. You have yours.

All that you might gain from walking in a city bereft of the sort of sights and interesting characters you might find as a Parisian in your own city, all that you have is your own thoughts. You could search for some sense of meaning in the mundane, but you’re unlikely to find it. But at least you’d have your thoughts. I’d never have a thought it my head if I didn’t walk.

Someone had to plan all of this. Someone had to envision all this. Someone had to draw it all up on a large sheet of paper, and then someone else had to say, “Yes, yes, that’ll do.” That is how I picture it: a lazy “that’ll do.” But really, how hard could it be

to draw up a thousand horizontal lines? Did they ask the planner to draw more after he

thought he was done? We won’t ever know—the planner himself remains anonymous.

And so, all the journeys a person might take are subject to anonymous law.

If I focus long enough, I can see the rooftops that we’re never meant to see. The flat ones, painted a greyish off white, or perhaps they were painted white, and the structures decided to paint themselves with whatever was to be found in the air. The contrast of rooftops—from the pointed, slatted ones in the closest quarter, to the flat ones in the farthest—is meaningful. Contrasts are always meaningful.

Small bursts of wind, needed to loosen the fusion of fog and pollution, the winds cut my back and urge me forward. Even as I feel tempted to accept the push, so that my body can be lodged between a rocky hillside and a movie theatre, even still I find something consoling in the rippling of my coat—a sort of rhythmic harmony, though impalpable—as a tumult of lazy whips wash along my back and carry out dead thoughts, strewing them over the city.

To my left, a man, smartly dressed in the uniform of affluence assaults the fringes. I refuse to look over as I sense him. The stench of some artificial amalgamation of florae diffuses around him. Here’s a man whose aura is created and bottled, and then premeditatedly applied to mask his true scent. By sort of veneer alone, I already recognize him, or at least the kind he represents. He stops and stands at penance. Perhaps he mistakes in my position the same sort of meditative contrition that would beleaguer him if he were yet human. But no human could smell this strange.

“Ah,” without invitation “there has never been a sight like this, our very own

Eden…”

I swallow a reflexive scoff and with it, a thick of miasma. It is a wonder to me how the same gesture of silence can be made to mean whatever the mood someone needs; in this case, it is contrived familiarity that beckons him to stand by my side.

“I need to say,” I really wish you wouldn’t, but you’ve already started, “I feel like the martyr. I have given a lot for them. And not for love or respect. I could’ve known it would have come to this. But…” he trails off and looks towards me for courage. I give him as little as the staunchest stoic could; apparently, it is enough. “I find purpose here for at least one day of the week. Perhaps,”—as he turns to me—“I should join you on

Wednesdays as well.”

He seems to think that I’m a sort of representative of the public. I want to tell him otherwise. I will tell him otherwise.

Eyes locked on the city below, I am speaking coldly, “I don’t come on

Wednesdays, I don’t have the time or the energy for biweekly visits.”

“Ah,” and again with the ‘ah!’ “A working man, after my own heart, as they say.”

Pandering annoys me. I am annoyed. I take a small step forward; I contemplate giving into the ineluctable, and scan the cliff side for the most direct route to my death. I imagine his reaction—his day is ruined! He might even lose sleep over it.

“Yes, I’ve got you figured!” He sees in my smile a concession. He puts out his hand.

Sir, you know nothing of me. You think I am a sort of man of god or a man of duty and yet I would throw myself down, just for the shock on your face and, maybe, conjure up a sort of curse on this hill. For a week or two, my death would arouse superstition in the fellowship. My ghost would have power I would never find in life.

But no, because, in my pocket I have a whole box of cigarettes, and that would be a waste. Then again…

I shake his hand. I consider pulling him down with me.

Relish this small victory; he did not ask my name, and so it remains untainted or less tainted, and I can rest easy with knowing that he won’t think of me as a friend. If he and I should ever meet eyes, I can turn away in an instant, and he can never call out to me.

“Sorry, I didn’t get your name,” answers the cloud of chemical stink.

Goddamnit.

And curled toes, creaking leather shoes, think of a name, “something J something,” make one up, tell him his own name, tell him to go to hell… JUMP!

Too late—through clenched teeth and protruding jowls, my tongue replies on its own. I am betrayed by a learned obedience to manners.

But even after I’ve given in, he is not finished. He wants to shake my hand again, to devour it in the perfume of a skunk, to memorize my calluses set against the squelchy cloves of flesh I have to pretend is a hand. Even as I return to my view, he places the other hand, with all the tenderness of a mannequin, on the small of my back. Push me, for the love of God, push! But he doesn’t, he only tortures me with a quote “and men go

to wonder at the heights of mountains, but themselves they consider not.” Oh you must consider yourself often, with your delicately pressed hair, cologne that must’ve been extracted from the vilest flower, a brow that never unfurrows. And then you must have your tailor do the rest of the considering. And what do you think you have to teach to me?

And somewhere, somewhere there is a Judas I need to thank. I hope it was the tailor that turned him in.

“Oh, and here, take this.” He offers me a white, plastic dowel—it is a pen, squared at the grip, and etched along all four sides in serif font reads: Vote Daniel

Greyson. “You can use this on voting day, to mark your vote. Remember to vote, son.”

My hatred of all sorts of terms of endearment threatens to boil out of me, but I cannot help but take the pen from him, if only to use it to cast my vote on anybody who’d have the gull to run against him. I’ll use your gift to ruin you; to ruin you with a single mark in a box with blue, ballpoint ink. For the first time in my life, I think I’ve found a reason to vote. I see right through your heavy-handed magniloquence—you silly caricature of a man. A thousand men just like you have already entered the annals of history, blithely ignoring the antecedences of their own passé personality. Everything you are, done to death. The compulsion of history is to squeeze out men like you, like clockwork, every decade as if we’d all forget how much we abhor your species—but, then again, we are likely to forget our loathing, vote you to the highest office available, sit indolently as you reintroduce us to that subliminal antipathy. But you’ll regret the day you started handing out pens with your name on it to those who retain the memories of the brand of man you

represent. And you’ll regret the day you started handing out pens with your name on it to

those who’d never vote for any reason but out of spite.

I consider myself the pessimist but how else should I understand the qualities of man in his habitat. He speaks, and so he must lie. He walks, and so he must strut. He dies, and so he must pretend he won’t. And it is all performed in the name of etiquette.

E-tee-qwet, a word we don’t even use anymore. It’s just seeped into the collective

consciousness and so there’ll never be a need to define it, even it forces us to do things

that can’t have any real meaning behind them.

I must try harder to be less that sort of man. When I must speak, I’ll speak truth

or else, half-truths, I’ll slouch and drag my feet, and I’ll go casually unto death. It hardly

matters, of course, what I do. People are so practiced and so precise in their perspective,

that peculiarities are glossed over. And so, I can jump and writhe like a madman, and

glances will merely stare through me. But if I calmly whisper, in a crowd of citizens,

“Marx was right about the course of capitalism” I will finally be brandished the madman

I’ve always wanted to be, castigated by silence or else thrown in prison with my fellow

communists, rotting to the teeth as they carry out their sentences as nominal laborers.

A liminal position on the horizon of concern would be my victory. I would still

be there, threatening to creep in, whispering to children through steel-barred windows,

raving at men and women as they walk by, devaluing their livelihood and their

possessions, culling out their passion, even if it is only that of hatred, until I have

summoned an army of changelings of which the church could have no power over—at

31 the very least, a Catholic (or, even, a Poor Clare!) would have to be called to perform the exorcism. That would bring a little color.

But, I am not a madman or a communist, and I am not a fairy with powers like those.

And what had communism, or any order of isms for that matter, done for us anyhow? The devils, painted red, beating their chests in obstinacy, pronouncing the means to what, exactly? Every man has it in him a compulsion for revolution, but these men revolted against time itself. Desiring to shake off the heavy burden of an era so defined by the utilitarianism that had already irreparably pronounced an end to history, they had instigated the final clash of idealism meant to take place on the battlefield of consciousness—and it turned to all-out war. Could they not have predicted this, when war itself is crafted in the hands of the most industrious of profiteers? In their failure to foretell the absolute boundaries of the drive for capital, they became defined as the darkness always threatening to devour the city; they became the specters demanding excision; and they, by their defeat, gave legitimacy to the belief that we had already reached the apotheosis. We held fast even as we turned on one another, “every man for himself” became the order of thought until we filled the prisons up to the hilt, erecting more for no other reason but to say “yes, we have vacancy still.”

But this was years before I came into this world. And, in effect, all brands of revolution have long since become kitsch. But the prisons remain. Every utopia must allot that portion of land for those who are unable to align themselves properly. Utopia is not meant for every man. And the ceaseless turning of each year brings with it a rising

population of prisoners, lacking in, with the death of all idealism, any real sense of

solidity. They are those truly alone in this world.

What the omnipotent planners of the city did not account for is the necessity for

psychiatric hospitals. A man so condemned by his idealism could, at the behest of his

family in most instances, plead insanity before the jury. I can hardly see the difference,

but the city’s government knew to allow as many cases of insanity to be heard as was

possible, the result of which was this: contention against the state become aligned with a

psychosis.

And any man may go insane if he reflects for too long on any subject we’ve taken

for granted. I could pull apart “I think therefore I am” until what is “I” dissolves entirely.

And then we would be left with no “I” but only a “you” to try to make sense of a right

mess. Any profundity that has ever been attempted was done with the assumption that

there was anything profound to say in the first place.

I start for the stairs. The congregation pours into a parking lot that seems out of

place so near to this simulacrum of an old-house-of-God. A kid, and I should call him that because he is younger than me, if only be a few years and I am always aging myself, a boy a few years younger than me stands too near to the church. I wouldn’t notice him except for the fact he is placed at the epicenter of a sort of anxious bubble, of which the congregation avoids pointedly. Unease radiates out from him as he is fiddling with his pockets. Perhaps it is because he is not dressed for church, perhaps it is because he is kicking at the gravel idly, or perhaps it is because there’s been talk of a criminal in our midst. But in any case, he is avoided entirely by a sort of somnambulistic ramble. I want

to help him, but it seems wrong of me to assume he’d need it. He only seems bored now,

and a little annoyed. He is of voting age though, and as such I fear for his life—it is only

a matter of time before the martyr, still wandering the yard, shaking hands profusely with

men and women and children, spots him and stakes a claim upon his soul and name.

Run, man, Run for your life.

He doesn’t budge from the crux of the bubble he has supernaturally created for

himself. The sun has broken out of the clouds, and a harsh sort of light radiates onto him.

His face begins to sparkle by the sweat from his pores. But now, he has removed a hand from his pocket so to block the light from bombarding his face. He has caught my glance, and shrugs his shoulders with a sort of smirk. I think him friend, but I am turning

back to the stairs so not to put him off even further.

***

Shit, man, it’s hot. You’d think that the clouds would have meant that today were

to be cold, but it’s not. You always forget how hot one o’clock feels here. Maybe it’s all

the more hot up here.

The people avoid you, take your hands out of your pockets and maybe they

wouldn’t be so strange about it. Be casual. You are terrible at this. You’re going to get

fired, your first month on the job, and he’s going to fire you. This is the best job you can

hope for. Everyone is jealous of you, so you know it must be a good job. They all have

to go underground, and you get to bounce around town with a private investigator.

You’re like a character in a novel. But, now, you really wouldn’t mind having to go underground if it meant you didn’t have to stand here so uncomfortably.

He didn’t feel like working today though so it’s just you. You, all by yourself: it feels good to have this much control over your day, and you’re getting paid for it! But you’re going to get fired if you don’t find her. Celestine. You went to school with her.

You must try not to feel too weird about that. If she spots you, just say, “Celeste, I thought that was you, do you remember me?” or whatever people say. Is she into something deep? Is that why Richard was hired? Drugs? Probably—her mother was into drugs. Not you, though, everyone around you had a needle in their arm, but not you.

And now you have this job to show for it. Good show, old chap. Give yourself a pat on the back.

You should get a suit. Next paycheck. Then maybe you wouldn’t be so obvious.

Don’t forget to watch. What if she walks right past you and you miss your chance. We had good information that she would be here. I don’t know why she would come all this way for Church. There’s a perfectly good church in her quarters. It’s not as fancy as all this, that’s for sure, but at least they serve coffee and muffins. Coffee isn’t that great— you’re supposed to develop a taste for it when you get older. Either you’re not old enough to get it yet, or bitterness just isn’t for you.

Celeste. Where are you? I need you to show yourself so that I can have something to write down for today. Otherwise Richard said he couldn’t pay me. If we have nothing to show our clients, then they won’t be paying us, he said. They demand a certain amount of discretion, but what they demand even more than that is a result, he said. Richard says a lot of things you don’t understand. He says he’s old school. He seems to think that stocking his shelves with Sherlock Holmes and all sorts of casebooks,

solved and unsolved mysteries and stuff, makes him old school. You thought it was a

joke. But he’s serious—as serious as they come. You’re still scratching your head at his

method of training too. He wants you to “learn by experience,” is what he said. But all

of this seems too serious of a thing to leave to experience. Two weeks in on the job, he

offered you a gun. It wasn’t a new gun—it was all worn at the handle and scuffed along

the barrel. It was a nice gesture, but you had to turn it down because a gun is a serious

thing. He seemed disappointed in you, like a father would be of his child. But a gun is a

serious, serious thing.

Where is that girl? Would you even recognize her if you saw her? It’s been

years. Size her up, like Richard says. Picture her: five foot six inches, a hundred and

twenty pounds or so, pretty to look at, high cheek bones, oval face, dark hair, light blue

eyes. The eyes were her defining feature. They were so pale that you had to wonder if

she could see out of them. If you got close enough, you could see a little grey sunflower

around her pupils.

Wipe that dumb smile off your face; they’ll all think you’re crazy or thinking

about their daughters. Well you were thinking about someone’s daughter, but that is not

the same thing.

Oh damn, who’re these folks, three feet away, closer than anyone else here?

One man, in an incredible hat, asks you what you are doing here and now you have to answer, without staring at his hat. The things people wear, really. I bet he’s balding and didn’t know how best to hide it so he bought the first hat he saw in the first store he found. “I’m umm just wondering umm when the next service is?” You said “umm” too

much, this isn’t gonna fly. He tells me it’ll be on Wednesday, that they are done for the

day and then says something about graffiti on a wall with a gesture that needs his whole

body to perform. You don’t know anything about graffiti on the wall. “I don’t anything

about graffiti on the wall.” You just got here. “I just got here.” But they don’t seem to

be finished with me.

They tell me that the police are on their way already. One of them, the small one

who still managed to find glasses that were too small for his face, tells me they are

coming for me. I would feel threatened by that if he weren’t so… so… cartoonish. And

his voice is offensively nasal, probably because the bridge of his tiny glasses are plugging

up his nose. He has to tilt is head up so that he can eye you through his glasses. “The

Police will be here for you very soon.” He has to say it again, because a man that small

probably has to repeat himself quite often.

You are trying to show them that you are calm. Smile a little, but not too much or they’ll think you’re laughing at them. It’s hard not to. You’re trying to picture the word

for all this. What is the word for it?

Chapter 3

The police have arrived. They weren’t kidding when they said the cops were on their way. Take special care not to do anything funny in front of the cops. They always seem to be stepping on glass, on edge. And a gun is a serious thing. Don’t eye his gun.

Look him in the eyes. It’s almost unbearable to look him in the eyes. It’s like staring through the sun. And then you have to blink and wipe your lids with your hands. But you can’t do that. You wouldn’t want them to think you’re scared. They might think you’re scared because you did something and they are close enough to figuring it out and that is why you’re scared. Best not to show fear. But they aren’t close enough to figuring anything out; they’ve got the wrong man. He’s probably watching all of this from a safe place, laughing at all the energy being used up for such a small thing.

The police are talking to the mob of men as if you are not here. You might be able to sneak off. But no, that would implicate you. So you’ll just have to stand here, powerless, while they decide what to do with you.

An officer strides towards you. A woman in a pink cardigan has her finger up at you. She takes a whole big breath of air as if she’s making up for a year of not breathing.

“I saw him earlier. I am sure I saw him. I am sure he did it.” You saw me? You didn’t see me. I wasn’t here, I don’t know who you saw but it wasn’t me. If you saw me, then you must see me everywhere, and honestly I’m flattered, but you’re crazy.

But you can’t say all that.

The officer tells her to calm down, flashing a flat-handed gesture like the way you’d tell a dog to lay on the floor before you gave him a treat. He turns to you and asks

for identification. You pull it out of your pocket and hand it to him. He reads your name

back to you once and then, “Are we gonna find any sort of record of you in our archives,

Mr. James?” No, no, you tell him. “Good, if this is your first infraction, we could

consider letting you off with community service,” and then he turns to the other officer,

now busy taking statements from your accusers, and says your name louder, for everyone

to hear. “Right sir,” says the second officer. Now everyone knows who you are.

But you need to let him know something more than your name. “I didn’t do

anything. I wasn’t even here when it happened.” Good, you’re getting the hang of this.

There weren’t any “ums” in that.

“Well, if it’s going to be like that,” he says, pausing, waiting, it seems, for you

change your mind, “then this might be a long day, Riley.”

“Sir. I’m on the clock actually. If you’d just call my employer, he’ll tell you.”

“We are working on contacting anyone that might know something.”

“But you don’t have my employer’s phone number. I do.” You reach into your pocket again, and pull out a business card, a little soggy since you let it go through the washing machine, but since the name and number are etched—maybe this is what

Richard meant when he said “old school”—but since the name and number is engraved,

the text remains clear. Officer No-Name takes it off your hands asking where it is you

learned French. I don’t know French at all, you tell him, but he just eyes you, as if you’re

going to change your mind and or suddenly have the revelation that you are really very

fluent in French, in fact, you speak French on a day-to-day basis and in your opinion, it is

39 a much better language than dirty, old English. But it is true that you don’t know French, so you can’t really help him on the matter.

***

That boy

That damn boy

He’s made himself known

He’s handing out Kind’s business cards like they’re free flyers for Chinese food.

You’d think he’d know better, and Kind is telling you “he’s good, he’s good at this, he’s got a knack for it, don’t you worry,” but you worry because he’s young and because he’s got to have other motives, of the ulterior sort, you know this, they all have something up their sleeves, and you don’t feel bad for thinking that, because it’s true.

Sarah always said

No, you mustn’t think those things

That’s just part of the larger narrative

She said.

You couldn’t really know what she was thinking because she wanted to be sympathetic and so you tried to be sympathetic, but it’s brought nothing. And now it’s in your face, and you’ve got to make a scene out of it just to make sure it doesn’t go too far, to make sure the police don’t ask too many questions.

That boy is here to ruin you

Maybe he just wants your money so maybe he’ll stay quiet about it.

And all this “staying quiet” all this “hush, hush, no one will never ask if nothing is ever said” the same thing that’s been said to you since you were a sixteen year-old boy thinking you had it all together, thinking that you were ready for something you weren’t, but you only thought that because, what else could you do?

And now you know they’re right

There’s a place for you

You can’t let that slip away.

Sometimes, you’d wish you’d done differently

But you didn’t

So here you are and you have to be prepared to do what it takes

Laurel says.

You shouldn’t wish that you’d done differently. It’s wrong to wish that, because look at all you’ve done by this course, and God must know you did the best you could, otherwise you wouldn’t be the “prophet” as they say, somewhat blasphemously. But this boy, he means to undermine all that, in front of your entire congregation.

You’ve called Kind three times already, and he isn’t answering, so you’ve done what you could there, so it’s really up to you what needs to be done.

So, what? They’re about to load the boy into a car, and they’re about to take him in, and who knows, you can’t imagine, who knows what sorts of questions they’ll ask him. Who know how he’ll answer? Who knows how quickly he’ll give it all up?

Walk out the doors

You can’t hide behind them all day

Waiting until it all gets out

As the city comes knocking

Calling for your death by hanging

Or it’ll be worse

You’ll be asked to resign

You’ll see your name in newspapers

Hear it whispered everywhere you go

You’ll be demonized

The atheists will rejoice

Why did they ever stop hanging people?

***

Now officer no name is telling me all about arrest records or a lack thereof, and about how they had to call the superintendent of my high school to find out for certain if there weren’t any infractions under the name “Riley James.” There weren’t of course, and they found that you were quite the student, all A’s and B’s, including an A, he’s adding like he’s doing long-division, in French three-o-one and an A- in French three –o- two. So, it seems, he tells me, that you’ve lied about your fluency in French.

Didn’t lie, you tell him slowly and assertively, because that was tenth and eleventh grade. You tell him that you hardly remember tenth and eleventh grade, it was years ago, and besides, you didn’t really need to learn French, just a few conjugations and a small dictionary of words in simple-tenses. You certainly couldn’t speak French, you

42 tell him, and maybe you could write a small sentence in French, if you thought hard enough about it. You could say “Je m’appelle Riley, comment vous appellez-vous?” which means “My name is Riley, what is your name?” but you aren’t entirely sure about the conjugation.

You shouldn’t have said it loud enough for your accusers to hear. Of course they were listening in, but now they go all smug and say, “He is speaking French, he speaks it well. Listen, he is confessing, in French!” “Taire si vous, se il vous plait,” you say, hidden under your breath, and thank god no one heard it. That was always your favorite phrase. If you were going to tag anything in French, it would be with that. But the officer is telling you that he is going to have to arrest you, and that he would rather not put you in handcuffs in front of all these good people, so you’d better go quietly to his car. But, you ask, did you call Richard Kind? He says they tried but there was no answer and that he doesn’t like to bother people on their day off anyhow. He says that you’ve bothered too many people on their day off. What is the word you still can’t find?

All this time, and you’ve never done a thing wrong and now you are going to jail for no other reason than that you took French in high school. Oh why didn’t you take

Spanish or Latin instead? You idiot. You wanted to make your mother happy. She knew a few phrases and she thought saying “shut up, if you please” in French was funny too.

You only wanted to have something smart to say back. You never did get to learn what smart thing you could say back.

***

“I want to talk to him,” as resolutely as you can and they don’t seem to want you to, “no, there’s no need, he’s not going to show any remorse,” they’re saying.

That’s it

That’s the solution.

He’ll have to confess to you.

You’ll make it right.

“Let me, please, I feel strongly about this” and they acquiesce and they go to take him out of the car, but, “no, I’d like to speak to him in the vehicle, please, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“Sure sure” the police officer is saying, “but be careful. We’ll be standing right outside, just to be safe”

“Oh, hum, it’s fine, really it’s fine.” But they’re going to do what they’ve been trained to do, the Prophet’s wishes be damned.

You must show yourself as confident to these sorts of people

Don’t let them think they can get away with any of it

They’re always eyeing you like you’d owe them something

Something from the beginning of history

They’ve got like a collective consciousness

Memories of their ancestors

But then, you’ve got God.

Slick your hair back and down to your neck, as flat as possible, and yes, you look confident.

***

“Okay, what do you want,” the Prophet is saying, whispering really, and its not so much a question at all. He’s far into your personal space; these church folks always invade your personal space, because no one ever told them about personal space or any order of things that might make people uncomfortable. He’s so close you can’t even turn your head to face him. You can smell him, and he smells a lot like wood polish and sweat. Like a person who’s only just started sweating, not like old sweat that gets trapped all in your pits, but like a fresh sweat.

But you don’t want anything, you tell him, “They all seem to think I tagged the wall with something in French.”

“But you didn’t?” He’s backed away a bit, thank god, and now you can see him, and all his pores, and his nose hairs splayed out along his nostrils, and you can see the roots of his hair almost glued to his forehead.

“No, I haven’t been here long enough for that. I was looking for someone. Do you know a girl with the name Celeste? ” He shuddered a bit when you said that, like you’d called upon Bloody Mary three times. Celeste, Celeste, Celeste. You’d like to say it just to see what he did.

“Alright, I think I can take care of this.” Oh, you can take care of this? You can tell the police Riley Mr. James didn’t do anything wrong? But he’s stepped out before you could ask any more questions that’d make him shudder.

He’s called officer no name and they’re meeting halfway. You’d like to listen to how he’d take care of this, like he said he’d do, so you press yourself close to the window.

“Mr. James has confessed, and has told me that he feels wrong about what he did.

And he swears on the Bible that he’ll never do it again. And as for the graffiti, I will pay it out of my own pocket. We will not be pressing any charges, because Riley has proven to be repentant about it all.”

But you hadn’t confessed a thing and that might’ve made you angry if you weren’t wondering how in the hell he knew your name. Your full name. Everyone knows you now, you weren’t wrong about that. And now, there’s no escaping that Riley

James Vandalizes Private Property in His Free Time. It’s not even free time—you’re on the clock. But you can’t really think too much on that, worse things have been said about better people. That word though, what is that word? It’s really nagging.

“You’re free to go, son.” Thank you, you grunt aloud, but the words stick in your throat, half-formed. But don’t call me Son unless I call you Father. I don’t care if you’re a Prophet or God himself.

Chapter 4

Funny how an hour spent in church infects your thoughts, turns them dramatic, warrants you to say “ye” and “thou” as though it were all part of your everyday vocabulary. I must not let it get to me, or else I’ll go raving in my head in a biblical sort of language and maybe I’d find myself standing where the Prophet stands, at the head of the congregation, because ‘in the beginning was the Word’ and that’s all it really takes, to speak in a language of imposing historicity, so no one really questions if what you’re saying is in the Bible or not, cause’ by god it sure sounds like it is. No one demands you to cite your sources if you talk like that.

Nothing can exist without the word, and that’s true, we can’t see a thing if it isn’t named, so how should we see god if we don’t name him. If I didn’t have a name, who would see me? No, they would see me, but they’d call me ‘man’ or ‘boy’ or ‘man-boy in church clothes’ and so I would be named and for that moment that is all that I would be.

The Train is here and so I must get on. It’s vacuous and cold. The seven or eight people who don’t celebrate Sunday much at all, they’ll be my companions. The seat next to mine is claimed by a real-estate flyer for some three-bedroom in the suburbs, going for upwards of half a million. Houses should not cost a fortune. It makes one believe that the purpose of life is to live in a house. Maybe that is the purpose of life, but who decided that? I don’t know. But perhaps that is why people who live in houses are so offended by the homeless—they defy the purpose of life.

I want to write; the desire always effervesces at the wrong moments—at a lecture, on a jog, while reading, on the toilet, and now on a train. But I’ve got Greyson’s pen and

he’d asked me to protect the sanctity of the ballpoint until voting day, or else that is what

it seemed. But it is no longer Greyson’s pen, and I will defile it by other uses. Men

harnessed atomic energy for the vitality of their country or for the sake of science, but

other men used it for their own ends.

A pen is not an atomic bomb

Thinks the man inside the train

Whose thoughts are then disturbed

By the dull clacking, clicking

Like a bell without a tone

Three seconds between each, one second, two seconds, three again?

Find your rhythm, beast

While the rest of us, in your bowels

Swallowed whole like Jonah in the whale

Are tossed around, needles in a tin box

Sitting, standing, in search of a natural state of being

Restlessly

Wrapped in cobbled shrapnel of precise shapes

Pulsating flashes of light

Something something something

I am not a poet

Eat me alive for pretending

Chew me up, and spit me out all for trying

A terrace of clotheslines where jeans are drying

Blue jeans are drying, a baby is crying

All the windows surrender to my prying

None of that is true, but it rhymes and has a meter

So I suppose, that makes it real

No, remember, poetry is not meant to rhyme

Somebody decided that truth couldn’t be squashed into couplets

Shakespeare must be distressed

All that counting on his fingers

The erudite lexicographer

Never rode on the Green Line

And shall never know the arbitrary

Not like we do

Something something something

Shakespeare is dead anyhow

And if we left it up to the officious, he’d never have existed

Dread the day that might happen to you

Erased by hindsight

You were never on that train

Because you never happened

The End

Wait for applause

But I am no prophet, and there’ll be no applause. And I can’t say anything for

certain. Crumple it up, crumple it up, but don’t litter, if one litters, it ends up at the other

end of the world, in a trash heap of things rich people were done with and who knows if

someone will recognize my handwriting, if one day I end up there again and I recognize

it for myself? That’s the way the wind blows.

Maybe that’s why the people in these quarters think life is so blessed—their trash

goes elsewhere and so they never have to face it.

The bin is on its side. I have to put it in order before tossing my little piece of

poetic idiocy. Mayakovski did it better, so what’s the point in keeping it?

Turning down an empty road, I find the window of a small shop that reads

ASSERT YOUR RIGHT, whatever that means and below the bold, yellow typeface it

suggests, “Buy a Gun.” I can recall the usual debates precipitating anytime a gun is used

for no other reason to make a statement. One side tries to make its point, all haughty like,

in alliterative language, using philosophy and enlightenment-style rationale like so (I am making this up, certainly): Ahem. Possessed by Orson Welles. ‘The confines of the established are constructed never to waver, but to impede shadows upon all who appear outside its mechanics. And to move towards the amendment of its principles, which by their nature necessitate conservatism, an ideology motivated by unbroken conciliation, would be to speculate its purpose and its power and to, likewise, lend sympathy to those circumscribed by ignorance of the truth of its exertions. Time, in terms of law, allows for the acquiescence of the qualities of permanence and universality; further, the language of

implicitness in those founding documents and all other laws subsequent work to instill a

faculty of the eternal. The remunerative answer of the established, when its artificiality is

summoned to the vanguard of even imprecise scruple, is to allow it to assimilate itself to

the internal laws of man, by way, where its appearance may have once been deemed too

abject, of the implementation of presence. This is, of course, the utility with which corruption has thrived where it should have been identified and therefore thwarted. Yet, this too, is the process of legitimation, which occurs among interlunations, and with it, imputed protection that, in general, is by the state from the state as well as from the threat

of anomy, but in this case is by the gun from the gun. Reflux is expected and has, in fact,

already transpired, since the legal arms of the last generation are the illegal ones of this,

but it is suggested by the guise of calumny in order to further subjugate acumen.’

The other side of the argument stakes its claim in rhetoric rather than the Word:

‘as long as there have been separate classes, there’s been conflict. And so we must

protect ourselves from people who want what we want. They (those who argue the other

side) want to leave us without protection so that the communists can take over, so that the

feminists can take over, so that the baby-killers can take over, so that the minorities can

take over, so that the poor can take over, so that the atheists can take over.’

There are a lot of people that want to take over. There are a lot of things that can

kill you. We are a city of hypochondriacs, I believe. And one day, an army of straw men

will rise up and drag us out of our khaki stained houses into the street. An army of

scarecrows, upon whom bullets have no ill effect, will declare martial law on the lot of

us.

It is from the straw men that haunt every corner of darkness in this city that I’ve

realized the lengths politicians will go to convince people to be just as certain as them.

On one hand, I want to say that “men must not use big words” and on the other, I want to

say, “men must not rely on rhetoric.” There is an air of certainty in both. The strenuous

burden of language on a people who have no attraction to artful words is meant to impart

to them the idea that language has a power, to say things all on its own. The very idea

that language can say anything at all is an erroneous one. Rhetoric purports a sort of ontological truth, that there is a bearing in anecdotes that language can not pronounce, and maybe that would be true and I might agree if men who used rhetoric didn’t also pretend that what they were saying was rooted in truth. In either case, I shudder in the face of their certainty. Men have done awful things in the name of certainty. The atrocities of religion were not committed in the name of God, but certainty. Hitler wasn’t born out of the crucible of a deteriorating Germany looking for a people to blame, no, he was born out of the idea that there was in fact someone to blame and he knew it with certainty. People have killed themselves too, for no other reason that they were certain it was the only course of action in the face of an indifferent universe, or for lesser reasons but all of which they were quite certain of.

But then again, men cannot handle the other end of that stick. What would get them up in the morning if they couldn’t be certain that there was any reason to get up at all? What would get them to work if they couldn’t be certain that that was what humans were meant to do with their day? Who would have built this city if no one were certain that it needed to be built? How could we procreate if we couldn’t be certain that this end

goes into that one or is it the other way around and screw it, it is too complicated, let us

just give in to uncertainty and let the whole human species die a languishing death.

Certainty was born out of logic. I might imagine that there was a time were we did not need logic, that we just did things grounded on what we felt and there was no need to be certain of anything, and somehow that whole lineage of mankind existed on its own just fine. But then something happened, we walked out of the cave and saw the sun for the first time, and thought, dear God, that’s what’s keeping the earth warm, making grass grow, allowing us to see the world and dear God, the world is the land which we step, which we may build our homes and civilizations, and dear God constructing civilizations is exactly what men are meant to do, and dear God, we are men and we are certain of that, and dear God we are talking to you and therefore you must exist. And that must’ve caught God by surprise, cause’ he probably had no idea he existed until men created logic and rationalized him into being. But, don’t get too comfortable, God, cause’ one day we will rationalize you out of existence. That same certainty that gave you life shall one day kill you.

And then we’ll do it all over again. We’ve already prophesized our end. The cliché is of course “history repeats itself,” but it was never so literalized until we decided we had reached the end of history. That is the result of the progression in ideas, we know

there is nothing left to build or plan, nothing left in the world we haven’t already thought

of. Freedom, ultimate freedom, but only insomuch as it is opposed to anarchy, so that it’s

really just a freedom from things we have identified as being opposed to freedom. We keep thinking that things would be better if our ideals reach further; if they would only be

53 completed to the extents we’ve imagined they should. But all this digging of ditches in the earth so we can plant another symbol of the capitalist model—the economic system of the purest form of egalitarianism, as we’ve deemed it—all of this just to buttress the fact that our ideals are already at play, and nothing now is left but to see them through to the endgame. We don’t need to imagine anything at all, cause’ we can fall into our hermetically sealed rooms and maintain that “yes, this is all there is” because we’ve pieced all the fragments of the world into our living rooms. The momentum of history is finished. There are no more walls to break through. And then what? We need that momentum, and it’s missing from our lives entirely. So we make it up, by doubling back, and doing it all over again because if we don’t, we’ll atrophy.

It’s hard to think and turn the key at the same time. It never seems to fit right.

Chapter 5

A rattle from down the hall, and before I can even get the wrong key out of the knob, the nurse has come barreling towards the door, pushing it open and standing there, hunched like a teenager out of mandatory confession.

“That man… he can order me to this or that and then when he’s tired of me, can forget who I am, call me a trespasser or… or… an immigrant. It’s as if his age, and he is not even so old I add, excuses him from reason or manners.” She stands before me, awaiting a reply.

Meaning to console, meaning to say ‘there, there’ or whatever could end this situation quickest but too shaken by this assault, I form the words at a whisper: “Yeah, he’s a dick.”

Her spine suddenly stands upright. She closes the door. She doesn’t want to let anyone else listen in. “I can’t… say that I…” I’ve embarrassed her. I move past her, into the hovel of darkness.

“Okay. I can talk to him. He’ll be better tomorrow, I promise.” She eyes me a moment, studying with suspicion as though I am to admit that I mean nothing by such a vow. I can only look away, face toward the floor. It is enough for her to abandon wariness.

“Alright, well, I have to end early today anyhow. Okay? Have a good day” and she turns on her heels and exits with a host of blinding incandescent attempting to tear its way into this sanctuary of dimness.

Flipping the switches is no help; the feeble lamps only accentuate the dank clutter

of a home utterly denying the comfort of its occupants. It was never so, not until I

accepted the cotenancy of a father whose mental state had only degraded by his bachelorhood and with a cohabitation with a so far estranged son. But, I really had no stake in the question in the first place—his name is on the deed.

It was his duty. I was his son, and he supposed he owed me a share of his providence. Blood made such a compulsion. I had no want for it; to be a beggar would be simpler—simpler to my conscience—for to be his obligation meant to be without a self. I had no qualities, in his eyes, because if he recognized any, he’d grant that I had the potential for more than his capabilities allowed him. And no son should overtake his

Father. That, he feared, would be my sin.

‘Oh, to be religious’ I once thought, having just read Shakespeare or Milton or

Goethe, ‘and to have it both ways; to have God’s word offhand when the extant of your logic has been exhausted. Those people are truly fortunate. If I could believe, if I could only believe in something, I would be too. But damn them, may God damn their obstinate sanguinity, while the rest, God’s sons and man’s daughters (as it is written) are locked in unconscious servitude to their laws.’

He had found God a few years back—true God, too. Not the sort of God that you proffer a share of your salary with once a year or the one that is conjured only when you cannot place your hatred or disgust within the terms of a human morality. No, it was the one true God, in all his glory, in all his love, in all his forgiveness. And, by extension, I found no escape from glory, love, or forgiveness.

Not to say he was not a Christian prior to his rebirth. It was just that, now, there

was a higher power behind his pride (and a devil behind his shame).

I drag myself down the narrow hall, deeper into the pit as though, at the end,

stands the scale weighing my heart against my history. I want to turn to the door on the right and avoid entirely the one unbearably ajar before me and hide away until... until he dies. I shouldn’t wish that. And I don’t—but, only, sometimes.

“I don’t want anymore visits from nurses with their bullshit prescriptions…is it

any wonder they’re all women? Always trying to run you, ruin you or something rather.”

“I can find you a male nurse then.”

“A doctor? I don’t want a damned doctor. I want to be left alone.”

“Okay, I’ll leave you alone then.”

“Oh, you’d like to just abandon me. But I’m too young to be in a home, and far

too sane to be in a madhouse.”

“If you’re so well, then why don’t you act it?” I have irreversibly found a moment

to push open the door, and now stand in the threshold of a narrow doorframe as if

preparing for an earthquake.

“If I’ve gone mad, it’s your damn fault. What, you went to school and then more

school—“ We’ve jumped right in…“—like you were learning something or maybe you

were too slow to learn it on the first pass, and all the while I am waiting a return on this

investment and I will wait until the end of time, it seems. You’ve wasted your time.

You’ve wasted my time. I should’ve lived in an age where having a son meant

something.” He has begun to lift his body into an upright position as though the

impotence of lying in bed needed to be shaken off. He must not be vulnerable in the face

of his Son.

“Have you tried having a talk with God about all that? You must have a direct

line.” There’s a mosquito eater in the room, trapped in an invisible cage in the furthest

corner.

A grunt like a muffled cough, “Does the parish know you mock them? I thought I

raised you better, but the devil finds his way or something rather.”

“He does. Hail Satan.”

Starting up, with a sort of dull crack in his knees: “You arrogant fuck, I will

beat…” and awash on his face, guilt flashes, or perhaps, that is just my imagination.

“I’m not a child anymore.” It was supererogatory. Su-per-er-og-a-tor-y: a word I had learned from Poe.

“I never…” And his voice trails into a moment of silence as he sits back on the edge of the bed.

I let him pretend, per usual. I have no need of confessions of guilt. I have never needed such consolation, and if I am being honest, his brand of discipline hardly had any effect, not at least, the desired one. All that it taught me was the power of silence. A man can lose his grip when up against silence. He held on to his, but only just, by defining my reserve as the mark of arrogance. I was the arrogant son. Funny, how that when I came to be of the age a son may realize the faults of his father, I found his foremost one to be of arrogance. ‘See in me what you cannot admit of yourself, father.’

And perhaps I was arrogant. Or perhaps I was slow. But in any case, I believed it

to be my right to learn for myself what my deficits were, rather than having them

imposed upon me. The mosquito-eater has escaped its self-imposed containment,

hovering at eye level above the queen-size bed. I didn’t even grant him the dignity of a king-size.

“Why do you do this?” I point at the head of his bed. The paint on the wall there

has been chipped. His face tells me he cannot recall the why. I watch as he forges a

rationale.

“This whole room needs to be redone. You’ve let it go… see there? We are

going to be suffocated by mold or something rather.” I can’t see a thing in the wall he

gestures toward, except for the minor scuffs I put there when moving furniture. But I do

not want to admit to that. I already have too many infractions against me as it is.

“I’ll buy some Clorox or something.” And then I’ll drink it.

My father lies back into his bed.

I rack my brain for something else to talk about or ‘something rather.’ I stiffly

wander to the desk to pick up the newspaper, a few weeks old, picked up at a liquor store

for some impulsive interest in old print media. I turn it over, delicately, as though it is

about to crumble to the dust of its obsoleteness, reading: MORTGAGE LENDER VIES

FOR POLITICAL SEAT. The photo under the headline hardly does the man justice. Dip

it in pickle juice, rum, and liquid refuse and they’d be halfway there.

“I met this guy today. I think he was trying to get my vote.”

“He should already have it, if you had any sense.”

“He’s corrupt as all hell… I don’t understand…”

“Don’t talk to me about corruption… the schools are the ones who’re… He’sa entrepreneur and shouldn’t be martyred for it.” Martyred? He already sees himself as such, a Christ on a cross of fashionable diamonds, Jesus in a suit.

“Just a real citizen, trying to make it,” Father proclaims. Unlike your lot, his inflection tells me. He rolls over in his bed—this is not a conversation he finds it necessary to stand up for. Perhaps he’s suddenly remembered that I’m hopeless. The mosquito-eater is lazily fluttering in a different corner, building a new prison for itself as it bounces off the wall repeatedly.

“I guess you’re okay with any pursuit of happiness even if you have to walk over the poor, their families, their children, to get to it?” I said it listlessly, hardly moving my lips as to hide the fact it took nerve. I hide it though he is not facing me.

“Idiotic rhetoric is all that is.” Shot down by a shiny, red scalp, far too textured by fifty years in the sun to attempt to detail.

Daniel Greyson--the son of a Grey. I might have more respect for him if he had the sense to at least live up to his name. But he dyes his hair stark black. Don’t deny your familial name, sir! I know this—he had earned his infamy as a mortgage lender type. His foul business practices had come to light when an anonymous whistleblower began feeding information to the newspapers, I think—I don’t know the precise details except that he had preyed on the lower class, selling homes that had been condemned or else promising a low monthly payment that began to inflate to exorbitant amounts even as the dwellings sometimes proved uninhabitable.

But somewhere in the fine print, so miniscule that the judge had had to pull out a

magnifying glass, were the details that would opposite-of-condemn him (abdicate? No no no, “exonerate” as it reads). He knew the laws all too well: “When asked of his experience during the trial, Greyson is quoted as saying, ‘I believe that my accusers were under the impression that I was not playing fair. But I know the laws all too well and so I had no doubt that I would be acquitted. I always tell my clients to read the entire contract; I cannot be held accountable for laziness or illiteracy.’”

The particulars of the case, of course, were too complex for anyone to have an opinion. But his exoneration did, in fact, make him an almost-martyr. The godless- welfare folks had very nearly succeeded in their conspiracy, though Judas remained anonymous and at large, it seems, since many were demanding that he or she be thrown into prison for libel or some other legal term they had little grasp over. He or she because “it must’ve been a women, a jilted ex or something rather,” my father told me when the trail first concluded. I tried to picture Judas as a woman, struggling to buy coffee with one of her pieces of silver (“the exchange rate is at 16.96 an ounce, this should at least get me a coffee!”).

And when Daniel dyes-his-hair-to-hide-the-Grey-son is asked if he should continue to work in home loans, he says, “If they don’t want me, they can go ahead and buy their homes cash in hand. I won’t be lending anymore.” And “Pictured here: Mr.

Greyson after his acquittal.” It should read: “Mr. Greyson, with his characteristic stoop like a shrug. Shrugging as if to roll the burden off his back.” I shrug my shoulders. I

feel a sharp pain in the sinews of my neck. This is not my natural state. I shall have to

keep my burdens.

“I know what you’ve hidden in your room” my father, sternly, interjecting my

thought, as I am rubbing my neck.

What? My room? What’s in my room? The Communist Manifesto? Some

Bertrand Russell?

“Just essential reading, sir.”

“Not what I meant.” He turns over to face me. “It whines. All hours of the day.”

“Oh,” shrugging my shoulders with an immediate reminder of the strain.

It has been awhile, and so I thought he would have forgotten his really inexplicable animosity. A week in, he had kicked the cat, proclaiming, “A house is not meant for beasts,” telling me that it always smelled of shit, not recognizing that it was his own smell he couldn’t escape. Very unchristian of him, if you had asked me, and though he didn’t, I told him anyways. “What do you know about being a Christian? Nothing, that’s what,” he said. The bastard of God, as I was, I kept the beast in my room, masking the scent with cinnamon air freshener—‘Christmas All Year Round’ the label purported and I hated Christmas, but I’ll be damned, I already am, I already am, I know and don’t remind me, but I’ll be damned if I let him impose his rule over this house.

“Listen,” he’s gestured me to make my way closer to his bed. As I do, he pulls me, by the neck, towards him, trembling with the stress of dragging me to his level, “you think you can do what you do behind my back. But I know you, and a thousand people like you. I know what you are. A stupid child in a man’s body, and you think you’re

better than all the rest of us? Or just better than me? I know things, and what do you

think you can get it from your damned books? You don’t understand shit. You’ll never

understand.”

I pull away and nearly pull him with me. “All this for a cat?” He languishes on

the side of the bed. I watch him struggle a moment before stretching my hand out to him,

perhaps as an offer of peace. He rejects it. I hear the mosquito-eater behind me,

knocking itself into the wall with the sounds of a sort of electric pulsing like you’d hear

out of power wire with too much pent up energy coursing along it.

“No. For all of your sins. Pride… Check.” He marks the air with his free hand.

“Wrath. Check. Sloth. Check. Lust. Check.” He stops his speech to take a requisite

breath. I will seize my chance.

“Gluttony,” I continue for him, and poking his belly, “Check.” He glares through

me. “You know, the Bible is not always on your side.”

“And I know you envy the will of other men…” he says, ignoring the insult and

pointing to the newspaper in my hand, “because you have none of your own.”

I have had it. My words, already practiced, ready as ammunition, “The only person I envy and will ever envy is the child I once was, too ignorant to see just what kind of person his father actually is.” Jumping from his throne of impotence, already halfway there in any case, the Father starts toward me, apparently expecting recoil or some other show of his omnipotence, because when he finds none, he stops, clutching at his heart. I now sentence you, father, to death by heart attack.

But no, not really, but allow me one last twist of the knife: “you know, they say

animal companions are good for a weak heart.”

“Get out,” I think he says. It is hard to tell through the intensity of his coughs.

Again, “Get out” adding, “you devil.” I oblige, but I want to tell him that the devil would

never be so obedient as to accept his commands. Still, one has to worry about his father’s

health. I start to go, only just remembering that I still clutch the newspaper in my right

hand. It has torn a bit by my grip, right over Greyson’s impeccable features. He looks

better in this light, more humble, without a nose or mouth. I splash it in on the desk from

whence it came, and a stream of grey confetti spread upwards.

I leave my father to pick at the walls and suffer at the state of his deteriorating

lineage, and trapped with not a friend in the world other than a suicidal mosquito-eater.

‘He cannot be my son,’ he must think. Perhaps I am the changeling, and his true son, the

good son, the best son in the entire world, is with the magical creatures. But I am here, to

ruin his life by silence or speech; whatever he believes is worse on whatever day it

happens to be.

My room remains locked, and so, at least for today, the cat is safe from his wrath.

I make my way down the hall, without a faint idea about what to do with my day. When living alone, it had been all too easy to stay in when there was nothing left to pretend to do. One might’ve thought me to be agoraphobic, and I suppose that is what I am.

Havens are hard to come by, in this day and age, and I’d have once thought that I wouldn’t have given mine up for the world. But I did give it up and without a fight too.

And now, none of us, not me, not my father, not the cat, has any real refuge. Loneliness

is a sure thing; it creeps in with the melancholy or by reminiscence, and makes itself

known when the voice in your head finds its way out of your mouth. But the mounting

desire of solitude you can never have—that is the worst sort of punishment you may ever

endure. In that case, knock down all the walls and it wouldn’t make any difference. But

at least the mosquito-eater would be free to find a new self-made confinement.

***

Ha, I’ve got you now, you awful little creature. Buzzing around like you’ve got any right, trying to ignore me, trying to flutter past me like I’m a piece of furniture and nothing for you to concern yourself with. You think you could escape my grasp, you

think you were too quick for me cause’ you’ve got wings. Well I’ve got hands, and I’ve

wreaked so much by them upon your species. Tell all your friends what I do with my

hands, if you’ve got the ability to call out, tell them before they come to pester me, just

what that pestering will cause them. Death. They will die, and then I will swallow them

whole. Tell them of the savage living in these walls, who traps insects and eats them.

Sick. And bored. Maybe more bored than sick. No one’s been able to say what’s

wrong, what’s wrong in the head, if it’s the head at all. They’d want to offer up all sorts

of treatments and prescriptions and now, so many pills hidden under the bed where no one should ever find them. There’s a monster under the bed, but he’s kept at bay by

those mind-altering substances. Who decides what sorts of pills to give if they can’t even

say for certain what’s wrong?

There’s nothing wrong; this is fact. They think it’s a paternally inherited disease, but this is a man in his right mind, in his right mind. They try to play tricks just to play

65 out the illness. It’s been February ninth for three weeks now. Wake up and see it’s

February ninth, and tomorrow will be February ninth too. February ninth was a cold day; the climate gnawed into bone. This February ninth is a sight warmer. So which is it?

Was February ninth a cold and bitter day, or is it a warm day? No more games. This is a man in his right mind.

I can feel you buzzing in my stomach, you fool: you think you can escape the belly of the beast? You can never escape the belly of the beast. You’re in it. You’re always in it, surrounded by walls that bend and twist if you tried to move about. So you scratch until it suffers an ulcer. That’s how you tell it that you’re in there, and no you haven’t forgotten that it swallowed you, and yes you are very much alive, and no you will not stop until you’ve scratched all the way through. Sorry for swallowing you, insect.

One can only do what he’s learned. That’s really all there is. We all suffer by degrees.

Even the beast that swallowed you is suffering. We are all suffering. You, least of all, but it is hard to understand with your little insect brain, it is hard for you to comprehend the ways men suffer.

Chapter 6

Mary had left me with a ticket to the museum. She’d placed it in my pocket. I’d found it when I finally emptied out my coat pockets, and there it was, a ticket, stamped for today. I want to consider not going. I don’t like the idea of meeting new people. New people are exhausting. How many men would be elated at the idea of a secret meeting with some mysterious woman who’d put a ticket in his pocket? I don’t think there’s anything exciting about that. People sometimes like to mimic what they see in movies or read in books, believing that there was a time when things like that was normal, that there was a time for romantic gestures, and mystery and intrigue, and that is how people stood out from all the masses of ordinary people. But I don’t think any of that’s true. Still, if you’re so hell-bent on cliché, Mary, I’ll meet you there. First, I need to change from this suit—no more placating the lord with layers of fabric. It is to his astonishment that a man should lie out his uniform before him and see in it his whole personage, as if the creature standing above it held no substance of his own. From that cloth emanates his ability and his identity and without it he should have neither. From that cloth he is made the man.

But I’ve strewn it on the linoleum floor. The fan has fallen of its axis again—it’s only a matter of time before it bursts out the bathroom ceiling and murders me dead.

I take the pills to end the fever. Constant fevers all my life without recourse except by a tiny orange-tinged pill to be taken twice daily. I must, then, dissolve any sort of contention with the state into the immutable fact that I am inextricably bound with this modern world, by an illness that thwarts my escape and that denies me the role of the vagabond I would be in another life. The privilege of life is granted and in return, signed

by blood, I am implicated in all that the state might do. There is no amount of private

ambivalence that could undo the vow or absolve me from anything the city might do.

The pills go down easier with water whereas dramatic self-loathing needs to be

accompanied by a cigarette.

Outside again.

There’s the woman who stands at her window all hours of the day, the old lady in

Apartment 1519 C. She’s there and so I can’t light a cigarette because no one in the world can know I do this to myself, or I don’t know.

Sometime last summer or the summer before that—now that I think about it, it was three summers ago—three summers since I had had enough or too much time on my

hands, I delved for the stories, or the rumors or whatever, from neighbors who I had

never spoken to, who must have thought it strange that I had this one, keen interest but

not strange enough to cause them to hold their tongues. As a matter of fact, they were

eager to give an account, though, as far as I could tell, not one of them could be old

enough to remember the details firsthand. One has to wonder how many drafts and

rewrites this particular story went through before it got to me. Memories of memories

intertwined with histories of histories capped with judgments of judgments and all the

while the woman was right there, standing over our shoulders, quarantined by a window.

If she could have only stepped through it, I imagine she might have told us all to mind

our own damn business. But it wouldn’t have mattered; she was the one truly mystical

thing in our entire lives.

And so, what had been revealed to me, in the sense that I had to amalgamate a series of truths, distilling them out of what rang false, played out much like an old gothic tale and I’ve taken to replaying it in my head, like an old VHS tape you’ve paused too many times so that the edges of the frame start to tear and all you can really do is focus your eyes dead center and try to ignore the stuttering on the border. If you can’t ignore it, well, you’ll never be able to enjoy the fantasy of the film as the deficits of old technology remind you than none of this is real and what is real is much less interesting than what is false but you must live in the real, you can’t spend all day sitting in front of the television until your eyes have all boiled out. Not until you’re too old to tell the difference between the real and the fantasy. Real: videotapes, VCR’s, metal, plastic, buttons with directives all scratched out, power cords, wall sockets, circuitry, etc. False: stories with beginnings middles and ends, characters with meaningful things to say about those beginnings middles and ends, rain at funerals, sunshine at the beach, New York in the spring time.

But give me this. Let me have the old VHS entitled The Matron Saint of Apartment 1519

C or, alternately, as every good movie needs two titles, alternately I want to call it The

Jeweler’s Daughter.

The Saint’s mother, a woman with raven hair that sprouted up and out as if to avoid the face entirely, I am told (complete with hand gestures), had given birth to a daughter at the ripe age of nineteen by a husband considerably older. Her first husband hardly believed that he was yet capable of begetting children and, in his shock, promptly died amidst the drought the city incurred in those days. The mother, for her part, held her head up, with a fledgling in her arms as though she were shielded from the sympathy of

the public by it, even as she began to wither at the bone from a general lack of nourishment (and what little she had only went to her child and at any given moment, at the behest of a citizenry who could only maintain pity for so long when faced with the taboo of a bare breast). Even still, there has always been something (perhaps perversely) alluring in young widows, even as a child burdens them, and so she found herself surrounded by men who only wanted to prove the deepest compassion of their hearts by promising themselves and livelihood to this meek widowed mother. They swore that there should be no benefit in such a marriage, and it was only the goodness of men and heaven that so pointed them onto her. She knew, of course, these to be false oaths, but at the end of a year, she resigned herself to one man who had made his grand appeals by the art of his craft.

The young jeweler might have then believed it to be love, and no one could yet blame him. There was something painterly in the widow’s pale skin, her orbs for eyes, and, as she had grown quite thin, the skeletal features of her shape. And he promised to nourish her back to health, with love and dinner parties, of which he found attendance of especially necessary after the widow had agreed to marry him. The whole city grew close to the jeweler and his new wife and were all the more enthusiastic when, after just three months of marriage, it was announced that the widow’s daughter was to have a sibling.

There was nothing enigmatic about the Saint’s birth, for the widow enjoyed a healthy pregnancy and short delivery. Yet, within a day from the moment the child was surrendered into the arms of the jeweler (who can help but imagine him excavating his

70 child from the depth of the womb?), a darkness spread from the raven hair onto the widow’s face. And it never left, not even as the Jeweler awarded her with diadems and necklaces the world had never seen as though they might catch the sun and reflect it unto her face.

The Jeweler, a man who understood the emotions of women as well as any man, prescribed the simple remedy of bed rest. And so the widow was confined to her room— this very same room the Saint now haunts—until which time she began to harbor strange visions and hold odd conversations with the shapes in the wall and ceiling when left alone (I can understand this, I have always seen pictures—moving pictures—in the stucco). A circumspect violence crept out of her, her children were placed in the care of nurses elsewhere, and the whispers under her breath turned to inconsolable shrieks. It, of course, made the Jeweler shudder.

She became beset with the notion that the Jeweler, her husband, was trying “to steal God from me” (and there has been much talk, by this legend, about what exactly that meant). He pleaded with her, told her she was causing a scandal, that his business was failing, that the cost of nurses and doctors were going to condemn them all to the poorhouse. But she was lost to a different plane of existence entirely, one where she could not solve her madness through sheer force of will. And, when she finally tore off the opulent costume the jeweler had tried to remunerate her body with (for she had become quite disfigured by the oppression of four walls and a ceiling and he found it necessary to distract himself from the loss of lust with his own work as well as those of the most popular designers), she stormed at him, having broken the window into shards,

and leaped for his neck. She cut him deep enough to leave a scar like a permanent band

and out of anger or pain or sight of his own blood, he condemned her to hell and she

gladly obliged, diving headfirst out the window unto the downstairs neighbors’ concrete

porch (who had not yet filled it over with the garden they had planned for, and that still,

to this day, remains barren).

Traumatized as he was, the Jeweler found the strength to remind his customers

that is was love for his wife that inspired him in his craft, rebranding his chain of stores

as Judith’s Jewelers (and naming his two most popular pieces after his daughters). The

city found itself, again, sympathetic, and, far from placing him and his kin in the poorhouse, the business was driven onto the front page as a “success story out of tragedy.”

But the child of his blood developed strangely. It became clear that she was mute, that she was incapable of looking you in the face, and that her foibles forfeited her from the right to the title of “the jewel of my eye” as her father once named her. Neither the

best nurses or teachers or specialists could undo the peculiarities of being that plagued

her, and as she began school, she found herself estranged from human communication

entirely. She whistled though, unto the birds, and they tended to whistle back (On this

point: “That’s nonsense,” a wife told her husband who shot back, “It makes all the sense

in the world, if you think about it” and I’ve thought about it, and I tend to agree with the wife).

Her father, a man who understood the emotions of little girls as well as any man,

prescribed the simple remedy of neglect. And so, the Saint was confined by silence—the

very same silence she enacts from her window now—until which time she found friends

in the walls and the ceiling of her family’s (quite grandiose) estate, only pausing her

conversations when her father crossed her path. A circumspect coherence crept out of

her, flourishing her home with characters who could only understand a strange language

of hushed fits and starts but who, in exchange for the chance to finally be understood,

communicated to her the secrets only they had seen and heard. It, of course, made her father shudder.

In this manner, she continued to mature outside the realm of human language, but could not, as it seems, escape the realm of human acts.

Her half-sister had grown quite normally, to the satisfaction of the Jeweler, and by the time she was twelve years old, she portrayed all the strength and beauty of her mother but none of her deficits. “Something great in her, something great,” I have been told, but

I might attribute that to the wistfulness of protecting a child’s nobility that had been taken too soon.

She died. At twelve years old, she was choked by the gold strewn around her neck in the vast garden that lay before the estate, her resting place revealed by a swarm of crows or ravens or some other bird of death. The strange child that haunted the grounds, obtusely lacking in language—and who can tell what the faces on the walls bade her to do—was the first to be insinuated in the murder. She was, more or less, condemned by the sins of her mother, as the Jeweler spent little time reminding the courts of, and even though a child of nine or ten lacking in the simple ability to say “yes or no” could not stand trial, the city, accepting the changeling as good-as-guilty, all turned their gazes onto

73 every second-born child, dissecting any eccentric behavior and promising to keep a close guard.

That she showed no sign of guilt was hardly a matter to consider. Her mother, it was said, believed to the point of murder, that an innocent man was to blame for her madness. And, perhaps, her child so too blamed the Jeweler for a life in anomy and took it upon her to irreparably bury the only faultless diamond he possessed (as the Jeweler himself put it, for he was not one for subtleties). ‘This poor, faultless man,’ the city adjudicated, ‘he has nothing left to cling to in this world.’ And so business flourished again.

To maintain his standing as he-who-is-faultless, the Jeweler demanded that his only daughter be admitted to the most expensive asylum in the city for, “God knows, she needed help” (so said the wife I alluded to earlier). And so she was branded with the diagnosis of a “congenital idiot” so long as it was mentioned that the disease was inherited from her mother rather than her father—but that tended to be the explanation for any defects of character, especially those irrational aspects, in any case. The Jeweler promised, less to his empty slate of a daughter and more to the public, that he would visit whenever he had the chance and continue to hope that one day she should have developed human reason enough to confess to her crimes. “Only then,” he was recorded as saying, “could true justice be served.”

The madhouse, with its smooth walls and ceilings, must have provided the Saint with no friends for clandestine conversations and so she had no choice but to follow the directive of her Father. At the end of but a month, she had given all her will towards the

uttering of a single sentence: “It was him.” And, oh the scandal, and how patient-doctor confidentiality or whatever it is called becomes null and void if someone can only get his or her name in the paper. A mute girl suddenly learning to speak after ten years of silence, and all for one sentence, gives a kind of veracity to whatever finally emits from her mouth. But all in all, it is still not enough to condemn a man of such a stature, even if it affects business somewhat.

Still, it excited the interest of everyone, not the least the courts who felt a tinge of shame for being so ready to convict a little girl of murder of her own sister (for a month had passed, they had time to weigh the whole ordeal, and maybe they had been a little too hasty). And so the body of the first-born was exhumed—and the Jeweler wondered aloud to the papers, “I have no idea what they hope to accomplish by bringing back the dead.”

The coroner had to then get his hands dirty, and lo, the discovery that this girl of twelve died not a virgin is enough to make you sick (I try not to consider the coroner’s reaction at the finding).

“But who is him? She could have just as easily learned to say ‘father’ if she meant me,” the Jeweler determined. At which point, the whole ordeal turned into a circus of linguists rapt in a discussion of the nature of multisyllabic words and tongue formation. Suddenly, the whole city knew the specific meaning of terms like

“polysyllabic,” “compounds,” “morphological derivation” and so on.

In the end, the Jeweler had to find in himself the courage to condemn his deceased stepdaughter and her somewhere-out-there secret lover, admitting that his dead wife was a sexual deviant as well, willing to sleep with a much-older man for even a measly

inheritance and so, it is hardly surprising that her daughter might have been of the same

mind even as a “young lady.” To an extent, his explanation sufficed, but wariness spread

over the city, and who would want to buy his engagement ring from a man so cursed as

the owner of Judith’s Jewelers? No amount of “slashing” of prices (“ironic, his ad

campaign was, being that his wife slashed his throat”—a perfunctory, yet uneasy, laugh) could keep his three stores afloat, and so the Jeweler had to abandon his chain whilst retreating to the original store and brand. “Back to square one,” he must’ve thought.

After a period of five or six years, the city had only the vague sense of something, a history that was outside vain attempts to recall, left elsewhere in news clippings or buried with a superficial phonological knowledge.

But the Jeweler’s flesh-and-blood daughter was not through with him, and over the years, whether or not the nurses tended to educate her out of a perverse curiosity of the full extent of her knowledge, she learned to read and write and, to the degree she could make demands, speak. What she demanded then was pen and paper, a journal in which she could emancipate herself from the secret history of her life in the estate (which had now become dilapidated by vacancy).

And so, before the organs of the past could entirely decay into the soil, they were once again innervated by the release of a tell-all autobiography: The Secrets the Walls

Told Me. I hardly have to reveal the conclusion to the mystery of what had really happened to the sister of the Matron Saint of Apartment 1526 D, and I admit that I do not have the stomach for the details of it anyhow.

As the city became enraptured by her account, the purity of her prose so actuated

by the voice of a child, the images of innocent youth lost to the firestorm of blame, they

hardly noticed that they were each implicated in her sentence. But what they did not miss

was that the Jeweler was a right old bastard, and so judgment was cast, yet again and he

found it impossible to make his way down the street where his business still clung to life

somehow, without a man or woman brashly sentencing him to life without parole. They

threw their stones, sometime quite literally, at the man with the ignoble mark around his

neck (though, he had come accustomed to hiding it underneath an unruly sort of beard,

“you could spot it if you wanted to,” I am told).

When he finally made his way to the asylum, demanding the presence of his daughter before him, the orderlies, chary as they were, witnessed a man broken by the

resurgence of a history he might have hoped to be long dead, and sought the Saint from

the depths of her haven, perhaps believing that he would atone for his sins before them,

and they could, in turn, become at least a footnote in an astonishing story. But that was,

of course, not the case, for the setting of his child before him, now seventeen years old,

stirred the fury of a man ready to end his lineage once and for all, and, leaping the length

of the table, he wrung her neck. He was pulled off, by the orderlies, before he could

entirely terminate her reign of terror upon him, but, raving violently as he was, the orderlies saw no course but to administer a dose of bromide into his throat, not knowing that he was fatally allergic to the plastic of the syringe. And so, they watched in a sort of droll dread, as his neck swelled with bubbles like a bib-necklace made of flesh tinged stones of which he tried to tear from himself until his scar seemed to open up afresh. It

was never discerned whether his cause of death was that of anaphylaxis or from blood

loss, and the city, of course, saw in it the ultimate revenge of his dear departed Judith for

brandishing her name and stealing her God.

I don’t know, but I find something sort of suadade in the details of the Jeweler’s demise, as though divine justice had found its way, as it rarely ever does. It’s enough to almost make you believe in God. I don’t know. But what I do know is that the Saint felt it necessary to use her profits to purchase the house her mother, who she had never really met, had been confined in until her death allowed her escape. I had imagined, over the years, that it was only matter of time before she replicated that committed nosedive (and really, somebody needs to fill in that damned concrete pit), but that turned out to never come to pass. Instead, she takes to standing at the window, and if I could only make the directions of her pupils (though, I am told, that her gaze is apart from her concentration),

if I could see where she’s looking, then I could say for certain that she eyes the porch

below at all times. Instead, I interpret flashes of sight in my direction that fills me with the sort of haze of grief I can’t entirely shake off. But I don’t shudder in her gaze.

Perhaps, after running it through my head so many times, it’s become a little romantic—too much talk of necks and the things thrown around them and a heroine at the

center of it all. What matters most to me, then, about the Saint, is that, whether because

the window acts as some sort of defense, I find myself incapable of peering into her. She

has a history, where the rest of us have none. She is free from the judgment of men,

enshrined in that history while the rest of us are stripped bare, before the world or before

god. She’s no need for the world and she’s no need for god, she can exist forever in her

78 windowpane and no one can get at her. She’ll stand there eternally and keep me from smoking cigarettes. Like all good Saints, she will protect me from myself.

Chapter 7

And you, invader of my thoughts, you who has no right to question the idiosyncrasies of my consciousness, wonder why it is I am bound to a narrative in my own head. I think that it began when I was a stupid little child. I believed God was listening in, attuned to me and perhaps only me in my childish egotism, and that He should appreciate the current of prose. I must have believed that, in my limited understanding of omniscience, He might mistake my body as my soul and desire or hunger as the driving force for all that I was. When I begged for absolution, even at church, I never clasped my hands together and instead, spoke inwardly, politely and with the utmost faith that he was listening, and my flesh and blood father: “I have been raising a damned atheist!” As I grew, pleads of forgiveness turned to bargaining: I’d think,

“God, if you let me keep all the hairs on my head, I shall never again do that thing that I did.” And before the spell finally broke, it fell into diatribes: I’d think: “God, you piece of shit, you let this happen…no, you made this happen.” But all the while, even when I needed not mercy nor had services to trade, I was acutely aware of myself, my movements, my speech, and all that my senses latched onto as I mediated the present, as it happened. In that way, I relinquished my cognizance unto God.

But now, you faceless creature who judges, not unlike the God I created as a child, not unlike the conscience that overrules free-will, not unlike the panopticon teeming with incessant unblinking gazes without sockets—you are the presence I accord this ceaseless soliloquy onto. And in words, words, words, I slander myself, I admit. But

only, when they ask, say I was never afraid to make admissions. That, by God, or no god

at all, I confess as, into my grave, I walk.

Rather, it is out the door that I walk.

The Dawn finally broke at midafternoon. It had been mounting all day, behind

the steamy fog and cloud, and now it’s reared itself, seven or eight hours late. I want to

call it a surrogate dawn, with a sun rising on the wrong side of the sky. A sort of mild

incongruity, a discoloring along the roadway where undulating mirages fade upwards, mirages that do nothing but elongate the extent of a freckled asphalt so that it seems endless, but are, I find, resolved when I turn my head sidelong. The uniformly baby-blue

paint of the paneling along the neighboring houses has bubbled in places, and maybe it

were always so, but the boils seemed all the more pronounced by the humidity. There is

a dozen or so cars along the road, the sort of cars that no one cares enough about to park

in garages: work trucks, secondary vehicles maybe a decade old, a sedan with a single

flat tire—really, the surplus cars. On many of them, yellow dust has settled along the

windshields—pollen from the oaks, I think.

Sunday makes it all seem like an extravagant ghost town. I feel like one of the

ghosts, too, floating along the road to a pointless destination, a specter trapped in

repetition, an echo of its last day as a physical creature perhaps, in a realm of constant

anxiety. A realm of hungry ghosts—and I am the hungriest of all of them.

My shirt needs to be washed. I forget to do the laundry; I always forget those

kinds of things. The very essential things like eating, combing my hair, and doing the

laundry tend to get lost somewhere in the day. There is nothing to remind me to take care

of these things, and so I forget, until I remember and suffer the pangs of hunger, the

anxiety of shabbiness, and the faint scent of yesterday’s sweat. And by then it is too late,

I am already in it. I should be telling myself “it is just an hour, maybe, at the museum.

No one will notice it.” But they’ll notice it; everyone always notices you when you feel

unclean. I’ll keep my arms tight at my sides, and though it’ll make it seem as though I

had been born with some birth defect that keeps my arms conjoined to my ribs, maybe

they won’t notice that I’m unclean. Someone will, but not all of them.

I can hear the faint whisper of life, mechanical life, but something nonetheless. It

could be the whirring of an air-conditioner nearby or the splitting of the wind around a

moving car a mile away. It is hard to know. Mechanical things start to sound the same

after awhile. Or maybe I’m going deaf. I know I’m going deaf, actually. It is worse

when I am in a room full of people and someone is trying to speak to me. I have to rely

on reading their expressions so I know how to react. I wonder if anyone has anything

important to say, if at one time someone imparted to me the meaning of life, the thing

that would make me happy, and I missed it because I couldn’t pick his or her voice out

from the crowd’s atonality.

I’ve always felt that—like I’ve only just missed something important.

But now there’s sort of breaking glass or porcelain or I don’t know giving some

semblance of verve to the street for once.

***

Dear Jesus,

Daddy hasn’t come home yet. Mother says he must be out day drinking. She’s downstairs breaking things. I don’t like it when he goes drinking because he sometimes comes home with cuts on his eyebrow or worse—one time he came home and spit out one of his tooths. Mother says he’s a helpless alchy-olic. But mother is mean. She says that I shouldn’t bother praying to Jesus cos’ daddy is too far down the rabbit hole. I don’t know what that means, but I am praying to you no matter what she says. I think daddy is a good person. He takes me to dinner sometimes, just me and him, and he makes me laugh. He call me his little boy, cos’ I like to keep my hair short, never past my ears cos’ if it gets longer I can’t see very well when I’m running. Mother hates it and she always tells me that I’m a girl and should act like one. She tells daddy that he has to stop ic-

ouraging me. But I think its funny. Can you keep him safe, Jesus? Can you hold his

hand until he gets home? I don’t want to ask a lot cos’ I know its Sunday and everyone

asks you for something on Sunday. But I really think daddy needs you. He went to

church this morning too, so I know he wants to be good. I won’t ask you for anything

ever again as long as I live if you just bring him home all right. Jesus, please, Jesus, he

needs you.

A-men

***

A museum is a mausoleum. A storehouse of dead things labeled by their

miniscule impact on civilization whose lump sum product adds up to something we must

assume is important. That’s where I’m going, to the mausoleum, to see all the dead

things left behind by dead people. All the things we misinterpret as essentials of their

time. But that’s not what they are. Art stands apart from its time—it is done to defeat

ephemerality. It whispers through the chapped lips of the dying, the death rattle of an age breathed unto a canvas in the hopes that it may be contained forever. I don’t think artists

believe their work belongs in a museum, where lovers of art can shuffle past the frames

until they find the one piece they know enough about to have anything at all to

contemplate before it. But we put it there anyways, against their wishes probably, and transform the works of geniuses into mundane example of their respective eras. “See, look, how Delacroix exemplifies the excitement of the French Revolution. No other artist captures the sentiment quite like Delacroix. He was in the middle of it all, and See how he draws it up on canvas. See how well he understands the meaning of the

Revolution and imparts it unto us, with all its glory, anticipation, and hope ” and meanwhile there’s a basketful of heads that think of the Revolution as, maybe, not that exciting and certainly not at all hopeful.

A basketful of heads connected to bloody stumps of neck, wanting to speak in all different directions and oh, how I’d like to join them. We’d all be dumped into the gutter together and as we’d float along with all the shit and trash, we’d have so many things to talk about—though, without breath, we’d have to learn the art of lip-reading. A river

Styx of heads without bodies, mouthing their life stories to one another. And we go on along it, seven times around the city, until one of the oars of Apollo’s lover disrupts our course. And then what? I can’t think that far.

I am halfway there. A small apartment devoted, as it seems, to nothing else but the garden attached to it. A botanical one, with plants and herbs never meant to grow

alongside one another, forced together in close conjunction and leveled, a present-day marvel of organic homogeneity. In the center, a rustic seeming fountain of marble, but not really marble, chirring incompetently by the electric motor of the pump that is meant to keep the water from turning green. It fails even at this though, and algae find its place together with the foreign herbs and ferns and such. A cosmopolitan gesture perhaps but in their uprooting from their homelands, I cannot begin to tell them apart—at least I can’t

tell what’s what. A fern becomes a fern, no matter where it’s from. A rose stays a rose,

even if one is Italian and the other English. And all the accumulated fragrances of this

unnatural garden are buried anyhow, under the encumbering scent of insecticide so to

keep it all preserved, if it is at all worth preserving, like formaldehyde in a mason jar.

The artificial forest is not even given the dignity of bending with the wind, confined

between red brick on one side, and a tall wire mesh fence on all the others. That there are

vines along the brick that seem to want to tear down the architecture itself or else climb

over the apartment entirely, gives one hope. But no matter, plants can’t feel a damn

thing. I’m not a child any longer. I know this. Still, it pangs me somehow. It seems

wrong.

Move on, I must move on. I cannot free the shrubs or the florae; they would

die in my hands if I tried. And so I must leave them to the impulses of Men who so

plucked them from foreign lands and imported them here for no reason at all. Back to

history, because when it is forgotten or expelled entirely, men seem to do everything he

does for no reason at all. By the absence of context, humankind does seem to become

85 something quite sinister. But put it all back into context, and man seems somnambulistic, sleepwalking towards the edge of history until he falls right off.

But, perhaps, he wants gardens and such so that he may come closer to knowing his one, true lineage that he holds over all others, the one from God. God planted a garden after all, and one can only rationally assume that in it, all plants lived within its limitless limits. Where else could this species of plant or that one come from, if He created it all, at once, out of a wave or a word or a sneeze? So they wish to contrive their own little garden of the world, along the backside of a sixty-year-old apartment building.

Do men ever do anything that God hasn’t already done?

Perhaps, it is all a vain attempt to undo original sin. Everywhere I look, we ease away from knowledge, into our little gardens of bliss. Then again, that pleasure we feel might be a direct result of the noxious fumes of pesticides.

The sole of my shoes have grown warm. I’ve been dragging my feet, sloughing the road, trudging as though I have no business going where I am intending. Nothing much excites me, the least of which is a museum, but I like these shoes. They are dignified, I think: red suede, with blue laces. I will have to take care to make the extra effort to walk in full strides or they will be worn before I ever reach my destination. A single step in each square of concrete should do the trick, perhaps one on each crack. My pace quickens.

Chapter 8

A small plot across a parking lot from a grassy park, that is all it deserves. In

what seems to be a Victorian-style house, perhaps because, in those days it wasn’t so

strange to build your home in three stories, but, presently, such a thing seems almost

crude. But it is of course no older than me, and so it maintains the standard of kitsch the

city has decided would be its distinction.

This is that: simulacra of the past and repository for all of history. At least, it houses all the history that didn’t get thrown overboard. Tell them that an Egyptian tomb is making a stop here, and you’ll see them flock. There won’t be enough room to house all of them. The wood of the floor will creak under the weight. But on any ordinary day, you’ll find it empty. And, anyways, a pharaoh has little at all to do with history and even less to do with art: they are the villains you battled in childhood, the specter in an episode of a cartoon mystery, or a picture in a textbook that seemed so foreign to you, so ancient, that it must be of a different ancestry of homo sapiens sapiens, certainly not of ours.

I shouldn’t say you’d find no one here—sometimes the retirement homes allow

the elderly to roam free down the halls and corridors filled with stuffs whose details are

written on plaques underneath, so small of type that even youthful eyes have trouble

reading it without straining. Perhaps the caretakers, having so little interest in history,

assume that their patients are as old as time and maybe these ancients knew Napoleon

personally and harbor sleeping memories of those days, ready to be restored by the sight

of dear Bonaparte on top of his Marengo. Marengo, that poor horse, whose skeleton is

sitting somewhere, in a better museum where people actually wish to go (perhaps, or is it

87 the same everywhere?)—I can’t imagine the man who wouldn’t want to see the skeleton of Napoleon’s stallion—yes in, a museum in Paris, Marengo remains standing until the end of time, and missing his hooves too, because of an association with some great, no not even great, some notable man of history. If David hadn’t painted the horse to be so prominent, and I really always thought it looked as though Marengo is trying the throw

Bonaparte from his back, down the cliff side, if there weren’t a perverse obsession with

Napoleon himself, perhaps his horse would have been left in peace.

I hope today is not one of the days the elderly are allowed to meander the halls.

But then again, where at all do they belong if not in that treasury where we deposit all the old things we have quite finished with? We throw it all away, like tatters of laundry after the hundredth wash, because the washing machine is too harsh. It is too harsh on history.

It is too harsh on the elderly. Try as we may, to cleanse it all, to make it new, to undo the stains of last weeks dinner, the mechanisms of contemporary times are simply too harsh on the material created when we knew to “handle with care.” But we no longer see the need. We can just throw it all away, and find ourselves in a department store in front of a rack of clothes that promises “an infinite number of washes.” ‘Sorry,’ we say not really meaning it, ‘but the future promises efficiency and it is so cheap, really, where is there then a need to preserve things that were never meant to last by our hands?” And so we throw it all away, but like sewage, it maintains a presence with at least one of our senses.

When the landfill overflows, the garbage seeps into modernity, stinking as it does, with our shirts, pants, jeans and shit and the elderly and the art of a few hundred years ago,

88 and we smell it, but cannot quite put our finger on what exactly it is. The specter of decay hangs over us, as it does, and we merely acclimate to the stench.

But then, we’ll be thrown away along with it too. That is all we leave behind: a stench. In the end, we are what we throw away. We are garbage.

Contrasting harshly against the Victorian style of the building, are two doors with large windowpanes I almost expect to slide open like in a supermarket, I expect this up until the moment I’m facing it near enough that whites of my own eyes flash in the freshly Windex-ed surface, gasping, because I didn’t know how to stop my forward inertia and almost crashed into the doors, by the skin of my teeth or rather the tips of my toes just barely saving myself the embarrassment. But I can’t stop myself from coughing after inhaling the minty chemicals of cleaning product, so that I’m clinging to the door handles, simultaneously trying to pull them open while the tips of my lungs are pulsing out coarse breath through my airways even as I attempt a full glottal stop. My cough is loud enough to awaken the lady of the house and she’s come to the door, gesturing me to back away as she pushes the mechanical latch of the left door. The Lady of the House is barely a lady, maybe twenty years old with short raven hair and seventies-style bangs, wide glasses that make her beady eyes seem even beadier--“Ya’right?” she says, because

I’m still having a fit even as I’m trying to read her.

I regain composure. “Yes, sorry, are you guys open or…?”

“Of course. We’ve just been having to keep the doors locked on windy days like this because the latch is broken, you see?” She fiddles along the side of the door. “They kinda start to rattle a bit, it’s really frightening if you’re not paying attention. But come

in, do you have a ticket, are you alone, not my place to ask, are you meeting someone

here sorry not my place to ask.” She’s begun to look back and forth between her phone

and the desk she’s walking to, sort of asking questions she doesn’t mean to ask and then

looking up and answering for me.

“I do have a ticket. I’m not sure if it’s usable.”

“Hmm, lemme see.”

I hand it to her. It’s a bit crumpled from my clenching it. Instead of looking at it,

she pulls out a sort of barcode scanner attached to the computer on the desk. Beep.

“Yes. It’s an all day pass. You’re good.”

“Okay, great. Anyone else here.”

“I don’t think so, lemme see.” She’s grabbed the clipboard off the top of the

barrier around her desk.

“It looks like the last person to check in did so about…” face to clock on the wall

behind her desk, “four hours ago. Jesus. I’ve just noticed how late it’s gotten. I think it’s

the weather.” But I’m not sure how anyone could notice the weather from in here;

fluorescents artificially light the whole place and there aren’t any windows on the ground floor.

“Well,” she’s continuing after overcoming her revelation of the impending evening “we only have one real rule, don’t use your cellphone, not to talk and certainly not to take pictures and also you have to sign in, it’s sort of a precaution against theft and the like, not that we think you’re going to run off with any of the pieces but we do it as a formality for everyone we used to only do it at random but people started getting pissed

90 cause’ it didn’t seem so random to them whatever that means.” I already started signing somewhere in that run-on. I hand the clipboard to her and smile weakly. “Thank you,” one of us says but I’m not sure who: I’m already walking away.

Chapter 9

There is a hall whose walls are filled with Jesuses. Not just a sporadic array of

Jesuses intertwined with other Christian or Renaissance art, no, a jigsaw a hundred by ten

on either side and even a few crammed alongside all four flanks of the column in the

entranceway, of Jesuses. Jesus here, Jesus there, Jesus everywhere. I suppose, if you

needed to explain to a pagan what is meant by “Jesus is everywhere” you could take them

here and show them in the literal. There is, in fact, so many of these paintings that they

had to downscale Da Vinci’s Last Supper to a degree so small that you can hardly tell one

character from the next and you might very well assume it to be a post-modernist collage

of Jesus in thirteen different moods at dinner, and so we may as well add twelve more

Jesuses to the list. There is a Jesus here, with a sun around his head, looking down upon

a Jesus on the cross (Murillo, I believe), and he only seems a little put off by his future

crucifixion, or maybe that’s in the past, water under the bridge, turning the other cheek.

And just when you think you’ve found a painting that isn’t of Jesus, you get closer and

find that the feminine creature at the center is meant to be a “boy Jesus.”

It would all be unbearably solemn if it didn’t look as though there were multitudes

of Jesuses trying to out-Jesus one another, fifty or sixty on one side, against fifty or sixty on the other. And I am in the middle. I am the mediator between one army of Jesuses and another army of Jesuses.

“Yes, Jesus sir, Jesus says he has grown quite weary by your judging glare. He says that you shouldn’t eye him like that, that Jesus isn’t meant to cast judgments like that. He says that you are an imposter; that too much scrubbing went in to the oils on

your face and the contours along your cheeks are all wrong. He says your clothes are far

too rich for his taste, and the real Jesus would know better. He also criticizes your

portrait artist for relying too much on Batoni, a far superior painter in his eyes, and thus

gratifying himself only with a pale imitation. Yes, Jesus, he does understand that you are a Roman Catholic interpretation, but he does not think that that excuses you for wearing jewels along the hemline of your robe.” Pressing my ear to the painting of the Sacred

Heart of Jesus, “Okay, okay, I’ll let him know.”

Making my way to the other side of the hall: “Jesus says that Luther got it into your head that Jesus should not be adorned with the papal-style of Rome because he is an

enemy of the Catholic Church. He says that you might think that you are the better Jesus

because you refuse to garb yourself in the garments of purity, but that is, in essence,

unchristian of you. And that is why he casts his judging stare in your direction. He says

that in your meagerness you have lost the ability to show your characteristic humbleness.

He says your superiority complex, indeed, your God-complex, worries him. He also

questions your inability to look him they eye. He says that you are always looking down

and away and that that makes you seem feeble. How should a good Christian man,

starving in a bad economy, look to you if you can’t even pretend to feed yourself?”

“Ahem.”

The last sentence, I’d said aloud, and I’m trying to go back on it, swallowing it

down my throat, erase time by three and half seconds, because someone else has entered

the battleground of Jesus. I refuse to turn, and toy with my pockets as if I’ve forgotten

something at home, forbidding the originator of the resonant “ahem” from ever taking

corporeal shape; the intruder will have to be content as a shade at the corner of my field

of vision. Straying into the kind of no-man’s land, maintaining an equal distance between

myself and either side of the armies of Jesus, I make to abandon the field of war, to

escape and leave the trespasser to work out the details of the treaty I’d begun.

“You know, you could thank me instead of running for an exit.”

“What?” Shit. I’ve turned without thinking. Now I’ve done it. But it isn’t the

front office clerk, as I feared.

“You changed.”

“What?”

“There are other words in the English language, you know? I said, you’ve

changed your clothes. Since this morning.” And now it’s hitting me, not so much as a

ton of bricks but like a light feather trickling down my spine. I didn’t mean to actually

meet her.

“Oh… right. You.” Pulling out the ticket stub, and I want to say something

funny, because if I don’t, anxiety will mount and so: “are we like, committing political

espionage, a secret tête-à-tête?” I spat out ‘tête-à-tête’ as quickly as possible because it is a word that I’ve never said aloud before and never meant to and I don’t know for certain if it is said with an ‘a’ or a ‘de’ so I just sort of sped through it so no one listening could notice that I’m using words that I don’t know.

“No.” She didn’t think it was funny and “no” rang out resolutely, like I had asked

‘haven’t I done enough?’ And St. Peter said “No.” Definite, like the answer to every question you’d hope would be the opposite and all you get is “no.” My stomach chews

94 on itself, because I had made a joke and just left it out there, hanging, with no support beam of a ‘just kidding’ or even a laugh.

She’s still standing fifteen feet from me, at the end of the hall of Jesuses, and I still can’t seem to piece her face together. And the way she’s talking, or hardly talking, paired with the distance is… foreboding.

“Alright” I am fighting back a stutter with a breath, “then, why?”

“I needed to talk to you, and I couldn’t then, and I had already gotten a ticket, so I thought ‘why not.’ It was really quick thinking on my part. I felt kinda smug after.”

***

Celeste. You’d found her, slinking into a museum and who had any idea that the museum was open on Sundays. Celeste. She’s in there now, and you can’t go in cause’ it emptied, hollow, not a soul in there except Celeste. Maybe no one else in the city knows its open on Sundays either. You can treat yourself to a cigarette; you’ve given yourself permission, so go ahead. It’s not so much a desire to smoke, as it is a necessity to look natural, to make it look like you belong, or else don’t belong at all, but you’ve got a cigarette so no one will question what you’re doing. Not that there’s anyone in the park either—one, big grassland, humdrum, four trees, and you’ve counted them, and that’s all.

Jesus, look at you, like an old man sitting on a park bench thinking of the olden days, when you were a sprightly young fellow. How the park must’ve looked to you then. All full of hope, all full of life, birds in the trees, not pigeons but real birds, and the girls, oh lemme tell you bout’ them girls, they’d wore skirts that showed their ankles and it was a big scandal, a trend like that. We came back from the war, hailed as heroes and all the

95 girls wanted to do was climb over you and caress your medal, which you wore like you would any red badge of courage, and they leave their numbers in your front pocket, you know, made of twill, with a bronze button on it that you’d have to shine or else your friend might have the glossier button and he’d be the one with all the numbers in his pocket. And then you’d have quite the row, because, really, you were the prettier one of the two and what right did he have to the darling little brunette, with curls in her hair?

No, no, not a single soul alive would tell a story like that. All those romantic ideas of chivalry, coming home from the good ol’ war, chasing girls, all those things you’d dream up in your memory when you got old and couldn’t understand a damn thing about the changing world, well those things are dead, long dead.

And you’re too old to play pretend.

But you’ve considered that. What if everyone in the city, in the world, all they were doing were playing pretend? That’s what this feels like. You feel like a trope in a bad novel, or you would if you were in Richard’s place. He’s got to feel like it sometimes, when someone comes to seek him out or call him, he’s got to think that they’re thinking they’re living in a movie from the nineteen-forties. He’s always complaining about calls about nothing, and he has to go explain to somebody that no, your husband does not work for a secret government agency, and no he is not sleeping around with prostitutes, and no he is not doing heroin under a bridge, and no he is not gambling on racehorses, cause’ by god we don’t even have those. What do we got then?

A city full of husbands that can’t face their wives unless they’ve had a drink in them.

Alcoholism: that’s all we’ve kept from the nineteen-forties.

***

“Is this is it?” She whispers delicately, as though we aren’t the only two people in

this whole place, as if someone’s concentration would be broken if she said it any louder.

“Is this what?”

“The one.”

“The one what?” And “we will be closing in five minutes, I repeat, it is now five

till five, and we will be closing in five minutes” over the intercom, without any attempt at

intimidation whatsoever.

“The one piece of art over all the others. That one that makes the most sense to

you. Everyone who gives a damn has it. That one piece that makes you think, for a

moment, that maybe art isn’t total nonsense; that maybe it has a place; that maybe art has

a value, maybe its moral value, maybe its psychological, but some sort of value.”

“No, this isn’t that.”

“Then what?”

“I think… it’s the opposite. This one doesn’t make sense. I can’t make sense of it. All the other ones, I might be able to understand, from someone else perspective.”

“What about your perspective? You don’t have opinions?”

“Mine don’t matter much, I think. I think its better to not have an opinion on any

of it. I just want to see these things the way someone else might see it, so I can avoid

having an opinion. So I can avoid, uh, certainty.” My words are slow, like I’m breathing

through molasses. She takes no notice, I think, but sighs and turns away.

“So then, what is it about this one?”

“There’s nothing. It looks like a scribble that a good artist might draw up in five

minutes. It only says, ‘she wears this’ and nothing more. A sort of show don’t tell. So it

doesn’t say anything else.”

“But then, what do you with it?”

“Nothing. There isn’t anything you can do. Restraint is a technique, I think. You

take out all the flourishes and junk, and all the ideas and feelings, you throw that all

away, and you make a clear statement.”

“What’s the statement?”

“That ‘she wears this.”’

“But that doesn’t mean anything. I know you’ll say ‘art doesn’t need to mean

anything,’ but what is the point of doing it.”

“I wouldn’t say that ‘art doesn’t need to mean anything.’ There’s too much

certainty in that.” And the intercom creaks again and “we will be closing in five minutes, thank you for visiting today” with a mounting passive-aggressiveness.

“So you can’t be certain about anything?”

“Not aloud, at least.”

“But you can think it? Why can’t you say it if you’re already thinking it?”

“Because if I say it and then realize that I’m wrong, then it’s too late, its already been said, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. It’s not like I can go back and edit what I’ve said. So there it is, I’m wrong, and for the rest of my life, there’ll be that moment where I said something that wasn’t right, and I’ll always remember it… It’ll

keep me up at night. For every wrong thing I’ve ever said, I lose two minutes of sleep

every night. Eventually, there’ll be no minutes in a night to sleep at all.”

“Oh but they have pills for that.”

“Pills for being wrong?”

“No, you know what I mean, pills for sleeping.”

“But if the thing keeping me up at night is that I said something that wasn’t true, and I took a pill to help me sleep, then wouldn’t I actually be taking a pill for being wrong?”

“I don’t like that logic. But if you can really remember all the times you were wrong, tell me about it”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because what if right now, what I said seemed wrong to me, but later I realized again that is what right, then now, I’d be saying something wrong”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious.”

“I don’t think I am. It’s this scribble. It doesn’t make sense, and it makes me feel like I don’t make sense.”

“Well then there’s your meaning.”

“What is?”

“It’s not that it doesn’t make sense, it’s not that art doesn’t make sense, it’s not that the world it doesn’t make sense—it’s you who doesn’t make sense.”

Cartesian Existentialism. A mishmash of smart-person words collided in my skull and somehow tumbled out.

“Is that what you’d call it?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know anything. I don’t know that I need to know anything.” The intercom again: “The museum will be closing in five minutes, it is now five past five, the museum will be closing in five minutes” and it’s hard to imagine the museum ever closes and only interminably barks empty threats at visitors all day.

“Well, I know something.” Celeste grapples my attention again.

“What’s that?”

“All this time, she’s started to change expression, slowly-like, and now there’s a bit of deviousness in the smirk on her face. I think I’ve fallen in love with her. Or, she’s fallen in love with me.”

“She’s not hideous, I’ll give you that much.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“Let’s take it.”

“What?” I almost choke on it. “No, we’d get caught.”

“I don’t think so. No one’s here. No one’s watching. And if they did notice it was gone, they’ll just put in an order for a replacement and they’ll get it here by parcel in a week. And then, people might actually want to come to take a look at the drawing that someone wanted enough to steal off a museum wall. They might think it meant something. We’d really be doing them a favor.”

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“But it doesn’t mean anything.”

“No one’s interested in anything unless there’s a notion of worth behind it. Now,

they’d think it was worth something.”

“But that’s… a crime.”

“Oh, really, everything is a crime if you think hard enough about it.”

Nothing, I can’t think of a thing to say to that.

“Okay, well I won’t make you a collaborator in my crimes. Here.” She’s turned

to the kiosk at the center of the room, where they keep a map of the museum, with a

checklist for all the rooms you’d visit. They also were kind enough to provide you with a

sort of half pencil, in a tray of fifty or so other half pencils. “Take one,” it begs. She

takes a pamphlet and a pencil and turns back to the Guys’. She tells me to give her a

minute as she starts listlessly scribbling on the back of the pamphlet without looking,

eyes locked on the sketch on the wall. I stand in absolute silence so not to bother her,

acutely aware of my breathing, trying to hold it in as long as possible before slowly

easing out an exhale. It is hard to breathe when you start to think about it.

“Done.” She’s finished, in maybe two minutes at the most, and she presents to

me her gray scale version of the lady in the black and blue dress. It is almost exact

somehow except that her lady has her eyes wide open so that there’s a sort of gleam

within them as she stares back at the viewer—she’s no longer passive to my gaze.

Celeste has unmistakably drawn her own eyes into the portrait.

“There,” she says, “Now we have our own. If they think they can charge us ten dollars to see copies of copies, we’ll just have to make our own.” She turns it back

101 towards herself and says, “Oh, I didn’t do it right. It doesn’t look right,” and she crumples it up and throws it towards an overflowed waste bin, to join the other pamphlets that didn’t make it into the receptacle.

I walk towards it, making sure not to take my eyes off where it’s landed.

“Ahem, so I guess you’ll steal my artwork but not that of dear…” she turns to the portrait, and reads the plaque underneath “Constantine Guys. You fucking criminal.”

I want to say, ‘but you’ve thrown it away’ but I think of poor Kafka, and remember that’s not justification enough to steal someone’s anonymity. But I don’t care.

I’m keeping it. I fold it up and stuff it into my wallet as if it means just enough to me that

I can throw it with old receipts and business cards of people I will never call.

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Chapter 10

You’ve got to get better handle on this. You’re not doing this very well. You

can’t get skittish every time a man walks by with his dog. A black Labrador probably

mixed with a Retriever, a really good breed after all, wearing a sort of bib that announces

that he isn’t for petting, that he’s “working” for the deaf man and the man himself, oh

write this out, the man himself has got to be about seventy years old, maybe older maybe

younger, you’ve always been bad with age, but he’s all white on the top, but it’s a sort of

thick white hair, the sort of hair any man could hope to have in his old age. But the

deafness: that you couldn’t bear. You’d have to learn a whole new language and who knows if your family will get on board with that, talking with their hands, you’ve got to hope this man started out Italian or some other race where they use their hands anyhow.

To be deaf, how you’d miss music, you’ve got to wonder if he can still hear all the old

tunes in his head, and maybe he’d gone deaf a long time ago when music was better

anyhow, and maybe it’s really a good thing he can’t hear what constitutes music these

days. Maybe his deafness is a blessing. At the very least, it must keep people from

bothering him and even if they’d try to approach him, he could just ignore them without

even having to fake deafness. He is actually deaf. Yes, he’s lucky. He’s got his own

little bubble, with all the good music from forty years ago, when music still mattered,

when people still wrote songs that meant something, and he’s perfectly protected, in his

bubble of silence, he’s protected from the pestering of everyone, he’s protected from the

shivers the sirens cause the rest of us, and he’s protected from ever being invited to see a

movie with friends who have poor taste.

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Okay yes, Richard always says the tiny details matter and that you should write it down, whatever it is, even if it seems inconsequential, cause’ lets be honest, everything seems inconsequential when you’re right up against it, when you’re seeing it as it happens, everything seems inconsequential, everything is meaningless until you’ve got a few minutes to think about it after the fact and give it meaning, so everything is pointless up until you’ve put all the pieces back together, on a sheet of paper like this, everything seems pointless until you follow your finger along the trail of events and characters and settings and see that everything, after all, is headed somewhere, and maybe you don’t know where, but you can take a step back from it and see that yes, something is going to happen, something is happening, something has happened. The blackbird in the tree, the tree is all naked from the previous winter, and maybe that blackbird is the same blackbird a character in the story saw early, the exact same one, and maybe this tree will be the one a character uses to hang himself. The End.

Jesus, Riley, you’ve gone too far. It’s the weather. The weather has been strange all day, sun bursting out from clouds and then ducking behind them again, and you can’t know whether to leave your coat on or off but it is much easier to just leave it on rather than taking it off every ten minutes, but then you just start to sweat, in your pits, and you know you stink, so you’ve got to hope you won’t end up standing near anybody in close quarters otherwise they’ll take a whiff of it and try to pretend that they don’t notice, but they’ll notice, and you’ll notice they notice, and you won’t be able to say a damn thing without thinking about how much you smell and how disgusting they probably think you are. They should start making deodorant that hooks onto your keychain so you’ll always

104 have it or else men should start carrying purses too; it’s not all that fair that women get carry everything they need with them at all times, but men can’t do it too. But then you’ve got to think about all the shit women have to deal with, and maybe you’re better off not having to carry a purse with you wherever you go.

Celeste. Celeste has come out. Sit back down, what are you thinking, Jesus, sit back down. She’s come out with a boy, can’t really make out what he looks like from here, but they’ve come out and seem to have ordered a cab cause’ now they’re getting into it and shit, you don’t have any money for a cab, and now what are you gonna do?

You’re gonna lose her.

“Riley!”

“What” you said back, not even thinking cause’ she shouted it like a mother would shout your name and now she knows that you’re there and there’s no way to get out of this. You’re in it.

“Get over here, now.” Sternly. She said it sternly. Just like a mother would, and now you’ve got no control over where your feet go, and you go quickly cause’ you don’t want her to get even more stern with you.

“Oh, hi, uh Celeste.”

“Hi, Riley. You’ve been following me. My guardian angel, you’ve been following me to make sure nothing bad happens to me, huh?”

“Uhh.”

“Riley, next time you want to know where I am, don’t ask around so obviously.

We have phones for these things.” She’s holding up her phone and shaking it at you.

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“Sorry, Celeste, I was working.”

“I know. It’s fine. I know who hired you to. Do you even know that?”

“…”

“Get in,” she says, pushing you through the door as she introduces her friend who slouches a bit; some inconsequential name you didn’t listen for in the anxiety of it all.

Celeste is haggling with the cab driver who told her “I won’t go that far, not this late in the day.” For the second time today, you’ve been forced into the back of a Crown

Victoria, and again you’ve got to feel a sense of guilt for no other reason than that you were doing your job. She called you her guardian angel, she mocked you, and now you’re sorry, now you want to tell her that you’re not a stalker or anything like that.

“Just drive, go as far as you feel like,” Celeste settles with the driver.

“Yes, Ma’am, whatever you like,” the driver answers, and immediately shuts the barrier between him and us.

And now that this is over with, she’s turned to you, like she’s awaiting your apology or confession or something, sort of like the Prophet did when he forced himself in your personal space, except you’re the one sweating now, caught up against the door on one side, and Celeste on the other, who looks a sight taller since she’s sitting on the center mound.

“Sorry, Celeste. I work for—“

“I know who you work for, Riley. It’s kinda hard to miss that. A boy your age finds a job like that, everyone kinda notices. And it doesn’t help that you’re terrible at it.” Your chest sort of swells every time she says your name, you had no idea she would

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know your name, bit the way she says it, well it’s like she’s ready to condemn you to seven years of hard labor.

“Well, I was just doing the job. Ya know? I don’t want to get fired so early into it.” The driver made an abrupt turn and you sort fell into her.

“I get it, Riley.” She shoves you off.

“…” She gets it, and her getting it feels a lot like condemnation, like you’re doing something awful and terrible for no other reason than to have a few dollars in your pocket. You never asked if the money was worth it, but now that you’re sitting next to one of your victims, you have to consider it, and no, it doesn’t seem worth it. Well, of course it doesn’t seem worth it, Kind hasn’t even paid you yet. But Celeste is lurking into your soul with her bright, blue eyes, the way you tried to lurk into her daily life, she is turning on you, and she is turning your gaze back onto you.

“Oh it’s fine. I kinda liked the idea that someone was there, keeping track of me, especially in this awful area,” and by awful she meant, the safest place in the whole city for anyone to be. “Bicycles, Bicycles, can’t they stay in their goddamn lane” you hear faintly from the other side of the barrier

“But do you know who hired you, Riley? I mean do you know who hired your boss?”

“No, I don’t get to ask those things.”

“I didn’t think you did. Would you like to know?” She’s turned to her companion, “And you, wouldn’t you like to hear it?”

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“Sure,” he says, rather weakly, as if someone had taken the air out of him and maybe he is just as uncomfortable as you are. “You shit for brains,” the cabbie is saying.

“Well let me tell you a story then. Do you know the ‘Prophet’ as idiots call him?”

You nod your head and you can see at the corner of your eye that he does too.

“That’s who hired you. He’s my father. He’s my dad. He’s my pap.” She’s started laughing a bit, but you can sorta feel the tension in the juddering cabin rise to a new height.

“Your father?” He asks, apparently not getting it on the first pass. This is not a quick one. “Drive any slower and I will get out and give it to you,” the driver says.

“Yes.”

“But he can’t be older than forty, he must’ve had you when he was…” And he’s right, the prophet is too young, there’s no grey in his hair.

“15 or 16?” She says.

“Yeah, and everyone says he childless, he’s married but he’s childless, they don’t sleep together that’s how pure of a soul he is, they all say.”

“Well let me tell you about his past life then. Forgive me if I leave anything out,

I’ve only just gotten used to the idea to telling the story out loud.

“My mother was middle-class maybe lower middle-class. Her father owned a small clothing store, not a chain, just a single store and she told me she worked there with her father starting very young because he promised her an allowance, and she liked the idea of having pocket change. She told me she’d never make it into a shop to buy what she wanted, if she ever had any idea what she wanted, because it all seemed to pour out

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of her pockets into the hands of the needy and homeless. She’d liked to say that she

never had more than a nickel to her will.” Celeste has got her eyes clamped shut, and she’s facing the roof of the car with a kinda sad smile, where one half of her face shows warmth, and the other shows a deeper, chiller, something.

“She’d been plagued with the deepest sort of human empathy all her life. That is why she ended up as a young mother without a husband: she trusted the emotions of others, believed the heart would conquer all, listened to far too many Beatles song about the strength of love. But she wasn’t an idiot. I’ll never say she was an idiot.” She’s opened her eyes up, to look at you and then at him, one at a time, just to make it clear.

“She was also beautiful; there was never a question of that. She had that kinda aura of foreignness to her, with features that kinda accentuated the South American half of her mother. I don’t really know anything about my grandmother beyond that she had some lineage from Brazil or something like that. But my mother was pretty like a chestnut. The sort of pretty you’d recognize from afar, that had to be recognized from afar, because if you’d get to close to her you might be tempted to undo the mystery inherent in beauty. You’d want to know, was it her eyes? No, they were a normal shade of brown. Was it her hair? No, it was an unruly mess of waves. Was it her nose?

Really, it’s just an average nose. And you’d keep going on like that, until there was nothing left to analyze, and the mystery died.” You knew exactly what Celeste was saying, and now that she’d mention it, you’d seen something foreign or something in her features, if you could look beyond her eyes.

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“But on the other side of the world, a young, biblical genius named Stephen, and oh, I’m sorry, I forget to mention that my mother’s name was Sarah. Anyway, Stephen was considered to be by most a kinda genius in the Bible. His parents were grooming him for priesthood, even as a child, because he knew the Bible inside and out like a kinda

Christian mystic. That’s how mom explained it to me. He had a mystical air about him that could overcome the kinda normal banality of Christianity in this city. He made it seem somehow attractive and deep, while other priests and such struggled to maintain the attention of their parishes.

“My mom was an atheist, and she had always been so I’d always ask why she felt anything for a boy like Stephen. And she’d tell me that what he said about the bible seemed outside the realm of silly anecdotes and normal Christian sophisms. It was as though he could reach beyond the words on the page, and call out the root of inspiration that had led men to write these passages in the first place. Again, this was the danger in her empathy.” The Cab driver is cursing at the length of the stoplights, “Why in the hell would they make me wait, when there’s no one trying to get across,” he’s saying.

“So, sometimes Stephen would be allowed to read and analyze passages for the congregation and my mom would go, just to see him. It didn’t take long for Stephen to notice her; he was still a fifteen-year-old boy no matter how repressed he might’ve been.

I never really asked how they met, or how they began to date, because I’m sure it was just like how any two people find themselves together. I’d wanted to let my mom exaggerate the story as much as she could, because really, that’s all she had.” The cabbie said,

“shit,” disrupting the black and white film playing in your head.

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“She told me about how she had to take the train or the bus because he wasn’t

allowed to be seen in her part of town. She’d finally found the will to deny the homeless

of her nickels so that she could use her allowance for the fare.

“The biggest problem with Christian repression is that you’d deny that you were a

sexual creature up to the moment that you were in the act of it. So of course, my mom

found herself pregnant with me, at fifteen years old.

“When she told him, he might’ve believed that I was his chance at shaking loose

the bonds of his talents cause’ he promised my mother that he would marry her and that

they would live wherever and however they needed to. But his parents, obviously,

weren’t about to let a common jezebel ruin dear Stephen’s future. They buried it, told

Stephen not to say a word and that they would take care of it, for his sake. And that’s

what they did. They called the police, told them the lady-stalker was back, faking that

the virgin Stephen had impregnated her, and my mother, I think, thought that maybe it

wasn’t worth it. Fighting a rich family. Fighting against someone’s fate. Stephen, like all great men, was meant for something. My mother, like all spurned women, wasn’t.”

A story as old as time, it’s just par for the course.

“That’s it, and then I was born, and my mother, rather than trying to talk to

Stephen, cause’ she didn’t want to bother him, rather than trying to have a human conversation with him, she’d just send him little trinkets on his birthday and

Christmastime and such. That was her way of saying she forgave him for doing what he had to do, she understood that certain men had certain expectation, and she didn’t want

111 anything from him. There was nothing in the world he could give her, and she showed that by giving him things. And that’s it. That’s all.”

“That’s it?” You’ve asked without thinking, cause’ you’d have thought there was more to it or more bad things to say bout’ that bastard Steven, and you were sorta following the story intimately.

“Yes, Riley, that’s it. She raised me on her own, and that’s it.”

“Oh.”

How much of that is true, about the Prophet, he’s asking when he shouldn’t. “All of it. And sometimes, none of it,” Celeste is saying. And that makes enough sense to you.

“But, Celeste, what about the drugs?” You’d had to ask.

“Oh, that. I tried to think about that so many times and I get a little bitter about it, and then I remember what she used to say. She’d say ‘Celestine, do you know how much of life is like the itch, the one you’d scratch and even as it still stung by the abrasion of your nail into it, a new itch would form right underneath it. The infinite itch,’ she’d say.

‘It’s like an infinite itch, that you could only try to ignore by thinking about anything else, all the while knowing that it’d be there the moment your thoughts went dead, and in the cold silence of reality without thought, it’d return to plague you, until you’d ache to root it out entirely, scratching deeper and deeper beneath the skin, but you’d draw blood, knowing you’ve gone too far. You’d go too far to scratch your infinite itch. Maybe you’d have to go all the way to the bone to dig it out.’ She’d say that, and I used to think that was just her way of having something to impart, cause’ no one starts a sentence saying

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‘how much life is like,’ no one ever starts a sentence like that without making some grand and misconceived appeal to romantic ideas. But now I think about it, and it was her way of justifying the drugs. Cause’ she’d gone too far to scratch the infinite itch. She’d stuck a needle right into it.” And she looked right into the dimple of your arm.

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Chapter 11

It was hard to picture the prophet as a youth with any sort of sexual impulses.

He’d been in a childless marriage for a decade or so, and that fit so much more in line with what I’d thought him to be. It was harder still to imagine him having a name, and such a common name at that: Stephen. I’d known a handful of Stephens or Stevens, and I can’t seem to picture any of them taking on the role of the Prophet.

But the oddest facet of Celeste’s story is that the Prophet was, at one time, innocent. The blame for his abandonment of his child and her mother could be allayed by the fact that by virtue of his birth and his talents, he had been made public property.

The whole city had eyed him, saw him as the true heir of Jesus and Paul, and saw in him the safeguarding of Christian myth. I’ve always thought him as a man playing a part, raising his arms up before all of us because that had been the role given to him, and now I see how true that is. I find a sort of sympathy for Stephen or Steven the Prophet, and this is something I never expected. But then it fades, and all I taste is sourness. I see the images of the Prophet and his family, dressed up for a portrait. I picture him as a child, in his private school uniform, holding a lacrosse stick for the yearbook photo. How are these the people who’ve commanded the most respect in this city? People like Daniel

Greyson; how are these the people who’ll reap the rewards of God’s blessings? Why does the city love them at all? What have they done to deserve it?

But, a city is an irrational creature or rather it has its own logic that belies human sentiment. I know it to be schizophrenic, exulting in its false reality. But really, how could it maintain a semblance of humanity and at the same time contain even a semi-

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balance of homogeny? But homogeny is not balanced in any case; it swings one way,

towards an apotheosis, towards the best of us, towards those whose souls are as light as a

feather. And at the other end, the worst of us simply slide off the scale into the pit.

These are the inner workings of a city: maybe at the heart of it, maybe the head of it, but,

more likely, in its bowels. And who are the unlucky multitudes ready to be shat out?

***

The driver had taken the three of us as far as he was willing to go. You can’t

really understand what his issue was, it really wasn’t that late, and it’s a Sunday night

anyhow, it’s always quiet on Sundays: nothing bad ever happened on a Sunday. And

now we’ve got to walk to Tansey’s, who said he would host tonight.

Cerberus, we call him. Partly because his house is set right at the edge of the

quarter, the last house before all the low-income units stacked upon units. He sorta

guards the world you might assume to be a hopeless one, where all the dirt and dust of

the city settles, where the immaculate uniformity of the rest of the city finally gives way

to the truth behind it all, where the clamor echoes loudest, where the cracks go deeper.

He sits there, sometimes on the porch without a view but a long out-of-business mechanic’s warehouse, in an old pale oaken chair, with a split down the middle of the seat, rocking by the warped legs, having been malformed by the seasons… a click, click,

click, as the one leg raps against the hollow deck, and you know that you’re here, in a

place you can’t ever escape. You can leave. You can go play pretend on the other side

of the world, but it calls you home. The click, click, click bids you back. And the

Cerberus of no mans land never has to bear his teeth, because he knows that any man

115 wanting to leave will always be back, more soulless than before, emptied-out by the realization that as he is born so shall he remain. And he’ll return, having learned the sting of a bitter lesson in reality, and will never again look out on the greener pastures.

He’ll let himself be sculpted in an unforgiving pose, head down, spine crooked, until he dies just like that, like a figurine in a courtyard and when daylight bites, over an entire garden of dead-eyed statues, it’ll expose the cracks of a thousand years, baking down on him and all the others who thought they’d escape, baking down in a crucible of hot dust.

That’s the myth of Tansey the guard dog. But we know his three-heads better than anyone. You meet them at different times, and they seem to show depending on the mood of the day. Or, maybe, the appearance of one head dictates the mood of the day.

He’s got a head of pure callousness, where you couldn’t penetrate the chill of his expression if you wanted—he’s saying how worthless the world his, how empty we all are, how there’d never been an era as hollow and gross as this one. His other head, well, that’s the one that turns on itself—he’s waking up in the morning, prepared to smoke through three or four packs of cigarettes, to drink morning to night, wearing an old t-shirt, always that same t-shirt, and he’s the worthless one, he’s the hopeless and hollowed out shell of an ugly, despicable human being. And then there’s the last head, the one that shaves his face clean, cooks himself a healthy breakfast, demands your attention because he’s really got something revelatory to tell you—he’s cleaning his house, sweeping the deck of a few weeks grime and spiders and faded adverts, and he’s got it into his head that this’ll be the day he makes up for the lost time.

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And no matter which head you’re speaking with, you’ll see the shadow of the

others, waiting in the back. So you never talk to him for too long, for fear that another

head will want its turn just as you’re getting used to this head.

***

Three-headed Tansey is still at the cleaning. Scrubbing the porcelain right off the

sink with all thirty-two ounces of bleach and a toilet brush. The kitchen is a place of

suffocating sterility: he’s bleached the counter tops, the crown molding, he’s even

bleached the refrigerator and oven-top and he’d bleach the floor if it weren’t made of laminate wood. If bleach weren’t bad on wood, he’d have bleached it with a mop already. Three-headed Tansey is trying to scrub out months of solitude, months where he’d given up on having guests, months where he’d let the dust and mold settle wherever it wanted to, letting it creep in even as he woke in the morning with the strong impression that someone had stomped in his chest as he slept. He’d already swept off the porch of

three-months worth of cigarette ash and leaves and them spiked bulbs that fall out the

trees. He’d already, on his hands and knees, cleaned around the toilet all the rust and a

handful of cotton swabs and empty toilet paper rolls that for three months he couldn’t

find the will to keep in the trash bin. And the trash! He’d had to take out seven or eight

bags of beer bottles and cardboard boxes, he’d had to carry three at a time, throwing the

weight of each hand over the other to stay balanced as he walked the length of a city

block to the bin. And then he had take each piece of recyclable out of the bags, placing

them, one at a time, through the little slots of the locked lids the city installed on the

dumpsters to keep the homeless from sifting through people’s garbage. This was the

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worst part of the day because Tansey hates the idea of locked bins. It made him shudder.

It disgusts him so much, this callousness of people that made them want to lock away

their trash to make sure that homeless men and women and children couldn’t get their

grubby hands on it. He’d know that none of his neighbors asked for it, that it was the

result of city board meeting that decided that it was necessary. The citizens of well-off

quarters had wanted these lids with locks, to ensure there was no temptation for the

homeless to wander into their quarters in the dead of night to work their mischief. And in

the end, it had to be implemented city wide so that no one could claim that the city Chairs

showed favoritism to the people that paid for their campaigns. No—they were fair.

But three-headed Tansey must set aside his disgust for the moment, if he is to get

any cleaning done, for three-headed Tansey has hosting duties to attend to. He’d

promised, and don’t ask him why but he promised to host the first of many dinners for his

dear friend, Robert Lancaster. He’d promised, but as a joke, he’d said ‘Robert if you

decide to run this year, I’ll host all the fundraisers and campaign meetings.’ But Robert

Lancaster didn’t get the joke and decided that he had to run, so long as Tansey was

willing to put up his house. ‘If dog-headed Tansey was willing to show his social side for my sake,’ Lancaster must’ve thought, ‘if even Tansey could sacrifice his private abode, even if for a night, then I really must be something.’ And so he is something, three- headed Tansey is thinking now, but not enough of something to make me glad about this ordeal; not enough to whistle while I work, thought dog-headed Tansey, and besides, dogs can’t whistle. They can only howl and bark and whine.

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Three-headed Tansey is talking to himself, or else one head is talking to the

others, the one head that accepts his name as ‘three-headed Tansey’ is talking to the other

two heads that do not accept that name. If anyone were listening in on three-headed

Tansey, at this point in time, they would probably consider three-headed Tansey quite

insane. Maybe they should have thought twice before anointing him as ‘Three-headed

Tansey.’ Before that, he never noticed he had dissociative identities, but now he’s nearly valetudinarian about it. All three-heads seem to revel in the idea that each one is recognized, distinct and separated from the other two for the first time in their entire lives.

***

Celeste said she’d be going to her father’s later, after the little shindig her and the boy were on their ways to. She said that she wanted you to go call Richard and tell him all about it; she said it like it were a warning, and now you gotta tell Richard, but you already know what he’s gonna say: he’s gonna tell you to be there, to wait there, to watch what happens and to write it all down and to not miss any details. But you’ve no money for the cab.

Celeste’s story—it’s stuck in your throat. And you’ve got to decide whether

Richard has any right to know, but it’s likely he is already aware, but he’s not one to ask many questions from his clients—he’d say they weren’t the ones on trial. Couldn’t really understand what he meant, because no one was actually on trial, only sometimes would something he found out be used in a court. You’d never be allowed in court, he told you that, he said that’s why you gotta write it all down, if it’s written down then he’ll assume

119 it’s truth, and he’ll swear by it. He’s put a lot of trust in you, but now the pangs of failure are in your stomach. What would Richard say if he knew that Celeste had caught you, that you had been forced into a cab with her, what would Richard say if he knew that you couldn’t even maintain a good distance, like he taught you? He might just fire you on the spot. But then again, you had information to barter with, and maybe that was enough reason for Richard to let you keep your job.

Time to face the music. It’s ringing and it keeps ringing, maybe he won’t answer and then what? Do you leave a message? Probably not a good idea, but at least you tried, and there’d be proof on his caller ID that you tried.

“Hello.” Did he only just wake up?

“Uh, hi Mister Kind?” Of course you know it’s him, you called him.

“Yes.”

“It’s Riley. Riley James.” Soaked. Your foot is soaked; you’ve found the deepest pothole in the city with your foot.

“Yes, I know. I can see that.” Right, he can see that.

“Yeah, uh so I’ve got news that Celeste will be going to the client’s home tonight.” A squelch every other step: a miserable sort of rhythm, like a slog with one foot plunged in a swamp; a swamp you’ve got to drag with you all the way to the other side of the world.

“What do you know about the client?” Right, he doesn’t know that you know who’s hired him and you hadn’t thought about how you’d respond to that question.

“It doesn’t matter, just get over there as you can.”

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“Uh, Mister Kind?”

“What?”

“I don’t have money for the cab.”

“Really, Riley? Oh for fuck’s sake, boy. I’ll call you a cab, where are you?”

Richard is in a piss poor mood today.

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Chapter 12

“I know there are those who think this whole business to be depressing. That its dehumanizing, on purpose, to keep the poor, the masses we might call them, confident in their lot in life. But I’m sure you’ve seen the other end of it, hmm? Up on that hill, those men and women are the ones lost to delusions, delusions of grandeur. Their religion keeps them blind to the other side of humanity, the darker realms of existence, where they’d find us lurking if it at all suited them. Their brand of belief is what keeps them confined, apart from us, so that they can maintain their lot without the threat of some abject creature robbing them of their birthright. It must be that God so chooses a handful to bless, if that blessing comes to them in the form of wealth, good doctors, happy little spheres of day to day experiences. Heck, they even get the best air to breath from, and what do the rest of us get? If we can tear out the bitter taste of poisoned oxygen, we might find the truest blessing, that by God, we may conserve our dignities with the secret we all recognize: we are the ones who have been liberated by God. Every day, they are burdened by all the anxieties brought with having. And so they have had to create a sort of Christian polytheism. They’ll have one god for their investments. They’ll have another for their health. They’ll have another whom they can count on to feed the poor so they don’t have to. They’ll call on another to protect them from the poor. And so on, you see? These people, here, all the men and woman and everything in between or freestanding, look to one God, a singular one, and only ask that He keep them cognizant and able. Not because they are happy with the notion that there are those who have while they have-not, but because, in the end, no one has any damn thing. Just imagine the

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businessmen with their suitcases or portmanteaus or whatever they call them these days,

pulling out their stock reports for St. Peter saying, ‘look, look, all these graphs point

upward, toward the heavens!’ forgetting that St. Peter lived thousands of years before all

this precision and details of economics and foreign investments and what have you.

“What the Church on the Hill preaches is strange to me, foreign even. But what

I learned is that it is done with the firm belief that there is a sense of control to be gained by the surrender of ones soul to that sort of god of many faces. You see, they are all about that, having control, especially over their lives, and that is why even God gets micromanaged into parts of a whole. By their submission, they may resign the burden of awareness that plagues the rest of us, and indeed, that is why they try with all their being to ignore the rest of their own city. They want to expel the very thought of poor or sick or whatever, even as the very worst aspects fascinate them, if it gives them a frightening story to shudder at. This is the reality that encroaches on their madness, and I know that is a bold thing to say, but that is what it seems.

“If their god legitimizes their lot, then this God, here, legitimizes our protests. I don’t know if God does both, at the same time. It wouldn’t make much sense, would it?

But I don’t pretend to know the nature of God, only the nature of men in opposition with one another. What I want to know is this: for how much longer can a god who is deprived of his sublime aspects continued to be summoned? I know, that when you begin to sever your ties from any portion of humankind, you begin the process of separating yourself from feeling entirely. Surely it may be undone, but this god they have, those gods they need, seem so much part of a calculation, a cold one at that. The Old

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Testament tried a cold God. Even that couldn’t last. But at least that God had the benefit of reminding a man of his creature-consciousness if his ego strove too far ahead of him.

Self-awareness, that is God’s greatest gift to us, and that is what the Church on the Hill denies its congregation.”

“Hear-hear,” and people are raising their glasses.

“Robert’s gotten a lot better at these sorts of things, eh Celeste” and yes he has, of course he has, he’s gotten a lot of practice in these past few weeks, and now you can sort of believe that he’s got it in him. He’s learned that you can say a lot if you pause for a long time, in the middle of sentences, where commas would be, you could pause and everyone would see that you were saying something important.

***

The dads finish his speech now is talking to the new man, talking about things you don’t understand, that you can’t understand if you want to. He talk about the God a lot lately, you never hear him talk about the God before, but after the mom dead and the little sister you never met, after they dead, people say that it’s normal to want to talk about the God more. So now he give speeches about the God, he is sort of like a preacher now, but you don’t think he know the God, you know the God, you know him better than the dads, cause’ the God come to you sometimes, when you sleep, and he show you things other people can’t see. The God don’t say anything, he just show you things, he come after the mom gone, and now the God with you everywhere, he right here, in the corner of the room next to Celeste, and he got a big smile on, he want you to see he smiling.

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A man, younger, nicer but you don’t know him, you never seen him, so maybe he wasn’t nicer, maybe he wasn’t even younger, but he’s got hair all styled, so you think him special or at least he thinks so, cause’ no one here has hair like that, they kinda let it fall wherever it wants to, like Tansey who got three or four strands that flow from the back of his head to the front and just lay there, you want to grab them, but you wouldn’t cause’ if you pulled too hard, then poor old Tansey would have nothing to keep his big head warm, but sometimes mister Tansey gets fevers and everyone worries about him cause’ he is the oldest out of everyone, so maybe you should pull on his three strands of hair just to save him from getting too hot when he gets sick. But the new man, everyone calls him boy, but he not a boy, cause’ you a boy and he nothing like you, but you can just chalk it up to something you can’t understand cause’ you so young, but you not that young, you seen things, you seen people deaded, well you saw one man deaded, that should earn you the right to be called an adult, if you see one man deaded, you should get a little badge that says you’re an adult and no one can tell you what to do anymore, no one can tell you to get inside when the sirens come down, no one can tell you that you have to stay inside when the sun goes down, you can just take a flashlight and walk all the streets you want to. But that’s how you get to seen someone deaded. You been wandering railroad tracks, cause’ no train ever comes down them, the dads said they don’t use them anymore cause’ there’s no need, they can just put all the stuff into trucks now, so there’s no more need for tracks, and if there’s no need, then what’s it matter if you wander them, they yours now cause’ no one else is gonna use them. The dads doesn’t know you seen someone deaded, he talked about the man that got deaded along

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the tracks and he told you don’t you go walking down those track anymore cause’ bad

things happen on those tracks, but he didn’t think you seen it with your own eyes, but if

you ever want to know the world better than anyone, then all you gotta do is see someone

deaded. You never feel out the loop again, cause’ now you know something the rest of

them don’t, and kids especially, you’re not like them anymore, you’re away from them

cause’ you’ve seen it, and you got to keep it your secret and everyone knows that a secret

is a powerful thing, especially if you take it with you when you’re the one deaded. The bum was sleeping, his head was on a trash bag, he was sleeping on a trash bag in the underpass, like where the train would go, if it were still running, where the train would go under the road and come out the other end so not to get in the way of the road cause’ sometimes even a train couldn’t stop the cars from rolling by. But you heard him sobbing in his sleep and begging to the God and the dad told you that a lot of them bums fought in wars and stuff and no one wanted them when they came home so they ended up with no home and they still carry them with them, they still carry the war with them in their trash bags and shopping carts, but that was some of them, some of them were just crazy and had talks with them-selfs and some of them didn’t care all that much for having a home and slept wherever they wanted just cause’, but you found out when the dads was talking about it that he been in the war, so that’s why he was begging to the God maybe.

But you thought he must be the poorest of all the bums cause’ this one didn’t even have a dog, all the other bums you see, well they had dogs at least, or someone with them, but this one was alone, sleeping all alone, with the war as his pillow. You thought you just tiptoe right past him, cause’ you wanted to look at the new graffiti in the underpass, there

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always new graffiti there, and they keep trying to cover it all up and if you get real close

to the edge of the concrete, you see all the layers where they had tried to cover it up, and

you sort of count them but you lose track after twenty, so you just thought that it was

endless. And then they came from the other end, a group of them, and you didn’t know

what to do, but you thought it lucky that it was dark enough to just run back the way you

came and climb through the hole in the chainlink and hide behind the weeds, and they

just walk on by, but course they didn’t do that, they had a plan, cause’ one of them had a

sort of red box he was holding by the handle, a little red box with liquid in it, and they

went right up the weeping bum and pulled him by his hair saying “yeah you think you

own this spot?” and sort of things like that and words you never even heard in all your life, and some you had from the dad’s but would never say out-loud, and they dragged

him to the tracks and sort of laid him over it, with his head over one side and his legs

over the other, and one of them stomped on his legs with his heel, and he did it again, and

again until you could hear the crunch, like you hear if you stepped on a mound of rocks

and they all sort of grinded together, but now that you hear it from a body, it made you

kinda sick. But you didn’t throw up, and you didn’t cry, you were perfectly adult about it

all, even as they dump the stuff onto the bum and you heard the click of a lighter and they

set him on fire, and he just kept sobbing the way he did when he was sleeping, there was

no change in his voice, it was as if all the sobbing he did when he was asleep was only

getting him ready for this, and the war too, the war must prepared him for this, and they

all sort of walked away from him but one of them came back and started tossing some of

the rags from the bed on to the fire and it sort of went out, but he just ran back to join the

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rest of them and left the steaming pile of rags. You didn’t go to it. You left it alone too.

And ran home. But you didn’t tell a soul about it; only the God knows you saw it. Now,

you and the God share the same secret.

***

I’d laughed. It wasn’t on purpose, it just sort of burst out of me, and I clung for a

second to the idea that maybe it was subtle enough not to be noticed, maybe it seemed

like a kind-hearted smile, but the silence begins to creep, and I’ve embarrassed myself.

“Sorry,” I say, “it’s just that you seem too… or you seem not enough like what

people expect from a politician.”

“Oh, yes, and thank you, obviously a compliment, but I think now, that might be a

positive, it can be turned into a positive or as they say ‘swung’ into a positive.” I don’t

know if they ‘swung’ or ‘swing’, I don’t know much about how politicians actually

thought, but I feel the dread dissipate, as it seems he’s no longer offended. The thing is, he does seem much like a politician, almost too much like a politician, as if he’s playing the part the best he can, the way he’s seen other politicians play the part in movies or the

way they’re portrayed in books; he’s like a parody.

“Do you think, and I’m sorry I don’t mean to cause any uh doubt, but do you

think you can win?”

“Yes, I think so. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it was possible. The

math is all there, after all, if you think about it the statistics are there and it’s hard to

ignore the numbers. We have a higher population of men and women of voting age than

128 they keep track of. They assume that they’ll never come out to vote, but I think we can what’s-the-word, galvinate them.”

Galvanize. But it’s not important.

“Galvanize, Robert, you mean Galvanize.” Celeste corrects him.

“Right, Galvanize. Thank you. You see, the people in the urban quarters as they’re called, the people here don’t ever have a reason to vote. It’s never made any difference who they throw there vote in for, so its never been worth taking a few hours off to make it to the polls or whatever, it’s never been worth losing ten or fifteen dollars, so they don’t show. So they’ve been forgotten. The city has all but forgotten them. But they’re there. Aren’t they? Can’t you see them? You must admit that they’re there, cold, hard empirical fact. They’re there, so we have to make sure they know that it’s not so pointless. I’ve got to be someone who can convince them that they matter, that their votes matter, that their voices matter.”

Robert’s voice sort of went into oratorical mode, and his hands started lifting up as though he were singing gospel. Celeste had to grab his arms and force them down back at his side as though he were a mannequin. Celeste tells Robert that I’ve yet to meet the host, and that it’s been nagging me. It hasn’t, but I go along with it. And Robert smiles, his gleaming white teeth erupting out of the darkness of the host’s naturally lit cabin-in-the-city. He gives us a wave too, as if we aren’t only moving two yards away.

***

“Break-ins! Yes, when I was young… nine or ten—“

“Again, Tansey?” He’s at this story; he’s only got a limited number of them.

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“There are new people here, shush Celeste. Just kidding. “

“Whatever.”

“As I was saying, when I was nine—”

“Or ten.”

“Oh shut up!”

“…”

“Just kidding.”

“Whatever.”

“Right. Nine or ten, a bum broke in through the security door, along the side-yard of the house, a little crackerjack house. Well, he came in and I don’t know what for, but he strolled on past my father, sleeping on the futon, my parents never slept together, it is a wonder I was ever born. But yeah, he must’ve walked past him and I was sleeping on the floor of my sister’s room cause’ someone had thrown a rock through the window of my room a few days earlier. So he comes into the room and just… tickles my feet, and as

I wake up to the tickling of my feet I can make his raggedy-ass sneakers, and I hear him bounding through the living room, slipping in the kitchen and finally slamming the security door and he’s gone like that. And the horror I felt was truly—“

“Why?” The boy asks.

“Why what?”

“Why did he tickle your feet?”

“I don’t know, really, I guess he was making a statement.”

“What’s that?”

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“What’s what?”

“The statement he was making.”

“That feet are meant to be tickled. I don’t know. He was probably nuts. Didn’t touch a thing except my feet. I slept in my own room after that, for the rest of my life, I slept in my own room, alone.”

“Well, that’s a sad ending to the story, Tansey.” Tansey always likes to lighten the mood only to crush it down again.

“No, it was a happy one. I learned something in the end.”

“That you should sleep in your own room?”

“No, that you should always keep your feet under the covers at all times.”

“What if it’s hot?”

“It doesn’t matter. Feet belong under the covers.” We all look down at our feet and wish we were in bed.

***

“Maybe, it comes down to math again, maybe a politician is only as good as the sum of all the parts. You get enough people thinking in all different ways, and they’re all standing behind you, maybe you can do something that matters.” Robert’s got one of those booming voices that you only had to half-try to pick out in a crowded room. I can already picture his speeches playing out on TV, as an entire city tries to listen politely, letting him finish before saying anything, shifting uncomfortably in their sofas trying to pick out what they didn’t like about him. And then it hits them, why this man seemed so out of place with what they imagine of their politicians, but they’ll have to swallow back

131 their words and think of something bad to say about this Lancaster person without evoking a past they’d assumed was long buried. Robert Lancaster is going to make a whole lot of people uncomfortable.

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Chapter 13

“I don’t think that we love life enough, and definitely not until we are faced with death. Hell, I don’t think we love our best friends enough, until they’re dead, until the moment we set the casket into the earth and it’s swallowed up, and we start to think about all the things he could’ve done if he’d only lived a little longer, and all the things you would’ve done for him if only, if only. But I think we need a little tragedy in our lives, cause’ everything is so boring, even those things you don’t notice or don’t think of as boring, the little happy things you get, a bonus on your paycheck, a new car, those little successes of your life you think are going to add up to something in the end, those things that tell you that you’re on your way to happiness, to being a respectable human being, those things that you feel a detached excitement for, as if you’re not the one experiencing them, as if someone else is looking over your shoulder at what you’ve achieved and you’re waiting for that someone to give a slight pat on the back. But you don’t realize how boring those things are until you experience the transcendence of death, don’t you think?

“Right. And then when this friend is buried, the one you never considered to be admirable, well now that he’s dead, you think of all the admirable things he’s done, you begin to admire him as if you should venerate him because he had the good sense to die for you. You think his dying is admirable, because you couldn’t imagine it for yourself, you would cling to your last breaths as long as you could, if someone told you that you were going to die in twenty or thirty breaths, well you’d try to hold on to those breaths, you’d try to exhale once a day if that were possible, and even if you couldn’t do much

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because you weren’t getting enough oxygen to function, even then, you’d try to cling to

those breaths. But my friend, well he gave into it, he became a master of life, because he

died. He got that period at the end of the never-ending sentence; he exhaled one last time, and so he conquered life by ending it. I’m sorry, I’m not sure if I making any sense, I think you make me nervous, it is really hard to put my words together when I’m sitting next to you. Do you have that power over a lot of guys? I think maybe I might die

right now, without ever being able to exhale because—

“No, not because you take my breath away: what a cliché thing that would be to

say. No, because the whole day has begun to weigh on my chest, yeah the whole day,

with the funeral and the rains, and then the heat, and now I’m here, the whole day is

compressing my chest. It hurts.

“No I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, that’s not what I’m saying.”

***

“From the university, eh? I’d like to pick your brain. Yeah, I want to know what

you think, from a scholarly perspective, em just kidding” and though he said “scholarly”

with a kinda sardonic breathiness, he isn’t just kidding—he means it. And you can see

the poor kid, his back to you, locking his arms to his ribcage as if he’d like to wrap

himself up in the fetal position even as he sits at the table. You can’t blame the kid

really; there’s always been an insistence in Mr. Tansey’s voice as though he’d like to tell

you what he really thought but maybe its too insolent to say aloud, so you’re kinda forced

into a clumsiness as you try to compromise what you know he means to say with the fact

that you’re kinda sickened by it. That poor kid, well he’s pointed his head down at the

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table because there’s an odd grimace on Mr. Tansey’s face, and it might make you

shudder, but then again you’re in his house, having just eaten his food, and you feel

indebted to his hospitality. “Yes” Tansey says, “I’ve decided that, in my old age, I need

to write. I’ve been writing a lot. I’ve been reading too, in case you think I’m like a

common Don Quixote, em just kidding—but I’ve started to think that I should write a novel, and I’ve had a few false starts over the last few years, but I think I’d want to sit down and draw them out.” He’s pulled out the name “Don Quixote,” but you can’t be sure he’s using it right. “Oh, okay. I’m not sure…” the kid is saying. Three-headed Don

Quixote tells him that he shouldn’t be unsure, that the university produces some intelligent people, and besides he seems smart enough, though “maybe not as smart as me, em just kidding.”

The kid gives him his consent mildly, with the fair warning that he might not be of much help. “Alright, alright. No pressure. Where should we start? I think it makes me nervous to think about sharing it with anyone, look, I’m shaking a bit. Maybe its an unconscious fear that someone might want to steal my ideas, em just kidding, they might not be all that great, so go easy. Or tell me like it is.”

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

“Would you like to hear about the novel that is meant to compare art to the act of

murder with a little flavor of Pygmalion? Or would you like to hear my version of the

modern Prometheus?”

“Like Frankenstein?”

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“No,” Tansey is saying, with an expression like bitterness, “It is nothing like

Frankenstein, nothing like it. Like Prometheus”

Dear Tansey, he reads one book on Greek and Roman mythology and thinks there are no other stories to pull from. There are no other stories in the world but the one’s written thousands of years ago.

***

“And he asked me, came up to me, and asked if I believed in God, right then and there as I buried my best friend, he thought it the best time to try and convert me, when I was at my weakest state, when I seemed vulnerable, he thought he could shove it straight down my throat as I held my mouth open in oblivious grief, he thought he could shove the whole Book into my mouth so I’d chew on the pages until I could taste the gospel, until I could taste the light. He said to me, ‘only God can give meaning to all the death in the world. Will you bow your head and send a prayer to God and offer him thanks for the blessings he’s given you?’ And he says that, and you know what I say back?

“I said, ‘What God? Your God? He who would condemn his children to live under the rule of a few? He who would murder out of spite? He who would allow for women nothing more than her chastity and yet give men no such law? I would not, not for that God. My God would not perpetually bless those who have already been blessed for the sake of undermining the will of the whole. I do not respect that God, not little as my creator, or as sovereign over the earth, for I put my credence into the liberty of humanity and if He should not want that for all his children than he is no god to me. I would rather burn in his hell for all time then bow to a god who would deceive us or who

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would not respect the humanity that he hath bestowed upon us in the first instance. What

sort of devil would toy with us like that?’

“I didn’t? You’re right, I didn’t say it, not aloud, but I thought it after a bit, and I

think that is as good as saying it, because even if I had said it, what would it matter, I

don’t think it would’ve changed his mind, but at least I thought it, for myself, and it

helped ease the bitterness a bit, because I’ve come to realize that some people are locked in ignorance or else they haven’t thought it all the way through, they haven’t thought about the implications of what they believe, and they are probably incapable of doing that, but I’m not, so I can assert my humanity by thinking. It was an interesting revelation, I think.

“No, I know that it’s been thought before. There is no such thing as original thought, but you know, that idea finally penetrated my brain for the first time, I finally understood what it meant, so that’s why I say its like revelation.”

***

Tansey is saying that he can only tell him if his eyes are shut when he’s doing

so—that it makes him too anxious to say it to someone’s face. “Okay… the main

character—‘aven’t thought of a name yet, names are hard though, huh, you’d think of

something and then it starts to sound silly…or just not right, so you have this great big

personality who you know has to do this and this, but no name. You could just leave him

nameless, but then people would expect you to make a big gesture about his, uh,

namelessness. But anyways, the main character, I think it starts off in the nineteenth

century, towards the end, and he’s just working for a traveling carnival company, or

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something like that, in England somewhere, cause’ I like the way they speak in England.

And no one knows his name—oh that’s what it was, it’s not that he doesn’t have a name,

its that no one knows his name, and he doesn’t know it either, so he just tells people they

can call him John, or something nondescript like that.” It’s becoming increasingly harder

to hear what Tansey’s saying, and you can’t hear a word the boy is saying. It’s this

nagging in your ear. Bzz, bzz, bzz—Jesus it’s endless.

***

Has nothing I’ve said been interesting to you? Haven’t I said anything

intelligent?

“What? You think I’m as interesting as a TV on in the background? Is that what you said?

“That isn’t fair. No not at all, I’ve only just buried my best friend, not half a day ago, and you’re telling me I’m as good as background noise. I only wanted to keep you entertained, even now when the burden of death hangs off me like dead weight on my soul, even now, I only wanted to keep you interested. That is the sort of man that I am, and if that isn’t enough for you, then I have to ask what is. What would interest you, what would I need to do to be interesting? I have shown you that I’m politically inclined and invested in the rights of women, that I’m a capable thinker that I have empathy and emotion, what more is there?

“A vagina? I did not know it was like that.”

***

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Tansey lays a sort of handwritten manuscript in front of me, telling me, I think,

“Please, I just want you to get a sense of my writing style, here’s a little taste. I’ll let you read it, and I won’t bother you while you do, eh?” I turn to it, silently, I can’t really deny him at this point, I’ve let it go too far, I’ve let him think I’m interested. It is not so much that I’m not interested, it is that I can’t hear a word he’s said so far, I’ve just been smiling and nodding anytime he starts to smirk, or frowning when he does so too. I’ve only been mimicking him, and now I’m stuck, at the table, Celeste has abandoned me to talk to some man who is relentless in his speech too. Maybe, we are in the same boat. I hope this particular boat sinks soon so we can all drown and get on with it. I’ve lost my place, back to the beginning:

‘If I am to ever recall that which has mattered most, I shall need to remember this book is here, largely unused and that, until now, where it has been filled, it was under the most menial and forced influences and those pages can be torn from the binding without any sense of regret. If I am to be honest, I had thought my life lived and I was committed to experience retirement working in the stables of animals I once believed to be exotic, too poor to die, too bored to live, friendless and aimless, counting down the days by the cracking of my knees, the thinning of my hair, and the ever-shrinking distance that my ears could make out the rubbing of my thumb and forefinger in the bleary eyed morning.

But, I suppose, I have found a small sense of purpose for this book. I am not quite sure what it is, but I feel...inclined to write of a young man who has joined with the company under mysterious circumstances (though, I should relate to you, that there is little mysterious about his character-- he is, after all, a young man). I first heard of him from

139 the boss, who overheard from the manager that a runaway would be joining us. I assumed he would be working with me or elsewhere, given some other greasy task, and that he would eventually run back home when he realized how degrading the work was.

But the boss told me he would have his own tent, set up near ours (in that area which visitors rarely ventured). He would replace the hunger artist, whose cage I would sometimes clean as he slept (and I have to wonder why it needed cleaning if he was never to be seen eating), and he would be given no income. I can’t say I was jealous--I have seen the way folks would gawk at the human exhibits, prodding them to be allowed their

“pounds worth” and scoffing when an excess limb failed to be conjured at their behest.

He must have joined us under the cover of night cos one morning he simply appeared and set himself into place as though part of some manufactured jigsaw. That first day he earned not a single visitor and I had to wonder for how long the manager would allow the newcomer to live off his bread. When, in the late afternoon, he opened his tent, he seemed shaken and even a bit dazed, crouched on his uncomfortably small stool. I, of course, thought him dumb. There was certainly a place for those children whose eyes would glaze and bodies would twitch--especially if they began to speak in tongues. But a man like that, even a young man, would put people off their lunch. The truth, however, reminded me how ignorant I am, even at my age, of the wonders of the world.

I cannot say I entirely understand. I know it is but an illusion, but his magic is something wholly unique and powerful. I saw him perform, wearing only poor-man’s clothes, to an audience of ghosts. He shouted out from his tent, proclaiming all sorts of

140 travels to realms--the “East” and the “North” and to Africa--where he was trained in folk magic and the sort. When, merely two minutes into his “show,” he exclaimed “I do not feign mastery over such power, I can only show you what I am capable of!” he pulled out a bluebird, and I tell you, I might have reintroduced my dinner if it weren’t for years of stable maintenance cos he snapped at one of its wings until you could hear the crunch of particles. But, he then covered the poor bird with both hands and I saw him fake such sickening pain, his teeth gritted and his eyes rolled back. Even more realistic was the crack in his own skeleton and the blood that seeped out from his own shoulder, devouring his elbow, and dripping onto the layer of hay and dust that covered the floor of his tent. I tottered at the bone crunching, feeling a little dizzy (which is always a selling point these days). But I watched, stepping silently closer, as he turned to the side, wiped the blood with a rag to expose the bone protruding from his own shoulder and I swear to you, I could see the whole ligament, if only for a second, as the wound closed and formed a rugged scar which slowly began to descend back into his skin and, even, as a few hairs sprouted from the area. He then turned back to face his audience, and revealed again, the blue bird in his hands that then began to flap both its wings as it was free. Tomorrow, this area shall be swarming with visitors, and I have no doubt that this sort of magic will bring in an excess of salary to our manager.’

It ends there. The word “shit” materializes delicately in my head, in Tansey’s own handwriting. I refuse to look up, because if I do, Tansey will want to know what I think, and words tend to come out when they want to when one has had this much wine.

There’s a hand on my back. It’s Celeste, thank god; Celeste is here to play the savior.

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“How bout’ you tell us a story, use that brain of yours to tell us a story.” That’s not what I had in mind.

“Yes,” Tansey is getting in his say too, “See what you cultivated people can do, just kidding.”

“A story? Are we in ancient Greece? Is this a symposium?”

“Not a clue what that is,” Celeste says, “But Robert wants to keep everyone entertained. He says we’ve got to make it memorable, somehow. And besides, you might as well start putting yourself out there.”

“Out there? Why?”

“Why do you think? We’re going to use you.”

“Use me? For what?”

“To rally people, you know, from the other side of the world. I told Robert that you might be able to write some speeches too.”

“What?”

“Oh really, do I have to spell it out for you? You’re here because Robert asked me to find someone who could help us get some of the vote from the other quarters. And so I found you,” says Celeste, with some annoyance as Tansey is busy grinning at me.

“Me? Why me?”

“I don’t know. You were late. You were there. I recognized you, maybe, but mostly cause’ you were there and I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve been dragging my feet on it for a little while now. I told Robert I found some people, but I hadn’t really. So,

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you were there, and lucky for me, huh? Now I get to keep my job, depending on how

well you speak. My livelihood depends on it.”

“…”

“Are you mad?”

Mad? Maybe. I sense madness creeping in from all corners of the house, but I think that’s just the flickering of the candles Tansey lit to “save money.” But that’s not what she meant.

“No I don’t really get angry. I guess, I just hadn’t thought about it.”

“Good, now go out there and make me look good.” She pulled me out of the

chair, and slapped my lower back. I’ve had more wine than I thought.

I have to think of a story to tell in the time it takes Celeste to march me to the

front of the room. I’ve got one thing in my repertoire. I picture it written down in my

notebook, on my desk. But it would be spiteful to tell it in front of the Christians in the

room. I’d seem like a heartless professor, editing something they’d believed to be

perfect. Red marks all over Genesis. But it’s all I got.

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Chapter 14

“Eve came first. She was a creature out of whose steps produced florae and crops and all the things necessary for life and for shade when you’d start to feel the burdens of life. She did not do these things purposefully, it all just sprouted the moment she lifted her heel from the earth and moved on, like a sprite in her rightful abode, without the burden of men coming to cut down her trees, to give the forests she birthed unconsciously a sense of order, for the building of civilizations and for the writing of books. No, this was before civilization and the writing of books entirely. She danced along the entire globe, free from ideas of innocence or responsibility. But Adam was not free from such things, even as he was but a child. He took to following close to her, and though she took no notice of him, he couldn’t help but be drawn to her, to her power and to her beauty.

He ate the fruits she left behind, slept under the trees she set, and settled upon the idea that his duty in life was to protect her from the serpents that found their way, in her wake, along the grasslands that seemed to flow out of her hair. In this way, Adam learned to worship her and her powers that were beyond comprehension.

“By those fruits, he began to grow in strength and in mental acuity. He caught glimpses of himself in rivers and saw he was a man, no longer a child. But as he grew, he learned to despise his lot in life. Why should he be condemned to follow her, forever, until the end of time—for it seemed she did not age and neither her beauty nor her powers seemed to fade—trailing behind like a trained animal companion? Why should she only have the power to create life and why should she be allowed to do so with such carelessness? He called to her sometimes, to her, begged her stop, but she seemed unable

144 to separate his voice from those of the beasts that had settled in the forests, in the plains, along the mountainsides she had painted so flawlessly. The fruits he ate began to taste bitter, sometimes rotting the moment he’d plucked them from the branch, sometimes bursting with worms, and sometimes, he’d find they were poisonous and made him ill.

This, he thought, could not go on forever.

“Men are not meant to be nomads, subject to the chaos of the earth. Men must cut down trees. Men must be able to plant their own gardens for food. Men must have hands to help maintain those gardens. Such were the thoughts of Adam, the first man, who so decided the course of his entire lineage. So, he ceased his pursuit, giving up on

Eve who had no ability to communicate in his language anyhow, and asked aloud “how do I do these things?” And the serpent came, waiting all this time for a question to be asked, for the first question in the history of mankind to be posed. He told Adam that he would need to cut out the trees at the roots to keep the forest at bay, to keep it from growing back on his plot of land. He told Adam that he’d have to capture the seeds from plants that were good for eating. He told Adam that he would have to till the earth, to dig out ditches to plant these things.

“And Adam did all of this, and when he had finished he asked another question.

“How can I maintain this all on my own?” And the serpent said, “you cannot do this on your own, for you will die one day, and all that you have built will die with you. Is that what you want from your life? To do hard labor all for naught?” “No, I do not wish to waste all of this,” Adam replied. The serpent told Adam, “then this is what you must do.

You must go to Eve. I will ensure that she sleeps, for she has never had the need to sleep,

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but I will make sure that she does. You must sow into her body like you have sowed into

the earth. You must plant a seed in her belly and it will sprout one day and you will have

the hands you need, and you will ensure that all your labors are not for nothing.” Before

he left Adam, the serpent gave him a stern warning. He said, “You must do this, but as

you do, you must not be tempted to look into her heart. If you do, you will be

mesmerized by the power that lurks there, and you will not be able to continue your

labors. You will never be able to shake the image of her heart out of your mind and you

will be cursed by it forever. For you will you want to seize her power, and if you do, the

earth will die, and you will no longer be able to cultivate the land the way you have been.

And you will feel the pangs of old age, which you have not yet had to experience.”

“And so he did just what the serpent said. While Eve slept, Adam sowed into her

belly with his seed, and though he was curious about her heart, he avoided peering into

it.”

***

The cruelest head of Tansey’s three heads has begun to stir. They won’t shut up,

and so it’s awoken, and three-headed Tansey will soon no longer be able to do a thing to

keep it from lashing out at his guests. ‘These people are a plague on your house’ it says

to him, ‘chase them out or you will suffer the same disease.’ ‘And what disease is that?’

he wonders. ‘The disease of obliviousness,’ it replies. ‘But what is it they are oblivious

of?’ he asks. ‘Of themselves,’ it retorts with matter-of-factness. ‘But how could they be oblivious of themselves, if they are, in fact, themselves?’ he only poses questions to keep the cruelest head distracted for a moment. ‘Only look, you fool, how they sit pretending

146 to listen to a silly story, how they are focused on their forks and knives and glasses full of wine or water, how they take care not drop or spill unto their clothes, these are not men and women, but pieces of clothing, clean clothing at best, but still only layers of thread given structure by insentient mounds of flesh. They only focus on the difficulty of such a task, only relinquishing it to ensure they swallow correctly, that food goes down the right tube, and water down the right tube, and so what? For a moment they are more than their attire, but only as far to consider their esophagus. Now see, the gullets in men’s clothes and the gullets in women’s clothes, and try not to laugh.’ ‘But why shouldn’t I laugh?’

Aloud, he’d said it aloud, but not for anyone to hear. It is none of their business, these gullets in costume.

***

“He was given two sons as his prize, and he raised them in his image, taught them his language and put them to work. By their hands, the garden of Adam grew tenfold, and he was content. But his children were not content. They beleaguered Adam with questions, asking him where they came from, why they had no purpose in life but to toil in a garden, why they could not leave the garden they grew up in, and who cultivated the land outside their garden. Adam told them “You came from your father, who planted his seed in the Earth, and raised you. It is your father who decides your purpose in life. It is your father who gave you this garden to cultivate, for, before me, there were no gardens, only chaos. And Chaos is who rules the lands outside the garden.” But his children, who were only half Adam’s, felt that their father was keeping from them a secret, for they

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would see, on occasion and from a distance, the woman who danced through forests and

they wanted to possess her for themselves.

“So they slipped out, under the cover of night and followed the trail of freshly

bloomed florae to their mother. Like Adam before them, his Children caught her as she

slept for the serpent’s power over Eve that let her sleep continued to work itself every

night. But unlike Adam, for they were not warned, they peered in the heart of Eve and

saw its magic and wanted it for themselves and so they tore the body of Eve into pieces,

casting each part over the world where her blood flowed out and created the oceans. And

they took her heart, each devouring half of it. I want you to picture the heart like a

pomegranate. Yes just as a pomegranate.”

***

‘Look around the room,’ the cruel head won’t be stopped now that it’s been allowed to speak, ‘look ‘round the room and tell me what you see. The gullets in dresses and pants and suits and shirts, yes, but what else? See the furniture. See how much it exists. The table with delicate inscriptions on it’s legs, a design from the native

Americans, an inheritance from your Mormon mother, who inherited it from her Mormon grandmother. At least a century old and well taken care of, at least it seems so if you never tear off the green cloth and reveal the stains in the oak, taken care of, yes, but for what? To surprise people when you give them the information about its age? Do you pretend that it’s an artifact even as they sink their elbows into it, even as they rub their feet against the edges of the legs to scratch some anxious itch in their feet? Do you

pretend that it’s sacred even as some lazy young man leans his ass against it? Its history

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is meaningless because the past does not exist. The table is here, now. Look how the

present reveals itself in all the mundane. Look at how everything exists as it is and to

pretend that it exists anymore than how it exists now is to pretend that there is something

that exists beyond what exists. But look how there is nothing behind the present, even if

you pretend that histories of objects or of people matter all. History is not a pension

you’ve earned from existing that you can spend after a certain amount of time—no, history is how you pretend that you’ve got purpose, that you’re going somewhere, or that where you are is where you’re meant to be; it is how you pretend that there is something meaningful in existing. Now, accept the nothingness behind existence, the oblivion of black or blue or whatever color might define the infinite; let these thoughts born at the back of your head come forward, yield to them, let them come forward—this is how you maintain your existence after all—let them leap to the sinus cavity between your eyes; see all that is when you stop pretending that there is more to what is. The immediate scents of nervous sweat and perfume, the monotonous humming of whispers underneath the fairy tale that hangs above it all, the grains of wood and stale crumbs beneath your elbow, the sight of people that become unrecognizable when you see them from what they pretend they are: all of this exists, how obnoxiously the present exists. Throw them out. Burn it down. Kill yourself.’

***

“By the magic of the heart of Eve, one brother was granted the power of conjuring the plant life while the other was given the power to control and give birth to the sorts of beasts that had begun to populate the world under Eve’s reign. And they went forth,

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drunk with their new powers, and began the whole project of civilization building. But

Adam? Well, he woke the next morning, feeling the creases on his forehead pouring over one another, he woke to find that if he moved his eyes one way, he could see his nose, he woke to find his ears irreparably waterlogged and he woke to find that his children had abandoned him. In short, he had become an old man. He remembered what the Serpent had said and knew that his children had killed the mother of all things. They had become

the murderers of all murderers—

“I think we should stop here; maybe you’ll have me back next Sunday and I’ll tell

you the rest? We might be putting too much on the host. It’s late, and I’m sure we all

have things to do tomorrow.”

“No, no, I’m fine!” Tansey answers from the back.

“Well, then it’s my fault then. I need some air.”

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Chapter 15

I’m wine-drunk. I’d needed as much wine as was offered, just to play the part of a social animal, to give that speech that was demanded. I want to go back and amend what I’d said, to make it sound somehow more meaningful. I wanted to toy with the story they thought they knew so well, just to test the flexibility of their beliefs. That’s what I had planned, but I got lost in my own words, and by the end of it, I had no idea what in the hell I was saying. But they seemed to enjoy the story on its own, so I can forgive myself, maybe.

Out around back, down the dim alleyway that all on its own seemed to advertise that “yes we have drugs,” out around the side of Tansey’s house, I find this sort of courtyard, enclosed by three and four story apartment buildings, each painted in different shades of white and off-white. I find it by following a line of sight to the tree that sprouted in the middle, just over the top of the apartment behind Tansey’s shack. It has got to be the tallest tree in the quarter so I don’t question for a second why I‘m attracted to it, why it beckons me alone. But then again, I am wine drunk.

The tree itself bellows out the iron grates in the ground, splaying branches right onto the grills, still attached to the trunk at the crux. The trunk twists in all sorts of directions, I can’t even be sure it is the trunk I’m looking at or if it’s situated somewhere deep below the surface. That’s what it seems to me: a tree miles deep, sprouting out of the sewers, thriving by a catacomb of filth which puts itself to use by fertilizing a giant oak tree, a tree that cares little for what city planners dictate. The courtyard was probably meant as a park for tenants, but it is instead occupied near to the brim by a tree no one

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asked for. So nature, as stubborn as she is, thought this would be a good place to take her

last stand, and out through the iron sprouted a winding trunk and a pinwheel of branches

all tilted to one-side so that it may maintain its balance, while the left hand remains free

to lurch out, writhing towards the sky in a final supplication to the heavens.

“You’re doing it again.” Celeste. I’ve known her for less than half a day and I

can already see she’s going to make it a habit of sneaking up on me. But I am lost in a

moment of silence, or else my throat is too dry to allow any words to slip out through it.

She decides to stand next to me, to see what I see, to try to find the significance that I

seem to convey. There’s a sort of sobering chill that flows past me and then bristles

along the leaves of the oak so that the branches clang up against the iron grates in the

ground. I feel a fever coming on.

“I want to know, well I want to get as much out of you as I can in this state, but I really want to know what you think about…”she had to pause to try and suppress a belch, but it came out through a sealed mouth anyhow, “I want to know what you think about,

umm how about death.”

“Death?”

“Yes, I’ve got a laundry list of things to ask people about when they’re drunk,

death, love, etcetera etcetera.”

“…”

“I think…”

“…”

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“I think you’re drunk, Celeste.”

“No, no, well yes, but ask anyone, I’m always asking questions like these.”

“And how often do you get an answer.”

“That probably depends on what time of day I ask them.”

“Well then, at this time of the day, I don’t know what I think of death.”

“You don’t know, or you don’t want to say for certain?”

“Well, death is sort of certain, I think, thinking about it makes you wanna say something for certain, doesn’t it?”

“And that is your mortal fear, isn’t it.”

“No, I fear other things more. I’m just sort of ambivalent about certainty.”

“You’re a paradox, man. What do you fear more then?”

“Silence, I think, I hate silence. It keeps me up at night. The dead of night, that’s scary, but then again so is silence between two people when you began to notice it. It sort of creeps and grows. Silence between two people is like mold, and if you don’t try to take care of it, it’ll start to reek and suffocate you.” The images of three different ex- girlfriends simultaneously flash, each of them sitting in a different position, in cold, dead silence.

“Well then, I should tell you, never to get married.”

“Unless it’s with someone like you?”

“Yes. Someone like me. Not exactly like me, but a bit like me.”

“Okay, back to death then.”

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“Yes. That’s the way to kill a marriage proposal: death. Here’s a diamond ring, diamonds are forever, you know, but you aren’t. You’ll get buried with it and when your body starts to decay, it’ll be the only thing left to identify you with.”

“Oh, and here’s a bundle of flowers. They’re gonna whither and die, just like you.”

Death is the mother of all beauty. It writes itself there, all in the Garamond print of the poetry anthology I’ve stored away atop the piano in the living room. Piano, I missed playing piano. I’ve not touched the thing in over a year, and dust had settled on the lower octaves. I should wipe that dust away.

“You alright?” Celeste said, disrupting the image of my living room. I’d forgotten

I wasn’t home.

“Yes sorry.” But I’m not sorry. I’ve always wanted to know what people would say if they didn’t always revert back to ‘sorry.’ We’d probably never get anywhere in a conversation, just always explaining what we really meant, we’d probably learn a lot about one another, we’d probably start to understand all the things we do that bothers other people, that annoys other people, that hurts other people, but then we would all just end up starving to death trying to explain what we meant, or holding our piss until our bladders exploded listening to someone else explain what they meant. I need to pee.

“Sorry gotta go,” I say to Celeste, weighing the corners by their respective level of darkness.

“Oh right. Boys can do that.”

“Only when I’m drunk, otherwise I’m too shy.” I found my corner.

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“I wish you the best of luck.”

“Thanks.” I sort of yelled it; realizing as I did that the courtyard itself seemed to amplify anything that was said.

“You were telling me about death?”

“Oh right, uhh I don’t know. If I were to die tonight, maybe I had too much wine and my liver finally goes out, if I died tonight, would that make today beautiful? Would that give meaning to my last day on earth? I’d be dead, so there’d be nothing in it for me,

I wouldn’t have a thought in the world, not a single flash of insight, even as I float to the light at the end of the tunnel, not a thought in my head. All the things I’ve done or hoped for or planned, all those trains of thought would finally culminate in… nothing, absolute nothing. My consciousness would be severed. There’d be nothing.”

“Nothing? That’s your answer, death is nothing?”

“No. Not really. I think, that the disconnect of consciousness, apart from your sort of waking awareness, that millisecond where your brain can make no more sensory connections, I think that’s infinite.” I’ve finished. “It’s silly, but I think about it, if I were to die, I would just create my own little world, the way I want it, in my head, and it would be infinite. Yes, I’d be living the same millisecond over and over again for the rest of eternity, but I would have any awareness of that, would I?” Do I really sound this stupid? I’m too drunk to remember to think and I’m only hearing my words after I’ve said them.

“I don’t know.”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

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“It’s a little scientific but its sort of hopeful though, I didn’t really expect it from

you. Maybe you do have romantic notions in your head.”

“I guess.”

“What sort of world would you be dreaming up, in that last second?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think that far.”

“Then what are you gonna do if you die tonight?”

“I guess I’ll just miss the train and be trapped in the moment where I’m trying to

think of a place, for-ev-er.”

“How about here? Just as a placeholder until you figure it out. Just think of

here.” It’s a nice thought, yes, but it won’t do.

“Anyways, we’ve gotta go.”

“What? Go where?”

“I’ve got matters to attend to,” she says, feigning haughtiness, “and Robert is making me take you with me. He worries about me, but I don’t know if its because he cares, or if he thinks he needs me or whatever. But it doesn’t matter, cause’ he’d probably lock me in a room somewhere if I tried to go alone.”

“Go where?”

“To my father’s. I promised I’d be there today. I keep my promises. But we’ve gotta get going or it won’t be today anymore and then I guess I’ll just go to whatever ring of hell they put people who break their promises in.”

“You’d be in the eighth circle I think? You’d have to wear a lead robe and walk in a never-ending circle.”

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“Jesus man, well, save me from that, will ya?”

“Yes m’lady.”

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Chapter 16

You can sense her eyes on you, glaring at the back of your head, as you rush around trying to gather your things and shake hands with every person whose companied you’d enjoyed or not. I’d not noticed it until now. Impatience exudes from her; she’d give me a heart attack just for making her wait, and I could feel it develop like a tumor somewhere in my chest, like I’d taken one too many drafts of her irritation, and it clung to my lungs. With her, I’d never feel like I had any time, cause’ for Celeste, time is of the essence and for every drop she’d lose waiting on me, well that’s a mark on my soul and all I can do is wrap myself up in the guilt of making her wait, wrap myself up until it

I can’t breathe, until I drown in it, until I have no air left but to say “wait, wait, I’m sorry” but ‘sorry’ won’t give her back the two minutes she’s lost to you. I’d swallow all the clocks and watches and phones in the city just to get her to ease up about it.

***

The Prophet was feverish. He’d been feverish all day, and his wife was trying to take care of him, the good woman had been placing cold rags on his forehead all day.

But then he felt the pang of duty somewhere in his chest and so he tried to tell his wife that he had a great matter to attend to, but all that would fall from his lips was a single name, over and over again, and so he tried to churn out the word in varying risings and fallings as if he could communicate what he was trying to say with that single word. The name wasn’t even on his mind, it just poured out, the two syllables of the name just poured out every time he started to explain himself. And it was the very name that his wife had banished from his vocabulary. He knew he had somewhere to be, but he wasn’t

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sure where that was, and so he left trying to tell his wife “goodbye” but could only stretch

out the length of the name itself, over enunciating it at his wife’s aggravation. He left

with a bible in his hand, clutching a catholic rosary even though he had never in his life

been catholic. He called for a cab with the only word in his current lexicon, and it appeared before him, thrashing up the lawn, kicking out mud from beneath its tires. The prophet stepped in, wanting to say to the driver that wasn’t there, that he did not know

where he needed to be, but he knew it was somewhere. The invisible driver didn’t seem

to care that he was not given a destination, and drove off at a rather reckless speed,

through side-yards and alleyways that never before seemed large enough to allow for a sedan to pass through, but seemed now to make perfect sense. In an instant, he was thrown through a hospital window, landing on the orthopedic seat cushion of the waiting chair as a woman gave birth. It seemed to be the most peaceful birth he could have imagined. The woman said, “You’re here. Good.” and out came the baby.

“Will you hold my child?” she asked him. But he couldn’t answer of course, and so the baby was set into his lap, already in his lap. “Bless my child,” she demanded,

“baptize her now.” These people only ever have one demand of you, to ensure they and their kin have a lease on a section in heaven, the prophet thought to himself. But the prophet could not baptize the baby without water of some sort. “The sink,” she answered. Yes the sink, the prophet thought, and he found himself before his own sink, in the kitchen, the two metallic bowls, one with a garbage disposal and he knew not to put the child in that one. As he filled up the other side of the sink, he felt the child go cold and limp, and heard no more of its heavy breaths, and dear god, I’ve killed the baby,

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the prophet was thinking, and he would never forgive himself for feeling, in that moment,

holding a dead child, that what he really wanted was a strong coffee, two sugars, one

cream. He tried to call to Laurel, but the only name he could say was not his wife’s

name, and so she would not come. The prophet considered praying to God, but he

wondered, blasphemously, if God would do any good in a case like this. The Child is dead, and it is your fault, the prophet thinks. But no, it is alive again, listen to the murmuring of the heart, faint at first, but now your whole world is quaking by the drawn

out rhythms of the child’s heart. The phone vibrates against the nightstand.

The phone.

The nightstand.

Vibrating.

The phone.

Vibrating.

The nightstand.

Vibrating.

Nightstand.

Phone.

Right.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Stephen, its Kind, I’m at your door an’ we’ve gotta talk.”

“Alright alright, about the girl right? Yes I’ll be down in a minute.”

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You could dress yourself, but really what’s the point, it’s too late to pretend to be impeccable. Don’t check yourself in the mirror; you’ll just be disappointed under the fluorescents. There’s the flickering of the television, accompanied by a murmuring:

Laurel is up, watching her true crime shows, no doubt. Why does she do this to herself?

It only makes her miserable and paranoid. Even worse, she gets invested in the crimes of passion, the bloody murders of lovers and ex-lovers, and blathers about it at the worst possible occasions: at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, really anytime there’s food involved.

It made you nauseous, too aware of the mulching of food in your mouth, and you’d feel it stick in your throat as you try to swallow a bite of a ham sandwich along with the severed testicles of a husband who really shouldn’t have had an extramarital affair, not with this woman at home at least. And then her stories tended to cast a strange sort of gleam upon all the knives in the house, especially as she stood over them. She’d once cut into a watermelon and said, “This must be what it feels like to cut into a human skull.” Don’t know why she had to identify it as a ‘human’ skull, but she did, and you’d have to watch her a little more closely when she handled kitchen utensils. And so, the true crime shows made you both more paranoid.

It was hardly any wonder that she’d asked you to do something about Celestine.

You really thought the girl was harmless, but God knows that there’s a story or two in

Laurel’s mind about what could happen in a situation like this. So you did her the favor of calling the atheist Kind—he took no amount of time to announce his atheism as if he were the only one in the world who couldn’t see past himself. You didn’t mind half as

161 much as Laurel though, but she grudgingly accepted that he was likely to be the only person in the city who does what he does.

We had to keep it private, after all.

You thought that there might be a time to come out about it all

Maybe at mass one day, as a cautionary tale of some sort

But it was far too late now.

Some things are set in motion

And gather enough momentum

You couldn’t stop it if you tried.

Sarah was dead. That’s the first thing Kind had to tell you, and all the years you spent trying not to say her name in front of your father and then Laurel, like her name was the beginning of a satanic spell, well all those years never stopped you from thinking it. But now, you saw her face again. You’d thought you’d forgotten what it looked like, but it came back to you, first vaguely in dreams or suddenly while driving, until it revealed itself entirely in your waking moments. Sometimes you’d be looking at Laurel, and she’d turn her head into a precise angle under a precise light, and Sarah would appear instead. Ashamed, you should be ashamed of yourself. But you aren’t.

“Laurel, dear, Kind is here with some news I think.” The last stair creaked a bit, and so you couldn’t maintain your anonymity any longer.

“What? Now? At this hour?”

“Yes. Do you need to change, or should I let him in?”

“Go ahead. I’m not getting ready for that man.”

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“Right.” Toward the door, and Kind’s shadow cast along the wall in the entrance,

like a mimicry of a character on the cover of a mystery novella. How does he do it? He

really must try. Or it’s just the hat.

“Richard.”

“What took you so long?”

“The stairs are… long.” And he turns to look to the three flights of stairs as

you’re nodding to them.

“So they are. I only ask to make sure she’s not here. Don’t mean to be rude.”

“No it’s fine. Did you expect her to be here?”

“Yes. Well not yet. The boy is outside just in case she comes. She’s not coming

alone, so it all sounds suspicious.”

“Who’s she with?” Laurel wants to take up the interrogation.

“Some boy. I don’t know his name, I can’t remember. It wasn’t important.

Inconsequential really.”

“Black?”

“What?”

“The boy she’s with, is he black?”

“Laurel.”

“What? Stephen, you don’t know the statistics. Have you looked at them? No,

you haven’t. But I know them.”

Laurel knows a lot of things, but she’s never been one to put them back into

context. Just a bunch of numbers hanging in her head—statistics on minorities and

163 crime, murder rates, times too, she’d remind you that anytime after six in the autumn and seven in the summer was when you’d most likely get mugged or attacked or whatever calamity she was picturing in her head.

“No, he’s white, I think?”

“You think?”

“I haven’t seen him, I was only told.”

“Told by who? ‘The boy.’”

She’s answered her own question derisively.

“Yes. Jesus, you’ve got to calm down.”

“Do not take the lords name in vain, sir.”

“One second an’ you’re sick with worry, the next second an’ you’re trying to save my soul? Jesus.”

“I said, don’t take the lords name in vain. You do not get to say the name at all.

People like you, ‘ll empty out the meaning.”

“Alright. Just calm down. We all need to calm down.”

***

Lord, I will always argue against Atheists. People like this man Kind. How could anyone deny the God that gave us the days of the week? Without Sunday, Men would never know the difference between a weekend and a weekday, and they might just go on working everyday of the week and they’d probably die at least two days earlier for every week of every year that they lived. How could they deny a God that let them live longer and allowed them to enjoy all the things they’d work for. How? And who’s at this door,

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like we’re hosting a party. But I know who it is lord. It’s the daughter. And now we’ll

have two people who want to bring hellfire down on us all. Lord, it is not me that invites

these people in. Forgive Stephen for being too weak to say ‘no,’ it is not his fault.

People are born with weakness in their hearts.

***

“I’m here, I said I’d be here and so I’m here. Can I come in?” The girl is demanding things already. We must let her in, who knows what she’ll do if we won’t let her name. It’s only a matter of a false move, and she’ll run to the papers.

“What do you want? Is it money you want? Do you want to take away our livelihood? Do you want to curse us, is that it? Is that what you want” Laurel is saying, aiming a finger at the girl, who’s immediately shrunk into the corner nearest the mantle not expecting the onslaught. This is the first time they’ve actually been under the same

roof together. And Celestine is looking around the room, for something, for something

maybe she could brandish back at the twitching finger or else find cover behind.

“No. I don’t want your money, and I don’t care at all about what you do with your

lives.”

“Liar. You’re a liar. Go back to your quarter. Go back to your friends. They’ll

tell you how precious you really are, but with their fingers crossed behind their back.

Because they don’t care about you, not really. But go back, and pretend they’re all better

people than we are. Go.”

Laurel means to banish Celestine from this house.

Laurel.

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So passionate.

A babbling brook of passion

Bursting out of the ground

Right where no one expects it.

“No. You’re right, I did come here for something.” And we’re all wishing that she’d just say what she wanted and get out, and let us all get on with our lives, but she means to drag it out. And she looks at you and: “Father, you know what I want” she says but you have no idea what she wants. And she’d called you “father” and that was a vicious thing to say, right in front of Laurel. You won’t be able to dam that river of sheer wrath, not with all the brick and concrete and steel in the world. Laurel is shaking, her whole body now, as she let’s down her finger, red, the color of embarrassment but also of anger, the back of her neck has turned red.

“Do not call him your father,” she let’s out finally, before she’s imploded and redecorated the room. Kind is keeping quiet. He’s of no use. You’ve got to calm the storming swell on your own.

“Laurel, its fine, how many people call me ‘father’ on a daily basis, anyways. But you could tell us what you wanted, because I can’t guess it for you.”

“I want that.” She says, and signals toward the mantle above the fireplace. “That is what I want.” And she’s found the very trifle thing that you’ve allowed from your past life—the thing that’s been waiting all this time, on an espresso-colored shelf of wood.

***

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It’s been here all this time. All this time, and you’ve had to think nothing of it.

For all you knew, it came with the house and it was a tacky little thing but you can’t throw out crosses so you never questioned it all the times you’ve had to dust around it.

And lord, she is trying to steal the symbol of your sacrifice from our home. The thief of all thiefs, she wants to take Jesus from our home. My husband is likely to let her have it.

But I know better. I know if she’s allowed this, she’ll come back every day of the week for more, until there’s nothing left in our home but the barren floor and walls. Lord, help us. Help him find his strength. She’s already taken the thing, without permission, and no one is doing a damn thing. And I ask you again, because I feel your eyes on me, lord, but are you watching? Do you see this evil creature doing evil things? Do you see what I have to do?

Dear lord, I ask for your forgiveness for what I am about to do. I must protect my husband, for I am bound to him by the sanc-city of marriage. He believes she can be saved, somehow, and that belief will destroy everything that you, lord, have given us. He is too kindhearted for business like this. But I know these kinds of women. I know what she wants. She means to blackmail us, to take from us all we have for the sake of her rep-ro-brate friends. I know she is the devil in a pretty young woman’s body. I must end her reign over my husband so that he may continue to do your work without the weight of a daughter that should never have been born. Lord, forgive me.

***

Look—the lady prophet is rushing toward the couple with a bible in her hands now. Down the roadway, the longest driveway you’d ever see, and into the private little

167 forest just outside the estate, she stumbles along furiously. She wants to convert them, maybe. You must watch, you must see what is in store, you must listen closely, Richard would say. The lady prophet is distressed, tears are on her face, she is calling out “you witch, you little witch” and there is an air of confusion. You could taste the anxiety retching from her. She is being pulled out of her kingdom of wealth and blessings to say something. She is doing the work of the lord whether she wants to or not, it seems, as now she is opening the bible, still repeating, “you witch, you witch” in all sorts of different tones. What passage will she read from? Will it be used to condemn the

“witch” or will it to be to save her? You cannot guess these things, so you stand apart and watch how it all plays out, Richard would say. This is good. This is something to write down. Take out your pocketbook and write it down, what you see. That is old school. Here is a young man and a young woman, kneeling out around the shards of glass, seeming only wanting to salvage what they can. He is telling her to leave, to just leave it, because it is useless. No, no, she says, her mother would’ve wanted to be buried with it, something inaudible, and she says, “She loved him still.” It is too late for that, the young man is saying, “your mother is buried already, you can’t just dig her up just to bury her again.” It seems almost cold-hearted, but you can’t entirely blame him. Again, he tells her to come on, as the distance between them and their pursuer dissolves. The singsong, “you witch, you witch” is echoing in the slight valley, sometimes drowned out in an ocean of wind that tips just the very tops of the excessively groomed trees. It’s all very poetic. The lady prophet, still with an open bible—a huge bible, the kind you’d find sitting on its own pedestal in the library—barely maintaining her balance, is but ten feet

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away. You can see Celeste clawing around, blind, for all the pieces as she is pulling

away from the young man, refusing to leave. They try to remain protected by a shroud of disregard, but the lady prophet is demanding their attention. She drops the bible on the ground in front of them, as though she means to present it to them. But you’ve never seen two people so afraid of a Bible in your entire life.

***

His wife stands before you. She is on you, the hound of propriety, heterosexuality,

everything that wants to murder you. You can tell she is crazed. She means to complete

the task. She means to tell you how sick you make her, how you’ve no place in this

world, how the devil got to you as a child and malformed you. She will not stop; you

know this. She stands with an army of trees and how like the trees she is. She’s one with

the arborvitae: tall and thin at the top, her dress draped around the trunk, and impossibly

upright as though there were a brace up her back to keep her from bending. You can’t

fight her; she has a militia behind her and they mean to close around you with their

straightened torsos. So you keep trying to round up the shards as quickly as you can.

She’s dropped the Bible, and for a second, you couldn’t understand why. But

then you peer inside and see the innards have been all cut out, jagged edges, with a

kitchen knife. A gun inside a Bible; she’d hid a gun inside a bible. You want to tell her

it is just a trinket, not worth brandishing a gun over, and it would mean more to your dead

mother than it would to her or her husband. It is nothing, really, you want to tell her. But

you see she is beyond sympathy, and any mention of your relation to her husband would

likely force her to the brink. And you’re too scared to speak anyhow. It is as if you are

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dead, without a breath in your lungs, already. You couldn’t even beg for your life. You

couldn’t even say sorry if she demanded it, if she told you it would save you, you still

couldn’t do it.

She calls you “witch” and demands that you look her in the eyes. But you know

that if you do, she’ll have won. What she really demands is to stare into your soul, so

that she may judge if you’ve really got one, somewhere buried beyond your psychosis, so

that she may weigh it against hers. But she won’t recognize it. Your soul is foreign to

her. She’ll see you as a depraved body—all you are to her is an object of sin, born out of

it, and committed to it as a result.

You fear for your life, and then you fear for his. It is hard to know, in a moment

like this, what’s to happen. But you search for clarity, for something; you listen to the wind, you beg that it drowns her out, that it’ll carry her shrill voice on its back and dump it into the sea where it can have no power over the strength of tidal waves and hurricanes and constant movement of one cubic of ocean in one corner of the world to the opposite corner of the world. You picture the sea, how it looked in the eighteenth century, how it seemed the last place on earth where chaos reigned, where you could drop a tall, thin woman like a bundle of stalk, and carry on knowing that she is lost forever and that you are free from her piercing tones. You’d hear “you witch, you witch” for one more moment, before the salt water mobbed her lungs, and as she’d swallow her last words, sinking to the bottom, still refusing to consider, in her head, anything but “you witch, you witch,” by the pressure of a billion tons of ocean as old as time, her spine would bend, finally, and then collapse entirely.

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***

Again, I find myself the negotiator between two parties.

Demons are streaming out of her voice, vying for their chance to speak. A thousand Demons, all with erratic foreign accents, are speaking out of her, the same phrases, over and over, as though they knew no other words in the English language. The more they are said, the less they sound like words. “You witch, yuitch, chuit, tcha-it.”

This is not a moment to bear witness. I am here, and here I am, and there is no place on earth I can picture in my head to escape to. She’s demanding that we look at her. Celeste won’t. She saw the gun and then carried out the business of collecting the shards. It is like she’s lost to a different world, where pieces of glass and plastic jewelry matter more than anything else.

And I don’t know what to do.

But this woman cannot stand to be ignored. Her words are getting shakier, she is gasping for air, her head is trembling—she might be having a seizure.

She’s cocked it.

***

You could hear the click of the gun. It echoed loud enough, or you were listening too closely, that you’d mistaken it for a gunshot for a moment. For a millisecond your heart dropped so far into your stomach you thought it’d plop right out of your back end.

You are worried for Celeste. All the while, the lady prophet’s voice breaks between verses of “you witch” and “look at me.” She means it. You know she means it because

171 she isn’t saying anything else. If she didn’t mean it then she’d be saying something that made sense.

There is something funny in this, something Richard said to you. He told you that you didn’t need to cock your gun, unless you were using an old revolver like they used in westerns. You could just pull the trigger. But the lady Prophet doesn’t know that. She doesn’t need to know that.

He isn’t as edgy as you’d expect. You’d expect someone to run away with a gun pointed at them. And he’s probably never had a gun pointed at him in his entire life.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t run—he’s never lived this experience before. But he’s fixed to the grass. You can see him thinking, breaking his brain just to figure out how everyone is going to get out of this alive. You don’t see how that’s possible. The lady prophet means it.

He’s itching to move in front of Celeste. He wants to die for her. It’s all so poetic.

“Wait.”

The lady prophet didn’t wait.

You expected the sound; you’d heard it before, but the flash—that wasn’t expected. It made you flinch and crunch your eyebrows to your cheek. She’d fired a warning shot. The lady’s gone a bit limp now, you don’t know, she’d probably never fired a gun before, but at least it isn’t pointed at Celeste any more. It was loud as all hell.

You can’t see why you’d ever need a bullet in your gun, just let it make that noise and no one can do a damn thing to you. “Celeste, we should go,” he’s murmuring, moving his

172 hands around the grass as though he’s gone blind. But she’s still busy collecting the shards, except now she’s huddled over them like no one’s allowed to touch them. No one in the universe is allowed to touch her fractural shards of glass. They are hers.

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Chapter 17

Thou shalt not kill. Lord, I’ve only for a moment forgotten your commandment, they were written in stone, but I never saw them in stone, if I had seen them stone they might have etched themselves to my eyelids properly. Lord, I did not mean to kill it; the gun is too sensitive. No one told me how sensitive a gun is. Lord, help me through this, give me the strength, I ask you again, I beg you, I need the strength to get through this.

Tell me what I am to do now. Lord, it came into my home, I know you understand, but will anyone else understand? It was self-defense, is this not self-defense as its defined in the bible? I was protecting my home, and the soul of your prophet, I was defending it, and I know it is not for women to do, but my husband couldn’t be a man about it, so I had to, I had to. You understand, Lord, when it came down to it, I didn’t have a choice, and I swear I felt your angels were guiding me, holding my arm steady, wrapping around my hand. Lord, you gave me the strength to overcome the trial before me, and now I ask you for more strength, for composure, Lord, I must have composure, for my husband and for all. Grace and poise, like a woman should have, grace and poise, dear lord. Give me grace and poise, lord, grace and poise. Grant me grace and poise, grace and poise, grace and poise, straighten my back, grace and poise, grace and poise.

***

The Prophet is tripping down the driveway now, with another man in his tow. It took you a second, but you’re certain now that it’s Richard Kind. They’re at the lawn and, “Jesus, Laurel, what have you done,” says the prophet to his wife, and not a word comes out of her. She’s mute entirely, as if she’d said all the things she ever wanted to

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say in her life. The erratic shudders of her body inch up her neck, like she’s treading in

the icy blue of the artic until it pours into her gaping mouth and down into her throat.

She can’t speak because she’s bobbing up and down in the cold mercurial tides of guilt

and anger or shock and insanity, a kind of systole and diastole with each gasp. The prophet wraps her up, a life jacket of a man, to keep her afloat, to hold her, to tell her that’s she fine, she’s really fine, Kind will take care of it, he knows what to do, all the while his wife remains inflexible, frozen solid, except for the trembles of her skeleton.

“See, you’ll be alright. There’s no reason to fret, really. What was she doing?

She committed larceny, one. She dropped the item, two. She was facing you, maybe

ready to charge at you, three. An’ see, look, if she had dropped it maybe five or six feet away, then she wouldn’t have been on your property, and they might call it manslaughter, but you see, you are well within your rights. I ask, Laurel, was the gun purchased

legally?” Richard is already busy making his visual assessment of the situation, sizing up

Celeste’s body even as the boy kneels over her.

But there’s no answer from Laurel. “Give her a shake, she’s in shock, just give her a shake an’ bring her to her senses,” Richard suggests. “Stephen!” He’s having to

shout cause’ the prophet isn’t listening. “Give her a shake, an’ ask her if she bought the

gun legally.”

“Yes, yes from a store, yes.” The Prophet’s wife says her first words.

“Alright, good, you are well within your rights, nothing to worry about. I will act

as witness through the process, not to worry. It’s really cut an’ dry.” Richard taps the boy on his back, “Boy, what is your name?” And there’s no answer. “It’s no matter,”

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Richard continues officiously, “You’ll get a few years for aiding and abetting. Be smart,

an’ don’t try to run as we contact the police, we’ve all seen you, an’ they’ll find you in

good time, an’ they’ll just slap a few more years on you for fleeing the scene.”

***

And even now, I feel you lurking in the depths of my consciousness, perhaps

asking me to pray, beg, confess. But I must keep some things sacred, and so I banish

you.

***

Richard has straightened out his back, and lifted up his chest. He lives for this

sort of thing, but the word that you can’t remember is back, as Richard, in his cheap

windbreaker from the nineties, as he is sizing up measurements with his feet, counting the

distance between Celeste and the edge of the yard, and then between Celeste and the

prophets wife, counting on his fingers, with a fresh corpse and a boy in mourning

entombed in a single moment, entombed because Celeste is dead, and that is for certain

and there’s no way around that, but Richard finds a way around it, with weights and

measures and the area of a circle is equal to pi R squared or whatever the hell he’s doing

and the whole thing is just, it’s just—

“Riley James,” he’s shouting blindly, turning on an axis, “Riley Lucius James,” and now he means it cause’ he’s said your middle name like a Father to his son, and so you’ve got to come out now.

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“I’m here,” you call out, only now realizing how near to all the action you really

were. Waddling down the hill out of an enclave of shrubs and trees, you must look like

an idiot.

“Good boy. I thought you’d be close. Did you see everything?”

“Yes, everything,” you tell him. The prophet’s wife is still holding the gun, that serious thing, and she’d eyed you a moment as the Prophet whispered something into her ear.

“Don’t you worry, Ma’am, he’s on your side,” says Richard, perhaps noticing the rise in tension by your approach. And she still clinging to the gun; no one thought to take the gun from the madwoman. No one seems to notice that she’d gone insane cause’, as

Richard said, she was well within her rights. It’s clear as day to you that she’s mad. But you don’t get to decide who’s mad.

Still, “Shouldn’t we take the gun from her?” you’ve got to ask, whispering to

Richard so that the Prophet’s wife might not hear that you mean to take her weapon.

“No. It’s hers and legally purchased, haven’t you been listening? What do I pay you for?” But Richard hasn’t paid you yet so you couldn’t answer the question.

“Deal with him,” Richard wants you to do something about the boy, whose knees are rooted into the mud near Celeste. He’s taken to rubbing her back as if he could comfort her even after death.

“How?”

“Just keep him from moving the girl.”

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“Celeste. Celestine.” She’s right there, the least Richard could do was call her by

her name.

“Don’t correct me. Make sure he doesn’t move the body, at all. It’s evidence

now. It belongs to the state, you understand?” And he’s looking at you, probing you for

ignorance or idiocy, just waiting for you to tell him that you don’t get it.

“No, I don’t understand. This isn’t what I was hired to do.”

“You stupid boy. You think I hired you for your talent? I hired you for the dirty stuff. So you could go into your part of town and do the digging. Earn your salary for once, do what I say.” He turns to his notepad. So it’s like that. Richard is only being upfront about what you knew already, but that you’d buried somewhere to let it fester in

the back of your head, but now it’s torn open, an open wound in the back of your left

hemisphere, bleeding out to all areas of the skull, and it boils because for the first time in

your happy little life of grave digging, hiding thoughts you didn’t want to think about in

compartments like miniature caskets the size of germs, for the first time you can’t help

but be sick with the purest sort of fury. You could only repress what you knew only as

long as no one had the audacity to point it out in words. And now, Richard Kind has

kindly put it into words.

Richard hired you for two things, two defining characteristics—Richard hired you

for no other reasons than that you are clean and that you are black.

“Such a trivial thing. Any idea why she wanted it?” Richard is asking Stephen.

“No. I have no idea.”

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“Hmm, it seems strange to come all this way for something you could pick up at

thrift store. I guess it doesn’t really matter; maybe she was just testing the limits to see

what—“

“Absurd! It’s Absurd!” Absurd: the word finally burst out of a subconscious

where it had been resting all day, it burst through with such drive that it dashed out of

your mouth before you could catch it, it sprung out into a universe that’s heard it a

million million times in the very same intonation. Richard turned his neck, and he had to look up from his notepad after his sentence trailed off and under you shouts.

“Absurd? You don’t know the meaning. What are you getting at? I’ll tell what’s

absurd, boy, that you should have job at all. You do what I tell you, or I’ll implicate you,

an’ trust me, it won’t be hard.” You and Richard both know that you won’t have a job

tomorrow.

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Chapter 18

Today’s been a long day a doggone, long day, a dog day. Twice you’ve had to

deal with the riffraff, on a Sunday, a s-u-n-d-a-y, does it mean nothing to them can’t they take a day off why is it your problem why do you have to tell people the laws of the land let them deal with criminals how they see fit throw them off the edges of cliffs shoot them in the face for all you care you don’t care but then no there’d be endless piles of paperwork, endless piles for a citizen’s arrest what would be the grand total of a few vigilantes you can’t imagine so suppose this is better and be thankful but you find it hard to be thankful cause’ doggone you were giving her the sort of sex that would make a woman think twice about divorce the sort of lovemaking that would make her run to her lover and tell him just how useless he was to her now that her husband her showed up again breaking down doors back in the saddle so to speak the sort that would make her tell her friends how sorely satisfied she was now why do they refuse to leave on the lights outside if they’re going to be running the generator for the blasted fluorescents hate those

damn fluorescents they make you look twenty years older but really they make you look

exactly your age its just gentler light makes you look twenty years younger if the world

were still lit by natural light and flame then you’d still be in your prime you’ve never

understood the meaning of ‘prime’ the prime of your life is supposed to be what late

twenties but what do you have in your late twenties but a mountain of debt that follows

behind you in a radio flyer creaking, creaking here I am did you remember to pay today

but you probably remembered you just didn’t do it cause’ you pulled out your bank

statements and said you’d like to eat today what do you have in your twenties but sex

180 with shallow women who are only hoping you make something of yourself so they can stay at home obstinate women telling you they only want to be mothers that was there dream their entire lives and you’re supposed to be the man and let them have their dream and what do you get well you can’t even tell them what your dream is if you’ve got one cause’ every dream any man ever had pales in comparison to the woman’s dream of motherhood well maybe you don’t want to be a man you want to grow a pair of breasts and doctor pull out the scalpel today you’ll be giving him breasts and then you can stay at home and no one can say a damn thing about it but you think there’s probably more to women then a pair of breasts probably chemical stuff you couldn’t work out in your head if you wanted to your car smells of piss you really need to tell the drunks they can find their own way to the station drag them by a leash if you have to why do they bar you from doing things like that you always believed that if a citizen breaks the law then he is no longer a citizen we need to start thinking like that or we will be overrun and they need to stop giving psych evals every full moon like the freaks come out with the waxing waning you forget but it hardly matters let men do their jobs and everything will be fine who are they trying to impress are they trying to tell all the criminals treading water in the cesspool of quarters three and four are they trying to tell them that we are sympathetic and no we won’t shoot them well then they’ll think they can get away with just about anything psychologists are here to make us look weak and that’s why they always send in the women and effeminates and you aren’t allowed to call them homosexuals to their face cause’ they’d probably suspend you but you do it in your head to their face and you have

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victory in the end especially when they’re stamping that sheet telling me I’ve passed with

flying colors and even then I’m still calling them homosexual.

“In here?” and Jon is nodding to you, so in you go to meet the face of evil or whatever and it’s a boy, in his twenties, eyes red of course, he got caught doing what was it Jesus trying to loot the Prophet’s house Jesus the balls on this one and what else a girl had been killed and her identification and you’ll be damned if it isn’t the best picture you’ve ever seen on a license she’s got eyes you’d like to plunge into and the lips too but you’d never get the chance cause’ she’s dead cause’ a fool of a boy got her to go in to do his dirty work a foul creature like the devil who gets pretty young things to do what he can’t do on his own “name and birthdate” but you don’t need either just to much effort to read all the particulars cause you’ve already sized it all up the entire situation he’d gotten a pretty girl to break into the prophet’s house and both of them were surprised to learn that they kept a gun like good citizens and of course someone died that’s always par for the course but did it have to be the girl but yes of course it had to be the girl cause’ if it had been him than he wouldn’t have to suffer the way he’s about to and there’d be no sense of justice and people love themselves some justice you’ve no idea what you’re in for probably expecting some time and then you’ll walk one day and it’ll be done with but you’ve gotten a pretty girl killed and they’ll plaster her face anywhere they can and then they’ll put your mug shot, they’ll pick the worst one too, and they’ll put it right next to this pretty young girl and no one will ever forgive you for getting a pretty young girl killed you’re in for it.

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We’ve got a mute he isn’t saying a word maybe he’s too proud to say a word maybe he’s an immigrant and doesn’t know a word in the English language how do we let these people into our country without knowing a word what is the point of being here if you aren’t going to learn the language like Mrs. Pascal or whatever her name is the neighbor’s housekeeper a cliché of an immigrant not knowing a word in English at least not being able to speak in English she can nod her head one way or the other so she understands directions well enough like a damned dog she takes orders well enough but if you ever wanted to have a conversation with her you couldn’t cause’ Mrs. Pascal doesn’t know how to speak English maybe her tongue doesn’t know how to shape itself to the words of English maybe it takes a considerable amount of tongue flexibility and Mrs.

Pascal doesn’t have the tongue for English but it doesn’t matter, it’s no matter cause’ we know the mute is not an immigrant he’s got state issued identification so he probably knows the English language he’s just pretending to not understand it because he’s guilty people tend to forget what words mean when they’re faced with guilt he’s going to end up with five years maybe unless he comes from a respectable family and can get himself a good lawyer and maybe then he’ll walk but the girl is dead, the girl he was with is dead dead and he’s gotta to feel that weigh on him especially when she’s pretty a girl like that he’d sent her to her death and you can never guess for what but the prophet and his wife live in a sort of mansion it’s really not so much a mansion but its large enough to make it seem worth looting but she’d only taken a single item we’ve got all the pieces of it in a little plastic baggie so whatever she died for will never see the light of day again it’s really just a few handfuls of glass and that bastard Kind wants to be a witness and you’re

183 tired of hearing all the things Kind has witnessed and why does he get to spend all day plucking cats from trees trailing, following pretty girls so their fathers can know what they do all day why does he get paid to tell women that their husbands are out drinking or with another woman and then he gets to reap the benefits meanwhile it’s my job to deal with the trash and there are no rewards in dealing with the trash except for a few interesting stories sometimes the stories were good and you’d have to consider writing a book about it and that’s maybe what you’ll do when you retire write a book and let slip all the dirty little secrets of the rich people of this town that never made it into newspapers rich kids and cocaine and alcohol taking out street signs the occasional dog sometimes a bum sleeping on the sidewalk overturned luxury vehicles and what a waste of a car to hand the keys to your spoiled kid and let him turn it over and Jesus Christ this boy is mute really not saying a word you’d forget he were here staring into the abyss in the floor piercing green eyes or are they blue it says blue on his identification but they seem pretty green to you but maybe you’ve gone color blind maybe all the flashes in the shooting range has made you color blind Celeste was her name, the girl that died maybe say her name and see how he reacts, “Celeste” but there’s nothing not even a flinch at the name maybe he never knew her name but no Kind says they know each other absolutely and he was next to tears kneeling over her so he obviously knew her and maybe you need to prod him more because it is really too late to be doing this now you couldn’t understand why it couldn’t wait till morning but some things take precedence and when a girl is killed on the prophet’s lawn you gotta get to the bottom of it and close the case and yadda yadda yadda and you gotta do that all before it makes it to the news so “Celeste

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probably wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for you. I don’t know if you made her go in, or if

she went in on her own accord, but either way you could’ve stopped her and you

wouldn’t be in this mess” and now you’ve got him, he’s finally looking at you with his

green-blue eyes and he’s going to say something, see his tongue working, his brain

sending instructions to his jowls as they protrude in and out of his cheeks he’s chewing on himself but still there’s nothing and now you’re staring him back trying not to blink but he’s got a light on his side, a little bulb we’ve never covered back up after we

replaced it and its streaming into your eyeballs and Jesus Christ boy, you win, I can’t

compete with a stare like that, but really, what does it accomplish so you’ve defeated me

with a stare but you’ll be crushed with the law, we’ll throw the book at you, and you’ll be

buried underneath the verdict.

These people and their secrets thinking that there is anything special in their

secrets as if you’d never heard the same old thing a million times no one has anything

special and they act like their secrets are worth holding on to and you tried to tell them

there’s nothing significant about their secrets we’ve all got things we think make us

different from everybody else but really we are all the same you’ve got your own secrets

of course women like notches on your belt now in your old age you’ve let yourself go

and you’re down to the last notch and the last notch is the same as the first notch you’re

back trying to convince yourself you still love that first notch but maybe she doesn’t love

you cause’ you’re on to your next notch the shallow woman cause’ women only get more shallow as they get on in age its really true they lose all depth as they get older or at least they start to be more honest about all the shallow things they want jewelry clothes sex

185 shoes clean houses guard dogs all the things she wants from you and now you want to know why do you feel such hatred for this boy you don’t know him and maybe its cause’ of the blood on his hands it’s his damned fault a pretty girl like that is dead and if she wasn’t dead you’d be allowed to take her statement and she was pretty even with all the blood on her face she still had light in her bright blue eyes you could see it even in the night that’s how pretty and young she was, even death and even night couldn’t hide the fact that she was beautiful and its his damned fault she’s dead and whatever secret he’s hiding, well that’s probably what killed her so you don’t care if you have to bash his head to get to the secret cause’ you have to find out why a pretty little thing like that had to die, and to die for him, this little prick, she died for him and it seems so pointless cause’ he’s a pointless human begin every breath he takes is air he’s stealing from the rest of us and that’s not justice why does god let people like this into our world people who can’t take responsibility and get pretty young girls killed because they’ve got no sense of responsibility you think they call it affluenza some psychological disorder of rich kids who get high and drunk and drive their parents’ trucks into a stalled car in the road in broad daylight and kill the passerbys like a woman and her child who only stopped to help the folks in their broken-down sedan and the rich kids never feel remorse because they never had to face responsibility in their entire live yes affluenza is a psychological disorder you could get behind but is that why you hate this boy so much because you really don’t know a damn thing about him no you hate him because he got a girl killed, yes, but also because your wife is going to leave you because of him you promised her that you wouldn’t work so hard that you’d come home and spend more time with her and

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not an hour later they called you in for this and so it’s his fault if Sam leaves you, it’s his

damn fault, and look at all these things he’s caused, a dead girl, the catatonic state of the

Prophet’s own wife, and now your own wife is going to pack her bags for good this time, a boy like this that can just ruin women for the rest of us like the pricks at school who

claim all the pretty girls for themselves, making promises that the rest of men have to

keep for them cause’ of course they aren’t gonna keep them so for all the sins of

prettyboys I will wreak vengeance on your soul, you will pay for all of it, with interest if

I’ve got to pay seventeen point eight percent then you will too back to the cell with you

let’s see how long before you’ve dirtied your face; let’s see how long before you’re

broken and shriveled up; let’s see how long it takes for you to chew through your own

teeth.

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Chapter 19

I call you back for the moment. I cannot communicate in the language of police

officers, so I call you back to me. I ask you, what’s in a day? After all, I try to imagine

the whole order of labyrinths that might have led me down a different road at a different

time. I suppose, that is what we all end up doing. You have to think about all the things

that had to go just a certain, specific way for things to have worked out the way they did.

You might stop too early, and say it must’ve been fate. It must’ve been fate that I woke

too late this morning, and from there, it was out of my hands. I want to believe that, in

some sense, the events of today that I am bound to seem just that. But then, I shake that

feeling off, and let it trickle down my fingertips, down through the linoleum, into the

concrete underneath, past the electrical wires I cannot fathom, into the earth. That is

where ideas of fate belongs, dead in the earth, dead as the night when all the city sleeps,

because tomorrow they all go off to work or school or to the museums or perhaps, they

won’t wake up at all, and then fate should be as dead as those who won’t wake up

tomorrow. Because what I know is this: we invented fate. We engineered it, and I don’t

know if the Greeks are to blame, and if only Oedipus hadn’t solved the sphinx’s riddle,

then he wouldn’t be eternally the butt of a perverted joke, I don’t know where it all

started but it wasn’t born with humankind, it came to be when we learned the power of

hindsight. That awful power that threatens to erase Shakespeare, that threatens to destroy us all as it comes in like the Flood when God looked at human history and realized it was a worthless history. Still, at the end of it all, we’ve woven all our triumphs together into the most intricate web. But we are not the spiders, we are the flies caught in the sticky

188 bonds. And we give in to the thought that we’ll never have the strength to escape it, we roll over and wait for a fate with eight legs to bleed us dry.

But maybe you pretend you’ve broken free. You’ve shaken off the bonds.

You’ve escaped and then you might give in to the thought that you’ve your own free will.

But what can you do with freedom? You only escape the web of fate and land in the impossible labyrinth of choice. The forking paths are like a stream of mad thought. You can never know, no one can ever know, what drove you to point B from point A, not really. Sure, you can work backwards a little while, but as you go further, you find it has all become quite faded, distorted even. Unless there were some creature capable of keeping track, or a machine in a warehouse somewhere negotiating the language of consciousness unto paper, translating the masses of webs tangled in your head, sifting through them for that one, prominent narrative that makes some coherent sense, unless all that, it is lost. But, maybe, it is all about momentum. Which direction you go, tends to be the one you are already heading. Not fate. Momentum. When you’re lost in thought, how do you pull yourself back into reality? You simply fall back onto the rails. And just like in a day, where different decisions would have altered it entirely, how conscious are you really, in that moment you are making the decision? Probably, not at all, and so what drives you toward an ineluctable, towards a conclusion that plays itself out and then suddenly makes all the sense in the world? Is it all the mechanisms of society? Yes that, and a thousand other things, in a few words, it is the momentum of all of history that drives you.

189

But now that you’ve stopped moving, you have to consider all the things that are and all the things that shouldn’t be. If they were all as they should be, then surely I’d be dead. If someone were to die, why couldn’t it be the man with no real story or pain or anything? Why can’t I take the place of the dead girl? Then, I might have something.

But romantic notions will not save me. I had dreamed of being confined to the madhouse, all in a straightjacket, the thing that keeps my body from being free while my mind travels the world, over oceans and continents, slipping through the cracks in windowsills, pillaging bedrooms for secrets, and on to the next one it goes. Who knows where the madman goes? And who can keep him from going? No, you must pretend you have him, that you can protect the world from him, because he is infectious, and to see him raving on the street about all the things he’s seen, all the prophecies of deliverance, well you’d never shake that. You might not remember what he said, not by his words at least, but you’ll know what he meant. “I am you.” And he’s become you. Now you’re the lunatic barking in the night at stray passerbys. And they’ll take away your hands, compress them to your torso, but no, that won’t stop you. You’re freer with a straightjacket than you’ve ever been. You’ve shed your body, and now you float in with the candescence—the moon, bulbous eyes of strangers, the strays of light that flutter when the trees turn on the very men who’ve planted them.

That prospect of freedom was the only one I could ever have hoped for. But a cold cell in a prison? That’s far too rational: cold and rational. The holding cell is cold.

It is also sterile, and for that, I am thankful. I try not to imagine the vagrants held here

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before me, the drunks puking until they’ve reached sobriety in the exact place I’d have to

rest my head tonight.

“You got a cigarette on you?” A shadow hobbles to the barrier of bars that separate us, dragging behind him a dead leg he’d had to pick up with both hands lest his leading leg strove too far ahead. The proximity reveals a red, sun-stained face, speckled

brown spots on chapped-red skin, lips made entirely of dander, and a wide gap where two

front teeth should be that I barely make out between his swollen lips. “Hey, I asked if

you got a cigarette on you,” he repeats himself, as I study him. “Well, do you?” I give

him a look that’s meant to ask, ‘what the fuck do you think?’

“Of course you don’t. They take it away from you, huh? Bastards. Fascists.”

I turn to the wall, pretending there’s a window or some other portal to the outside.

There’s nothing. Just wide grey slabs and the stucco between them. I have the urge to

scratch out the stucco, to feel the rubbery stuff under my nails. Only twenty years of

scraping and the wall might topple, longer if I don’t take my biotin vitamins; would they

allow that? No, of course not. I’d have to go au naturel.

“Ey, brother, you alright? You can’t let them break ya, ya know?” Break me?

This isn’t the revolution; I’m not a political prisoner. They have no intention of

‘breaking me.’ They couldn’t care less what I do. As long as someone gets the sharp

head of justice, metaphorically speaking of course and unfortunately, as long as they have

someone to ease the need to activate that particular faculty, to validate their laws and

sentences, to show the usefulness and necessity of such things, to show the battle for right

and wrong still wages on, as long as they have all that, what do they care about me?

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“Man, you in there?” I turn to him. He’s reached out his pale hand through the

grates. I want to snap it off for penetrating into my space. But instead, unconsciously,

my hand goes out. I can’t ever break that habit. A hand goes out, and so I must meet it.

“There ya go. I’m John. Do you know what the means?” He’s put his free hand

over my wrist as if he means to pull me closer, talk privately and affably, but he’s too

weak and I easily maintain my stance, even if I can’t break out from his dual-grip. I

decide to answer with a silent mouthing of the word ‘no’ and a shake of my head.

“It means, brother, that I can bless people. My name is John, ya see.” It is hard

for me to even force a smile, but I make the attempt anyhow. He doesn’t seem in his

right mind; I’d rather avoid offending him.

“Do you believe in God?” He asks.

I suppose that is an easier question to answer than the usual ‘Are you a

Christian?’ but it is still one that I don’t know. I shrug, tilting my head toward my

shoulder.

“Well, I can wachawayyerallyersinsanyacanbereefromem.” He’s lost me a bit as

his speech undulates high and low, with no relationship to any words I know. And his

hair, his wild gray hair, styled by months of sweat and dirt—his medusa hair is

distracting.

“I baptized Jesus.” Now, that, I heard clearly.

John; so you’re John the Baptist. You’re that John.

“Ya see, God gavemepowers only I have, t-bear witness to tha light so through me everyone believes.” I’m looking to him trying to put the words in a rational frame of

192 reference. Can he believe he’s that John? Is there that much power in a name, that by a name and name only, a person would be born into a history of his own and would know his own purpose without questioning it? No. That’s nonsense. This man is speaking nonsense, and it’s pouring out of him like the sweat from his palms over and under my hand.

He’s clung to me for dear life, as if letting go means one of us falls into the pit.

“Do ya believe me?” He waits for an answer, but only for a second, breaths heavily, “I know, cause’ Imma drunk, right? I’m crying out in tha wilderness and no ones hearing me, so I drink. No one would notice a holy person if they saw one, they’d just call him crazy. They’d make em drink. That’s me.” That all made more sense than anything else he’d said.

“But ya see, and I know this, Jesus is coming. He’s coming to save all of us, to take us to heaven. We only hafta suffer a little longer and then we free.” He grins and reveals the darkness where his two front teeth should be.

“When?” I finally spoke.

“When what?”

“When is he coming? Do you have a date?” His grip tightens.

“No, no bassoon.”

“Soon? By whose standards?” He doesn’t seem to understand the question.

“How much longer are we going to wait? Two more years? Ten more years? A hundred?

A thousand?” I’ve given up trying to pull away and am now leaning into the longest shake the world has ever known.

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“It don’t matter. He be here, and if you die before then, he save you too. And he come and save only those worth saving, and the others, they see they weren’t worthy. Ya know even now, people are starting to get theirs. Things are changing. Jesus is always with us, but he take to his self soon and he strike awe into unbelievers.”

And that’s it, that’s the problem with all of this. It’s not that it’s coming; it’s that we assume it’s already here, revealing itself by an ambiguous justice that only the chosen can understand. All the promises we cling to are fulfilled under a haze. Jesus too, he will come, but we’ll tell him that he was already here, all this time, handing out blessings and carrying out that justice, and we don’t need another Jesus. We’ve got an entire hall of them. What’s this imposter got to offer? And his messenger? What’s he got to tell us that hasn’t already been said?

“Ya see, all you got is to let me wash clean yer sins and accept im into your heart.

And yer saved.”

“They’re going to behead you, you know? Or did you not read that far? They’re going to cut off your head and serve it on a platter and then when they’ve grown bored looking at it like it’s a commodity, a piece of grotesque art, when they’re done with that, they’re going to bury it in a pile of shit. You’re that John.” He expels my hand out of his grip. I’d done it. For the first time in my life, I’d said something that repulsed someone.

For the first time in my life, I said something the way I’d have thought it. He backs up, the geological embossed topography of a face folds over itself. He’s afraid of me.

“Man, ya need to get yaself a drink. Or a cigarette. Or both.”

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“What about Jesus? Ya got any of that?” I put both hands on the grey brick wall.

It’s cool. My hands are warm; I must be feverish. I press my forehead to it.

“Brother, what ya do? What ya here for?” I’ve fallen into a dead, cold, permanent sort of silence, the kind that should speak spades of what sort of evil bastard I am. I become one with the dead, cold, perpetual silence of the universe I’ve been treading against all my life, splashing around like a spastic, trying to keep my head above it because if I ever did slip into it then I’d know that it wasn’t that I feared it, no, it was never that, it was that I’d recognized it. The dead and cold and endless silence is the atomic stuff of man and earth and space and time and air, it is in the air too, and see I am breathing it now, I am breathing in the void. I become that void.

“Ey! Snap out of it man. You’ve not been here a day, and yer already losing it.”

“And so what if I am.” I said it viciously, with vicious intent, a bark before the bite; fair warning before I tear him to bits.

“Relax. Tell me what yer here for. It help man.”

“I’m…here—“ I try to recall, but “I don’t know.”

“Oh, wrong place, wrong time, sort of thing?”

“I guess I’m here because I saw…” That’s all. ‘I saw.’ I had seen.

It hits me.

I’d been a witness my entire life, a silent observer, a passive voyeur and it had finally caught up to me. That’s why I’m here. ‘I saw.’

“Well see, it can’t be all that bad. A boy like you, ya’d make bail in a beat.”

“Someone’s dead.”

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Celeste is dead

I might have forgotten if I hadn’t said it. It felt distant, a year ago, or like a fetal

memory. It seemed vague and ambiguous, like the dark matter of space you could only

feel weighing and pulling on you and objects around you, but could never see clearly.

“Oh. I’m sorry. A friend?” A friend? I don’t know if she’s that. I’d only known

her less than a day, but then again, I was there at her death. Friends should surround a

person at death. So yes, for her sake then, I am her friend.

“Yes. A girl.”

“Pretty?”

“Huh?”

“Sorry, I’m not a perv. It’s important to remember those ya lost or they might slip

out of ya forever.”

I picture Celeste, rather, I picture her eyes boring through my own. They’re too

bright to look at. You’d burn up trying to look at them.

“Ya gotta pray for her. It helps. She gonna rest in peace, ya know?”

“Not under your judgment. She’s barred from your heaven.” I’d only just

realized it, picturing how divergent she seemed. Surely, no Christian heaven would take

her, and now I knew the most obvious of a long list of reasons why.

“What dya mean?”

“She’s a homosexual.” I say it slow as if I’d only just learned the word. I say it slow, so he can hear the scratch of every syllable to see how much it grates him.

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“Oh. Well, pray she recognizes—“ He stops as I turn to him, daring him to finish

his sentence. “Sorry, brother, I gotta say it, pray that she ask for forgiveness from her sins. It will be given ta her if she asks. God is fair.”

“I suppose he is, John.” I throw out my hand through the barrier, open. I offer the shake this time. He is taken aback, but only for a second.

“Yes, there ya go.” He takes the bid. And I grip until the brittle bones of a lifelong alcoholic crack and he yells to God and then to Men and then to me, all for mercy. I give it to him because I am more merciful than God or Men.

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Chapter 20

The more I think about it, the more I realize that they’re right. I killed her. I did it. Now, all is left is for me to come around to a confession, in words, that makes sense to me. How did I do it? Must I say so in words, or couldn’t I hang myself and let suicide address my guilt for me? But no, I have known this voice. It pours in with sardonic cadences. It tells me that I am evil—that evil things will be done by my hands. That all the evil committed by my hands will be done without my consent. It tells me that evil is done whether or not I’ve acceded to it. All the Evil I will commit will be done unconsciously without regard for my intentions. It is inescapable, this evil I’ll do. And people will suffer. I will suffer. It tells me that these things that I will do have already commenced, by my birth, by my first words, and they will continue to work their mischief after my last words, after my death. There is no such thing as freedom, it says, because whatever I do will be done in the name of Evil.

And then, when it has finished breaking my will, telling me that I have no will of my own, it beckons me to end it all—to sever myself from consciousness consciously so that I do not have to be an observer as all the evil I’ve done floods over the earth, into homes, into hearts and minds. This voice tells me that it is the only decision that is left to be made. It is the only decision that I’ll ever make.

But, no, I am an agnostic. I sit on the fence; I sway on the precipice. I do not know what evil is. I do not know that there is such a thing. I do not know if suicide is meaningful. I do not know if anything at all is meaningful. Existentialism tells me that meaning cannot come from the world. But then again, I don’t know about existentialism.

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When all the philosophy in the world, and grandiosities and nihilisms seep into the

collective unconscious, when all the ideas become stunted or aborted before ever coming

to fruition or mature far too quickly, like an infant mind in an aged man’s body, when all

this amalgamates in a toxic sort of fusion, we bear our dissociative stance like a shield or a sword, conflating all the bad things done in the name of ideas or otherwise into the same degree of evil banality. That’s what is demanded of us at the end of histories, to say: “oh my, today is terrible, I’ve lost five dollars out of my pocket” and in the same breath say “and there’s genocide in Africa.” We are all guilty of the conflation of evil things.

And maybe I am guilty of innocence. Maybe I am guilty of believing I should side-step sin, all the sins of man, by giving no credence to the idea of sin or evil. Men are not evil on their own accord, I thought, men are merely enervated by awful histories, or by boring ones, and through their limbs, evil is enacted. But it is done unconsciously, so that no man means to sin, it only promulgates out of their mouths or streams from their fingers. And if one were to try and avoid committing wrongdoings, they would have to give in to the ideas of right and wrong, and then morality itself would be the foci of evil.

Know this: the universe is mute and cold and dead silent, but we are proud creatures and so we must speak for it, or maybe it speaks in a language we can’t understand, but we pretend to interpret it anyhow. But I’d committed the same sin, but not of the universe, no, I never tried to speak for the universe—I wanted to translate for people the stories they didn’t know how to tell or else didn’t want known. I wanted to take unto me their stories and their burdens.

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What lurks inside me is an awareness that I want to contain, but in the end, will

overcome every fiber of my being. The teeming masses crawling under my skin, wanting

to make their way to my ears as to whisper onto me a whole flood of secret histories and

forbidden futures so that I may translate for them. But before I can, they burst through

me, rupture out my limbs, my mouth, my eye sockets, and I am devoured, into heaping

scraps of bones and flesh and teeth as they scatter for new hosts.

They’ve killed me, and I deserve it—for not telling their stories, for not letting them out when they asked, for burying them deep within my body so to keep them mine.

I’ve hoarded them for far too long, stealing them away, larvae in my marrow, in my heart and stomach and brain, until they fledged like maggots, hungry for new flesh. Return to me, I want to call out, make me whole again, but I have no mouth to speak, and they do not understand this language anyhow. The creatures who live in my marrow have abandoned me and I am alone for the first time in my life, there is nothing on my back, no sense of lead in my bones to slow me down, to stop me.

And from the state of inertia I’d settled into by a birth without recourse, and with all the energy waiting in the wings—because energy cannot be erased after all, it is always there—from that, into momentum. Forward momentum into a brick wall built twenty-five years ago, and you’ll see, I’ll break through it yet, you may call it indestructible, but I’ll show you. I’ll burst through, and out with a mess of particles all around, even if bone and brain matter interspersed with the cement and sand and soil and lime and whatever they’ve mixed to build up these walls. You can’t stop me. Listen— here—John the drunkard Baptist in the cell over, he’s crying out to me, telling me I must

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stop or there’ll be nothing left, and I have to agree with him. Yes, there’ll be nothing left

to tell me apart from cold, artificially manufactured stone. He’s begging, I can hear him

retching, and now the guards are rushing to unlock my cell, but no they won’t get to me,

not till I’ve finished, I’ve too much momentum now, and I’ll drive through it. You won’t

get to me. I can taste blood and it’s telling me that I’m on the right course. It’s drenched my hair, poured over my eyes. They’re telling me I’ve got to stop, but I’m not going to.

I’ve already told you, I can’t stop. You won’t get to me. You won’t keep me from doing

the only thing I’ve any right to do. Again, towards the wall, I know that this is the last

burst till it crumbles, till I’ve laid waste to prison walls, I don’t need open doors to dictate

where I can and cannot go, and with every bit of force in me, I’ll break it down, I’ll make

my own door by sheer acceleration and velocity. I am the maker of doors, of portals, I go where no one else could, between dividing lines, I’ll blow out the geometry of the universe. I am the wrath of God, I am Shiva, I am the last man in the last world, because

I’ve swallowed it whole. The universe is in my belly. I am chaos.

“He’s innocent, tell him we know he’s innocent, tell him we know it’s not his fault,” someone is shouting. Riley’s shouts, truncated and exposed as officers of the law pour in from the door to the hall of holding cells, Riley’s shouts are a waste of breath, like the last words in a vacuum. Riley means to save me. But no, I am not innocent. I am the murderer of all murderers, what can you say is innocent about that? No you won’t take me with your ideas of innocence, all drawn up on a sheet of paper that says “guilty or innocent (circle one).” You’ll never convince me I am innocent. You mean to take away my guilt, the only thing in the world that’s mine. I’ve done it, don’t you

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understand? I’ve amassed the debt of a million billion tiny little evils, and they’re mine,

here, look, in my belly. I’ll pull out the proof my guilt if you only let me break through.

Please, I beg, if you take this from me, I will never be complete. My life will end with an

ellipsis. I won’t bear it, please, I beg you.

“What the hell is he talking about?” I’ll tell you, if you’d only let me finish.

Please, sirs and madam let me finish.

“No, he needs treatment. He needs to be instituted, I think.” I’ve done it; I’ve broken free. Yes, I am mad, yes, I have made it. They said it. They’ve deemed me worthy. I am free. I can go. Look… I am free now. And now, I see me as you see me.

Now I know what it’s like to look down on men, on a city of men and women and children, on a world of men and woman and children. I know what its like to watch them live and die, and I understand the true meaning of apathy. From the vantage of God, from the vantage of the overhead voyeur, all the moving, shaking, mechanical whirring, undulating expanses of human civilization, it is all too much, too dense, a sensory overload, lobotomize yourself and leave it to the kleptocrats. Eek out that bit of brain that strains you with human empathy, pull it out through your nostrils and spill it on the ground. And this wretched creature, dragged along by two officers of rational law, this poor, young hunchback, the universe must’ve rested on his back his whole life. Yes, we must feel pity for him for he’s been burdened by the sheer density of the world, under a globe that only is made heavier with each passing year. Yes, we see him now, and we could condemn him by his guilt, but why not absolve him while we’re here? Why not consider all the things he’s not done? Why not make him the hero of the story or else we

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might have no hero and who cares for stories without heroes? And his name? What is the

poor boy’s name? Look closer. They’ve had to make up an official sort of form to

transfer him from the police station to the hospital, look closer, let us look closer and

what is scribbled above the line labeled name? What is scribbled under the line where his

birthdate is written in tiny boxes between slashes? What does it say? Who is this

anonymous hunchback? It is hard to make out, so lazily scrawled in the designated space

and perhaps it is inconsequential what his name is, perhaps it is a boring, average name.

But we need a name, otherwise how would we tell others the story we’ve experienced

without a name? Listeners and readers alike will be asking, “yes, but what is his name?”

every time we try to get to an important point in the story. What is his name? Look

closer and see how the law identifies him. Justin Triguiero. Ah, yes, an insignificant

name, perhaps there is a tinge of Portuguese in his surname, but at least we have a name.

Now, let us leave him to his fate, to his quixotic guilt, his fevers, his itches, his narrative of banal clichés, and his characteristic uncertainty. Let’s leave the boy who is no longer

central to his own narrative.

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Epilogue

Monday came with a fierce veracity, as if to say, “back to work everyone,” but

Riley James hadn’t slept at all after leaving the police station the night before feeling as an abject failure. Not a word of his testimony was written down and his version of the events of Sunday was dismissed offhand. But he had expected this. What he didn’t expect as he spoke to Tansey and then to Robert Lancaster the next morning is that they too would dismiss the death of Celestine and the incarceration of the boy as a mundane byproduct of life in the city. Not a soul would come to testify on behalf of Celestine, and as such, justice ran its course like a sleepwalker that gets by on the pretense of seeming conscious, going about its business, up elevators, into board rooms and offices, down stairs, into a cab, into its house, into its bed where it lies down beside its wife and not a person notices that its been wearing a blue-gel sleep mask all day.

We hear about the story, vaguely at first, and by Tuesday morning, we have come

to wonder if the whole thing would ever take definite shape or if everyone it concerned

would just shrug it off and slip back into his or her roles. We nearly forget it happened as

Wednesday comes and it seems so much like an out-of-focus daydream we had thought up to get through the workweek. But then we listen to the news, watch brazenly as learned authorities debate the details of the case, or, at the very least, follow the banners of headlines as they move across the screen during a game with a lazy sort of incredulity.

The déjà vu is undeniable, or it is more than that, we feel as if we had supremacy over the

entire ordeal, because we saw it all in a dream, as it happened, maybe before it happened,

and in that case we are like clairvoyants. And what next? We observed as the Prophet

204 came clean about his affair a quarter of a decade ago. We studied his shame and his expression of honest regret, and we forgave him, even if he would not forgive himself, we forgave him. He asked to no longer hold the title of “Prophet,” describing it as blasphemous, especially to christen someone so undeserving of such a title, but we continued to call him “Prophet” in our heads and under our breaths. His wife, Laurel, was exulted to the vanguard of gun rights, her face plastered on firearm shop windows, and she naturally learned to enjoy the sort of distinction her husband had always maintained, but without any similar sense of shame. She began to charge a large sum of money for speaking publicly and added much to the household income.

Richard Lancaster, for his part, denied ever knowing anyone by the name of

Justin. Never in his life had he known a man by such a name. And on the girl, Celestine, he pleaded the right to “no comment” and seemed to escape any sort of scandal there. But the Lancaster ticket failed miserably at the polls anyhow, and Greyson was elected to the seat. And who can forget the debates as they argued over the meaning of the word

‘decent’? Robert Lancaster claimed that he was “just a decent man” in his bid towards the humble men and women of the city, but Greyson countered, enquiring whether

“decent is the best he could do—surely as a political candidate seeking to represent the people, Robert Lancaster should do a lot better than ‘decent.’ Greyson went on to say,

“‘Decent’ will not do in these times when sinister idealisms are at war with the good people of the city, attempting to suppress true Christianity” etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on and so forth. And even months after the election, the smart insignia of Greyson’s campaign faded into chrome bumpers, wobbled on front lawns, and his pens, of course,

205 were still in use, as hands adapted to the square shape of the grip, and school children distracted themselves from boring lectures by filling in the engraving “Vote Daniel

Greyson” with the ink of an identical pen.

Tansey eventually published his version of the modern Prometheus, cashing out a years worth of pensions to pay a publisher to push it into local bookstores. It sold poorly, but as shops noticed that residents of the city had now published two books, displays labeled “local authors” popped up, and Tansey’s book sat aside The Jeweler’s Daughter, which had been republished under the new title, and the autobiography enjoyed a spectacular surge in sales as a result.

As for the mad-thief, whose true name never seemed to have anything to do with reality in any case, well, his father found, by the formal institutionalization of his son, the resolve to find his sanity as if he were declaring that, “no, it does not run in the family,” and went back to work within a matter of weeks.

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