The Sound of Hammers Must Never Cease: The Collected Short Stories of Tim Fulmer

Party Crasher Press

©2009, 2010, 2014, Tim Fulmer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Tim Fulmer.

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and perhaps the result of a psychotic breakdown on the reader’s part.

This definitive collection of Tim Fulmer’s highly entertaining short work includes an introduction by the author and sixty-one stories that chronicle the restless lives of what have been called Gen X and Gen Y. From the psychotic disillusionment of inner city life in “Chicago, Sir" and “Mogz & Peeting” to the shocking and disturbing discoveries of suburban dysfunction in “It’s Pleonexia” and “Yankee Sierra,” Tim Fulmer tells us everything we need to know about growing up and living in North America after 1967. His characters are very scary people -- people with too much education, too much time on their hands, and too much insight ever to hold down a real job long enough to buy a house and support a family -- in short, people just like how you and I ought to be all the time.

These are stories of concealed poets, enemies of the people, awful bony hands, pink pills, sharp inner pains, Jersey barriers, and exquisite corpses. The language throughout is unadorned, accurate, highly crafted, ecstatic, even grammatically desperate. The observations are firmly established and adequately enduring. – And the list of modifiers and qualifiers could go on and on. But the result, finally, is a model of “outcast fiction” and a signpost for a new approach to avoiding happy, coherent endings.

Author’s Introduction: The Meanest of Them Still Shines

I glance out the window today and see it’s raining. Does that perception signify anything beyond its own presence? Well, perhaps not, at least in terms of everyday, day-to-day life. I open a book and read the first sentence of the first paragraph. Does that sentence signify anything beyond its own presence? Well, perhaps it does, at least in terms of the expectations of someone seeking out a good story to read. But why the difference between those two scenarios really? Why does a reader expect so much more from a piece of fiction than from his or her experience of everyday, day-to-day life? I believe the sixty-one short stories collected here provide an answer to those vexing questions. And the answer is simple: everyday, day-to-day life is repetitive and boring -- stable societal organization requires it -- and therefore we turn to the arts for an artificial environment of surprise, shock, and excitement. The problem, as we all know, is that those artificial environments become addictive, so much so that they may destroy our ability to appreciate everyday, day-to-day life and lead us into very dark, destructive corners. This collection of stories focuses on people who find their way to those corners, people who, for the most part, are earnest, competent, and highly intelligent but who nonetheless experience an unrelenting unease with daily life. They want more than what daily life can offer, so they go out and seek something else. What they find, however, are places they never sought out or even imagined in the first place. I believe such a life narrative is especially indicative of anyone born after 1967 in North America. While that covers a lot of people from a lot of diverse backgrounds, personal experience living in six different locales over fifteen years leads me to stand by that statement. Nor is such a life narrative unique to American generations born in the last half century. Gustave Flaubert describes it more than adequately in Madame Bovary. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud already lived it more than a hundred years ago. Perhaps the French were the first to experience that restlessness. I don’t really know, and I don’t really care because it doesn’t really matter in the scheme of things. In any case, these short stories serve to provide an entertaining glimpse into that reality, not an explanation of how it arose and how it’s sustained. I have my ideas on that too, of course, and they all source back to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Please understand there is a lot of humor here, despite the violence and insanity -- or maybe because of it. I don’t really know, and I don’t really care. These stories, as a whole, sit somewhere between my more experimental fiction like 2 Sides of the Same Coin and my longer novels and novellas like They Really Were Outsiders. With the former, the stories share a certain “wisdom in psychosis,” while with the latter they share a certain “insight through rebellion.” With both, these stories ultimately agree that human life is worth leaving behind in pursuit of a higher, non- human reality.

Table Of Contents

Half Cruel, Half Voluptuous Vocations The Poor Man’s Process Eat It While You Ride Which Way Is Oklahoma? Countdown On Martin Luther King Day Japan 9 The Bend Sinister I’m Afraid I Don’t Quite Follow See also Causes of Delight Marcie Timmons The Concussion God Is a Fire In the Mind Very Fishy Best-Case Scenario Beat the Drums Pink Pills Zagovor Open Payment Shiva Nova РАДЕНИЯ Dangerously Detachable Disruption Novel Combinations UBL It’s Pleonexia Awful Bony Hands The Transformation of a Concealed Poet Yankee Sierra A Story about Alice & Bob Zest with Ease The Dynasty And So the Night Passed. Memoirs Too Don’t Forget Dirty Singles Enemy of the People Aitch & Racah The Great Game Called Seeing Five Fingers Up Milwaukee Deep The Kicks, Man! On Whitcomb Street Potential Trouble Source The Promenade The Meanest of Them Shines The Key Is Not A Key Uncle Clyde The Hanged Man Jersey Barriers Sponges, Paper Towels, Garbage Bags, Gloves, a Hammer, & a Saw The Spherical Art Unconfessed Preoccupations Inconvenience Ars Moriendi Peggy Mogz & Peeting Chicago, Sir I Clean My Gun & Dream Of Galveston Three-Zero-Four Zeek Exquisite Corpse

Half Cruel, Half Voluptuous

. . . I proceed to give an account upon these plates of my proceedings . . .

You, the pedestrian, must hate me for intruding upon your consciousness like this. You look upon my visage with disgust and scorn. You’d sooner let me die in the street than accept this invitation to listen to my tale. Of course the easiest thing would be to act as if you’ve seen nothing, to let events take their course. In fact, if you prefer, this very moment you could picture a whole different time, a whole different place. But where is the truth in that? You really think the whole world is dancing around your feet? In actual fact, our attention is mainly manifest elsewhere. We’re all guests even in our own lives--and only crushing a worm can be called meaningless. Shall we go then?

To seize everything was and still is my imperative. Not to get bored with very little difficulty. Not to meddle in politics. Not to make excuses for myself, the next minute making life miserable for everybody else. That said, I won’t pretend it’s possible to determine to what extent I’m a charlatan and to what a proper man of science. I’m often uncertain myself. To seize everything has set me at odds with my own form, made me want to topple myself. To seize everything has a tiresomeness about it too (my arms are always numb). And a bit of posing is naturally unavoidable. The future terrifies me: if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

All my life I didn’t know what to do with my hands--until I made seizing everything my fundamental imperative. I beg your pardon? Oh, I’ll have a vanilla ice, a bowl of pea soup, and, let’s see, the tender wing of chicken. Perhaps I could use that army blanket over there? Thank you. I must say we have a highly refined scene here--dinner is served. So I apologize for this bit of soot on my left elbow. I hope you’re not at all distracted by it. Anyhow, like I said, with the help of such an imperative, my hands are eternally occupied. Now they’ve seized upon you.

I’ve always been interested in the oddities of mankind, preferring to the word ‘insane’--I’ve not heard of any lunatics in the neighborhood, aside from that murderous assault on your cat--the phrase, ‘mentally impaired owing to childhood conditioning.’ So see what you can make of this: the story a dead man told me several years go in Los Angeles, California. Well, less a story than the continual accumulation and disintegration of objects and people at a modest, assembly-line pace. Doing things in the presence of a corpse is not quite the same as doing them elsewhere, of course, especially if it’s the corpse of a Moroccan businessman, a well-connected Moroccan businessman, a fashionably dressed, expatriated Moroccan businessman living, at that time, in a two-bedroom condominium that gave an unobstructed view onto the Pacific Ocean. This businessman’s adopted name was Oliver Boyd. In all matters business, he gave the impression of pursuing very important destinations--quickly across the globe, both forward and backward in time. Yet, somehow, he also possessed a superior fund of leisure activities. Mr. Boyd liked to write poetry and gamble in Las Vegas and, during the summers, discuss the Los Angeles Dodgers. If encouraged, he could draw the most delightful caricatures of politicians or celebrities. He was a tall, thin man, with a bald head, high cheekbones, and a long, lean face. He was unmarried, something of a loner. Perhaps the most unexpected things about him were his professed Catholicism and his two parakeets named Alma and Amulek (a reference, I believe, to the Book of Mormon). Right up until the day he died, indeed, up until the very moment, I was Mr. Boyd’s next-door neighbor and probably his closest friend outside the firm he managed.

As it happens, Oliver Boyd was also not above drinking alcohol or passing a joint between us. I admit we spent a good deal of time together pursuing those pleasures, which, I believe, is a sign of solid friendship. No? Well, in due course you may change your mind. Now then, conceive, if you can, of a singular Southern California evening (less than an hour before Mr. Boyd’s untimely death). The two of us are sitting on the balcony sharing a bottle of California wine, when Mr. Boyd suddenly broaches the subject of immortality or, more precisely, the symbolism of immortality. Already I have no idea where he’s heading with this, though all the same I’m not disturbed by the arcane nature of the topic. Under the influence, Mr. Boyd is easily given to traveling through distant precincts of the imagination. So I relax and listen. This is what he tells me:

“Surprising how few people these days give the topic of immortality much thought, especially the younger ones who aren’t as squeamish about dying as their elders. You see, the old alchemists believed in the possibility of spontaneous generation. Whatever pops into your head, there it is: good God, it’s moving! Creative energy in equilibrated action, and a very serious undertaking at that, one best effected at the ‘ventilated margins,’ though as a result more dangerous, more efficacious, . . . and bloody macabre if you think about it. The whole of mankind would hardly suspect or accept such an incarnation. For that reason, the law of secrecy is rigorous among adepts, as it is among vagabonds, hangmen, barbers . . . into crystal, into teacup, into pools of ink. Indeed, publishing a magical operation without proper certification is absurd and repugnant, quite uncharacteristic of those, like myself, not given to dramatic flashes or bursts of fire or mouths of angels doth declare it unto all mankind yea. Yet, as you know, I am not of an atheistic caliber. Hah! I like to claim I’m a retired horse-dealer. Besides, if I didn’t believe in God I wouldn’t go to confession and Communion or be willing to sign my name in a church vestry. I wouldn’t be brandishing this crucifix either, now would I? As I see it, the Church has always been the chosen haven for every kind of formulaic eccentricity. It’s so romantic, so thick with obscurity, that it’s like looking through a red-plastic viewfinder, or waking up on your back in a field surrounded by concerned- looking Mexicans--believe me, I’ve been there.

“Let it suffice to say, and this according to one Mr. Landau from Hoboken, New Jersey, that the word alchemy, an Arabic term consisting of the article ‘al’ and the adjective ‘khemi,’ means ‘that which belongs to Egypt.’ The pyramids belong to Egypt. They are alchemical. Cuban pineapples are not. When pursuing alchemy, one must have no other object in view than to glorify God. A pellet of plutonium, birth-control pills, Lacoste shirts, a yarmulke, Percodan, the World Series, the British in New Orleans, flying a kite during a thunderstorm, a fist fight over a billiards table--all for the glory of God. I’ve noticed that you enjoy little pleasures. Do you pursue these for the glory of God? [I nod to indicate that indeed I do.] Very well. [Mr. Boyd pauses to slice off a small piece of bread, spreading a lump of butter over it before popping it into his mouth. For the first time I notice a slight tremor in his hands.] In that case we’re both on the winning side. We know the end of the world is code-word blue: a kind of indifference interposed between ourselves and the prevailing landscape. How else to spend one’s time? Anyhow, on that night [in fact this is the first time he’s referred to ‘that’ night, at least in my presence] a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, her feet not touching the floor. This figure wore an exceedingly white robe, blinding to look at for any length of time. She addressed me by name, my Arabic name, and said that she was a messenger sent from the presence of God. Of course I quickly sat up in bed, now within arm’s reach of this so-called messenger, whose featureless face, the longer I stared at it, began filling up my mind. ‘Filling up’ is the only way of putting it. All my usual thoughts were pushed out of the way to make room inside of me--is any of this making sense?--for what, I only later determined, was an entirely new understanding, relative to present-day civilization, of humanity’s proper place in the cosmos. Stunning, to say the least, and the next morning, upon awakening, I seemed older, stronger somehow, no longer a man suspicious of social intercourse. Indeed, a singular exhilaration filled me. I was conscious of my power, I rejoiced in it. Does any of this sound familiar? [I nod my head again. Somewhere I’ve read similar descriptions of conversion experiences.] If anything, I’ve always been a realist, a sensualist, which means I manipulate people. Why shouldn’t I? But something crucial happened to our ancestors when that monolith appeared on the moon. That’s all I know. It’s pretty strange, like I said, I’ve yet to clear it all up, to get to the bottom of it, but that monolith sent me a lesson in the form of a messenger. Come along, there’s something I want to show you.”

We leave the balcony and return inside. The condominium’s main sitting area is vast, otherworldly, its twenty-foot ceiling supported by carved pillars. Candles flash warmly from girandoles. Fumes of incense fill the room. We walk down a corridor, enter a bedroom--the door slams shut behind us--and there lying on the bed is an elderly woman wearing a black head- scarf and a yellow raincoat. I’m intrigued. Is she asleep or dead? Or is this some kind of elaborate hoax? Still silent, Oliver Boyd leads me over to the bed. Candlelight from a nightstand provides the only illumination. Deep lines of age mark the woman’s face. I remember now the unlit hollows of her eyes. I also remember the silence, how the longer we stand there, not a word spoken between us, the greater the tension in the air. I sense that Mr. Boyd is waiting for me to pronounce a particular phrase, to ask a certain question, and that until I do so, the evening cannot proceed any further. Finally, at a point where the tension is well nigh unbearable, the words, without any conscious effort on my part, blurt forth from my mouth--For the glory of God? --The gun wasn’t mine. I didn’t know it was loaded. --She’s been shot? Where? --Life itself is but a symbol, and-- --Where has she been shot? Is she alive? --And the soul of man must be restored to its body, so that every part of the body may be-- --Hey! Listen to me! Is—she—dead? --restored to itself. . . . I see now that Mr. Boyd is in a trance, totally oblivious to what I’m saying. He stands there at the bed motionless, silent, hands at his sides, head titled slightly forward. Without touching her, I bend over and closely inspect the woman, looking for any signs of blood. I find none. Her chest, however, does not seem to be moving. Perhaps she really is dead but not shot by a gun. I cannot bring myself to touch the body. I glance up at Mr. Boyd whose eyes are closed. His breaths are very shallow. I am also fearful of touching Mr. Boyd. At even the slightest nudge, the man might burst out of his trance . . . then? But what is the connection between these two people?

I walk over to the opposite wall and sit down in an armchair. From this vantage, the unmoving Mr. Boyd and the old woman lying down compose quite an artificial scene, a sort of wax museum display lit by the single candle on the nightstand. I feel like I’ve stepped entirely outside the flow of time. Except for the quivering candle flame and my own thoughts, all is still, all is silent. Yet panic would seem to be imminent--that I’m trapped without knowing why or how to escape, that Mr. Boyd has deceived me, slipped a drug into the wine, or, even worse, put me under a hypnosis which only he can pull me out of, that these people before me are not really people but images or copies of people, that nothing in this room or outside of it is any more real than my thoughts, which, by the way, seem to have compensated for the exterior stillness by accelerating to an incredibly rapid pitch, a pitch which, nonetheless, I find rather agreeable. Every possible explanation of how and why I’m in this predicament effortlessly unfolds in my mind. The most absurd, conspiratorial explanations shade off into the most physically causative. A web of explanations--no, a grid of explanations, extending both horizontally and vertically, is rendering my mind, paradoxically, static and somehow vacant. Confronted by every possibility, finding none more likely than any other, my mind has come to a complete, visionary standstill. Absent any motive for choice, I have nothing left to strive for. So where am I?

Vocations

He was alone. He was lying on a cot, smoking. The room’s whitewashed walls, ceiling, and tiled floor formed a perfect cube, which was empty save for the cot itself and the wall-length mirror facing the cot. A wooden door with a Judas-hole occupied the third wall directly opposite a railed balcony overlooking a courtyard. A large body of blue water was clearly visible, far off in the distance, beyond the many blocks of bungalows and villas. It might’ve been the Aegean or the Adriatic or some other lesser known sea. Except for the mirror, the room’s walls were bare. A small prayer mat lay neatly on the floor two feet from the mirror. When the man wasn’t lying on the cot smoking, he was kneeling on the prayer mat, gazing at himself in the mirror. Such was his current vocation. He was sustained by an unshakable conviction that hidden gates would open before him. Some already had. He was on his fifth vocation. His previous vocation had been the study of hermetic literature in a castle on the Rhine. Each vocation was complete unto itself while also serving as the necessary preparation for the subsequent vocation. There was much speculation as to whether a terminal vocation existed. Most notions of liberation implied that indeed a final threshold must necessarily exist. But no written record had yet been uncovered of anyone ever having stepped over it. The man sometimes entertained the notion--and it may well have been erroneous--that with the successful completion of each vocation, he was, in effect, peeling away another layer of the onion and that, at some future time, assuming his mind and body didn’t give way, he would finally reach the core, the paradoxical center which is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. But he was careful not to cherish this belief lest he sink into the mires of self-deception. Many, in fact most, got ‘hung up’ on this vocation or that, remaining there until they died or went insane. Turning back was impossible, for it violated the initial oath: the way lies forward into more life. To die in a knife-fight under the open sky somewhere in northern Africa could very well have been the terminal vocation. Gazing into the mirror, the man had watched his face transform into thousands of other faces, most of them in various states of decay. He’d heard the cries of a child by the roadside. He’d visited a London cafe at the bottom of a lake and eaten freshly slaughtered pork there. These were more than visions or hallucinations. These were forms of intensity, all representing something about himself, about his past or his future, and none was more significant than any other. The evening he challenged himself to Russian roulette and, on the first spin of the chamber, blew his brains out was on par with the instant he struck a match off a young woman’s zipper. Once he saw thousands of Christians martyred. The streets and marketplace ran with blood. Another time he went into the men’s room, locked himself in a cubicle, and wept for more than an hour. Now he lay on the cot, smoking. To raise up the dead could very well have been the terminal vocation. He liked this idea, but again he was careful not to cherish it. The thoughts and visions came freely, of their own accord, tempting him with their truths, while he, each instant, in response, willingly let them go, one after another. So long as nothing lodged in his mind, he could proceed to the next vocation. He would never be imprisoned by another man’s system, nor would he himself strive to create his own. He accepted chaos as the root of his universe. He was alone.

The Poor Man’s Process

All’s well while the wheels go round. But then Indiana disappeared. So, having grown weary of hunting and fishing in the Michigan backwoods, he decided to strike off for Kansas City and look for a job there. This was the summer of his thirty- seventh year. He was returning home to a place he’d never been before. He might’ve stepped into a taxi or a shop. But no. He quickly found employment as a short-order cook at a popular fries-and-hamburger chain. Even here, in Kansas City, on the verge of a nine-hour stretch of farmland reaching right into the Rockies, the pleasures of eating, drinking, and sunlight meant a great deal to him. He wasn’t poor just yet and could therefore have everything, even while, everyday, making possession all the more impossible. Perhaps he truly thought, as one does two or three times a year, that he was turning over a new leaf, and although his life, thus far, was mostly an odd form of spiritual nihilism and therefore lacking a clear center of dramatic interest, he wouldn’t have been true to himself unless he persisted in his promiscuity and recklessness. The doctors had told him he was built that way. Genetics came in very handy on those long, solitary road-trips. But no pretty lady waits very long for anyone, especially at an Interstate truck-stop. The whole place, with its rows of vacant tables, smudged napkin dispensers, and stained coffee cups, seemed blank and unreal, a forgotten locale where love is impossible but sex is not and answers return as echoes. He took a table as far away as possible from the entrance. The nearest person was an obese woman bearing the unmistakable imprint of self-pity who was hunched over a plate of hash browns and bacon. After his initial assessment, he refused to look at her again. He felt like he was doing prison time here, both elbows on the table, feet crossed at the ankles, neck awkwardly outstretched. He watched as the tired waitress approached wearing a phony name-tag. When she reached his table, he stuck out his right hand and gave her a big, phony handshake. She was somewhat taken aback. He then introduced himself as Russel, ‘with one el,’ which was a lie, and quickly forgot whether she even told him her own name. Without glancing up, he said he wanted a cup of black coffee and a slice of their freshest pie. Why the hell was it already light outside? Beyond the window, rows of eighteen-wheelers lined the tarmac. This man was a pipe, a conduit through which flowed a turbulent mix of emotions. He had never been an easy person to live with. Fits of nervous depression made his temper uncertain, and he was easily given to explosive and impulsive outbursts. Once he’d gotten drunk at a party and put his ex-girlfriend’s kitten into the blender. Except for driving Interstate highways, he never felt alive in anything he did. Thoughts, usually of the more unsavory variety, imprisoned him. He wasn’t a criminal, however, and he’d never committed a crime outside of his own imagination. On the road, of course, things were different. There it was easy enough to slip into a turnpike-trance, and you naturally forgot how nothing is worth doing in this world. He was paid to shuttle rental cars to and from agencies throughout the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. His living in Kansas City thus served a purpose. From there he could easily reach Omaha, Wichita, Denver, Sioux Falls, Tulsa, and any place in between. And when he wasn’t driving he could flip burgers and pour milkshakes and listen to the customers at the counter talk about nothing important. In the summers tornadoes became an issue, especially in that stretch between Salina and Oklahoma City. In the winters the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming were treacherous and oftentimes impassable. But the cars had to be delivered on time. A paycheck awaited him. He drove only Interstate unless he had no other choice, because Interstate highway was fast, clean, and efficient. The monotonous scenery allowed him to abandon his mind for long periods of time, allowed him to forget his own ability to think and to reason like a normal human being. Behind the wheel he transformed into a kind of machine. At nights, in hotels, while waiting for the sleeping pills to take effect, he would, in his mind’s eye, scroll backwards through the previous day’s drive, remembering in minute detail each filling station, truck-stop, rest-area, and fast-food restaurant he had passed. This was the only time he gave his mind free reign to do as it pleased. All other times he kept it emptied of all content except for the immediate perception of the car’s hood and the asphalt sliding along beneath it. This man had no desire to live, in fact. He didn’t care about his own or anyone else’s well-being. Nothing on the evening news could shock or sadden him. No scene of beauty could move him. He was simply a pipe, a conduit through which flowed a turbulent mix of emotions. He let these emotions flow onward forever, aware only that they existed but not concerned with what form they might take. This flow, he knew, originated somewhere outside of his mind and body, and he was therefore not ultimately responsible for what it depicted. He owned and asked for nothing, and whatever came his way, no matter how glorious or horrific, he accepted with the same harsh indifference. He wasn’t poor just yet, and it never crossed his mind to overdose on sleeping pills or drive a car head-on into an overpass stanchion. His mind and body would give out at their appointed time. Besides, he had no say in the matter because none of it was his. He was not the creator, so who was he to decide when and how it ended? He couldn’t recall ever having actually requested this life. It was simply his lot. He would therefore endure to the very end, knowing that all’s well while the wheels go round.

Eat it While You Ride with urgent acknowledgments to Joseph Conrad

Ben Gurion International. Baruch Hashem! I’ve always enjoyed jogging, a habit I picked up running cross-country and track in high school. It’s one of the few times I can be alone with my thoughts, even in the midst of a crowded airport terminal. Jogging puts me here, one step beyond the automated hand- inspection kiosks, one step closer to a newly reconfigured identity. Looking neither right nor left, my chest heaving, I push through the crowd, thrust my boarding pass into the hands of the attendant O daughter of Zion! and disappear through the gate. I haven’t the patience to fly anything but commercial airliners anymore. [Right about now dub in a series of multiple explosions.]

Flight 3447. Those who have perfect knowledge cannot be kept within the veil: a new technique has been developed, and this technique shall decree the shape and style of all future discourse, both in print and on the airwaves. So let it be known I’m nobody’s spy. Never have been, never will be. I’m not a spy at all. I’m an agent, an aspiring literary agent. Strength of will and an earnest purpose are not enough to make an agent. One must also possess ‘vigor of declaration.’ And by the way, it’s always pleasant to share the aisle with a Jewish-American writer in the tedious habit of saying brilliant things. So what kind of charming nonsense are you churning out these days? Good stuff, is it? Am I supposed to ask where you get your ideas from? I apologize if percentages and advances show up in the bulk of my speech. Oh, of course, you don’t have to write to please anyone but yourself anymore. You’re that good. Varying degrees of coherence and internal complexity compete with one another until a degree of synergy emerges in the narrative. You must be one of the best known National Book Award finalists from Camden, New Jersey. At a thousand bucks a pop, who needs occupational therapy? Well then, I’ll save my breath and put these exquisite, Hasidic sentiments right back into my pocket. If I died tomorrow, every penny I owe would gladly be yours. You’re that good. I smile, reach beneath my seat, and remove a heavy baseball bat, propping it up between my legs.

Newark International. Layover. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the flight. Smoking isn’t allowed in the airport. I wander over to the gaming area to watch total strangers play Ping-Pong and shuffleboard. I’m stiff with fatigue, and maybe I’ve had a bit too much to drink if I threaten to throw myself out a window. I imagine them wheeling me down to X-Ray. But doctors lie. They don’t tell you the truth, and they attack any chance of psycho- social development in either themselves or their patients. Of course doctors are quite rational within their own highly limited perspectives, but then so are racists and child-rapists. That’s probably a shocking accusation, so let me document exactly what I mean. On the other hand, why pander to the very thing that creates overly limited perspectives in the first place, namely, evidence? How utterly absurd. I once took a workshop in Gestalt: images fixed on a dead retina. Lately I prefer following the Freudian tradition of never intruding on my clients’ projections or transference. I advise them to refrain from acting out and instead to put it all down in writing. Crime, consumerism, candor, and courage, not to mention the military-industrial complex, are all more accessible in print than out on the street. Wonderful. I’ll give you a call next week. In fact, what’s happening before your very eyes right here may be a not so thinly disguised sales pitch for a pop-noir thriller. [Dub in the sounds of a telephone ringing.]

Flight 0684. Ever wish you could run somewhere to be alone with your thoughts?--that you could scrape the flow of time?--or pin it down with real nails? --A science fiction fantasy? Not at all. Such systems are already operating. ‘The dollhouse has many rooms.’ Metal doors swing open. Robed monks usher me inside. Breathe in. Count backwards after me. The sedative has begun to work, semi-paralyzing my body. Something . . . something appalling . . . something someone forgot to tell me? I’m on my back, looking up, and all I can see are the stars. God help me if I start hearing flying saucers.

LAX. Smoking wasn’t allowed on the flight. Smoking isn’t allowed in the airport. I wait for my luggage in the baggage claim area, standing there motionless for practically an hour, in my wrinkled pinstripe suit. If my mind wanders--and the only chance to defeat it is with its own black magic--I usually end up in a quiet, low-ceilinged room overlooking the Seine, with the sound of drizzling rain overhead, and beyond the windows the lights of cafes reflected off wet pavement. Otherwise, I occupy myself with this gallery of weary travelers, so many half-finished canvases leaning their faces against the wall. Good Christ, it’s all I can do to marshal even a modicum of interest in these--what? Nor do their input devices seem to have noticed me. Hah, of course! Imitation humanoids, ridiculously clumsy, with insulin levels poorly adjusted, their youthful features sunken into a hideous obesity, and dare I mention the heavy folds beneath chins, the thinning hair, the preposterous paunches--what makes these Christians think anyone would even want to drink their blood?--when suddenly I’m distracted by a shapely, Nordic- featured blonde woman wearing a Princeton sweatshirt who’s sitting in a wheelchair beside the baggage carousel. She appears withdrawn yet in command of herself. Nobody asks, who’s she? or what’s she doing there? I stare at her like an enraptured child, every particle of me screaming here I am! Finally she glances over at me. What’s the matter with you? A malignant tumor is what’s wrong with me, lady!--nothing to do but wait for the inevitable. You think you got it bad, you think former California governor Ronald Reagan is inoperable, you say you’ve cornered the market on sheer physical torture, on pity for wooden-legged misfortunes. Hah! I got a lot of stuff might interest you, lady. Our lives are irrevocably linked. So let’s make each other rich! Let’s make each other free! She begins wiping her hands on a premoistened towelette.

Avis Rental Counter. A small-group climate: nine to twelve customers, including a copilot and a flight attendant, the same number of people in a terrorist cell, on a jury, in a religious discipleship. Already I sense a transition from total alienation, typical of traveling strangers, to progressively warming relationships. In particular, the young lady standing in line ahead of me. Gold heart earrings, perhaps a gift from her mother at high school graduation. Combat boots. Hair uncombed. Definitely a snorter, not a shooter. Monogamous? Possibly. But when was the last time she examined herself before a full-length mirror?

Lincoln Boulevard. A point comes when war is the only course consistent with honor: the streets of Los Angeles. Impressive, aren’t they? Incredible blocks of ancient stone. The funky neighborhoods. Attics full of wonderful illegal stuff. Convoys of limousines. Women in Gaultier evening gowns scurrying through great glass doors to get at those crudité platters. The light so clear, the sun so bright that dusk is but an illusion. Yet no other city hides its shame behind such sweet facades. It’s one of the conventions around here that no one has any permanent talent. Indeed, seldom but very seldom is anything of substance ever actually transacted: obsolescence in this business comes very fast. You must do your utmost to stay ahead of the enemy. Of course loudmouthed friendliness is another matter entirely. Very well. I’ll drive to my hotel and have a wash. But first, a smoke-- and second, a restaurant or at least a 7-Eleven: I’ve lost far too much weight these last few weeks overseas.

McDonald’s drive-thru. The multimedia menu is an anachronistic mixture of pedantry and disbelief, a page ripped right out of one of those old-fashioned metafiction anthologies. But there’s more. Plainclothes guards, already drunk and surly, stand outside on the pavement, frisking any and all teenagers wearing baggy clothes before allowing them entry. Just as many teens, perhaps those not granted entrance, cluster around cars in the parking lot--bona fide LA gangs?--slouching off their pubescent anomie in jeans, T- shirts, bikini tops, and sandals. Oh I’m sure they have plans for the rest of the day and the evening as well. Meanwhile, the teenage girl at the window who hands me my order is on serious medication, the zombie stuff. As she repeats the order back to me, she stammers in a sort of transistorized monotone. I imagine her retreating upstairs to her bedroom, smashing a lamp into a mirror, slashing her wrists with a shard of glass, though not very skillfully: unconscious on and off for days, hooked to machines, two bags of fluid hanging near the bed. I promise I won’t. I promise I’ll never do it again--I promise. Now she’s serving me an Extra Value Meal, forever benumbed to flattering love notes and bouquets of flowers.

Best Western Hotel, West Manchester Boulevard. The clock ticks. I feel her fingers reach for the buttons on my shirt, as slowly, ever so slowly, she begins to undo them one by one. What’s your live-in boyfriend do? It’s not important. Is he in publishing? She pulls away. I sense a passive anger about her, as if any moment she’ll confront me with a massive backlog of grievances. Why are you lying low in this hotel? Coming off a bad trip or something? She shrugs her shoulders. What’s your point? Well, don’t be so paranoid, but if we’re gonna just sit around here and not do anything, might as well enjoy the free HBO. With the remote I turn on the TV, but I’m too restless to watch it. I’m too restless to watch more than ten consecutive minutes of TV any time of day or night. I stand up from the bed, walk over to the window. Tour buses and airport shuttles clog the parking lot. This woman’s name is Carol. She won’t tell me her last name. She’s wearing a black plus-size gown, and beneath it a satin brassière. Not much, in terms of loose protoplasmic fat, but she is a rather hulking woman, like an opera singer, a disgruntled one at that. Making love to her would be scary at times. Of course therein lies my fascination. An abject apology is the last thing to expect from such a person. We met just twenty minutes ago in the lobby. Something about her struck me as desperate, almost drug-addled, so I invited her up to my room for a drink, and already I gather she’s one of the last generation of devoted martini aficionados. At the moment, as I’m biting at the bit to do something, even if it’s only a five-mile jog, she’s finished surfing the channels and settled on two programs: a day-by-day recounting of the press leaks in the Watergate affair and a talk show spotlighting lesbian mothers who won custody of their children. How can it be that such pictures are still not seen with the eyes closed?

Next morning. Dingy coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles. Smoking tobacco is forbidden. I’m sitting alone at one of three tables arranged in a horseshoe. I keep an eye on the clock behind the counter. Everywhere else I glance: fat pots of coffee, pitchers of hot milk, triangles of toast with strawberry jam. Overhead, a clarinet melody from a Rogers and Hammerstein musical is accompanied by cymbals, wire brushes, and drums. I try to discern individual scents in the heavy, stale air: scrambled eggs definitely, bagels, an undercurrent of sausage filth. The only waiter is a lantern-jawed, gray-haired African-American who’s frowning as he pages through the National Review. In contrast, the only other patron besides myself, a punk-rocker type in black leather who’s nursing a mug of coffee, has a broad, foolish- looking a grin on his face, like he just got a blow job on the way back from the john, or maybe he’s getting one right now. I crane my neck to get a look beneath his table. Sure enough, water’s churning at his promontory. She’s a regular pro. Nothing to it: infant baptism becomes an evil abomination. So where do I fit in with all this? Well, the writer’s name, the man I have an appointment with, is Michael Helaman. His passion for disguise amounts to not too dressy, not too casual. And although he drives a brand-new white Jaguar, he pretends to be a moral outcast who trades in defiled stories about Western democracy. His latest collection is entitled Christ on a Crutch, a so-called ‘Secret Continuation of the Nineteenth Century.’ Screamingly funny. How else to explain the applause signs and laugh-tracks? But today Michael is fifteen minutes late. My cell phone begins ringing. I answer. It’s Michael asking to postpone the meeting to three o’clock this afternoon. No can do. I have to be in Beverly Hills. Okay then, move the meeting to Beverly Hills. No can do. I’m meeting another client at three o’clock in Beverly Hills. Okay then, how about this evening? No can do. I’m scheduled to depart on the 5:00 p.m. flight to--to where? I’ll tell you if you let me finish. To San Francisco. Okay then, when will you be back in LA? Not sure. Okay, well, when you know, call me and we’ll try to set up a meeting the next time. Okay, will do. Goodbye. I hang up and leave the coffee shop.

Afternoon. Rodeo Drive luncheonette. Smoking tobacco is forbidden. But if my body is crying out for a cheeseburger, why am I picking at tiny sandwiches of watercress and sliced cucumber? Probably because Julian Hennessy won’t be caught dead, or alive for that matter, south of Olympic Boulevard. The other problem, the reason I’m even here in the first place, is that the first draft of his latest novel reads like he spoke it directly into a tape recorder half a chapter at a time, with little thought to tight editing. I wonder if his interests are entirely professional. I mean, there’s nothing mysterious about writing a good story. You need equipment, preferably a word processor, determination, or what they used to call ‘gumption,’ and a proper sense of timing: some days will be better than others. The money may be good, the job prestigious, but writing’s not supposed to be fun--it’s basically a power trip. Click! A waiter appears, interrupting my reverie. Tea?--do you prefer India or China? I wave him away. What a place. Patrons halt their forks in midair over iced cakes, pastries, or the poule au riz. A waiter flambées crêpes. I sense physical attraction allied with intellectual abhorrence. No one here gives a shit about humor or self-reflection or flipping life open at random. They all sit fixed to their self-appointed seats, daring the world to move them, reminding themselves and each other not to wear semiprecious stones unless they’re very, very big, not to mix platinum and gold, or emeralds with rubies, and never to ride in a car with a loaded shotgun. Finally, twenty minutes late, Julian Hennessy appears at the entrance with a dazed look on his face. Blood is dripping onto the sidewalk at his feet. His skin is as white as a porcelain plumbing fixture. His dark brown hair rises from his scalp like the pine pickets of a fort. He’s stumbling in circles, nearly tripping over himself. It doesn’t seem like a good idea for me to stick around much longer. As I’m leaving, a lady at a nearby table begins to scream. Someone else shouts, Watch out! I turn around just in time to see Julian Hennessy remove a knife from--where? Wherever, it’s a knife all right, a gleaming steak knife he’s holding partly on the handle, partly on the blade, which explains all the blood running down his arm. By now, of course, more than one person has dialed 911 on a cell phone. The luncheonette’s manager is shaking his head in disbelief. These things don’t happen in Beverly Hills. At first it appears that Julian is going to enter the luncheonette, but then he lurches around toward the curb where I’m still standing, transfixed, about ten yards away. His eyes--God forbid!--show recognition. A slight smile forms on his lips. He begins stumbling in my direction, lunging at me with the knife. I forgive you for screwing my girlfriend, but there’s other shit we gotta talk about. I promise you’ll be reimbursed. That’s not the issue--growth isn’t everything, but survival is! What else does the reader expect me to do? First, by distracting Julian I’m allowing everyone in the restaurant to scatter out onto the sidewalks and jump into their cars. Second, this is a client situation: no matter how humiliating, it’s still my responsibility. So I’m standing my ground, confident that originality and invention are merely novel combinations of old ideas. And anyhow, if literary agency doesn’t pan out, I’ve got a degree in education to fall back on.

Which Way Is Oklahoma?

He has a ten-pound sledge for a hammer. He once used it, at company picnics, to hit cows over the head--but that was years ago. This late December morning he sits before a mirror, combing his hair and practicing his smile. His name’s none of your goddamned business.

Some five minutes later, downstairs, in the kitchen, he removes a frozen pizza from the refrigerator, placing it on the counter beside a package of Fig Newtons. Those will be his breakfast.

Thirty minutes after that, he arrives, by foot, at the nearest bus- stop, where he catches a bus into the city center. He’s lucky to find a seat. Having sat down, he quickly rubs the moisture away from the inside of the window. This forestalls any sense of claustrophobia and allows him to watch the passing blocks of buildings and parking lots.

He’s a high school English teacher whose classroom sports white, featureless walls.

His students arrive to class wearing Tommy Hilfiger jackets. They’re all talking about this weekend’s big Y2K party. Russel Sauer, one of his brightest students, is showing off a Best Buy gift certificate he got for Christmas.

Tonight, on the TV, Jimmy Stewart is hugging Donna Reed. They’re laughing and smiling their way into paradise. But this man isn’t paying attention. He’s concentrating on smoking, on the taste of tobacco smoke.

The next morning he goes outside to find another sack of garbage missing. Ten minutes later, he’s riding the bus into the city center, watching the same filling stations roll past with their colorful plastic flags barely flapping in the gray winter wind. He imagines he’s living on the surface of a Mobius band.

Tonight a test-pattern hums on the TV. He’s dozing in the recliner. Strange, chaotic dreams trouble his sleep. He’s confronted with undulating masses of faces, steel mills, coke refineries, meat-packing plants, and even a couple bowling alleys--so many missing fragments violently forced into place.

On the bus the next morning he reminds himself he’s a solipsist. The woman beside him is fiddling with the wrapping on her Christmas fruitcake. He reminds himself this woman is a figment of his imagination. She doesn’t exist outside of his own mind.

This afternoon he takes his car in for an oil change. At the back of the large, cavernous garage he glimpses rows of metal lockers decorated with Playboy centerfolds. Flies buzz around pools of blood on the concrete floor.

The next morning is a Saturday morning so he sleeps in. When he finally goes outside to retrieve the newspaper, still dressed in a bathrobe, he takes a moment to tease the neighbor’s schnauzer. He then returns inside to find a crisscross pattern of light and shadow on the kitchen wall. He smiles. For some reason today feels like Christmas, New Years, and Easter all rolled into one. Leaving the newspaper on the kitchen counter, he goes to the bathroom to shower and shave. Some fifteen minutes later he’s standing at the foot of the bed, staring at the crucifix he’s hung on the wall. He smiles, reminding himself nothing here exists outside of his own mind.

He spends much of the afternoon watching TV. Many of the channels are discussing the possible consequences of the Y2K glitch. Some people will hunker down, expecting the worst, while others are planning massive parties to usher in the new millennium. Later, he works out on the Stairmaster.

Sunday morning he sleeps in till ten-o’clock. At eleven he’s eating a light brunch in front of the TV, watching as large, cow- sized animals of excellent meat are herded, one at a time, into a metal chute. This all takes place in Oklahoma. But which way is Oklahoma? Unable to determine the cardinal points of the compass, he decides to change the channel. Now boring young Americans in white T-shirts (their knuckles drag the ground) are playing some kind of prank on tourists standing in line below the Eiffel Tower. He changes the channel again and is immediately confronted by the ominous phrase, the moon is only the first step. The next channel arrives with the question, did she ever regain consciousness? But who is she? Well, it turns out she was a drug addict who slipped into a coma after overdosing on a variety of tranquilizers. She worshipped the devil, for pity’s sake. The next channel is Judge Judy. And after that it’s a gardening channel. He can’t help but notice the woman is wearing Martha-Stewart brand gardening gloves. Good for her. The History Channel is discussing Checkpoint Charlie, while the Philosophy Channel, he’s pleased to discover, is advertising a two-part series on solipsism, beginning next week. It’s entitled We’re All Solipsists.

Sunday afternoon and evening pass without incident.

He awakens early Monday morning, showers, shaves, combs his hair, and practices his smile before realizing it’s New Year’s Eve Day. There will be no school today. He decides to drive out to the beach.

While driving he compulsively scans the radio dial. Nothing suits his taste, it seems, except a random hodgepodge of lyrics which include forever’s gonna start tonight . . . a man of wealth and taste . . . money feeds my music machine . . . the earth says hello . . . and whisper words of wisdom.

The pier is sturdy and solid, stretching more than a thousand feet out into the ocean. He walks to the very end. The bitter cold wind reminds him spring is a long way off. His mother comes up from Florida for a week every spring. But she probably doesn’t even exist outside his imagination. Glancing around himself, he manages a smile.

Hell, nothing here exists outside of my own mind, Herr Doktor.

Countdown on Martin Luther King Day

10

It’s an ordinary Monday here in the United States. There’s nothing left to do. I’ve seen everything. I know everything. The grand tour is over, the last go-round complete. Then what shall I do? Well, let’s begin with what do I need to do? Yes, necessity. No panics yet, no Christ’s or fuck’s or shit’s, though maybe some dammit’s. It’s all very nice. The best medical care money can buy, a wife, and five or six kids. Still, what do I need to do? Well, I’m curious, I’m serious, I’m impatient. I’ve been living in America for eighteen years now, but here’s the thing--I’m starting to sense I should get the hell out before it’s too late. For what?

For escape. I smell snow in the nighttime sky as I walk across the airport parking lot to my sedan. I swallow in deep gulps of air. I nervously pat the pockets of my jeans. And who is this ‘I’? Well, I’m listed under ‘therapist’ in the Yellow Pages. My name is Raymond Ingersol. I’m of medium height and weight. I have bags under my eyes. My hair is thinning in back. I speak with an affected, broad-voweled Australian accent. And most importantly, I have one of the highest IQs ever measured. My clients, while keeping themselves blind to the need for change, are paying me quite outrageous fees to understand why they need to change. I know it’s sort of cruel--and I’m a fine chap to talk about evil--but I can’t help myself anymore. I play up the credibility gap whenever and wherever it serves me. I even accept credit cards.

Dammit, there it is again, in my gut. A moment of static equilibrium. One helluva choice. Never before have I felt fight or flight quite like this. I drop to my knees on the tarmac, touching my forehead in a half-salute--the only defense against instinct. To survive by running at this age is impossible. Well then, try to act afraid.

9

Hey, take it easy--this isn’t a free-speech issue! Tickets don’t go on sale for half an hour. I should know. I’m the theater’s fucking manager. And what a great, non-creative profession, to be in charge of projecting other people’s fantasies for a nominal fee. And no, I’m not suicidal, no danger of that. All I need is a little peace and quiet, some time to think, some room to edit. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. Snip. There! Feeling better? Whoa! It’s way too short--I don’t like it. Applause. Cheers. Okay, guys--fold up the chairs!

Black looks good on you, lends you an air of mystery, black as in ‘big black sewer rats,’ as in Leading Man black. In fact, firestorms of speculation regarding Leading Man’s sexual proclivities are raging in the pages of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. To rectify the situation, up on the screen now, Leading Man wraps one arm around her back, the other around her buttocks. She senses he’s never letting go. She struggles, then starts to cry. Leading Man, with a sly down-turned smile, finally displays his erection for all to see. Does this answer your fucking questions, this black plume of smoke going right up your goddamned chimney?

His palms are slick with sweat. Leading Man sits outside the emergency room, staring at a clock that reads 11:40. Was it inevitable that he would lose control of the car, that the police would interview him and accusingly glare at him Chappaquiddick-style?

8

These matches shall serve as kindling for the cigarette I need to smoke. But is there any cognac left? Of course, but so early in the day? Oh, so you’ve turned pious on me, eh? Just give me the fucking bottle. Ah yes. Everything is so close, so convenient. Want me to teach you some harmonies too? And what a laugh-- cuz nothing works less’n you believe in it first. Now, close your eyes and imagine a blue field. Let objects enter that field. Any luck? Hmmmmmm. Let’s see . . . LEFT TO RIGHT. STAGE 13. Well, for one thing, it’s a long, long way from the cohesiveness of the miniature landscapes that decorated my Newark, New Jersey childhood. Landscapes no larger than a thumbnail. Dime- sized landscapes in the fabric of a sleeping bag. Landscapes on ledges of moss, on dirt slopes, on rusty beer tabs. Rocks parting for passageway into more majestic types of landscapes. That’s all I knew back then. The dizzy exhilaration of miniature landscapes. The shriek of wires pulling away from a fence post. The candles go out, the doors slam shut, my fevered imagination begins gorging itself on blackness. That’s the way it worked--that’s the way it still works. A ladder facing outward is enough to send me into vertigo. And as for those black Converse high-tops--forget it. Absent any feet inside of them, how could they ever really hurt anyone?

With my wiry body and super-pale skin I resembled a lovely little space creature. My eyes were like dinner plates dangling from an extra-narrow cabinet, and for some reason I shrugged my shoulders a lot. Mother dressed me in the bluish-white fabrics standard for young boys of that era. Every morning she served me a bowl of shredded wheat and a piece of buttered toast. The first day of classes I ran straight home and begged Mother never to hire a chauffeur to pick me up from school. The second day I rode my ten-speed through the middle of a Frisbee game, crashing into a pole, successfully landing myself in the hospital for a week. I hated that private school. Its campus of low-slung brick buildings was ringed by a razor-wired chain-link fence--to keep us in and them out. Guards with walkie-talkies or felt-tipped pens patrolled the corridors. Mandatory heavy plastic boots replaced my black Converse high-tops. Cinnamon-red uniforms replaced my ratty T-shirts. I still recall Mr. Clifford, our world history teacher, shaking his fists at the heavens when he lectured on Nazi Germany. How I despised those regulations! Yet doodling on the covers of textbooks, falling asleep in homeroom, and spitting phlegm on my English test earned me only suspension, not expulsion, much less excommunication. Wearing tight black jeans with a white, un-ironed T-shirt finally did the trick, however.

Father was a ghost presence in those days--literally. True, he was also a mail carrier, but only before he died of an embolism. The stepfather who kindly replaced him smoked a sherman one Friday night and passed out naked on the front lawn. The neighbors called the cops. Mother divorced him the following week. My second stepfather is now living off disability checks. My third and latest stepfather, the one who sells auto insurance in Orange County, California--we’ll get to him later.

7

If you offered me War and Peace I’d refuse it. And if this really were a Hollywood dream, I could come up with anything half as compelling. Hyper-flatulent, Tolkeinesque fantasia. Blizzard stories. A flood of raw sewage pouring through New York City high-rises. Attacks of gallstones.

I suppose Christ’s message still hasn’t reached me because, like most people I know, over the years I’ve filled up my allotted spaces with scads of unnecessary memorabilia. Brass JFK bookends. Charcoal sketches of moonless nights. Maps from the US Geologic Survey. Camouflage gear. Genuine recordings of Hitler’s speeches. It’s all very reasonable. No need to call the cops.

I carry my tomato juice over to the TV now and place the cup on the arm of a black plastic chair, right beside a half-eaten package of franks and a six-pack of Oly. If any new broadcast images come along, especially purple formations, I’ll be sure to sit awhile longer, to figure them out, slowly, carefully, until I emerge on the right-hand side of things. I know it’s hard to grasp how anyone can actually breathe through a television screen, but believe me, it’s a thrill. For fifteen minutes, half queasy with excitement, I watch All My Children. Beware--spit can accumulate on the carpet if you watch TV too long, or if you forget to stop daydreaming.

Two hours later Mother begins pounding on the door until I let her in. I remind her to observe the no-touching rule which applies to me and any of my belongings. Mother’s unchangeable. A brown, stippled pattern marks the exposed portions of her skin. Her gray-streaked head seems to jut out from between two chutes, one green, one red. Her tread is heavy, thudding, and her hemlines not quite right. She nervously reams her ears with that stubborn, outstretched index finger. Today she’s impressed by how I’ve managed to shove all my apartment’s trash into a single plastic bag. She wants to know if I’m interested in attending a Holocaust memorial rally, but it’s much too cold out. I’m thinking, Why not a charity ball in West Palm Beach?

6

You want a long lecture about the afterlife? Well, let’s wait till the seat-belt light goes off. I’ve always loved airline travel--quite surprising, really, when you consider that the first time I boarded a commercial airliner my shirt caught on fire. I was a young, six- year-old boy bound for the West Coast to visit my grandparents who had kindly presented me with a first-class ticket. It was the 18th of January. My flight was scheduled to depart from O’Hare International at 1:05 p.m. A blizzard had just passed through Chicago, snowdrifts were piled a mile high, and the runway conditions must’ve been deplorable, but that pilot was determined to pull away from the gate. This was back in the days when the upper deck of a 747 was a cocktail lounge and polyester-uniformed stewardesses passed out plastic captain’s wings to the children or perhaps offered them a tour of the cockpit. Anyhow, turns out the flight would be grounded due to the impending snowstorm, forcing me to spend the rest of the night in a hotel by myself. Bless Mama and Papa for that backup credit card.

5

Every fucking winter it’s the same. I’m trying to organize a coffee-klatsch for Saturday mornings, but the scheduling is nearly impossible to coordinate because my associates all have unlisted phone numbers. I’m standing there in the kitchen, hair dripping, bath towel slung low across my hips, shouting into the telephone. Hello, Andrew? What? Hello . . . hello . . . ? It’s you- know-who. Anybody there? Andrew? . . . Andrew, I think we have a bad connection. I hang up the phone. What the hell? Yiddish sounds a lot like German usually. Maybe I forgot to bake him those chocolate chip cookies. Yes, that’s it. Now that I think about it, I did forget. And maybe last night was a big mistake. Or maybe not. I dial Andrew’s number again. Hello? Andrew, please talk to me . . . Hello? Anybody there? . . . Listen, Andrew, was it only last night? Huh, was it? . . . Hello? Hello? I whisper a few intimate things in Japanese. Still no answer. Finally I slam the receiver down. Goddammit. This is really pissing me off. I know we did the right thing last night. So what the hell does he want from me now--a fucking blood test? Got your passport handy? I have to know what he’s up to. I can’t lose him. I wonder, is this what Shakespeare meant by ‘anger burning brightly in the brain’? I stop now, try to breathe more evenly, one breath at a time, one moment at a time, to remain within the range of the anatomically average, but it’s easier said than done. I return to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet. Soap, shampoo, hydrogen peroxide, dental floss, razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. I scream and yell at the blades of blue steel before violently throwing the cabinet door shut.

I look at myself in that mirror. My nostrils are quivering. The muscles on my neck are constricted. The muscles across my shoulders are strained and ropy. The muscles around my mouth seemingly vacuum-pumped. I rest my fingertips on the inside of my wrist. No vital signs at all. I feel like I have to do something now or risk suffocating. I try breathing more evenly, one breath at a time, but, like I said, it’s much easier said than done. I open the medicine cabinet again. Soap, hydrogen peroxide, dental floss, razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. I scream much louder now, at the very top of my lungs. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. I keep screaming. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. razors. Until fatigue shuts me up. My throat is throbbing. My eyes are watering. My sense of body is fading. I put my arm around my waist, lead myself into the bedroom. I sit down on the bed. I fumble with the belt of my khaki shorts, finally removing them. I lie down. What a trip.

And don’t even get me started on X-Acto knives or dental tools.

4

Forty-five-year-old Andrew Singer was born and raised in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. For most of his adult life he’s resided here in Orange County, California, where he sells auto insurance part-time. He used to sell auto parts full-time. Lately he’s maxed out four credit cards financing an independent film entitled Velvet Steel that, in his wildest dreams, will make its debut at the Sundance Film Festival. When he’s not selling insurance or threading film into a 16mm movie camera, he’s relaxed behind the wheel of a black Buick Electra four-door sedan, driving the streets of Orange County, sometimes all night long. He keeps an antler-handled bowie knife in the glove compartment ‘just in case.’ But in fact, aside from his chronic allergy problems, Andrew Singer is reasonably well-adjusted. He’s never been arrested, never been fired from a job, never cheated on his wife or taxes, never lied to his rabbi, never made a fool of himself in public. The list of what he positively is would include marmot- like incisors, a prominent nose, protruding lips, and sun- coarsened skin. His wife isn’t even Jewish, not by a long shot-- she’s full-blooded Choctaw, with the shiny black hair, high cheekbones and almond eyes typical of that nation. She walks with liquid grace, her breasts barely sticking out beyond her ribcage. She doesn’t cry. Ever. She’s what’s known in the business as a ‘character actor.’

January in Southern California is usually pretty pleasant. Today is no exception. The kitchen radio is tuned to NPR. Andrew Singer and his wife are enjoying a morning cup of licorice tea with a tablespoon of bee jelly. The Girl Scout cookies kindly purchased from their neighbor’s daughter remain uneaten. Soon a rolled-up Restoration Hardware catalog will be thrown against the wall.

3

God, was I uptight back then! Remember how I flipped out if somebody borrowed my coffee cup? Compromise was impossible. They practically had to corner me with dogs.

Today is no exception. It feels like my brain is stuffed with cotton. The weird combination of sight and sound is blinding. So I’ve dismantled the smoke detector and am now drifting off into a chaos of double negatives. My greatest nightmare is coming true. I’m opting for the future, becoming a symbol of technology, ageless, genderless, as bland as a Minnesota Protestant. I’m the flip side of the one-man-band, I can spot padding wherever it’s hidden, but knowing exactly what I face leaves me quite dry in the mouth.

Some . . . things? Hmmmm, . . . let’s see. What was that phrase Chairman Mao often used? Don’t starve the piglets?

I hurl a bucket of scraps into the hog pen.

2

All my life I’ve had a secondary focus in anthropology, so I see all these things even when trying not to look for them. I’m talking about cougars and coyotes ranging across the North American continent, from the Arctic to Mexico, from New Haven to Baltimore, from Texas to Virginia. I’m talking about the things you’re not allowed to do in the White House. Hot-tub sex with Hitler’s advocate. Playboy centerfolds tacked up as neatly as wallpaper. Plastic baggies of marijuana stashed beneath sofa cushions. The white powder I assume is high-grade cocaine from Peru. I’m talking about the RCA dog, the Statue of Liberty’s arm, Hello Kitty backpacks, Guatemalan machetes, tiny resilient pillows, galvanized-steel lunchboxes, frozen Eggo waffles, or a piece of Juicy Fruit that’s lost its flavor. I’m talking about women in rural bus stations cleaning out their purses. Chicken squawks and food smells. A black bear from Alberta. Children doping themselves on pink Hostess Sno Balls and Pixy Stix. Painkiller- kids out near Meteor Crater in Arizona. Sagging barbed-wire fences. Weathered farmhouses. Civil War battle sites. Pink-vinyl cocktail napkins. Blue drinks with swizzle sticks shaped like monkeys. Wadded-up aluminum foil. Huge bouquets of FTD flowers. Dinners in Westwood. A leaky hut in monsoon country. Airports that look like shopping malls. The splendid lights of Manhattan at Christmas. Evocative Christs. Enemy paparazzi. Handsome yet gaunt cadaverous men. Beautifully nuanced anomalously poisoned luminous social reflections. Another man I meet suggests I worship the twelve-gauge shotgun.

Of course the reader remembers this too. Every bit of it. I’m talking about ten thousand dollars of unrestricted travel money. We could argue all night over it. Oxygen-starved. Omnivorous. Miles of exposure. Nothing but first class all the way. Strolling along Central Park West at dusk. Reading the Los Angeles Times over breakfast. Late at night in the carrels deep within the stacks: one footnote twenty-two pages long. Then two more weeks crossing the Sonoran Desert. Winter months of struggling to keep the water from freezing. There are thunderstorms somewhere in Alaska, and clusters of big machines shrouded in plastic, and when we drive we have to swerve so as not to hit the other cars, road signs, and guardrails. But who’s running the show in Denver anyway? For some reason people associate Denver with the Rockies.

I’m talking about wrapping our faces in socks and bandannas. Leaving Kentucky to work in the Chicago steel mills. I’m talking about sodomy as therapy and documentary proof of what shouldn’t be happening. You Americans are so strange about such things. You can’t buy that stuff here. You can’t move a bloody thing in London. Lisbon’s okay, though it cramps a man’s style. It’s off the beaten track politically. Bourbon for me, champagne for her. Very tasteful.

Then wave your hands and it’s gone. Every bit of it. Poof.

Yours truly--that’s who.

1

I arrive home from ethnographic studies in the Australian outback. I see the light blinking on my answering machine, but I already know. No panics yet, although there’ll be civil suits afterwards, and probably criminal charges. Okay then, let’s begin with what do I need to do?

0

Japan 9

Other versions change the order of events and even deny they occurred on a single day.

Also, please note that some of the following sentences are important, others are not, and the excision of a number of lines has been unavoidable (on account of the Balance Factor).

Perhaps my logic is feeble, perhaps my intuitions frail. Perhaps the footage has also been painted over.

In any case, Virgil Cane is my name, and in earlier times I’m stretched out on a bed when someone knocks at the door. Loudly knocks. A man-eating alien. Or a gymnast-assassin. Who is neither abrupt nor excessively kind but who nevertheless strives to rule the entire galaxy. He lets himself in, and I pull back the counterpane so as to describe how I spent the previous night scribbling furiously in my journal, locked in moral combat with False Memory Syndrome. Rifles, bayonets, switchblade-combs, many painful blows to my unmentionables. All perpetrated by a libertine Gnostic sect doped up on organic substances derived from little blue flowers. But the man’s not buying it. He interrupts me, says he’s the son of Nyx and the twin of Hypnos and it’s Hell Week in Salt Lake City, Utah.

According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, the robbery should have taken all of ten minutes, but Stockholm Syndrome set in, and from that point on, things changed. A bit of hostility, plenty of sexual innuendo, and, overall, a rather weak grasp on reality. A guided, directed hallucination looming larger than life. When, suddenly, the door opens and a slight magnification alters things.

The man’s daughter was arrested in September of 1975 after having spent many months living as a hostage on the streets of Salt Lake City, Utah, praying to the Holy Mormon Spirit. When the AUTHORITIES found her, still with the sword attached to her belt, she was clearly recovering from the effects of sodium pentathol. Her face wasn’t pretty but she had a good figure. By the way, this was a near-future, dystopian version of Salt Lake City, coinciding, point for point, with present-day Salt Lake City, except for an enormous palace, a zombie-like slave race, and nearby, rafts of refugee boat-people afloat on the surface of a large salt-water lake.

Loudly knocked. I opened the door to Dr. Daniel Cooper. He was a tall man with a shaggy beard, a fierce face, and the eyes of a leopard that never seemed to reflect anything. (Later I came to understand why, much later, in fact, but too late nonetheless.) Today he wore a black cape. I gestured him inside and offered him a seat in the parlor beside a small table of incense burners. The place stank menacingly of scotch. It always did back then. The doctor quickly informed me his daughter had gone missing since last week. He suspected she’d been kidnapped and coerced into committing spectacular crimes. I said I would look into it. Then we lost sight of each other, and a week later the doctor was found dead, behind his desk, with a blood-soaked copy of the Urantia Book lying in his lap.

Turned out the security footage of the robbery had been painted over, Rotoscope-fashion. Nonetheless, his daughter was immediately recognizable. The long black hair, the nice figure, the sword attached to her belt. And the small events too, like the nine copper coins placed on the counter by a rather shaken-up bank-teller or the geometric patterns formed from the intersection of three pink laser beams.

The doctor’s reactions are as impossible to catalogue as those of his kidnapped daughter--because the doctor isn’t really a doctor. More knocking at the door. He lets himself in, removes his raincoat, walks over to the bed, awakens me with a rude push of the hands. Today he’s Agent Smith. Because he wears a dark business suit. And his loafers shine. And his white shirt is neatly pressed. He asks me why my hands are smeared with shit. I simply smile: persistence of vision has its consequences.

When, suddenly, his daughter turns up at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. She’s alone and in possession of the stolen money. She’s booked on a one-way flight to Tokyo. Over and over again she repeats the phrase, ‘Japan Nine,’ while waving around a tattered paperback of Montaigne’s essays. Clearly she’s recovering from the effects of sodium pentathol. Nevertheless, her father, trapped in a Richard-Nixon-like time-warp, continues to express baffled rage against anything new or confusing.

Rings loudly. Waking me from a deep, dreamless sleep. Brief paralysis. Rising out of the inkwell, flying through the air, seeing giraffes and lions. Ghosts appear and fade away. A great deal of fainting lately. And a great deal of voices speaking Latin too. Glossolalia? It’s nine o’clock in the morning. It’s November 21. Thanksgiving weekend. Young people line the streets of Salt Lake City. Future poets, priests, and politicians. They look pleased. They’re smiling. A black limousine turns the corner, followed by a hearse and many policemen on motorcycles. We watch as the procession crosses beneath the Jamarat Overpass. We continue to smile. The towers of the World Trade Center loom in the distance.

It’s the Law of Fang & Claw, the empire never ends, and I’m a multinational entity simultaneously alive in many different contexts. In my hand, this morning, I carry a long glass wand. Pinned to my lapel, the Yankee Rose. From the sidewalk on the other side of the street, I turn and look back. The doctor’s daughter, accompanied by three of her Palestinian captors, is just entering the bank, while I, tongue stuck firmly into the New Testament, marvel at the morning’s incredible visibility. The Wasatch Range looms crisp and sharp in the distance. No two mountain peaks were ever more alike. No two people ever more made for one another. Her EEG is isoelectric. My hands are smeared with menstrual blood. Naturally God forgives me.

The Bend Sinister

Some things happen for no godforsaken reason. A rod of green fire. The wail of a train whistle piercing the sky. A primary lesion on the mouth or elsewhere.

Soon it will vanish, but for now the rain continues to beat down on the windowpanes. What the hell’s wrong with me tonight? I like to retire early, and I strive for total clarity--but when I can’t fall asleep at two in the morning, and it feels like a miner’s light is shining from the middle of my forehead, or maybe worse, that I’m caught mid-scream at the epicenter of a seismological disturbance, well, what’s clearly wrong with me is I’m not yet cured of insomnia. I’m so greedy for sleep I wallow in my intestines. I invent new names for each of my vital organs, words like tangible and glorious. I check for bedsores on my rear end. I consider donating my body to science and requesting the unused remains be cremated--until finally I pull back the covers on my side of the bed, careful not to jostle my girlfriend, and practically roll onto the floor. Whoops. Scratch that one. If I can’t sleep or turn my stomach inside out, I can just as well eat my way into paradise. I pull the smock up over my head, unhook the anti- masturbation device from around my waist, step over to the closet, and slip on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Without turning on any lights, I walk down the corridor, through the family room, into the kitchen, across the dining area, over to the refrigerator. I pull the handle. A machine-voice barks out, STAND CLEAR! THE DOORS ARE OPENING! But of course there is no darkness inside a refrigerator. There is no night in there at all. Where are the gravediggers? Where are the hearses that haul the dead to their graves? Oh but no one ever dies in that land, and no one goes hungry either.

My face flushes. How the hell am I supposed to develop a lean and hungry outlook on life if eating occupies all my spare time? The very idea of it is inconceivable. Okay, then what’s really wrong with me tonight? Well, if appetite is a war between exalted objects, I can declare a cease-fire by simply walking away. So I close the refrigerator and rush to the foyer, where I put on a kevlar vest, a shiny black raincoat, and an oilcloth hat. (I briefly consider donning my big sombrero instead, but no--my neighbors will only make fun of me.) I lace up my boots. Suspiciously malevolent thoughts are beginning to twist my mind into a pretzel. This surprises me, and I’m surprised that it does, since I’ve always enjoyed dreaming up intoxicating adventures for myself. Besides, most medication errors are errors of omission, not overdoses or large doses of the wrong medication. So perhaps what’s really wrong with me tonight is I’m not experiencing real pain. In fact I’ve never experienced any pain more real than a toothache that worsened each time I moved around. (I have received occasional power pulses or waveforms, though I never picked up any details except for some sort of countdown.) But tonight will be different. I will pursue pain to the very end of forgotten destiny. I’ll ply virgin territory. I plan to be back in no less than two hours, hopefully before any unneutralized gastric juice wreaks havoc on my stomach lining.

I don’t know why, it’s probably the time of year, but the nights are growing more severe in color, darker, blacker. Tonight every house in the neighborhood seems to have its lights on except mine--quite strange, considering how late it is. The rain has become more intense now, the wind has picked up. Rows of trees and parked cars on either side of the street descend the sharply sloping hills towards the northern shores of Lake Union, while farther off in the distance, across the lake, stand the glowing high-rises of downtown Seattle. Being a cop, especially an off- duty cop, is nine-tenths staring. Through kitchen windows: recent meals, uncorked bottles, half-empty glasses. Through bedroom windows: voluminous bedding, winding-sheets, the sounds of mattress springs. Through the slats of decks and balconies: vibrating wings, dark bluish flames. I yearn to go inside each house I pass, to inspect it--an instinctual urge to open each door wide, leaving it ajar--but I control myself and look away, which is exactly what I’m supposed to do: relapse into apathy. How else to deal with such things? Pederasty is rightly despised and not to be excused, though of course the very impenetrability of night is the source of its power to cause fear in children.

Lately our neighborhood has been set upon by packs of wild dogs, filthy, flea-ridden, unpredictable, rumored to be infected with rabies. One of these mongrels approaches me now. I wave it off. There’s also a rumor at one of the city hospitals that an orderly who took bodies to the morgue was having sex with the female corpses. But oh no, the authorities won’t ever let the radio or TV report on that because then the whole city would be panic- stricken. So I ask you, what’s loyalty worth if it’s merely situational? Look, I don’t vote or ever plan to run for public office, and I never served in the military, but none of that means I’m not political in the sense that we’re all political. I enjoy important conversations and great debates over drinks. I have friends on the Board of Education. In fact, long ago I considered becoming an elementary school teacher, yet somehow I knew all along I’d choose law enforcement instead. The steady, expressionless gaze of a city-hardened cop, so superior and compelling, is an experience common to most American children, and, for me at least, a life-defining moment as well. Imagine your ancestors getting their first glimpse of the Stars & Stripes on Ellis Island. Growing up in America has also taught me the meaning of obesity. The whole thing is a simple matter of relativity: you lose enough weight, soul and body will meet again--they have to.

Similarly, there’s a predefined point where a smirk becomes a leer. It’s not hysteria, not hallucinations, though it’s not a hot news item either. What it is, is a world of signals. I notice now, standing across the street beside a beat-up sports car, a young man with wire-rimmed glasses, a grizzly beard, and lots of muscle definition. He’s so thin as to be bulimic, but he does well to maintain his macho composure, as if to say, Look at me, I’m not your average drunk. He can have no idea, of course, that he’s leering at an off-duty cop. Two lanes of vacant pavement separate our parallel paths. The rain and wind beat fiercely about us. Mind your own business--yes or no? Well, local anthropologists are beginning to fence them off for study, these members of ‘the submerged tenth,’ transients who mill around Seattle’s outlying neighborhood districts. They drink their whiskey and wince with pain until collapsing into a coma, a hair- trigger alertness their only defense against killing each other over a few bottles of booze. Some of them are buckass-naked, with bloated bellies and distended tongues, while others, like this man, keep themselves looking trim. Either way, loosened half-rows of teeth, split lips, bruised and broken jaws, blenderized feeding through nasogastric tubes--all are more readily dealt with, from the law enforcement perspective, than back-stabbing club owners or petty gangsters.

On the other hand, legalized prostitution, or ‘paid obeisance,’ to use the official term, has rescued many of the women from poverty, offering them an alternative to sweatshop-sewing- machine slavery. Believe you me, these women can read your mind simply by looking at the bulge in your pants. Bouncing breasts struggling to escape from pink brassieres, hips ready to burst through the seams of dresses. I recall one hooker I first encountered in my very own backyard, a big-boned black woman resting beneath a tree, feeding off a tray of ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I would’ve been a fool to pass her up, so I invited her inside. That day I fucked her in the mouth, between the legs, up the ass, and on top of the horseshoe bar in my basement. Everything about her turned me on, the epicanthic eyelids, the flattish nose, the dark nipples, the cesarian section scars, the thick black pubic hair, the black-and-blue bite marks on her neck. Her skin even gave off the pleasant odor of cooked pork. By the end of the day we were a sweaty mess with heaving chests, a-swim in sperm and saliva. She spent the night, and the next morning I treated her to a breakfast of bacon and fried potatoes before sending her on her way.

You use the word pain, and people think you mean something so terrible it can’t be what they’re feeling, something of an uncertain nature of transmission, something resistant to treatment, something impossible to approach with too much gravity. I mention here another hooker, a white twenty-year-old named Dolores, whom I solicited as recently as last week, again without my girlfriend’s sanction. Let’s just say this one wasn’t Grade-A pasteurized. Coming off several months of vomiting and blood loss, she was bound to be debilitated and frightfully thin. She also sighed a lot, although immediately after sighing she usually managed a smile. Two enormous rows of teeth. Her only clothing a red blouse with a zipper down the front and a silver-lamé miniskirt. No undergarments, no shoes. The soles of her feet were cut up, swollen. But of course none of this mattered when she knelt down on the tile floor to undo my trousers--at least I didn’t think any of it mattered. Turns out she’s married to some crazy Rambo fuckhead named Richie whose skin is covered with blisters and sores. Turns out for the past year Richie’s been screwing Delores up to the high end of her sphincter tube. Turns out I have a primary lesion on the mouth or elsewhere.

Elopement? Suicide? Nothing of the kind. It’s raining too hard tonight, and dawn is still quite a ways off. Now more than three miles from my house, I’m beginning to stray into a rundown section of the city. Rubber palm trees, papier-mâché pineapples, check-cashing outlets, poor people’s beauty parlors, botánicas, boarded-up travel agencies. I pass an Eye-talian restaurant where I used to take women on first dates. Its windows are also boarded up. If it were daytime, street vendors would be selling onyx bracelets and scarab necklaces, or hawking fry bread and soft drinks, but at this hour there’s only pouring rain and an off-duty cop in a shiny black raincoat who’s wide awake when he’d rather be out cold. What’s most frustrating of all is I’m more alert now than when I started walking. My pace has quickened considerably. I’m totally focused on walking, no hunger, no thirst, no distracting worries. I’m knocking off a mile every fifteen minutes. But, of course, unless I turn directly northward in the direction of the Canadian border (right now I’m due east), I’ll inevitably encounter a certain obstacle common to the Seattle area--a body of water. So since swimming is out of the question, I’ll save myself the frustration of boil off and start heading northward now. Usually insomnia grabs your throat in one hand, your testicles in the other, and drags you screaming and gagging right back into the bedroom--because insomnia doesn’t want escape & expansion. Let me also confirm that, although the issues of sleep deprivation are well known, their solutions will likely surprise you. That’s all. Stubbornly immune to bold initiatives, foolproof stratagems, and all relevant points of contact, insomnia has continued to plague mankind for centuries, and there’s no indication of its imminent demise. But the noninvasive resolution to insomnia is a cure as simple as the slight touch of electrical current from a glistening wire. Your arms and legs blink in and out of appearance. That’s all I can tell you at the moment. Therapists talk about ‘attitude-control,’ whereas I’m talking about one of thousands of propositions directed at earth.

Because I am not stopping. If necessary I will lock onto source and step my way right into unconsciousness, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do--set things in motion literally. A blast of heavy gunfire will not keep me from sleep. The whole goddamn universe won’t keep me from sleep. Electromagnetic fields, gas flows, large-scale chemical reactions. Nothing. Three hundred crackpot troopers from the emperor’s own regiment. Peat-bog fungus. Safe-sex lectures. Velcro pockets. The Atlantic coast of Florida. Equatorial crater villages. You name it. Nobody in, nobody out. Indeed, until I fall asleep the sun will never rise again, life will never die again, time will never lie again. Of course that’s right. I cut these shots from the frame of the moment. I count a thousand times faster than the cause of panic. Every pause a compression of the bonded mind. Every breath a folding-tube concussion. And it’s working! Hear those sounds exactly five feet off the ground? Oddments of plastic curling. Snap-roll sheeting. Mirrored flex-glass. Giant chunks of metallic chalk. And loudest of all--the power grid calling out to me. Ta-ta- ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. I’m wheeling forward through urban darkness, splashing into puddles, colliding with low-hanging tree limbs. My voice echoes off parked cars and buildings all cut from the same stock. My god even the floor-mounts are gone! Ta-ta-ta-ta- ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. I’m shot through solid crystal. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta- ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. A line of light stabbed into the tangent becomes, if you will, a time machine beyond the future. Maybe I’ve even got a crystal ball. Who knows? Who really knows? Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta- ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. Such a dirty job with such a reflexive mission, yet someone’s got to do it, keep doing it, adding energy to need, racks to drapes, at least until the alarms shut down. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, Ta- ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. No wonder I make slapping motions with my hands each time a right leg juts forward.

Above me now a military helicopter angles southward. Many of these streets are so poorly lit I feel like I’m surrounded by a great number of unfamiliar objects, vaguely organic in appearance, engaged in some sort of terraforming process. Rainwater dangles from overhead limbs. Droplets cling to ivy-covered walls and six- foot hedges. Tree trunks slide sideways to expose curving tunnels. Great flowering plants descend spiral stairways. Ground- floor windows divulge wormholes into foyers and lobbies. The night sky has become a twinkling, vertical rock-face. In the random coherency of puddles and splashes I’m even picking up faint strains of Swan Lake. Every clanging motion, every brass nameplate, every access to every service panel reveals a contradiction in terms. Every analytical engine reaches free-for- all. So on, so forth, onward and outward, until the final result is what’s officially known as ‘absolute flow.’ No matter where you look, it doesn’t matter where, you get coherent flow, you get ten more yards of flagstone path, you get havoc running in reverse. You kick the ramjet loose. No bang-bang, rather more of a phhhht-phhhht. It’s like you’re in an elevator but you keep pushing the UP button. Truly fantastic--and the sense of power is unmistakable, the sense that everything works exactly the way it’s supposed to. My ribs are now cracking under the strain of breathing. My skin prickles. My stride has accelerated enormously. I make chopping gestures with my hands like I’m trying to rip the rain into bloody pieces. I know it sounds ridiculous, but all my clothing has become too wide for my girth, too short for my limbs.

You finally reach a point the expanding spherical flash where you’re pure force field (can you imagine?), where you see this night can’t be real--it’s too fast, too furious, too confusing-- because awakening from a dream while remaining in that dream is so difficult. But walking works! And it is working! The traditional insomniac must learn to cope with small increments of time. For example, until tonight, my usual routines included doing push-ups, then sit-ups, then more push-ups, or placing the palms of my hands together with the fingertips resting on my chin, or even reciting a prayer (though I’m not at all religious). On still other nights, when my girlfriend is out of town and choice hookers aren’t readily available and pleasuring women is therefore out of the question, I’ll put something in my mouth, bite down hard on it, cover my face with a wet washcloth, letting myself holler (while on similar occasions it’s enough simply to bury my head in blankets). But tonight I’m discovering that long walks are the most reliable option of all--not because they put you to sleep, no, but quite the opposite, because they keep you fully awake. Perhaps sleep is just a small atrocity that occurs to the unsuspecting brain. If you can recognize the onset of sleep you can ward it off before succumbing to its oblivion. Do I smoke? No. Do I drink alcohol or coffee? No. Do I take sleeping pills? No. Do I subsist on a Diet Coke-and-pizza diet? No, not since last summer. So maybe I can add sleep to my list of no’s. Okay, then take it a step further. If I can walk away from sleep, what keeps me from doing the same with regards to death? Indeed, the very idea right now would seem to lift a huge burden off my shoulders. Apparently somewhere in the past I inherited the notion that sleeping and dying are constraints on human life which can, at best, be coped with. Tonight, however, I see them for what they are. The deepest needs of my being are now fully satisfied. How can I not smile? I’m succeeding far beyond what most men do with two good legs--I’m behaving like a true gentleman.

Digital timers now tick away the last minutes of a test long, long underway. I’m finally starting to see the fences--electrified, of course--and the transformers. But this is no sensation of concrete or pavement beneath me. Nope. This is steel mesh--because tonight I accomplish my first full mission. The whole world is watching me. How many people in Venezuela know about this expansion? I close the faceplate of my pressure helmet. I slide back a section of the cylinder. And? I approach the entrance ramp to the northbound lanes of Interstate-5.

I’m Afraid I Don’t Quite Follow

Routine’s boring but it keeps you out of trouble. It also keeps your mind from breeding vermin. In everything I do, in everything I think, I need to feel that ‘distant closeness.’

One day I’m browsing through a Porsche showroom near my home in Southern California when who do I run into but my former parole officer. We exchange pleasantries of course. We have to. He says, ‘You look really good,’ and I reply, ‘It’s those energy-enhancing vitamins and a daily jog around the Hollywood Reservoir.’ He asks about my trivial outbursts of anger. ‘Not much anymore,’ I answer, ‘because I’m cultivating a kind of self- control.’ ‘Good to hear,’ he says, ‘but keep in mind that abilities of every sort must evolve. Try to exercise patience.’ Before leaving I remind the car dealer to check all his EXIT signs. ‘It’s only a little bulb,’ I tell him, ‘but it makes a big difference to the safety of the customer.’

The next day, a Sunday, I decide to visit an open-house advertised in the LA Times. It’s in Hollywood, near the 101 Freeway. I take a Polaroid camera and an electric stun-gun. The real estate agent is an Irish woman if I ever saw one. Unprofessional too. Her backless dress dips an inch below her coccyx. Her name’s Maggie Luckenbill. It appears I’m the only arrival today. I take a few Polaroids of the place which, at first sight, is merely your typical Southern California bungalow. But then we go into the library where Maggie reveals a whole suite of rooms behind a sliding bookcase. Although empty now, except for the bronzed viscera of a small mammal, I imagine an occultist or alchemist once worked back there. I ask her if the owner would agree to my renting the property. ‘I doubt it,’ she says. ‘I understand,’ I reply, ‘besides, many persons have doubts, even religious persons.’ ‘I don’t quite follow,’ she says. ‘No problem,’ I reply, ‘because the important thing here is to believe, not to hope but to believe.’

Whole sections of days sometimes disappear from my memory. I’m walking through one of the seedier sections of downtown LA--every business I pass has one of those roll-down security fences--when suddenly a white, nondescript van pulls up beside me, the passenger-side sliding-door opens, and I’m forcibly shoved inside by a ski-masked pedestrian who’s apparently been in pursuit. Am I alarmed? You bet. Just yesterday my friend got busted dealing dope out at Denny’s. The assailant asks me, ‘Where’s the money?’ ‘What money?’ I reply. ‘The billion dollars.’ ‘Billion dollars?’ ‘That’s right,’ he snarls, ‘a billion dollars gone missing, a billion--that’s ten raised to the ninth power.’

Here was a new and complex sensation, comparable only to Father’s intrusive probing of my childhood subconscious: the vast cyclic movements of Earth. No Irish woman ever felt it, and yet her brassiere’s showing, and her backside reminds me of the great flanks of Venus. She slowly pushes the room-service cart down the spacious corridor. Unfortunately most of the rooms she passes show DO NOT DISTURB signs. Mine does not, however, and when she reaches my room I ask for the two bottles of Dr. Pepper I ordered. ‘Put it on my tab,’ I say. She nods. I then add, ‘A second ago your bra was showing--just thought you might want to know.’ She pushes the cart past me, not saying a word. ‘Have it your way,’ I call after her, ‘besides, how do you know I’m not connected with the Chicago Mob? Got any counterfeit gambling chips?’ She gives me the finger. I can’t believe it. So this is Las Vegas hospitality?

I cruise Las Vegas Boulevard wearing my favorite pair of night- vision goggles. My motive is not prurience but simple curiosity-- to solve the mysteries of night through successive approximation. Up ahead it appears a giant rocket is rising with a scream over a vast river of flame and a field of onyx chessmen. I pull over to enjoy the spectacle. A few minutes later a hooker walks up to the car and taps on the glass. I roll down the window. ‘Yes?’ ‘Oh, wow,’ she says, ‘cool glasses. Need some company tonight?’ ‘Sure. Get in.’ I unlock the door to let her in. She’s wearing a see-through tank-top with spaghetti-straps, a leather miniskirt, and the standard high heels. No eye makeup, however. ‘So what do you have in mind?’ she asks. ‘Well, can you get me a Mexican passport?’ ‘What for?’ ‘That’s not important. Can you get one?’ ‘Maybe, yeah... I know some people.’ ‘What kind of people?’ ‘People who forge documents.’ ‘No,’ I say, ‘you don’t understand. I don’t want a fake Mexican passport. I want a real one.’ ‘In your name?’ ‘In anyone’s name, just so long as it’s real.’ ‘Then how would I get it?’ ‘I don’t know. You’re a hooker. Maybe you rip it off one of your Mexican johns. How about that?’ She thinks for awhile and finally asks to be let out of the car. I oblige.

Do I believe in the Eucharist? Sure, sometimes. Hell, I’ve seen a naked girl walk through a wall formed by the interference of two wave-fronts of light. I’ve seen Night of the Living Dead--talk about elevating and breaking the host, and the din of barking was incredible! But the laundromat is crowded today, far too crowded for my tastes. So I walk over to the nearest front-loading dryer and begin removing wet clothes in order to make room for my own. Suddenly a young lady rushes towards me. She asks me what I’m doing. ‘Your eyes get real big when you’re surprised,’ I say, ‘do you know that?’ ‘Give me back my clothes’ she yells, ‘and put them back in the dryer!’ Instead I put her clothes in the nearest washer, change the settings to HIGH HEAT, and slam in four quarters. ‘There,’ I say, ‘now they’ll shrink to nothing and you can walk around looking the whore you really are.’

So here I am, on Ocean Front Walk, confronted by a consumptive man equipped with a doll’s face and a propagandist’s breast- pocket. I walk up to him and ask, ‘Is it dress-up day or something?’ He ignores my question and launches into a frenzied diatribe against the Central Intelligence Agency. I can smell alcohol on his breath and feces on his fingertips. When he finally finishes some five minutes later I simply reply, ‘Yep, it’s late in the day all right.’

I’m too young for semantics, and I’m far too impatient to listen to the language of memory. This afternoon I stand in the sunlight eating two hot tomales beside a vendor’s cart. He’s a kind Mexican fellow, and best of all, he doesn’t look like a dork. ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ I ask him, ‘that some events are part of a calculated, concerted conspiracy?’ ‘Like what?’ he asks. ‘Oh, like death.’ ‘What do you mean?’ he asks. ‘I mean death, the word “death.” Last time I checked it’s only a word, but a word given terrifying content by a group of highly placed political malefactors.’ The vendor pauses for a moment, then says, ‘I guess I don’t quite follow.’ ‘Ah forget about it,’ I say, ‘maybe reproduction really is the beginning of death.’ ‘Maybe,’ he replies. ‘In any case,’ I say, ‘never forget that heaven and hell, like everything else you might care to mention, exist only within the confines of your imagination.’

Only a nobody walks in LA, and yet it’s only those nobodies who leave a video trail. You’ve got to wonder. Three satellites can triangulate the location of any car once the proper transmitter and antenna are put into place. Are such contraptions made on Earth or here on our own planet? Electricity under God! Well, I walk over to the salesclerk who works in the furs department and ask, ‘Have you clubbed a baby seal today?’ She’s not impressed. She’s heard that one a million times, I’m sure, so I up the ante and ask, ‘Is that why I was hit over the head and rewarded a three-week vacation?’ Her blue eyes blaze coldly. Finally she says, ‘Sir, may I help you with anything?’ ‘Oh I’m sorry,’ I reply, ‘but my head’s a little slow since it got bumped.’ ‘Sir, I have to attend to other customers. I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have if they come up.’ She turns and walks away. ‘You seem to be in a godawful rush not to hear about the plight of my crippled Quaker father,’ I yell after her.

This one’s Baby Tuckoo. She’s not dead--she’s simply changed her body-clock and faded out like a piece of film left in the sun. Over here, these are a pony, a rabbit, and a meal of soup and crackers. Over there, that’s Gondwanaland, where the mountains touch the sky. ‘She can’t hear you,’ the nurse tells me, ‘because the last injection still hasn’t worn off.’ ‘I know,’ I say, ‘besides, things can’t stay the same. It’s far too dangerous.’ ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow,’ she says. ‘I mean I wouldn’t want to be in the eleventh grade for the rest of my life either.’ ‘You must understand,’ the nurse says, ‘that after her body recovers fully, she’ll need a thorough psychiatric examination. These bouts of severe depression often recur without proper treatment, each one more severe than the last, until...’ ‘Are you trying to refer to that big whatever-it-is thingy?’ I ask her. The nurse momentarily frowns at me before turning around and leaving the room.

I’m walking around nearly doubled over from the ickiness of it all, telling myself over and over again, ‘You have no business putting this filth into a computer.’ And what happens? The knot in my stomach just keeps growing larger. It’s a week before Christmas. ‘How are your injuries now?’ I ask my girlfriend. ‘Now?’ ‘Yes, now, as opposed to later.’ She thinks for a moment and says, ‘I’m not hurt, not badly.’ ‘But you are hurt,’ I say. ‘I suppose I am,’ she replies, ‘but the psychoanalysis should take care of it.’ ‘You want a Coke?’ I ask her. She nods. I go into the kitchen and return with two cans of Coke. ‘Are you hungry? Can I fix you anything?’ She shakes her head. ‘Now what’s that supposed to mean?’ ‘I’m not hungry is all.’ ‘Okay then.’ We drink our Cokes in silence.

It’s Christmas Eve. My girlfriend and I sit in the living room, waiting for Santa Claus. ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ I say aloud, ‘where the hell is he?’ We sit quietly for several minutes, lost in our individual thoughts, before finally I say, ‘Your mother has a new boyfriend, doesn’t she?’ ‘What are you so angry about?’ she replies. ‘Nothing, nothing at all. I’m just curious. Does your mother have a new boyfriend or doesn’t she?’ She lets out a sigh and says, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You must know,’ I say, ‘because she’s your mom.’ ‘I said I don’t know, and I don’t care either.’ ‘Is the psychoanalysis working?’ I ask her. ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’ ‘Well what do you know?’ ‘I know you’re irritating me with all these questions.’ ‘Oh, so I’m the cause of all your problems?’ ‘Go to hell!’ she yells at me, jumping off the couch, and running upstairs, leaving me to spend the rest of the night alone waiting for Santa Claus. The bastard never arrives.

See also Causes of Delight

I

I like to watch sci-fi movies before turning in for the night. My wife prefers old Matlock episodes or Unsolved Mysteries. So we alternate. Tonight it’s Unsolved Mysteries.

I keep a crowbar under my side of the bed. It gives my wife the creeps. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m going to use it on her. The person I’m going to use it on is the psycho-pervert who, over the past three months, has been breaking into people’s houses and jerking off in their beds, usually when they’re not home. The two times he discovered sleeping bodies already in the bed, he first murdered them with his bare hands before jerking off. Why the cops can’t apprehend this lunatic I have no idea (they must have fingerprints and DNA), but I’m not taking any chances.

I pull my wife under the covers now and curl my arms around her waist. Her hair is damp, smelling of Alberto VO5. I squeeze her tighter. Her body softens in my arms. I like it when we make love to the crude sexual lyrics of rap music. She sings along, making little O’s with her mouth, while I’m giving it to her rough and hard. Afterwards, it’s into and out of the shower. Quickly. She likes it when I wear children’s Pokeman underwear--form follows function. We both like it when I nuzzle against her belly (though not on the carpet, please). I also like to put odd or offensive items into her little red vanity kit.

Myself, I’d rather not watch Unsolved Mysteries right before bedtime because it gets my mind racing, and racing thoughts left unchecked, having shifted into overdrive, finally crash headlong into a migraine. Consequently, two hours later I’m sitting up in bed waiting for the Tylenol PM to take effect. I’m snacking on a sort of trail mix my wife calls gorp. The bedroom is pitch black-- I can’t see my hand in front of my face--because even the tiniest sliver of light disturbs my wife’s slumber. To help myself relax I begin to mentally enumerate all the objects in the bedroom. On the wall above our bed hang two poster-size reproductions, a Caravaggio and a Roy Lichtenstein. Over against the opposite wall is the--wait! I’m picking up noises from the far end of the attic. A tiny voice screams into my ear, Rats again! My heart ascends to within an inch of my tonsils. The food in my stomach wells up into my throat. A trace of gastric spritz tickles my tongue. I’m dumbfounded. We’re never going to get rid of those rats, and I’m never going to get any sleep. Attic access is by a pull-down stair in the hallway. I keep a flashlight on the nightstand. It sounds like a long shot, but Lord Jesus, it’s more blessed to give than to receive. I hope to be back in bed at my wife’s side by morning.

II

I suppose there’s no particular significance to hearing a radio in a dream, but what about the importance of locale? In particular, a window seat on an old-time airliner. Pleated gray curtains cover the windows. Note--in the dream I’m riding on an airplane, not piloting one, or standing on the ground watching one. Seems to me these are three quite different scenarios, each deserving its unique interpretation. The worst dream I ever experienced--I guess the proper term here is ‘nightmare’--was rather brief: I’m in the kitchen cooking (which in itself is odd, since my wife does most of the cooking around here) when suddenly I suffer a dizzy spell over the stove. I fall directly onto the burners, start screaming horribly--ah but then my wife shook me awake, so I’ll never know how it would’ve ended.

It’s also worth mentioning those times the telephone or doorbell or alarm clock interrupts a dream. No way you can predict what will happen. I’ll also confess that, at least according to my own experience, we rarely dream of things that are physically impossible in the world of the waking. Stuffing an elephant into a refrigerator. Hugging a waterfall. A miserly infant. Bleeding cheese. By far the weirdest object I ever encountered in a dream was a syringe that doubled as a telescope. The second weirdest was a palm-tree parasol. The third weirdest, a sundial on stilts. And the fourth, a crucifix made of cork.

Then there are the dreams that remain with us for most of our lives (like that line from the Tom Cruise movie, the dream is always the same). In my case, it’s the sexual advances of a former coworker named Sandy Tyler. Every time she places her hand on my crotch I’m shocked, incredulous. I wake up quite astonished, sitting bolt upright in bed. In another semi-monthly dream, I’m standing in the middle of a desert (and I’ve never even seen a desert except from an airplane), when I’m approached by a bare-chested man wearing jeans and a cowhide belt. The odd thing about him is his right arm has been amputated at the shoulder. Quite brazenly he strides up to where I’m standing. Sweat droplets run down his neck. I feel a kind of flush sweep through my body. He then says to me, in a threatening voice, words that, to this day, I still haven’t deciphered: “So I see you’re not being a Christian again!” At which point I awaken. Thing is, I’ve never been a Christian or affiliated with any other religion, for that matter. My parents, before their untimely deaths in a freeway mishap, were both lifelong atheists who despised organized religion and raised me, their only son, to be the same. (They only partially succeeded--I merely make fun of religion. I don’t proselytize against it.)

III

--Open your front door! --Why should I? --Just do it!

According to the delivery boy, our morning newspaper was stolen after he delivered it. I suspect that over the past couple weeks some of our mail has also been stolen, or if not stolen at least tampered with. There’s more. Two, three times a day we get obscene phone calls that Caller ID identifies as ‘anonymous.’ My guess is it’s a phone solicitor harassing us for hanging up on him before he could explain what he was selling. However, a few weeks ago the neighbors’ two daughters, both elementary-school age, were playing in their backyard, first with a Play-Doh Fun Factory, but then a bit latter with several books of matches. When I asked them what they were up to, they said they were trying to build a campfire. When I threatened to call their parents, they ran inside. So maybe it’s their mom who’s making the phone calls. Or maybe it’s my other neighbor Ronald Wright, a wheelchair- bound, mucus-snorting, oxygen-toting paranoiac-octogenarian whose home was recently burgled by teenagers looking for painkillers. Or maybe it’s Hannibal Lecter. Ever try dialing 911 and screaming incoherently?

Anyhow, I have the place all to myself for the entire weekend. My wife is up in Arlington, Virginia, visiting her parents. Her father’s kidneys are on the verge of shutting down. I don’t even want to think about it. I’ve just returned from the local market with handfuls of peaches and strawberries, a jug of apple cider, and a box of chocolate-covered graham crackers. For at least two days no one’s ramming a Pop Tart or frozen pizza down my throat. I’ll drink coffee, lots of coffee, all of it black, followed by a couple snifters of brandy to take the edge off all that coffee--but no dessert, no point in overdoing it. I’ll then synchronize my watch with the VCR before going out drinking on Saturday night. I also plan to visit an antiques show at the National Guard armory Sunday afternoon.

The Prozac must be taking effect. I’m starting to feel detached from myself and everything around me, like I’m that kid actor who sees dead people--no, more like I’m returning home after many years’ absence. Well, here goes. I put down the canister of Pringles, wash and dry my hands, snap on a pair of latex gloves, and walk down the hallway to my wife’s study. The telephone starts ringing again but this time I let the answering machine take care of it. My wife’s study is her private world. I’m rarely alone in there, but if I am, it feels kind of weird, intrusive, dangerous, like it might even be booby-trapped. If I stay too long, I begin to feel unsure of myself, my worth, my looks, even ashamed of our vigorous sex life. Then what’s so immoral about it? Well, I open the door, flip on the ceiling light, and step inside. The blinds are drawn. A sharp, fruity smell fills the stuffy air. Several Disney animation cells decorate the walls. I make a quick gestalt of the room’s contents: cheap laminate bookcases, a desktop photocopier, a fax machine, a StairMaster, a Macintosh Power PC. What secrets could she be hiding in all this high-tech clutter? Stolen jewelry? But I’m standing there now in full ‘agoraphobiac mode,’ heart racing, eyes twitching, not knowing what to do, trying to restrain myself, until finally I take a deep breath and grab on to my beautiful hard cock. OK, faggot, we’re going for a ride.

I have my own study that serves as my private world, though, in my case, it’s a world without style or pretense. I don’t even have a CD player yet. However my cassette deck is of reasonable quality. I can enjoy a whole ninety minutes of Led Zeppelin or Deep Purple. Sound familiar? It is what it is. I mainly use my study as a storage area for various antiques and a small cache of Class Three firearms, including a Beretta submachine gun and two MAC10s. In the closet I hide a black Naugahyde attaché case filled with stacks of crisp twenty-dollar bills. I take the case over to my desk now and open it. I enjoy riffling through the currency. Each bill has the same serial number. Phony? Yeah, that’s what it means, I’m afraid. I’ll never risk spending any of these bills, but I’ll never destroy them either (and I can’t relate, for obvious reasons, how I came into their possession). As I look at the money, nerves deep within my brain begin to awaken and groan with real pleasure. Sounds dangerous, I know, and I wonder whether I should take off all my clothes, but I’m in ‘practical mode’ now. I’m especially respectable--en route to Lazarus’s tomb for an advanced lesson in faith-healing. And what the hell’s that supposed to mean? Well, I love this song. It’s one of my favorites. To prove it--I can control myself, I can control any situation, I don’t need your lectures! Ten minutes later I return the attaché case to the closet.

IV

Fuck--I forgot the muffins! Oh well, my wife takes cheese in her omelet anyway. She also says her father has less than a month to live, which means for us, among other things, an unplanned vacation to Arlington, Virginia, to attend his funeral. No problem. We can afford it. We’ll also have an excuse to take in some sightseeing. Neat. I’ve always wanted to see in person the buildings that house our federal government. It can’t be all that dangerous, but if things do get out of hand, I can fake a heart attack.

Now listen to me reminisce: You know how you can get fooled out in California? A Christmas dinner is such an odd event if you’re from the East Coast, while an all-expense-paid tour of Hollywood, even when it delivers on the promise of busty women in sequined thongs, rarely avoids the petty annoyances of traffic. But I took lots of photos anyway since that’s what a tourist is supposed to do. Quite the sights. A gang of punked-out queers with HIV+ tattooed on their shoulders slumming along a seedier stretch of Sunset. A street musician in black shirt, black jeans, and black leather jacket, his hair apparently styled by a garbage disposal, strumming an out-of-tune acoustic and mumbling the words to ‘Working Class Hero.’ I’m thinking, Into the mic, man! Into the mic! There was an invalid whose jaws were too small for the size of his teeth. There were unbelievably worn-out hookers with flabby stomachs. There was a gigantic film advertisement depicting a gleaming steak knife plunged between two noteworthy breasts. And finally, there was a group of motorcycle cops outfitted like ninjas. So what if someone got hurt? Later that afternoon I processed my film at a one-hour photo lab. Every photograph was overexposed. Hallelujah!

So I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not getting fooled the same way in Washington, D.C. And by the way, the TV is reporting that the newly elected President has inoperable lung cancer. He sure sounds like he deserves it. His two closest advisors, the Great Architect and the New Physician, are very careful to monitor his speech centers. Unfortunately, his genes, chromosomes, nuclei, molecules--all are now open to scrutiny by the mass media. Yet our Supreme Court cannot identify him as terminal until the twentieth week of his Presidency! Still more proof that pride cometh before the fall.

V

On the wall of my study I’ve tacked up a large-scale topographical map of the District of Columbia, including the bordering regions of Virginia and Maryland. I’m preparing myself for our vacation. The nation’s capital is, by nature, bewildering to an outsider, and often downright embarrassing. It’s like waving back at someone who isn’t really waving in your direction. The salt of the earth may elect them, but those old politicians treat us like who the fuck are you? Yeah right, I’d reply, and hey, I never saw you in the office the night you allegedly . . . Anyhow, you get the picture. News spreads fast within the beltway. Thankfully when the SWAT team breaks down your door they yell police! so you know exactly who it is.

I have the piece of toast evenly covered with rhubarb jam and am about to cut it into triangles when the phone rings. Caller ID shows ‘anonymous.’ Hullo? Hullo? Anybody there? . . . Who the hell are you? Only the shallow breathing of a criminal. But this time I’m in no mood for entertaining profound thoughts. My eloquence rises to dramatic heights. I totally lose myself to rage. Before long my eyes are streaming, my throat sore. At last I think I detect a defensiveness in the silence on the other end of the line. Peace! I scream, before slamming the handset down onto the receiver.

Tonight we’re lying in bed together watching Unsolved Mysteries. When the show ends I reach out to take my wife into my arms and kiss her. I pretend that all my life I’ve waited for this moment. She looks at me with wide-eyed wonder. I suppose she’s thinking about her father. He’s hardly said a word to her since becoming comatose. So that’s it. And all for what? To spend more money? Seems to me that’s what he valued over everything else. I wonder how many secrets he kept from me and my wife. And all for what? An obsessive sense of privacy? If he’s lucid in his comatose state, I imagine he’s asking himself, Why not a new house and new furnishings at the eleventh hour? But it doesn’t work that way. The illusion is irrevocably done. Now is just the jumping-off point. For once he gets to feel alien and lonely, rejected, invisible, unloved--a real ego-trip, though probably not the sort he ever imagined embarking upon. But if he sticks with it, gets used to it, he’ll become oddly insubstantial, disembodied, sort of like a ghostly tourist. He’ll see all those funny shapes and manifestations of form, with arms, legs, heads, and so on. He’ll understand that although the brain is a marvelous invention, there are some things it simply cannot do. He’ll also sense that his appetite isn’t what it once was (perhaps the sight of all those empty tables). Money will then finally get old and lose its shine. Finally, the question will dawn on him. Well, what do I do next?

Hah! You want to know what my income potential is--at a time like this?! Please, help me clean these insects from my intestines.

VI

God knows I don’t want to be here. Washington, D.C. has thoroughly betrayed my expectations. Besides government buildings and museums, it’s mainly hotels, restaurants, and housing. Shiny new Lexuses, Lincoln Navigators, and BMWs all with heavily tinted windows drive right on by sweatshirt-hooded, multi-pierced miscreants smoking crack out on the sidewalks or shooting up in doorways. Nothing cozy about the place. I’m bone-tired, hungry enough to eat two Big Macs in one sitting. So far, the two highlights of the trip are, first, a photo my wife took of me posing with my MAC10 in front of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and second, purchasing White House souvenirs with a couple of my phony twenty-dollar bills. Light- hearted crime at its very best. (So, arrest me if you can’t take a joke. Illegal humor is liberating. You should try it some time.) We toured the FBI and took lots of detailed photos of a building that apparently houses the IRS. Unfortunately we failed to locate the headquarters of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Of course my wife and I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for her father passing away. I can accept that. I’m loyal to my in- laws. Turns out her father is eligible to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery. Plus, it’s free of charge. A sign at the cemetery’s entrance reads, No Gays in the Military. What a joke! My wife and I know a lot of such men. Top brass. The ones who like dressing up. The ones who suck your dick, then go back to their straight lives to brag about how disgusting gays are. The ones who never venture beyond masturbation. Why even bother? Anyhow, it’s medium-nice, afternoon-type weather, ideal for a leisurely stroll through a cemetery. I’m wearing jeans, an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt, and Birkenstocks. In one hand I’m carrying my MAC10, in the other a crumpled-up supermarket bag filled with fruit smoothies and fresh pastries, mostly cinammon- sugar rolls and banana-nut bagels. My wife, in her black leather Nine West platform loafers, beige slacks, and University of Michigan sweatshirt, is carrying a large beach blanket. Her black hair is tied back. No makeup except for lip gloss. She smells like orange and coconut.

Arlington National Cemetery is a scary place, even if you don’t believe in God. From denial to grief to rage is the trajectory they’re aiming for here. Row after row of white marble headstones. It looks like a fucking rapture (in the Baptist sense of the term). All the same, it’s also a rather masculine place.

Nervous laughter. My wife stops to blow her nose. Right now I’m what you’d call ‘comfortably angry.’ I don’t want to hurt anybody, though, of course, I probably could be tempted--by pleasures unexpected. I’m just the wacky sort of guy to do something like that, now aren’t I?

We begin walking again. We’re drifting in that direction anyhow. The white headstones stretch towards infinity. I sling the MAC10 over my left shoulder, put my arm around my wife’s waist. I like the way her body feels, the way it smells. I like that she doesn’t talk all the time.

The MAC10 gives my wife the creeps. I don’t know why. It’s not like I’m going to use it on her. The five women I’ve used it on are far, far away from here, buried in the uninhabited woods several blocks from our house.

Marcie Timmons

Something about her was familiar. He swore he’d seen her face before. But the first time he actually laid eyes on her was in the park across the street from the state-police barracks. She was sitting alone on a bench picking fuzz balls off her sweater, not far from where, some two weeks later, her body would be discovered in a pile of autumn leaves with a black nylon stocking twisted around its throat and evidence of blunt-force trauma to the head. The second time he saw her, rain was coming down in sheets. It was late at night, in the dining room of a Waffle House. They were the only two remaining customers. He was drinking cup after cup of black coffee. She was thinking about her parents back in Indiana. He admired her firm, up-tilted breasts and liked how she’d threaded the length of her long blonde hair through the hole in the back of her baseball cap. The third time he saw her, he was disguised as a florist’s delivery-man who’d lost his way in the neighborhood and mistaken her house for someone else’s. As she gave him directions she was careful to hold the neck of her bathrobe together. Glancing past her shoulder into the house, he glimpsed a rather large livingroom with lots of deep furniture and throw- pillows. The fourth time, he watched her get into a little red Miata in the parking lot of a large indoor shopping mall. That was the last time he saw her in person. The fifth time, her brutal rape and murder were an item on the local evening news. He learned that her name was Marcie Timmons and that a DNA analysis of dried semen was underway. Later the same evening, he signed on to AOL, pulled up Google, typed in the words, ‘Marcie Timmons,’ and clicked on the SEARCH button. It turned out she’d been keeping a web-log over the past year. After reading several entries, he gathered she was a rather rambunctious, fast-living twenty-five-year-old who worked as a cashier at a department store during the week while tending bar on the weekends. He was intrigued and stayed up most of the night, carefully reading each entry of the web-log, starting from the most recent postings and working his way into the past. He wanted to find evidence of some series of events which inevitably led to her being raped and murdered. He took copious notes. The following morning, at the Waffle House, over a breakfast of blueberry pancakes and fresh-squeezed orange juice, he studied these notes, looking for patterns, signs, and foreshadowings, but ultimately found nothing. On his way out of the restaurant, he threw the notes into a garbage can before returning home. Over the course of the next couple weeks, he would be haunted by memories of Marcie Timmons. Odd sensations brought images of her face and body to mind, sensations like the smell of pepperoni or the sounds of canned laughter or the feel of a foil-covered chocolate egg. He regularly surfed the Internet for any new information regarding her life and death. One of her friends now had a web-page devoted to the memory of Marcie Timmons. He saw many photographs of her there, some of them taken on the Florida beaches during the previous spring-break. She was incredibly sexy in a two-piece bikini. Her skin was tanned to a dark brown. Her arms and legs were nicely toned. He downloaded several of the photos, printed them on photo-quality paper, framed them, and placed them on his desk as a shrine to Marcie Timmons, the young lady who was raped and murdered before he was able to overcome his own shyness and make her acquaintance. A month later, Marcie Timmon’s murderer was still at large. For some reason this greatly worried him. He felt his own life was also in jeopardy. Knowing how murderers often return to their own crime scenes, he began regularly visiting the park where her body had been found, keeping an eye out for suspicious people, hoping the killer’s disguise would give him away. (After thorough consideration, he’d decided the perfect disguise for a sexual predator would be an FBI profiler.) But nothing came of his efforts. One Saturday morning, upon returning home from the park, he went into his study and removed from a filing cabinet all of his old bank statements, canceled checks, and income tax returns, taking them outside to the barbecue grill where he doused them with lighter-fluid and set them on fire. He ate chicken salad for lunch, then went upstairs to take a nap on the large, four-poster bed. He awoke sometime later to frantic knocking at the front door, but he was too tired to get up. The knocks soon subsided. Around five-o’clock he finally rose from bed, walked downstairs to the kitchen, and ate a cheese- mushroom-and-tomato omelet along with several crescents of cantaloupe. He spent the rest of the evening and a large part of the night surfing the Internet. Around the computer he arrayed several glass bowls of olives and nuts for snacking. Unfortunately he found nothing new regarding Marcie Timmons, but he did find incredible pictures of Nazis kissing babies. He also learned about subdural hematomas. The following morning, when he went outside to his Jeep Cherokee, he saw that his neighbors had set up a badminton net in the front yard beneath the large maple tree. Their house, with its glossy black shutters, ornate window-boxes, and waist-high iron fence, always put him in mind of a Beacon Hill townhouse, and although this certainly wasn’t Boston, his neighbors did enjoy putting on blue-blood airs. A couple years ago they’d invited him to a party where trays of mushroom puffs and pâté made the rounds before crisp brown roast duck was served as the main course. For some odd reason now, as he opened the car door to get in, he recalled once having read on the Internet how, during a domestic violence situation, it’s imperative to get the husband and wife out of the kitchen. Pulling away from the driveway, he decided, instead of the Waffle House, to drop in at the nearest Starbucks, where, upon arriving, he saw they were advertising wireless broadband Internet access. Unlike most of the customers in line, his order was quite simple: a large coffee, black. He drank it sitting behind the wheel of his parked car. Before leaving Starbucks, he put on a pair of Bose noise-reduction headphones. While yoga breathing helped only marginally, these headphones never failed to put him into a serene state of mind, which was particularly important for this morning’s drive. He drove past many dead malls and out-of-business establishments patrolled by rent-a-cops intent on preventing gangs from putting up graffiti tags. None of these places was adequately supported by the global supply-chain algorithms so necessary to today’s frictionless markets. But what did he care? He was just another fucking artist, a short-story writer whose core competencies were imagination and observation. The Internet had trivialized information-exchange and was on the verge of creating a totally sedentary society where all inputs and outputs would be within arm’s reach--so here was the extremity at both ends. The line of cars to board the ferry was quite long this morning. He had to wait more than hour, giving him ample time to recall, in chronological order, the four days he saw Marcie Timmons in person. Afterwards, he felt a tremendous sense of relief. And he was lucky today too: he would be the first to board the next ferry, and when his time came, he would accelerate forward, driving the Jeep Cherokee off the dock directly into the sound.

The Concussion

Since the age of fifteen his mind had been racked repeatedly by the same question. In this life, what is the proper thing to want? The answers he’d received he grouped into two broad categories, the abstract and the concrete. Abstract answers included ‘happiness,’ ‘well-being,’ ‘fulfillment,’ and ‘forgiveness (from God),’ while the more concrete were usually along the lines of ‘a career,’ ‘a faithful wife,’ ‘healthy children,’ and ‘a house.’ Of these, he ultimately chose the more concrete simply because concrete things are immediately perceptible and easily possessed. The reader must therefore understand that this man’s world was truly concrete, partly through genetics, partly through upbringing, and partly through strict self-discipline. Misery and suffering had always been impossible for such a man, nor could he ever perceive these in other people’s lives, since ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ are abstract words. They cannot be directly pointed at. The same applied to ‘stupidity,’ ‘corruption,’ ‘pain,’ and hundreds if not thousands of other words in the English language. No matter where he walked over the surface of the planet, none of these abstractions could ever take part in his life, and, by the age sixty, he had walked (or been conveyed) far and wide. His was a world of direct perception. Colors, sounds, smells, flavors, and tactile sensations all combined to form his own body as well as those bodies, both animate and inanimate, outside of him. Everything in his world capable of being named could also be pointed at. Naming and pointing went hand in hand. Thus, while it was possible to point at ‘a scrawny child dying of hunger in Africa,’ it was impossible to point at ‘misery’ or ‘suffering,’ for these were, so to speak, second-order words which, on his view, served only to cloud the crystalline clarity of perception. His ability to filter out all higher-order, abstract words was, he believed, a mark of genius, and he was certain all humanity would benefit greatly from just such a faculty. But he was not a teacher or a prophet. He was simply an observer and perhaps a reporter. The great artistic geniuses before him, those who, in some manner, had succeeded in surmounting the limits of civilization before either killing themselves, going insane, or dying under mysterious circumstances, had, time and again, failed to repel the lure of abstractions. Those given to fatalism in Russia and the East took ‘pity’ on humanity and railed against ‘God’ for the ‘suffering’ He admitted into His world, while those in the self- enterprising West experienced ‘disgust’ for humanity’s ‘stupidity,’ criticizing their fellow man for the world’s ‘sufferings.’ In either case, the words ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ had always been at the root of civilization. This man didn’t know why, and he didn’t really care, but it seemed only under threat of those two abstractions did people strive for the more desirable abstractions of ‘improvement,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘enlightenment,’ in such a manner creating the ultimate abstraction, ‘civilization.’ That autumn day he awoke from his afternoon nap at exactly twenty-three minutes to three. He rose from bed, walked over to the window, and watched his wife rake the oak leaves into several large piles. He watched her for awhile--he was an observer, after all--and some time later, still standing at the window, he hit upon the idea that humanity is, in fact, nothing more than an experiment whose purpose is to test the limits of the human organism. Of course he dismissed the thought immediately because of its abstract nature and refocused his attention on the leaves and the grass and his wife’s beautiful red hair. Ideas by the thousands had occurred to him throughout his life, and most all of them he’d dismissed as being abstract and therefore not ‘real.’ Once he entertained the idea that he was the unsuspecting victim of ‘a nihilistic plot,’ another time that ‘compassion’ was the only acid test by which to judge anyone. ‘Salvation through sin,’ ‘spiritual awakening through penance,’ and ‘prodigious imagination through self-destruction’ were all, for him, much more abstract and therefore more fraudulent than ‘a badly ventilated lion house,’ ‘crushed testicles,’ ‘a backyard bomb shelter,’ or ‘when the red red robin goes bob bob bobbin’ along.’ This man was a channel, a conduit of pure sensory perception. This writer therefore finds it impossible to translate his world directly into English which, like any other language, is, by its very nature, an abstract entity. In any case, his wife noticed him standing there at the bedroom window and called out, asking him to join her in gathering up the leaves. He smiled, nodded his head, and said he’d join her shortly. As he walked down the stairs, a wave of ‘happiness’ rushed over him. He was going to help his wife with the yard- work. For some reason this made him feel incredibly happy. Leaves and grass and a rake and gloves and a jacket. Were these delusions in an infinite series of delusions? Of course not. These were ‘happiness.’ And this must’ve been the first time in his life he didn’t immediately dismiss an abstraction from his mind. He dwelled upon it. When did a man discover he was truly happy? Well, when he was walking down the stairs to help his wife with the yard-work at five minutes to three. Once outside, he added the cool wind and the rustling leaves and the brick sidewalk and his wife’s eyes to the definition of ‘happiness.’ The list of descriptors could very well be infinite. ‘Happiness’ might subtend all concrete things. Unbelievable. Everything he saw, everything he did was just one more concrete thing filed under the abstract heading of ‘happiness.’ He wanted to do it all, all at once, regardless of obstacles, with all the recklessness and abandon of the Karamazovs. Then, on his way to the garage to fetch extra trash bags, he slipped on a wet patch, falling down and striking his head hard on the driveway pavement. He quickly passed out. When his wife found him she went into hysterics. The neighbors called an ambulance, and the man was whisked away to the nearest hospital. That day the doctors declared he’d suffered a serious concussion, making it doubtful he’d soon awaken from his coma. The man, of course, didn’t ‘mind,’ for he’d found the only ‘abstraction’ which mattered, finally putting to rest ‘life,’ ‘death,’ ‘eternity,’ and even ‘happiness.’

God Is a Fire in the Mind

He grew up on a hog farm in Iowa. During his adolescence he considered entering a monastery. He wasn’t religious. He simply wanted to escape from the sounds and smells of hogs. His father understood his plight and paid his son’s way through four years of college at the University of Iowa. Today, some ten years later, the externals of this man’s life had suddenly taken on the quality of a dream, and he was again considering entering a monastery. He lived in Des Moines, and ever since graduating from the university, where he took highest honors, he’d set foot outside of Iowa only twice, once to visit an old high-school friend who lived in St. Joseph, Missouri, and a second time to visit the Black Hills of South Dakota. It seemed that only in the happy seclusion of his rooms was he able to gather himself together, and because he earned a living designing English-language web-sites for clients abroad, all of whom he knew only through email, having never heard a single one of their voices over the phone, he was able to mark out a unique world within the walls of his high-rise apartment. (Yes, there are high-rise apartments in Des Moines.) At night, however, his dreams were becoming more and more obscene, to such an extent, in fact, that they were less dreams than nightmares, and nothing seemed to alleviate the problem, not porno movies, masturbation, or even regular sex with the forty-year-old divorced woman across the hall. He dreaded falling asleep. He would lie there in bed, for hours, staring up at the ceiling, playing round after round of golf in his mind. Each green was perfect. Each hole he birdied. But each night would inevitably be worse than the last. The dreams were incredibly vivid. The feel and odor of hot, sweaty flesh and the sounds of moaning were more real than anything in his apartment, indeed, than anything in the whole state of Iowa. During the day, when he wasn’t working, he found himself drinking cup after cup of coffee or can after can of Mountain Dew, lost in hours of endless thinking to no particular purpose. He didn’t cook for himself. He simply ordered out, usually pizza or a Stromboli sandwich. Finally, after months of such unreality, he decided one morning to strike out on his own and find that monastery. The following day would be the strangest of his life. He went eastward, driving his Toyota Camry through the cornfields of Iowa towards the cornfields of northern Illinois. He was dismayed to discover that Illinois, the third state of the union, outside of Iowa, he’d ever set foot in, looked almost identical to his home state. He wasn’t exactly sure what he expected, but the uniformity of the landscape put him into a panicked state of mind. He remembered the Black Hills of South Dakota and regretted he hadn’t driven northward, but turning back now would not cause these cornfields to vanish suddenly. He could only move forward. Then, in the middle of the night, somewhere outside of Peoria, his car ran out of gas. He’d been too preoccupied to notice the fuel gauge was on red. Unbelievable. Fortunately he was able to pull the car over to the shoulder. Still at a loss as to what to do next, he remained sitting behind the steering wheel and, in an attempt to calm himself, began playing a round of imaginary golf. This worked, for awhile. But soon he found himself slipping towards sleep. Minutes later he was startled awake by the thunderous whoosh of an eighteen-wheeler. He was thankful because he dreaded yet another nightmare. It would probably be better to stay awake. So he got out of the car. It felt good to stretch his legs and walk a bit. The hot, humid summer night was something new to him, and, with nothing else to do, he became restless to explore it. He made a quick survey of his surroundings and saw, more than a mile in the distance, a surprisingly well-lit building. In order to reach it on foot he would have to cross through a rather large cornfield. He retrieved a flashlight from the trunk of his car and locked all the doors. Walking through a cornfield at night was also something new to him. Because the building was situated at a rather sharp angle from his car, he would have to cut across row after row of corn in order to reach it. This made it quite difficult to maintain his bearing, and after some thirty minutes of walking in what he thought was a straight line, and finding nothing but still more corn, he decided he was lost. If he’d been a more experienced outdoorsman he might’ve used the stars to help guide him. It was a clear night, after all. But as things were, he could only follow the beam of the flashlight. He tried looking over the cornstalks in order to find the building, but the stalks were too tall, even if he jumped. An indecipherable collision of tendencies now welled up inside of him. He could either keep moving in the same direction, change direction entirely, turn around and try to find his car, or not move at all and wait for sunrise. He settled on the last option, believing that if he kept moving, in any direction, he could very well become more lost. He turned off the flashlight and sat down on the ground. He tried listening for the sounds of Interstate traffic, but either the traffic was too sparse or he was much farther away from the road than he thought, because he heard absolutely nothing except the rustle of cornstalks and the chirping of insects. The longer he sat there, the more his limbs and mind crowded with fatigue, until finally he lay back on the ground and relented to sleep. The dream was different this time. He was alone, walking the corridors of a vast, poorly lit hospital. He was searching for a particular room and having great difficulty finding it. Corridor after corridor revealed only hundreds of bedridden patients, many of them feverish, sweating, and lost in delirium. At some point he passed through a sort of fog to find himself at a doorway glowing with harsh white light. A sign beside the door declared, FACE TRANSPLANTS. He stepped inside and was immediately confronted by a very tall doctor dressed to perform surgery. The doctor shoved him back into the corridor, saying in a very stern voice, “There are human-like beings on this planet who have evolved far beyond humanity, and that gives me hope. Now go back to where you came from. There you’ll find what you’re looking for.” The following morning he awoke with sunlight in his eyes. Rather than continue his search for last night’s building, he decided to walk in the general direction of the Interstate. Some forty minutes later he had reached his car. Turning around, he was startled to see that the building in the distance was in fact a church. Not long afterwards, a kind woman, responding to the man’s outstretched thumb, pulled over and offered him, free of charge, three gallons of fuel intended for a lawnmower. This good fortune allowed him to reach the nearest exit and fill up the car’s tank. Now convinced that Iowa was as good of a place as any to establish a monastery, he turned his car around, returning home later that evening. That night, in his own bed, as he fully expected, he enjoyed a deep, dreamless sleep.

Very Fishy

I was tall and wiry, a rangy Texan in my mid-thirties who now lived in Florida. I dressed in jeans and cowboy boots. I wore an orange baseball cap. I was disobedient perhaps, and maybe I shrugged my shoulders a lot, but I had nothing left to lose except some highly sensitive family secrets and my father, who was laid up in the osteopathic hospital dying of cancer.

She was a small-boned woman with incredibly large breasts. Her clothes consisted of cut-off jeans, cowboy boots, and tight-fitting blouses. She worked at a strip mall during the day. She bathed in the river at night. That morning her blouse was unbuttoned to below her breasts. I could see her left nipple. I also noticed a small mole beneath her collarbone. She held the cigarette away from her lips as she spoke. She was saying she’d been married once and that she hoped to be again. But I was hardly listening. I was shaving at the kitchen sink, looking at myself in one of those circular mirrors. Later we ate breakfast together. I read the newspaper. After finishing my meal I stood up, walked over to her side of the table, and tried fondling her breasts. But she elbowed me and scowled, shaking her head. I moved my hand away. I told her I should be leaving anyhow. I had some important business. I really needed to be somewhere and meet someone. As I walked out the door she didn’t even say goodbye. I guess she was like that, up one minute, down the next.

I’d waited a long time for this opportunity and taken only alleyways across town in order to get here without anyone knowing and then parked my motorcycle three blocks from where I was now. I was sweating profusely. My hands were trembling. I was crouching behind a large rubber potted plant because there was nowhere else to hide. It was evening and quite warm, unusually warm for early June, yet the air was crystalline. I was looking across the street at an asphalt-shingled house. I could see, inside one of the windows, the glow of a sixty-watt light bulb, and on the windowsill an alarm clock. It was a four- paned window. Suddenly a black Chevrolet pickup appeared at the top of the house’s driveway. A man got out. He stood there for awhile, gazing up at the darkening sky, stroking his throat and chin, then rubbing his temples. I did not recognize him. Finally he returned to the pickup and drove off.

I spent twenty minutes searching every nook and cranny of that house. What a mess! Polaroids of naked women in lewd poses were thumb-tacked to the walls. In many of the photos the women were holding cans of beer or bottles of whiskey. They wore G-strings or black panties. I was searching for the photograph of one woman in particular. When I eventually found it, I removed it from the wall and placed it in my jacket pocket. I then reminded myself to stay away from the windows. Before leaving I leaned on the door-frame for awhile and smiled to myself. I was hungry. I wanted some spaghetti.

The next day I was walking along the pavement when suddenly I encountered the woman in the photograph. My God, I thought, she’s real! A white woman wearing a tiger-striped bathing suit and a floppy straw hat. She was skinny. She wore a cheap gold necklace. She was tanning in a lawn chair beside her trailer, rapidly flipping the pages of a magazine, pausing occasionally to remove a can of diet cola from its cup-holder and take a sip. I also noticed a little Negro boy in diapers peeping out from behind her chair. He was holding a plastic toy. The woman eventually glanced up and smiled in my direction. Moments later she invited me inside her trailer. She said her husband was unemployed and therefore out of town interviewing for a job. I sat down in the recliner. At first she sat down on the couch, but then she stood up and walked over to stand in front of me. I told her I knew her husband was, in fact, stealing and selling tires to make ends meet, but I assured her I wouldn’t turn him into the police. She didn’t reply, turned around, walked into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of whiskey and two red plastic cups. She sat down on my lap. I knew she liked drinking. I also knew she used to be waitress at a local café, though now she was jobless. The little Negro boy was sitting on the floor beside the recliner playing with his plastic toy. She put her arms around my neck. I cupped her breasts in my hands. We began kissing.

Later, I looked into her bright eyes and saw she wasn’t kidding (about her husband). Still, I wanted to reply. I really did. I wanted to argue with her too, but I couldn’t think of anything. I then realized that I, in fact, had nothing left to say that mattered. I no longer felt a connection--and suddenly the air in the trailer was heavy with humidity and rife with the odors of sweat and fried food. My chest began heaving. I needed to leave immediately. The interior of that trailer was reminding me of all the things I’d been trying so hard not to think about the past few days.

I’d heard that Florida was a wonderful place, but everyone in that mobile-home community was either a charlatan or an imbecile. Bone-jarring hurricanes threatened to flatten the entire establishment. I tried to imagine someplace equally as hot and boring to visit, but of course I couldn’t. Gravel roads stretched off into the distance. Rusty bicycles leaned against cinder-block walls. Puddles of stagnant water bred mosquitoes. I guess I was letting my mind wander. But what I really needed was to get my mind cleared, to let my thoughts go limp. I was hungry too. Though I would have to hurry. The sun was setting. Soon it would be dark.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the hamburger. I picked it up, took a bite. Lord, it was good. Juice ran down my chin. When the waitress passed my table I socked her on the arm and asked her to pass my compliments on to the cook.

A night like this came along once in a lifetime. She was an attractive woman. She looked cheerful and nonchalant. She lay on her side, mouth wide open, gills working. My knees felt so weak I could hardly stand. I approached the couch. She reached for my line. She laid her other hand on my thigh. I tried to chuckle to ease the awkwardness but almost fell over onto my back. A strange melancholy then washed over me. I felt hollow inside. Finally I began to relax. I raised my chin, took a deep breath, told her I was fine. She smiled tenderly, revealing a gold tooth, and nodded at me. Everything’s all right now, I thought, her husband won’t be coming back soon. But there was a pause, followed by a loud thump at the front door. We both startled. The hair bristled on my neck. I ran to the door, slid the bolt just as the doorknob rattled, and looked through the peephole. The man outside had a darkish tint to him. He had propped the screen-door open with a box. He simply stood there on the porch, silent. I turned around, returned to the sofa. Finally I was aroused.

By nine the next morning the man outside had left. I borrowed the woman’s car and drove into town. I barely made it to the McDonald’s drive-through window. I ate three breakfast burritos in the parking lot with the engine still running and the air- conditioner going full blast. At some point during that meal I realized I couldn’t keep the fantasy going any longer. My wife, no doubt, would be wondering where I’d disappeared to the past couple days. She would also be surprised to discover how over that period of time I’d broken into someone’s house and had sex with three women who were total strangers to me. She would certainly request an explanation for such outlandish behavior. But I didn’t have explanations. I didn’t even believe in explanations. There was no use getting angry about such things. Tomorrow would be here soon enough.

I pressed the glowing doorbell. No one answered. I turned the doorknob--and the door miraculously opened. I stepped inside--it was rather dark--and cautiously felt my way into the kitchen. In the half-light I noticed a birthday cake in the middle of the table and shiny Mylar balloons tied to the chair-backs. I went to the refrigerator and removed a six-pack of Coors. I took the beer over to the table, sat down, and cracked open one of the cans. I was thirsty. I quickly drained it. I opened a second can. Thirty minutes later I’d finished all six cans. Somehow I managed to stand up and stagger into the bedroom. I unrolled the bedroll, lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and tried to picture my father. My father. Instead I remembered a young man, in his mid- twenties, seated in a large armchair, bound and gagged. He was in wretched condition. His hair was straggly, his beard scruffy, his eyes bloodshot and hung with dark circles from lack of sleep. That man, of course, was me, the narrator, some ten years before. And now, as I fell into a deep sleep, I momentarily wondered, is the love I feel today equal to the pain I knew back then? The next morning I walked outside to the clearing behind our shed. I lifted the hinged lid and looked down. The trench was six feet deep. The dirt at the bottom was still fresh and moist. My wife lay on her side with her knees pulled up to her belly for warmth. She smelled strongly of sweat and urine. But she was still alive. Thank God.

Best-Case Scenario

Dear reader, I’m sorry this won’t be a more imaginative tale about, say, movie stars living in the south of France, or a sudden meeting between lovers in a rural long-distance bus station. But it all started on a Tuesday night in June, behind Julia Forbes’ house, where the lawn merged with the forest.

The church bell in the town square had just struck nine. Paul Lennox was lying on his back in a sleeping bag, looking up at the darkening sky, listening for the sounds of low-flying aircraft. A light sheen of perspiration glistened off his forehead. He’d been lying there for quite some time, in fact, pretending he was part of a covert military operation. But then, after awhile, he smiled more broadly and ran his thumb over his mouth when he realized his mind had wandered to the topic of women. He liked voluptuousness in a woman. He’d always been partial to blondes as well. He imagined a winding staircase, with window-seats at each of its two landings, leading him up to a lavishly furnished master suite. There, on the heart-shaped bed, reclined a gorgeous woman, totally nude, who gave Paul a glance of excited recognition upon his entrance. He began removing articles of clothing as he hurried across the room towards her. Interestingly, though she had blonde hair, her skin was colored a very dark black, black as ebony, with twinkling tattoos over her limbs and across her midsection that were obviously meant to mimic the constellations of the night sky. Her eyes flashed as well, or twinkled rather, much in the manner of a star. The two of them, Paul and this ebonite woman, would make love that night without the benefit of birth control, because--rest assured!--she was not ovulating.

The next day Paul was filled with nervous energy. He spent most of the morning fiddling with the amplifier to his electric guitar before launching into the Jimi Hendrix arrangement of “The Star Spangled Banner.” He then took a long walk around the neighborhood after lunch. The weather was balmy and clear. After returning home, he changed the oil in his pale blue Chevy pickup. Around five-o’clock he decided, more or less on the spur of the moment, to drive to the local church. For some inexplicable reason, Paul felt deeply compelled to pray in a house of worship (rather than in the privacy of his own home, where he usually accomplished this task). He didn’t shower or even change his clothes because he knew, in the eyes of God, all are equal.

A handful of people were scattered around the pews in the side chapels. These were the vanished or perhaps merely the unfortunate (it doesn’t matter). Anyhow, one of them was humming “Purple Haze” as if it were a church hymn, and he didn’t realize how foolish he sounded. At first, Julia thought he was an ugly s.o.b. He smelled slightly of grease or lubricant, and he was carrying a yellow shopping bag stuffed with Chinese- language newspapers. Yet he was also muscular and clean- shaven, with a sad urgency in his pale blue eyes that made Julia feel warm inside. She wanted to lead him outside, across town, upstairs, to her bedroom. So she looked up at him, her dark eyes equally sad, awaiting his verdict. Paul must have noted a certain dignity in her face, for in a suitably subtle sort of way he frowned, squinting his eyes. Neither one of them knew what to do next, whether to kiss or hug or simply shake hands. So Julia smiled, opened her mouth a little wider, and moved it slowly upwards towards his. Paul slid his hand along the back of her head and ruffled her hair. As they kissed, Julia imagined he was a retired Presbyterian minister (though Paul couldn’t have been older than forty).

Julia’s moods were usually compatible with the weather, which was balmy and clear the following day. Julia’s hair was long and blonde. Julia’s nails were polished. She was a tall woman, well- built, and yet she looked like fragile cargo. However, looks can be deceiving: she was also a sensual woman, and quite passionate, especially with men (though somewhat less so with women). Julia sat down now on the bed, taking off her earrings and bracelet, putting them on the night-table. Although it was nearly midnight, the light of the moon through the window lit up the ceiling. She leaned back on the pillows and looked up. If there was a crack in that ceiling, she probably wouldn’t notice it till morning. But an hour later she still hadn’t fallen asleep. She was thinking about Paul. She imagined the two of them trekking across France, sharing a train compartment with two gendarmes traveling north to fetch a prisoner, a local man who had murdered his wife and then fled to Paris. Julia was sitting slightly slumped over, her head on Paul’s shoulder, when suddenly one of the gendarmes reached into his tunic pocket and removed a pair of handcuffs. He then leaned across the compartment, efficiently slapping them onto Paul’s wrists. At the sound of metal striking metal, Julia gave out a small scream of fear, waking up. She was off the bed in an instant. And then a soft knock came at the bedroom door. It was Paul.

The next morning Julia poured herself another cup of coffee. During the night she’d decided the important things in life always happened by accident. Like last summer, when her only son was shot dead in his parked Honda Civic. It didn’t matter that the cops were sloppy and mishandled the evidence in their investigation of the homicide. Everyone knew how much cops detested paperwork. Everyone accepted their laziness and incompetence, much as the church’s congregation reluctantly accepted their minister’s extramarital dalliances with local teenage girls. It came with the territory. The wealthy town she and Paul lived in thrived on corrupt behavior. Corrupt behavior provided drama, which in turn dispelled the possibility of boredom. Julia walked into the bathroom now. The shower door was wet, the towels askew. She sat down on the toilet lid, putting her elbows on her knees, then her chin upon her outstretched palms (not as uncomfortable as it might sound). Now why would Paul be angry at her? Well, perhaps he suspected she was still sleeping with that nineteen-year-old computer-science major. And his suspicions were well-founded, as he had seen Julia and this young man drinking and dancing together in a nightclub across the street from the church. As much as she wanted to, Julia could not lie to him about that. But, she wondered, why couldn’t Paul understand how at the end of a long day of volunteer work she needed to release a certain amount of pent-up energy? And what better way than to get drunk and have sex with a man half her age? It felt quite liberating, in fact, and made her daily obligations to religion and holy ritual that much more meaningful. Her escapades also, in theory at least, were a benefit to Paul’s peace of mind, providing him ample opportunity to express his forgiveness.

Well, because housework wasn’t as mentally or emotionally demanding as volunteer work at a church, Julia often found herself avoiding the house or, at the very least, spending most of her time only in the kitchen. Right now Julia was nervous. Thinking about aborting a pregnancy always made her nervous. She was standing at the dining-room window. She had a clear view of the swimming pool and the woods that hemmed in the backyard. Perhaps one day in the not-too-distant future she too would be out there, in those woods, hiding there, perhaps even living there with a hillbilly type, a man with a large scruffy beard, a low forehead, bloodshot eyes, and a twang to his voice. Perhaps by then Paul wouldn’t care she was no longer pregnant because he’d be sleeping with other women. It probably wasn’t his child anyway. Julia imagined giving birth to the child, naming it Gretchen or, if it was a boy, Hans. Something very Germanic. She wondered momentarily if this child would also end up dead in a parked car. Never in her wildest dreams, of course, could such a scenario even be hinted at, much less realized in graphic imagery. But this was not her wildest dream, not yet anyway. Besides, how did one go about translating one’s wildest dream into the appropriate legalese? Turning away from the window, Julia walked through the front hall to the living room, where she lowered herself onto the sofa. She massaged her lower-back muscles, then focused her attention on the sacred painting that hung on the opposite wall. The last thing she wanted to think about right now was the abortion clinic.

Paul was tired of packing and unpacking, moving from one woman’s house to the next. If things weren’t working out with Julia, maybe he should move back in with Amanda, but rumor had it Amanda was shacking up with the Asian guy who cleaned Julia’s pool, strangely enough the very same man who had introduced Paul to his first and only male homosexual experience in the alley behind the church. True believers rarely had any sense of humor about what they believed in, otherwise they wouldn’t be true believers. So afterwards Paul had kicked the man in his crotch, leaving him there writhing in pain. Paul had also stolen the man’s yellow shopping bag of Chinese-language newspapers (which were promptly burned in the church incinerator). Anyhow, Paul couldn’t remember the last time he’d stayed in bed so long. He wasn’t tired, he was simply trying to find fresh perspective. Yet half an hour later there he was pawing through a basket of dirty laundry, trying to find something to wear. Was there any bleach in the house? But the house was silent, the kitchen pristine, with no sign of Julia having eaten breakfast. Paul, now wearing a yellow paint-spattered shirt and frayed denim shorts, walked over to the counter, where he gave a coffee mug a little nudge with his index finger. It was empty. He leaned against the counter with his arms folded and ankles crossed. He pressed his fingertips to his mouth. He was trying to imagine the best-case scenario for Julia’s disappearance. But nothing occurred to him. His mind instead was becoming a tangled mess of contradictory thoughts. So he simply opened the pantry door and walked outside, going around the swimming pool, towards the woods. He thought he might find Julia’s body there. In any case, her sudden disappearance was not Paul’s fault. And besides, where was the physical evidence that a murder had in fact been committed? And wouldn’t it be impossible to get a conviction without a corpus delicti?

The woods behind Julia’s house extended many acres through conservation land. There had once been houses in those woods. Only their crumbling foundations remained today, with maybe a cellar hole here and there. Oak, maple, and birch trees provided a thick canopy in the summer. Paul enjoyed the silence and the peace, and yet the farther he walked today the more uneasy he felt. It was an unease mixed with anger--because he’d been loyal and faithful to Julia. So how could she betray him for a nineteen- year-old nitwit? Well, perhaps the rumors had panned out: that nineteen-year-old nitwit was a very short man with a very long tape measure. She’d admitted to having two lovers before Paul. Somehow, fortunately, they both had faded away, leaving room for Paul whom she’d practically seduced in a church pew (it often happened that way).

The path through the forest was narrow yet defined. But for some reason today the scale of the woods was slightly off. In fact, the area seemed overly large, quite spread out, and rather frightening. Paul imagined soldiers rising up out of the ground from camouflaged trenches, striding towards him, shoving automatic weapons into his face, pinning his arms behind his back. In a few moments he would be dead. But then, just as quickly as they appeared, the soldiers vanished, leaving Paul alone again in the dense forest. So he continued walking (though now the path had merged with a muddy stream-bed). The afternoon sun was beginning to sink. How long had he been out here? In any case, he really needed to turn around and return home. His legs were sore, his breathing labored. Obviously his search had proven fruitless. Then suddenly Paul felt a shock of recognition--this was his moment of truth. It was finally time to confess what he’d done and risk going to jail. But what the hell had he done exactly? Assault Julia? If so, with what? What had actually happened? Paul’s gait now quickened. Yes, he needed to return home. He would find circumstantial evidence there, not out here in the woods. Of course that was the truth. There, in the bedroom, he would discover who had killed Julia. As he now recalled, she had been speaking with her father on the bedside phone, had just hung up, when Paul burst into the room. His entrance was so sudden she didn’t even have time to close her eyes and pretend she was sleeping or not feeling well. For a moment Paul too was disoriented, as the shifting moonlight made the furniture look larger, more dangerous. In Paul’s mind the bang of the gun was simultaneous with the crash of breaking glass. He imagined retinal hemorrhages in both her eyes.

Paul returned to the house out of breath and emotionally drained. Walking in the woods had been an incredible escape from the world, but now he was back, and certain issues had to be resolved.

Paul entered the front door, scrambled into the bedroom--to find Julia in bed making love to a young Asian man who couldn’t have been more than twenty, the very man Paul had befriended in the alley behind the church. On the one hand, of course, Paul was greatly relieved to find Julia had not been murdered, and yet on the other, he was quite infuriated to find her in such a state of physical disarray, groaning with pleasure while a dickless nitwit entered her repeatedly from behind. Clearly Julia had no self- respect. She would have to discuss this matter with the minister. But in the meantime it was Paul’s responsibility to resolve this nasty little affair.

Moments later, as he embraced Julia, and the young man lay in a coma on the floor, everything Paul had felt during the day came back: the disbelief, the anger, the fear, the exhaustion. Their embrace grew tighter, lasting longer than was comfortable for either of them, until finally Paul broke down, totally losing his composure, and the tears came as they never had before, tears of genuine forgiveness.

Beat the Drums

I

The cat is now out of the bag, and once more I’m surprised by the results, how, taken together, all of my endeavors comprise a continuous, premeditated story of motion and stillness. The real thing here, what gives these proceedings that special flavor, is the concept of ‘killing time.’ The pause that refreshes. A stone knife hanging there in midair, having just sampled the blood of knowledge. Triggered off. May 18, 9:45 am. Seconds later I awaken from a stupor. I feel feverish, chilled, weak, the taste of iron still in my mouth. Whew! Thank God I’m not a practicing scientist. Absolutely not. And who cares if there’s nothing good on TV--I can take care of myself today. I’m a liar, an accomplished liar, downright patronizing. I plan to mock the world forever, to fold up my notes and smile, blah blah blah. Motive? Yeah, the insurance money.

I don’t work Fridays, not regular paycheck work anyway, but since it’s considered abnormal to sit around all day staring at walls and ceilings, I decide to set out for a long morning stroll (though only after first taking a shower, brushing my teeth, and enjoying a few puffs from joint #2). On other, more ambitious days, of course, I first roam the estate, up and down its corridors, in and out of closets, past doors left ajar through fixed interior walls, groping about in the dark, coming upon the most impractical of objects. This estate, much like the city beyond its walls, is overly large for many apparent reasons. And questions. But what shall I say about a freedom fighter in a Metallica T- shirt?--except, Is this all I AM? or words to that effect, at a place where I can’t even imagine being depressed. Indeed, my mood, reflecting this morning’s fantastic weather, expands beyond eggshells, toothpicks, insane bicyclists, sun-baked mermaids, the rings of Saturn--finally to encroach upon the Orion Nebula. I maintain an up-tempo pace on the crowded sidewalks, rhythmically opening and closing my big hands. In my jacket pockets I carry painkillers, disinfectants, syringes, scissors, a bar of Italian chocolate, and a tin of Altoids peppermints. Inhaling the downtown air hurts a lot more when you can feel it, through your sinuses, softly tickling the back of your neck, but I carry on as usual. What I really need right about now is a breakfast drink, I can taste it, and I wonder, how did people make ice before refrigeration? There must be a special name for it. Like Atascadero is the special name of the California State home for the criminally insane.

I’ve been walking a lot lately. It’s a compulsion of mine. It’s evolution driving me towards new goals. The lights flash, revolve, strobe. The color burns. I expose my perfect teeth. Sweat glistens off my flawless forehead. Summer’s officially begun. Tornado season. Murderous. Give me a hamburger and warm peach cobbler, but hold the fries, and tomorrow you better have pork chops: you know me and pig meat. Say, is that blood on real bacon?--wow! really spectacular! A slab of meat tethered to a brass frame.

Out in the open now, perhaps interesting people, though really it’s shit around here, total fucking shit, a nice neighborhood for a murder: couple of grocery stores, couple of bars, couple of arts- and-crafts places catering to a couple of Japanese-Catholic tourists. The street is heaving with tourists, mostly couples and groups of teenagers. Men walking past selling roses. Cars edging forward aggressively. The wind, the machines, the tires, the traffic.

II

In certain paintings where we see rulers wearing masks for rituals, we sense a moment of silence before--what?--the searing power of narcotic sex, or a back-to-back showing of natural disasters? Ever seen this guy? Well, you’ve already met him. So what do you think? A black-hooded refugee, a ghoul who scowls and gestures back. Trivia goes in one ear, out the other, particles are exchanged for statistics, a hash pipe’s passed around, and you’ve got to have both kinds before you can smoke one--but those old agents from the air still haunt my dreams. You do know what makes babies, right? Each female gives birth to one woolly pup.

Pardon that last paragraph: I’m relaxing at my favorite club, the Venetian Room, trying out some new insights on my drinking companion, Buck Critcher, a retired electrician. (Three years ago a state agency implanted a personal location device into Buck’s foot--I have yet to meet with such a fate.) I’m urging Buck to think real hard, to concentrate on a photograph of a black-hooded figure in profile walking through Times Square. A black-hooded figure carrying--what exactly? A shoebox? And a second photograph of the same figure but from a different angle, revealing a large forehead and a buzz cut. I reach for my bourbon, turn to Buck: now listen, if you were truly at peace with your ancestors, meeting them in spirit form wouldn’t bother you in the least, right? I’ll drink to that. [An oily waitress with a nice figure--bra size 34-B, panties size 7, shoes 9-B, hair colored ash blonde #3--arrives to take Buck’s second order: two more Amstel Lights, a shot of Cuervo, a Tom Collins, and a plate of quartered dill pickles.] Enough, already! Now I ask you, Buck, are you willing to fight and die for the consequences of your actions? What? Well, enjoy the scenery of our beautiful city while you can, and you better get used to living in brick houses, because soon we’re gonna force you to reconsider the very nature of your mission. To bulldoze trenches, to bury people alive, to shatter all the glory is how we’ll fight this fucking war--don’t worry, we’ll provide alternate choices along the way. [It’s difficult to figure out what century we’re in here. The ceiling of the club is strangely contoured with orange polka-dots. There is a mirror behind the bar, and a lot of lights, a hell of a lot of lights. The walls, however, are lined with inspirational posters from the 1970s, while the restrooms are stuffed with stocks of coffee, toilet paper, and lightbulbs, along with the usual fishbowl of prophylactics. Up on stage a jazz pianist is trying to figure out the melody to “Girl from Ipanema” but keeps getting stuck on the same note. Meanwhile, hordes of young men in striped suits are swarming about the club. Male competition is fierce in a desperate race against time. Indeed, copulatory furor becomes sacrificial offerings to the few remaining ravenous females, the ones with enormous legs and pin-sized heads.] So think in terms of evanescence, Buck, in terms of reverie and wildlife and great ripples in a sea of sand. The big industrial projects and the global corporations committed to social or environmental concerns are out that way [pointing], past the private foundations and the sewage-treatment-slash-food-processing plants. The sorts of places that stick out in your mind. In fact, a few years ago, I’d have done it myself, but I’m too old for it now. David Klein’s not even my real name, and I’m not actually from Virginia. Anyhow, I’m not asking just on account of myself--shit, I’m not even asking. I’m telling you, Buck, commanding you. Do you have any idea what kind of lawsuit we could send your way? No? Well, I suggest you spend some time contemplating it. Once you get involved, you belong, or we take care of you. Also keep in mind that trial by newspaper usually precedes trial by jury. Catch my drift? We don’t want another Oswald. No priors, no convictions. [Buck removes his tortoiseshell sunglasses and wipes his sweaty face on the sleeve of his shirt. Finally, I see the beginnings of wild excitement in his eyes.]

The problem is that nobody goes out and does anything anymore, so we have no stories to tell our children. But what’s the alternative? I mean, psychology was the trademark of a previous era, when the Nameless Authorities encouraged our citizens to become slaves to freedom. Even today preemptive wiretaps disrupt our phone lines, making it difficult to summon an ambulance or order a pizza, while every small community is required to pay for two police forces. Hard. Growing harder. Fabric of reality bursting asunder. Strangers not allowed in the city without an escort. We don’t need their chicken-shit. Too distracting. Less teeth, Buck, less teeth! You don’t like him, do you? Is it the black motorcycle jacket or the tight suede pants or, I know, that hair all green, gold, and shimmering in the lights? No way he’s gonna suck something smells like stale sweat and urine. But oh how I long to put my arm around a real President’s shoulders, and to do so without transgressing my conscience. A President who is, like, beyond wacko, who’s blonde and skinny, who speaks too loudly, then gets all edgy in the afternoons if he drinks too much coffee. A President who experiments with the occult. A President with a magnifying glass in one hand, a pair of tweezers in the other, and Sunday afternoons in bed with the First Lady, stroking her body up and down, fucking her from behind, afterwards telling her stories about his childhood. A President who won’t flee the capital on the eve of an enemy attack or wind up in a ditch screaming with pain, desperately trying to decapitate himself. Ouch. No wonder the White House now lies vacant except for one concealed room. So I’ve heard. Planning for ancestral substitutions? The problematic, much-sought-after Union--of what exactly? I mean, it’s all the same God. Just different ways of talking to Him. Whew! Pure effluvia! I feel resurrected, reborn. Oddly clearheaded.

But Buck Critcher is shaking his head, as if to say, “I knew this wasn’t going to work out.” I imagine a camera zooming in for an extreme close-up of the future assassin’s hands. Then a second camera slowly drawing back to get a long shot of the entire scene: Buck Critcher hunched over in his chair, with me, across from him, nodding slowly. Ahh, it’s just politics, extraordinary politics. No date, no transcript. Muffled voices. Interruption (Snow White). Discontinuity (William Tell). Imperfection (Hieronymous Bosch). Why is your tape recorder on, Buck? Turn that damn thing off! I start rubbing at an itch on my back oooo ahhhh that feels so good when suddenly I freeze mid-motion. I cannot move. What the? My back’s gone out. It happens. Ever since I got myself into that motorcycle accident. Thirteen years ago, in the prime of my youth. Thirteen years to the day! So time is circular. Lines of pain crinkle around my eyes. I’m hearing church bells. I’m going to pass out. No, please don’t, Buck, don’t lift me up.

III

The Hilton Hotel, Midtown Manhattan. My room looks like it’s been hit by a hurricane. The stench of whiskey. The plainest shock possible. What’s wrong is I haven’t slept all night. I have no ideas, no ideas whatsoever. More coffee? Game of solitaire? A Bill Moyers special? Snacks? I limp across the thick, noise- deadening carpet into the bathroom for a glass of water. Three glasses. My back and neck still feel paralyzed. I inspect myself in the mirror, delicately moving my thin fingers over my trapezius, deltoids, biceps, and triceps. I roll my head from side to side. I spend considerable time doing this. What exactly am I looking for? A phrase echoes through my mind: ‘The girl in the lake is the Grail to God.’ An hour and half later, to boost my spirits, I remove a series of faded black-and-white photographs from my carry-on luggage: a man pedaling a ten-speed bike through the streets of Paris, a family picnicking on a waterfront, a mother picking food off her daughter’s blouse, a calico-Persian half- breed, my uncle in a Shriner’s cap sitting behind a battered Wurlitzer organ, my mother in her kitchen (red-checkered curtains, a double-door Frigidaire), my father leaning against his meat case, Coast Guard ships off the coast of South Florida, the Golden Staircase at the Palazzo Ducale in Venice, Two World Trade Center, Chicago’s Drake Hotel, a white Lotus parked in a driveway, my sister at the Notre Dame homecoming dance her freshman year of college, a crowd of jobless men (Buck Critcher among them) loitering in front of a liquor store and a movie marquee, and my favorite, some half a dozen scientists gathered together to help dangerously large animals have sex.

I’m not a psychiatrist, I’m a storyteller, so I can’t be certain, but maybe I’m suffering from some type of mild information starvation. Like I’m spending too much time stuck in Fast Forward. Perhaps running away to be a great writer is really just getting away from Mother (if so, then why am I still running?-- Mother was killed three years ago). Ah, don’t be silly. Disappearing into sleep has always been your favorite way of leaving space. Something poetic about it. Red-hot bricks one instant, blocks of ice the next. Reality versus abstraction. Rope clotheslines. Charcoal on bark. It’s so easy to hate an abstraction, as opposed to, say, free oral sex every Wednesday or a driverless truck full of dynamite. Parked the truck where exactly? An early morning departure from LAX, with a stop in Chicago, is what landed me here in New York City. That big space you have to fly over in order to get to New York City: everyone happy with their big yards and the big Wal-Mart down the street. Then the cab ride to the Hilton. And the 23-year-old Hispanic maid I met in the parking garage. Her face, her throat, her chest above the buttons on her blouse. Once in a public restroom, twice in the laundry room, in various corridors, on top of a piano, even in the lobby. I do it without ever looking down. I do it by rote. Afterwards, post- coital chitchat. Arts and crafts or something. So where are you from again? You speak very good English. She flicks the ash from her cigarette into a nearby wastepaper basket. Her fingers are short, slender, weighed down by fake diamond rings. Come here. Oh, I can’t. I’ve got to go. I’m late. Suit yourself. I drain the last of the whiskey. Whew! I can rest easier now: I only mess with women like that in my nightmares. Tension’s released, my mind finally gone blank. I roll over and fall asleep.

IV

When I awake, I cannot remember. For a moment I’m not even sure of my own name. Obviously I’m in a hotel room. I get up from the bed and pull aside the drapes. Four stories below, the streets of Midtown Manhattan are--what exactly? That’s fog down there? I can’t see a damn thing. I walk back over to the bed. What’s going on here? I go into the bathroom, turn on the shower, wait patiently for hot water. Several minutes go by. Weird. No hot water--but in New York City?! I return to the window. If it’s not fog, perhaps a thick smoke of some sort, a milky haze of clouds and combustion products. It looks eerily beautiful from up here, like a heavy fog on Pacific Coast Highway. The enemy’s land. But since I can’t see more than ten feet beyond the window, there’s no way of knowing what’s happening on the street below. Apparently there’s been a slight change in programming. I wrap a thick towel around my waist and step into the corridor: more silence, but well-lit silence, which is a good sign. So I return to my room, turn on the TV: a special on the sinking of the Titanic . . . Senate hearings on computer security . . . we have Tramell but no Lisa Oberman . . . The Navy flew me in on a chopper from a carrier while they evacuated the embassy . . . You’re one funny guy. . . . Nothing more. I fail to turn up Buck Critcher’s phone number. Only a book of matches from a jazz club called the Venetian Room. I try to remember the last fragments of last night’s final dream. Was I startled awake? I doubt it, but I can’t really remember. I need some caffeine to clear my head. Coffee, a Coke, anything. Dammit, I need a better memory. I need clues. I rummage through the wastebasket and pull out a sheet of crumpled paper. Dear good father, sir. I wrote this? God, please give way. I cannot take much more! I’m getting dizzy, the room spinning, accelerating faster and faster. I’m losing all sense of footing. Somehow I manage to stumble over to the window. I begin pounding on the glass with my bare fists. The window rattles, vibrates. By now the room is only a grayish blur. I have no sense of walls or ceilings or even of my own fists as they pound harder and harder against the glass--then a crack, and another, and a third, before the entire windowpane collapses into shards and slivers. I step forward and plunge into the fog below.

When I come to, my hands are sweaty on the steering wheel, my brain is boiling, my body tense with anticipation. The stench of my clothes is overwhelming. Shit runs down my legs onto the floorboards. It’s food poisoning, maybe dysentery. I’m losing fluids at such an incredible rate that I feel the life force leaking out of me. My driving is erratic, and as I exit the Interstate I nearly sideswipe a busload of Christian choir singers. I maneuver the car up to one of the self-serve gas pumps at a Chevron station. I can barely open the door to climb out. A pool of blood-speckled diarrhea has formed on the front seat. I stand there holding the nozzle in the gas tank. No one approaches me. I decide to use my debit card and pay at the pump. I get back into the car only to find that it won’t start. The engine won’t turn over. I keep trying. For how long? The fever is destroying me. I’m supposed to be dead by now. Then why won’t they come to remove me? I finally give up on the engine and begin pounding the steering wheel with my fists, utterly exhausting myself into unconsciousness.

Anybody home? I’m startled awake. I sit up in bed to listen. I notice it’s quite cold from a draft blowing through the front door and up the stairs. I sense there’s a stranger in the house, somewhere downstairs, probably in the living room, a stranger with a plastic machete in his hand. I wonder if I should alert Mom and Dad. Their bedroom’s down the hall, at the head of the stairs. If it is a stranger, he’ll likely enter their room first. Having grown up in this house, I know the distinct sound the stairs make when someone walks up them. So I begin listening attentively for those telltale creaks. The only problem is, if I don’t get up and move around I’m liable to fall back asleep. So I reach over the side of the bed to find my flip-flops. Not there. I lean further over the edge of the bed in order to reach further beneath it. No--a hand does not grab mine and pull me under (though the possibility crosses my mind). Instead, a bizarre notion occurs to me, that a dream is always reaching further. Further and further, until, well, until you’ve reached right into another dream, which in its turn touches upon a third neighboring dream, and so on, a thousand little steps. Hands are what’s most important, not your feet, but what you do with your hands in dreams. Hands pull you from one space, one room, one place to another. It’s because of your hands that you can’t sit still for very long in a dream. Are you following me? The needle is gold this time around, isn’t it? No wonder I’ve never gotten the hang of rent payments. The same goes for your memories: door-to-door antiques.

V

Oh God, this can’t be happening. I’m circling back toward the east again, to a cemetery. I’ve parked my station wagon and am now standing at the edge of an open grave. Tall brown apartment buildings across the street make the rows of grave markers seem small and out of place. I can’t describe what goes on in those apartment buildings since I’ve never been inside them, but that won’t stop me from making up stories (and I don’t expect any unborn children to forgive me my indiscretions). The crystal meth capital of the East Coast? The local chapter of Hell’s Angels? First I notice a warm flash of incandescent light from one of the upper-story windows. Then I sense a brooding, sinister presence lurking in the background. So I walk over to my car to remove a pair of binoculars from a black bag on the front seat. I focus on the light. Lord Jesus, it don’t make a bit of sense to me. She must smell like a bitch in heat, the bitch she wants to be, because she really puts her weight into it. Her long hair cut shoulder-length, hands on her hips, breasts high and taut, with nipples so large they show right through her dress. She buys them tighter and tighter, twelve to the package, at the local Goodwill (while all the experts at General Motors and Royal Dutch Shell, with their hideous strings of alphanumeric gibberish, declare the Noble Savage is only a myth). Maybe I’ll throw a biscuit up there or a piece of hard candy--one in each palm for redundancy. Yeah, I like it when she screams orchids in a cut-glass vase. That thick Jersey accent gives it all of three sentences. More than that, I love to leave the bacon over the coals. The smoky smell of it fills the whole yard. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. But if I linger here for too long, she’ll notice a lot of flaws, especially around the edges. Anyhow, she deserves a lot better than me and my butt-clenched lovemaking. God, and such an illegal investigation! How can I justify it? I’ve failed her just like all the others. But why her exactly, when there are so many other federal government personnel in this town, not to mention a particular city councilman, an assistant fire chief, and two schoolteachers? I don’t understand. I’ve seen her email addresses, her credit cards. I know her social security number, her date of birth. I’ve catalogued the relics of her youth.

I open my hand now and let the damp soil drop into the grave. Sure am glad the Lord is kind enough to share His earth with me. Fucking Bastard. They say He’s a really good volleyball player too, and as though to prove it, today He’s wearing impossibly tight, sky-blue-colored swimming trunks. Not how it used to be. But like all previous ethical conflicts, I’ll manage to circumvent this one as well. A change of environment could be the key to my recovery, or at least a blonde wig with an ice pick in the pocket. Indeed, I imagine four Popes in wire-rimmed glasses frowning disapprovingly at me from--where exactly? Just as well. Who was that early Christian--Tertullian? Cyprian? Origen? Boys, always in twos and threes, incorrigibly young priests, extraordinary Italians doing extraordinary things.

I have to fight the bile from rising into my throat, but I get so mad thinking about it that I’m afraid of myself sometimes, and I bet a lot of readers out there wouldn’t approve of it either. Down a stretch of highway to the private beaches. Somebody drove right on by, shot him twice. Like I say, it was strange. Five nights a week as a janitor at the university hospital, my father most of the time wore striped overalls and a jacket with clear plastic pockets. He had a full head of hair, brilliant white, and although he was overweight he wasn’t nearly as fat as most of his contemporaries. Yet the cops found a gun, a .38 revolver, in a bookcase behind some of my books. It’s all about pussy. What a phonetic way of putting it. So honesty is now a time issue. You want to learn something else, or you just gonna ask me more questions? No? Well then, tell me your story, reader.

Pink Pills

That conspiracy. The one with no beginning and no end. Everyone knows about it, everyone’s in on it, including you, the audience. Only more clues.

I’m bleeding at the mouth. I’m hungry again. I read signals in the flow of traffic while simultaneously signaling to others. I’m driving away now, reminding myself not to escalate the anger and hostility but to exercise control--to attend to my actions, to be totally aware of the freeway as I head east towards the desert. That my consciousness is the center of all meaningful political activity, that I’m an operative among brothers and sisters who soon will have the nation at their feet. I glance into the rearview mirror: why of course, I’m aiming for the positive, the rehabilitated, taking full responsibility for my mind, merging it with all minds. So I’ve removed one person from our world: that life may begin for another--without freedom of speech, without breathing deeply, without sleep at night. Indeed, a sense of recognition is building up inside of me: that long ago my parents’ physician signed my name, and though at the moment I’m less than a hero, still I’m crafted of that same substance.

Yesterday, like every other day for the past several months, a group of us initiates were blindfolded and driven out to one of the church’s ‘cocaine parlors,’ where very faintly the sounds of waves reached us. I wonder now how the leaders occupying the highest levels of our organization ever stabilize their abilities. Would I understand even if I reached such levels?--burning from the inside out, a pure cold flame, self-interest erased, until only a glittering image remains. To achieve the dangerous station of easily leaving one’s body. I glance down at the floorboards: congealed blood. Not paying attention, I recklessly swerve into another lane. On the passenger seat lies the dark-colored knapsack, and even now I cannot bear to look at it. Yet my thoughts keep returning to my friends, Brian and Cindy, studying the word of God every minute of their lives, how with time they were saved, then later remarried in the Mormon Church. Even their children are baptized. Brian has a wonderful job with benefits. Cindy’s returning to school for her GED. So let us call their stupefaction worship.

I exit the freeway. Up ahead, a place that serves burgers and shakes. I park, get out, lock the doors, and glance through the window. On the back seat, in plain sight, a blood-smeared towel concealing the knife. I’m certain no one will see the blood and jump to conclusions, and anyhow, I haven’t the will to dispose of the evidence, to bury it out here in these wide-open spaces--an image that lights up a thought: yeah, I’m out of that. My memories are now fully transferred onto spools of magnetic tape. The past is finally outside of me, not me, gone forever. As planned. An archeologist, or some unsuspecting cop, can uncover the tapes many years from today, savor their delights, listen to the motives, absorbing them into his own psyche, transforming himself positively. But however it happens, those aren’t my motives. How can they be? I’ve shaken myself free from that indulgence. You cannot put me there. I hate a lot of paper, and I’ll never write it down.

So I walk inside. At the bar a redheaded man sits with his back to me. He can have but doesn’t have to have a body--the same with all of us. The issue becomes what to do with your body if you can operate without it. Where do you put it? Well, I imagine a series of fully-soundproofed, dimly-lit, underground rooms far away from any external stimuli. Within these rooms are many tables, or small box-like chambers, one body per, similar to a morgue-- except of course these aren’t corpses, no, they’re living human beings, never eating, never excreting. Nothing material enters the bodies, nothing material exits. Yet it’s neither sleep nor coma.

I sit down in a booth. Right now I sense I’m the only person alive who could silence an entire population. These are my thoughts, no one else’s, so mine is a vastly different opinion from the whole. So I decide to order myself a beer, to relax awhile, ordering beers and reading the menu, both Spanish and English- language versions. But consider leaving the body in order to control and operate on a stranger’s thoughts, like these patrons’, for instance. To direct energy through matter, space through time, to become wholly conscious of someone else’s thoughts. If one person knows how, then everyone can know. Paranoia serves as recognition of this fact. I inspect my limbs and torso: I’m not broken. I make a fist, I stretch my arms, I glance through the curtains. The sky has turned bluish-white with intermittent flashes of lightning.

A rather young girl in the neighboring booth is discussing the Bible, quoting passages in an oddly precocious manner. “And He said to his disciples, Gather up the fragments that remain, so that nothing is lost.” I reach inside the pocket of my windbreaker and touch the blood-soaked leather glove. Then looking down at the floor, I discover dried blood stains on my socks and shoes. Suddenly the girl raises her voice, yelling at her two companions, “I’m not leaving. God steered me here for some reason, and I’m not leaving!” So she continues: “In John it says, Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears My word and believes in Him who sent Me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life.” Finally her friends stand up to leave, leaving her to pay the entire bill. I order my second pint of lager.

My own holy revolution is also in full swing, though I don’t confront people with it in public places. It all started this time last year when Brian and I worked as package couriers. At that time Brian also delivered weed on the side. We formed a drug-based friendship that eventually developed into something more genuine involving our personal spiritual quests. During work and in between deliveries we hung out at his place in Los Feliz, smoking pot, discussing transcendence and the various ways of achieving it. The cops never bothered us. I think between the two of us we knew the streets of LA County better than anyone--and we drove fast. Anyhow, then quite suddenly Brian’s transformation occurred: he checks into a rundown motel with a gallon bottle of vodka, and as he drinks it down, he’s undoing all the damage of the past, millions, billions, trillions--or so he thinks--and he’s peeling off the bottle’s label, when like a little boy he drifts into a semi-conscious state. Two days later, the desk clerk opens the door--no! I get up now from the booth to leave: I’m not interested in enhancing my soul with that young girl’s Bible.

It’s dark outside. Beneath the arc lights the freeway’s become the deep purple of a bishop’s cloak. On each side of the road . . . Anyhow, the first time Brian experienced focused states of consciousness--in that motel room, with the TV on, the lights out, and of course the empty gallon bottle of vodka. No cups or shot glasses. The stench of alcohol. A figure sprawled out on the bed. No group dynamics or educational curriculum, yet carefully crafted to elicit Brian’s first opening to the One--and it almost worked. It’s always greater, no one ever suspects It, and if anyone encounters It accidentally, he’s unable to catch It again years along. Ridding oneself and others of past-life trauma, watching the false futures develop. But pretty soon, if we’re not careful, even Muzak will filter underground. Sounds to soothe. Better yet, I nominate myself the hero. So what’s the next big thing? Well, if the kids buy up the stuff--but I’m not handing them the bottle, no way: with each swig they’ll swallow sleeping pills at a rate that depletes them within 40 swigs. So the next big thing? Pill-swallowing. Dimmed lights. But when the desk clerk opens the door and shouts a command to vacate the room, there’s no reply, while outside, a dog growls in the parking lot. So the clerk kicks the edge of the bed. Still no answer. But when the clerk asks us? Well, it’s that conspiracy. Besides, I haven’t the patience for dumb suspense. So he shakes the bed. Finally Brian’s body falls limp to the floor. The eyes stare vacantly at the ceiling, the mouth hanging open, moonlight on the feet: a fine chap whose soul has flown away--to operate in other realms.

Yes, kind reader, it’s the awareness of your own feelings, the very movements of your mind towards hysteria, towards the acceptance of words that lack all reference, towards assumptions of--this nation’s laws are legion, everywhere evident, and yet if no one tries to escape, the ravaged roofs remain as before. For how many days? A few? were we all in such a beautiful place? But, of course, that’s the very question, and in attempting to answer it, well, I return home to the reverberations, to the tone of a voice signaling the final result of my personal God: the cumbersome baggage of a past turning lighter and lighter, fragmenting into disturbing images ingesting dismembered fragments.

The people out here on the freeway have a sameness about them that is stronger than their individuality: identical expressions, identical patterned responses, same tone of voice, same lack of distinct personality. Their bed sheets hardly touched or made love upon. I imagine their thoughts light up a thousand fires in this city. A language of multiplexed binaural beats, of pink noise and relaxation exercises. Yet the reader who hears every sound, smells every odor, grasps everything that moves may in fact be guided by habit, whereas a state of total paranoia is a state of total awareness. Charles Manson said that we can learn as much from the coyote as we can from a child. Of course he’s right. A baby is born, given one chance to live, while it doesn’t know the difference. Then how does the creature learn not to die those first fifteen years? No, try as I might, I cannot conjure that forgiveness. Into the world, into a state of God--then Barbie dolls. By the way, I know the front men of those counter- organizations, and I tell them right here that order will be lost, and as for privileged faiths, no religion will survive. Choices are made in the world of power and pigs, of money and foul air. A facade of tape recorders whose operators are absent. We separate, then fall apart again. For over twenty years I’ve robbed other people of their asylum. I’ve helped hurry crowds into the gap. I’ve yielded to the luminous sky. Believe me, I’ve changed my routines more than once--doing it again right now, in fact, although my peers bitterly oppose me.

I look for a napkin in the glove compartment to clean the blood from my pants. Finding none, I reach into my breast pocket for a handkerchief, which is also missing. Immediately I’m agitated. I haven’t done a very good job tonight. But if religion is God’s biggest problem, then as a bagel encloses all within, shall the Godhead embrace all without, though not a single one of us may divide that circle, surpass, or even delimit it. On the radio now the DJ introduces a proto-punk thrash track featured on the justly famous White Album. This synchronicity, though alarming to the uninitiated, only serves to move me further through the desert. Delicately poised behind the wheel. Aware of everything, of living organisms, of viruses, of gift shops filled to overflowing with poorly rendered copies of Impressionist oil paintings. Pot- headed philosophical notions? Well, by this you shall know them--by their arrogance: they simply cannot listen. I guide the car with the thumb and index finger of my left hand, my right hand lying gently along the head-rest of the passenger seat. They speak to me, millions of voices at night, in dreams--and before the dreams, instants before. My hands. I make a fist with my right hand. My hands haunt me in those dreams. Two fluttering ghosts at the edges of memory. I close my eyes. At night. Short nails hammered into a beam, hung from the top, off the rounded edges. Fingers toying with me. Many small scars, and a bruise on my left knee.

I watch the shadows of my fingers on the steering wheel. The confidence of an oddly relaxed grip. Yes, every genuine effort receives its just reward: you must work towards authenticity, becoming your own production designer, never adapting yourself to their props. Instead, go further back in time, do it by twos, feeling your way along the walls of the tunnels and corridors, into the hidden closets, all in order to be faithful to yourself, to the cinematic adaptation of your own life which, last time I checked, begins in June of 1966. Funny how one of the easiest ways to befriend a stranger is to make him feel worthwhile--a simple form of manipulation, really--for if a stranger feels that his very presence is, well, within him then the superficial questions never arise. Yet I have an even better means of eliciting a conversation piece: selectively filter incoming information from all five senses before blocking some of it from seeping into the higher levels of consciousness. Where to go for the best package pick-ups, how long to wait--such questions are a waste of my time. So I make them twisted. Blue sheets grip their naked legs.

Some years ago I inquired into becoming a cabdriver. Let’s just say it was no terse response. Usually when you ask a stranger about their salary--yes, I know, in the United States it’s a rather rude question. Anyhow, on that particular night an Arab cabdriver and myself, along with two hookers, check into a motel near LAX. It’s rather late, and I’m sizing up the two women. Mine, well, I was ready to take her down, had a perfect shot. I was downwind from her, as they say, hidden by a copse of trees, but when she glanced in my direction . . . somehow sensing that everyone’s reality differs--on purpose, built that way to make the entailing pain and suffering more bearable. Soon the four of us would begin an orgy lasting well into the morning. So how much did he earn driving that cab? Like I said, his answer contradicted the usual replies. He was Muslim, of course, an Iranian, but I didn’t pursue the matter further: he’d paid for both hookers. As we climbed the stairs to our room, I watched him fondling and whispering to the black hooker. No problem, I thought, I’ll take whichever one God gives me. But I must admit he’d managed to find a magnificent piece of ass. Born that way? Impossible. Hours later, a pause in the lovemaking. I glanced quickly into her dark eyes. What was she trying to tell me?--to care for this man? I stared at the Arab who awkwardly knelt there, as if submitting to his imminent death. Yet at that moment all violence had left me. I felt only an unquenchable need for change. My changeability, to this very day, simply cannot stop. It’s a genuine art. Somebody has to do it, and maybe, just maybe . . . like now, of course, as I drive through the Mojave. Proof positive: I inherit the cunning of the coyote. So many eyes staring out, no hierarchies or categories, no, only eyes, and realizing that money, indeed, my own life made little difference to me, the Arab lowered his pistol. Bullets avoid my type. The trigger is never pulled because the intention vanishes. Of course the two hookers watched the scene with a similar sort of indifference. Outside the motel window it was already morning. Hungry, I left for food, stepped right out into the wide open. Looking back on that incident, I feel now as if the Arab were simply--what? Granting me the planet? The weight of the bodies. The blankets, the sheets, the bedspreads as the maids had left them.

Some stories, when you read them from beginning to end--the act of reading can be so seductive--you begin to sense that the author is setting you up for a beautiful trap. But as I see it, nothing in this world is apparent until you crouch down beside a mattress and measure the break of surface tension in the sheets. The outlines of the bodies having lain there. Then at sunrise, with a transistor radio, to enjoy unitive experience, when paranoia forces you to think from time to time.

Or, on the other hand, you can catch it on the evening news: fires breaking out over widespread areas. ‘Plumes of smoke’ was the phrase they used, as well as ‘ominously spreading’ to Manchester, Vermont, Figueroa. So bring in the units, a variety of government-owned you-know-what for effectively conducting operations. Let’s just say none of it was off-the-shelf. Daily life reduced to a matter of reflexes, where it’s dark, darker than this desert. Written over, crossed out, erased multiple times. Each side caught in an opposition neither of them purchased or personally owns. Not the beginnings of an art, no, but of disgust, disgust with a real pathological ‘Take Cover! Get the license plate number!’ Requesting additional back-up, inventing a concrete version of reality to serve their own venal interests. Drugged me for how many years? Well, it never happened. Dragging me up and down prison hallways? No, you’re confusing me with another celebrity. Laying my head on the chopping block? Again, no--too old-fashioned. Systems. Of? And please don’t waste my time with geology textbooks or NASA. Unlike me, kind reader, you’re simply a prisoner, your five senses taken hostage by an organic disease known as the appliance store.

That day the streets seethed with heavy white smoke slowly rolling into black clouds. Billowing flames clawed their way through collapsing roofs. Scattered about here and there, sneakers, bean-bag chairs, liquor, half-hippie points of view, oddball purposes, several copy-cat scenarios--though not enough to implicate--for even external to our church’s hierarchy, some dozen or so pieces of writ are sufficient for survival of the core doctrine into future generations. A collective essay, a collaborative book profitably consulted by future historians to put our present-day position beyond all measurable doubt, to kidnap the victims and subject them to an intense, repeated inculcation of a program. Within that program you can insert whatever you like, say, your personal philosophy of unchained melodies or odors of burning leaves--allow me to find distance there--but you cannot force an entire conspiracy onto a single accessory, not because the technique is limited in this regard, no, but because too many investigators arrive on the scene, creating too many paths from the center. It might even turn out that a particular prosecutor has hidden the trigger which compels the victim to commit his ‘mindless act of destruction,’ as described in USA Today. But you cannot defeat me, none of you, and though you’ve beaten more traditional enemies many times in the past, you’ve only proven time and again that your highest achievement is discrimination, which perhaps can lead to genuine enlightenment, but I don’t want to be there when you encounter it. And no, I’m not referring to the modern-day practice of psychotherapy. More profanely, you can destroy yourselves in a fucking restaurant parking lot, or by riding a motorcycle along some canyon road where a reasonable speed would be, say, thirty-five, though the police estimate you were doing ninety, failed to make the curve, were thrown off, and instantly killed. Wickedness where it’s not worth the bother, disgust for false forms of restriction en masse. The effect is progressive, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle, each pass serving to put you in the presence of something eerily familiar, to remind you that once before you lived in these visionary cities.

But what if all pills are Pink Pills, rendering this dialectic nothing more than an amusing mechanism, a toy guiding us back to the opinions we held in the first place? I mean, does anyone seriously think it’s possible to identify the location of every sniper? Shit, you’ll be spending the next month reporting to chain of command. As for employing combat VHS cameras--to what end? Yards and yards of footage of, of what exactly? Securing parking lots here, mini-malls there, all of them charred around the edges. Informants and police liaisons making detailed log entries, keeping the rest of us between certain body stations, because all cops must be able to think on their feet and make rapid decisions in case an item of freight arrives unexpectedly.

Already lots of broken glass, and it’s pretty smoky. I park across the street from an abandoned store just blazing away. In the distance, big banks, whole strip-malls are charred and smoking. I wish I had a knack for getting scientists to explain these events with simple metaphors. If only to translate this looting into meticulously accurate diagrams or better yet, abstract paintings, or even more up-to-date, computerized animations. I’m becoming dizzy with the glory of a universe unfolding before me in its limitless expanse, and even if it misses Dada, at least it’s surreal-- though summed up by a cornball talk-show host as ‘a brutal scene of mindless human rage and societal breakdown.’ I wonder what sort of covert anti-rioting tactics those cops are using down here. Psychotronic thought-projection into a subject’s mind via low frequency waves? But what thoughts would they project? What is a specific example of an ‘anti-riot’ thought? What you should do instead, kind reader, is abandon your body altogether, transporting your energies to another space and time.

So do all these phenomena derive from the same elemental force? Well, judge for yourself. Large flames shooting out the doors and windows of another liquor store. An overturned car continuing to burn. A city finally reduced to the satisfaction of a pathological curiosity, or a private place to ring a bell, a bath, money, and a stomach, or a windy bouquet of flowers, or, I got it, the sound of an orchestra fiddling away at more legislation. The world as seen through a sensory filter made of chicken manure--this despite the additional refinements of logic which inevitably fail to determine the correct design tolerances. Seeking to understand what? And why not? We all know some of those people, right? Finally, I start the car and pull back into traffic. Racking my brain for a shortcut, I cut off an approaching Mercedes, then run a red light. But as I scan for cops on the periphery, I notice a bright red indicator light flashing on the dashboard.

Zagovor

On an impulse Zagovor opens one of the side doors. He walks in. The cathedral is huge and almost entirely empty of people at this late hour. He pauses to admire the architecture. Rows of columns support a vaulted ceiling. At the front sits the altar behind a cedar railing. Even the pews have a grandiosity about them. He decides to take a quick stroll about the premises and is startled by a plaster statue of the Virgin that has fallen from its niche and lies shattered on the floor. If it’s meant to be a sign, he cannot imagine what might lie in wait for him. He cannot clean up the mess, nor can he conceal it. So Zagovor simply steps around it, and having done so he immediately feels ashamed of himself. Zagovor is forty-five years old, tall and slender. His hair is short, cropped close to the head. He’s a disillusioned tax attorney, honest to God, and also a devout Catholic, perhaps more out of habit than reflection. He claims to have attended daily Mass now for twenty years. He therefore expects to have some peace of mind when he dies. Tonight, however, he feels more like a little kid playing hide-and-go-seek who’s hidden himself so well that no one cares to find him. The caps of three ink pens gleam from his shirt pocket as he steps away from the confessor’s compartment and kneels in the penitent’s box on the right. He slips off his hat. The priest slides the panel open. Zagovor leans forward. The vague outline of the priest through the grille looks deceitful, maybe even homicidal. Zagovor almost wants to laugh. How is this man, who’s built his life on such a metaphysical bluff, able to absolve obtrusive thoughts on innocent pink in particular?

Afterwards Zagovor sits down in a nearby pew without feeling much better. He didn’t confess to the fact that nothing irreversible ever seems to happen in his life. Irreversibility is not a sin. Perhaps he needs a therapist to help him address that issue. Perhaps he just needs to be lighter on his feet. On several sleepless nights, rather than wandering the streets, he’s stared up at the bedroom ceiling and argued with himself long into the wee hours. He’s backtracked, worked out a biography, and in the process he’s taught himself a mean form of contempt. Of course he did once experience the seventy-two faces of God, when he was nine years old, and it wasn’t merely a hallucinatory experience. No one gave him a drug. No one threatened or hypnotized him. What happened was a low doorway, masked by dummy book-backs, swung open to reveal a spiral staircase hewn out of solid stone. Of course he descended the staircase. Who wouldn’t? Suddenly he was enveloped in total blackness, and while his knees grew weaker with every step, a relentless force kept pulling him downward, seemingly toward the basalt center of the earth. The air rung with a silence filtered through more than a hundred centuries. The impenetrable gloom became a lunatic companion glaring back at him. Zagovor could only feel along the crevasses in the wall, without having any idea what final surface awaited his feet. He quickly lost count of the number of steps. He couldn’t even know whether his eyes were open or closed. When suddenly, who knows how many turnings later, he’s shocked to see, right before him, within arm’s reach, a pair of malignant yellow eyes, perhaps those of a large rodent, and just as he cries out, a finger plunges into his eye socket, boring a hole into. A two-note chime over a loudspeaker now jolts Zagovor out of reverie. He realizes he’s been lost in thought for a considerable time. He feels like his heart has been touched by? Christ, he hopes. His elation dissipates, however, when the sound of thunder is heard rumbling through the city streets. He leaves the cathedral, returns to the sidewalk. Bolts of lightning dance on the horizon. The treetops are beginning to sway and whisper. He feels a surge of panic and curses himself for not bringing an umbrella. He must hurry. Then, just as he picks up his pace, a weakness sweeps through his legs. But he fights it off. His mind is playing tricks on him again. The rain hasn’t even begun yet. He still has time. His pickup isn’t parked more than a mile from the cathedral.

But his pickup has a flat front tire. Zagovor cannot believe it. He jaywalks across the street to a Shell station, but it’s closed for the night. Strangely, there’s not a single pedestrian within sight, nor are there any cars. In fact, the predominating color is the black of night sky and unlit pavement, though he can make out, several blocks away, the yellow of a blinking traffic light. He feels as if he’s trying to shake off a bad dream. Then the first drops of rain pelt his face. Quickly a downpour ensues. He’s drenched, and furious with himself. His shirt and pants are plastered to his skin. With no other options, he begins to sprint toward the distant traffic light, and no sooner does he turn the corner than he finds himself in the parking lot of a rundown motel. He goes inside, thinking he’ll use a phone to call a taxi, but then decides on an impulse to spend the night. He can call a taxi in the morning. The night clerk offers him a weekly rate, but Zagovor declines it. He’s not that type of client. He wants shut-eye, nothing more. The room reeks of stale cigarette smoke. He strips off his soaked clothes and falls naked across the bed. The sheets stick to his skin. Whatever happened to the good old days of chenille bedspreads with zigzag patterns? He almost laughs. For awhile he studies the painting above the TV set. It depicts sailboats on a stormy sea. Then he turns out the lights, lies back on the lumpy bed, and stares up at the ceiling. But he cannot fall asleep. The unfamiliar surroundings have made him more alert. So he turns the lights back on, and with the remote flips on the TV, just in time to hear Dustin Hoffman scream, “Elaiiiiine!” Dustin has apparently stolen someone else’s bride right from the altar. The movie’s soon over. Damn, now Zagovor’s getting hungry. He calls the front desk to inquire about round-the-clock dining. The only suggestion is a Denny’s within walking distance. So he puts on his damp clothes and returns to the street. The downpour has subsided to a sprinkle. He decides to take a shortcut through an alleyway. Undernourished cats scramble out of the garbage as he walks by. The walls surrounding the Denny’s parking lot are covered with graffiti. Zagovor counts a total of five cars, all of them more than ten years old. He requests a seat at the counter where he can enjoy a cigarette while waiting for his order. Not more than five minutes later, a woman sits down on the seat beside his and introduces herself as Marie. She takes off her coat, arranges it over the seat-back. She orders a taco salad and a Diet Coke, then lights up her own cigarette. She’s wearing little or no makeup, but she is an attractive woman.

At Marie’s request, Zagovor is standing in front of the mirror in his underpants, flexing his muscles. He’s grinning at himself in the mirror. Marie’s quite the inquisitive woman when she isn’t choking on laughter. She wants to know why he’s never been married, why his old girlfriends let him get away, why most of the men she meets don’t have his sense of humor. He’s too busy posing to answer, but he finally has to stop when his shoulder starts hurting. It’s then Marie’s turn to pose, and she feels compelled to show off the best she has to offer. Afterwards they lie down together on the bed to watch some amateurish stand-up comedy. Soon the bed is rocking with laughter. They’re laughing so hard they can’t catch their breath. They’re laughing at the jokes, not with them. Finally exhausted, Marie takes Zagovor’s face in her hands, pulling him close to her, locking him in an embrace. Her flesh smells strongly. She probably hasn’t showered in a couple days. Zagovor feels like he hasn’t either. Her breasts are small and firm. Her skin is nearly white where a bathing suit has blocked the sun. She now lies back on the bed. At some point in the lovemaking Marie loses herself to a sudden burst of frenzy. Her body arches grotesquely toward the ceiling. Words come out of her mouth in a rasp, words in a language Zagovor doesn’t quite understand. Her head, with its jaws gaping, seems to possess a life of its own. She’s momentarily transformed into a hard-faced bitch with malevolent black eyes. Zagovor’s never seen such a case of dual personality, but he’s certainly aroused. Later that night he awakens with a start to find his erection painfully pressed between his stomach and the mattress.

It’s ten in the morning. Zagovor and Marie are sharing a booth at Denny’s. The restaurant is crowded with elderly couples and young mothers with babies. With her eyeliner and mascara, Marie looks somehow younger than last night. She could easily pass for twenty-five. She pokes at her chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. She licks a drop of gravy from the side of her hand. Zagovor watches the delicate working of her jaws. She’s easily the slowest eater in the world, mainly because she has so much to say. Did he know that her last name means ‘bad gift’ in Spanish? But it’s not really her name, of course, it’s the name of the man she divorced two years ago, in case Zagovor didn’t already notice she’s a gringo. Anyhow, the story goes that one morning she woke to find her husband snorting cocaína in their bathroom. She managed to barricade him inside long enough to call the cops, who arrested him. He’s now serving prison time. Maybe she went too far, but he deserved it, not just for his general all-purpose obnoxiousness, but because drugs are destroying society. After the breakup Marie worked for awhile at the Department of Sanitation, not as a trash collector, but as a trash sorter. Can’t he just picture it? And after that job was up, Zagovor doesn’t even want to know. She hardly ever gets enough sleep. Her feet hurt. Two nights ago she left her blue knit jacket in a taxi. And does Zagovor ever feel like he’s on the verge of losing it all, like having a nervous breakdown? Marie presses her lips together. She wonders what it’s like to be a widow, as her mother was after her father’s chemo failed. To find out, first she has to get married, of course. Second, she and the guy have to part ways. Third, the guy has to die. And fourth, she has to remain alive. On top of that, Marie tried to quit smoking a few weeks ago but then took to biting her fingernails. Also, with the exception of this meal, she’s on a strict low-cal regimen: Diet Coke, heads of lettuce, and tiny cans of tuna. She’s allergic to chocolate, shellfish, and penicillin, and she’s worried about her cholesterol level making her blood pressure too high. Zagovor suspects that if she’s a masochist at heart, it’s up to him to prove it.

The afternoon is warm, but not oppressively so. In the near distance they can hear exploding firecrackers and farther off, a military band. The wooden seats of the pedal-boat are uncomfortable. But the ice cream and French fries taste very, very good. Once they’ve reached the middle of the pond, Marie and Zagovor stop pedaling. She leans into his arm. He touches her hair, strokes her face lightly, then tilts her head back for a deep kiss. She’s blushing as if this were her fist time, though of course he knows better. He then tightens his hands around her breasts. He wants to gauge her reaction. Tears well up in her eyes. He’s probably hurting her, but she probably likes it.

They have a long drive ahead of them, most of it through the early morning hours, but if all goes as planned, they should arrive by morning. Zagovor wants to show Marie the house he grew up in, the house he inherited two years ago from his dying father which now serves as his rustic getaway. Marie’s wearing a dress that looks a lot like a smock, easy to put on, easy to take off. No bra? Zagovor nudges her breast with his elbow. She flinches, sighs, turns her head away. She’s getting more familiar with his terrain. A grin creeps over Zagovor’s face. He strokes the steering wheel. He ought to make her wear a blindfold the whole trip. To create genuine surprise or, even more erotically, to playact a kidnapping. But he doesn’t mention it. Marie says she likes the cowhide seat-covers. She also says a blue Dodge pickup isn’t what you expect from a tax attorney, if that’s really what he is. Zagovor pulls out a large sheaf of bills in a gold money clip. Not exactly jukebox money, is it? There’s only silence at the other end. But then that’s not really the point here, is it? He gives her a dirty look, almost starts laughing. Heck, next weekend he might even treat her to a rooftop restaurant overlooking the city where they serve meals with five different forks and a certain Juilliard string quartet plays right up until closing time. But Marie isn’t listening anymore. She’s eating chocolate cake out of a box with her fingers. In fact, the more Zagovor thinks about it, the more appealing he finds the idea of getting married to a demented housewife, a woman always in frantic need of stronger medication who spends most of the day watching X-rated movies on cable TV, a woman whose voice has faded off to a whisper, indeed, a woman who threatens to put her fist through a pane of glass when she doesn’t get her way. A real window-smasher. Upon returning from the office, Zagovor would leave muddy prints on the bathroom tile, accidentally of course, and then demand she clean them up. At breakfast he would push the cereal box toward her, reminding her it’s fortified with eight essential vitamins and minerals. Together they would suffer the desperate humor of soldiers joking in the trenches. They would avail themselves of the services of the water faucet and sardine can, their robes hoisted high before the Last Supper, he as Judas, she as the Virgin. The blasphemous moment only then would pass. The holy sham of it all. Zagovor yawns now. It’s almost dawn. The sky’s beginning to show the first signs of light. Marie has fallen asleep against his shoulder. He swings the pickup off the main highway onto an older road washed out with mud and potholes. Suddenly a wild dog leaps onto the hood, flinging itself against the windshield with tremendous force. Blood is flowing from the dog’s muzzle. Marie startles awake, screams, then starts laughing. Zagovor is more upset than she is. He hates dogs, especially maniacal ones. He takes a rather dim view of cats as well.

All the furnishings of Zagovor’s country house pale before the color of the wallpaper. Yellow and red flowers run so riotously through the patterns that Marie feels tipsy. She fears she won’t be able to fall asleep tonight. There’s no television either. On purpose. When his father died, Zagovor removed the TV so that he might have a media-free zone. The nearest neighbor is more than a mile down the road. In such stark surroundings Marie takes on the qualities of a fictional character, a blooming figment of Zagovor’s imagination. He likes it that way, while Marie most of all prefers the front porch, where they spend much of the first evening sharing a lawn chair, his hand between her thighs, the air upon her flesh. Gibberish fills out the rest of the silence. The high point is when Zagovor tells Marie that every Russian has some Mongol blood in his veins, even if he was born and raised a Catholic in the United States of America. She then demands that he prove it. So he takes her in his arms, carries her into the bedroom, and lays her out on the bed. How does one measure such a sacrifice? That night, after the wild, Mongolian lovemaking, Zagovor is wakened by a nightmare of towering trees falling in a windstorm. For more than an hour he stares up into the remoteness of the ceiling, his thoughts running farther and farther afield. He’s starting to suspect that Marie is pursuing him, that she’s never going to let him go, that in fact she’s been eyeing him ever since that crummy motel room. At the same time, Zagovor’s forgotten exactly where he is supposed to be going. He may be fresh and energetic for his age, if not so handsome, he may be well-off, he may even radiate a kind of power, yet most evenings he can hardly bring himself to return to his own apartment. And if he doesn’t really like Marie, maybe it’s because he doesn’t really know her, and maybe then she doesn’t really know him because she never asks the right questions. That he’s good in bed? Zagovor smiles at the ceiling. Either way, to have another person following him around, watching everything he does, lobbing questions at him, it soon becomes unbearable. Most of the time he feels like he’s looking in every direction at once, even when Marie isn’t listening to him. In fact, if she disappeared without warning, he’d be more than happy to pretend every bit of it was a fantasy of his own invention.

The following weekend Zagovor is taking a breakfast of rye toast and tea in a dingy coffee shop. The sections of the Sunday morning paper are spread out on the table before him, but he’s not reading it. He’s waiting for Marie. She’s late. From the window he watches a Caterpillar bulldozer clear stumps and rocks from a piece of land across the street. When Marie finally arrives, she looks like she’s two days out of detox. She’s wearing a pair of silver-rimmed aviator glasses he’s not seen before, her hair is dyed with streaks of orange and purple, and she’s carrying a large plastic puppet dressed in leotards and leg warmers. A piece of the puppet’s cheek is broken off, revealing the mechanism of its eyes. She takes the seat across from Zagovor, places the puppet on her lap, and then proceeds to get sick all over the floor. An unpleasant smile comes to Zagovor’s lips. Wherever she ate, they must’ve had great guacamole and a hundred different wines on tap. Marie’s still leaning over, drooling on the floor, yet to say a word. Of course she’s attracted the attention of everyone else in the diner, especially the waiter who quickly arrives with a mop. Zagovor slips an arm around Marie and helps her out of the chair. There isn’t going to be any screaming or sarcasm. Once outside on the sidewalk, Marie asks Zagovor to accompany her to her apartment. They walk quickly to his pickup. She throws the puppet into the truck bed. She tries to give directions as he drives, but the cramps are quite bad and seem to be getting worse. She’s doubled over, her head between her knees, as her whole body is racked with the dry heaves. Her arms and legs have also taken on a greenish tint. Zagovor reassures himself it’s not uterus contractions. Anyhow, since she’s incapable of giving directions, he has no idea where to go, so he decides that a hospital emergency room would be a more appropriate destination. Suddenly the drive becomes exhilarating, as he weaves through traffic and runs stop signs. He’s proud of such a generous impulse.

But Marie comes out of the emergency room exactly as she went in, heaving and coughing. Or so it seems. In fact it’s not a hospital emergency room at all, but thank God it’s not a funeral either. Zagovor has decided that maybe all she needs is a public restroom. Now he changes his mind. She really does need medical attention. They return to the pickup. Then, just like that, Marie gains control of herself. Unbelievable. The transformation is so sudden he has to wonder if she’s been putting him on. She pulls her mouth into a goofy smile and directs him the rest of the way to her apartment which, it turns out, reeks of sweat and stale linen. The beds are unmade. Photographs are scotch-taped to the wall. Zagovor uses the john. Cigarette butts float in the toilet. Of course there’s no toilet paper. When he returns to the bedroom Marie is giggling, already fumbling with her trousers. Soon she is naked. He cannot believe it. When did she start specializing in the high-velocity stuff? She’s so good at keeping him on his feet, literally. His own trousers are now down around his ankles. Her tongue glides over the insides of his thighs. He feels the warm saliva on his testicles. He looks down. The veins on her forehead stand out in relief. Her face is changing color. He clenches his teeth, moving his head from side to side. He raises his eyes to the ceiling. It isn’t a distressing feeling at all, but rather pleasurable. A warmth moves down across his chest, over his stomach, toward his groin. The sensation stops for a moment, before her lips begin again, more purposeful now, more pornographic. Zagovor’s reminded of a waitress who balances a loaded tray among a crowd of rowdy patrons. Afterwards, Marie wipes her hands on the sides of his jeans, but she remains kneeling on the floor, looking up at him, silent. He then notices tears streaming down her face, which reminds him it’s her birthday tomorrow. He wishes he could stay and celebrate, he really does, and he’ll try to touch base with her tomorrow, but it seems there’s something more pressing at the office. So he dresses quickly, though still rather dizzy, and makes his way to the elevator. When the elevator doors open, he’s greeted by two cops, each holding the elbow of a small Oriental man in handcuffs. Zagovor almost laughs. Not one word is spoken the rest of the way down to the lobby, but an image of Marie in handcuffs flanked by two cops forms in Zagovor’s mind. He almost laughs again, thinking about it. Of course he’s one of the cops, the taller one.

Zagovor’s ten minutes late. He desperately needs to relieve himself. His bladder is screaming. Plus he hasn’t eaten all day. But he continues striding down the corridor because this is where he belongs tonight. He’s not hesitating. No doubt he’s been granted some sort of privilege as well. Acts of appalling blasphemy. He wonders what words to use should he be requested to make a gruesome confession: that he’d crawl over the body of dead woman to treat Marie’s wounds? He almost laughs. A welter of smells issues from the various doorways he passes. Garlic and onion and chili and coffee and cinnamon and cheap liquor. Of course at the end of the corridor, in the last apartment, he finds Marie. She’s lying alone on the dark sofa. But before he can hand her the birthday gift, Zagovor must use the john. Frustration is tying him in knots. The hordes are threatening to burst the gates. When he returns to the sitting room, Marie’s flat black eyes are already scowling at him. She says nothing. He puts a cigarette in his mouth, lights it. He’s trying to get his bearings, but Marie refuses to speak. In fact, her silence seems more menacing than any words she might use. Zagovor’s shoulder begins to throb. The light from the room’s bare bulbs stings his eyes. Finally he hands her the gift. She accepts it, not smiling however. He steps back. Inscribed on the lid of the box is a faded coat of arms depicting an eagle with a snake in its beak. Suddenly Marie hurls the box across the room. It shatters against the wall. She rolls over, burying her face in the cushions of the sofa. The moment of total disbelief. Zagovor’s sickened, shocked, and he ought to make her pay for her indignities, but he also knows he must say something, anything fast to bring Marie’s mood back around. Otherwise the night is beyond recall: there’s nothing more in this direction except hotels, room signs, or a whorehouse, and yet it’s too late to turn back. So he stubs out his cigarette, leans forward, and pumps all the stale air out of his lungs. But unease overcomes him just as he begins to speak, the menacing sensation of hysteria, and his voice comes out sounding like an old husk.

For two hours afterwards, Zagovor drives around the city, with no purpose or goal in mind, before deciding to spend the weekend alone at his country house. It doesn’t really make any difference. Besides, why is it so important that Marie knows what he’s really thinking? A thin man in a striped apron pounds a cut of veal between two pieces of plastic. His feet are callused from years of wearing cowboy boots. A second man leans on the rail, squinting at a horse-race form. A third wheels his shopping cart up to the checkout counter and leaves with two white plastic bags of groceries. A fourth hires a housekeeper in a white uniform for two-hundred dollars a week. A fifth shuffles around his apartment missing the smell of his wife’s cigarette smoke, and even with those terrible clothes, you can tell he’s a very intelligent man. A sixth is in danger of jeopardizing his disabled status with the insurance company. A seventh, who has memories of Vietnamese peasants fleeing their villages, compulsively pokes two fingers under his ribcage to check for liver enlargement. And finally, the eighth puts Bach’s Concerto in C Major for Three harpsichords into his CD player, kicks off his shoes, and stretches out on the living room couch. Now why the hell is it so important that anyone know what all these men are really thinking? A young couple is hollering in a supermarket, and customers are listening, in particular those elderly women supposedly studying chicken parts and turkey slices, sliding their fingers over plastic, looking for spoilage. But what exactly are they listening for? Zagovor imagines himself a kind of surgeon. The cuts will be precise and clean, the width and length exact. The traits of personality that shape a face and give it form will finally be decided: neither beautiful nor unattractive, but supremely competent, and certainly no mask of depravity. Their bodies will touch, politely at first. They will discuss the lawyer’s busy lifestyle, his money, and his peculiar brand of intelligence. They will probably go to the lawyer’s house for supper. They will watch some TV. Later they will turn off the lights and lie down on the sofa together. In fact, Zagovor didn’t even kiss Marie when he left. Rotted out years ago. Sweating, dysenteric. The color of jaundice. But he knows himself well enough to know that he’s been poisoning himself for weeks. In fact, he’s done far more than his fair share of turning away, leaning against walls, and closing his eyes. He now has to learn to go about it more skillfully. By the time he reaches the house he’s exhausted, but strangely exhilarated. Of course he’ll have the place all to himself, and the silence.

The following evening Zagovor sits on the front porch, drinking a glass of wine. His mind easily drifts on the currents of memory and reverie. He remembers that Father used to keep a pair of binoculars on the porch rail, for bird-watching. He remembers the first fireflies of the evening drifting across the dark grass, and the sounds of Mother’s soap operas from the television set. Tonight the air smells crisp, the sky is clear. He glances over at the blue Dodge pickup parked at the side of the house. For some reason he’s reminded of a mania he had as child: burying things. First it was small objects like marbles, buttons, razorblades, guitar picks, and keys. Then later, a shoe box filled with pages torn from his sister’s diary, and a package of Mother’s kitchen knives, and a rather exquisite pre-Columbian piece from Guatemala. He buried an anthill once, even a hoola hoop. But none of these required the determination needed to bury a two-week-old possum carcass. Still, the curiosity is gnawing at Zagovor again. Not to bury something, of course, but to dig something up. It would be testimony to the past. He walks over to the pickup to retrieve a tire-iron. He feels he has to hurry this last little episode. Memory is chafing at his conscience. He finds a suitable clearing in the front yard, falls to his knees, raises the tire-iron, and plunges it into the earth, again and again. Caked dirt and mud fly into the air. The harder he swings the tire-iron, the more excited he gets. Soon he’s panting with desperation. His heart jumps into his throat when iron suddenly strikes wood. It’s a rather large crate of sorts. With the tire-iron he manages to pry back several slats to reveal one of Father’s gaming trophies, the polished, glistening horns of an African ibex. Zagovor stares down at it, too stunned to move. He can’t remember ever having buried it. He looks at his hands. Blood is everywhere, between his fingers, under his nails, spattered over the legs of his trousers. He’s apparently cut himself several places on the hands. He sits back on his heals and stares up at the night sky. Something’s moving up there. He should return to the house.

Zagovor can hear his own breathing now, as he unlocks the front door and walks into the foyer. Into the world of a man who must soon die? The red light of the burglar-alarm system blinks at him from its box. He fumbles for a lamp, turns it on, then jumps to the telephone just as it rings. Only dial tone. Weird. Malefic. The scraping of a mouse behind the wainscot. At length he finds himself in the musty bathroom. A naked bulb hangs from a wire in the middle of the ceiling. Paint is peeling off the hot-water heater. The medicine cabinet’s shelves are crammed with bottles, one of them containing a yellowish puffy mass floating in clear liquid. He removes a can of deodorant, spraying it into the air for the aroma, but then must hold on to the edge of the sink until the nausea passes. He backs through the doorway into the bedroom. He presses his arms against the jamb. He looks at the bedroom’s wallpaper and is surprised he’s never taken careful consideration of its pattern. His mother once picked out that pattern. Zagovor finally decides he does need a bath after all. So he returns to the bathroom. The water is scalding. He stretches out the length of the tub. Only his head remains above the waterline. He soaps and shampoos, then soaps again. He’s washing away the dirt and mud from the scratches. More than an hour later he steps out of the tub, dries off. He shaves. He looks very clean in the mirror. Spotless. He puts on a bathrobe. He returns to the living room and eases himself down into an overstuffed chair, resting his head against the cushioned back. He feels weary. It’s very late. He fixes his gaze on a small glass vacuum tube with a little vane-like propeller inside it. Shortly before dawn he falls asleep.

The following evening he sets himself a dinner for one. Oddly enough, he’s reminded of elegant dining rooms from the past, the shinning silverware, the tapestries decorating the walls with ancient personages. Before eating, he raises his eyes and hands toward the ceiling in attitude of prayer. He listens and then pretends to call out to someone upstairs. Of course no one answers. The record player in the living room is playing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. He listens for awhile, letting the music carry him. Somewhere. Perhaps off to the kitchen, where various utensils hang from hooks affixed to the stove hood.

The sound is muted and urgent, with nothing of good news about it, the sound of a solitary life. Zagovor has vaguely felt it approaching for some time now. To renounce conversation. To become a guardian of silence. His eyes fix on the immutable white ceiling with its big brown-rimmed water stain. How serious everything’s become. Whatever happened to three pairs of Hostess Twinkies in cellophane wrappers? Or the blinding halls of major European museums? Or a uniformed police officer charging into the kitchen, his gun drawn and leveled? Besides, it’s the survivors who do all the rearranging, while it’s Zagovor who merely turns the little key twenty times more to postpone everything. And yet a feeling of disgust wells up inside of him. He might go to the movies alone, or to a bar, some ugly jerkwater place, or he might look past Marie at the grimy clouds beyond the kitchen windowpanes. Beer mug in hand. Grinning at himself. Wearing a cheap nylon sweater from the rummage box of a discount store. Can’t you imagine what it’s like to vulgarize the bottom of the ocean? Of course he invites her home, but she falls asleep before he can get her clothes off. And her face is deathly pale, true, though blessed with good bones and an ironic smile. Yet she never once expresses a wish to see him again. So can’t you see she’s crazy? But can’t you see you’re sick as well? Almost everyone’s sick with some kind of unaccountable melancholy. Then how do you finally convince yourself to leap into battle without giving thought to your own injuries?

It’s Labor Day weekend. As Zagovor rides along in the cab toward the airport, he studies the skyline and the treetops. He remembers the street corners he lingered on. He remembers a bloody fist-fight that left him with a broken nose and badly dislocated shoulder. At some point he falls asleep, only waking when the cab arrives at the airport. He pays the driver. At the ticket counter he makes a request for bulkhead seats. The flight departs on time. After the seat-belt light goes off, Zagovor stands up briefly to inspect his fellow passengers in first-class. He notices a wedding ring here and there, but he recognizes no faces. He says good morning to several people but is ignored. So he returns to his seat. The passengers behind him are speaking French. He leans forward, putting his hands over his face. If he squeezes his eyes shut sometimes there are yellow waves and sparks.

The hotel seems empty of guests. Nobody says a word. The news-and-cigar stand is shuttered with a steel fence. The pink- floored lobby is swept and smells slightly of whiskey, fish, and perfume. Overall the decorations are perhaps a bit too striking to be considered in good taste. The desk clerk gives Zagovor a wink and two messages. The message from his mother Zagovor will put beside the phone. The elevator works well. His room is spacious, with a large window facing the street. He can faintly hear cars driving by. The hotel has an impressive swimming pool as well, with adjacent Jacuzzi, showers, and sauna facilities. This evening Zagovor has the pool to himself. He swims lap after lap of backstroke. He can’t help but look up into the sky.

Rather than visit the hospital, Zagovor spends most of the following day reading newspapers and smoking cigarettes in the hotel’s sports bar. He chooses a table that faces the lobby so that he can watch travelers arrive and depart. The blonde waitress chews her gum in time to the country music oldies. Today’s special is two-dollar bottles of Heineken. Zagovor’s not interested. He’s not a drinking man, never has been. A cup of hot tea, please, that’s all, Lipton. Same as yesterday. He can’t resist looking at her dark nipples beneath the thin white blouse. She notices and returns a smile. He wonders if her nipples get hard at the mere touch of a finger. Perhaps her boyfriend is away in the service. Perhaps her affection requires centuries of attention. Zagovor stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray with quick, hard pokes. Then what’s wrong with him? Overwork? Strain? And what psychiatrist could ever understand that when he touches a certain brain cell, he hears a voice from long ago or experiences a strong emotion? So this is paranoia, right? No, it’s more than that, because he’s also unable to shake the apprehension of some pending misfortune, especially of his own approaching death. How absurd indeed, for he’s healthy enough, at least as healthy as any of these patrons. He scans the tables. Up at the long, mahogany bar a group of strange-looking colored men, probably half-Negro half-Polynesian, are drinking orange pop and watching the football game. During commercials they discuss the dull life they’re leading. Sure, he could punch any one of them. But what happens when they hit him back? A wild flurry of punches delivered in a breathless rush of adrenaline? Zagovor’s never fallen unconscious before. Perhaps it’s like hibernation. A large man now enters the bar and, seating himself at a neighboring table, demands a Heineken in a rather formidable voice. This man carries himself with a rather self-satisfied air. He’s obviously never learned the value of keeping a straight face. The jukebox starts up again. Tammy Wynette.

The sun has set. The rain is coming down much harder now, and although he has no umbrella, no hat, only a hooded windbreaker, Zagovor decides to walk from the hotel to the nearby Jesuit cemetery. He cuts through a little park to a bridge that crosses the canal into the cemetery. Vagrants are milling about in the park, chattering amongst themselves. No one pays Zagovor heed. He enters the cemetery unmolested. That was fun. They’re all fun. Except for the homeless priests. But then they’re not really part of the pattern, are they? Zagovor finds a tree to urinate against. Finished, he watches the downpour in silence, and he listens too, inclining his head a bit to the right to favor his better ear. His hands dig deeper into the pockets of his jacket. He walks awhile longer, then stops. At his feet are three graves dug close together, side by side. Unlike the others in the cemetery, these are more recent. Two are full-sized, one is smaller. He kneels down to wipe the dirt and mud away. The inscriptions on the headstones remind him again of the mutilations. Two priests and a crucified boy. He pictures the holy water sprinkled over their caskets. What a weird way to die. He still can’t make sense of it. Yet he feels secure in this cemetery. He senses tradition and order. He resumes walking. Eventually he comes upon a fork in the footpath. To the left, the woods. To the right, the cemetery. Zagovor decides to walk into the woods. The leaves and branches soon lose their detail, becoming a mass of darkness. But he continues. Twigs snap and pop. Low bushes lash at his legs. Vines arch from tree to tree. Suddenly he finds himself in a grassy clearing. He feels as if he’s crossed the line between two worlds. Three men in raincoats stand together next to a pile of cordwood. Each of them holds an ax. Zagovor quickly steps back into the woods before they have a chance to see him. As he backtracks to the cemetery, he remembers how his father taught him to swing an ax.

Half an hour later Zagovor decides to return to the hotel along a busy boulevard. The rain’s still pouring, but he’s somehow in better spirits. Even at this late hour, in this terrible weather, the jostling crowds won’t leave him be. The street-lit darkness has a swiftness about it. The breeze off the bay glides over his skin. All the nerves in his body seem ready for one great thing. On an impulse he drops by an all-night hamburger joint. The counterman, whose white cap and uniform are spattered with grease, treats his impatient customers rather indignantly. It takes several minutes to fill the order. Zagovor takes his food to a stand-up counter. He pulls a handful of white napkins from the dispenser. The couple standing beside him are discussing a movie they’ve just seen. The young lady’s laughter fairly ripples through restaurant.

The following afternoon Zagovor takes a taxi across the city. From the back seat he tries to familiarize himself with the dashboard lights and windshield wipers. He tries to catch the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror but fails, as the driver is compulsively fiddling with the radio dial. The taxi passes high- rise hotels, department stars, neon-lit bars, movie theaters, pet stores, furniture showrooms, and many lumpy-looking men carrying bedrolls. At some point Zagovor must fall asleep, waking only when the taxi pulls up to the hospital’s entrance. He pays the driver. The reception area is practically empty of visitors. No one says a word. The gift shop is closed. Wheelchairs are stacked and folded against a wall. A nurse walks by, glancing through a folder. The women at the nearest nursing station are talking on the telephone. Zagovor reaches a door marked EXIT without anyone noticing him. He ascends the flight of stairs.

Her room’s door is ajar. Zagovor feels the panicky impulse to bolt down the corridor, but he finally gathers enough courage to enter. The room is dark. The blinds are closed against the setting sun. An old woman lies bathed in the eerie, amber rays of the night-light above her bed. Her eyes are riveted to a blank television screen. Her nightgown has a very large tear around the upper right shoulder. She smells of baby oil. There are no chairs for visitors, so Zagovor leans against the bedside table. He looks at the woman for awhile, then averts his gaze to the ceiling. Finally, when he can bear it no longer, he turns around to open the blinds. The fading sunlight casts long shadows across the room. What a lovely view. He looks up at the sky. He imagines a doctor lifting a white sheet. Suddenly he hears a muffled cry behind him. He shuts his eyes, puts his hands over his ears, but the crying continues, and he cannot shut it out. He awkwardly wheels around to face the bed. The old woman is reaching a hand out toward him. He quickly leaves.

In the elevator Zagovor encounters a sick man on a stretcher wheeled by a nurse who’s holding up a saline bottle. The nurse smiles at Zagovor. He notices she has a cruciform birthmark on her temple. He returns her smile, then exits the elevator on the ground floor. A series of green arrows leads him the rest of the way to the so-called ‘open ward.’ Here the patients are supposedly harmless to themselves and others. They’re even permitted to check out for the day. The catatonics spend their time in immobility. How could they not, when any moment a flying saucer might swoop down to snatch them up? Car noises come through the windows. Screws clink in a jar. Door hinges reflect sunshine like silver butterflies. The upholstery is green plastic. None of the patients or attendants says a word. Zagovor stands at the window, his hands joined in an attitude of prayer. Outside, yellow and red leaves are scattered on the ground. The trees are empty. The soldiers are gone. Zagovor remembers once as a young boy kicking at the barren ground, looking for something he’d buried. It was raining hard, almost dark. The treetops reached up into the sky. The wind rose sharply. He shivered. He felt alone. Shadows were forming at his feet. He knew he would be lost for a long, long time to come, and that the next day it would be best not to say anything about it to anyone, when suddenly Father appeared, lifted him up, and carried him right back home.

Open Payment

1 I remained fairly confident in my diagnosis. So I moved to Boulder, for personal reasons. Meanwhile, Jenny remained at the hospital in Denver. I thought it was an intelligent, imaginative sort of solution to Jenny’s problems. I also changed my name to Edmonds. Because I wasn’t a psychiatrist. Not really. Though I was told I behaved very much like one. “Jenny, if you want to have a child accompany you on your visits to the museum, a lifelessly clean sort of child, well, I can arrange it. I can also light the scene evenly and put it within earshot of a beer-hall, one so quiet perhaps you’ll hear the clock tick pleasantly.” I enjoyed walking to my office along the most crowded of streets. Because maybe, at the root of that world, someone would approach to show me pleasant things. Sometimes amazing things. Though always good things. Like a church, cold, smelling of wax. Believe me. One blessed with a majestic entrance separated by a ponderous, leather curtain from what lay inside, a vast void silent as paper. When behind me, suddenly, the boiler kicked in with a thundering whoosh, making me jump. I found that, unlike in Denver, in Boulder lunch was the crown jewel of the day. People dressed for it as for a wedding. They dined among the quiet flames of seven-branched candlesticks. They sent waiters off to hide certain things, while black figures swarmed around the maître-d’hôtel. Once, though, beneath the dull light cast by fake snow, I fell victim to the Jack Frost Syndrome. I felt building up inside of me the power to do away with all troubles, especially Jenny’s. Yet I also somehow found it unnecessary to cancel the so-called tarantella. On weekends electricity became unnecessary. When I became a beast. The expressionless manner of a beast stirring in its cage, trying to fall asleep with its paws clutching at a perch in a most absurd manner. A beast stretched out on a cheap motel bed, lying under coarse woolen blankets, in a room so dimly lit by a single bulb and yet so abundant with food, with red wines. The mineral lamps would be extinguished by midnight since most of the guests had already left. Which made me feel like I needed Jenny all that much more. Perhaps take her to an amusement park for her birthday. Or, at the very least, wheel her out of the Denver County Medical Center. To follow our fantasies past the elevator shaft. To descend into the streets of downtown Denver and then wind our way between the many high-windowed buildings. But unfortunately the next item on this week’s agenda was a survivor of a minor automobile crash. Had I not been a psychiatrist I might’ve been more upset by that client’s marital problems. You would not believe it, I’m sure. In fact, that same day in the reception room several small children broke open and spilled onto the floor many yellowed sheaves of paper. While their negligent parents simply milled around, whistling tunelessly between their teeth. Yet, through it all, I remained confident in my diagnoses. I often glanced out my office window at the Rockies, imagining they were a full-scale mock-up of the Andes ranging southward. Within a month my desk was surrounded by dozens of boxes and crates with bales of newspaper tied up in hay-rope. Some boxes even contained what looked like ledgers. At Jenny’s insistence I didn’t save the boxes stuffed with papers, since most of them had turned white and shapeless with age and damp. Nevertheless, I worked with extraordinary skill. Curing my patients of their obsessions was much like pouring a thick pink soup onto plates of paper. Once, a diabetic patient named Tony described how Mommy and Daddy were going to the waters, so to speak, and then ‘binding’ themselves to sweets and fruits. Yet another patient spoke about The Others who carried flashlight beams which they trained on invoices wrapped in rubber bands. Then one evening, returning from the office, I pulled something out of my slacks and put it beside an elevator shaft before moving quietly past, through a small stone arch. My nose wrinkled at the smell of rotting. And the darkness there was considerably deeper than what I’d grown accustomed to around the Fourth of July. A male guide then indicated where Jenny’s lost trunk was. Under the stairs, near a gas-burner fastened to the wall. Very ordinary looking. But why was the guide studying my hands? So I took one of them out of my jacket pocket and squeezed him with it. I told him, “take it all, sir, all the measures of the tock of that clock.” He nodded, then led me to the lobby, where a lonely parrot babbled something at the ceiling.

2 The other day. Was it just the other day? Yes. I clearly remembered the quite unusual feeling of elation that had just come over me. Jenny’s hands were still tangled in my hairy breast, and her thighs were stained with semen. We were lying in bed. Later that afternoon we would go running barefoot along the city’s warm unpaved streets, bottles of beer in our hands, money in our pockets. How I admired Jenny’s regal stature and her short black curly hair. She wore her favorite summer dress. I wore only shorts and a military jacket, one with brass. Those days I showed no particular interest in other matters. And even then, of course, Jenny couldn’t let go of me. She feared I might get lost in that city all by myself. So she was the look-out. She couldn’t have been more inspired by the anticipation of my forthcoming purchase. A necklace of silver moons. Upon seeing it Jenny sighed with relief and became quite cheerful, as if God were rendering Himself full-rayed upon her. While all around us, in the streets, drunkards carried leathern casks or leaned upon their pikes, and large chariots rolled their wheels over flagstones past baggage- laden dromedaries and other beasts of burden. Such discoveries. Such adventure. And quite unexpected shops. With the result that I became a kind of domestic bloodhound, and a rather eccentric one to boot. Everything in that city stirred in diffusion. Women with parasols in their hands. Women mounted on asses. Men with parrots on their shoulders and mastiffs at their sides. Butter wrapped in fig leaves. Snow shoveled into linen bags. Temples whose doors were open to reveal glimmerings of light off golden plates. True, some of it was to be praised, and some inveighed against, but I simply searched things out. I was confident of finding even a Libyan goat or a purple couch. Or perhaps ramps to the moneychangers. That city pushed my interest up from ‘moderate enough’ to ‘obsessed.’ I wanted to take it all back with me to our Rocky Mountain village.

3 I watched the ice-bag slide down Jenny’s wet, cold forehead. I watched her blue, nearly lifeless face grow gradually shining. Now maybe it was cowardice that made me slink away from Jenny’s hospital bed the following week. Although I’d never been a coward at heart. Well, maybe I was a coward in action. But I simply couldn’t stand there, so shabby, with such tears in my eyes. Because I still had to go out again. Now don’t imagine I lunged at the door, flinging it open, fleeing downstairs no matter what. No, please don’t imagine that. However, not more than ten minutes later I was standing in the ‘billiard loft’ of a nearby tavern, savoring a beer, and admiring the ceiling, how almost all the boards had been stripped away, allowing bright daylight to filter through roof-beams strangely hanging down. As if from fantasy came reality. Or maybe the roof had simply been torn off the tavern. I really didn’t know. But then I fancied I could feel the barman’s breath on the back of my neck and that he was about to see why immediately. I felt like I was standing beside the pickled skeleton of a prehistoric monster. Don’t be in a hurry to laugh at his jokes, I thought, maybe he wants a three-way. In any case, he accepted my explanations then moved away from where he’d been standing to another spot. So I watched the customers walk by my stool, how they carried their shoulders past without a word, without a warning, without even noticing me. Now I could’ve forgiven blows, but I couldn’t forgive the fact that no one noticed me. So I moved to a table. Same result. Their eyes slipped past surgically removed. I looked down. No splinters, hardly any litter on the floor. Soon rage was blocking up my throat, blocking up the chute where the food went down, and as a result, I felt quite nauseous. That day I realized I’d never before seen a mannequin in a drugstore. Weird. So when I went outside I also wasn’t prepared to vomit on the sidewalk, having long beforehand, from the previous shock, forgotten to look for the stomach remedies. I’m sure I looked wretched in that ragged, stained shirt with white bone-studs. Then moments later, my overcoat was the only thing so conspicuous in that tavern, but rest assured, it wasn’t one of those lemon-colored ones. God how that garment held me back! Yet the coat itself was very good. It kept me warm and dry. Though now it was all wadded up on the barstool, all homely, confused, and troubled, much like its owner. The next night I went out again, as it were. Yet more furtively, and with raccoon eyes. My shirt collar was the very height of vulgarity. So perhaps I needed to change my ‘collar intentions,’ because I still looked as abject and miserable as the night before. I was trying to remember if Pepto-Bismol was even available in that drugstore. The third night I actually stole the two mannequins standing three rows to the right of the stomach medicines. Or so I imagined. I guess I’d seen what I wanted. The same lewd intentions of sacrificing myself for a beaver like that one, a female officer’s. Subsequently I began visiting the city morgue, or so I imagined, and after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of dead German beaver. Though such German beavers soon wore through. Please don’t be alarmed, kind reader. I can explain such odd behavior. I think. At first I wasn’t able to divide fantasy from reality, but as time passed, I became more and more sure of what was real and what seemed real. I just read the instructions on the box’s label.

4 And so, the following morning, I asked Jenny about what I believed was the line whipping her dead body out from beneath my overcoat on Judgment Day, along with our pet cat Fritz. Because I waited constantly for that feeling, to be with her, and yet with me, yes with, especially with me. Did I succeed? Well, Jenny and I were eating breakfast in the hospital when I said, “Picture yourself planting radishes on the fifteenth green of our dead cat Fritz,” to which she responded like I was talking about the field of Mister Angel, or a baby, or even a football in the crook of my arm. That was also the morning I invented this story, when I claimed that Jenny had subconsciously wanted to get AIDS in order to shut down her immune system. It so maddened me that I began to say, “Advanced psychological circles at that time sure enough fell for the theory and said so.” So as I crapped on this planet, through my elbows of course, I invented what I wanted to kill while Jenny continued to fall through my arms into a heap at my feet. Until her skin was stretched thin across her cheekbones and colored purple. I wanted to breathe fire into Jenny’s will, and yet now history expected me to clean up after her. As if I had to wash out and flatten everyone’s soup cans and account for every drop of unused motor oil. A fact I regarded much like an unpaid bill. Eventually the authorities might force me to give up and run myself aground. Fat chance. Because I wanted to put a bullet between every human being who’d screwed things up and trashed the world. I still liked to smoke, and being Catholic, I incorrectly traced everything back to man’s free will--which used to annoy even me. So I asked Jenny if her getting AIDS was comparable to such things as having to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried forests. Or pumping chlorofluorocarbons straight into everyone’s lungs until the tissue turned black. Yet somehow Jenny considered her doom free of good sense, preferring not to discuss her condition or my possible death in gasoline tanks or land-filled sites of toxic ‘front species.’ She also ignored my suggestion that every whale and dolphin had already been sludge-dumped a generation before we were born. But what I said to Jenny about our generation being the crap of history was also what I really believed. Because I wanted to destroy everything and smother all the French beaches I’d never seen. In fact, to speak of burning the Amazon rain-forest was a mainstay of my bag of verbal tricks, as well as that the universe was a dump-valve on a super-tanker feeding off uncapped offshore oil wells until all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat would consist mostly of misery. But please, kind reader, don’t think of this final passage as one of extinction. Consider it more as history paid out in years, or better yet, try to imagine you’ve long been a part of a cycle of humanity reeling you out before downsizing itself. So perhaps for thousands of years I’d wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Beautiful. I’d never been potentially doomed to hostility but I guess I finally caught it in the end. I now looked at the universe and saw open payment. I looked at how the universe reeled me out, like I really was the fighter I imagined myself to be. Unlike the way most people flop and thrash before they reel you in. And so that morning I held Jenny’s face in my knuckles, bashing her until her teeth broke through her lips. Yes, I bashed Jenny senseless, subtracting her struggles from my life of folly. And perhaps these fists would blast her world free of history. So I bashed her with my psychology textbooks too and then made the mistake of walking away from her hospital bed. Forever. Because I wanted down-the-pipe orthodoxy. This is my world now, I’d thought, this is my world, my world, with all these medical personnel floating around inventing their mundane, unimaginative causes, and all those endangered pandas even I wouldn’t screw to save my own species. I finally laughed. Because I wanted silly birds and deer to burn a silly course right through the Mona Lisa. God, the Louvre! What I could do there with a sledgehammer!

Shiva Nova

Reader, if you must, remove this story carefully by pulling the pages straight out from the binding.

I

As a ‘transcendental cartographer,’ I’m both an artist and a philosopher, a bronze-skinned philosopher at that (please don’t label me aristocratic). Say, you got a few minutes? Yeah? Great. So what I’d like to do is, first, determine, perhaps with your help, everything that happened millions of years ago, and second, weave the whole thing together with what’s happening in the world today. A sort of Ice Age reenactment that takes into account New York City’s public transportation system. No--I’m serious. Better yet, a five-act tragedy in blank verse composed right here on my old Remington typewriter. Imagine a thousand pages of manuscript, some parts neatly typed, some handwritten, others still in outline form: clippings, notes, articles ripped from news magazines, encyclopedias, histories, dictionaries, cave- drawings in various languages, golden catalogues of thought, long complex sequences of repeated phrases. And if you like, you can also imagine my study. The deep drawers with brass knobs. Innumerable pigeonholes. Large aluminum filing cabinets. Cane- backed chairs piled high with manila envelopes. Massive bronze ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ash. But you should see the video discs! Information compressed into grooves 1/10,000 of an inch wide. Beautiful, and very unusual.

Nevertheless, an important question remains: why insist on chronological experience?--when the easiest way to draw a flower is to place a transparency over the picture and trace its outline. Mine’s such a long story anyhow, I barely have sufficient time or vocabulary to conceive it. ‘Long-term yak yak’ is the most descriptive blurb I can come up with. In fact, just to fulfill this appointment, I feel like I’ve spent all of two hours traveling a mere twenty miles by freeway: roll-over accidents, cars blaring Spanish music, cars overheated and stalled, motorcycle gangs weaving through traffic and setting off barking dogs in pickup trucks. My eyes are now bloodshot and vague, my respiration artificial. Besides, lecturing is such a dreary pursuit. The timing isn’t quite right, or I can’t read my notes, or the champagne hasn’t arrived, or I’d rather not intrude upon the crowd’s natural silence. Seems I’ve done everything in this business except crawl on the ocean floor. And yet, the seminar room is jam-packed this evening, the audience begging for my latest installment--shrieks of dopey laughter, pointing forefingers, arms and legs wheeling about--yes, I’m quite flattered. Simply by peering into their eyes I can raise the audience’s intelligence to the level of my own, before sitting down on a bench at the front of the room and stretching my legs out before me. Ah yes, so maybe this really is as good as it gets.

II

I feel alone. So, then become a travel agent! But alone is too real. Ever try mass transit? No, because alone is worse than a frigid planet 480 million miles from the sun. Well then, I’ll bring the boys over--I know how much you love their cute little goyish faces. Okay, but alone is still a stairway into the dim past or the presence of an immense, silent eye. Shut up, will yuh! I’ll tell you what alone is--it’s a night without crashing!

Anyone who ventures into the Key Holes is certainly alone (the reader wouldn’t be here otherwise). Indeed, you can’t help but wonder how they were ever formed in the first place: terraced, parallel rows of holes, seven meters in diameter, perfectly circular, each with a distinct keystone. Entering any one of them is a moment of absolute bliss (like crossing the border into Canada). But exiting is, well, it’s irrevocably Indian:

Shiva Nova

The different ways of doing things, the inefficiencies, the language barrier, the metric system, the standard job-application procedures--these infuriate and frustrate any newcomers who prefer to dance the sweet dance of equilibrium. In Shiva Nova, action comes alive only with memory. Elitist units such as the Criminal Investigations Division would have great difficulty functioning around here. Instead, local kids police the territory, and things remain pretty quiet. In fact, the only behavior that might be considered aggressive is when inhabitants push, shove, or rub up against one another. I’ve never seen any squaring-off between individuals. True, our politicians sometimes go out at night, but if they do, no one molests them.

Most of our roads were built more than forty years ago, and limited space has required the layering of graves, some as many as twelve caskets deep. Although prices on consumer goods are quite high (nearly double those in the United States), Shiva Nova offers something to everyone, all of it in a country no larger than California, and none of it contaminated by spent fuel rods: tennis, trail rides, trout fishing, hot-spring baths, large servings of buffalo steak in mushroom sauce. Our new shopping center will have space for fifty new shops, thirty offices, and parking for hundreds of cars, while the genital slit ending near the rounded anus will conveniently identify every available female customer. Myself, I like it up on the mountains where it’s much easier to invoke botany. The afternoon breeze is light, the air wholesome. Waves of white gold surge beneath the sun. When you walk with such beauty, the miles are shorter, the paths less steep. Happily, very little ever seems to happen up there. So please go away--this is private property. I can’t help you.

Still you persist. Okay then, I’ll do my best to introduce myself as a 40-year-old man with an exaggerated appetite for menial labor who was born in a clearing at the end of a long, unpaved valley road. How many men my age sport such a head of honey-colored hair? Who knows? I’ve never been overweight, never will be, and nothing, not even those leaky windows, can persuade me to lose my mind. We hill-people are strange about our manners. All of my family is rather unusual and uniquely individual, but my wife Shirley is everyone’s favorite. Her energy’s contagious, and yet somehow she’s always in perfect control of herself, even after several glasses of champagne. I often get nostalgic and lean my body into Shirley’s, craving contact. I like to caress the small nick on her chin. When I think of Shirley I think of the eclectic mix of her striped T-shirts, her penciled eyebrows, her farm-girl forehead, her pierced navel, and her flat, wide behind. I think of cupping her feet in my hands. Her voice often carries me away to a feast of peach tarts and cream. Next in line, after Shirley, comes my oldest daughter Gretchen: a skeleton in the most expensive corner of the cemetery. Then my son Darren: skydiving without a parachute--just pick him back up and let him slumber on your shoulder. And finally my nephew Flagstaff: aiming backwards at a brown flurry in the shadows.

Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll bomb the bastard into oblivion. He probably deserves it. Where is he? He’s right behind that rock over there. Then we’ll blow him to pieces. No? Okay, several gunshots to the face. You worried about roadblocks and killer cops gone crazy? They won’t attack me, they wouldn’t dare.

III

As we all know, writers’ incredulities are just as charming as their credulities. Yet many U. S. writers are pessimistic about the finality of Shiva Nova, especially a writer named Kemper Rolfe who resides at the illustrious corner of Seventy-second and Central Park West, five floors above the park--prime real estate for pessimistic writers. Mr. Rolfe spends most of the day ensconced in his study, sitting behind a large mahogany desk at a window that overlooks the green portions of Manhattan. He sits there all day, every day and most of the night, dressed in tan slacks and shirts of fine British cotton. He fancies himself a ‘transcendental cartographer.’ He types non-stop on his old Remington: row upon row of tiny black puncture wounds on white linen-finished paper. The single-spaced pages continue to pile up. Every Monday Mr. Rolfe awaits a weekly delivery of requested rarities from the New York City Public Library, a privilege granted only to the smallest minority of writers, no matter how physically disabled or well-referenced. Every long- forgotten novelty culled from every uncommon resource eventually finds its way into Shiva Nova.

I suppose Shiva Nova is a form of hoarding, like stashing a pack of cards into a secret pocket or compressing 20 trillion watts of power into a billionth of a second, but however you choose to conceive it, you cannot deny that some of Mr. Rolfe’s paragraphs are pretty goddamned filthy. Take a good long look--you might go totally psychosomatic but you won’t get bored: A naked young girl on a putting green with a St. Bernard puppy (tubes target her red chamber). A second young girl wearing a straw hat kneeling in an ivied grotto near a small waterfall. A mouthful of cola squirting from pursed lips (each beam reflects off a mirror). A fetus-sized rubber doll. A hideous creature with bile-colored skin. A snake that swallowed a chicken inside a spherical steel chamber. An Orthodox Jew, with long beard and black frock coat, hawking diamonds in a bourse on West 47th Street. (By the way, if diamond is the world’s best thermal conductor, why are they trying to sell me this shitty ring with a burgundy stone in it?) Crates of tea from India, apples from Washington state, Chinese tennis shoes, big skyscrapers full of pigeons, stylish blondes with huge pointed tits, Sorbonne-educated camel herders drunk on quick-kick rum who stagger homeward from the headwaters of the Rio Grande, English lads at a boarding school in Brighton learning how to transform a small island into a modern nation- state, clamorous rock-hoppers bouncing from boulder to boulder, bulldozers leveling a whole city block. Yes, all of these vignettes and many more comprise a typical page of the Shiva Nova manuscript.

I suppose, from one perspective, Shiva Nova is a boundless flow of energy and linguistic freedom (though to the average physiologist it’s probably more akin to sword-swallowing), while from the opposite perspective, it’s a fantastic infringement on world history. Yet twelve still makes a dozen, and twenty a score. Compost remains the world’s best fertilizer, and railroads the most energy-efficient means of transporting bulk waste overland. Where else to put the waste? How about launching it into space, into the sun?--into Shiva Nova? Now that would be the end of everything!

It’s looming bigger and bigger, isn’t it? Five words or less and a timeline won’t help me explain why, if for no other reason than that the easiest way to draw a flower is to place a transparency over the picture and trace its outline.

IV

Now please keep in mind that Shiva Nova won’t be for everybody. Many readers will not make the cut, many will be culled--which, unfortunately, doesn’t mean that some hop-head dingbat a few blocks down the street won’t try to fuck with the manuscript, make it into a mud-colored scrapbook, or package it in rose-and-white-flavored endpapers. Ho, ho. How’s that for a warped lens? Well, here we are, and the name of the exit is the same, though almost everything else in the vicinity has changed.

I regain my composure and try to laugh.

Several minutes later, having pulled back sufficiently far from the Key Holes, I discover that the details of Shiva Nova are rapidly fading from memory. The real challenge, and one I still can’t meet, is translating my vision of Shiva Nova into the language of common reality. To hold the vision in your mind. To transpose it. Finally to cherish it. Trust me, it’s only a matter of time before the technique is perfected. I like to imagine that a young scholar in Palo Alto is already busy preparing a doctoral dissertation on Shiva Nova and the practical means of sustaining its vision.

РАДЕНИЯ

The episode begins. I’m sitting on a monorail, hurtling through Tomorrowland but feeling like I’m trapped in a Jetsons time- warp. I share the car with a family of bloodthirsty Christians. As we proceed through yesterday’s future, the mother occasionally glances to her right, frowning at my mohawk. Already, without proper introductions, I’ve become the prime suspect, public enemy №1. I’m the guy concealing a bag of commercial-grade dynamite. I’m the anarchist-intellectual with a doctorate in Judaism who’s arrived to give all the tourists a crash-course in random human suffering. My allegiance to humanity diminishes daily. I imagine how, just looking at me, the mother begins to miss her marble floors and chilled bottles of Pouilly-Fuissé. She yearns for the protection of her hot-pink Hummer. She’s worried, preoccupied, impatient to return home, to see that big blue billboard with the words, WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI! THE MAGNOLIA STATE. I’m the black custodian smoking in a broom closet. I’m the skinny guy subsisting on a steady diet of Dr. Pepper and chicken sandwiches. One evening the mother sees me standing outside the French doors to her dining room. I’m smiling. She lets out a scream and reaches for the phone. She dials 911. With my gloved fist I smash a pane of glass and let myself in. I’m still smiling. The room is charged with a dull green light. My name is Edward Kelley. The last time I supposedly died was July 22, 1934. However, I look quite different this time around--though the FBI still offers a $250,00 reward for my capture, and the state swarms with bounty-hunters intent on preventing me from escape into Reality. The mother suddenly lunges forward with a kitchen knife. I swiftly step aside, laugh, and tell her the pancakes would’ve been better with a bit of buttermilk in the batter. I then explain how I’m all things, all the time, all at once. I’m the final disclosure. Your cyanide-laced panties don’t frighten me, nor do your anonymous letters to the FBI. Besides, how many cops are already out there, right now, walking the grid? Does anyone care? Her lips are cyanotic, her pale skin sickening. Once upon a time her days were long and sweet, filled with peace and closeness. In small towns the most beautiful women are always blondes (or, at the very least, lesser female deities). But ‘once upon a time’ is not the same as it ever was, and I’m not preaching a new Gospel. I’m simply demonstrating the limits of my own humanity. It’s not a question of what you should know but rather what you cannot know. I’ve already crossed that river. Bank to bank. I’ve posed as a Navajo tribal policeman and long since moved beyond biography, melodrama, toe-tags, and blood-soaked kerchiefs. I’m ready for a third helping. God knows I’m ready. Then later, a year later, following a rigged trial, on the night of December 29-30, from about half past ten to half past midnight, I’m the same guy, though now dressed in an orange jumpsuit and strapped to an execution gurney. Does anyone care? The episode ends.

Well, punk’s a state of mind. Martha Stewart and Donald Rumsfeld are not. One moment I’m standing in the doorway, wearing a pair of a paint-spattered overalls and a blue bowtie, clutching two pieces of moss-green fabric, one satin, one chiffon, both absolutely gorgeous. The next, I’ve barricaded myself into the kitchen and begun screaming for cocaine. The whole Los Feliz neighborhood can hear me, I’m sure. The floor of my apartment is littered with crack pipes and Lego pieces. I’m half Chinese, half Jewish, and not at all what a CPA would call an asset to society. My imagination contains all possible combinations of success and failure, none of which even remotely interests me. I’ve trashed hotel rooms and kicked out windshields and waggled my fingers at the overhead lights like an exhausted invertebrate--and that’s not even balls-to-the-wall. If necessary, and it often is, I can subsist four weeks on Cocoa Puffs and Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream. Today my hip’s killing me. Tomorrow I’ll probably put on an orange reflector vest and stay home all day eating M&M’s and watching Return of the Jedi over and over again. It’s getting near the summer solstice. Time to apply for the NRA’s Distinguished Marksman qualification. I visit the local shooting range at least three times a week. I’m not a bad shot, a real Beltway Sniper, if you will, and pleasantly non-homicidal to boot. Some citizens think I’m an elitist asshole, but they have no idea my grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, one of the People of the Book, or that my mother is Atlanta’s premier plastic surgeon. Still others smile and tell me I’m the lucky one. But I try to ignore their blow-job facial expressions, because, like Popeye and Yahweh, I simply am what I am. I was born on February 28, 1973, if that means anything to you. I grew up in Brooklyn, where I learned to drive. I was even a National Merit Scholar. I took the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan and I modeled underwear for Calvin Klein. Two days before turning twenty I moved to Seattle, where I studied videography in the evenings and bussed tables during the day. However, more than five years of overcast days and under-employed mediocrity drove me to consider suicide over mass executions, but I worked my way through it, finally packing my bags and moving to LA on August 7, 1998. It’s so convenient taking one’s hatred of the world out on oneself. In my case, I realized how impatience with mainstream society was leading me down a path of self-destruction--and still is. Consider these hesitation wounds and this pill organizer. But at least now it all makes sense to me, the Bruce Lee poster, the iPod, the rubber inflatable sex-doll hecho en México, the stench of garlic and oregano. Mother tells me they have the best shopping in Atlanta. Damn. Last time she saw me I was a drag queen dressed as a geisha. I vomited out of a car window. Blank disbelief on her part. High-fives all around and good-natured fist- pumping on ours. To this day, I love criminal law more than five- and-half-carat diamonds. I prefer the high-pitched whine of a vacuum cleaner to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry or the MTV Video Music Awards or any concept album you might care to mention. And nothing’s more enticing than good posture. I know I could’ve been a club promoter. I could’ve learned to follow society’s choreography. I could’ve purchased a new Palm Pilot, sworn off this regimen of tranquilizers and narcotics, and moved to Canada where there’s no such thing as celebrity. How do Iggy Pop and David Lee Roth do it? But no, my heroes had to be Kurt Cobain and Elliott Smith and Brown v. Board of Education. If only the world were a dance studio of reinforced concrete. We wouldn’t have to drive in silence to our favorite restaurants, asking ourselves, which writer made the light and which the dark?

Then you shall have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. And we shall name him Nanotechnology. What more do want? The military disaster of Dien Bien Phu? A vague retelling of the Boxer Rebellion? An abusive foster father? Or maybe an iron toad wired to an electric battery? The same is true of all other cultures and societies. Lots of autobiographical interjections. More and more incoherence. Fragmented, often conflicting accounts of parallel stories set in the past and ripped off wholesale from Father’s illustrations of Dresden. Copious footnotes too, and numerous descriptions of illicit sexual encounters. An LA tattoo-parlor employee lusts after a stripper in a land of wild palm trees, s(c)andals, rubber toys, and leman meringue pie. —When suddenly Father’s most illuminating secret is revealed. Reference is the same as (equals) meaning. Most of the events and characters depicted in this film turn out to be entirely fictional. Except for the labyrinth of the Palace of Crete, a severely damaged Statue of Liberty, a pistol with a hawk-spirit, and one of the plagues from the Book of Revelation. Some speculation also revolves around a lost Beethoven symphony so entertaining anyone hearing it goes into a stupor for seven days. But the bulk of the narrative is told in flashback while addressing the classical philosophical issue of personal identity. Overtly esoteric symbolism abounds, and cryonics is often mistakenly referred to as ‘cryogenics.’ So maybe this is the world of transhumanism. Maybe that’s why the main persona confuses a needle-gun with a nail- gun and inexplicably fragments in Part Four. Or was that a blurry picture of a corpse’s face? Wait. But of course! That ellipsoidal assembly of small, cloudy jewels, the screaming zombie from Evil Dead, the Nigerian phone call, the fumetti and speech balloons, the slivers of metal, ice, glass, and hard plastic. Aha! Those were thirty-minute catatonic episodes. Turns out we’re all part of a hive-mind governed by an aristocrat with his hand on a dead-man’s switch. Civilization is a distraction, humanity is the enemy, imagination is a drug, and the majority rules. All these years we’ve been blindsided by the obscure facets of Twentieth Century pop culture. Reality has become a positive-feedback loop and we’re trapped inside a K-Hole. —Which explains the existence of sex, pride, gluttony, war, and creative business solutions. In fact we’re no better than a Porta-Potty or a whoopee cushion. Wait! Was that a blipvert? Or am I suffering from Stendhal Syndrome? And what’s Priky-7? Well, maybe our souls require an incubation period. Okay then, bring out the frequency grease and blinker fluid. It’s 5 a.m. on a Monday morning. Outside my window, a car accident. Inside my window, an absence of tourists from the future. I can’t help it, doctor, but I’m voting for the piano. Governments aren’t preaching it. Corporations aren’t selling it. Good times never seemed so good. And do you know who I am, Herr Doktor? One of two things. I’m a left-handed smoke-shifter. I’m a dialogue about a dialogue. If I do, no one ever told me. And if I don’t, quite frankly, stand for hours on end, opening and closing a pocketknife, while the splendid universe draws away from me, then maybe I glimpse a number between one and ten or steal from William Shakespeare and recite many hexameters. Because here the story grows deeper, more complicated. Here I might add a code entirely forgotten by everyone save for a mind impermeable to forgetfulness. I am losing. I am distorting. I feel more strongly than ever the tragedy of Germany’s fate. And people shall bury me in a church sanctuary, and they shall compose an epitaph to a brilliant cure. But they’ll lose the patient. And my elders will search for me without success because I’m never heard from again.

Then one day last week a man named Treadway Maccurdy was admitted to the Manhattan State Hospital. He’d been found wandering the streets of lower Manhattan holding onto his genitalia either openly or more discreetly with his hands in his pockets. He claimed he was targeted by a group of men known as ‘the genital thieves.’ (He’d also been mixing antibiotics with his heroin in a futile attempt to avoid infection from dirty needles.) Nevertheless, pretty much all I remember of him now, four days after his ‘death,’ is that low, chuckling laugh devoid of any real emotion and those outrageously crude homosexual fantasies. I originally found my way here via a hospital emergency room, where I arrived one evening coughing up blood while pneumonia ate away at my lungs. The thing is, at the time, I insisted to the doctors it was massive rectal bleeding. I simply couldn’t tell the difference, and I was thus deemed a danger to my own well-being. However, according to Treadway Maccurdy, at the moment of death a person can, if he so chooses, change himself into an infectious microbe and find passage into someone else’s body, in this manner achieving a kind of immortality. The microbe should, of course, be resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics. Thus, Maccurdy chose a vancomycin-resistant strain of Staphylococcus aureus as his latest embodiment, infecting me in the process and landing me in the infirmary. When he’s finally grown tired of circulating in my bloodstream, I imagine he’ll migrate into the body of a nurse or an orderly. I only hope I can piggy-back my way into immortality before this body gives out. Naturally none of the hospital staff suspects Maccurdy is still circulating among us. I suppose no one in modern society can maintain his mental balance while believing in a literal, physical rebirth. So I won’t bother demonstrating. Besides, a 104- degree temperature and a dangerously low blood pressure render me delirious almost 24/7. For example, last night God spoke aloud in a Jewish dialect. He was dressed as a carpenter. Who knows what tonight holds in store. Mick and Keith singing ‘Ruby Tuesday’? A Super Bowl half-time show? Gestapo firing squads? True, my mind’s not exactly the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But I’m not going around smashing department- store windows either. I’m a former US Army radar technician. I was good at my job, I liked the military, and I didn’t want to leave. So when I mustered out in the spring of 1967 I felt quite directionless and vulnerable. I recall one sunny day in June of that year, sitting in a Berkeley cafeteria overlooking Sproul Plaza. None of what I saw or heard made much sense to me. I was either frightened or disgusted, I still don’t know which, but, in any case, I spent less and less time outside of my one-bedroom apartment. Soon I suspected anti-war demonstrators were covertly harassing me. What first tipped me off was the unusual patterns of occupancy in the apartments surrounding my own. After that came strange noises in the ventilation shafts and odd instances of door- slamming in the middle of the night, culminating in a breaking- and-entering episode with the burglars leaving behind, as their calling card, a slaughtered canary in a canary cage. It was all downhill from there. Over the course of the next two decades I would learn about the long-term effects of Xanax, the horrific truth behind Sick Building Syndrome, and the symbolic identity of the Wicked Witch of the West. No one could hang a name on me. I was Schlemiel in one town, Wandering Jew in the next. I eventually lost all ability to manage my life, ending up homeless, nearly dying of pneumonia. Now, today, Treadway Maccurdy relieves me of that late unpleasantness.

Dangerously Detachable

I

If self-control can be such a slippery thing (just ask a trapeze artist), why volunteer to reduce your influence over an adversary?

Horrible enough at first sight and therefore an outrage to the audience’s blunted sensibilities, I appear before you this evening in violation of no fewer than five international laws of native- species transport. Be that as it may, I’m a civilized man with no intent of directing anyone to organize a butchery of the imperial status quo. Quite the opposite, in fact.

I’m speaking here only to those who would dominate. As you all know, I’m a colonizer myself, the ambidextral master of a universal delusion shredded into tiny strands of treachery. Consider me Svengali mesmerizing Trilby, or Freud analyzing Anna O. Wherever I am, I am there for now, but soon I must depart, as my labors draw me toward ever higher apotheoses. However, the Forbidden Shockwave Disaster--only the United States President can issue that order. Atoms clash! Spectra flash! All slaves condemned to fragments! Coca-Cola, American Express, Gillette--the list continues--Wells Fargo, H & R Block, The Gap, Nike, Starbucks, DuPont, Merck. It’s not easy to represent the spelling and pronunciation of that language via the typographical characters of an alphabet more inclined to hostile symbolism. Obsessive consumer-types might thus find many of the following events difficult to accept. Compulsory employment, for example, as well as, perhaps surprisingly, the progressive corruption of all inferior values. For now, if you can, please try to envision a leader in command of rubberbands rather than spindle motors and actuator magnets. A leader with indefinable splendor-fingers and eyeballs white as dust. A leader more idealistic than Woodrow Wilson.

Operations will be performed that are impossible under the laws governing the known operations going on at present in the material world. Don’t tell the white people about any of this either--they won’t listen to you anyway: individuals no longer reside here in the United States: Expressive Personality has vanished. In its place stands Parasitic Economy, a social organism whose brain is the all-powerful corporation and blood the regular flow of profits. I haven’t decided whether such a life-form is admirable or deplorable, or whether there’s some other meaning behind it, or whether it propagates according to the Mendelian formula, but it’s certainly not the most romantic flight of civilization. Its very lack of spontaneity does, however, allow for easy computer simulations.

I hereby declare the Lethal Chamber open to all captains of industry.

. . . move their bodies to the edge of table over the tub so as not to make a mess . . .

II

Murder is always with us--it’s a beloved institution. Poverty is also an inviolable thing, though high-resolution infrared satellite imagery is leading to new interpretations in much of that area.

On my speaking tour I move from city to city in a strange glass bubble that clicks into and out of a universal network of rotating reflections. Parameters are tweaked to produce combinatorial explosions of the most mesmerizing patterns (the so-called ‘inclined shapes of heaven’): mirror-balls seeking space, half- lingered enterprises, debris-filled tornadoes, long bus trips through cornfields, the taste of crushed filth, white fish from the Kentucky caves, leopard-winged butterflies. Yes, Panoramic Reflection is quickening the pavement of life. Orbiting cameras are reaching their limits. A traveler becomes, as it were, the epitome of the history of a new technology.

Tonight I speak before a capacity crowd in one of the poorest cities of the United States. What words can I offer a place like this? My throat is already parched. The swelling behind my eyeballs is extremely intense. Singular, piercing. If you can, try to imagine the red-hot blade of a guillotine knife strangled in the hands of God. Indeed, within minutes the pain is so unbearable that I’ve no choice but to eject from my body, yanking myself backward through the scrim curtain of laughter. With one toke, in a single stroke, I’m a cartoon-like incarnate, a multihued creature wielding a carrot-handled hammer. Blood flows from my nostrils. Breathe with force--then look away! There’s no denying my appeal is on the rise. In many cities reservations must be made a year in advance. The white man can see me, touch me, hear me, and heal me, but he cannot copy me, and I refuse to do sequels. Each installment, each engagement is unique. Nothing can overlay it.

In Boston I do a syndicated talk show. I’m given eight minutes to encapsulate global climate simulation.

In Atlanta I deliver a commencement address at a community college. I foresee armies of robotic ants transporting heavy objects across factory floors.

In New Orleans I attend three fund-raising banquets. If the red light at the end of the street isn’t glowing, that means it’s turned off.

In Las Vegas I’m offered thousands of dollars to engage in a public debate with renowned futurologist Rae Szabo. I decline the offer. I don’t like to be in the spotlight too much, I’m not a circus impresario, I hate being mistaken for a tourist, and I’m not selling souvenirs. If you ask me, Las Vegas is much like the African continent--a great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.

In Los Angeles I’m interviewed by a show-biz reporter. I remark that ‘an illusion is not entirely untrue, otherwise it wouldn’t be an illusion’: the most brilliant solution ever to bad script writing.

Have you any water by chance?

III

With what can only be described as ‘elaborate caution,’ my driver steers the dark blue BMW to a stop at the end of a muddy driveway. (My driver can dismantle an entire BMW in 30 minutes.) Here, at the end of the driveway, is my retreat, a half- empty, domed-over, vacant lot. The non-empty half is outfitted with interconnected ring-shaped structures of various sizes that serve as recording and amplification circuitry. The dome has a shiny, crinkly surface similar to rumpled aluminum foil.

My driver, who carries a swagger-stick, also has a revolver strapped to his hip. Deep scar tissue encircles both his eyes (and you should see him play basketball). He escorts me now to the main entrance. The door slides open. Four man-shaped machines greet us, ushering us inside. The door slides closed. It’s a little cooler than on the outside, with orange illumination and subtle, high-pitched buzzing sounds.

Time to zip up!

I don’t understand how my detractors can get so irate when they discover I’m screening their phone calls, shredding their letters, and deleting their emails. It’s simply a form of reflexive vanity. Don’t ask me why, but for all their egotism, those critics--and they’re mostly white men--are much too desperate to make themselves palatable to my tastes. Many of them even claim they want to kill me or have threatened to hire someone to kill me. To them, I’m some fast-talking prick, self-confident to the point of recklessness, who wants only to upset the national balance (note-- not ‘natural’ but ‘national’). Physiologically, most of them are hardly more sophisticated than a sponge.

Over the course of my lectures I’ve discovered a curious thing-- there is no limit to rage. Rage can reduce a personality to rubble. I’ve seen it happen. It’s like trying to flush out your kidneys with a straight razor.

IV

Suddenly there’s a ringing sound. I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket to remove my cell phone. It’s my driver. He’s parked out back, waiting for me. I take a breath, smile, try to blush, and request that the interview be cut short. The interviewer stares at the ceiling for a moment, then says, “What?” “What do you mean ‘what’?” I ask. “Just you wait. You come back, we’re not paying for another private plane. We’re not footing more hotel bills.” She makes a sharp gesture with her hand. Her eyes become small, shiny like little brown beetles. “Suit yourself,” I say. “And have a nice weekend.” As interviewers and audiences consistently try to out-maneuver me, I have to work all the harder not to blow my front. Each public appearance serves to balance the scales in my favor by providing me publicity equivalent to hundreds of thousands of dollars of paid advertising.

Each engagement differs. Each engagement is the same. Each engagement is a fucking mess. But of course it’s always sold out, and of course if I am a bit perturbed by a particular seating arrangement I try not to show it, while, at the same time, being quite careful to examine each woman in the audience with equal interest. Waves of energy spatter my white jacket and crumple my permanent-press shirt. Caterers offer me little bags of golden fruit or precisely arranged trays of salty vegetables, sculpted eggs, and tubes of meat, all skewered by striped plastic toothpicks. Hostesses cut bread in a businesslike fashion. Cream or custard is poured into wide, pale buns. A glass of Vichy perhaps. Sometimes popcorn supplies the music, other times it’s Albinoni’s Adagio. Next year it’ll be electric guitars. The set design breathes of liquid geometries.

V

As my tour intensifies, I continue to experience problems with increased intraocular pressure. I’m also developing a stutter. I suppose this really freaky energy requires some really freaky outlets.

It’s not enough to go through an illness--you also have to go through the cure. And where certain items are concerned, the deader the better: sump pumps, range hoods, stain-resistant carpeting. (A defibrillator might also be a good idea for your household.) But when I die, hopefully in a state of medieval humiliation, I want to go straight up to heaven--up like a rocket. That’s how I see it. I simply won’t tolerate a bloody corpse. Though if I do survive the nasty head wound so characteristic of ill-fated agitators, I’ll be sure to dress and wash myself regularly. And right up to the very end, I’m sure, nurses will be roping me to my bed screaming. Besides, even while the molecular biology folks are busy cooking up their DNA strands, I don’t find comfort in knowing that a clone with my memories will survive into the future.

VI

I’m starting to suspect that the Secret Service wants to kill me as soon as possible, and how ironic, considering my own visceral hatred for those who would break the law and refuse to submit to strip-searches. True, I’m saying the worst right about now, but that’s hindsight, because a note doesn’t attract a note. It won’t grab headlines either, and you won’t read about it in The New Yorker.

Pffffff! But that’s not all. A conspiracy exists between the World Order Council and the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development. Four doors slam. We’re on our way. My driver has stuffed eighty copies of the LA Times and ten thousand dollars cash into the trunk of our sedan. He’s tuned the radio to a bullfight. He’s sweating, smoking, and speeding down the 101 freeway. In the back seat I feel like I’m trying to read the Braille alphabet for the blind. My lower lip dangles down to my collar. Next thing you know, I’m standing in the New Age section with a Carlos Castaneda book in my hands. I feel vibrations in my boots. I recognize Carol immediately. Her hipbones cast shadows over her private parts. We’re shaking hands, she’s smiling, I’m smiling, we’re cross-checking our smiles against the perfect calm of our stances. Still later, the ceiling is falling, the floor is rising, fingers dig into my collarbone. What a hovel--and they call this a luxury suite! Alarming. It sounds like someone’s practicing the violin in the next room. I want to put my hands over my ears to drown out the sound, but I’m more than a little nervous about what I might find. So I pick up the newspaper. I move my lips slightly as I read the reviews. Oh yeah, and a carton of rocky road ice cream is melting on the nightstand, and the hotel’s one-hour dry cleaning service is taking twenty-four hours, and I’d like to find something else to wear, but I can’t unlock my suitcase. Damn nuisance. I’ve also stopped pretending I’m on an adventure because I’m actually behaving more like a traveling salesman. Boston, Plymouth, Salem, Lexington, Concord, Gotham City, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, Cannery Row, La Brea tar pits. Caliphs, murderers, bards, versifiers, pen-peddlers, moose- lipped hunchbacks, eunuched females. Purple claws. Pairs of eyes on stalks. They’re all gawking at me--well then, let them gawk!--but my old skit about pear trees and the spittle of nymphs isn’t working anymore. In its place, a virgin forest is swarming with toads and snakes. Big strange flowers stroke my face. Im- pos-sible. I wipe off Carol’s lipstick with a Kleenex. No woman in the world is tall enough for me to lean on, except Carol. Her palms are down on the circulation desk. My fingers rest lightly on top of her buttocks. She knows what my ass looks like, but she has no idea what it feels like. Lie still for a moment--I’m trying to find a vein. A seam opens in the front of my pants. Warm white light pours out. Robert Mitchum ravages Judy Garland. The SLA abducts Patty Hearst. Exciting. Likewise tomorrow morning at seven, before my appearance on a local talk show, we’ll meet in the Starbucks at Ventura and Kestner for a nonfat no whip venti mocha or maybe a nonfat venti latte with a shot of espresso.

Everyday hundreds of different faces press towards me. It’s a tête-à-tête with an out-of-town taxi driver. Or a photographer who throws a tantrum. Or an anorexic upstart who’s threatening to leave her boyfriend. Or a drunken celebrity at the Sky Bar. Or a classroom of idiot savants. Or it’s a book-signing at Barnes & Noble. I cock my head sideways to read the wristwatches of the passing customers. Im-pos-sible. I now have forty-five minutes to zip downtown. I’m so tired of being tired. My daydreams are fragmenting into sheets of particles. When I close my eyes everything starts to swim, but I have many, many more appointments to make, and many more questions to answer. Shit, I’ve misplaced my cell phone. So I walk across the street to a liquor store and use the pay phone in the parking lot to call my driver. He won’t be disappointed, that’s for sure. There’s still plenty of time.

Then Saturday morning I awaken to find everything abnormal. I can’t feel my fingertips. The landscape is flowing from lava-field to meadow then back again. Already by Sunday I’ve learned to cope with it. I even slide out my yellow legal pad when a giant insect settles onto a leaf and slowly flaps it wings. But when I awake Monday morning I have to pause to take a long, deep breath--to clear myself of a hangover. The wine they serve around here can no longer be trusted. We have to check out immediately. The hotel’s rubber-gloved concierge leads Carol and me into a cool interior of cut-stone archways and dark carved woodwork. Blue light spills out of doorways. The air is overburdened with lilac disinfectant. A cat watches us walk by. What time is it? Before the whole series repeats itself.

I’m alternating now between periods of eerie alertness and drowsy confusion. Audiences are beginning to think I’ve gone mad. Maybe they’ll have me back, maybe they won’t. I tell myself they aren’t human. They aren’t even proper animals. They’re black blurred ghosts, wet-black vinyl ghosts--with threatening, combative, outstretched fingers. My frayed jacket hangs precariously from my shoulders. I wear only tennis shoes, if I wear any shoes at all. My spindly legs buckle under me. In a public restroom, where the foul-smelling urinals fail to work, I lean against the nearest wall pinching my brow. Later, I’m fiddling with a revolving, three-tiered glass cake plate. Later still, I’m holding a champagne bottle with a pink napkin. After that, I’m looking through a rack of rayon shirts in Macy’s. Until finally, at sundown, we’re driving along the highway somewhere between Palm Springs and San Diego. There are no other cars. Why am I here? My driver reaches over the seat, hands me a complimentary bag of little gold fruits. I, in turn, pass them to Carol who’s ravenously hungry. I smell fresh perfume on her skin, something my mother used to wear. I also notice she’s powdered her face--for this drive through the desert. She’s determined to make the most of the journey.

I’ve been golfing only two years and already broken eighty five times. Downright amazing. So I’ve still got a job if I need one after this lengthy tour. My Moorish ancestry is also an asset. Oh what the hell, I’ll have a glass of wine. White liners are the worst. Carol? A toast to the tour! To the final engagement in downtown San Diego! To ruin the word again! To transmit stones to all! To beat egg whites with a fork! And most of all--to destroy the honor of the story again and again! So here we are, sitting in a booth at the very back of a rundown tavern, near the restrooms and the sterilization facilities (specimens included, I’m afraid). In the dim light Carol’s blue dress seems to melt into her limbs.

After awhile I notice there aren’t any sharp corners around me, and if I move my eyes too fast I get seasick. So I stuff as much air as I can into my lungs. I tighten my diaphragm. Here come the dread and nausea. Smile, I tell myself, try to blush. I touch the silverware. Then I touch my wineglass. Then I touch my eyelids. Then I stretch out to touch the waiter, who replies with a rather jaunty look. He obviously recognizes me. He’s a fan . . . who’s now becoming a very young boy on roller skates--suddenly the thwack of Carol’s fist against my shoulder. She opens her eyes extremely wide, reaches for the two glasses of water on our table and, without even asking, pours one over each of us. Water streams down our faces and bodies. I’m a bit perturbed. My celluloid shirt-front is drenched. She’s not done it quite right, but she’s still doing it all wrong. Such grotesque clumsiness. She keeps on drinking more and more wine, drowning in her own buffoonery. Her eyes are red-rimmed and rheumy. Her nose looks like a sweet potato. Shit, maybe she really is drunk! I reach into the inside pocket of my jacket to remove my cell phone. I’m summoning my driver. Maybe they’ll have me back, maybe they won’t, but at least I know what hierarchy is. Kidnapping is where I draw that line.

I know I’ll look back on the whole goddamned thing. Again And again. The entire tour. It’ll probably take ten days without sleep against a white-walled crucifix. (Nothing but long days on this planet.) By the way, none of this performance was premeditated or spent on telling lies: I was never moved by hours of such somber rubbish. I never rolled big kittens in the kitchen. You can scoff at me, deny or refute me, or trouble yourselves with an avalanche of compliments. Either way, it’ll still cost you the price of admission. Backstage now, I adjust my jacket and slip an Army-issue .45 into the waistband of my chinos. Just how far am I willing to go with this? Hell, if I looked in a mirror, I probably wouldn’t even recognize myself. My eyeballs must be white as dust. But the real point here is the confusion of levels. I can’t make it any more explicit than that. The confusion of levels. And no mention of snipers either, which is nice because I’m already committed to this final performance. God, what a mob tonight! Ad-mi-ra-ble, indeed, triumphal. The moment I step out onto stage the audience goes berserk with a cacophony of catcalls. They’re begging for the coup de grace. And why not? It’s funny to watch them go apoplectic when I say shit this and fuck that. At least I have the advantage of not actually knowing them. In fact it’s become a minor daily ritual. But then something quite unexpected happens. It opens slowly, like a huge dark flower, a flower both angelic and murderous, with claws of bright bloodied pink and screams of sunset. Pfffffff! Pfffffff! The force of the blast knocks me on my back. I look down to find that my right foot is attached by only a thin strip of flesh. My, that was a bad one. I’m a bit perturbed, yet this is all very much as I’ve fantasized it. I owe every last word to my fans. It’s not their fault. They paid fifty bucks for that blast. I don’t mind a bit, really. It’s my pleasure. So I decide to make a mockery of the attack by standing on the shattered end of my exposed shinbone. Smile, I tell myself, try to blush. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to roll your eyes! Roll your eyes! Here come the dread and nausea.

Disruption

I

Ask ten people on the street what it is, and you’ll get ten different answers. For a long while there I didn’t either, but now I think I can see it. Great. But can you, the reader, understand that every true god must be both organizer and destroyer, both an apex and a monumental failure? Can you fuck a bunch of suffering? Can you handle these harassments? Oh yes, throw the ball, throw the ball up into the air--and why not? We always have. On a mass scale. Simply a question of the proper attitude toward the known chemistry of a pigment: at a given time the word must cease. Now, some say that ‘score’ means an outline or a plan, while others, anything but that. Well, I’ve never done this before, so I’m not sure what’s expected of real stuntmen on dangerous writing assignments. But let’s just assume I’m a ‘pilot monkey’ who’s trying to resonate with a second-order modulated frequency. And why can’t that be enough? Ow. That hurts. Okay, okay. I see a blue chip’s bent out where it ought to be flush with my frame. You did that? The cockpit compass is swinging erratically. The speakers crackle with static and looped blips. Hello? Hello? Have I missed an exception to the Mexico Notes? Bushmen in the shadows of Mars? Last stand for the Andes? I beg all of you out there to disperse, to read along, but quietly, please. Large numbers of experts, with supervising statisticians in tow, are moving in upon us.

This initial episode occurs outside the local post office. First, imagine a leftist brigade of terrorists armed with stink bombs, itching powder, a few oily rags, a kerosene-drenched shirt, and one muddy little shoe. They approach me with various pamphlets and press them into my hands. So far, I like the way it’s going. Then suddenly I punch the tallest man with my leather-clad fist. I hold nothing back, my every blow cracking against bone, each punch a chance to wipe him out, to reclaim the equivalent, again and again and again, the basic principles of empiricism, the real thing for the first time--indeed, I feel myself rising into the shadow of the spirit, surmounting the laws of civilization and decay, oh yes, the very deliquescence of an empire. History is a game of considerable technique--when you’re learning about life, the world is your classroom--and the way I see it, this bookish sod is paying his debt to nature. Finally, after having pummeled him into the side of a parked car, brought him to his knees, and pistol-whipped the bastard until darkness has overcome him, I shove a liter of STP into his mouth. Nor do I now care (two days later) that this man, according to the newspapers, was actually a salesman who wanted his son to attend medical school. I really doubt he knew much of what he was doing. Besides, didn’t he have life insurance, say, $60,000, or half of what my policy’s worth?

No means of torture can extract a confession from me. No mystical snippets of a trance script. No zebra-patterned wallpaper or clothes of hierarchy and precedence. No overwhelming medical data. No champagne bottles within easy reach. I’m the recurring decimal. I’m like the man who came to straighten out the Lord’s paths: I’m fundamentally unnecessary to our nation’s economy. I’m too polite to scream, and I’m not afraid to say this changes everything (though exactly where the fluid collects depends upon the root cause of the malady).

Sprung from jail, the next morning I enjoy breakfast at a rinky- dink café. The ambiance alone is a reprieve from the local heresies: light-green Plexiglas and marble balusters. I sit there, big as you please, writing a letter, while the rest of the customers exchange the latest gossip about an admiral, a general, a congressman, and a particular drug company’s bizarre testing procedures. I’ll reveal that whole subject later from quite a different angle. Meanwhile, I nibble away on the coffee cake, chasing it down with fresh-squeezed, pulp-laden orange juice. I look about me. Long, stringy plants dangle from the ceiling. A foul-smelling, pine-sap-oozing waitress constantly shakes hair back from her face. A fan-shaped shadow darkens the edges of her veil: no shame at all. She’ll serve anything you please. The café’s walls are decorated with vivid, three-hundred-year-old jungle scenes. On a makeshift stage to my right, a young lady with a barrel organ is doing a spoken-word routine about a Polish undertaker who rescued her in a rowboat. Nothing nearly political, or with impaired memory, or even bludgeoned and stabbed to death, yet it’s the weirdest feeling of the western edge, as my morning feast gathers momentum. Next, a brazen blonde bombshell with bloodshot eyes, pale limbs, and a marvelous round bottom cold and serene, comes riding up the sidewalk on a stolen bicycle. At this sight, my ‘baby spot’ rushes between wood grooves and rails to become the tail of a big black dog.

II

I’m not the only one of us. We’re all bullshit artists with fire in our balls, and although we lack a physiological basis for what seems like very odd behavior, we’re always ready to start learning about the transience of others. We don’t complain. We celebrate. Our brains burn up to 15 percent of our bodies’ oxygen. So here we are again, eyes watering, bodies sweating inside these oversized pig suits. We glance at each other once, before pushing through the doors of our favorite tavern, the Shaky Splatters Bad, located a few blocks from my day job. A convulsive, burning paint smell flails its arms at us, smashing into our nostrils, but, well, I kind of like it. My friends order nerve tonics. I make the decision not to drink. What’s the point? My pig suit transcends autobiography. I look about me at this rubbish dump of forms and half-tone reproductions. On several ceiling-high TVs, identical copies (corpses?) of an anchorman hum through their teeth in response to the dust-specked silence of a dying politician who’s serving as a scapegoat for a consortium of federal allegations. At the bar, chess-players lean against piles of newspapers. The prosaic fellow serving alcohol has a German component to his stare. Tacked to the cinderblock walls are faded posters of stewardesses, excuse me, flight attendants, flashing the bottoms of their thighs before going down with a grunt and passing out somewhere on a Florida beach. Vulnerable chefs stand by with ice-cream scoopers. Vegetarians try to order their favorite tofu dishes. Ideograms alternate with pentagrams. And yet, although the windows are wide open to the sun-drenched afternoon, every patron seems half asleep in the darkness of many preceding days. They’re asleep? But it’s daytime, not night. Oh, I see: here everybody is asleep all the time. You didn’t know that? So I fall upon the nearest drinker, dragging him down beneath a table and kicking him repeatedly just above the temporal lobe until he bleeds from the eyes, then afterwards searching his pockets for weapons, only to find a 9mm Glock in the seat of his pants. By now my heart’s racing. I peel back one of his eyelids to check for dilation: HIV positive at least five years running. Indeed, I suspect an entirely new era is upon us, an improved way of thinking, with electrical devices implanted into our children’s brains: difficult to get used to at first, especially those spindle-shaped polyhedrons.

But according to Third World Marxism, the process of history continues unabated until the dictatorship of--? Did I say either limiting or self-destructive? And why do you keep staring at my fingernails? Well, if nothing exists (who convinced me of that?), why should I feel so good about everything? I mean, I go to work, I provide a diagnosis, I conduct an autopsy. I make grand, extravagant gestures. I write my stories. A scrap here, a scrap there, fragments of a rainbow dancing on wallpaper, a shop window full of cakes and pastries, the aroma of coffee and vanilla, silver coins on a table, wooden rosary beads, a piece of aluminum sheeting, a gold object about the size and shape of a child’s shoe. Might I continue? But civilization stops at 18,000 ft. Adjust or die. Anyhow, what international event can match the negative sum of my expectations? All other institutions of the Occident do as I do. For example, in today’s newspaper: a 40- year-old gay CIA Republican (name withheld) was found dead in a Boston hotel room, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. A stretchy red fabric covered his chest. His shoulders were squared, as if bracing himself for confrontation. With what? Died in his sleep? Yet no evidence linked his death with the soft green dress found draped over the railing of the room’s balcony. Weeks go by. One voice announcing an unwanted pregnancy becomes two voices dying from bliss. But nobody wants to hear about THAT.

Okay then, consider a hybrid religion governed by a Caucasian inner council, mostly prominent God-fearing businessmen, who extract money from disciples by saving their souls. Despite rumors of weekend sex parties, any sign of sexual arousal on the part of a disciple would demand a compensating act of self- laceration (such as a cut on the wrist). In fact, you, the reader, are invited to join--to tremble from contradictory impulses (or lack of B vitamins), your palms itching, your face the color of parchment. It’s like a fucking bullfight. Until one night you’re forced to watch a videotape of your friends dying on the street (not really your friends, just stand-ins, or perhaps mannequins--so it’s legal). Afterwards, when the council slips you a painkiller, the room becomes quite dark mainly because your eyes are closed, so what you see next can only be an illusion. Better yet, why not block out a story that will sell? Something structured around mass hysteria. A surly mob with machine guns sacrificing a six-year-old boy. Or a male prostitution ring involving minors. Some sort of odd combination of brothels and athletic fields. Or take it several steps further: a feature-length documentary exploring the ties between I. G. Farben and the Nazi Party. Must include many references to ‘a clandestine Nazi unit’ with ‘a full sense of mission’ that is ‘clearly pedophilic and fascistic.’ Also try to fit in a subplot involving the daughter of a high-ranking American military officer. Key adjectives would include ‘abhorrent,’ ‘ruthless,’ ‘unendurable,’ and ‘barbaric.’ For good effect, intersperse the following phrase throughout the voice- over: ‘None were ever found, but the parents are still digging.’ Also include ties to the Mussolini family? Every time I think I’m done I want to add a little more on. Anyhow, my secret is pretty much out. I cannot state my beliefs any more succinctly: if dominated I will not run, if neglected I will not swerve, and if asked I will decline the polygraph. Then why the double standard? Well, it’s damn hard maintaining a good reputation. Time limits. Space limits. Rusted, collapsing machinery. Over-the-counter ointments. Hell, even with my professional sewing kit it’s difficult to suture the wounds of my escapades--you need total commitment, patience, and a steady hand, but that’s all bullshit. I’ve opened my legs to artillery fire. I’ve stood between my father’s heart. I’ve sung the idylls of first love. I’ve even been mulling over a marriage proposal. Any fishermen in the group? Well, I have learned the methods of philosophy and history, and the arts of a civilization ‘in the first week of October.’ (Curiosity in these domains is limited to the Elite.) Ultimately I’ve reduced all distinctions to one principle: thumbs sliced off, a bellyful of gasoline, two Bibles placed on either side of the body. In fact, lots of people prefer such a life-- either a simple yes or a simple no will do. But tonight the photographer and I are walking home a roundabout way through the focused outskirts of the city. We’ve just beaten up a pastor and stolen the money from his suitcase. Now page after page floats through the air (the records of decadence), as columns of fire brighten the irreversible sky. Flames reflect on our faces and in our eyes.

So send in the White Light. Maybe that’ll clear the air. Another Super Bowl is over. Dusk steps back a few inches more deeply. Having polished off a case of Budweiser imported in the bottle, I return to my wooden rosary beads: a form of low-intensity warfare against a nation of masked dancers, an empire having run itself out in the relief of daily routines: special minds submerged into dead bodies impervious to these award-winning paragraphs of wisdom. Drivers full of capricious energy, insisting on going much too fast. Their cars are pieces of shit anyway. Everywhere I’ve seen crowds who want change, who want a better job, who want a terrific piece of ass. They want to turn their lives into poems? But that’s when they’ll enter a new phase. On the seventh day, God was granted immunity by the United States government.

Fuck, you’re a wooden Indian! What fingernails! What slippery dog skin! But the worst thing you can do is doubt the value of what you’re doing. A white flash zigzags across the hood of my limited-edition, forest-green Ford Mustang. The brown-velvet interior sports more safety features than a commercial airliner. The radio plays music. The shock absorbers groan. I rev the engine and accelerate at full power, skidding through alleyways once so familiar but now crowded with strangers and rescue workers. Some kind of trouble with the collective film projector? Many intersections are blocked by Hummer vehicles or, at the very least, guarded by U.S. Army troopers, ancient-looking men in camouflage fatigues armed with rifles. Portions of the main canal are also blocked. I notice that demolition squads in brown, official-looking uniforms are climbing from window to window. Little bits of seed float through the air. Our headlights blaze past long stretches of pipe and barbed wire. Already fund-raisers, blood-raves, and soup kitchens are being set up near the wreckage of the blast zone. The local authorities have painted great five-pointed stars on the pavement to ensure liberation from any guardian executioners. Quite alarming. Facts are working through armies, action becoming character, and character plot. Every Ryder truck is considered more dangerous than a Honda with handguns. A glistening, warlike scene pervades a city once famous for its openness to all newcomers. In the days that follow, these downtown streets will surely be viewed with increasing suspicion. No joy, no real surrender to the last third of life. Bloodlines cross-linked to personal revenge. Success designed for failure. Burned records lost forever. Jeepers, the place is a loony bin! You can’t adjust to the bastards. So I try not to pay attention--yet every siren freshens the memories, rekindles the anxiety.

III

I sense that fragments of this narrative are finally beginning to converge, to coalesce. Listen. Listen: context is everything, anything--but not this. What we have here is a tradition as old as the human race. The Shocking Story. That’s it, that’s the plot, at last I have found you--and with such cowboy-style medical reports! You stand motionless for awhile, sipping a Diet Coke, partially concealed by a noisy crowd of intellectuals, artists, religious fanatics, and revolutionaries. When you notice me staring at you, you duck back out of sight. But you can’t fake it. You can’t ignore it. I know better. I can gauge the intensity of your life. Earlier this morning you carefully loaded your pistol before slipping it into the back pocket of your trousers. You’ve rehearsed your cover story. The labyrinths of hallucination and nightmare. Animal carcasses thrown onto anthills. Large bony hands with protruding joints. Mom told me to tell you to be careful and to keep in mind that you can’t step into the same stream twice. As for me, with my acute sense of style, I’m not confirming your views or contradicting them. Instead I’m offering you good luck in your endeavor. I’m glad you’re finally doing what you were meant to do, rather than someone else’s busy-work. The key thing here is to profit from your catastrophes. Besides, this war needs a great remedy. For whom but the cynical and perverse? You really were framed? Then let us say that certain objects are communicable only via proper lighting.

Four candles burn before us in brass candlesticks reflected off a wall-length mirror. Tonight: the Vortex of Will: the Desire to Get and Retain a Job. Any job. This isn’t graduate school. These are psychic driving messages. Do as I do. First, pray to God. Gods plural or Gods singular. (Believe me, God is no expert skeptic.) Pray in a manner symbolic and dignified. Tap into that native urge to transgress the limits of your being, to discover the source of invisible wealth. Delivering things to those who need them. Deep, more deeply into thought, yes, hoisting yourself mentally into, yes--to feel the value of your demands. To reveal the subject from an entirely different angle. Another axis of reference. Push down hard at the base. No, harder. Okay, good. Now, there on my desk among all the papers is a letter addressed to you. Find that letter--read it--and we continue tomorrow. . . . The following night: a column of figures, you’re counting them softly, two hundred prime numbers, with a feeling of THAT mixed in there too, yes. Now, a ball of light begins pulsing in the palm of your hand. What does it want--from you? No, not those. Can you hear it? This is not well-being in any ordinary sense of the term. Listen more closely, to the in-di-vid-u-al words. Yes, that’s right, ‘congressional investigations.’ And what about them? You’re getting closer. Now we must consult the stamp album again.

IV

Sunday, noon. I’m walking to the store to buy some groceries. Little does anyone know that, as I pass series after series of short- order food outlets and discount department stores, my mind’s on a corkscrew path over distant roads, miles away, outside my reach (with no parking lots and all the windows of merchandise painted over in sky-blue)--until, that is, I become aware of a lady on the sidewalk who keeps giving me dirty looks. How little elementary tact most people have! And what for? I break a twig off a roadside tree. She pushes on her hat, rocks back on her heels, still glaring at me. Finally I clap my hands. No response. Her doctors must be slipping her painkillers, immersing her in sleep, a deep yet benevolent sleep. Her government must’ve convinced her that vigilance is the perfect virtue. After yoga class she probably enjoys a beer with her friends, who convince her she’s living a borrowed life. And I suppose, for the sake of brevity, I could just grit my teeth and fuck her. But a sudden fit of conscience compels me to leave her alone and instead enter a half-lit restaurant. Forks and knives. Congealed tomato sauce. Why keep them straight? A black guy who talks like a white guy sits at the counter beside a coin-operated lottery-ticket dispenser. Coffee, please, black. The waitress named Hosanna, upon delivering my coffee, notices I’m staring at the black guy and whispers to me that his name is Eddie Underwager and that he’s plagued by impotence and partial memory loss. How does she know? I then notice a thread of saliva trailing down Eddie’s half- open lips. Shit, this guy can’t see past the end of his own dick. So I leave a silver coin on the counter and quickly return to the street. But the lady who earlier gave me those dirty looks is nowhere to be seen. I’m appalled. What kind of asshole am I turning into? Suddenly a vagrant begins screaming at me. The crack of doom is at hand. Vietcong POWs and the Waffen SS. I go back inside the restaurant. This time, rather than the lunch counter, I sit down at the bar. But what the fuck do I know about drinking? I’m supposed to be shopping for groceries. If only sticking one’s foot in the ground made one feel nourished. Footsteps of blood. I crane my neck and try to look out the window at the cloudless blue sky. Images begin to assemble in my mind.

Well, as it happens, I suspect my wife is having an affair--with a small-breasted, long-necked woman from Oklahoma who enjoys her perfumes. How disappointing: I’ve actually got to fight for the woman I love. No wonder I’m getting drunk. But that’s how you do it if, like me, you’re just too stubborn to be hypnotized by tradition. Anyhow, it all started this morning when I woke up, half-conscious, to find the body of my father at the foot of my bed. My father, a welder by trade, a monetary reformer by night, suffers horribly from elevated blood pressure--and he was very upset this morning. There’s no other way of putting it. He was big and ugly with a strange tuft of bushy white hair scrunched up around his mouth. Looked worse than his driver’s license photo, worse than dead fish floating on the surface of an ornamental pond. I suppose my father would like to return to a time when there were no borders and no fences, a time of sudden influxes of vital energy, of evenings spent with a rucksack beneath his head. Instead, the elderly lie with their knees drawn up and their faces thrown to one side. Access to family and friends is also strictly forbidden. Proving once again that the bust really does outlast the throne.

Novel Combinations

1

I wanted to combine perfume with cigarettes, to merge the two items into a single entity. But how to do so correctly, without attracting too much attention? Each of them, perfume and cigarettes, had been assigned its own individual row, and fortunately the rows were contiguous. Then how to unite the two rows without arousing the salesclerk’s suspicions, how to make a proper mixture, a combination?! I stood there forever, it seemed, taking note of the sides of the display-case, its scratched, thumb- smudged glass, before finally opening it, without asking permission, then stopping, stepping back two paces, feeling a bit unsure about whether this behavior might leave room for the proprietor to call in a lawyer. Or what if the proprietor’s wife really was a lawyer, or maybe a cop, an undercover cop hiding out in a hotel bathroom, reading a comic-book on the toilet? I imagined her rushing out of the bathroom, hair in disarray, lipstick askew, eyes superhero-wide, her arms brusquely pushing aside that mirror-backed door, her fingers clasped around a pistol grip, her lips caged in a slow, gradual hiss (a rather uncommon expression these days). And of course the hotel room would smell of wet--wait! Or the proprietor might simply stride up to me, make a full stop, grab my arm with a violent jolt, and toss me bodily onto the ground . . . into bed? I glared at the Japanese teenager sitting behind the counter: I was floored: her eyes, her hair, the body-length tattoos were so properly Byzantine, so befitting of drugstore-royalty, of young decadents skulking in poorly lit corners, that I could only turn toward her, in that way allowing her to smile in return and reach out her palm to hand me those beautiful perfume samplers. She then stood up from her seat, dropping the comic-book onto the unswept floor, and stepping out into a courtyard which served the drugstore as some combination (yes, another combination!) of lobby and lawn. The following night was Sunday night. I was sitting proud at my family’s Super Supper Table. At my side stood a walking cane supported only by air. I smiled. I beamed. I nearly screamed with latent satisfaction, for I had finally put an end to ‘display- case-gazing,’ having irrevocably ousted that compulsion from my revised worldview, and though my limbs still twitched and cringed at the sounds of glass sliding over glass, though imagery, of perfumes and cigarettes, voyaged deeply through my fat eye- sockets, glittering like stupid evil stars under which swished the murderous thwack! of a proprietor’s fist heavy against a portion of wall concealing infinite loops of surveillance footage, though-- wait! The center of the supper table was now squirming with bugs. They held my gaze, and yet they were petulant little creatures, flickering from one shade of brown into the next, before dissolving back into the table’s grain--no! before a yin or a yang turned the chandelier’s light neon, twisting it, without warning, into a constellation of cheaply-mounted scarlet suede cut-outs. God, I really needed a three-day weekend from these symbols! Beneath me now, my destiny was getting spelled out, in olive oil, across the plate’s rainbow surface. But I paid it no heed. While Mother, oblivious to my joy, continued passing plate after plate of cold pasta around the table. And Papa?--well, this evening his eyes were set so deeply into their sockets he could barely stay awake. Hell, he’d already boozed away half his life in that inimitable style of used-car salesmen. He liked to sit at the head of the table, his monstrous torso looming over a place-mat depicting chrome-plated hubcaps, his plastic plate piled high with roast chicken, pasta, peas, and mashed potatoes. The following morning was Monday morning. I was relaxing in the bathtub, rolling the washcloth-hedgehog into a sacrificial ball, its damp, terry-cloth folds opening and closing soundlessly--when suddenly I suffered a relapse. I dove full-tilt into a trumpet-bell pealing forth from my bathrobe’s pocket, and when I leaped out again, my feet were sizzling across the bathroom’s tiled expanse, carrying me toward the medicine cabinet, where I began hammering at the mirror, striking sparks off the glass into display-case canyons, sending silvery shards into the sink. My eyes started from their sockets. My hair was spiked on end as if from a warm rain of money. I was so far beyond realizing the display-case wasn’t even locked, and yet I breathed, gasping for air like a shoplifter having long forgotten his death so many years ago. Finally I turned and ran, again, bolting out through the bathrobe’s pocket now moistened with suds black as pavement. Somehow I’d been singled out, my likeness chosen from a dozen shoplifters lined up and staring through a two-way mirror lost in the many perspectives it failed to portray. Yet the expression on my face was the same as the cop’s: grinning, cigarette butt dangling from lifeless lips, huge marble eyes fixed upon the wall--wait! I was sitting up now, in the tub, my gray palms making noises on the porcelain. In an attempt to calm further down, way down, I began rocking back and forth. My flabby pectorals swayed like huge punching bags. An instant of noise then rattled through the doorknob before Mother appeared with a fresh towel. My cheekbones flared scarlet. My forehead burned. My skin was drenched with soapy water as azure as Norway’s plummet from north Atlantic icicles.

2

At the bar, the liquor siphons were damp, and the air was fermented over with a yeasty odor no different from what I recalled of the gray brewery out back. But the ventilation here was worse, much worse, with a distinct lack of air-freshener. The stifling heat-currents bore teeth tonight, or claws, yes, more like claws, prying at my thumbs and forefingers, and pulling at the spigots of three highly polished taps. Well, I decided to become passive-aggressive for awhile and watch the liquor suds mottle the mouths of three well-oiled patrons, before, finally and irrevocably, holding my own empty tankard up for the bartender to examine: a dull steel tube with a leather thong at one end and a small bronze pyramid at the other. The bartender gripped the tankard, impatiently yanking it from my hand. Beneath his eyes were bat-wings of shadow on the verge of flitting away into the deeply-folded darkness of the pub. A strange thought then occurred to me. I had been to this pub once before, to check out the inventory sheet, as they say, and had left without buying anything, and yet now I imagined, somehow, that this place, for so many years wrapped in cylinders of cigar smoke and cheap cologne, and now simply known as The Cobra, was in fact a telescoping segment of coil wound tightly around a spring mounted to the worn-down countertop of a cosmic display-case. Hell, half the crowd here wore filtration masks to protect themselves, presumably, from the odor of the bartender’s tissue- brown fingers smelling of used toilet-paper. Suddenly, in the mirror behind the bar, mean neon stripes shuddered against ranks of bottles stripped clean and twinkling. The glass shelves, lit murkily by the meager light filtering through the front windows, would be easily destroyed by the tremor. I raised up one hand, reaching out toward a small bronze pyramid for support. Yet ten seconds later the earthquake had ceased. In the subsequent confusion, I managed to leave without paying for my drinks. Outside, across the street from the pub, several white fiberglass coffins were centered in a funeral home’s parking lot ‘side-style,’ as caretakers like to say. I walked quickly past them toward the opposite building’s lobby-lights. Once inside, I took the elevator to the fifth floor. I drummed my fingers against the elevator’s button-panel so as to properly express the anticipation building up inside of me. I felt as if I had all of California to myself, the whole goddamned state squeezed like an orange into the depths of my sweaty palms. I walked briskly down the corridor, to apartment 237, removed the passkey from my pocket, dropped it into the lock, punched in the proper code numbers, opened the door, stepped inside, shut the door behind me, and unzipped my backpack. This was Janet’s apartment, furnished in a distinctive early 21st-Century style. Janet was one of the salesclerks at the drugstore. Janet was not here, however (though traces of her perfume lingered in the air), so I let my fingers momentarily drum against the wall, before putting them into the most conveniently located pockets of my trousers. I stepped further inside the main room. An overhead lightbulb flickered on. I glanced long at that bulb, wondering who had in fact turned it on--weren’t some bulbs even clap-activated?--and then turned my attention toward the rumpled ancient-style curtains. Still, nothing occurred to me (except that the windows behind those curtains were made of glass and therefore cleansed from the outside by men paid large sums up money to dangle on a wooden plank hundreds of feet above solid concrete). So I walked directly across the carpet to the bathroom--a curious certainty pervaded my limbs--and swung that mirror-backed door wide open--to find white fiberglass coffins racked up in a complicated framework set into a sort of metallic scaffolding, six tiers of coffins, ten each, all of them scrubbed as clean as the bathroom itself.

3

The following day was Wednesday. I returned to the drugstore to gaze into the display-case, not so much to combine rows of things as to gaze, simply gaze, eyes wide open, peripheral vision keyed up to help watch for possible shoplifters. I realized now that if I wanted to make combinations of things like perfumes and cigarettes and bubble gum, I could do so mentally, simply using my imagination. I didn’t have to actually touch the merchandise. In this way, I could satisfy my obsession without arousing suspicions. Janet was working today, sitting behind the counter, chewing on her fingernails and paging through a furniture catalogue. I would spend most of the morning standing in front of a single display-case, combining soaps, shampoos, deodorants, and feminine hygiene products. At one point I managed to hold simultaneously in my mind fifteen distinct combinations. I was quite proud, of course, although the subsequent headache ruined me for the rest of the day. The following day was Thursday, and first of all I learned that what Janet had told me was true: the staff of the motel across the street from the drugstore had requested my presence, well, maybe not all of them, but some of them for sure, in particular the night-clerk and the large-limbed groundskeeper, who often watched me from the hedges and from some other place, below a grating, six-feet deep, gazing up at visitors passing through the lobby whose floor was otherwise a soft patchwork of hand- woven wool. The motel’s hallways, crumbling in some spots, mildewy in others, water-stained throughout, were still firmly attached to the walls and floors. And though rumor had it there was a dead woman in one of the rooms, a woman, well, perhaps only a dismembered mannequin they’d brought in as a prank to set up in a bathtub for shock-value. But really, I didn’t mind. I had my own mannequin--in my back pocket, no less! Anyhow, one of the hallways, my very favorite, was lined with museum- cases: archaic-looking, glass-fronted boxes filled with a wide variety of objects documenting the motel’s sordid, one-hundred- year past. Of course the opportunities for creating novel combinations were staggering. I had spent many an afternoon browsing up and down that corridor, generating, in my mind, while not touching a single thing, not even smudging the glass, but simply generating combinations of contiguities all based on the past indiscretions of guests. I imagined that one day I would stay in a room, commit an indiscretion, and subsequently become immortalized among such quaint (even if a bit off-putting) memorabilia. I rubbed my nose now with the back of my hand, then shoved it--no! Let it air-dry, I reminded myself, just like Emily Post recommends. So I let my hand dangle at my side. The corridor’s air currents would, presumably, evaporate the mucus to a fine, golden crust, which then could be picked off, preferably with tweezers, and placed in a wastebasket. Damn, I’d spent the entire afternoon walking up and down this corridor. No wonder my nose was running, my head quite reeling, and neck so horribly cramped--I even felt a bit intoxicated--and yet when I turned away from the museum cases, towards the paneling on the opposite wall, the feeling passed. A few minutes later I turned back to ‘face the glass,’ as we gazers like to say, and all was fine. So badly I wished I had a clean cloth and a new bottle of Windex, but, of course, in that case (hah! exquisite pun!), my hands would necessarily come into contact with the glass, which, according to Janet (she had friends on the staff), was not permitted. Anyhow, besides these museum-cases, there were at least twenty guest rooms on this corridor. I really needed to check into one of them in order make combinations between the contents of the cases and the contents of the rooms. (And by the way, before I forgot: the Russian word for ‘combination’ is сочетание, pronounced something like, ‘so-chee-TAHN-ee-yuh.’ (Also: combining the letters of two different alphabets would be, so the хитрые linguists tell me, akin to some form of mild schizophrenia.)) But I could imagine, right now, in this motel, that if I were to find my way into one of these guest rooms, I might create, or no, devise, yes, devise combinations like ivory-elephant lampshades, glass- lined bat-wing doors, or--God be praised! I looked into one of my pockets to find a twenty-dollar bill: this would get me a few hours in any room of my choice.

4

Before lying down, I inspected the stained ticking and faded sheets. God, my head was throbbing with strange, reflective, mirror-like tremors, so badly, in fact, that I had to struggle to keep my lips firmly balanced between nose and chin. I looked around me. The motel room’s wallpaper was simply brown stripes, fat brown stripes, dark stripes, reaching from floor to ceiling, where a single bulb, on a twisted length of black wire, very black wire, dangled above the bed, enchanting me the way glassy lightbulbs always did. The bulb’s acid-etched upper curve was incredibly supple. I looked around the room more thoroughly now and decided that later, less than one hour later--as little as ten minutes later?--I would get down on my knees beside this lice-infested bed and beg Allah, or Jesus Christ, or some other ultra-powerful deity, to reach down from where?--wait! Suddenly I realized I shouldn’t rush things. Novel combinations would eventually occur to me. I simply needed to buy more time. And what better way than to play hide-and-go-seek with one’s own imagination? So I tried to picture the lobby downstairs, to materialize it before me, to project it out from within me, especially the fireplace working its magic on several mattresses hurled from up above, from many stories above. I would lean over the balustrade, face rapt, dark eyes intent on flames eating their way through all the things impossible to fit into a drugstore’s or a museum’s display-case, things like slabs of yellowing white wall-plaster, and two pieces of leather furniture greased with polish. Then, abruptly, a girl’s face appeared, a striking though not beautiful face: the salesclerk, Janet. She sat on a plain wooden chair, her small hands resting on polished leather, her feet propped up on an iron bedstead painted white. But I couldn’t stop there, no, I was now being forced to imagine other things, things like pink and white mouth-parts moving, lips within lips, and groans sounding from behind a pink plastic shower curtain, and the shadow of the shower’s attachment, and me raking back the curtain to reveal a woman long dead (judging by the lack of breathing and the horrific stench and the rusty air- dryer). I glared at the corpse. I felt its fury turn white beneath my tired eyes. So here was the tub, and within it, a rotten middle- aged woman reclining in stagnant water, a woman who so badly wanted to resume living, who regretted her impulsive suicidal behavior now that her spirit was trapped, perhaps forever, in the bathroom of a rundown motel. But, I thought, the terms of death are exponential, however ill-defined and obscure they might appear in our plastic-mass world, where each pore cries out from suntanned skin, where eyes go flat as glass and pupils the tint of dumb metal, followed by a faint bloating about the belly and the most minute asymmetries along the breast and collarbones, where--wait! Suddenly a light flared up, brighter and brighter, filling the entire bathroom, blinding me, enclosing me in total whiteness. I jerked around, trying to escape from such horrible uniformity but with no success. Then I noticed small red dots dancing before me, hovering in the air, not dots exactly, but spheres about the size of bing cherries. I walked in the direction of what I thought was the door, walking with that same jerky, marionette-like stride, and curled my fingers around the knob. But the whiteness was expanding relentlessly. It could have been anything, a trick of light, a bar of soap, a stiffening in my chest. And the bing cherries were now the size of balloons. My heart was whamming frightfully. Huge, red, amorphous shapes were blocking my exit from--where? I could taste my own terror now, I could smell and feel it. This was no longer the bathroom, no longer the motel, no longer California--this was no longer me! ‘I’ was riding out behind the rush of a carrier wave, a breaker of seismic fluid rich and corrosive--to where and to what purpose, ‘I’ had no idea.

UBL

With a bag of pretzels and a six-pack of Sam Adams at his side, and tortillas warming in the oven, Ichabod Walcott sat alone in his living room on the divan, watching the same day-old surveillance-satellite footage of the First Family’s motorcade winding its way from Andrews Air Force Base to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Ichabod operated a freelance surveillance agency out of his small, two-story house. Clients came to him primarily with requests for intercepted satellite imagery, and although he charged an incredibly high fee (because of the risk involved), he rarely disappointed. His was a quiet, self-contained personality immune to panic and thus ideal for treasonous counterintelligence work. (He also bore a disturbing resemblance to former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.) And yet, perhaps not surprisingly, as the son of a construction worker and a waitress, owner of three Dunkin’ Donuts outlets, and former member of the Crusader-Zionist Alliance, Ichabod, at the age of forty, was still in search of the happy ending. With the exception of his two pet dogs, a terrier and a pug, the only other creature in whose presence Ichabod felt truly alive was a young lady named Mimi Moffett, who unlike Ichabod, had long since given up smoking and drinking, replacing them both with a voracious appetite for sex and God. Mimi found God within the act of sex, a single God indivisible and therefore impossible to see, a God subtending All & Everything, from the Midwest to the Middle East, from Karl Marx to the Tarot and all the oil wells in between. Together, the two of them, Ichabod and Mimi, helped certain shadowy figures plot the assassination of certain world leaders and plan the destruction of certain world monuments. By sowing fear in the public at large, by helping to plan hijackings, kidnappings, and suicide bombings, Ichabod and Mimi served God’s inscrutable will. This morning Ichabod made love to Mimi Moffett like it really mattered. They were in the attic, lying beneath the gable on a bed of pillows and quilts. Around them were boxes of newspaper clippings and several glassed-in bookcases revealing the yellow spines of National Geographic. Mimi’s body was long and lean and packed with a fearsome sexual stamina. Finally, after more than two hours of lovemaking and multitudes of orgasms, Mimi slipped on her low-cut panties and bra and climbed out onto the roof to watch the sun rise. Ichabod, meanwhile, clothed his large circumcised penis (nicknamed ‘The Big Red One’ by Mimi) before going downstairs to the kitchen to prepare a breakfast of Rice Krispies and tapioca pudding. Mimi Moffett claimed to be an American from Kentucky, and despite rumors to the contrary, getting through the fabric of her underwear had been more difficult than penetrating even the Kremlin armory. Yet somehow Ichabod had managed. The first time he laid eyes on her she was running barefoot down the street in a bathrobe. The memory of it still made him blush. This morning Mimi wore a tight, sleeveless T-shirt with the phrase, CONCRETE TAKES THE COMPRESSION-- STEEL TAKES THE TENSION scrawled across her shapely breasts. Ichabod’s blue T-shirt stated simply, NEXT TIME AIM BETTER! The two of them were genuine T-shirt enthusiasts. Over the course of their five-year relationship they had silk- screened hundreds of strange, offbeat sayings meant to provoke confusion and even consternation in the minds of the public. While Ichabod’s favorites were PROGRESS IS A WAY FORWARD BUT NOT A WAY OUT and PIECE CORE, Mimi preferred FOUR HEAVY DIVISIONS & TWO AIRBORNE DIVISIONS AVAILABLE FOR DEPLOYMENT. Ichabod and Mimi agreed, over breakfast, that one way of eradicating the tribalism and nationalism responsible for so many of the world’s conflicts would be, first, to make it mandatory that each country’s leader be chosen by the electorate of another country, and, second, to require of every mother that she raise not her own child but that of another woman’s. We would all finally realize how civilization is merely a bloodless algorithm giving rise to Sarajevo’s premier funeral parlor, the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, everyday low prices, the Sexiest Man Alive, and anything else one might care to mention. Ichabod also preferred adding genius to genius rather than intelligence to ignorance. To that end, he envisioned an elite, international leadership composed of men and women who had evolved far beyond both scientific progress and religious dogma to become true creators, gods on earth. Yet scientists considered that ideal the height of foolishness, while the priesthood saw it as a sacrilegious heresy punishable, in some instances, by dismemberment or even death. Ichabod and Mimi also agreed a trip was in order, a trip to the mountainous wastes of northeastern Afghanistan. Ichabod would travel alone, leaving Mimi behind to monitor satellite imagery of North America. In preparation he began brushing up on his Farsi and Pashtu and Islamic law. Could he pass as an Probably not. In any case, it wasn’t worth the ? ﻣ ﻔ ﺘ ﻰ Iranian risk, and anyway, he didn’t really need a disguise beyond what was typical of the usual American tourist. The wig and prosthetic teeth, the Abercrombie & Fitch travel bag, the Birkenstocks, the olive-colored binoculars, the commando knife, and the single-use, prepaid mobile phone all combined to create the contradictory impression of an ex-Special Forces weapons-inspector. Moreover, Ichabod’s money-belt was stuffed with undeclared one-hundred-dollar bills. So here was the Kabul International Airport--quaint in a dusty kind of way, with the unburied dead adding to the stench and risk of pestilence. Ichabod ran his fingers through his hair. Was he really up to it? A brief heart-to-heart with UBL, one of Ichabod’s finest clients. Well, first he would need to arrange transportation to the cave complexes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, in the general vicinity of the Khyber Pass. Only there might he find UBL along with his weapons-grade uranium 235 (≥88% refined). Sure enough, three days later, the buzzer rang, a door clicked open, and Ichabod stepped over the threshold to greet UBL as he rose from the cavern’s floor. Finally, it seemed, loose ends were connecting, needs were being met. The oxygen tube was in place. The heart monitor beeped. And nearby, chicken fajitas sizzled in a skillet: Ichabod had found his happy ending.

It’s Pleonexia

I grant you this: a brief prologue to a story about a fight, a fight between practical common sense and sentimentality. Now, since the sum total of every preamble is partly warning, partly apology, I should also mention that what you’re about to read has a great deal in common with those long ladders that lead us up into attics. That is to say, the language here is entirely devoid of ‘chisel work.’ In fact, without giving anything at all away, indeed, for the sole purpose of adding suspense, I can already report that, throughout, cynical remarks will interrupt abrupt silences, that a third of the way in, black pillars of smoke will rise above the wide boulevards of a city, that more than once the male lead will scowl to express his disapproval, that the female lead will very often have no specific thoughts in mind, and finally that I’m quite embarrassed by the outcome because I’m not a scandalous person, but I’m still obsessed with drawing that fine line between shock and fear. So I will talk, and you don’t say a word till I’m finished. Agreed? Now, here are the men and the women and the places where they do their things.

PART 1 The First City

Lately I spend most of my days drinking alone on the roof, staring west, toward the city and beyond. Seems like I haven’t moved a muscle in a week. My broken-down sedan, parked at the curb out front, is pasted over with police citations. The toys of my neighbors’ children are scattered across the front yard. There’s a bird that acts like it doesn’t know where to land. All the same, I’m pleased to note changes in the landscape now that the leaves have fallen. My favorite lanes have taken on such an unfamiliar aspect, they seem intent on leading me into new realms of temptation. So every now and then I raise my unloaded Russian Kalashnikov, aim it at car or a window, and pretend to pull the trigger. (The rear lights of a Mercedes flash red as it slows at the nearest intersection.) Look at it this way: since it’s my house, this tall green two-story with a splendid porch, it’s also my prerogative to say, Go ahead, tear it the fuck down, take pot- shots at it. Your empire is already falling apart. Why can’t mine then also? If my neighbors inform on me, I’ll inform on them. Why pussyfoot about it? Every instinct of my being is anti-democratic. I’ve thrown rocks, marched, demonstrated, organized a student riot, destroyed laboratory experiments. They say Malcolm X was black, well, I’m his white counterpart then. I’ve no reasons for my point of view, only rationalizations. I’ve had to learn my trades from the bottom up. I was first class signalman in the Navy, later a hammerman in a tool and die foundry. After that I sat behind an aluminum desk, speculating on other people’s misfortunes. Lately I’ve served as a technical proofreader for a number of prestigious medical journals, a rather boring, uncreative job which does, however, allow me to work at home alone. I should also mention that I’m still recovering from a bad case of hepatitis I caught swimming last summer in the marshlands. This morning I reversed the clock an hour to account for the end of daylight savings time. I poured myself a tomato juice, took five B-complex vitamin pills. I spit-polished my boots so now they capture and hold the afternoon light. Two cords extend outside my bedroom’s second-story window to the roof, one to my telephone, the other to the electric blanket whose controller I now set at the highest notch. I close my eyes. I try to sleep off some of this booze.

But the phone rings, some ten minutes later, waking me with a start. It’s N—, swinger extraordinaire, trying to call me down from the roof, to entice me into visiting her in the city. She does this almost every day. Funny, right when you think you got someone down pat, across the river, in her loft, a woman’s running circles around you. Thing is, if I burn my hand on the stove or bump my thigh against the corner of a table, if I catch the flu, if I write socialist-sounding letters to the city newspapers, if I do any of these things, I feel myself swing back to life again. I guess I’m big on ritual that way. ‘Ritual’ might be an abbreviation for what I call ‘flipping the 9th cicada off your hip.’ Let me explain by giving another example. Jacqueline Leatherdale. With blond hair curled in a tight perm, she stands about five-foot-nine on disproportionately long legs covered in black hose. She thrusts out those large, dark- nippled breasts or flashes a stretch of bare thigh. She’s also knocking back two packs of Marlboros a day. I guess she’s the type we used to call ‘a little burnt out, a little out of breath.’ Thing is, yesterday she phones, says she wants to suck my dick for free, just like that, and I don’t know what to do. I could fall back, of course, right into a glop of Vaseline, or squirt a bottle of seltzer at that little twat of hers, or, but, well, last time she went down on me I almost emptied my lower intestines. We’re talking suck at twenty-thousand feet. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no expert on solitude: I used to buy twenty pulp magazines a month. And what about that retarded woman? you ask, What about her, the one dressed like a filthy flamingo? Or the drug-crazy nymphomaniac from the great heartland of? Ha ha. Look, I admit I appear the same as I did fifteen years ago, same general body outline and all, but I’m actually like four of what I once was. I was twenty-three then. I might as well have been two-and-a-half. Unlike your typical poet, I don’t claim to sing the world into existence. I don’t take the weather too seriously either. Most importantly, I won’t subject the reader to any form of chronic amiability. Let’s leave that to the purveyors of big dreams: every political decision shaped to a single end: still more production. They’re lathering up the old instincts. Not that there’s anything tacky about it. Of course not. We’re all horny for privilege.

I’m sitting on the toilet with my pajama bottoms around my ankles. Business is booming as usual: two dozen cans of smoked oysters, a case of champagne, three ten-milligram Valiums, one stack of girlie magazines, two lava lamps, and the scrotum of a dead man. Of course I’m reading travel literature, a genre specifically designed for the bathroom. I learn that Helsinki is a city without too much excitement because the weather’s no good for it. ‘Digestible sustenance’ sure is a handsome phrase. But the olives can wait until tomorrow. Then there’s a skull drawn on top of a pyramid, Buddhist temples in Java, the ghats of Benares, an Israeli kibbutz, the Acropolis in Athens, bales of hashish in Kabul, a mining company moving its machinery into Aboriginal land, brigades of shock-workers on the outskirts of Moscow, a night-blind straggler in somewhere. The phone rings, startling me. It’s N—, swinger extraordinaire. She’s calling from a telephone booth this time. I can just imagine her clutching that bloody petticoat of hers. The latest plan is, I take the subway into the city and we meet up at her loft. After that, we’ll see. Just so long as she doesn’t send me into the dark corner and order me to jerk off. I’m too proud for that. I’d rather stick it in an ice bucket. Still, as always, I’m impressed by the clarity of her voice, the energy that emanates from it. N— could bum a bob off a bishop. She probably already has.

To emerge from isolation, even if not from a cork-lined room, can be rather disconcerting. The full scope of your vulnerability is laid bare. Everything looks so bright and new, so vivid, you’re often assaulted by migraines or stomach ailments. Echolalia isn’t uncommon either. Can’t you just see me ringing up N— for bail? I’m dressed in an orange jumpsuit, seated in the gallery. They call me before the judge for formal charging. I start to hyperventilate. My legs begin to buckle. A felony? Why didn’t anyone tell me this was a felony? When I’m feeling lonely I look for Marlboro ads in the subway. These ads are islands of sanity and decency amid a sea of social chaos. I’m even compelled to light a cigarette. In Soviet times, the subway epitomized heroic achievement in the face of physical and technical odds. In our times, in this city, the subway stands for Hell almighty, and if it epitomizes anything at all, it’s the subordination of society to an all-out moral law. This subway’s designers certainly had a disturbed fascination with the color blue. Yummy, yummy, yummy. A rumor’s been circulating that the authorities now pump an odorless, pain-killer aerosol into the subway tunnels in hopes of pacifying the rush-hour throngs. I don’t know, it’s all so strange. Walking the length of the narrow platform does require delicate legwork. And cold calculation. Racism isn’t a good thing anywhere, of course, yet what I’m seeing down here is a lot of dyed turkey feathers, plastic elk teeth, patches sewn onto jeans, saffron robes, soldiers in gray uniforms, intellectual gadflies passing out anti-war pamphlets, and vendors selling one of our local specialties, fried clams rolled in tortillas. Never any time for shilly-shallying. Every bullet is a heat- seeker. The volume, not the rhyme, is what makes me nervous riding the subway. We’re fifteen passengers crammed into the last car, including one peasant-type dressed in a canvas bag. As we leave the station, gaining momentum, my mood turns flat, then euphoric, then flat again. I feel stiff, weightless, exposed. I want to pound on the windows. I feel like my possessions are flying away from me, like I’ve just been mugged. I’m less a traveler than that over which someone else is traveling. The refrain ‘mobs of people, mobs of people, mobs of people’ echoes through my head. Euphoric, then flat again. Mobs of people. Mobs of people. These polluted forgers of truth. Euphoric, then flat again. Euphoric. Double that. Dormant, then open again. Double that. Mobs of people. Mobs. Then double that again.

I arrive out of breath. N—’s doorman never remembers my face. I ain’t exactly the gas man. The mere sight of N—, to say nothing of her voice, does me good. No other woman can do what she’s about to do, and she’ll do it with such ease, especially her French routine. Every time I visit she’s in better health. Today she’s wearing only panties with a tiny red halter. As she rushes about the loft, her breasts and nipples reveal themselves with the greatest of playfulness. I become a dizzy just staring at her. I represent, of course, the days gone by. Ten years my junior, she probably regards me as a freaky swab jockey, but that has nothing to do with the matter of this story. Being a devout Catholic, N— naturally doesn’t agree with divorce, which also means she’s been screwing around a lot. It’s late. We’re both quite hungry. N— begins searching all the cabinets, then the refrigerator, where she finds three leftover fish sticks, a carton of eggs, and a cylinder of cranberry sauce. So let’s rearrange all the food on the shelves! No way. A bit later now. The loft’s light is soft, smoke-blurred. Rain dashes against the casement. I feel the strength of the good walls about me. The mattress is too small lengthwise, so we have to lie down across it. The two of us undress. We collapse into each other’s arms and listen to the night-storm with few if any intolerable thoughts. Like most people, we do strange things in bed. N— brushes her nipples across my lips to give me a taste of that sweet perfume. She presses her naked thighs against my shoulders. She makes mewling sounds. Her perfumed, perspiring flesh is finally so overwhelming that my penis erects jack-in-the- box style. The two of us begin thrashing about on the mattress. I flip her on her back, enter her frontally, then withdraw. I flip on her stomach, enter from behind, then withdraw. Tell me you can’t feel it, you dirty slut! Tell me! Tell me you can’t feel it! I dare you! Tell me you can’t feel it, you lousy little cunt! She clenches her teeth, fighting back, ripping at me with her nails, pleading with me to enter. It’s like something out of a Russian ballet. Afterwards, of course, loud, prolonged applause, cheers, shouts. “Long live Comrade Stalin, hurrah!” “Long live the advanced collective farmer!” “Long live our leader, Comrade Stalin!” N— places a Rolling Stones record on the turntable. ‘Lady Jane.’ We finish off the wine. We feel exhilarated. Sex is a necessity, that’s all, a refreshment of one’s hormones, even if it does hurt my knees to fuck her that way. N— chews on a corner of her pillow as she listens to me. I’m telling her how, on the way over, I punched a guy who tried to sneak into a cab ahead of me. I let him have it. I think I hurt his head quite badly. He kicked frantically for a moment, then passed out. Like I said, I ain’t exactly the gas man.

I’ve had to work especially hard to shake off the powerful influence of television, and because of that, my life has become less structured, simpler, more indifferent. Still, it’s an exhausting way to live. Good grades are not the chief intellectual weapon here. They never have been. The main thing is to get through with it, even, if necessary, to keep bankers’ hours and take very long lunch-breaks. Nobody likes a grump either, especially store clerks. No problem. I can be a smiley-faced chump with a hard- on, which also proves I’m not a prude. I have entertained a fetish or two. I’ve used a French tickler. A speculum. I know it’s okay for a woman to be a dominatrix or a rubber-freak or a Rumanian weight-lifter. Besides, all of us are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. We institute governments to secure those rights. And should a particular government fail in that mission, we also have the right to alter or abolish the government. First off, try to use as few words as possible. Never explain your actions to the authorities. Never leave anything behind except a folded newspaper, at most, on a tabletop. Here, tear off a couple strips, shove them up your nose. Of course it’s also a little uncomfortable walking around with a slingshot in the back pocket your overalls, but let’s try not to disappoint them. It’s the following day. I’ve left my roof again, taken the subway into the city, but it’s been a boring day nonetheless, terrible if also beautiful: a delirious old guy in the municipal park yelling Good one! Good one! over and over again to three juiceless winos, a group of several young, rather grimy, frumpishly-dressed Vietnamese women, a row of blank-socketed TV sets spinning madly in spirals that can only end in oblivion, a shop overflowing with thick, musty Oriental carpets. The whole city owns all of them, yet no one really owns it. Look far enough, you always find muscular toil, nuts-and-bolts, meat-and-potatoes toil. I’m thinking, okay then, if that’s what they want, let’s herd them all into the central valley, make their bodies resilient, their hands tough, encourage them to fight like wild dogs caught in a barbed wire fence. All that economic activity would make for quite a complex graph, I’m sure, with lots of cross-outs, cryptic little asterisks, arrows, but without any overlaps, please. I’m assuming handcuffs won’t be necessary either. Even so, let’s not prescribe Demerol or any of that over-the-counter shit. Let’s also take away their liquor and dope. Let’s force them to interview for one dumb job after another. As for me, I’m an omnivore, my teeth are those of an omnivore, though I’m probably more scavenger than hunter because I take each ordeal as it comes, chalking up point after point. Four million years of upright walking have also had a warming effect on my speech centers. I suppose there’s an inclination to romanticize events that happened more than a twenty years ago, to lard them over with the far-off strains of Latin music, but I insist my life was not that dull when I was growing up. In fact, I have the rare capacity to actually look back on what I once did, but heaven forbid I should remember it all! The facts I do find are rather disconnected, and a shade disconcerting. I recall daybreak on the Mediterranean, and a pre- dawn ocean skinny-dip, and a place in Italy where you can walk through the fields to find fish. It’s true. I later read about it in National Geographic. Haifa was hot. BRAVO YANKEE.

Freedom is the fundamental requirement for peace of mind. A life of fantastic homelessness. Indeed, if the purpose of this story is in fact to identify freedom, then that battle is hardly over. It’s just begun. Soon I must quit this scene altogether. I will abandon my house, not even putting it on the market, pack one suitcase to capacity, and hail a taxi to the bus station where I’ll buy a one- way ticket westward. And here I thought I was through with running away. Problem is, my life has become embalmed in legend. Then perhaps it’s time to give a second thought to Puritanism. Yes? A humble ascetic dedicating his life to raising German police dogs? But no. I prefer a haunted place instead, full of wild tales, inside very dark, where I’m the landlord and I want my fucking rent. I’m staring at Cinderella’s silver boots beneath a throne. I crawl to those boots on all fours. I try them on. Yeah, man, get your money’s worth. I welcome N— to the Self-Emancipation Group. Impressive, isn’t it? Three cylinders release a powerful tranquilizing gas into the leather-cushioned interior of my sedan. Alcohol, of course, is not among our vices, not today, because alcohol will make us sick. The pleasant things that might occur on acid or peyote are quite nice however, though when the hatred of being enclosed in our own bodies is replaced by a terrible fear of the flesh, right then, that’s the proper time for speed. Stimulants of the central nervous system keep you and me, indeed, keep all of us, society as a whole, from committing mass suicide. What then of this fifth substance? Well, do you want a demonstration of it mixed with methedrine? No? And who ever told you that affection is a dyadic relation, or that the right side of the human body is unlucky, or that positive thinking is a probable offshoot of Christianity? Huh? And the consequences are varied? Really? Well, suppose an ashtray turns into a cockroach, or Little Richard arrives in a pickup, or one of my loafers falls onto the concrete, or various requests disappear into a maze of administrative advisory and study committees, or worst of all, that every animal in Lucian’s history suddenly shrivels away. So please understand that those who draw in air are mortal, while those who draw in ether, those of us, you and I, we are immortal. In fact, this is so far from a digression I think it nearer a demonstration, for as I live not by common examples, so shall I not derive a common design. Rather, to be a man of ‘revolutionary doctrine,’ one whose principles are answerable to the very rigor of nature, yes, whose ideas shall dispense with their seals to probe directly into the matter. All of my previous lives, each a stratum in the order of my eternal evolution, were unconscious preparation for this final one. So be it. I shall not surrender to the sexual mechanisms of the mind. Biographers know that exceptional people contain a multitude of unfinished selves. Mine include self-abandoning self-abnegation — self-abhorring, self-absorbed, self-accusing self-improvement — self-adjusting self-disclosure — self- balanced self-boasting — self-canceling self-consumption — self-combating self-conflict — self-condemnatory self-conquest — self-consumed self-contempt — self-controlled self-deception — self-constitutive self-denial — self-destructive self-display — self-doomed self-dominion — self-feeding self-fulfillment — self-exalting, self-excusing self-exile — self-governed self- humiliation — self-inflicted self-instruction — self-elected, self- harming self-helplessness — self-idolized self-invitation — self- judging self-justification — self-loathing self-maintenance — self-loving self-mastery — 3rd cervical 9th dorsal 4th lumbar — self-pleasing self-nourishment — self-perfected self-perpetuation — self-praising, self-preserving, self-relying self-revelation — self-questioning self-restraint — self-ruined self-satisfaction — self-sustained self-support — self-tormenting, self-troubling self- trust — self-sustaining self-tuition — self-upbraiding self- worship — as from green to red, from red to black, from black to a million other colors, these uproarious alterations of independent selves simply cannot cease. We end up in the parking lot of a fish hatchery. It begins to rain so we decide to stay in the sedan. I hug N— with my free arm. She reaches for my T-shirt, leans over, kisses my neck. She then wraps her hands around my head, holding me tight. She’s breathing into my scalp. She’s kind of drunk, but I feel protective, not sexually aroused. I listen to the rain pound on the roof. Facts submitted to a candid world: the man and woman parked beside us are passing a bong back and forth.

Two days later there’s a knock at the door. It’s B—, with a sleek bottle of scotch in one hand and an enormous sticky cake in the other. This is the first time she’s paid me a personal visit. She’s radiant today in one of her tight-fitting, peach-colored, homemade dresses, but then I glance down at the floor and see she’s wearing a pair of plastic sandals so ill-fitting they should never be allowed on her feet, or anyone else’s feet, for that matter. So we quickly sit down at the kitchen table. B— has a strange knack of avoiding the gaze of the person she’s talking to by staring off into some mysterious middle distance. Perhaps it’s because she’s a fanatic who sees only a single vision. I don’t know. Well, the first thing she says is this morning she dropped her toothbrush into the toilet, just like Jerry Seinfeld once did. I don’t get it. Second thing she says is her dress is a bit damp because she washed it only last night. I don’t get that either. All I can think of is fine dining. I mean, what atmosphere of feud and flirtation are we imbibing here with the scotch and soda? Doesn’t matter, though. Before long, B— is off again staring into that mysterious middle distance which happens to be occupied, at the moment, by my samovar. It might just as well be my mother in her purple silver-stitched negligee. B—’s lips wear one of those quizzical half-smiles that usually reflect mixed feelings about an upcoming wedding or some other such festive occasion. She rubs her eyes. I do a lazy drum-roll on the table. A bit later she tries to bait me into an argument over Bulgakov. I don’t get it. A journalist slips in a pool of sunflower oil and is decapitated by a passing tram. Then there’s O—. Here, comrades, is a representative of that human state called ‘stupidity.’ O— is forced to speak with unbearably long pauses, otherwise her words tend to obstruct one another. She is not, however, what they used to call ‘retarded.’ Remember that? The sound of it? Tiny glass pendants of Viennese chandeliers clinking together. Doesn’t it frighten you a bit? God knows it’s no picnic. Anyhow, last autumn the two of us were enjoying a walk together. The apples were ripe on the trees in the university’s orchard. We eventually found our way to an enormous ruined greenhouse. Red vines fluttered in the wind. Suddenly an automatic sprinkler system kicked on. You can imagine the rest.

For a moment, directly above me, the high scream of chopper blades. Gulls are swooping in over the dock to fight over a can of sardines I’ve left for them outside my sedan. I’m parked in my regular parking space. I’m alone, enjoying a coffee and danish. Swooping birds are familiar symbols from my childhood. I remember once it was so bad they had to pry the poor kid off the fence: chocolate milk, vomit stains, an odd, dildo-like projection. Luckily nothing visible belonged to me, besides that lottery ticket. God, how their syrup tasted like honey, honey laced with hickory smoke, and they kept thrusting it into my mouth, applying pressure to my windpipe, ‘they’ being The Quick Bash- Up Boys. Keep that nose up, asshole, keep it up! I preferred not to fight them, but there’s a big difference between that and getting fucked on camera: hard, brutal screwing against back- projected exteriors. N—’s sweaty, pink face reminds me of a little girl’s. She’s screaming like an exorcism. But I’m giggling. It’s hard not to. Afterwards the audience stands up to cheer. They shower the stage with flowers. Of course the days of twenty-five- cent operas are finally over. The flickering motion picture has come to be. Power through money. That’s all. Funny to think our dollar sign derives from a snake wrapped around two pillars. A really mad image for money. Subject-object-verb. Anyhow, the pain goes away after a couple hours, leaving N— with a weapon she never even dreamed of.

PART 2 The Bus Journey

Journeys preempt the need for hierarchies or shows of dominance. Either you accept the view that things cannot be otherwise, or you reject it and sink forthwith into a den of demons and everlasting accident. Believe me, it’s much more than a mania for sleeping each night in a different bed. So it’s Sunday morning, extremely cold, snowy, but the bus is warm and stuffy, as buses often are in the dead of winter. When we board I notice the bus driver has a line of whitish crust along the edges of his lips. The odors of spent fuel oil and never- aired upholstery are suffocating. N— and I begin looking for our seats. N— is dressed in baggy trousers and an overly large sweater. I’m wearing a three-piece suit tailored to the highest refinement. Neither one of us looks like we’ve ever set foot west of the almighty river, and we haven’t. We’re frontier amateurs. We can hardly keep our breakfasts down, we’re so excited. It’s like Christmas without the religious shit attached. Once seated, N— and I take turns gulping on a concealed bottle of brandy. A lovely heat soon pervades my body. Outside the bus’s windows, the sky is darkening into a blizzard. I imagine soon there’ll be nothing but icy blackness. I turn on a reading light to study the map. N— gets out her magnetic Scrabble board. A bit later I notice that across the aisle sit two pregnant women who are total strangers to one another. What a coincidence. Pregnant women always spook me, make me feel uneasy. I watch one of them open a plastic bag to pull out bratwurst, bread, and pickles. Soon her fat lips are chewing, loudly smacking. I have to restrain myself from leaning over and shoving that food right down her fucking throat, choking her on it. I’m no daddy, that’s for sure. I’m no daddy to you, you reptile! Just look at what you’ve become! Squeezin’ ‘em out like liver sausage. Sure, I’ll look after you, I’ll sympathize too, and I purposely won’t lock the door at night. I’ll even take you in. But I’m not your fucking daddy because I’m not enmeshed in the blood vessels of animals. How else can I express my gratitude? Ah forget it. Women can be so fucking awful sometimes. N— is the odd exception.

A person can’t feel more useless than this, all day staring out the window at nothing. Most of the bus’s passengers are fast asleep or in stupors. I’m tired, but I’m not sleeping, so I decide to pretend that in a few hours we’re all going to die. A grinding of brakes. Then darkness. I imagine a dummy clock whose hands are already set at midnight. I bring my own hands up to my face. Nothing. Perhaps this meditative habit of mine has rather dimmed my social characteristics. Okay, then from now on, no forcing it. Just sitting back. Otherwise one of these days I really won’t return from sleep alive. Several more hours drag by, until I want to throw snowballs at the sides of the buildings we pass. I’m like a villain without a country. Who gets the reward anyway, me or the person who turns me in? But there’s no answer coming from my companion. N—’s asleep, her breath deep, rattling. So maybe freedom isn’t an expression of personality but more escape from personality. Okay, but then only those who already have a personality can ever know what it means to escape from one. That’s why ideologists are by nature so dogmatic: to construct a classless society from total freedom makes waiting the worst part of it. It gets so boring you start to lose your temper wondering if maybe all ideology is false consciousness, or merely a dream. Okay, then suppose I fall asleep right now and dream. Well, you won’t believe the weird shit I dream up: I’m on my way to Libya with passports and 100,000 Deutsche Mark strapped to my waist. A Bach fugue blares in the background. Strangely, all clocks have been removed from the airport terminals. When she does finally wake up, I mention to N— that somewhere I must have secrets about the war, or at least memories. Periphery stuff. It doesn’t matter who put it there. For example, imagine the interior of a cattle-car crossing the German countryside. We’re prisoners of war. Our uniforms are rotting off our backs. We got thirty bucks between us. I’m the youngest. I’m quite the honcho. I pick up a newspaper from the empty seat beside me. It’s folded in the middle. I flip through till I find page one. What a bunch of bullshit! I haven’t got a straight message out of the media for three whole months. The only possible response, a rather unattractive one, is no longer leaving the use of physical force at the discretion of individual citizens but to grant that task to governments, in which case, I should put in my orders for a second double vodka. A couple hours later, I turn to N— and ask, What do you mean, it’s just an arm? It’s my arm. I’m only being logical so don’t you get angry with me since it’s all so fucking silly anyway. Bishop Berkeley’s refutation of matter. A Jesus-brilliant thing to bring up at a time like this! I pull from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held in place by an elastic band. On the opening page I’ve scotch-taped a grainy, black-and-white photograph of my alcoholic mother. Her skin and hair are coated with a fine, white dust. My mother spoke French. What was that? Was she French? No. She was, well, ah if you know what I mean.

I’ve tucked my pants into the tops of my boots like a paratrooper. I wanted only to stretch my legs, but now my toes are soaked and my hair is covered in snow. So here I am. Siberia never ceases to amaze me. Main Street is the only street that’s paved. It’s long, rambling, and immensely wide. The few remaining buildings are double-wide trailers anchored to cement. The sky is mostly vacant except for a number of abandoned grain elevators dotting the horizon. My eyes are drawn to an automobile, filled with actors, that sits atop a flatbed truck. I imagine them staring at one another in the reflections off their sunglasses. The two actresses, who are wearing out-of-season Day-Glo bikini tops, sport hair that falls a couple inches past their shoulder blades. The two actors have tipped their Stetsons forward to cast shadows over their eyes. The shoot is set to begin in twenty minutes. Too bad we didn’t bring any folding chairs. I return to the bus. Was it years or was it minutes I stood there in that stupid village? I cannot say. But which is most infuriating, all the sameness or all the difference? Either way, the journey’s fading into tedious nuance. The barrier between dream and observation is dissolving. Conversations seem to stretch into infinity, seasons soar by overhead, while hours last only minutes. I feel like tearing through my intestines with broken elbows. I’m gripped with ineffable longing, yet there’s no place I wish to be. A medley of snores. Eyelids rolled back. Frost and smoke. Frost and smoke. Another medley of snores. Frost and smoke. Individual bus stations blur into a single Bus Station. Big square windows gleaming with pale light. The high-ceilinged, apricot- colored cafeteria jammed with those black Formica tables. The menu posted outside the wooden cashier’s booth. A single rusty gas pump stands in the middle of the plaza. Nothing special. I’ll remain seated for this stop. I remove one of the half-dozen or so Frank Norris novels stashed in my luggage. Random selection yields The Octopus. I return the book, make a second selection. Blix. I return that book, make a third selection. The Octopus again. I return it and shake the bag to mix the books more thoroughly. My fourth selection finally yields Vandover and the Brute. As we move westward, our bus is absorbing new ethnic groups at every stop, but let it be known this is no caravan of despair, no sir. Why, you’re welcome to join us even if you’ve broken your vows a thousand times. Please, put your face on the burning sand or on the earth of the road, and let the scars of your hearts be seen, for although the existence of a world beyond your senses is untenable, do not conclude that one doesn’t in fact exist, for in already supposing your world is merely subjective you imply an objectivity by which to compare it, and yet how can you know of such an objectivity without necessarily rendering it subjective, and on what was your initial supposition of subjectivity therefore based? Thus, One is untenable, not nonexistent. Fifteen minutes later I return from abstraction to the here and now. But what is here to be calm about? I don’t want to be calm, for God’s sake. I have no trouble with the word God. I don’t hate it for lacking all meaning. Times like this, you quite forget you’re alive. You could sit on this bus and talk to God, but why put so much faith in words? Getting loaded falling into a swimming pool, running away getting arrested, going to prison for Grand Theft Auto, getting pregnant having an abortion. There’s such a sense of loss as these snowy illusions slip past the bus’s window. I suspect I’m stuck in a state of continual self- overcoming, terminal adolescence, which means, if true, I’ll be forever at the beginning of my journey. I probably haven’t said a word here I couldn’t have said four days ago sitting on my rooftop. Even then my mind was moving. Anyhow, the fact I’m never allowed to become complacent or to justify my own confusion has lead to a state of constant preparation, and perhaps that is because preparation is the art of staying awake, and what is staying awake but immortality? In fact, immortality is the one and only proposition ever worth pushing. But if this journey is under divine guidance, it’s sure bringing me to the point of perplexity. Headlights reflect off the snow-banks along the side of the road, while further beyond, the monotonous fields and parking lots seem done up in dry ice. Even the bus’s windows are frosty to the touch. I crack open the last bottle of Bebsi-Cola and unwrap one of my special salami sandwiches. So how can I assure the reader I’m speaking here from the heart? Well, I can only say that an instinct prompts me to. However, keep in mind that I am One thing, while my speaking apparatus is another, so I’ll try my best not to let these descriptions deprive the reader’s reality of its inherent value, but truly now, how much reality can the average reader bear?

I imagine the bus driver’s dark eyes gazing into infinity. According to the name tag, the bus driver’s name is Hamid. He wears a beret. He has a wide, stump-like neck. Throughout the journey he’s remained cool and dapper. And even now, as the weather dramatically changes, he’s not the least bit giddy. The ice is turning to slush. There’s a slight drizzle. We seem to have left the snow behind us for good. A mountain range looms up in the distance. We continue to pass through one small village after another. I watch the local women holding up their long skirts as they pick their way through puddles. I watch the men with muscle-bunched arms adjust their stomachs as they walk. Even in the midst of war, these local peasant populations remain the crank-handle of world history. And now that the weather is changing, a whole cascade of things comes tumbling into mind. I’m completely bewildered. A cramped shivering leaps up and down my spine. I try to quote some Frank Norris phrases. I try to do addition or multiplication in my head. I point to the word ‘tomorrow’ in my Turkish- English dictionary. Nothing works. My forehead’s sweating. Finally I lean back into my seat and cross my arms, placing my right hand on my left shoulder, my left hand on my right shoulder. This posture relaxes me. Within moments I fall asleep, but when I awake it’s dark again and we’re crossing the mountains. I feel a sense of authority in Hamid, a no-nonsense attitude that leaves little room for compromise. He’s running a real class operation here. The point is, Hamid can get things done, just about anything you want if you concentrate hard enough. How do you think I’m pulling off this trip? Seems the further I proceed westward, the more I’m forced to transmute every image, every thought that comes my way. Hamid’s gloved hands tighten around the steering wheel. I imagine intense heat emanating from his armpits. Perhaps his skin is flawless except for a small appendectomy scar, that famous symbol of unfinished business. A black leather massage table. Pink neon lighting. As I remove my clothes, which isn’t easy, I’m shaking with anxiety, telling myself to relax, to enjoy it, as any man would for God’s sake. I’m nude, lying on the massage table. Hamid begins to massage me. I look up at him, I blush, and in my most girlish voice I ask, Do you have any extras? He smiles, walks over to a cabinet and returns with a piece of tinfoil, a lighter, and two straws. He hands me a straw. He drops a ball of opium onto the tinfoil. He holds the foil over the lighter flame. The opium begins to run. I inhale and hold my breath.

Part 3 The Second City

The smoke of a burning city hovers over the bus like a blanket of fog. As the last of the sunlight pierces through the dense soot, the sky lights up in a fiery sort of display. If it’s not the end of the world, it’s at least the end of the day. Yet the stalls in the peasant market are still open for business, selling fruit, fresh vegetables, bread hot from the oven. Our bus passes oddities like a gourmet butcher shop or an Italian-style portico leading into open galleries. Brisk-looking men press ample groins against balustrades. Now and then women peer back over their shoulders or walk arm-in-arm. Packs of soldiers in gray uniforms loiter on street corners. I find it all erotically stimulating. The tones of this city are heavy, resonant, solid. Suddenly, at one especially congested intersection, our bus collides head-on with a Toyota Land Cruiser. Hamid is furious. The police are summoned. N— and I decide to disembark rather than wait out the delay. We step off the bus with our luggage and are immediately overwhelmed by the odor of sizzling meat fat. A shirtless, gray-bearded vendor is grilling steaks and sausages on the opposite sidewalk. We’re both quite hungry, so we approach. We order two sirloins, one medium, one medium-rare. There’s a saying that although the god precedes his statue, the statue only delimits the god by being much too visible. Such is the case with this burning city. I know we won’t spend more than a week here, no way, but I feel all right about it nonetheless. Here we are, both of us perspiring on a honking, busy street, shoveling down our two sirloins. Between bites, N— tells me that at the end of the week she’s taking a plane to the Bahamas, where she’ll meet up with a friend. I don’t believe her. No way. She’s much too spoiled for that. Myself, I’d like to get back to Antigua for a couple weeks, if only to vegetate. Then again, I don’t believe so. Maybe the island gets boring after awhile, especially if you decide to live there. I really don’t know. I’ve never lived on an island.

#3D. It’s a one-bedroom co-op whose floor and walls are painted metallic silver. Management requires the blinds be drawn at sunrise to keep the colors from fading. If the room’s damp mustiness hardly reminds me of a summerhouse, then the white satin sheets and nice white crucifix above the bed must certainly remind me of Mary Magdalene at the sepulcher. Upon awaking, and finding N— already gone for the day, I do a series of stretching exercises. Afterwards, still dressed in my all-cotton pajamas, now with a slight flutter in my stomach, I step outside to the open courtyard. It has the feel of a beer garden. A pigeon takes flight from a windowsill. Weeds have sprouted between the paving stones. An attractive black woman is sitting alone at a table, nursing a coffee, indulging in daydreams. Her brother beat her up again? But I thought her brother was dead. Well then, perhaps his superiors have relieved her of conducting revolutionary activity. I wonder if I should give her anything for the pain. Then again, how much aspirin is already in that bloodstream of hers? Even her skin looks moist. Pulmonary edema? The prescription blanks in any Emergency Room are pretty easy to get hold of. I return inside. The television is reporting sporadic unrest throughout the city. Even from my window I can see several pillars of smoke or no, not really pillars, more like dark rifts gouged into the air. Indeed, the improbability and incredibility of this moment are the only indications I’m still conscious. So I replace the sound of the TV with a tape of generic organ music and heat up a can of chili on the hotplate. I’ll spend the day here reading. It’s getting late. The sun has nearly set. I’m walking as fast as I can along an exceedingly drab stretch of industrial street. A steady stream of poorly dressed men and women go by with huge bundles of food in bulging plastic suitcases. Many of them slow down to watch me as I vanish up the street. I can hear the wind whistle through their sunken lips. So many gray faces with stuffed noses: absorbent cotton to stop the bleeding. Smoke is thick in these parts, very thick, though not thick enough to smother that everpresent scent of spicy, roasted meat. I’ve got only Burger King napkins, so they’ll have to do the trick. I tear off a couple strips and shove them up my nose. Two yellow points now poke out of my nostrils. I peep into other people’s windows. I go up other people’s staircases. I’m looking for him. But who is he? Point him out to me, please. I’m looking for her too. I want to gather a multitude about myself. I want to evoke them, to let them out into the arena, a whole group, no, a whole team of feelings. A shock group. Finally, up ahead, I see N— standing at our prearranged hook-up spot. Oh how I love these scenes. I accept the encounter as if she were an utter stranger with a twinkling gaze. As I approach, I remove the two pieces of napkin from my nostrils. N—’s first words are that her eyes are burning. Once more her delicacy fills me with disgust.

The entrance to Club Pleonexia is shaped like the bow of a ship. N— and I try to enter, but we’re rudely blocked by a bouncer who holds up five beefy fingers to indicate the cover-charge. No, I’m not a Dolly Parton fan, neither is she. So we have to fight our way to the bar. Pink Floyd is blaring from the speakers. I pluck the yellow earplug from N—’s head, put my mouth to her ear, and yell, Is this a gay bar? She nods. I wonder if there’s a military base nearby. I jerk my thumb over my shoulder, to indicate my destination, the men’s room. Unlike most, this men’s room has an anteroom, done up in mauve with a wine-colored carpet, several stiff, formal-looking chairs, and a glass end-table. The walls are lined with bookcases. Books are wedged into every available space. I enter the restroom proper, pause before a wall-length mirror. My face hangs motionless in that mirror. I smell beer, sweat, urine. I start to think about optical illusions, when suddenly, behind me, a young black man exits the nearest stall. The first things I notice are the reddish-purple strangulation- marks around his neck. His fists are thrust into his trouser pockets. His jacket is unbuttoned and gathered behind. His pose says, Well sir? His mouth says, My name is K—. His face is so close to mine I can smell the aftershave beneath his stale breath. Believe you me, this ain’t gonna be no affirmative-action bake sale. You whistle like a peasant, you wonderful woman, you! Hah! I pinch N—’s calf when nobody’s looking. N—, K—, and I are sitting at a table near the dance floor, drinking gin-and-tonics. Are we supposed to eat off these fine plates? Even the ashtrays are clean. God help me. Things would be easier if I were stoned. Club Pleonexia is packed to capacity tonight. The sharks are chewing at my flapping arms. Anyhow, K— tells me he got those bruise marks around his neck by falling through a plate-glass window. No way. I don’t believe him. Strange, I’m starting to smell burning corn and hear drums rolling over bodies. And warm smoke is blowing through my mouth. And the dancers are circling closer and closer. Suddenly a strong pair of hands pulls me up by the shoulders. It’s K—. I glance over at N— who’s still seated. She’s grinning at me. I look up again, at the ceiling this time. Droplets of water strike my forehead. I have to steady myself against one of the dancers, clutching onto his shoulder. I look at N—, this time more intently. She continues to grin, then breaks out into maniacal laughter. All right, what the hell did she put in my drink while I was in the john? I wake up smelling straw on wet wood. I’m lying on the floor, on my back. I recognize the ceiling of #3D. I gather it’s the following morning. N— is nowhere to be found. My leg is bruised, swollen. I’m thirsty as hell. I find a note in the kitchen giving vague directions to K—’s place. He’s arranged some kind of art show for this evening.

K—’s got so many tattoos you can see them coming out the top of his T-shirt all the way up his neck. He’s wearing skin-tight, pocketless slacks with zippers up and down the front. He’s a kindly soul, and a pleasant host too, generous, unstinting. I imagine he sings to himself at night, smokes marijuana most of the day, doesn’t eat all that much. He drives around the city on a motorcycle with a sidecar that he purchased at Army Surplus. I’m told an incipient hernia kept him out of the war. He used to be an electrical engineer, even studied at a private university, before changing his mind and sailing off to Tahiti, then to Chile, where he found work overseeing a small crew of men working on a railroad. Last year he returned to the city to open a shop called The Ikra which caters to Pure Mind Buddhism. Animal skins cover the floor. Well-fed, luxuriously-furred Persian cats roam around with big eyes. I gather K— is a very cunning chemist too. Last night he asked me if I’d ever tried vitamin B-12 injections laced with amphetamine. Beautiful, man, just beautiful! Several painters or, more generally, ‘visual artists’ are standing around taking notes. Tonight’s show is a damn good one. Everyone’s smiling. Everyone’s enjoying a healthy sense of confusion. No casual war memories, no idiot vigilance. The performers hoot, cheer, and whistle from the stage. A porno movie flickers on the ceiling above the dance floor. The air seems to be filled with either rarefied luminous spaghetti or great wiggling millipedes, depending on how you look at it. I’m sure everybody in this room could relate some fantastic material, as good as, if not better than, what I’m telling you right here. But so long as I don’t give you a ration of shit, I’ll do just fine. In fact, N— and I used to arrange similar get-togethers in her studio. Once, I caused a furor by passing out a series of prose-poem polemics. I pour myself a tumbler of Glenfiddich scotch, neat, adding to it a pinch of nutmeg. N— is huddling in a corner, her hands shaking as she sips from a cocktail. I notice that one of her ankles is swollen, blue turning yellowish. What’s wrong with N— tonight anyway? Great. I really don’t feel like doing a pelvic right now. It fills me with self-loathing. Have you experienced any discharge? Trouble when you urinate? Tried a different mouthwash? There’s nothing worse than an uneven or poorly wrapped birthday present. In fact, I’m reminded of when they deliver Chinese food in those neat little white square boxes. So the movie finally begins. As far as I can tell, it’s set in Northern Africa. I see the desert. But I don’t get it. I just don’t get it. I pluck the yellow earplug from N—’s head, put my mouth to her ear, and whisper, God, it’s nice to see you. Shut up and watch! is all she can reply.

Errands? On a day like this? I don’t think so. I’m alert to all frequencies, overloaded with confidence and jumbled thought. I haven’t slept for two straight days. My jaw is trembling as I lower myself into the crowds. To keep my long hair from blowing around, I pull a stocking cap down over my ears. For the first time these sidewalks and streets connect with my bones. The storefronts are crowded with notable specimens. The International House of Pancakes open 24 hours, the Incense Emporium, and the Mystic Trends Smoke Shop, one free screen with each purchase. But the trash, my God, the piles of trash. As if the war and pollution aren’t bad enough, the trash collectors have gone on strike. Unbelievable. The narrow stairs are awkward to climb. Laszlo gestures toward the corner of the attic room where I suppose he’s painted other men and women. He tells me I’ll enjoy it more if I don’t fight his suggestions. For a moment I want to laugh, but I blush deeply and turn my head away. He’s right. Laszlo is an exceptional man. He’s capable of dissembling perhaps even better than I am. Like every great artist, myself included, he sees the world exactly how he wants to see it, not how it actually is. He paints what he paints. Right now he’s painting me with my eyes wide open because it’s the easiest pose to hold. The rest of the view is spotless. My lack of reaction is probably throwing him off. So Laszlo puts on some music. As far as I can tell, it’s just a guy playing bass guitar and singing, with a rhythm machine in the background. But the longer Laszlo works on my portrait, the more seized I am by a passion for vengeance. I imagine he’s handed me a loaded gun and dared me to use it on him. I walk up from behind. I touch his shoulders, then his back. He turns around. His stale breath is repulsive. Why’d you kill her, Laszlo? Huh? Why’d you cave in her forehead like that with a metal pipe? You better hope the cops don’t find her body. But if you really wanna talk death, you worthless bastard, if you really want it, I’ll gladly fuckin’ kill you! I undue my belt, unzip my fly, and wrestle him down to the bench. I’m straining to find something that might excite me. I manage to get a hand up a leg of his baggy shorts. I find his balls. My other hand pinches a nipple through his sweater. He’s beneath me now. I grab his clotting hair, pull his ear up to my mouth. I whisper, Death for death, Laszlo, death for death! Mine! Mine! Mine! He’s hissing. Mine, Laszlo! Vengeance is mine! Mine! Mine! I’ll fucking kill you! Suddenly the gun muzzle burps flame. My grip relaxes. I wipe off, stuff myself back in. Laszlo dabs at his shorts with a Kleenex. Money. A huge wad. I can smell him thinking. Change myself into a woman. Maybe I really will. The blade is fantastically sharp. Laszlo is scrubbing the chopping board clean of blood. He scrubs quickly, efficiently, with palpable skill. Many flies have landed for the blood. The best meat is the bloodiest and therefore attracts the most flies. We talk about movies as the steaks sear on the grill. I seem to agree with everything he says. He defends Wim Wenders and attacks Godard. I’m starving. The steak tastes fine. The charcoal helps, as does eating it inside, away from the sooty air. There’s also corn on the cob, but I think the potato salad needs some dill, or some vinegar, something to make it less bland. We also enjoy apple pie with vanilla ice cream melting off the fork. The meal is a nice reprieve from the weird Chinese shit N— likes to eat. I don’t know why she can’t be satisfied with regular food. She wants to get even with me. She’s that hysterical. While we’re eating, Gabrielle drops by. She’s your typical punk, with blue hair, smeared eye makeup, and a studded dog collar around the neck. She’s nude from the waist down. I can’t help but notice she’s got a very thick growth of dark pubic hair. I think she’s a little scared of me. Anyhow, Laszlo asks her what happened. There seems to be no question of rape or half-hostile lovemaking, she’s not screaming, not even crying. She was apparently let out of a car near the edge of Chessman Park without her pants or panties on. She says it’s not like it looks, or at least not as bad as it looks. I don’t get it, but I’m not going to say anything. She’s obviously not in the mood to be nagged. Laszlo gives Gabrielle a pair of his underwear to put on. She plops down on the sofa while we return to our steaks. I’m somewhat shocked to find out that Laszlo and Gabrielle have an open marriage. It was her idea, of course. Gabrielle seems more like a real bitch to me. After we’re done eating, I call up #3D to see if N— has returned. She answers. I giver her directions to Laszlo’s studio. N— says she’ll pick up K—. So ten minutes later, all five of us, N—, K—, Laszlo, Gabrielle, and myself, are gathered in Laszlo’s studio. N—’s describing the wild, bouncing cab ride she and K— enjoyed on the way over. She’s wearing tight black corduroys and a yellow bowling shirt with her name embroidered on the pocket. No bra, of course. N— doesn’t like bowling, but she loves bowling shirts. I look around. Gabrielle is still without pants. No one seems to care or even notice. Laszlo is fiddling with a couple water pipes. K— is looking through Laszlo’s CD collection. He puts on the Rolling Stones’ Some Girls. Laszlo begins passing around the pipes. We each take a couple hits, and after awhile we start talking about ourselves. Gabrielle tells us about painting and printmaking, about how hard it is to buy supplies now that the war’s on. Imagine being a painter and having only four colors of acrylics to choose from. Nothing subtle about that. Laszlo responds with bitter laughter. I suggest they take up writing. Pencil and paper are a cheaper, more convenient way of expressing yourselves than all that Bauhaus bullshit. How you gonna top that? Laszlo stubs out his cigarette, says I’m just another prole, another jerk waiting to get nuked or enslaved by someone else’s economics. He begins yelling at me, how he’s so fucking alive when he paints that I have no idea, that I can’t fathom the wide serenity of the Nile at Luxor, the barren silence of the Valley of the Kings, or Rommel, Napoleon, and Alexandria, that I have no idea how painting enlarges him, how it frees him from the prison of his own experience. He’s right. I have no idea what prison he’s referring to, and even if it does exist, it’s his problem, not mine. But when I notice everyone else is rapt with enthusiasm, especially N—, I decide to say nothing and pretend I enjoy being lectured. When we return to #3D later that evening, N— and I don’t kiss. We stand there staring at each other. Where’d you get that mark on your cheek? She won’t answer. I monitor the space between us. I scan her face. I zoom in on the mole below her cheek with that tiny hair I always want to pluck out. I take another step toward her. She responds with, Just get the fuck away, would you please! What’s going on? Suddenly she breaks down, sobbing, and says, I’m not sure, I’m not sure what’s going on. And neither am I. The phrase ‘Don’t cut me off this time’ pops into my head, but it seems somehow too ready-made for the situation. Shhhh! Just listen a second, N—. I know you. You’ll do something. You’ll. Get the fuck out! Hey listen. I. Get the fuck out! I back away toward the door.

The waitress at the International House of Pancakes is wearing an attractive outfit tonight. When she delivers my food, I touch her arm, but she instinctively jerks away. Later. It’ll have to happen later, if it happens at all. I wonder when her shift ends. I introduce myself as Slick. She buys it. The expensive smell of the leather upholstery of a chauffeur-driven sedan. Claudia has changed out of her waitress’s uniform. Her blouse, trousers, and navy blazer are all cut to give the impression of a body more lithe than it actually is. Not to mention the scads of eye-liner. But her husky voice is hypnotic. I put my arm around her shoulder, pulling her close to me. She doesn’t resist too hard. Still, I feel like I’ve done something wrong. Her breathing is shallow, much too shallow. I know, I tell her, I know it’s terrible, it’s dehumanizing, I admit that, but why fool me, why make a fool of me? This is so far beyond anything I deserve. How can you be such an egomaniac? Indeed, she’s quite strong-willed and self-possessed, typical of someone holding back a generosity that in fact knows no bounds. I reach into her handbag. Is this your book, The Hobbit? Yeah. Ever read Frank Norris? No. I return the book to the bag. You have a passport photo? No. Were you a cheerleader? Yeah? I thought so. I bet those teeth of yours have been cut on a thousand ears of corn. So, you wanna tell me about the last guy who dumped you? No. Suit yourself. Just so long as some boyfriend doesn’t think I’m muscling in on his gig. We have the laundromat and the bleach odors all to ourselves, but we’ll pretend it’s the palazzo bedroom. Claudia thrusts her breasts forward into the fluorescent light. I taste her nipples. Salty. Soon we’re buckling in to each other. Her back’s arching up off the table. She’s squealing like a stuck muffler. Oh you’re the best! Oh, Slick, you’re the best! Yeah, I’m competent all right. I’m made for frenzy. I plunge my dagger again and again into her stomach.

Well, the curtain is finally closing on this city. This is my last day in #3D. I have no choice: N— took all my money and split, not one word out of her. Did you notice anything besides the pavement, darling? You forgot your aspirins. A souvenir would’ve been nice too, a piece of glass or driftwood or a purple plastic peace-symbol keychain, but not a bowl of soup flung across the room with noodles still stuck to the wallpaper. They say it’s silent underwater, part shampoo, part tears. Well, is it? It’s so hard to tell down here. Thing is, I took the wrong piss from the top of the stairs, over the railing, hitting N— by accident. So be it. I hope she went away to the Bahamas with a new perspective, with a dash-dash-dash instead of a biiiiig question mark. I would’ve expected to feel elated, triumphant, but my only thought now is that I have to keep going. So I gorge myself on a last meal of gristly beef, potatoes, and rye bread, washing it down with sugary iced tea. Good enough. I pack up my things and change into a running outfit for a walk to the park, actually a walk through the park to the train station. Thanks to all the soot in the air, the western skyline is richly colored in pinks and purples this evening. Rain is long overdue. I’m walking as fast as I can. Strong, recurring gusts of wind kick up trash from the gutter. There’s almost no traffic. Many people are out watering their lawns, adjusting satellite dishes, or tending to their wickedly shiny automobiles. I pretend to pull a pin out with my teeth and lob a dummy grenade into a swimming pool. I know soon enough these screws will all unscrew themselves. I won’t be here to see it. But wait a minute. I glance at my watch. The windows of the storefront church pick up a yellowish glow from off the streets. I enter. I’m apparently alone. Lots of plaster flakes and porcelain-like walls. It’s the airless monotony of an ordinary Moscow church turned inside out. The acoustics ought to be great however, with no carpet to suck up the sound of my footsteps. I survey the large room and spot the stereo. I’d love to dance. I only need to pee anyway. But the men’s toilet is nailed shut. Unbelievable. So I try the women’s. I peer through the grille to make sure it’s vacant only to discover the top part of her pubic hair has been shaved off. Still, all I care about now is doing my business. She greets me with a condescending smile. How brave you are today! I lift the nightgown over her head, spread her legs, and ease her down by the armpits. Thing. Form. A gray blob bobs in a black hole. A brackish brew sloshes inside her cup. I can smell it. Slurp it. And so familiar too. The panting noises turn faster and faster. The coagulated fat of her breasts begins breaking loose. Her face bulges out from nostril and lip. Greasy hair sticks to her forehead. Her hands are shivering over my shoulders. She gasps in pain. Ouch! Take it easy! Afterwards we sit for a long time in silence. I feel somewhat ashamed that I was too obviously phallic. Still, show me an elegant lover, and I’ll show you a bore. I’m an industrial man. Laugh laugh. I specialize in protracted orgasms. Long lines of customers creep forward. Unlike N—, this woman’s hair is professionally done. She likes her makeup heavy. She must be a whiz at jewelry accessorization. You want a ride to the train station? I’ll give you a ride. But I’m not hanging out there all night so you can act like an asshole. Speak for yourself, you bastard, I am not drunk. Shut your fucking mouth! Ah, what difference does it make? But her feet are still warm! Are you can idiot? Can’t you see she’s dead? The second shot hit her in the jaw, exited out the back of her head. The first shot I have no idea. Of course they’ll want to CAT scan the body to find out where that first bullet is. Anyone know what caliber it might be, or who swathed the body in these rags and gauze? No one’s admitting anything. What an asshole. A real moron. A creep. A total creep. She had no money, no insurance, no welfare. But let’s go stand over here. Her body’s giving me the creeps and stomach troubles. All very standard. There’s no hard or fast rule to any of this. So is that where it all started, then, in the storefront church over there? By the way, what are you doing here tonight? I thought you were supposed to be in jail. No, I posted bail this morning. Oh, okay, but if you killed someone, would you go to their funeral? Now that’s not just a rhetorical question, is it?

Part 4 The Train Ride

Holy Moses, do I feel like I’ve been running a marathon or what? V— and I share a crazy sense of freedom. The journey’s hardly underway before we find ourselves laughing and rolling around the cabin as if we’re drunk. Newspapers are sent flying. Bottles emptied of scotch are tossed out the window. By evening the sense of celebration becomes so unbearable we’re forced to invite several other travelers to our already cramped cabin. The five of us, all men, spend the night chain-smoking cigarettes and exchanging our favorite smutty stories and tired disquisitions on sexual intercourse. V—’s personality is reminiscent of the more Mediterranean climates. V—, it turns out, is what’s called a fartsovchik, a black marketeer, who does his business ‘on the left,’ as they say. He deals mainly in currency. As proof, he likes to open a leather handbag to show off thick wads of cash. V— also has a positive mania for the game of Monopoly. He hunches over the board, his enormous black glasses sliding down his nose. He loads up his Atlantic City properties with green houses and red hotels. He handles the orange five-hundreds and yellow one- hundreds with brisk efficiency. Between games we take breaks in the dining car where the babushki serve zakuski, mostly meat dumplings and dried-out sausage sandwiches. V— orders pink lemonade and a hard-boiled egg. Fortunately I stashed some produce in my luggage before departing the last city. Taste this pear, man, just taste it! Sugar and honey! It’s the calmest hour of the night. Beyond the train’s windows, the clear sky is stretched tight to the horizon. In fact, the sky is verily ‘wind-chiseled.’ V— has fallen asleep. He’s snoring loudly. I’m in a daze. I lean my forehead against the window and imagine walking down a deserted street with N— at my side. We enter a neighborhood of beautiful old mansions converted into embassies. Guards peer at us from their sentry boxes. We turn down a side street. We hear shouts, a man and a woman shouting, rushing around. We can’t tell whether they’re raging mad or having a wild time of it. So we approach them cautiously, but when we’re finally within arm’s reach, we’re stunned to discover that the man and woman arguing are in fact myself and N—. I startle awake with a chill. You’ve heard of Shostakovich of course. V— has also heard of him. The music is haunting. You’ve probably heard the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack too. But there’s a peculiar expression in V— ’s eyes this morning. I expect him to say, I don’t want to bore you with these stories, but instead he remains silent, says absolutely nothing, stares out the window at the endless, shimmering desert. This could easily be the setting of one of those French New Wave films.

I glance at my watch. I’m trying to understand the series of associations that have led me here through so many villages and cities, the jumbled mosaic of disjointed personalities, mostly women and homosexual men, who have nothing to do with anything really except to serve as place-holders in an isolated dramatic sequence. Every voice a mixture of disapproval and curiosity, every name a little strange. I don’t know. Thing is, I feel quite dispassionate about the ordeal, excuse me, about the journey. I imagine it’s similar to how serial murderers feel about their victims. With the possible exception of N—, I don’t think I wish to meet any of them again, not in person anyway. On top of that, for some reason I’m never sleepy anymore. I’ve never felt so awake, never felt this good in my life. My eyes are so brimming with liquid candlelight, I have to blink back the tears. Of course. Health is not what I’m talking about either. Sure, I look healthy. I’m lean, my muscles like rope. What I’m talking about is being able to see the curvature of the earth, to be outside, at the limit, looking in at the lives of these people. It’s less evangelical, more cynical. Really that’s all it is, I suppose, cynical, but in a spiritual sense, if that’s possible. Are you listening to a word I’m saying? V— nods vigorously. I don’t believe him. He’s tired as hell.

We find ourselves in that fuzzy zone between night and dawn. V— wants to know where Aachen Cathedral is, as if I know all the monuments of Europe like the back of my hand, but I have no idea. I excuse myself to the john. Soldiers and piss are inseparable: the distinguished officers of a people’s democracy. I’m very proud, as I stand at the urinal, to find my pajamas hanging so loosely about me. Why look, my pajamas are halfway open to the sunlight. I twist my head to the side. I can’t remember now if I closed my eyes, but if I did, I still managed to see the main thing: a soldier standing there on the terrace, as limp and lazy as I might stand there. But he has no eyes. Revolting. So I bawl him out, I insult him. Fear runs through me. Comrade Petrovich! Comrade Petrovich! Hey, Comrade Petrovich, are you a true patriot?! Like most soldiers, he’s quite elusive. He won’t answer me. He flashes by one instant, totally disappears, then appears again up above, far away. Comrade Petrovich! I try to get his attention by waving my arms. Comrade Petrovich! Comrade Petrovich! Please, Comrade Petrovich, I can’t go on being divided like this! But he flies right over me, shoots past in the air. It’s morning now. Should I continue looking for him? A car blocks my way. Militsiya. I notice pigeons are beginning to fidget from the city’s many brick niches. A few vagrants are doubled over with nausea on the nearby sidewalks. So many refugees from Central Asia! Yet no signs of Comrade Petrovich. He won’t dare do anything else. He better not. I’ll threaten to write a book entitled, Conversations with the KGB. Are you listening to a word I’m saying? V— nods. Well, the true revolutionary is a communicator, a multilingual sophister. Revolutionaries bring children so much joy. They pinch mothers’ bottoms. They make sucking noises at the fathers. They’re able to capitalize on public hysteria. In particular, a revolutionary with a hoarse voice, or a revolutionary turned back by police roadblocks, or a third revolutionary whose body has passed through one too many moving trains. Some are Epicures, some Cynics, some Stoics, some again Peripatetics, some even pretended Platonics. And what’s that revolutionary over there shoving into her fake Gucci garment bag? Why, it’s a copy of the Masonic Journal of Vienna, circa 1926, with odd notations in Cyrillic scribbled on its back cover закодированное послание о смерти. And what are those two over there whispering about? The genital oath from Genesis 24:9. You mean the mutual touching of phalli? No, rather the sexual union between God and Man through consumption of semen, blood and semen, sometimes even vaginal fluids: acts consummated over the Goat of Mendes: humbug raised to the highest pitch of art. Every exit serves as entry to elsewhere. Did Rudolf Steiner know about any of this? Not even: plunged into cryonic secrecy. It all started two years ago when I put an ad in the paper: “Apartments for rent. Must speak a foreign language, preferably Russian or Spanish. Must not believe in God.” Ever since then, I’ve been recruiting well-educated young men and women into my ‘revolutionary yoga’ group, a group so isolated from the rest of society that its members rarely speak English and, even more ominously, are no longer confined to socially acceptable behavior. This group I shall refer to as The Two Horns of the Letter Why. A few of our rituals are meant to entice the public, though the far majority remain strictly private. Prospective initiates are coerced into revealing their personality-type by answering a lengthy series of questionnaires. Anyhow, much to the chagrin of the local Christians, we’ve publicly declared the unity of Christ and Satan. We’ve also declared that four lone madmen planned the Crucifixion, with no coconspirators, and that there are no laws outside the body of Christ. We’re not stopping there either, no. In fact, we’ve been regularly issuing declarations for more than a year now. Turns out most thrill- seekers cannot tolerate adversarial revolutionary inculcation, ARI, and even worse, togetherness scares the hell out of them because it means their bodies might rub up against the flesh of total strangers, so-called ‘unworthy craftsmen.’ So what are you going to do after the war? What’s the hurry? I have no idea what it means to be a sober citizen, to earn a living and expect the days to pass simply because there are certain actions to be performed. The nights must become days unto themselves. To want things, to want stability, to live in one place and make plans for the coming year, to get married. I can’t fathom it. I can’t remember the last time I interviewed for a job. V— says he wants to live somewhere where it rains a lot and things grow furiously. I suggest the Amazon or Seattle, Washington. What do I know? I stare out the window at the desert. Impressive, isn’t it? A desert like that will make you into a super-realist. I’m reminded of the Mojave again. I also recall a bas-relief Madonna clutching withered orchids. V— then mentions that we’re out of spirits. Well, if we’re still on schedule, we should be rolling into the next station in less than ten minutes. But upon arrival, the conductor announces that the station café is closed for remodeling. Damn. The problem is, if we go into town searching for a café we’ll likely miss the train. Okay then let’s look at it this way: missing the train will make our route all the more untraceable, all the more, let us say, ‘Byzantine.’ And isn’t that what we want? Apparently not. V— vigorously shakes his head. I clear my throat. But we’re completely out of booze, man. V— says he’s not that hard up. He can wait till this evening. Suit yourself. I pull my canvas bag out from the under the seat, put my sunglasses on, shake V—’s hand, and say goodbye, forever a stranger to his peculiar truth.

Part 5 The Desert Town

Shut up and walk, I tell myself. A car stops to let me cross what’s probably the only intersection for miles. I can feel the sun on my back. A single thread of sweat unravels along my ribcage. I’m dressed completely in black, which must make me look like a total fool in the middle of this desert.

I hack my fist at the table to indicate I want another grappa. You Italian or something? No, what’s it look like, I’m middle-class Egyptian intelligentsia? Figures. I smell grilled meat again. I smell faded postcards. I smell blood chewing through my abdomen. I stare at the waitress’s surgical-red lipstick. No ultramarine for her. Excuse me!? I said, do you want to try the grilled-cheese sandwich? God no, I hate grilled-cheese sandwiches. I’ll take another grappa, though. She adjusts her ponytail. Did I offend her maybe? You okay? Yes yes of course. So I touch the ruffly edge of her yellow-and-red uniform. She must be the hottest ticket around here. Say, you wanna be left alone for the night? I can always stay at, uh, at the. No no really. I’m sorry to imply that, say, just how old are you? I wait for the oh golly golly part, but she obliges me with something more outlandish. Later, with the help of vodka, pills, and clove stogies, we’ll dream together it’s raining outside. Yeah right.

I’m sitting in a motel room that will never be mistaken for the Ritz Carlton. A tall skinny window looks across an alley to the red brick wall of a 7-Eleven. The bathroom doesn’t even have a window. The air-conditioning is crimped in heat’s teeth. The newscasts are getting on my nerves. Drab olive men butchering a helicopter. So I turn off the TV and try a variety of long distance phone numbers. First off, N—. No answer, no answering machine either. She must still be in the Bahamas. I try Laszlo, but I get the wrong number. I try N— again. Nothing. I mean instead of a whore. So I draw the curtains against the bright afternoon sun and lie down. I drift off for a few minutes before my left eye begins to itch, waking me. I look up at the ceiling for a long, long time. It’s a ceiling quite similar to that of #3D. I stare so fixedly at a single point that I actually hallucinate the ceiling of #3D. For a moment I’m back in that city of sooty skies and cooked meat. The smell is appalling. But just as quickly I return to the motel room. My head now begins to fill with scenes of violent sex. I feel some kind of outrage welling up inside me. Maybe what I need is another grappa. Drinking more grappa should calm me down. I walk across the street to the café. Does everyone around here hook their thumbs into the pockets of their jeans? This time I introduce myself to the waitress.

The list is long. Penelope’s arms are badly sunburned. Her lips are cracked and peeling. A baseball cap sits askew over her tiny blonde curls. Her collar needs straightening. She smells faintly of cigarettes and gasoline. But what’s most disturbing of all is that under that dark blue dress of hers a baby is growing. She says it’ll arrive by year’s end. Your old man throw you out? You rip him off? Did he beat you? Shit, what the hell do I care? She covers the lampshade with a paisley scarf. Pink, gold, and purple paisleys. She lets me stroke her breasts. She starts to kiss my neck. I unzip my pants. This is my father, the diplomat. She doesn’t get it. I sense her disapproval. Then again, I’ve attracted disapproval most of my life, and if it doesn’t leave me indifferent, it might just this once delight me. But with Penelope I feel otherwise. More night. More windshield grease. She’s chewing on a fingernail. Don’t bite your fingernails like that! Go on, now, go on. I firmly push her down to her knees. Her finger falls from her mouth. Go on. Find something to eat down there. Baloney and mayonnaise. She’s breathing like she’s forgotten how to breathe, but believe you me, she gives it right back, all of it, till the very moment I snap. Lips pressed firmly together in satisfaction, I wipe off, stuff myself back in, and zip it right up. I then walk over to the door, remove my shirt from the doorknob, put it on, and tuck it in. I pull my green canvas bag out from under the bed. I remove my sunglasses, put them on, and zip up the bag. I throw the bag over my right shoulder. I’m not tired, not at all. Still, it’s a funny time of day to be departing. I open the door. I smell real air this time, real desert air. I step outside. The blue sky with no clouds is like a strong, clear psychosis. Birds float in ever widening circles. I’m going to be an astronaut or the President someday. Ha ha. Or maybe South America, if the rent-a-cops get involved. Who said there’s no zealotry in the virtue of suspicion? Yevtushenko perhaps. Penelope is standing in the open doorway, watching me through the video viewfinder as I walk across the 7-Eleven parking lot. I don’t know how else to describe it. I’m like a ghost made of street light.

Part 6 The Bahamas

Anything to declare? No. This canvas bag all you have? Yes. Is the purpose of your trip to the Bahamas business or pleasure? Now what do you think? A couple months later, N— and I are relaxing on the beach, I’m paging through People magazine, and what do my wandering eyes find but a video-still of me, right there, in the middle of the page. Penelope Sanders is credited with the image. I laugh a long time, a real long time. N— doesn’t get it, of course. Why should she? When I finally run out of laughs, I press my lips together in satisfaction, turn over to my back, and look up at that sky, a sky so blue, so cloudless, it’s like a strong, clear psychosis. Awful Bony Hands

Every object in the cosmos must rotate on its axis at one speed or another, including a black hole. I’d seen this coming all along, but still it winded me. I was adrift in a bizarre espionage nightmare. In my right hand I carried a large featureless package. My left hand I stuffed inside the pocket of a windbreaker to conceal the bloody gash where a pry-bar had glanced off my wrist. ‘Slightly injured’ were the proper words for my condition. If this were truly my day off. It was almost dawn. I was walking in the general direction that Dr. Malcolm had indicated yesterday evening. My body moved slowly but laboriously. I could neither will myself to stop nor force myself to maintain a rapid pace, so I compromised with a halting walk. Without nourishment I wouldn’t survive more than two more days. If only a distance of 2,800 miles were reduced to zero. If only aircraft traveled backwards in time while moving forward in space--to three months ago when I resigned my post as NASA’s State Department liaison, changed my name to MacGregor, and relocated to the West Coast. A long hard pull- -and to what could it lead? How long since I’d guzzled beer with friends and laughed till long after midnight? On my view, ‘distance’ meant ‘time traveled,’ and the sole function of matter was to create the space it occupied. But if all matter were absent, space would cease to exist--zero equals zero--and distance would vanish. The universe becomes tethered to one’s cockpit then, as consciousness merges with the central spark of life. The path I followed throughout the night was only now turning away from the banks of the river towards the farm buildings scattered nearby. A stiff breeze rattled the branches of the trees and stung my nostrils with smoke. Off to the north a large fireworks warehouse was burning out of control. Alarm bells were ringing on and on. Luckily I was moving in the opposite direction, gliding on unsteady air, like a roadmap kicked up by a sudden gust of wind. Dried sweat and grime covered my face. Too many cigarettes had scraped my throat raw. My eyes shifted from side to side seeking more light, and any bit of surplus energy propelled my mind into motion . . . when you can’t sleep, tell yourself the story of your life. The questions before me were twofold. What should I do? and Where should I go? One after another, answers trooped into and out of my mind. Too bad none of them promised an easy solution. Because a multimillion-dollar production was about to go right down the toilet, I feared the bureau’s outrage when they discovered how much more I knew about the situation. Questions could not be allowed to exist, notes must be destroyed, and not a single word to the local police (which was why they hired me in the first place). The bureau had codes, ceremonies, and aliases. They had oaths and practical engineering problems, not to mention the important matter of accounting for their money. But I’d been methodical. No one had tried to stop me. Not a single witness to the act. Nor was I followed. Tracing the flight of a boomerang. Yet none of my superiors at the bureau, including Dr. Malcolm, cared that I must live with the consequences for the rest of my life. So I planned to lie about my motives, which was what I did for a living anyway. Circumstantial evidence might prove my guilt, but I’d never be convicted. Besides, wasn’t it overkill for the bureau to cancel all future transactions for an indefinite period of time? I wasn’t accusing anybody of anything. The records weren’t clear. It had been a routine run, I was paying the heaviest debt of all, and I felt betrayed. Were they staging these bogus fights for my benefit? Mitchell wasn’t physically overpowering but those hands, those awful bony hands, hard as stone, the color and texture of brown tarp--and the momentum exchange. I glanced at my watch. Jesus, the morning was half shot already. I quickened my pace. After four more miles, through barren fields of fuel tanks on steel spider-legs, past two mobile- home communities, around a sanitary landfill and a dumping ground for corroded aluminum, I arrived at an arched stone bridge. My left leg was developing a tremor, my chest felt hollow. I stopped to rest. I watched the water bubbling up from its subterranean watercourse, carrying tiny leaves and sticks downstream. I tried to relax, but fragmentary voices surged through my head. I went down to the banks of the stream to enjoy the water. I was thirsty. My lips were dry and cracked. Yet, despite my general weakness, I felt capable of anything. Having satisfied my thirst, I continued following the path up across the barren crest of a hill--where I saw it up ahead, a quarter mile away, the white stucco three-story house Dr. Malcolm had described to me yesterday afternoon. I approached the building cautiously, out in the open, so as not to arouse suspicion. A narrow footpath ran up to a circular drive of crushed oyster shells. There was heavy spadework behind the house where someone had dug a sizable hole, roughly three feet by six feet. Seeing that hole sobered me up. So much for wine and good company or tacky auxiliary amusements. Not far from the hole were parked two motorcycles with Oregon plates. A mangy dog was tied to one of the handlebars. Either that dog’s drugged, I thought, or I’m the one who’s going mad. I paused outside the building’s rear entrance and felt a deepening sense of foreboding. The road ended here? I stared at the facade for a long time, studying its design. What was the price of admission? Rumor had it Dr. Malcolm’s exile factions lived here. (Rumor also had it Dr. Malcolm played the Autoharp and two kinds of banjo.) A door opened and a plain-looking man in his fifties emerged. He was tall, wearing a short-sleeved shirt, beige slacks with pleats, and rope sandals. A brief glance of professional appraisal indicated he didn’t dress like a homicidal maniac, and his facial expression was suitably bland, not devious. “May I help you?” he asked. “Yes, I think so,” I said, “I believe this is the address Dr. Malcolm wanted me to deliver this package to.” He walked towards me, stopping about fifteen feet away. “Do you mean Dr. Frederick Malcolm?” he asked. “Yes, that’s the man, my superior.” “And what's your name?” “MacGregor,” I replied. “It looks like you’re injured.” “Yes, but not badly, a pry-bar . . . I'm very tired, though.” “You walked here?” “I had no choice since my car was stolen yesterday.” “Are you alone?” “Yes, of course. And are you alone?” I asked. “As I like it,” he replied, “and now let’s see that package, Mr. MacGregor.” I held it up. “Do you know what’s in that package?” he asked. “No, I don’t.” “Well, what do you say when you get in bed with me every night?” “Excuse me?” “Correct answer, you may come in.” I followed the man inside the building. We sat down across from each other at a card table in the middle of a poorly lit kitchen. Barely any daylight made it through the drawn shades. Large wafers of paint were flaking off the walls and ceiling. Empty cans of dog food and foam containers lay about. Bits of newspaper littered the linoleum floor. Whoever lived here lacked the patience for neatness. The place had the sweet stale odor of spilled liquor and undone laundry. A musty pall of self- destructing, single-minded failure hemmed us in. As far as I could tell, we were alone. I placed the package at the center of the table, straightened up, and took a breath. The man looked me in the eyes and said, “My name is Benton Starling. Perhaps Dr. Malcolm told you about me.” “No, I don't believe so.” “Oh come on, Mr. MacGregor!” “No, really,” I insisted. “Then I have some explaining to do. Where to begin? . . . I'm a man of enlightenment, a libertine. I grew up in Orange County. After high school I served in the United States Air Force, stationed up on the DEW line, which was where I met Mitchell and Dr. Malcolm. Later I worked as a news reporter for Life magazine and--are you listening to me?” “I’m doing my best,” I said, “but I’m tired from a night of endless hiking. Feedback anxiety complicated by exhaustion.” Starling, irritated, said in a pained voice, “One way or another you’ve got to hear this.” “Go on then, please, I’ll do my best.” He rose from the table, walked over to a refrigerator and removed a can of Pepsi. “Would this help?” he asked. “Yes, of course,” I replied, “as would a cigarette, and a limited menu of fast-food items.” He ignored my sarcasm, opened the can, handed it to me, and sat back down before continuing: “This isn’t cocktail hour, and I don’t smoke. So where was I? . . . I was saying that I grew up in Southern California before--ah forget it! What’s the point? Are you drunk or spaced out on something, MacGregor? Are you under morphine?” “No,” I insisted, “this Pepsi’s clearing things up for me. Myself, I’m an American, from Wyoming, against the draft, crazy about Johnny Cash, addicted to double-meanings, and--go on, please, with whatever, your life story, whatever it was.” “No, I won’t!” Starling yelled in a slightly maniacal voice. He stood up and scuffed his feet impatiently. “Have it your way, Mr. Sterling,” I replied. “It’s Starling,” he said, shaking his head in disgust, to which I responded with an elegant shrug. I handed him back the empty Pepsi can. He wrenched it away from me, hurling it across the room. “I bet you’d sell out secrets to the cheapest whore on the block!” he yelled. “Yeah,” I replied, laughing, “and I bet you’d fuck a pig in knickers.” I made a corkscrew gesture with my middle finger. Starling lurched over to my side of the table and slapped me viciously across the cheek. “I could kill you right now, MacGregor, and no one would know about it! Over there in that corner, on your knees, with your hands tied behind your back!” “Ohhh, you’re plain wicked,” I said. Starling stepped back, gathered himself for one final thrust, and struck me a second time, much harder, with his open palm. Giant torch-beams and flocks of fireflies dazzled my sight. The left side of my face tingled. My lips went numb, my jaw seemingly unhinged and tongue convulsing as I tried to breathe. I all but doubled over, when my whole body contracted, becoming tense and purposeful. Starling was pissed, but I didn’t give a shit about the details of his thirty-cent past or what his real name was, or anything else except the money he owed me for the fucking package. At this point I didn’t have enough coordination to spit. I felt like I could pass out any sec-- When I came to my senses an indeterminate time later, my wrists were bound, my mouth was gagged. Dr. Malcolm sat in his leather recliner, grinning at me: “Why, hello, MacGregor! You’ve returned to the land of the living. Hearing things okay? My associates have great difficulty treating you like a normal person. Some of them despise you. But I value your company, MacGregor, so I’ve come up with some thought-provoking and intriguing theories about this series of misfortunes that has befallen you. Rest assured, you have my sympathies, but your fiasco is getting the bureau into worse trouble every day. You’ve stumbled into something, and you’re still bumbling your way through it. Difficulties of this sort seldom end with one event, and what’s worse, the hero cannot withdraw from the process until every scenario has run its due course. By the way, the package is secure. I am curious about one thing, however--was that an editorial or a royal ‘we’ you used in our last telephone conversation. What I mean is, because things around here look even doesn’t mean they are. That should go without saying. It sounds crazy, but my style is typical for our times. The you- scrub-my-back-and-I’ll-scrub-yours ethic has been replaced by if- you-don’t-smell-I-won’t-smell. "Let’s suppose all this spills out into the press and television--and my enemies are capable of making that happen-- and suppose it’s true I did have an affair with Laura Heller, and suppose you’re the private-eye who heads up the investigation. You’re no fool. You’ll keep writing down what your apparatuses record and one day put all those stories together in a book with your name on the cover. Let’s admit the plain facts. You know you’d let that happen, reducing complicated situations to a few juicy phrases like ‘a sex life beyond all proportions’ or ‘a strange drug and a madman who wanted to control the world’--some such lunacy--with as many positions and orifices as the censors allow under the principle of ‘truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ What other stimulus do you have to carry your work forward? Your own behavior would be suspect as well. "The problem is you’re too damned busy to be afraid or uncomfortable. But strange as it may seem, there are other topics in this world more worthy of discussion than my past assignments. You’ve got to see it my way too. What plain proceeding is more plain than that? The story’s too sensational. It would haunt me for decades. It’s your type that reduces the rest of us to fanatical seekers of privacy. Can’t a man grow rice for more than his own family? Am I so anachronistic? Don't you have any other choice? I thought you were a pain in the ass, but it’s turned out worse. So tell me, MacGregor, what is the most valuable piece of data, and what’s the highest price it'll bring? Must every lurid detail be printed somewhere? "Jesus Christ, you’re good at getting me all wound up! I can count on it. Come out here, let’s continue our discussion on the balcony. It’s too nice to stay inside. Let’s enjoy it while it we can--and such a pleasant enclave of very private estates. Everybody around here works for the government, and the streets have weird and funny names. Understand, you can’t leave here, MacGregor--you don’t even know where you are. So relax. Comfortable? A cigarette? Hah. Our stash includes three Hershey bars, a coconut, a few stalks of celery, a thermos of grapefruit juice, four changes of underwear, a pair of jeans, and a torn raincoat in the hallway closet. Hey! Take your fucking foot away from that door! Sit down, MacGregor, everything’s on schedule. Please don’t force me into a high-pitched lecture. I hate having to adjust my loudness control. Nothing’s happened to you yet, nothing you aren’t responsible for. You’re a good-looking man with dark wavy hair--why ruin it? Allow me to close the door behind you. Come closer. Oh, your poor arm, my dear. That nasty pry-bar. A little smear of blood on your cheek too. No, over a tad. There, you got it. You’ve met Benton Starling. How are your fingers? You took a nasty tumble back there. That leaves Mitchell waiting for us downstairs in the kitchen. I weary thinking about having to explain to him the urgency of our little situation. But don’t be alarmed--it’s a minor policy issue, little more than a five-hour ice-water bath or cigarette burns on the soles of your feet. "But does any of it makes a difference. If I felt you were on my side I wouldn’t resort to these phony games and is-it-safe? routines. I don't harm poor lonely souls for the sake of a few days pleasure, and I’ve known one or two criminals who were excellent company off duty. In any case, you’re safer in this house than in any jail, and I’m not interested in the formalities of arrest. "What pickle did we last leave our bold hero in? Ah yes, you were interested in the issue of money, my money, and you were hoping for ‘sign here, pal,’ or ‘push that button, pull that lever, and set that wheel.’ But I don’t work that way. It’s not conducive to operational efficiency. Strange how fascinated we are by machines. Speed, speed, speed, the American drug. Open for business till the very last minute. Time’s too short for us anymore. The basic necessities have become standardized. Asimov’s The End of Eternity brings to mind a line from another sci-fi novel: ‘something that was not human lay crushed near a machine.’ Maybe I read too much. "You sit in a chair ramrod straight, MacGregor--I like that in a man. I hope you’re enjoying yourself. No point softening words, but you have the look of someone who’s told a lie without taking the time to think about it, a bad habit, automatic when it’s unnecessary. Some people don’t have trouble with contradiction. Well, I’m not one of those people, and if you had the simple- minded sense to do as you were told--if. You know damn well I don’t like this side of the business. Let’s wash this godawful mess down the sink! Agreed? For Christ’s sake, MacGregor, are you drunk or spaced out on something? Let’s go back inside. We’ll take a respite from this drama and postpone our dinner for later.” Dr. Malcolm joined Mitchell in the kitchen, leaving me gagged and roped to a chair in the adjacent dining room. My bare feet gripped the hardwood floor. My head and body ached, my thoughts were a little fuzzy, but I behaved as normal as possible given the circumstances. Everything had gone beautifully the last two hours. Things were rolling merrily along. Dr. Malcolm’s ‘urgent little situation’ was hazing into a nightmare of monotony and petty bickering over last week’s imponderables. He couldn’t resist subjecting me to another one of his rambling ‘interrogations’-- how many had I suffered through over the years?--asking much, saying little, establishing nothing. The shrill tones of an oratory from a kid in kinky green knickerbockers. No gesture was extensive, no expression genuinely dramatic. The man was an affront to my nerves. He was also clinically hysterical. Picking a fight with him would not have mattered in the least, though a sizable dose of commercial barbiturate might’ve done him some good. Typical of Dr. Malcolm to be on my ass screaming for action. Like a mission-control officer, he designed his voice to send men scurrying, yet he required things be repeated back to him. How long could he last at this rate? I was revolted by his pasty, full-jowled face and the way his nose had twitched as he yelled at me. He reeked of duty-free cologne and made feeble attempt to conceal the sublime massiveness of his gut beneath that tight-fitting plum turtleneck. He was suffering from some kind of nasal congestion that had forced him to keep his mouth wide open throughout the harangue. Only the happy-pills kept him from giving too grim an impression. Then there was Mitchell, his sidekick. Divide the pair, each was left shouting his position to the sky. There was no way the two of them could destroy me. They were fooled by my cunning ability to let my guard down. How could they not see the curious amusement in my eyes, how the taste of their poison was fading? My features held the implacable calm of a Zen withdrawal from the facts of reality, a detachment that teetered on the edge of disdain. Nor could they know about my brown- belt proficiency. If it weren’t for his awful bony hands, I wouldn’t have taken note of Mitchell. True, he was one of Dr. Malcolm’s best scavengers, and he performed his manual dexterity chores well (scavengers were necessary to keep the bureau’s matters ‘sanitized’), but I put Mitchell near the top of my low-life list, right up there with Dr. Malcolm himself and Marvin Hollis. Mitchell was a retired cop in his fifties. He had the quirky manner of a stallion that thinks it'd like to kick your head in. I’d seen it happen. A small panic came into his eyes, voices flashed in his head, before negotiations degenerated into an all-out brawl. He was dumber than a state congressman, he couldn’t communicate, he despised homosexuals--he was fucking inexcusable. I imagined flipping him an outrageous wink before going at his face with a hammer or one of those skull-popper flashlights, swift vicious blows, or better yet, bouncing his head off a dashboard. Make him sing high soprano. Uppermost in my mind right now was determining whether a third man, or woman, lived in the basement of this estate. Evidently Dr. Malcolm’s mansion was being used for living quarters, office space, storage, and less understandable purposes. My eyes made a slow circuit of the dining room. Cocktail napkins, matchbooks, and brandy snifters were scattered across a large glass table that occupied the center of the room. Plants and woven fabrics hung from the walls, heavy-looking canvas bags were stacked in a corner, unused video sets lay everywhere. Light was supplied through a transparent ceiling to eliminate the need for any wires. Dr. Malcolm was ripe with prosperity’s fruit. Were there any pets? A French-trained space cat? Opposite me, a pair of sliding doors opened onto a screened deck. The curtains over the open windows filled with breeze, then subsided. Outside, skinny date palms towered over the neighborhood. A gray Renault with four flat tires was parked in the driveway next to several pieces of redwood patio furniture. I discerned a jetty at the other end of the huge backyard. A staging area? Water trickled somewhere. I occasionally caught the sounds of revelry, neighbors entertaining and being entertained. This wasn’t Westwood. Except for the palm trees, it could’ve been a Milwaukee or Chicago suburb. I noticed how quiet the house had become. Only the sounds of houseflies, household appliances, and mice in the walls. I waited a few minutes for the sounds of footsteps, but nothing happened, nothing stirred. I prepared myself for the long haul, concentrated on staying awake, remaining calm, not squandering energy. I knew about patience: the formation of a star takes tens of millions of years. A couple hours went by, or longer, until I was no longer aware of the rope cutting into my skin. A numbness permeated my body, and my mind began to wander. I was dimly aware of voices behind me. Harsh tobacco smoke drifted from the kitchen. The words ‘California’ and ‘Seattle’ were mentioned, and the phrase ‘a forty-seven-dollar bad check--that’ll change his luck.’ When had Dr. Malcolm returned? Had I not been paying attention? The slow thud of my heart was lulling me back to sleep. Was it too late for last minute tactics? The whole thing might end unsatisfactorily, but I didn’t care. I was tranquilized out of my mind, tranquil to the point of lethargy. My life-support- system batteries were running down. It was all in my mind. I gnawed on the gag awhile longer, humming to myself, as fatigue carried me through an endless series of questions towards an uncertain destination. Did any civilians know the area? Who should I get in touch with? From the start I wasn’t straight with you guys, you sons of bitches, you’ve kept me here a week, maybe longer! You’re bloody fools! Six days without bathing. Little pieces of human weakness sticking out. Were there any living witnesses? The windows were too low, and the phone continued ringing until I reached it, ringing far beyond the grass-grown slopes, strong swells breaking against gray granite rocks becoming the sound of an ocean liner’s drive shafts shifting to the sweepings on the floor of a stock exchange, the timeless accumulation of pine needles, a few red flecks staining the overall pattern of an old man hunched on a sandy hillock. The pursuers had closed the distance in half. Their footprints in the sand were clear enough. I turned. I fired again and again and-- everything stopped inside of me. I flushed, biting down harder on the gag. A shiver scuttled up my back, penetrating my flesh. My body seemed to have shifted inside a humid bag. I opened my eyes. What the hell was going on? The dining room had darkened considerably. Long blue shadows lay across the table. My ‘tape and cameras’ had been shut off for some length of time, leaving me with only the distorted shapes of lost memory. From the kitchen I heard a series of coughing noises and then the sound of a body hitting the floor. A preliminary victim? The larger of the two men was giving the other a lesson in mortification. I imagined tall thin Mitchell standing behind the parlor doors, wielding one of his patented L- shaped devices, dishing out Dr. Malcolm’s brains. One after another, a series of horribly loud crashing noises, like someone taking a baseball bat to a loaded dishwasher--before a final smashing blow jarred the entire house. Silence returned. I waited, knowing something worse was about to happen. Because of the way I was tied to the chair, I couldn’t crane my neck to see what was going on in the kitchen. I could only wait. A moment later I heard a harsh cough behind me. I sensed another presence in the room. I froze. Fear went off inside me like a strobe. My heartbeat accelerated, my chest on the verge of bursting open. The room was horrible now, the air swollen with impending subtropical heat. Perspiration ran down the insides of my forearms. The shadows had grown so dense and reckless that I could barely make out the wall nearest me, a mountain of darkness, a black void, no longer a dividing line between floor and ceiling. My feet were slipping out from beneath me. The clear sensation of time running out, of seconds counted off towards an ending, and directly behind me-- Mitchell's awful bony hands loosening the knots of the rope that secured me to the chair.

The Transformation of a Concealed Poet

There’s a widespread notion that hip people don’t have hang-ups. We concealed poets don’t have hang-ups, which is why we’re concealed poets. (Deliberate forgetfulness, will, and imagination.) An ancient Stoic philosopher says somewhere that if you want to become virtuous you must first search out your own evil. Yet he also reminds us that flesh inherits all things, in particular, sin. Thus, my father, a barefoot boy from Kentucky, served the greater good as a St. Louis city cop. My mother? She was grand- scale hysteria. My lunatic uncle? As brilliant as the noonday sun, a real mind-gangster, ‘thunder-perfect,’ as we once said. (15 August, Salt Lake City, Utah) Dear Marco, I’m writing to tell you I’m taking a sabbatical from the good life and won’t return the same person I am now. I'm adopting a different, unrecognizable identity, a different name, a different social security number, a different haircut, jaw-line, and gait. Seen the movie Seconds? I want to find excitement, something non-trivial to use my mind on, anything more than atheism. I’m sick and tired of atheism. Chemistry, physics, and biology fill me with overwhelming apathy because they have to be right all the time, right about their atheism. Then there’s Harvard Medical School and Wharton Business School and Yale Law School, who have to be right about their professionalism. Yet I know more about philosophy than any professor in any goddamned philosophy department, and I speak any language I wish, and history I’ve plumbed to its very depths. I’m far beyond the Indian Removal Act • the Cuban Missile Crisis • Jackie Kennedy’s remarriage • the Arab-Israeli War • corridors littered with last month’s computers, and deeper than any singular dates on the esoteric, non-mediated side of American humanity 1777 • 1801 • 1811• 1861 • 1867 • 1889 • 1907 • 1913 • 1933 • 1951 • 1973 • 1987 • 1993 • 1999 • 2003. I’ve gone through lots of phases and lots of changes, but last week I experienced a religious conversion when I took LSD, a full dose of acid, and listened to Geogaddi for twelve hours straight. It’s impossible to put into words what I learned from ingesting that psychedelic--to see solidity dissolve before my very eyes, to watch the material dematerialize. Do I consider it a very religious experience?--wait! I can tell you one thing I learned relating to numerology. Every sunflower has 2 spirals of interlaced seeds. One spiral goes clockwise, the other counterclockwise. In some species there are 34 clockwise spirals and 55 counterclockwise spirals, in other species, 55 and 89 or 89 and 144. What’s the significance? Those are consecutive numbers in the Fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144. Take care. (20 September, somewhere on the California-Nevada border) Journal Entry #3499 I’m feeling more and more disconnected from American reality. My ego has undergone a phase change, and it’s like my ass was kicked into the next century. Everything around me has a shimmering quality about it. I’ve suffered some tremendous headaches too and consumed many large bottles of Excedrin over the past three weeks. The only good news is I believe in God again, though I’m worried I might be heading for another delusional, megalomaniacal mental state because I cannot shake the sensation of being permanently plugged into a channel of pure, multidimensional information. It’s happening without the use of any drug or narcotic or alcohol. As I scribble these notes under darkness, fragments of the past month come back to me. Lake Tahoe. The Burning Man Festival. Gambling in Reno. A phone call from Marco and Chrissie in Pomona. They’re engaged to marry in six months. Marco knows how to make violin strings from cat intestine. One weekend I watched him do it, sitting there on a large divan with the intricately embroidered throw-pillows propped up behind me. It was a total mind-fuck but child’s play compared to where I am now. The fiddler picked up his bow. (15 October, Las Vegas, Nevada) Journal Entry #3500 For two weeks I’ve been holed up in a cheap motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas, and I cannot remember how I got here. Large chunks of memory have vanished. I’m reminded of those accounts of women and children in Colombia who are doped up on burundanga for purposes of prostitution and gang-rape. Under the drug's influence, the victim becomes a zombie powerless to resist orders, no matter how bizarre or immoral, and when the effects of the drug wear off, the victim has no recollection of what transpired even under hypnosis or threat of asphyxia, making it impossible for law enforcement to carry out an investigation. (Imagine an Avon lady making her rounds with that stuff!) There’s speculation that Sirhan was acting under the influence of a similar drug when he assassinated Robert Kennedy, which might imply he was taking orders from one of the young, disheveled women who accompanied him around LA. But from whom were the women taking their orders? What does it matter? That’s water under the bridge. Let's say they were inspired by the White Album. But will I escape from this goddamned motel, and why is there an exit? I’ll be forced to leave when I run out of cash and max out my credit cards. But that’s a long way off. (12 November, Las Vegas, Nevada) Journal Entry #3501 No end in sight. The same room, the same days, the same nights, the same Gideon Bible with the same Book of Revelation, the same glances out the same window at the same empty parking lot. To keep myself from going bonkers, I’ve begun writing a screenplay based on my experiences over the past few months. I'll sell it to Hollywood. How unreasonable is that--adapting mental disintegration to the big screen? There are precedents: the audience must accept a protagonist who expresses his confused thoughts via voice-over. And why not? (New Year’s Eve, Los Angeles, California) Journal Entry #3502 Glimpsing the light at the end of the tunnel. I’m staying at a Ramada Inn on the Sunset Strip, and although I’m alone in my room, I feel some sense of jubilation because I’ve completed the fourth draft of the screenplay. I’ve whittled it down to the requisite 100 pages, which makes for an hour-and-forty-minute movie, assuming the filmmakers don’t cut anything out. Why should they? I’ve done most of the editing for them, night after night pacing back and forth, fidgeting over each line of dialogue and voice-over, leaving the room only to replenish the ice bucket or get a Snickers bar from the vending machine across the hall. I’ve begun wearing a hooded, black-velvet, scarlet-fringed cape that contrasts strikingly with my pale skin and puts me in the proper subversive frame of mind. My renewed belief in God has spilled over into a love for all things evil, especially Satan. I enjoy a dual concept of divinity, akin to Persian Zoroastrianism, though it's more accurate to say I believe in everything and nothing. I can imagine the shock and bewilderment on the faces of those film execs when they read the screenplay. When is the exact moment a stream of images becomes a film? (18 February, Los Angeles, California) Journal Entry # 3503 Would it be possible to put a ‘trigger’ into the screenplay to activate subconscious tendencies in the audience? Imagine a particular phrase, innocent enough at first glance, that provokes psychopathic behavior in a normally stable, well-adjusted individual. The implications are unbelievable in a spiritually bankrupt society. Political assassination, for example, or cannibalism or violent overthrow of the government. You know how boys do when they have a gun--they carry it! (5 March, Los Angeles, California) Journal Entry #3504 Today I completed the seventh and final draft of the screenplay. Each word, each phrase is so searing in its emotional immediacy that reading the manuscript risks subjecting an audience to a mental and emotional breakdown. The successive waves of shock, depression, fear, and paranoia depicted therein are so intense yet so captivating that any adaptation of the screenplay to a film slated for wide release could lead to mass hysteria. I realize it's enough to stand or sit before the audience and read the screenplay, allowing the listener’s imagination to conjure up those things it might. Whole regions of images and feelings exist that are rarely given outlet in daily life, but when they do manifest, they take perverse forms and make for quality entertainment. Today my Bel-Air Spanish Mission estate is packed with West Coast underground press writers and Unitarian ministers. They’ve come to listen to a reading of my recently completed screenplay. A couple of the ministers are smoking dope, and I don’t like it. The small room we occupy is papered in psychedelic orange, blue, yellow, and red. One wall is lined with hundreds of books about Satan and witchcraft. The room’s corners are rounded, and I imagine if it were painted all white or black the room would resemble a limbo set. But that’s another day. Right now I’m preparing myself for the performance. I sit before the audience in a large, throne-like chair, around which are arrayed stacks of official-looking documents bearing the seal of an important, though widely underestimated, governmental agency. I turn to the first page of the screenplay and begin. A panorama of American history soon fills the room as my story shifts from theme to theme. Empires, ideas, lives, institutions, heroes and villains--everything and everybody must fall, tumbling like dominoes. The whole shebang is there, the world of my senses, birth, death, and rebirth, the whole damn thing, a bright yellow Phantom VII Rolls Royce, a Beach Boys concert, a shaman’s spirit, a New Mexico desert highway, swarms of cicadas, an arrest at a Texas theater, Raymond Shaw, Robert de Grimston, the supposed death of Jim Morrison, the sand of Malibu Beach. As the minutes pass, and my delivery becomes increasingly maniacal, the room floods with turquoise light, and everyone present evolves into a state of pure energy-- until a slow series of impressionistic images brings the story to its tragic end. The audience bursts into applause. I stand up, walk into the kitchen, squirt whipped cream into my mouth, prepare myself a chocolate shake, and chew on a Snickers bar. Afterwards, rock-and-roll, pure rock-and-roll right down the chute. Three minutes and thirty five seconds. Music with a capital ‘M,’ a mixture of electricity and Do-Re-Mi. (Phil Spector rates high on my list of geniuses.) (15 August, Bel-Air, California) Dear Marco, It’s one year to the day I decided to give up atheism. Look at me now! You too can be rich and famous. See how easy it is. To sell your soul. Take care.

Yankee Sierra

1. Ruby first met Brian the day he walked into her office in hopes of hiring her to redesign the atrium and food-court of one of the city’s larger shopping malls. He didn’t know that Ruby Dieter only designed houses of religious worship like chapels, churches, and synagogues. Over the course of her twenty-year adult life, Ruby had never set foot in a shopping mall, and she found the prospect of redesigning even a portion of one incredibly distasteful. Nevertheless, that day Ruby swiftly led Brian into her office, closing the door behind her and motioning him towards a couple of plush armchairs that faced her desk. She sat down, closing a file, setting it aside, only to stare at the man across from her. Two weeks later, here she was, in Brian's bedroom, slipping her arms around him and holding him tight. He was stronger and heavier than Bernard, but at least he wasn’t a latent homosexual. Nor did he enjoy taking a break from sex. It was a physical thing for him, a genuine outpouring of feeling, with lots of backslapping, boisterous shouting, guttural sounds, and brass balls with wooden handles. She never experienced that raucous behavior with overly-sensitive Bernard. As Ruby saw it, her main challenge was to make maximum use of Brian’s thrust--to reach higher peaks of climax, greater summits of sexual bewilderment. For the sake of imparting additional excitement to their relationship, Ruby and Brian had devised an encryption system, unbreakable unless you had the ‘book,’ in which consecutively- numbered sheets, once used, were shredded or burned. The book consisted of erotic vignettes that provided a secret message when Ruby and Brian exchanged numbers over their cellphones. Those numbers designated particular words from the text which, when strung together, created meaningful and understandable, if not grammatical, linguistic units. Thus, the number, ‘22-14-5,’ was translated as, ‘page 22, line 14 (from the top), word 5 (from the left).’ Using this method, Ruby and Brian planned their rendezvous: ‘tomorrow emergency exit First Methodist.’ 2. One particular day, in the spring, three weeks into their relationship, Brian decided to surprise Ruby and drop by unannounced. He parked his Jeep Cherokee across the street and rolled down the windows, not getting out. He watched her house for awhile. 4709 Ninth Ave., N.E. Surveillance excited him immensely because it wasn’t anything to be ashamed of and, however carried out, was vastly superior to voyeurism. It had a more pleasant air about it. Ruby’s neighborhood was impressive. The large, decrepit mansions lining the streets put the visitor into a decadent frame of mind. Brian imagined each bare-floored basement having a musty smell, and each bedroom dim and stifling with decades of frustrated lust and carnal self-deception. Battery-operated chirping noises came from the lawns and trees. Sounds of a vigorous quarrel emanated from an opened but curtained kitchen window. Yet the strangest sight was a man in a dirty yellow raincoat breaking down a front door (his own?) with a sledgehammer. No passersby tried to restrain him, but they did point and laugh. Here was Ruby, emerging from the breezeway, rolling two plastic trash containers out to the curb. She was attractive though petite, reminding Brian of a lapsed vegetarian, and although falling in love with her was easy enough, Brian didn't feel comfortable betraying his first and only wife. Lying about extramarital sex was understandable, but falling in love was more difficult to rationalize. Ruby immediately noticed the Jeep Cherokee parked across the street and waved, smiling. They agreed to meet the following day at one of the fanciest tea shops in Chinatown. Brian arrived first. He ordered green tea from a beautiful Uighur waitress, then sat back and enjoyed the feng shui arrangements. He imagined thousands of full-sized terra-cotta soldiers sent to accompany him to the afterlife, and calligraphers too, lots of calligraphers with red indentations on their thumbs and index fingers. Thirty minutes passed, and Brian’s patience was rewarded when Ruby arrived wearing a cleavage-revealing red dress and high, narrow heels. She swiftly sat down, adjusted her top, crossed her legs, and dragged her hands through her thick black hair to untangle it. Her eyes, big and dark, flashed with amusement. Brian leaned back with a satisfied smile. He could see the outlines of her nipples through the taut red fabric. More than half of what she said was meaningless, but she said it just to reach him, to reach into Brian’s soul. Things were moving along nicely. The next weekend Ruby, via encryption, invited Brian over to her place. They ate lunch, and she showed him around the sprawling house, which, by Brian’s estimation, was far too large for a single woman. He accompanied her into the darkroom and watched her develop a few black-and-white eight-by-ten prints of various cathedrals she'd photographed in Europe. Because they were at an early stage in their relationship, they had difficulty keeping their hands off one another, and a bit later they made love on the floor of the darkroom. Breathing in the heady odors of developer and fixer imparted a certain kind of high to the lovemaking, and afterwards both agreed a sequel was in order. 3. One month later, outside the window, a spring rain was falling. Ruby sat in the front parlor, on a divan, vacantly gazing through the windowpane at passing cars and intermittently pulling a blue shawl a little higher up around her shoulders. The house was a bit cold. Today she’d received in the mail a note from Brian that she now held in her hands. It was scrawled on a piece of hotel stationery, stating, ‘101-23-2 23-20-1 156-37-4 173-12-2 100-12- 2 100-2-2 12-32-6 87-20-1 55-2-1 34-23-2 100-2-2 65-17-4 65- 17-5 23-21-5 78-35-6 90-30-5 156-28-1 143-4-4 112-5-5 45-20-5 76-3-4 78-10-3 5-28-5 66-6-7 66-6-7 89-6-4.’ Many of those numbers were familiar to Ruby, making it easy for her to glean the basic meaning without reference to the book. Ruby felt sorry for Brian. She knew how wanting to come down from the heights of virtue was one thing, while being able to was quite another. If you tried to land squarely on your soles, you risked breaking both your legs. Instead, you needed to fall ‘into’ a roll and scramble to your feet. But if the parachute of vice failed to open? Welcome to the hell of rapid deceleration. Ruby put down the note, reached over to the coffee table, picked up a handgun, and let it rest on her lap. The idea crossed her mind of masturbating with a loaded weapon. Was such an idea beyond all reason? But was she brave enough to pull it off? And did she have an itchy trigger finger? Or how about masturbating with a loaded water pistol? Brian’s affection lately seemed half-hearted, and instinct told Ruby he was either married or seeing someone, perhaps a local woman who cleaned his chateau every weekend, a woman with false identity papers and an intense blue-eyed gaze. Brian, at thirty-three years of age, was, like most single men, given to vanity, self-absorption, and unreliability (though once he reached forty those shortcomings would vanish). Didn’t they say that the age of forty, if it didn’t bring you security, would at least bring you to the brink of mediocrity? But they said a lot of things--that success is a form of fascism, that Frenchwomen are the most beautiful in the world, that after you’ve tasted God the flavor of flesh is a mere formality, that that which says ‘no’ to everything cannot say ‘no’ to itself, that you can submit every feeling to doubt except for doubt itself, and that it’s logically contradictory to apply something to everything which cannot apply that thing to itself. Out of spite, Ruby tried to imagine a man of ‘unkempt charm,’ courageous and charismatic, with a watchful alertness to his manner and two pretty children living in Cologne, a man who didn't hesitate to infiltrate a military installation and blow up the main equipment room, a man who, having once served as an operative for MI6, spent his twilight years as a professor of French literature at a British university. Yet the only man who came to mind was Brian. The doorbell rang, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. Ruby felt ill-disposed towards accepting any visitors, no matter how traitorous, yet, upon answering the door, Ruby found Brian standing there with an armload of gifts. He wanted to surprise her on her birthday. She saw behind him in the driveway a black Porsche 911 which, she later learned, he had rented at the airport just for the occasion. He was wearing a black sport coat, a canary-yellow shirt, and sunglasses with rectangular lenses of indigo. How could she forget today was her birthday? She stepped aside for Brian, closing the door behind him. 4. Ruby was electrified, literally. She lay on the operating table with her wrists and ankles in worn leather straps and her head clamped into a restraining device. Wires from an electric- shock machine ran between her feet and up her dress to her groin area. Brian stood proudly at the controls, with a stern expression on his face and a blonde wig on his head, and when he spoke or yelled at her, his voice was thick with a German accent. Ruby begged Brian to turn the voltage higher next time, so that her labia and clitoris burned with an intense, all-consuming heat, a heat intense enough to melt copper cable. How long had they been here, the two of them, investigating the limits of the female orgasmic response? The subterranean air was filled with the sharp odor of scorched insulation (or was it the after-effects of a thermite bomb?), and the room was so poorly lit Ruby could barely make out the floor- to-ceiling racks of equipment. Yet, as she lay there, staring up at a mass of color-coded pipes and cables, she felt proud to be an informant. This wasn’t the first time she had helped her country’s enemies, and she gladly told Brian everything she knew about his pathetic little wife. Brian flipped the switch again. Flames billowed from the rusty control-panel. Ruby let out a strangled scream. A tremendous bang rang out--before the room went dark. Moments later a door slammed shut. Had Brian left her and gone upstairs-- to his filthy, disfigured wife? Ruby yelled out for him, but there was no reply. Her mind began racing. She was at the end of a tunnel, at the bottom of a black plastic sack. A dreadful suspicion dawned on her. 5. The following weekend Ruby had a surprise in store for Brian--an expedition through fields and forests on the outskirts of the city. They were trespassing, which explained why Ruby carried a gun in her purse, in case a farmer or field-hand or forest ranger threatened to turn them into the police. More than three hours into the hike, they emerged into a clearing. A tower stood twenty meters before them, at its base an open doorway beyond which, according to Ruby, was a winding staircase leading upwards, more than fifty feet, to a small, windowless chamber at the top. They paused, standing perfectly still, staring at the tower. Brian’s eyes met hers. He touched his fingers to her lips. His hands were shaking, which, in a comical manner, caused Ruby’s lips to tremble. They turned to face the tower again. Above the entrance, in large block letters, were the words, YANKEE SIERRA. Here was Ruby’s first design-project, dating back to high school, when with the help of her father she wrote up blueprints and hired contractors. Today she would show Brian what lay inside. They were like brave boys and girls on a daredevil mission, as they walked towards the tower’s shadowy entrance, the mildewy staircase, the windowless, pitch-dark room at the top, its concrete floor without comfort, its plaster walls absent of remorse, its air the very odors of burnt gunpowder and sex.

A Story about Alice & Bob

Because these facts speak for themselves, indeed, they're given to boasting and the occasional harangue, I proceed with this elaborate literary procedure more out of legal precaution than for any other reason. There is no other reason. ‘No excuses for anyone’ shall be my guiding principle at the outset. But allow me first to sit up so I can breathe more easily. Beware! Even in bed, with a fever, I am functioning and have no trouble expressing myself. Sickness has made me more lucid. Funny how the subconscious works. Each one of us so thinks we’re our own exceptional case that we desperately let loose with an appeal against something. Like we're some bastard with wavy hair and an even temper, or rather with wavy hair and no temper at all. (Nietzsche’s great achievement wasn’t that he killed God but that he killed Truth.) 1. Charming house--isn’t it?--and one with no shortage of quaintness. It once belonged to a slave-dealer. What a scandal! (But that’s for later.) On a table by the window Bob Sickler finds Alice's word processor. Spread around it are newspaper clippings, one of them describing the recent mutilation of a psychology professor. How would it feel to mutilate someone? To wheel above the earth, to look down on roofs covered in shop signs and bird droppings. Soaring over the whole goddamned continent with a bitter taste in your mouth. How intoxicating. Man, your head would swell up like a watermelon. You might lose track of the sunlight itself--an attractive idea. Bob walks over to the middle window of the room and stands there, looking out, his hands in his hip pockets, a cigar in his mouth. He’s studying the asphalt-covered roofs across the street. --When all becomes clear: power on the planet settles everything. Kings died and kingdoms fell. Bob is excited, feeling as if he’s lost all sense of historical proportion. His jaw tightens. He goes to the phone, picks it up, and watches himself in a mirror across the room as he dials the long-distance number. He stares hard at the mirror, trying to see into himself, through himself. His teeth are bared like a madman’s. A beautiful, electrical humming sound fills his ears. He frowns, pausing to listen. There’s something internal about that sound, and parasitic. Yet we hear: Christ... I can’t believe it... invisible ink? This is a fucking nightmare! Who has access to my file? Oh, yeah. That little, uh, Communist tart, Amy LeSage, from Oyster Bay, the one who works as a secretary at the Computer Dating Company. I love the rain, don’t you? Would you like a drink, Bob? I'm having one myself. Please, sit down--and don’t laugh, but I love that old phone with a passion. At breakfast I like to spread it on my toast. Are you going to spend the rest of the evening prying at that clown’s mouth? Excuse me, Bob, I know it all sounds terribly Freudian and everything, but I didn’t mean it that way. You better dance with me before you leave, or I’ll never forgive you. 2. Alice returns to the kitchen, while we, the audience, are treated to a MONTAGE of her singing and dancing in several local nightclubs, followed by a SERIES OF DISSOLVES of the street outside Alice’s apartment shown at different times of night, interposed with images of Alice and Bob in various states of undress. Alice looks masculine tonight. She’s wearing pants and a jacket. Her hair is combed off to one side. She turns to Bob, ice- pick in hand, and smiles. There's something sexual about the way she holds her body behind that weapon. Alice is stunning as she strides across the dining room towards the table. Those legs could strike off sparks anything. As she leans in his direction, Bob notices her eyes are bloodshot. She’s cranked up on speed tonight ... and under that skirt, beneath those panties ... odors of brown soap and urine ... blood spattered across Stalin’s lithograph, where last night Bob stabbed a knife into the red-, white- and blue-colored caviar ... a razor blade, a bottle of potassium permanganate solution ... in those dense multitudes of reddish curls. Two hours later Bob’s wearing only a T-shirt and jeans. He looks good. Very good. Much better than any stuffed horse hanging from the rafters. We hear the toilet flush from the master bath before Alice emerges in her husband’s boxers. She pauses in front of the bed. There’s a rivalry between the two of them, Bob and Alice’s husband. Alice is staring into Bob’s face like a hypnotized chicken. Here--chew this. It’s your half of the acid. Why the hell can’t they make it a little less pure? She gags, slaps a hand over her mouth, rushes to the bathroom. That was more than an hour ago. Alice is stuffing her husband down the incinerator right about now, having seized psychiatry by its vile, skinny neck. 3. Alice can see the sunshine, the parasols, the military limousines, the flashing uniforms of the young officers--and that absurdly placed copy of the Statue of Liberty. Bits of Americana. White Cadillac convertibles. Balsa-wood miniature airplanes. Punctured bags of potting soil. A rabbit’s foot. Photographs of a company picnic. A wonderful collection of knives, including a hari-kari blade. And in the window of the barbershop across the street, the dim figure of a man on a telephone, someone, she imagines, who wanted to run away and join the circus as a kid. A perfectly ordered suitcase, everything neatly folded into a fantastic universal pattern. Other times the disorganization thing is liberating. As is shoplifting. Alice pilfers a package of Twinkies, slipping it into the oversized pockets of her painter’s pants. Best not to be excessively moral, otherwise you miss out on far too much. Instead be scientific but with gusto--and much ad-libbing. Alice moves past a construction worker through one of those temporary pedestrian passageways. 4. Alice and Bob are dressed this evening in bright Japanese kimonos. It’s the deepest of night, just before the sky lightens. As we grow accustomed to the darkness, we see bits and pieces of incongruous objects. Alice is fast asleep with her head pillowed on Bob’s midsection 5. The dinner party moves to the living room for after- dinner drinks. The party progresses. I have to say this story didn’t do much for me. Someone else makes a pot-smoking gesture, as if that’s sufficient explanation for the chaos. 6. Signs flash COCKTAILS -- BEER -- DANCING -- FOOD. More of a parking lot, less of an architectural structure, it’s an isolated box surrounded by twisted metal and chunks of concrete. The wind is picking up. The light is fading. We see a cop on a motorbike. Forty-five minutes on your knees with the dry heaves. 7. The contents of the files spill across the table--we ZOOM IN on Alice's word processor. In the background we see an old black woman. In the foreground Bob sits down at a phone and dials. The old black woman motions in his direction. 8. It’s daylight now. Police technicians have invaded the scene. What’s going on here? The reader knows, so I can’t tell you, but Alice looks like Mussolini after a facelift. 9. Bob awakens to find himself alone on an absurdly inhospitable planet--under threat of civilization.

Zest with Ease

1. Hello! ‘Wonderful Works of Art’ is one of the greatest joys anyone can know, and I’m happy to provide the reader with such. To read this text is to run as fast as you can towards the finish line. Any other course of action will inevitably lead to defeat. Victory, then, is available among these precious monuments to human thought. Inside here, kind reader, you’ll soon forget that I speak to you in the most dangerous way possible about things I’ve come upon in every corner of my life. The two of us, writer and reader, have collided unavoidably, and now, like two ships becalmed, we bob to and fro, our sides gently rubbing. Yet victory’s near, before our very eyes, in the words of a man who has gone through some things--and survived to write about them. That man, however--I do not envy him his devotion to the text, for still he forgets to meditate upon it. And why not, within such perfect surroundings, in the midst of his own audience? Looking over his past, we see that on certain occasions, when unnatural conduct befit him, our writer ignored the simpler sets of rules--that a foot race is a linear problem with a single solution, that a scream from the dead is likely imagined, that pain in the pancreas portends addiction. Thus, you, the cadaverous audience, popping your pustules, reading the trademarks, enduring your obesity, reminding the carnivals of groaning dyspeptics to palpate their spleens--you must awaken again. So rejoice! First, take note of voluntary illiteracy, and second, understand that linear problems favor brute-force solutions. Here a non-linear solution is sought, and what remains, if anything, winds up in the trophy case. 2. The typical reader, peppy from caffeine, instinctively chooses a ‘reading situation’ that she cannot define. She wonders if a provably effective solution exists. There cannot be one, however, and what follows is nothing simple or easily captured by defined rules, for within this text I wrote. Yes. I wrote. A word to the wise is in order, to the kinsmen and kinswomen in possession of the strongest minds: become informed, erase all modesty, and clear away the flames. If, on the other hand, over the course of your hectic lives, you’ve consumed all thought of uniqueness in the swilling of espresso and gobbling of pizza while gagging on that vile avalanche of diapers--if that is the camp you belong in, my advice is, first, don’t panic, and second, understand there’s still enough time, even for your sort, to reach the final goal, which is no goal. So yank those burrito globs from your mouths. Let’s get this show on the road. I see my readers’ teeth are decaying from gingivitis. Sickness and disease shall be our companions then. I also single out a certain kind of magnificent fake admiration, as though I’d prefer to have no public at all. But I’ll be up front about this: the audience is bought and paid for. 3. Those parents holding their children out for my perusal once hoped they might avoid suffering, and being desirous to forgive their enemies, they tried to make peace with the world before entering into that most solemn of pacts, the family. But this world ain’t no convent. Something’s happening out there, and no one can escape it. The most devoted of the foolish believe otherwise, extending their hands in friendship. But if the strongest-minded men and women took that hand, given the temper in which it was extended to them, they would invite terror and confusion into their lives and experience a form of moral asphyxiation. In a zero-state world like our own, you cannot go on vacation--though I do admit some difficulty distinguishing between them and the various versions of them 'they' provide us. Here I’m the artist, and my task is akin to the ceremony of marriage, the merging of two parties, writer and reader. I make no claims to being a prudent man. Pragmatic, yes. Prudent, maybe. Prudence is something I’m slowly picking up on and learning to accept--though I must say this text appears as two sides turned to one. Moreover, I’m willing to treat my enemies with discretion, even while, over time, they've become indistinct images to me, proving to be located right where they were from the beginning: in here, not out there. A carefully conducted investigation is therefore in order, since most of the critics were dead wrong. As for what ‘they’ told me about the Diamond on that vaguely recollected night--let me say no more on it. I’m rushing myself and losing concentration. 4. One thing to do with this text is take it home and destroy it--which reminds me, as for my home, it’s a large, many- windowed affair, and although there's a little bed in one corner of a half-hidden room, a bed behind a calico screen beside a bureau- washing-stand, I prefer sleeping on the floor: a posture that protects against complacency. Beside the opposite wall stands a stout mahogany hat tree on which my overcoats and jackets hang. The house’s remaining space is occupied by a sofa here, a sofa there, random collections of easy chairs grouped around a fireplace or next to a bay window, and in the cathedral-ceilinged central hall, a huge round table. A few of the third-story rooms are amply furnished with books and lamps, though I rarely make it up there. My gout, having gotten the better of both feet, makes climbing the four long flights of stairs, even with the help of a cane, a dreadfully painful exercise for which there is no need, since technology has assumed an autonomous status over my life. Recently I learned that many readers are rushing into technology’s arms expecting salvation, or something more--God? I suppose those wires, screens, and knobs make a good substitute for the private sitting room, but a so-called One Computer God is not scheduled to arrive on the world scene any time soon. Nothing top-secret about that fact. Feel free to share it with your friends. If something’s camouflaged, I’ll be the first tell you. I’ve never favored secrets or gifted encrypted types. Lately I’ve become string-bean thin and grotesquely pale. My mind is still nimble, however, everyday crowding with mystification and jokes. My writing hand also remains firm. 5. When I was young, my father entreated me in the interests of science to serve as a subject in a series of behavioral psychological experiments. I was reluctant, to say the least, but he was my father, and back then, he stood for authority. I’m not asking for consolation from the reader, but I want to mention that fact outright. As for the unsatisfactory catering service I encounter daily, I don’t eat much anyhow, not nearly as much, I bet, as the typical reader. As for those four long flights of stairs I pass each time I need to reach the dining room or answer the street door, passing them reminds me of the word ‘upstairs.’ 6. Soon after arriving, the woman from the catering service heats my daily meal in the microwave. On the drive over the food goes cold if she gets stuck in traffic. I call her ‘Miss,’ much as I say ‘doctor’ to that runty, sickly, pock-faced grandfather of a man who delivers my medications, sometimes accompanied by a nosy intern who’s swallowing the propaganda. A doctor, a hunter, a sportsman--all striving for that elusive advanced degree--then let us expose them to a jolt of electrical current! Preaching about the inevitability of a deformed and diseased population, all of it--the symptoms, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, and anything else I’ve failed to mention-- designed to procure the largest possible bank account. We're nearing the terminal state of ‘carnival freak’ classification, and more than 50% of the population declared ‘crippled and ugly’ before being turned over to the pigeon-toed funeral director. I can hear it now: “We’re making them over one foot shorter and one foot taller, as our friendly Hospital-Computer God sees fit!” The important treatment has become lost in instant cosmetic surgery. It's unbelievable, indeed, impossible: countless surgical procedures for scores of vicious self-haters who become strangers to themselves. We shall purchase our own alienation. The higher the fee, the greater the loss--until what? We’ve returned to Rome? I’ve been assured--by my doctor, so beware--that under the present economic situation I was lucky to find rooms as good as these. But what the hell makes him an expert on interior decorating? Well, he makes the most of his visits, offering banal assurance amid puffs of cigar smoke. Nothing unexpected occurs on those occasions, nothing intriguing like a World Communist who married his immediate cousin. Although the doctor is gracious with his replies, I consider keying him in on a few of the Eternal Verities. Then again, few animals learn anything from humans, particularly that ‘human,’ the dog, the mule that he is. And if I had a precious stone to offer the spiteful and useless intern, I’d hurl it at the poor son of a bitch. I'm told the doctor’s wife is a ‘high-minded woman, never returning for an answer, holding herself in the highest conviction over the past forty years.’ I’m also more than forty years old, more than forty of those years having evaporated looking for the Diamond--which I found, by the way. 7. The Diamond is what this text is about, which is why I keep inadvertently returning to the topic only to evade the issue again. I don’t want to give too much away. I’ll let the conclusion give it all away. My purpose here is to spare the reader a world of anxiety over the safe keeping of her mind. I remember it well. An exceptionally hot evening early in July, and the fire of a young man lacking all constitution, a man filled with longings for a past that failed to materialize, a man who crossed many bridges into a variety of fields, oceanography, cattle, sheep, and calves among them. That young man--this writer, but many years ago--lacked any concept of the rational organization of our modern-day, collective slaughterhouse. He was unaware of the nutritive role human beings play in the Society of Man. Once upon a time, mankind was happy with the horse, the ass, the parrot, and the blackbird, among a few other companions. Many centuries later, any remaining animals were relabeled ‘creatures,’ so that a human being might become a ‘man of character,’ an animal active in his preeminence yet limited by closed doors. In that manner our collective history was recorded. The strong drinks and milk couldn’t stop it, Top-40 radio couldn’t stop it, and as for the executive entertainers who teach us when to laugh--superfluous, all of them. Machines can't laugh unless they’re programmed to do so, and it's irritating to hear their laughter when they snicker at something that isn’t even funny. Machines don’t experience nostalgia either, unless, again, they’re programmed to do so. That's consolation to the ambitious writer who cannot himself become anything superhuman, claiming that only the lazy fool has the time to do so. 8. I see how difficult it is for my words to say that which it is not their purpose to say. Who knows what happens when we hear those sounds? My thoughts, much like the reader's, race nightly without being apprehended. Those same thoughts indicate the tyranny of words over an experience that willy-nilly passes through language--a filter--to produce little more than new vocabularies for modes of communication all the more distant from the ground of daily reality. I’m not the first to suggest a distancing function for language, and I mention it here as a reminder: the curse of the discursive creature: receiving a face at birth through which we pattern reality, thus encouraging cognitive waste pure and simple. (Akin to a dislocated dance.) So be it. I’m as wise as anyone else in the world, sheltered here by the crumbling roof of a three-story house, sorting utensils into their appointed cupboards, and searching for that elusive unique object.

The Dynasty

I unscrewed the lid of the salt shaker sitting on the table like I used to do at the local Burger Palace when I took lunch breaks there, back in the days when fast-food establishments put shakers on the tables. Who would be the unsuspecting victim today? I smiled. I'd watched one too many Al Pacino gangster movies. But right now I was into my thing, gorging myself on a couple beef burritos. Nothing else to do. The weather forecast was rain, like yesterday and the day before. All morning the torrents had come down. I was camped out here at my favorite diner, eating burritos, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, listening to the oddly out-of-place 1970’s-era Muzak, and watching the muted, cable news imagery on a ceiling-level color TV. The drive-thru lane outside the window had become a gurgling, two-foot-high stream that I’d sloshed through to get here. My feet in flip-flops were thoroughly soaked, and puddles had formed all around the chair where my beige raincoat hung past my knees. Looking around me between bites, I noticed that each of the tables in the diner was unique. Life inevitably came down to those little details, and I was tempted to quote Shakespeare in homage to the Earl of Kent. I'll teach you differences. A battered card-table behind the counter was covered with a plastic, green- and-white-checkered cloth. It wobbled on three legs, and in place of the fourth stood an ugly-looking, grease-stained pile of a decade’s worth of LA County Yellow Pages. The tablecloth was torn at one of its corners and lay askew over the table. I folded a napkin into my lap and returned to the burrito. A few other customers were here, but only a few. It was too early for the lunch crowd. Nevertheless, I looked appropriate in Father's fisherman’s hat two sizes too big for my head. Despite his ragged appearance, Father had been seeking disability relief for more than a year. Sooner or later the government funding would kick in. Strangely enough, none of the visitors at Mother’s funeral reception last week had been friends of the family. The additional irony was that the reception was held at Father’s house, where Mother hadn’t set foot once in more than ten years since their bitter divorce. So here's the scene: weirdoes and wankers more than twice my age gathered in the flower-wallpapered dining room or moping about the dusty sun room or, worse yet, picking through Father’s bathroom medicine cabinet. Whoever those strangers were, all of them were trapped in the confinement of their more than ordinary lives, sentenced for the duration to excruciatingly boring jobs, and, on top of that, doing everything necessary to remain forever local. Amen. I sat in Mother’s bedroom most of that last day. At the foot of the daybed lay her cane, now unnecessary to a former decrepit, bedridden millionaire woman of ninety. Early that same morning, hours before the afternoon reception, some other almost whispery commotion occurred in the house, downstairs mostly. Father, no doubt. Earlier I’d watched him ease his way into the receiving area and take a handkerchief from his back pocket--like removing a sword from its scabbard. I laughed at him now more than ever, at his excessive caution to prevent Mother’s attacker from concluding he was also alone and asleep. Father--as egotistical, selfish, and money-hungry as they come. By God, no piece-of-shit high-school thug was going to shoot and strangle him out of his fortune! Blackmail? Geez, and what did I stand to gain from this? I’ll be up front about it: a multi-million-dollar inheritance. I was briefly a suspect in Mother’s murder. What a hoot. Over the years I’d imagined myself many different things, some of them pretty damn weird and perverted, but never a murderer. Still, regardless of the outcome of her stupid legal case, I understood the where, how, and what of It. It being Money. For most of her adult life, Mother had a nervous tic. It was a wonder Father didn’t have ten of them. Lately I found myself mesmerized by the most mundane crap, like I was a child again armed with a net trying to capture butterflies. But could I capture the past in a glass jar beside my bed? Having finished the burritos, I went inside the diner’s repugnant restroom and watched my brown eyes in the mirror as they flit back and forth. REM sleep in a waking state, as if I were sitting in a rocking chair and looking out at the cars splash by on the boulevard. The diner’s ivy-covered walls loved the rain. Lizards darted everywhere. The restroom’s one window, a cracked frosted-glass affair, was wide open. A cool draft washed over my face. The window faced southwest, and I felt a peculiar pang of joy when I saw the sun peeking out from behind clouds on the horizon. Hemmed inside these tiled walls, I felt warmer than I liked because the air-conditioner ran continuously, rumbling, making orders called out over the microphone difficult to hear. Back in the dining area, I returned to my window-seat and watched The Guiding Light, one of Mother’s favorite daytime dramas, which she enjoyed on a measly 19-inch Wal-Mart special. No wonder she was a millionaire. The way I saw it, a life-savings was a deferment founded on fear and ignorance. Did she and Father think they were the founders of a fucking dynasty? After the divorce they could only have competing dynasties. I laughed. Dynasty--another one of Mother’s favorite syndicated series. My parents’ neighbors could tell you stories about how the two of them appeared locked together as lovers one instant, only at other times to be locked in mortal combat. During those latter times the neighbors became a faithful audience to those battles, cheering on their favorite contender. So much for friendly intervention. Only by a supreme effort on my own part did I control the two of them, keep them from clawing each other’s eyes out. But that changed when Mother moved to an old folks’ home. And although it might have been a self-enclosed community--as advertised--it lacked the equivalent of a law enforcement department, which explained how one of the orderlies bludgeoned the night-guard with a monkey wrench, made his way down the corridor to Mother’s room, jimmied the cheap lock, crept over to the bedside, and efficiently strangled her with a pair of well-manicured hands--so the investigators assured me. Changing bedpans for a living wasn’t his model of freedom. Shit, it wasn’t mine either, but I wasn’t taking my rage out on defenseless old women, no matter what their net worth. And was he hired by Father (as everyone whispered behind my back)? No way. Hiring a hitman would cost the bastard money. Nor was I acting out unresolved Oedipal bullshit as the psychotherapist suggested to the attorney. All that's beside the point, since I had-- and still have--a bad habit of chewing my fingernails. The authorities reached for anything to take the pure, unpredictable nature of Chance out of our dull, mechanistic lives. The attorneys get paid well for it--and don’t forget we’re the ones forking over the cash, the ones who go deeper into debt over the legal bills. Solving a case is about as important to us as declaring bankruptcy. I laughed and blew my nose into the napkin. Trying to make Mother’s murderer the solution to all their problems, a means to link together a million unsolved cases into the serial- killer crime-spree of the century--but really nothing more than an attempt to eliminate any uncertainty remaining in those cops' pathetic, shitty little lives. It was simple: cold-blooded murder. Maybe the fruitcake had a thing for Mother. She turned him on or something. But those types of urges was why they built boardwalks, basements, cellars, and other hideouts. The dark and dimness, the smell of pine pitch, the trash and popcorn kernels. The clatter of heels on the boardwalk above you as you plunged the knife into the breast of your victim. The night before the murder I heard voices upstairs. But that was a different matter. Three bedrooms upstairs, one of them the master bedroom (Father’s room), a second one Mother’s den, and the third my room when I lived there now empty except for a rust-stained mattress. Father had invited his friends over to play bridge or poker. They were up in the master bedroom most of the night: Father’s alibi. Simple enough. Injustice? Look at the old oak tree, the one Father and I planted, now felled--and Mother’s shrubbery nicely trimmed. Who was Father paying for that? I smiled. Father paid little attention to the air-conditioner and TV, spending most of the day looking down at his hands, which had a life of their own the way they shook and quivered, at times the fingers making a sort of crossing point. Downstairs: the well-used foyer where the feet of a thousand travelers had worn the tiles smooth, and in the winter the sheen of ice glinting off the sidewalks leading up to the front door. But nothing could remind Father to be careful as he crossed. And the third room upstairs, my bedroom while growing up, held treasures that kept watch over the entire musty scene. Neither a monk nor stockbroker knew such an experience of time. I heard nothing else but noise in the distant rumble of thunder. Maybe a roll of drums, the clash of cymbals, the moans of ecstasy. Both of their lives modulated to the same frequencies. A view of the street through the family room window. Father’s nightstand littered with empty beer and pop cans. But I never complained. It was their money, and they could spend it all themselves. To hell with a dynasty. Not exactly the Coney Island Housing Projects, but still. . . . Meanwhile, I enjoyed hopping up onto the toilet lid to watch the birds outside the bathroom window. I stood up now from the table and moved over to a comfortable-looking booth in the corner that boasted pepperoni- colored cushions with mustard stains and cigarette burns. As overweight as Father was--and why not? Then let us imagine human beings as individual spheres, and maybe the world they inhabit will become pollution-free, and the air sweet and plentiful, and the water flowing freely as crystal-clear bottled water, and the earth will become fertile and rich. Technology had advanced faster than a busy librarian the past few years. A dozen or so boxes littered my old bedroom, each filled with dog-eared sci-fi novels, newspapers and magazines. And a twin-sized mattress on the floor. The diner’s coffee put me in mind of 16-molar hydrochloric acid, the way it burned my cheeks, gums, and tongue. Fuck their insults. Another tavern would smell of bourbon and the bartender’s Old Spice. One thing I never forgot was Father standing there, laughing his ass off in the kitchen, watching Mother back the old Cadillac out of the driveway. That had been the end of the marriage, right there, that instant. Not a quart’s worth of rage in the man. He gripped his heavy belt and laughed, laughed, laughed--and later that afternoon another six- pack of empties. Only other thing he did was lash out at the old neighbor lady who volunteered to clean our house every weekend. Was I going to be at school the next day substituting for the gerbil? That stupid memory made me laugh. The time Father spoke to my kindergarten class about his hobby, cartooning. He dressed in the proper attire, to be sure, which consisted of? My head was hurting. I looked up. The waitress’s eyes had widened in surprise, and I noticed my last few breaths smelled like the fart of a man constipated for days, a horrible odor spilling out of me. Gesturing wildly. Cutting through the air. Massive internal hemorrhaging. I looked the part too, in my black Nine Inch Nails T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and long, beige raincoat that concealed the twin shoulder-holsters strapped to my body, or so I wished. The diner’s dimness seized me, but this solemn behavior wasn’t my style. Nothing to will or mull about-- though within a more normal structure of unusual design where the rhythms of brick danced between the leaves, and as the cool years came and went, old faded watercolor renderings of wanton destruction of public property. When paralyzed people dreamed, did they walk? Could the power of the subconscious mind make a blind man see? What did he see? In our sleep, when we dreamed, did we use our eyes, and did our eyes pass the day through long moments of empty minutes? Sounds of shredding paper. A preformed, poorly programmed life-module was plugged into my head, and here I sat in an amnesiac haze lying to myself about my stupid rich parents. Nostrils were drilled into my soul for purposes of ventilation only. But you could also stare through those holes and see the world’s furnishings, the rooms whitewashed from floor to ceiling. An unpleasant, antiseptic cavern. The impression was one of insignificance and solitude, a single portion of 96 amounts of flesh, muscle, and bone all smacked together. From the wall and shelves behind the diner's counter, the waitress began knocking condiments and napkins to the floor. Chaos was brewing. The fat bastard cook came out of the kitchen and tumbled onto the floor, flinching and kicking. Pissing? Standing up again, he advanced around the wide base of the counter towards the customer at the far end who had insulted the waitress. I watched the attacker’s eyes. No more orders, nothing more to deceive us. Did they see a woman before them in an expensive waitressing uniform or a pompous snob? And the cook, a struggling old man of a thing who astounded me. Ninety-one years of this shit. Mother barely made it through unscathed. In the East they called it Conditioned Genesis. Yet today’s vile, quick carvings lasted only as long as necessary to prove a point, the point. Like pressing pins into a soft, unyielding cushion, time and artistry drove away our patience, leaving notions of beauty further and further from the minds of all present, and further yet from the reaching phalanges of Time. Hah. I couldn't help laughing. And when it wasn’t raining--those hot, sticky summer nights, the worthless window air-conditioner, walking to the hilltops to pass the time and get away from the city. To smell the cool humidity of swamp air and enjoy a brief jaunt down to the spring for a cupful of sweet bottled water. Pick some watercress for tomorrow’s salad? Geez. Deeper and deeper into history. We immortals carved on flimsy pieces of wood, and the only disturbances left were smoothing out the whiteness of the goddamned place. Thus I enjoyed memories of hot summer days dragging my sneaker-clad feet through golden fields of knee-high grasses. Or was that a postcard I ran across at an Interstate truck-stop? Vine-covered hideaways? Climbing those large maples in our backyard, book in hand, searching out a seat for the afternoon read. Sci-fi novels, Ray Bradbury mostly, and later I got on a Stephen King jag. But World History cleansed those days of any suspicion of guilt and any shadow of uncertainty, returning my attention to the present: a dingy apartment with a rattling refrigerator in the corner. My reputation tarnished and unused, I pulled back the rusting screen-door and walked inside. The black-and-white TV, a forgotten idol of nourishment, had watched over my reading habits as I perched on the lowest branches--until, after several more years of waiting for someone to show up, one day I heard a car pull into the apartment building’s gravel parking lot. I waited and waited for the car to pull out and return to town as cars did, but this time Mother had kicked the bucket, and here were the messengers I'd been waiting for all those years. Right through the front door into the broad daylight of my consciousness. Important and technical. Conditioned Genesis. An old woman’s life fully exposed, objective and independent. A surgeon deftly detaching the past from the present. And I was the one appointed to work out the implications because I was the only one left who pretended to give a damn. But now, a week later, I was euphoric. Everything and anything wrapped in plastic. A piece of leftover meatloaf from last Thursday, and in the fridge’s door, an aroma strong enough to leave an overcast sky behind it. I looked down from my apartment window at the planet below me--known as Reality to some because it came complete with a matchbox casket and a popsicle-stick cross. Years ago, decades, before I was born, the wallpaper in the kitchenette had been stamped with little plums. Drab, autumn colors struggled against each other on the walls, while the naïve 1960’s-era interior designs huddled in a ball in a dusty little corner near the microwave. The ideal apartment for contemplating the metaphysical aspects of life. I therefore did my best to imprison myself here, and I was immediately shaken when anticipation led to fantasy of the most ridiculous proportions. Outside in the parking lot, a group of teenagers were hanging out. No responsibility, none of them planning for the rest of their lives. Based on that one phone call, the one I hadn’t received yet, her breath the scent of half an onion. Funny. A few minutes later I suffered another bout of ennui. In the door of the fridge, an old bottle of ketchup, a small cube of cheddar cheese on the top shelf, and off to the side a strawberry Jell-O mold. Empty. Her head jiggled. History was the caring Mother who appeased her children. History was female? I assured my parents that nobody would emerge from the thrilling darkness of my past to disturb their future descendants. But were those crazy voices I heard? I couldn’t see who, but I heard voices, many voices, a whole damn family. I heard little children lining up to sit in the Easter Bunny’s lap. The other day I was walking in the mall and saw them, teenagers without a care in the world. Mother died? That day at the mall, impressed by a stranger’s fancy cigarette lighter, I stepped up to a man for a closer look and inadvertently sent out signals of some kind. The odor of Old Spice. The nostrils. A harsh scent of gasoline in the shirt, embedded in the threads, combustible. After lighting my cigarette, the man put the unusual lighter safely back into his pocket, then pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, lighting it up with a second lighter. He asked me if the aroma wasn’t maddening. He said “maddening,” a word I never heard Mother use. I now began eating a fourth beef burrito, gulping it down in mouthfuls. That man’s overalls made me wonder if he might be a mechanic, which explained the strong stench of gasoline and motor oil. I thought of Mother’s second marriage, that day too, long gone, so far past--and whether there was liquor to drink at the wedding reception. What kind of liquor did Father drink back then? More of Father's 'construction projects'? And the time we got news that Father's younger brother’s lungs had developed a bad case of the Agent Orange disease. In the meantime what was Mother doing to herself? Moved here a month after their marriage, didn’t know a soul in this wretched town. Even if it’s a suburb nowadays, it would’ve counted as a town back then. The two of them lived in a house with a sunny patio and flowering plants in big clay pots and pleasant smells coming from the kitchen, like Grandmother’s homemade pesto sauce, which Mother was too nervous to prepare. Since her death? I wasn’t weeping tears of pain. But how could I know I wasn’t the same guy myself, what with the bad stomach infection I was only now getting over? A week lying in bed with a needle taped to my arm and a big--well, imagine me eating three beef burritos two weeks ago. No fucking way. And the task of creating a carved tribute to Mother, a monument fashioned from a brittle, stinking piece of soapstone. After five packs of unfiltered cigarettes everyday for 50 years, was it any wonder? She refused to wear a respirator the final days. Dirty scab. As for the pocketknife high-school graduation gift from Mother’s best friend. So many years ago. Everything at the diner today was delicious and tasty. Like you were in a hurry to live again free from the constraint of guilt, to feel sunshine on your skin because you forgot what it felt like. The day of the wedding reception I poured champagne into glasses. No cascading pyramids of glasses, though tables of glasses. I did the pouring from a distant vantage, months, years, an eternity away, looking at the event like an audience watches an actor perform the lines of very boring play. Mother had left her corpse behind and fled. What kind of respect was that for the survivors? Got to pay the hospital bills, and Father and I would still be doing so if she hadn’t passed on, as they say, because, according to the clinicians, feeble-minded Mother was the latest proof of principle for a newfangled life- support technology, or some such bullshit. Her lifeblood was more valuable than gold and diamonds combined. Our generation’s children behave so fussy and fidgety these days. The reader has read about young men and women eating snakes, swallowing shellfish, and so on. But none of that was Father’s claim to fame, so paranoid he was--and still is-- about a clean bathroom and a clean bed of sheets, returning life back to the meaninglessness from which it came. Colors merged in a misty whirlpool of highs and lows that I failed to grasp. A whole village was on fire, and this little boy was burned right through, cut off from the social arena. The inherited pattern of the natural progression of things had reared its ugly head, and I watched with glee. The champagne bubbles bouncing up from the depths of the glasses. Father handed me the first glass--though he knew I never drank liquor--then poured himself his own drink. Over the course of some 91 years Mother popped in and out of so many lives at irregular intervals--until the day Death Personified arrived on the scene and the two of them drove off in His bright green pick-up truck. The waitress now brought me a cherry Coca-Cola served in one of those Happy Holiday glasses. The drink was not complete without a red-and-white straw, a few ice shavings, and, topping it all off, two white cherries that failed to float. She's recently hired, I told myself, cut her some slack, she confuses a carbonated beverage with a milkshake. I leaned forward, craning my neck, intent on the ceiling-level TV screen. A model’s tanned face of perfect proportions and a commercial composition of a family photo album. Floral shorts, dresses, framed photos of the sea, sand, and sky. At birthday parties, gazing at another distant planet where everything is clear and space is permeated with a subtle series of calming thoughts. No ending to our plight. Have we all yet to hear the rumblings of things that are more than meaningless? I wasn’t in the diner anymore. I was home in my kitchenette. Where were the guests? I sucked a half inch of liquid through the straw, tasting the syrupy, noncarbonated root beer that burned the whole way down. I was in the mood for some air hockey, which meant going down to the nearest arcade. Air hockey is a game played on a fairly large table, so there was no way to fit one into my apartment, which would only collapse again. My thoughts were gathering enough velocity to repeat the same morbid pattern over and over again, an endless, vicious cycle, a monster inside me clawing at the walls of my stomach, gnawing outward through the skin. Maddening the first time after the funeral. But over the course of several dinners, the sensation got old and boring, like I was chewing on tasteless shoe leather. I wanted to eat something 'naughty,' as Mother used to say, but my body, this ugly man-made instrument filled with moisture and air, was the only thing emptiness had given me. I began hitting my stomach until tears welled up in my eyes. The stomach was a pouch of liquid, and I wanted to stifle the agony, strangle the monster--to escape from the past week’s silent fury. Five minutes later a German convertible sports car drove past my window. The way Mother made me order the veal with vegetable marinade or grilled salmon. Keeping my frail body alive. I breathed effortlessly back then and without conscious thought, which all changed on the last day I pulled into the nursing home parking lot. In the middle of the floor of Mother's room an enormous pool of . . . blood? A large puddle of water spread towards me from the window air-conditioner. Such was life in a domed enclosure devoid of any patterned resonance. I need to find simpler examples to illustrate how we abolish time. A surface. The kitchenette window covered by a steel plate with half-inch holes drilled through it. Pretentious? Outside, a turquoise pendant hanging on a pole next to the empty parking space the landlady assigned me. Having little else to do with her time, that bitch extracted the rent from me on the tenth of every month. I now opened the blades of a Swiss Army knife. The way I did must’ve looked a lot like Grandfather, how he removed a knife from the bib pocket of those faded and fraying overalls. I went over to the kitchen counter, turned on the radio, began whistling along with a melody. Pausing for a moment, squeezing my eyes shut, I pressed the blade of the knife into my left wrist. This was how they did it. Like in the movies--a phrase unique to the last 100 years of our planet. 'Like in the movies.' We all know what that meant, the shadings of irony and cynicism. I pressed the blade down harder, enough to redden the skin--then dropped the knife onto the counter. Somebody up there had made off with half a cherry pie, three dollars, and a bunch of red roses. So much for the FTD florist--he’d have to wait a little longer for my turn. Father had tipped his glass towards mine that very instant, and the crystal planes of my mind had converged. At the push of my finger the wind-chimes jingled softly in the otherwise silent apartment. Hanging wind-chimes inside my apartment had scandalized Mother. It was so . . . weird. But after the car gave out, nothing mattered except me sprinting as fast as I could, though by the time I got there-- What was the true cause of the crime? A madman who plotted a savage course through life without a beginning or end? Something more exotic? Did anyone guess Father's hand could encompass all space and beyond, holding it tightly to his chest never to reveal the secret? No feasible boundaries. I might’ve held myself together, held the urge in check--but around that time the bubble did pop. How long had it lasted, our family joined in a state of perfectly proportioned Order & Chaos, Mother’s refrigerator door decorated with up-to-date lists of arrival and departure times? Now, one week after the Final One, my mind resting undisturbed and nothing in the world able to offend it, I sat next to Mother's high-school portrait, studying the details of her immobile face. Was it any wonder her unpalatable insolence nearly destroyed me during my teenage years? I pictured the scene so goddamned clearly, walking past the room where Mother had taken leave since her asthma acted up. She telephoned me a week before. Was it earlier or later than two-o’clock when I got there? My car had stalled in the middle of the fucking Interstate, a fate worse than passing out during rush hour. But I went through with the visit. Did the rain mingle with my tears? I'd be lying if I said so because it wasn’t raining that night--and I can no longer taste the difference. Inside Mother's room the boom-box faintly played a Benny Goodman CD. That was all Mother had, old 1940’s-era music. (Memories of the second World War were never high on my list of priorities.) Mother was awake when I arrived. She turned to me and said, “I asked you to pick up a pint of skim milk.” The attendants were flippant about the way I walked and dressed. But look at me now, kind reader. As for the phrase 'the local government before you left'—huh? Last thing I did was assure Mother that Father's goddamned cat wasn’t starving. It wasn’t her cat anyway, nor was it mine. It was a stray when Father found it one morning sleeping on the front porch. But I've forgotten the rest of what I wanted to say to Mother that last night--because when I awoke today, more than a week later, I found that cat very dead, its stiff corpse drowned in a puddle near Father's house. Still I can hear echoes of Mother’s voice. “I reminded you to fill up the gas tank before you left.” But I laugh about it now, because she'll never know that the U.S. Postal Service will shortly deliver a bill for the tow-truck and gas expenses to her vacated house.

And So the Night Passed.

1. All chronicled in the ringing of a bell and reflected in the windowpanes of high-rise hotels, hailed as both a thriller and a consummate work of art, ‘well-crafted, intricately plotted, most clever, amusing, and irreverent, overflowing with authentic detail and remarkable comic inventiveness, a totally original work impossible to forget’--hot news straight from the studios, a most compelling sense of drama--becoming a sequence of plain, full notes . . . as you like it! . . . The two of them were breaking the sound barrier. Timed the tones on their wristwatches and created a short story in the meantime . . . Oh, those long spring twilights! Thus it began with a fresh breeze off the harbor and a young lady alone on a nearby park bench reading Shakespeare. A delectable Swedish girl with rheumy nostrils and skin the familiar red of common clay or more so resembling a transparent bacon wrapper. Her blonde hair was tied up in a magenta scarf. On her right ear, a cola-colored birthmark. Slight mounds and depressions throughout. She was nothing short of marvelous. Irish-type of voice, a wide thin-lipped mouth, ankles and wrists loaded down with beaded bracelets, and dangling from her neck, the large flat metal disk--a sign 'the circuit was open.' Nevertheless, she also seemed absentminded, the way that cigarette scattered embers down the front of her dress, and reflective or apoplectic, perhaps once complaining then irresolute, studious in her indifference to the huge unhappiness of a human soul, not to mention the forgetfulness of her own personal dilapidation (yet when she smiled those teeth formed a beautiful arch over that lower lip), and a certain kind of puritanical sparseness amid broad clean sidewalks--dressed and ready for breakfast! I suspect she was such a ‘six-bedroom Dutch Colonial with framed photographs above the fireplace’ that she rearranged all her values around the images of frigid restraint, as if somewhere an unanswered telephone were ringing . . . in a dark, low-ceilinged nightclub, stuffy, smoky, uncomfortably warm for this time of year, with many empty cartons at the back and German beer mugs on the mantelpiece. The tincture of charlatanism and smooth dealing hung in the air amid music so crashingly loud intimate conversation was impossible--got those racetrack blues! The clientele were dressed in ‘lurid costumes,’ and several men seated at the bar discussed turf battles between the Italian and Irish factions. Mostly broken ribs--they’d be all right. The young lady’s plan was for those men to enter the nightclub with their frocktails parted across the cruppers of their horses (‘as if descended from a family of Continental Army soldiers,’ according to one mock-up). She would wear dark clothes and a hat and not drive a car but walk over from the local Greyhound station. Her head was to be no higher than the men’s shoulders, her body slightly stooped with the shyness of a child. Yet the first time she entered the nightclub would be a moment of blank astonishment. Soon she would attract a regular group of male followers, though her revulsion at their deceit and unctuousness showed in the half-finished martini and crumpled paisley napkin that lay on the bar before her. In return, the men despised her for rumors that she was having an affair with a Negro, calling her Sugerlips behind her back. Useless sons of bitches in their beige uniforms, the jumble of their voices engulfing her in faster and faster theories of art & science. Topographies of Mars and Venus. Their leader making diagrams on the tabletop with beer glasses and ashtrays, marvelous sociometric designs that symbolized a third man mutilated & scattered across three miles of farmland. Slammed his palm right down on the table. Yeah, she thought, hitch your wagon to a star, you bastard--and at the climax of the sunspot cycle? The sun erupts, you bet. Then retrieve Clorox from the pantry closet. The young lady laughed at the ambiguity of her embarrassing position: a gauche, bitchy little girl swaying slightly with drink, pale and foul-mouthed, the smell of women’s breasts. Why had the local postmaster such a dreamy look? His carefulness of heart? His swollen, misshapen feet? No--his doll’s face, a clean-cut high-school-looking lad holding a letter with a Canadian postmark on it. The way he fingered her at the bottom of her shirt pocket made those teeth clench. Trying out his powers, studying carnal dynamics from the business end of things. She was a queen who owned half the world’s oil. Under the provocation of his Rasputin intensity, strong and dreadful, majestic ‘n ruthless, she leaned forward on her palms. The nightclub’s back room was bare except for a rickety table, a cracked mirror, one small cupboard of cobwebs and grimy bottles, and the postmaster’s two attendants in beige uniforms who pinned her shoulders to the mattress. To hell with confidential tones. They was singin’ hymns with tears a- streamin,’ and the warm flat beer trickled down her throat. Manly images and robust rhymes, bursts of bawdry. Makin’ it the hard way with a limited degree of privacy and a limited view of one another. In the mirror, she watched him upon her horse galloping down the side of some sunset mountain. He tucked it in each time she straightened up. The other priests had looks of amazement on their faces. Anticipating the thrill of discovery (rumors circulated of a devastating, incandescent blast), crowds were gathered in the arena awaiting the final march through the city. Outside in the streets children passed time playing marbles on manhole covers and overturned 55-gallon oil drums. Lots of cars in the narrow alleyways. Yet the only light glowing in the neighborhood was from the young lady's parlor . . . memory flashes of little brother sitting on a duffel bag reading a comic and eating a Milky Way. In the morning, a little something extra, donuts and soft drinks, some girl-talk. She kissed each one of the men goodbye, then slipped down beside the bathroom sink onto the linoleum floor. Opened her robe to look at the burning red marks on her body, marks in the pattern of a backgammon board, and one of the slashes beneath her right breast. She’d broken a fingernail too, but there was no use talking to Daddy until he got his fruit out of the way. The postmaster had fallen asleep with his clothes on. 2. Keeping things in balance, delaying the explosion a little longer at the apex of euphoria. The young lady watched him standing in the dim light, a handsome young lad in shorts holding a guitar, his head like an old lion’s, and a long scratch on his left thigh gradually turning bruised. He might’ve been a king- surrogate for Jesus Christ, with that certain quality of swift reflection and those eyes of absence. The drawings were blank, dried mud beneath his side, flanks sculpted into fresh pear halves--about to haul her into the hay. She watched him wide- eyed, saw that he was smiling back. He felt her eyes on his face as he drank from the soft drink can. His heart expanded into an enormous ball of brownish-black manure. This great beast would lick her wounds clean. You don’t know how much I need you, she thought, I'll cut off my right arm. And smoking cigarettes made her feel younger. In sync with the bright lights and continuous music, he put his unlicensed hands onto her hips, his voice rising in anger and ringing off the marble walls. The world had two faces, and it was a strange, passionate performance. Slapped him several times on the face, ripped buttons off his uniform. 3. You don’t seem to realize there’s a war going on! Negro dissent must be converted into revolution. Pissed off because they wouldn’t hire his cousin. Overdrawn the checking account three times. A personal loan at the Wells Fargo. He’s high on something? The landscape was romantic enough, in a yellowed- snapshot, dust-and-crushed-insects sort of way. Past several miles of untamed, muted wilderness, cedar thickets, low rambling hills, and glimpses of westward shoreline to a hairpin turn onto a rutted, uneven two-lane road, past a sorry little playground between two rows of trailers and a couple teenagers smoking pot, narrowly missing an old-timer with a newspaper rolled up in his hands, and far, far beyond many more half-hidden unpruned countless drab and nameless lives, their plastic wastebaskets for collecting valuables, wheelbarrows and furniture vans, before arriving at a frame house badly in need of paint--dark shingles with white trim, a lamppost at the end of the drive--and several wooden dog pens built beside the adjacent boathouse, not to mention the strongbox filled with cash hidden inside a bedroom closet, a sapphire ring kept in a drawer, a reserve of work clothes, toiletry bags, and slickers, the light of Coleman lamps, an old board fence around the yard, and thirty feet of wooden bulkhead that came with the property. The grass grew thick and deep. Slight mounds and depressions throughout, and bewildering possibilities. An icebox stuffed with eggs, milk, cottage cheese, orange juice, and vegetable salad, a medium-sized bundle of untreated marijuana. Papers got delivered, papers got read--but last week the washing machine broke down, flooding the entire kitchen. This evening was special. The lakeside air was hardly warmer than a heated swimming pool, and with a bottle of bourbon on the patio coffee table, and three more in the front parlor--so why not?--they were exchanging drinks. Their hair was still wet from the lake water. It had been a glorious afternoon, full of laughter and very full of smoke, sunning themselves on the hatches, a little something else in the swivel cockpit chair, a dream’s lightness seeping throughout, subsiding into an unusually clear and cool evening, clear enough to glimpse, so many miles across the lake, the towers of downtown office buildings lit up on every story. The two of them were settled into their folding patio chairs, huddled beneath overcoats and blankets. Between them slept the half-malamute, half-Labrador retriever Morris. The young lady put two fingers against her cheek then gestured at the man beside her, a retired Catholic priest named Donald Bartlett, who kindly returned the gesture. She began: “Next to last time I saw him was in a Jersey City diner. It was Christmastime, three a.m., and outside they were decorating everything in sight. He was sitting on the end stool at the bar fretting over a breakfast of beer and powdered eggs with about twenty of the locals. Berthed among the mighty liners. Looked like the sort of guy who stumbled eastward across the plains, through old doors that sagged and creaked, through old gray rooms, and here he was before me, in corduroy pants and construction boots, shirt clinging to his skin. A tanned, country-lined face, with a closely cropped grizzled moustache and a head of hair that was feathery and irregular, shoulder- length, dyed the color of garlic grass. Sweetly innocent. Marvelous attributes. The kind of man who runs a gymnasium in rural Germany. He lacked only horns and a wreath of olive. Yet in those dark eyes beneath inch-thick brows I glimpsed something nameless, an obscure veil that hung between him and the world of machinery, the terror of a house of evil spirits-- howling winds roaring through his bedroom--and he performed it on me a thousand times, moist breath on my neck, fat lips set in an expression of simpering impropriety. That sweet smell becoming heavier. My shoulders and buttocks tightening. Enter, search, seize, and take everything away he could lay his hands on. Smashed windows, waves crashing in on us. Demonic influences. Cleared our throats, uttered strange and mystic words, wrenched out desperate, shocking phrases. Our rites were bold, singular, arcane. Flanks smoking, withers sweating. Worked it around desperately in my mouth stirring up the lubrication--the very feel of his America--until the spire vanished into starlight. Tyrannized by a weak, bent neurotic, a black-hearted rascal, and I savored every moment of it. Pushed beyond realism into the fantastic and grotesque, challenging the accepted standards of the state legal code. Shocking and distasteful, the large benevolence of a declining soul--before the cutting pain returned to my heart. "Such talk was meat to me. So I put a call through on the bullhorn the following night, picked up my drinking straw, and languidly waved it at him--a one-woman welcoming committee-- before swinging down off the stool and striding in his direction. Melted, sludgy footprints along the bar. It was several yards, but seeing me approach, he stood up, mumbling something like 'must get going'--which annoyed me deeply. ‘You're scared of coming home with me, aren’t you?’ He nodded as he walked past me to the exit. And so the night passed. "Two days later in the jungle depths of Brooklyn--a sight that made my blood run cold, so ugly, beyond the operation of chance. Here he was again, dressed London-style in a velvet shirt, silk necktie, and jackboots, an expression of bland innocence on his face. He was pale and haggard in the restroom mirror, with a stained shirt bunched up around his shoulders. A desolate sight. Deep, ugly lines ran up and down his face, his cold eyes ruminant and speculative, the smell of fried pork on his breath, and he’d shaved that great mane of warrior hair, altogether giving the impression of a beached whale. Still had that bad habit of cracking his knuckles too. And he said nothing! Standing there gazing at his reflection in the mirror, teeth chattering. "Thoroughly repulsed, I pretended to flush the urinal, gave him the five dollars I owed him, and left--and I’ve not seen him since! Spend the rest of his days sorting through the laundry. A dying man’s curse. Didn’t know the fucking meaning of self- respect. It’s so true--vomit has the bitter smell of women’s breasts. Last I heard, he was working as a part-time cashier at a local late-night drive-in. "By then I’d run out of categories, the bloom was off, a storm had broken inside of me, and I could hardly speak about it to anyone without stammering--but enough of my interminable reminiscences.” “Oh no, Holly,” the retired priest replied, “please go on, whatever it is--get it all off your chest.” The young lady took a sip of bourbon and continued: "I remember looking out the windshield at the fresh lights, alone in an empty parking lot in Florida or California, when I decided to break off my obsession with all human affairs. It could only go wrong a second, third, fourth time, and I was sick of fighting and then retreating with a damaged ego. In a reptile suspension of awareness I saw my skull down there--white and round, so dark you could hardly see your hand a foot away, and I figured I’d preserve what had to be preserved and leave the rest behind. My life lacked all safety features--born on the kitchen table, poor and plebian in origin, ‘frightened by the charts in the hallway,’ as they say, yet surmounted by a pair of eagle wings. "The promise of year-round golf might save me from the mechanized feeding frenzy, but it was like trying to trace the complex destiny of a Southern family through the land of the philistines. I wasn’t up to it. I’d caught a rare glimpse of what was lost between the light and shadow. Raw, mindless sky bound by an unbearable surface tension, with no trace of the envelope, its lyricism more restrained--yet with plenty to cry about. The slow droning of some remote, insensible machine. Wagons sunk down to their axle hubs, clouds of rank smoke, everywhere spotted pools of light and hands soiled from black earth. The business of flatness had become the issue, with nothing but shadow passing over the sun and my unruly flesh. "A long and weary mile, but the sunny days made me gay instead of gloomy. The faded splendors of a great salon, the Glories of Rome, Glories of Venice, a cathedral square centered on a monumental obelisk or perched atop a hill at the edge of the Mediterranean. Hitting policemen in the face with bricks. I dreamed of visiting Maui, but the band stopped playing while the rest of them rolled out of the stations with their watches, wallets, and briefcases, their jaws lank and learned, nothing . . . nothing . . . oh God please have mercy on me, Father, and let my orchard bear some crooked fruit!”

Memoirs Too Don’t Forget

Come to pass as old ideas give way . . . and here the speaker’s monologue ends, followed by a roaring round of applause. The three of us stand from our front-row seats and make our way through the noisy crowd to the exit, where two burly doormen shove us out into the warm night. We light our cigarettes and mill about the large, poorly lit parking lot adjacent to the auditorium. The usual nonsense of people-watching, drinking Cokes from paper cups, and reading freely distributed leaflets. Signs posted on a nearby wall read no coolers or pets please. But there’s no question of canceling the festivities now. Groups of sexless degenerates in extravagant Mardi Gras-style costumes--including my own favorite, a jackal-headed Egyptian god--are celebrating the first night of summer by piling trash into the middle of the parking lot, dousing it with gasoline, lighting it on fire, then urinating in the flames. Nearby, elderly women in flowing, ankle-length dresses dance figure-eights around twin pillars wreathed in roses. Many thunderous shouts of anger add much needed depth to the mayhem--and to conclude the proceedings, a 28-second barrage of police gunfire, which the three of us don’t plan on witnessing. The collective intoxication with struggle has become little more than an infantile death-wish. I cough and fan the air. “But is it as simple as the speaker said?” I ask my two friends. “Subconscious attainment of the super-conscious Goal, afterwards passing on the proper instructions to the distant watchtower sentinels?” To me, the speaker’s ‘postulate-theory’ was little more than a sequence of letters with corresponding numbers attached, hardly the key to the symbolism of the ages. “Well, depending on which direction the first number points from the head of the series,” Del Corso replies, “the subsequent numbers can represent order or confusion, but not a five-minute package. And the importance of balance cannot be overemphasized.” I get the impression Del Corso is a heavy thinker because the power belongs only to him who knows, whose horizon references immortality, the merging of the solar and lunar currents. Perhaps I lack the skills to describe the man, or there's an insufficient sense of historical reality to his words, a fainthearted tendency to jump to pessimistic conclusions. But who’s running away with our lives, the three of us, our little group of distinguished scholars? Up ahead, a signal from God of future protection and happiness. It’s time we be on our way. So we begin the evening stroll, following one of the narrow paths of the extensive trail system that branches throughout the city, along the way passing many high-res screens flashing psychedelic messages that offer the option of selecting 15 excursion routes for additional experiences. The latest advertisements for Memorabilia Rooms, Flight Simulators, and Suspended Decisions. We wind our way through the large, sprawling, suburban parks of silver birch trees. Wild shrubs with big white flowers brush against our legs. The celebratory din behind us has diminished into rustling weeds, crunching gravel, an occasional wind-chime. The subtle odors of bonfires, similar to burning leaves, conjures inappropriate autumnal sensations. Del Corso is limping slightly, while Mathers, my other friend and partner in wretchedness, displays his irritating habit of whistling repetitive cycles of melodies. I also notice Mathers’ bright-orange running shoes with white stripes curving around their sides. I’m silent for the most part, meditating, counting the outer and inner points of a variety of mental figures I will to materialize before my mind’s eye. Look, Ma, no hands! Ma and Pa are accustomed to thinking only in straight lines, with guardsmen stationed at their pagodas. The three of us, on the other hand, are the king’s better half, with a heightened moral sensitivity and a greater sense of social responsibility, not so much to the fellowman as to God. Still, I envy my parents for having a mindless good time of it, even if they must repeat their lives a thousand time more before they get it right. I also worry about Del Corso, who takes far too much exercise lately and complains about phantoms of the eye. I know what he means and also know he must survive the experience according to his own dimensions, rendering my most pointed advice beside the point. Tonight we pass occasional pedestrians, mostly demi-reps and drug addicts. I glance at my pocket-watch. “We must hurry,” I say, “there’s a curfew in effect for the city center from 10:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m., which doesn’t give us much time. The shuttle service is closed down for the night.” The bridges and city boundaries are guarded by checkpoints. “It doesn’t matter,” Mathers replies, “since they’re short on sentinels in these parts.” A sudden burst of gunfire in the distance. I laugh and say, “There’s your disagreement, Mathers, sounds like reinforcements to me.” “I doubt it, and since we’re close to a practice field, I’m not worrying about it.” Del Corso turns to Mathers and says, “Sounds to me like you’re gloating over our latest triumph, which could get us all into big trouble if you’re not careful.” Mathers shrugs his shoulders. Mathers and Del Corso are a pair of matching relics from another age, one of them representing Mercy, the other Severity-- with me in between, Mr. Mildness. We’re easily identified by our facial expressions of repressed hunger and the bandoliers of rifle bullets slung across our shoulders beneath threadbare Army jackets. No resonating residues remain in our bodily structures except nonnegotiable demands. We pass beneath a train bridge, then step around a slashed-open mattress and a haggard woman stroking lipstick onto her upper lip. The pearls around her neck are the same color as her teeth. We turn left onto a much narrower path. Piles of worn Oriental carpets. Cinderblocks. The night’s clammy, smoggy. I steal a quick look at my friends to see if their eyes are open to the special oddities and endless blessings of unfettered free enterprise. Large jagged pieces of old Chinook helicopters, cables, pulleys, levers, and catapults, the gutted quarters of Victorian-style mansions, shit-heap dance pavilions, graffiti-clad outdoor amphitheaters, out-of-business Wal-Marts, Targets and JC Penney's, weed-choked picnic areas, mildewy black-and- white-tiled restrooms, collapsing porticos, circular walkways, prayer stations, galleries sans balustrades, stone carvings, miniature airstrips, testing grounds, in and around all of it the rusty tangles of chain-link fence. The masonry of these later ages leaves much to be desired, which explains the improbable condition of the landscape: level of productivity made equivalent to degree of prosperity. And since the Chronicles, Floorplans & Frameworks were obliterated decades ago, the remains are mainly of archaeological interest not to judge but to save the world. Soon, reports that the Vatican burned throughout the night will portend a plummet in the world birthrate, a dwindling population, two generations of trifling profits--until things fall back into place and Cause and Effect have proven themselves an inseparable pair, forcing the abandonment of all economic, cultural, and racial categories that have accumulated from rigid adherence to ideological norms. Experts drop the word ‘eschatological’ and the phrases ‘brink of the abyss’ and ‘gloom of earthquake and eclipse’ (despite the unanimous refrain of the pure theorists that God is neither here nor there.) Then new provocation, new rhetoric, new economic policies misconstrued and deformed, followed by publications of a falsely denunciatory character. Greater fluidity with less fixity in sexual relations brings about more debauchery than actionable virtue, resulting in overweening insistence on blindly inherited oppositions--until, though preventative measures be taken, the nuclear family withers away, purged of all meaningful social content. Humankind thus affirms itself through the penultimate denial of God--and the disturbing irony of it, the cunning perversion of our collaborative history: turns out there’s no such thing as a ‘people’s will’ . . . and so much more, if only I could allow myself to amuse the reader at her own expense. appears to be ejecting shells from his weapon . . . I look more closely at the photograph and nod my head. Mathers is right, and the implications shock me--that Del Corso is a Twice- Born. I’m shaken into reflection. Del Corso has never told either one of us. Why not? Nothing to be ashamed of. Del Corso’s incapable of shame, his proto-conscience erased as cleanly as the rest of ours. So why not tell us, his two closest friends? Not a good-natured hint. Unbelievable. I describe Del Corso as ‘fastidiously lucid’ and ‘painfully abrupt though altogether splendid,’ and how typical of him to give frequent advice on ‘mastering your own thoughts to achieve a mental balance’--but now he’s failed on his own account. The cumulative effects of our indoctrination sessions? Overmedication? A blinding pain of mental exhaustion forms above my left eye, crushing further efforts at apprehension. “My head’s killing me,” I say to Mathers, “but there’s no need for haste. A lack of self-discipline is a menace to proportional planning.” Mathers pauses, then replies, “Okay, since the original plan was for the three of us to meet up beneath Tiger Bridge tomorrow night, we’ll stick to that, not change a thing. So Del Corso won't get suspicious.” I nod in agreement. Mathers continues: “At that time, let’s see, okay, the two of us can . . .” A very long pause-- because Mathers doesn’t know what to say. “Let’s play it by ear,” I interrupt, “something’ll come to mind when we’re under the bridge. Look at the bright side--we know the truth. Initiative is in our hands.” Mathers is silent for awhile, unsmiling, then begins to whistle. But goddammit! . . . and for such good reason I value Del Corso as a counselor with helpful ideas. I’ve shown him the proper respect when we work together--though only because I never assumed he was the World’s Greatest Liar. Mathers perhaps, Del Corso never. Another victim of piecework dissimulation? Who would try so foolishly to fashion gold from a dust heap? Either way, God will answer his darkest prayers in full color, shape, direction, and tangent. Detailed reproductions, ladders of light, a rich fever of secrets these, His truest regions (though visual memories are rarely accurate, tending to swirl about inside us like circular typhoons, stirring up wavelets of self-consciousness on the normally placid surface of our psyches). Love is one thing, survival another, after which come other precious gifts like memoirs and records of my boyhood calamities. The time I got poison ivy, for instance. Then why isn’t the rest of the citizenry speaking in strange tongues and enjoying happy convulsions?--because the curse of eidetic memory lies in its agonizing regularity, its total absence of public spirit, its devastating physical and mental torments, the terrible weight of succubus, of nightmare--that I must sleep it all off. I’ve had as much wall-fruit as I can devour in one lifetime. And drops of laudanum red as blood. Time to confront justice: an instant tightening of the grip before another one slips through, gone, leaving behind a shy little photo of the shadow of its foot. Feels like the cars of a train are passing over me. The phone rings about fifty times, but I refuse to answer it. I’m trying to enjoy a pre- celebrational nap, to die into being, the little acorn snug in its grave. nescit vox missa reverti . . . 'a word once uttered is irrevocable.' Such is the edict of the magician. Mercy and compassion disappear into the upper gloom of rainbow-colored hallways. We must read as we run--awakened from a dream near a sea full of redwoods. A collection of Arabic characters scrolls across my sight to leave me gazing out a bedroom window. I look up the driveway. Pa, in his austere and impeccable manner, waxes our family’s antique 1955 Cadillac. It’s one of those red- brick dawns Jack Kerouac poignantly described. And if Mathers and I get our way, this will be Del Corso’s last dawn. Shed him of all personal encumbrance. Pick the berries, have the picnic. I feel better after eight hours sleep. The stress has lessened considerably over the course of the night. Relaxing a bit longer before rising from bed, I watch a neighbor throw watermelon rinds into the garden--and get to thinking about Del Corso variously declared dead or banished. Though essentially incapable of remorse, I welcome the judgment of God into my life as the imposition of a personalized death. A self-induced spasm. Albert Camus declared slavery a blessing of the future. Thoroughgoing schedules of punishment, a peasant girl viciously raped, outlaws and convicts thrown into a ravine. The only thing worth mentioning about democracy, besides the heedless urge to reduce us all to a common denominator, is that God sent each of us into the world on equal footing. The light from the dusty reading-bulb is yellow, flickering badly. Eye-strain prevents me from reading the pamphlet's Section 2: Totalitarian Psychology, which is little more than a tiresome rehash of R. D. Laing. I decide instead to read a few preparatory passages from the New Testament. God is a matter for the memory. The keener the memory, the closer one is to God. The key is not forgetting. Not swooning must be the highest objective in our lives. We must aim for a single continuous manifold of perception that supersedes the fundamental duality of Sleep & Awake: the original sense of Breton’s surreality. But why are the media hyping it as The Return of Mediaeval Mysticism? This time around Del Corso has failed to make the cut. He’s as dumb and doomed as an animal, declared null & void. A renewed understanding might align him correctly or encourage him to keep a diary, but I prefer to expedite matters. It'll work in Del Corso’s favor--to generate a new series of circumstances, a new series of attacks, any one of which might result in his triumphant liberation from reality with a small r. In some higher sense he’ll thank me for rescuing him from the slime of his unmanageable forgetfulness. Yet I wonder if Mathers isn’t also one of the Twice- Borns. If so, I’ll have no choice but again to act out the truth with unflagging vigor and bravery: a prince from the other world on my travels through this one. I sense someone coming up the backstairs. Pa, no doubt, searching for one measly reason to unleash one of his protracted tirades, upbraids, cannonades, criticizing me for my ‘nigger uppityness.’ I quickly make the bed, put on a pair of denim shorts and a fresh T-shirt, hide my Bible, and go downstairs for breakfast. above all else one must be of His time . . . time, Alvin Gladstone’s time, my time. “Insert a paperknife at random into a dictionary and what word do you get?” I ask Del Corso. It’s the following evening. The three of us are gathered beneath Tiger Bridge, sipping Cokes, going through one of our word-game routines. “I don’t know,” Del Corso replies. Mathers laughs and says, “Reject the natural image as soon as it serves its purpose-- then what do you get, Alvin?” I ponder that a moment before answering, “Print.” “And beyond print?” Mathers asks. “Beyond print you get either typeface or blank sheets of paper,” Del Corso replies, “depending on how you look at it.” “And,” I add, “it’s more than a visual thing. With no more words around you get silence, the sweet, melodious grandeur of primal silence.” No one says anything for a few seconds before we burst out laughing. It’s shaping up to be a nice evening--or so it seems to Del Corso--but Mathers and I have sprung the trap: a little gold receptacle of the pernicious drug scopolamine. I’ve sprinkled several grains into Del Corso’s Diet Coke, and he looks pretty flipped-out. "Must transport and destroy the life-addict," I say to Del Corso in pure thought-language, "you’ve almost made it home, old buddy. Marshal your inner strength to overcome the messianic delusion!" Distinct streaks of light, random shots from a Roman candle, trailing little stars. Del Corso mumbles something and backs more deeply into the woods. Mathers and I follow, supporting him on either side. A puzzling scene to any onlookers, this rapid degeneration of a brilliant mind. The bitterest scourge. I lift my cup of Diet Coke, gesture to the city in the distance, and shout to my two friends, “One final toast to the health of the cogs. May their words forever remain yea and nay!”

Dirty Singles

The man sitting on the train beside me removed a tattered paperback copy of The Manchurian Candidate from his briefcase. I saw he was more than two-thirds of the way through it. Instead of a bookmark, a creased page corner marked where he’d left off. I watched him read for awhile, out of the corner of my eye, wondering what kind of person would read such a book on a Friday morning train from Philadelphia to Washington, DC. Perhaps the book’s themes related, in some way, to his personal life. Judging by the looks of him, the man was in his early fifties, well-groomed, fit, and scholarly looking in a pair of glasses with gun-metal frames. I figured he was once employed by the federal government but now worked for a think-tank. I also imagined he was a cog in something turning, something large and all- encompassing of which he had no knowledge. I didn’t see a wedding a ring, but I didn’t draw any firm conclusion from that observation. At the train station in DC, no one greeted him, just as no one greeted me. At the curb outside, we both hailed a taxi. I told my driver to follow his taxi. I explained that the man was a friend of mine whom I wanted to surprise by showing up at his doorstep announced. We eventually arrived in the Maryland suburb of Bethesda, not far from a subway station. I was careful to instruct the driver to proceed a couple blocks beyond where the man’s taxi had stopped and to drop me off there. He did so. I knew this area well, having once lived in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is one subway stop further than Bethesda from Foggy Bottom. I also knew it would be easy enough to return to my Georgetown flat whenever I decided to abandon this little charade, so long as I left before midnight when the subway stopped running. According to my watch, it was one-o’clock. The time of year was early fall. The sky was overcast, a slight breeze was blowing, and the leaves on many of the trees were turning. The man lived in a large colonial-style house with a well-tended front lawn. From across the street I watched as he let himself in the front door. I reached inside my jacket pocket and removed a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, one of those small, capped bottles they give you on airplanes, which is where I’d acquired it, on a direct flight to Philadelphia from London. I gulped down the liquor. The warmth I savored, the flavor I loathed. I reached inside my pocket again, this time removing a stick of spearmint chewing gum to serve as a chaser. Infinity exists only if you want it to, I reminded myself, only if you want it to. Right then I wanted it to. They say (or I heard it sung on the radio) that every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. But my difficulty is distinguishing the ending from the new beginning: one follows so closely upon the other that the two are inextricably entwined. And as I stood there in the street, in front of that man’s house, for all my confidence, I was confused as to whether something new was about to begin or something old was running its course. Each of us lives in a private dream. I was then, and I am now as I write these words. Yet it’s possible, and it happens every day throughout the world, that our private dreams intersect, creating a form of social intercourse. Two individual privacies become one privacy composed of two. It might surprise the reader that those intersections are driven by hatred as much as by love, because both of those emotions are a polarity of one thing called desire. Without desire, our private dreams would never intersect, making intercourse and all forms of community impossible. That also explains why people, in all walks of life, in all cultures and societies, have an easy time relating to love or hatred but are befuddled by indifference, which, being the opposite of desire, doesn't support any type of community. Still standing at the curb, I reached into a pocket to remove a second bottle of whiskey. I downed it quickly, noticing for the first time how quiet the neighborhood was. No sounds of children playing or car engines running. Very peaceful, an autumn day the likes of which put me in mind of going off to school. I associate the autumn with school, elementary school, high school, college. I suppose autumn is my favorite season. I don’t know why, and it doesn’t matter. I forget how long I stood there in the street. Memories tend to dilate time, so it was a shorter period than it seems to me now. But I do recall, with great accuracy, the number of little bottles of whiskey I gulped down. Four. On an empty stomach, and being careful to place each empty in the gutter (since I don’t like carrying trash with me). I was in an inspired state of mind when I approached the man’s house. I strode purposefully up the driveway, turned onto a sidewalk, and found myself at the front door. Again I stood there, shuffling my feet, idly fiddling with the leaves of a large potted plant. When confronted with the options of knocking or ringing a doorbell, which do you choose? A knock is warmer, so long as it’s a series of sharp taps and not the loud banging one expects from an impatient policeman. The ring of a doorbell, however, is more melodious. When you’re attracted to someone, you don’t want them to know it, at first anyway, otherwise you feel rather vulnerable. Having grown up in the American Midwest, I learned from my mother and relatives that American men make the best husbands for American women. But how could any of those women make such a claim when they'd never befriended a single foreign man themselves? As for me, I’d been living overseas for awhile, having gone off first to Athens and then to Moscow, in hopes of finding a husband whose first, middle, and last names were Dark Twisted & Perverse. After more than five years of failed attempts, I was forced to admit defeat. Yet here I am today in Bethesda, Maryland. Was it a hunch? No. It was The Manchurian Candidate. And was that day a new beginning or an ending? I don’t know, I never will. But I learned one thing: once they take it away, you never get it back.

Enemy Of the People

If there's such a place as Hell, I'll find it one day soon, though perhaps I already have, for whenever I shut my eyes and let myself drift into oblivion, right at the threshold of sleep a frightening sensation of falling grips me below the ribcage, abruptly bringing me back to full consciousness. The only way to avoid the problem is to dope myself up on sleeping pills or liquor before retiring for the night. Only then I don’t fall asleep, I pass out. It’s a form of insomnia. Many must have it. Yet, when I ask around, I find no one who shares this horrible experience of plummeting through an endless expanse of black space bereft of both mind and body and reduced, it seems, to a pinpoint of awareness without reference. Last week my neighbor tried to commit suicide. The week before that he spoke to me, across the hedge separating our two yards, of how he suspected his wife was seeing another man. (If his wife wanted to deceive him, her life couldn’t have been planned along more convenient lines.) In any case, he tried to hang himself in the garage but instead tore out a large chunk of ceiling plaster, knocking his head on the concrete floor and ending up with a mild concussion. His wife was then out of town, ‘on business,’ as they say, only returning today, seven days after the attempt. I imagine my neighbor saying to his wife something like, “Tell me who it was and I’ll forget about it.” He’s that type of person. He doesn’t want to lose a stunningly beautiful wife to another more handsome, more intelligent man. I write a regular column in our town’s newspaper where I dispense advice on how to overcome life’s emotional difficulties and setbacks. My only qualification is an undergraduate degree in psychology from an Ivy League school, which may not sound like much in this era of over-education, but in a New Hampshire mill town of only 5,000 it gets the job done. Except for the paper’s editor, no one in the town knows I’m the column’s author. From the beginning I’ve been careful to use a pseudonym. Everyone on the street knows me as Spencer Ewing, the writer of short stories and screenplays, but when they address their problems to the advice column, they call me Joan Bearden. The photograph of the young woman accompanying each column is a picture of my deceased sister when she was eighteen years old. Not a single reader has picked up on the clue, and I doubt they will. Who has the time, in this day and age, to go digging around in old high-school yearbooks? That day two weeks ago, the day my neighbor and I were discussing his wife’s suspicious behavior, was also the day my wife and I finalized our divorce. Understandably, given those circumstances, I was in a rather bitter frame of mind, and I remember remarking to my neighbor that women aren’t what they used to be, although, in any case, a man ought to marry at least once because he'd never regret it. Perhaps my thinly veiled misogyny in some manner influenced my neighbor’s decision to kill himself. I don’t feel guilty about it--I’m too healthy for that-- but I am curious. God am I curious! This whole week I’ve been preoccupied with writing a story about ‘possible ideas for a story.’ Each idea occupies its own paragraph and, presumably, could stand on its own as the motive force behind a full-length short story or a novel--but I don’t write novels (though I once did), because novels contain far too much exposition. As I see it, one margin is as good as another for running over a skunk. When my writing isn’t going well, or I’m bored with it, or my wife’s attorney keeps interrupting me with phone calls, I focus my attention on the advice column. I try to lead off each column with a witty play on words. For example, in response to one woman’s request for advice on dealing with autistic children, I couldn’t resist the coinage ‘ought-ism.’ My editor believes--and I agree with him--that humor, even in place of advice, lightens the reader’s mood, making her problems seem more manageable. Other times, following my advice will deepen the person’s problems. But this is as it should be, since only by shouldering a much larger burden do we come to realize that what we thought was a problem was, in reality, only a prelude to the real problem. Yet, from another perspective, there are no problems, only solutions. John Lennon said so. Sometimes I agree with him. If he so desires, an advisor or a consultant or a therapist or, God forbid, a psychotherapist can act as a revolutionary, which is one of the highest of human callings. It’s also one of the most difficult, because authority structures, being stable through space and time, are necessarily anti-revolutionary. Governments and corporations never have job-openings for entry-level revolutionaries. Universities don’t offer courses in violent or non- violent revolution. Who coined the word ‘revolutionary’? Revolutionaries plan and act in secrecy, much like that other great human calling, the spy. My neighbor, the one who tried to kill himself, is one of those paranoid, anti-government types you encounter in the backwoods of New England. He’s mentioned to me more than once, in a half-facetious manner that fails to conceal his stubborn conviction, how he suspects I’m spying for a foreign government. Why? Because I spend so much time alone in my cabin. When I explain to him that I’m a writer, and that’s what writers do, spend a large portion of their lives alone toiling over words and syntax, he replies that writing is only a cover. And when I ask why would I be spying for a foreign government when I don’t know a single foreign language? He says I’m lying, that I do know foreign languages, in particular, Russian. Thus, to cleave to his belief that I’m a Russian spy, my neighbor reduces me to a bald-faced liar. I can go entire days without uttering a single word. I’m rather autistic in that regard. I love silence, I bathe myself in it. I don’t own a TV or radio--I can supply my own static, thank you. I have a switch in my mind that toggles back and forth from ‘totally focused’ to ‘totally open.’ When I’m open, hundreds of ideas and images flow into my mind, sometimes so fast my writing hand can barely keep up. When I’m focused, everything in the world is filtered out except for that one sentence whose syntax or word choice isn’t exactly right. Turns out most people don’t know how to toggle their own switches. Many don’t know they have one. Then there are those whose switch is forever stuck in one or the other position, who suffer from autism (totally focused) or attention-deficit disorder (totally open). As I’ve written in my advice column, those cases are best treated not with medication but with awareness training. Patients need to learn how to toggle their switches back and forth. Drugs can do that for you, but drugs replace one problem with another, drug- dependency. Awareness training, on the other hand, removes the problem altogether, leaving you with a more flexible attitude towards daily life. But I ramble--do I not?--for this is a short story, not an advice column. If you want my advice, read the local paper. Looking into the mirror hanging on the wall opposite me, I see I’m a different man than I was two weeks ago when I spoke to my neighbor about his wife’s suspicious behavior. I look more haggard. Face it, I need sleep--because I don’t fall asleep anymore. I pass out, and to pass out, you must either strike your head against a hard object or ingest some kind of drug. I’ve tried both, and they both work--though the former leaves large bruises on her face and head. By ‘drugs’ I mean alcohol, large quantities of alcohol ingested in a very brief period of time. People have been doing it for centuries, yet it never goes out of style. Why? Because intoxication activates the imagination, supplying the drinker with an ever-changing infinity of imagery and ideas. The contents of the mind are faster than the contents of reality. All dreamers, visionaries, artists, and revolutionaries know that, and it frustrates the hell out of them, because what they see so clearly and quickly within themselves takes so long and is so difficult to manifest in the outer world. The worst side- effect of a hyperactive imagination is impatience. God how I suffer from impatience! The world out there is so slow to move and, worst of all, slow to learn. Not only individuals but entire countries and cultures make the same mistakes over and over again. If they do eventually learn, it takes them so goddamn long I give up caring. Let it all rot in hell. I walk too fast, I drive too fast, I eat too fast, I think too fast. Much like the great French poet Arthur Rimbaud, I’m a great passerby, a genius with heels of wind. I’ve learned in the writing business that the mind destroys everything, including itself. Look at the life of the German poet- philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. You don’t have to go that far. Look at my life. Last week my neighbor tried to commit suicide. Why? Because of my own impatience. I, so to speak, walked right past him, told him his real problem wasn’t an adulterous wife, it was the preoccupations of his mind. If he didn't take his mind so goddamned seriously, he wouldn’t be racked with anxiety and depression. Maybe I should move to Canada. It’s a two-hour drive to Montreal. I understand they speak French there. I could pretend I’m living in Paris, an anarchist revolutionary living in a Paris apartment. But I ramble, do I not?

Aitch & Racah

Return of the First Saturn. Poised at equilibrium and twitching with avid life. So good at first--but later something would happen between us more confounding . . . than Mount Fuji? It began in an unfurnished dormitory room with three naked girls who didn’t know each other. Idiotic expressions of pleasure, and the heat we generated! But the windows were open, and afterwards the phone rang. “Hello . . . yes he is. He told me to tell you he’ll be right out.” Such a big sin, after all? Let me first describe the interior aspects of the story before allowing the reader to settle on a final outcome. The mid-April weather was gripping, a real wire on a curve. The top was down before we left the rental car garage. Crowded streets flickering by us for awhile, lights, signs, mirrored facets, a barefoot youngster with heaps of newspapers, the barrel of a gun, lost momentary impressions diminishing into foothilly countryside and musical wind. A resplendent blue morning, higher than a kite, with burgeoning leaves gleaming luxuriantly. My friend Rachel was a flowery, careless, Southern type of girl, and the way she drove, so Biblically slow, it wouldn’t be long before I felt a twinge of claustrophobia whenever the top was up. Leisurely to the point of absurdity. Gold-braided clean corpses were fascinating as hell. Difficult checking my impulse to kiss the girl, thaw out the old thighs. Sign of old age that I worried about rain spoiling our weekend getaway? Hours passed with the scenery. A mound of cigarette butts formed in the ashtray. Long-shafted memories and little to speak of. So why not activate the imagination on a spotless day like this? Wild zigzags, unheard-of disasters, very messy, involving a German publisher with a prominent ring on his index finger that nervously tapped a gold-colored cigarette case. Chic spies, bribe- takers, gay villains with curt requests--“Off you go, my lad, and please do leave me alone”--against a backdrop of Pacific sunsets. Such was the scene at first. Then subdivide it further into Rachel’s new seaside palace. Dingy walls blistered over with yellow wallpaper, unswept floors textured into bizarre mesmeric circles, no door locks, the pervasive odor of old vegetable soup. Not one to oversleep, Rachel found pleasure in Threefold Torture and Banishment to Siberia (though only when Siberia was transplanted to Ventura County). The girl was in a class by herself, seized by the messenger. I will be reckless, I will be daring, I thought. The story continues on about how once upon a time a red Mustang convertible cruising north along Pacific Coast Highway- -on this morning, on our way to the estate of Mr. H. Rachel had rented the car under her name and asked for a convertible. Bull- calf and a red heifer. I laughed. Looking over the precipice into the Deep. Fresh gusts. Solid, glassy waves. A green veil of trees. The man we were visiting was an upper-crust wastrel with a long, winding drive leading to empty, silent rooms. “I remember the rolls of thunder. I stood for hours in the shallow stream with my trousers rolled up, and they laughed at me, saying ‘Look at the fool taking a pleasure stroll through the mud!’ I knew I had to make a living, and since I liked business, well, it’s true I valued my calling highly.” Here it was, the wolfish profile of Mr. H, whom I described to Rachel as “a lonely man in a myopic position.” His large beardless black-eyed putty-colored face, jowls like empty flour bags, jutting shoulder-blades, and surly manner. He was prone to lying prone, face buried in pillows, paralyzed by the sound of the electric clock-radio on the bedside table. Other times he lounged about quasi-sarcophagus-fashion, arms upon his chest crossed at the wrists, feasting on plates of his favorite Russian piroshki. Last year contracted pneumonia, slated to die within a week, but the first cup of strong tea revived him--much to my chagrin--and today Rachel and I were paying the consequences. Discerning any shapes in the spacious bedroom was usually a difficult task, but not today. A bizarre combination of two beautiful women (a Persian cast to their faces), brighter-than- normal lampshades, and a concierge borrowed from a Beverly Hills hotel gave the bedroom an hours-before-twilight coloring. The fatal moment. Rachel pulled the curtains open the way she was instructed to do after arriving at Mr. H’s mansion. She adjusted the man's lumbar cushion. And by the way, Mr. H had something very important to ask us. Did we appreciate the first of our little luxuries awaiting us at the airport, the shiny red Ford Mustang convertible? Of course, sir. Proof that Mr. H made at least a few concessions to those of us not entangled in pampered lifestyles of luxury. I could be flexible as well, and Rachel and I awaited our orders… Into the next morning. Sunny and warm. Ideal for a drive along the coast--again! Did we enjoy the incredible red Mustang convertible? Of course, sir, its hood as shiny as the casino lights on the Strip. (I never divulged my real opinion.) Bored, very bored. But this being Rachel’s initiatory trip, I was willing to wait awhile longer and listen to the prerecorded voices of three generations of Mr. H’s predecessors. Silent cobwebs, Crispy Rice Cereal leftovers from yesterday’s breakfast, custard-pie fights, a snow-globe souvenir, Oyster Bay High School yearbooks from the 1950’s, artwork on the walls in the way of parodies of Mondrian, amateurishly composed black-and-white Robert Frank-derived two-page photo spreads. Mr. H once proposed an avant-garde postal system, yet where was his belated audience today? Or the reprints? Or any prints, for that matter? Damn, Kinko’s Copies must adore this man. We should book him some time at one of the municipal museums. Contemporary art came to a screeching halt in the summer of 1974, and leafing through piles of Mr. H’s photomontage scrapbooks proved it. Twenty-seven three-ring binders of loose-leaf collage. Buck Rogers, OJ Simpson, a one- eyed priest. Lighting for the exhibit was a cinch, since Mr. H's king-sized bed was close enough to the bedroom window for any passersby to see him (had there been any). Of course, sir. I'll step inside to watch you scratch your ass for awhile and play a hand or two of strip-poker. The bare-assed messiah. There were fewer and fewer passersby these days. Dozens of states had casinos. Not even Mr. H’s native state Nevada enjoyed the draw it once boasted. Mr. H was badly in need of audience response. Song and dance routines? Look at the bed’s grimy oak headboard, and the dust-mice scurrying beneath the frame. Disruption of the Universe of the Neatly-Clipped Lawn. Ample evidence of what his mansion had become. Fuzzy, with a long tail--until I realized it was a large rat! Irregular forms bouncing on the walls. I laughed and begged the master’s forgiveness with marginalized marks of indifference. “We’re all whores of Babylon,” I said, “in this world exploding into images,” and you know what they say about the road of excess. “I should’ve guessed it from the beginning,” Mr. H replied. The photographs in the scrapbooks were ordered according to a system of documentation known as The Park Ridge, which was a more formally serviceable spread than the serially based Muybridge method of representation. The original artistic conception of the magic-square grid with its laws of similarity and contagion made for a monstrous series of stills that never failed to tax the patience of even the most empathetic audience. Page after page, drier than a theoretical essay, anti-art in the true Warholian sense of that term. Tristan Tzara stood proud. Ready-made poetry is for everyone! The path to integrating idealism with humanity! Whitman’s Leaves of Grass served as inauguration into the Pleasure Dome. Out of this cartoon-strip photorealism Mr. H created a conceptualized serialism that developed into a mundane form of minimalism culminating in a strictly nonrepresentational mode of satori-like transcendence founded on a continuous and progressive what for? One place from nowhere. Clouds on a wall. Do it like a phone call, man--broadcast something! An day and night on a yacht, signal flags flapping in the wind, the deck photographed from a cramped cabin. Or consider the infamous series holiday- decorated trailer-park #3, with a flags flailing in the wind, mostly American Mid-Western flags, and black-and-white images graced with a foreground of middle-aged overweight men wearing American T-shirts. Mr. H's art managed to put the final touches on human misery. Claimed he was proud to participate in that venerable tradition begun by the French painter Courbet, who said nature's beauty is superior to all the conventions of the artist. Moreover, if German philosopher Schopenhauer is correct that genius is the capacity to remain in a state of pure perception, Mr. H should qualify for that title as well. Active searching. Wisecracks, classical poetry described as a glorified form of list-making, and- -most famous of all?--Mr. H’s emphatic stylistic contrasts. Closets free of skeletons, underexposed dungeon-like cellars. A bit creepy. Bowls of lima beans, plain white boxes, cans with seductive labels, crates worth more than the donated food they contained. And still we needed an audience and some cottage- industry Marxist doctrine, or 73 serial permutations on the words ‘Winesburg, Ohio’ and Kate Smith singing "God Bless America." A malfunction of memory retrieval? Otherwise, biological evolution would’ve freely given way to conceptual evolution, rendering humankind the signless and the reactive-mind without tendency: a mirrored spectator: post-larval. A prodigious number of questions remained. To a movie? “Who’s crying?” Antique toys from the Eisenhower era, the application of USDA-approved labels to exciting foods like prunes and dates, an ancient water-heater, old pipes and drains, paint-peeling walls, a hand-wound victrola, a few damn good ghost-shots, including a Bedouin shepherd boy at the northwest shore of the Dead Sea excavating Mr. H’s hand-fabricated parchments. Fresh paint laid on with a palette knife. Broadcast something colorful! Mr. H said he was proud to see the Parisian Situationists receive their due these days. On and on. --Until the concierge escorted Rachel and me to one of the motor-courts on the mansion’s grounds, where he had kindly parked our red Mustang convertible--more than a day ago! And ss a puff on the peace-pipe, here was a box of family provisions Mr. H provided free of charge. “I’d like to kick your goddamn head in!” Talk about unparalleled understatement. Philanthropists took their own sweet time. Evening was on the verge of turning into night. Rachel and I had one last thing to do. Nothing was holding us back. Off we went. What’s there to do on a clear, boundless evening? First, put the top down. Night too chilly? Turn up the heater. The drive began with a high-angle shot. More than 1,500 lights lit the Valley more than a mile below us. Fifteen to twenty towns laid end to end. You imagined things looking out over it all, and after being holed up in Mr. H’s digs, this sight cheered me up. Nine carpenters. Seen Slotless City? What about Three Dots? I removed a pair of high-powered infrared binoculars from the glove compartment to make a quick reconnaissance. No sign of recent mass graves cut into the Valley’s floor. No smoldering rubble. Peaceful. A thousand pinpricks of light, grids of streets, turquoise swimming pools, sparse traffic (mostly traveling statisticians), planetary conjunctions. Like the olden days of the repressed secrets of suburbia. Satisfied with what I saw, I reported back to Mr. H’s concierge, who said we were free to proceed. Rachel drove only on the two-lane roads, the ones that slowly descended into the urban-sprawl, twists and turns providing us time to think and plan and watch from afar. Blank pieces of paper. Empty spaces. Stray headlights. A couple blast-off cigars. We were silent most of the way down, as Rachel maneuvered through the series of toll-gates, check-points, and sentinels that brought one closer to the Valley below. Dr. Floyd’s journey to the moon. "Behind the Camel"- type soundtrack. Then into the maelstrom of late-night, streetwise activity. At one point we climbed to the top of a multilevel freeway-overpass rise for a stunning view of what we’d become, and I loved every angle of it. Some 205 special-effects process- shots and a photograph of an American flag flown over the White House. If only to play along with the farce, to brush my teeth and comb my hair. The force of Necessity. What was I doing, waiting for manna to fall from heaven? I told Rachel to pull the car over so I could get out the camera rig. A truck of brass-helmeted firemen barreled past us. Rachel was overdressed for an impromptu photo-shoot, but she was a gaudy dresser anyhow. Her attire tonight had more in common with a sidewalk-barker’s than a banker’s or a baker’s, but she enticed those drivers-by with her coupons. I was a great judge of young girls’ figures. Time of her life and a palpable sense of well-being. Ninety minutes after our departure we entered the outskirts of the Valley--with crazy, bewildered eyes. We were famished. Luckily a few remaining heavily-guarded 24-hour fast- food outlets had accumulated a glut of comestibles and offered many 2-for-1 weekly specials (though nothing more than old promotions of new imports). Bacon available on all sandwiches, chili as a side item, baskets of chicken fingers, foot-long Coney dogs, patty melts with Cajun spice flavorings. We spent thirty minutes in the convertible exploring that cuisine and scraped the lovely enamel from our teeth. The toothless server waved us good-bye as we gunned the Mustang past the drive-thru window. Reseda Boulevard would take us directly to the university. Get to the root, I thought, never mind the branches. Further down the street, a man sitting on a front porch, a cat asleep on the railing. Nice cozy places, small but clean, though the inhabitants rarely peeked out their upper-story windows. None of that oil-derrick-dotted Signal Hill-type landscape where I grew up and went to high school, no Long Beach Freeway traffic, and Rachel pointed out a few other advantages, gabbing too much--until our one-vehicle parade had mistakenly taken a left turn down a wrong street. I announced I was lost. Rachel's grin had diminished a trifle. She was sleepy, wanted to drive us to her cousin’s house, which made no sense to me. “No way,” I replied. “You’re gonna have to wait till tomorrow morning.” For the rest of the drive Rachel sulked behind the steering wheel. Her cousin lived in Lancaster, on the other side of the mountains, and come hell or high water I was spending the night in the Valley, in a dormitory room with young women, as Mr. H had ordered me and Rachel to do. Odd-looking people lined the sidewalks, lean-faced and bony, cord-like veins in their necks. Jammed under the rafters, so to speak, they walked unnoticed in the world. Bits of bone pasted together. True believers in fitness, some of them came out only in their night-clothes or took a pleasure drive up into the hills to view the stars from inside a well-secured SUV. Women of the neighborhood, housewives and maids, and the city-park guards. Rachel finally found the university--thanks to my photographic memory. She parked the red convertible in the littered parking lot of an out-of-business movie-rental establishment. Darkness above the tragedy. For the first time I felt closure in the air. I yawned. “Oh God, what a day!” I yelled out. Dragon munching them all. I stretched my arms, and flexed my bare, un-suntanned legs. “Ready for a little action?” I asked Rachel. “Take it or leave it,” she replied. “Hey,” I answered back, “no more sulking or pigheadedness. Get it out of your system. Scream a half-dozen times or something. This has got to be a positive sort of thing.” The night was hot out on the pavement. Head-cold coming on? My irritable nature? I unbuttoned my tunic. “Oh what filth!” Rachel screamed, “I don’t have a wig!” I shook my head in disbelief. “C’mon, Rachel, this is the Valley. It’s positively lunatics down here, no comparison.” She was silent, composing herself. Off we went on foot. A real journey. Our faces painted purple, hair tied back and pushed beneath billed baseball caps. Our loose tunics concealed a few other things. Whole mobs of students gathered around the entrances to many of the dormitories. A bunch of insufferably superior little bastards they were. Behaved like pigs with their bellyfuls of dearly acquired knowledge. They had a lot on their minds. Rachel despised them more than I did. Guzzling their cheap booze. So few of them were registered, photographed, or fingerprinted. It wasn’t our scene. But we were here on orders from Mr. H, and we must carry out those orders or otherwise risk expulsion from the communitas, Mr. H’s nice and toasty communitas. Keeping an ear to the ground. I laughed. “Can’t I blow my nose?” Rachel bellyached. “Never mind that,” I replied, “we’re in a hurry, in case you forgot.” Rachel bent down to see if she could figure it out. The structures around us were sound and well built. Enormous palaces of gigantic height, big lengthwise joints, stretching to the next avenue, with God knows how many windows. Each free- standing unit was a numbered corpus. Corridors and vestibules were full of undernourished men and women wrapped in towels, blankets, and afghans. Mobs of all ages and origins. Stale odors of fried food, spilled liquor, freshly brewed coffee, cigarette smoke. Textbooks everywhere. Donations weren’t rolling in, the poverty kept on coming, but no one was refused admittance. The students lined up around the clock for lectures, seminars, and qualifying exams. A perfect locale for recruitment, and I was falling in love with the place. The sparrows were happy, as they say, and Mr. H would be elated. So where were the young women? “Which corpus?” I asked a passerby, who told me it was Corpus 12. “Soon,” I whispered to Rachel, “the big-time hysteria will kick in. Predictions anyone?” Rachel laughed. She and I were the unmanageable ones, the real horror- bugs. “It’s the population moving,” I said. “I mean, right before the war.” We passed some loud music, a performance on the green consisting of a Japanese balalaika, a mandolin, and two tom- toms. Then a procession of Hondas and Toyotas rolling out of a nearby parking lot, turning south onto the avenue. Few convertibles in this crisp nighttime weather. “Forget putting up the top,” Rachel said to them as they passed, “turn up the heater.” I sighed. “If only they listened--but don’t count on it, Rachel. Anything to keep up the morale. Then it starts all over again. But in the long run, piecemeal rot.” I paused, then continued, “Doesn’t bother me though, since I got a great idea I inherited from Mr. H, and I’m on the look-out for recruits to help me realize it. It’s a concept, and the way we work it is Mr. H stays busy in the background while I’m out here on the move, an existence of glory and royal services. Dead or alive, dream or reality. You understand me?’’ Rachel nodded. “Good, because I noticed yesterday Mr. H is trusting you more, and I wouldn’t want to set him up for a backstabbing. Okay?” Again she nodded. “Good, Rachel, very good. It's important to be clear on that point.” Rachel stopped walking and said, “Listen. I’m with both of you, you and Mr. H. I know the stakes, I know the risks, and I’m willing to accept them. I’ll do my dedicated best to hold up my end of the bargain.” I smiled and said, “That’s good to hear, Rachel. Outstanding, in fact, because when we landed at LAX yesterday I felt some doubts cropping up, as I do with new recruits. It goes with the job, but--” Rachel stopped walking again and said, “I gave you and Mr. H my word that I accept the orders, and I’m tired of talking about it. Okay?” No problem, I thought. And her timing couldn’t have been better. The entrance to Corpus 12 stood open before us.

The Great Game Called Seeing

I thought of you today. Two old men were sitting on a park bench with a chessboard between them. I smelled alcohol on their breath. Moments later, at an intersection, I encountered a DO NOT WALK sign. Standing there, waiting for the light change, I reached inside a jacket pocket and removed the key to a safe-deposit box. It reminded me of you, of your voice. The Chinese take-out menus scattered near the mailboxes in the lobby also had a nostalgic effect. The elevator opened. I got off and listened. Behind the nearest door a radio played Glen Miller, which evoked a screen-door banging repeatedly against its jamb: a place in the country, the rustle of cottonwood leaves, the scent of new-mown grass, and in the evenings, the rasp of cicadas. I thought of tuna-fish salad on thick white bread, fresh peas, and Jell-O. I thought of the faraway peal of church bells and the hollow expanse of a large foyer. Familiar figures move in my memory. The worn-out man in a crumpled khaki uniform standing alone on the platform of a bandstand. The indignant, overweight black woman in her loose yellow blouse and ridiculous-looking pedal-pushers. Those young girls--you know the ones--prancing about in those skimpy summer dresses. A florist’s van and the driver who wore a Yankees cap. Right behind the cops were two paramedics. That night, the night of the cocktail party, the night we drank those overly-sweetened blue-colored drinks and I told you I was a big fan of Mark Rothko's paintings--that night I left early, without telling you or anyone else, and went to sit in Grand Central Station to mull things over. All kinds of people were waiting for trains or standing around. I remember a barbershop quartet, still in costume, arguing among themselves about who was responsible for a piece of lost luggage. At one point I glanced at my watch, grabbed my cell-phone, and dialed your number. You were still at the party. I left a message on your machine. The next day I saw a cab pull up in front of the Chrysler Building. Two adults, two consenting adults, I imagine, got out. He was a good-looking man, she was a good-looking woman. Later, I dropped by the Blue Moon Tavern. I took a seat at the bar. An off-duty cop was explaining to the bartender how to administer a Breathalyzer test. I drank a bourbon on the rocks and watched a plasma-screen TV while listening to the cop and bartender talk shop. I recall that someone had ‘two priors,’ one for cocaine possession, the other for theft of a doctor’s prescription pad. The fourth and fifth fingers were missing from the bartender’s left hand. Imagine, if you will, reducing all your perceptions, ideas, and memories to a single unity. Sometimes I call it ‘nothingness with sparkles,’ other times ‘one-pointedness.’ At a terminal in La Guardia I accomplished it, and I can tell you with certainty the light speaks. As you know, I like the coming and going of airports when I’m not coming or going myself. I watch as liaisons and connections are made and broken. Sitting there, I reached into a jacket pocket, removed a pair of Latex gloves, and thought of a place in the country, a house. Inside, the house was hot and still. The shades were drawn. No one was home. I walked down the hallway to the kitchen. A pie sat cooling on the drain-board. Other notable items included a cut-glass bowl, a lace tablecloth, and the serrated metal edge of a box of tinfoil. In the bedroom the bed was unmade, clothing lay over the backs of chairs, and the end-table was stacked with boating magazines. In the garage were the faint smells of paint, turpentine, and old tobacco smoke. I reached inside a jacket pocket and removed the mini- tape-recorder. I pressed REWIND and waited a few anxious seconds for the tape to return to the beginning. I sat there motionless, while all around me people bustled to get on and off trains, sat there for eight minutes, the time it takes sunlight to reach the Earth, before pressing PLAY. Today I awoke, as the alarm went off, to the squeak of shower faucets being turned on. I might’ve peacefully died in my sleep if it hadn’t been for those several months of disturbing dreams. Later, I went to my favorite cafe for breakfast and relaxed in my favorite corner booth. I thought about our neighbors, the Wintergreens, and their boat with the barnacle- encrusted hull and the day we all wore matching Ray-Bans. The sandwiches, the lemonade, the cookies. It was worse than a high school reunion. The jingle of bells on the cafe door reminded me I had errands to attend to. I left a twenty-percent tip. Standing in line at the post-office window, I told myself it’s me and the present--that’s all it was, will be, or can be. Failure’s not an option. You can do anything you set your mind to, so long as you have faith in your liver. This afternoon I dropped by Tower Records to buy three Muddy Waters CDs. It’s night. I see Orion and the Pleiades. Trash burns in the incinerator. A homeless man suffering from some form of mental illness obsessively repeats the German word wunderbar. I remember the photo being taken, the light spilling from your bedroom window, your thin nightdress. I imagine a bouquet of thirty roses lying on the bed. My love might’ve been conceived there, on that night, but then a shadow crossed before the window, and I was not to be found. Nine single-spaced pages. A manila folder of clippings. Those can strengthen us. Straight ahead: a square room with half a dozen desks. Here is the color-man’s catalogue. Here we sense the reach of the Directing Intelligence. Blindfolded, a woman sits at the center of the room with her profile towards me. I imagine it’s the den of a Russian saint. I imagine the din of V-1 rockets striking at the heart of London. I feel a curious kind of detachment. I reach inside a jacket pocket to remove the key to a safe- deposit box, but I’m reminded I have errands to attend to. The door closes, and I'm gone.

Five Fingers Up

She wasn’t killing time, she was juggling with air: a thirty-something, heavy-set, Slavic-featured woman compulsively flapping her arms up and down. Like so many others, she was summoned here tonight, to this hallowed ground, not as a tourist but as a witness to the reception of a tumultuous era. She was instructed to prepare for any contingency, and as she looked up at the darkening sky, she felt something pressing down on her, numbing her. The force of make-believe, or the plot which had no name, or a lost soul in search of a forgotten address. Her eyes restlessly scanned the monument-speckled horizon in search of an answer. Today was Independence Day, and this was Washington, DC. Candles burned everywhere. Searchlights played over the Mall. Crowds congested the sidewalks. Sloppily dressed street musicians crooned one-hit wonders and oldie-but-goodies like you may be a lover but you ain’t no dancer. The scene was reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. But with one difference: this evening there would be no benefit luncheons, no national health or charity drives. Instead, the Chief Executive of the United States, live on national television, at the foot of the Washington Monument, was to burn a copy of the Constitution as if it were a piece of used toilet paper. For months, thousands of concerned citizens had demanded his resignation, but all for naught. The President’s power was so great, nothing could stem its growth. Flags lined the route of the presidential motorcade. Corporations declared ‘immortal’ also lined that route, as did thousands of angry protesters, many of them holding aloft placards displaying the word ‘PIG,’ which the President read as an abbreviation for ‘Peace In God.’ The President enjoyed this part most, the slow, stately drive through the streets of the capital city of the most detested nation on Earth. No one could see him, yet he could see everyone. He felt safe from insults, eggs, Molotov cocktails, hand grenades, automatic-weapons fire, and land mines. "Life is good," he thought, "my power keeps on growing, nearly spinning out of control, and nothing can touch me. Looks aren’t everything." At 9:30 p.m., to much fanfare and disgust, the President of the United States, Guy Woodhouse, along with Vice President Hermann Schmitz, stepped away from the parked presidential limousine and walked towards the Washington Monument. The President was dressed in his usual loose-fitting, holy-man clothes, his outer robes sporting an intricately embroidered white camel, the White Camel. Around his neck hung Christmas-tree tinsel. A large coterie of advisors, Secret Service personnel, lodge-masters, and assorted zombies followed in his wake. By 10:00 p.m., ‘The Prime-Time Immolation of Our Beloved Rights’ was complete. The most extravagant fireworks show in modern history could now begin, accompanied by a rousing soundtrack that included Neil Diamond’s "America," Celine Dion’s "My Heart Will Go On," and Eric Clapton’s "Wonderful Tonight." The Slavic woman, standing not far from the Museum of Natural History, gazed into the eyes of those who passed and said to herself, "TV, astrology, Jesus, Ahura Mazda, the Hispanic Goatsucker, Satanism--it’s a free country, so let them believe what they want. I used to care, but things have changed." Once upon a time she prayed, but she’d lost that ability too and needed something else to keep her thoughts from slipping into a familiar downward spiral. She removed a souvenir key-ring from her bulky purse and jingled the keys for a moment before replacing it. But the sound did little to cheer her up. "All women are eunuchs," she thought, "because they have no testicles, including me." Tinnitus reverberated through her skull. Overhead, a fireworks explosion ripped across the night sky. She put her hands over her ears and mumbled, "Sky Drive, of course, Sky Drive’s the road out of here, out of this dreadful mess, the road to the heavens." She imagined herself shoeing the rungs of a ladder leading upward. Meanwhile, President Woodhouse had convened an impromptu press conference near the Vietnam War Memorial. A reporter was heard to wisecrack, "Charlie don’t surf!" But no one dared touch upon topics relating to the Wehrmacht or Zyklon B. The President was ‘in a groove,’ as they say, and therefore uninterested in controversy. He fielded few, if any, questions, preferring instead to launch into a complex oratory punctuated throughout by his trademark convulsions of laughter. Important quotes included: "my authority is the crown of order," "military strength and moral clarity," "shaping circumstances until crises emerge," and "meeting threats before they become dire." Like so many others out here tonight, the Slavic woman, standing near the Washington Monument, understood for the first time that no nation, including her own, was exempt from the nonnegotiable demands of liberty, justice, and law. Heavy words those, but the devil lay in the details, not far from the Dakota Building, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Predestined by God? Unquestionably. You had to admire the focus of the President even if he was focused on the proper goal. A plastic soda was one thing, a broken pitcher of beer quite another. A young man passed her wearing a bright red T-shirt with Символический Змей scrawled across the front. Seeing those dreadful Russian words, the Slavic woman sensed her sanity was balanced as delicately as a cue ball at the verge of a side-pocket. Unlike so many others out here tonight, this woman wasn’t looking to get entangled in a ridiculous love triangle. She was happy in her blue tracksuit retrieving twenties from the ATM. She was happy when the microwave beeped and dinner was ready. She was happy handing her video-store rental card to the cashier. Bile rose into her throat. She needed to consider job- hunting. Everywhere she went she tried to picture herself working in that environment, but nothing appealed to her, nothing except standing beside a chocolate display or sucking fiercely at a strawberry daiquiri in a club whose staff dressed in bikinis and swim-wear. She glanced around herself and realized the physical President was gone, escorted away by three Secret-Service bouncers after having danced his way across the commons performing a striptease. "Hey," she thought, "maybe the poor guy isn’t gay after all." But the First Lady remained, showing off her wares in a low-cut dress split to the thigh, as did their two young boys, both hypnotized by a video-game. Knowing how even good people can do very bad things, especially guilt-ridden kleptomaniacs, the Slavic woman began running towards the nearest Secret Service car holding five fingers up. Behind her, people shouted and screamed at the tops of their lungs. A spotlight was turned on the woman, blinding her, accentuating the bags beneath her eyes, the chapped and bitten lips, the smudged mascara lines. "Lux Aeterna" was the last thought to cross her mind. It appeared to be a case of poor marksmanship. Or was it?

Milwaukee Deep

Here was an odd trio: a retired Air Force flight surgeon, a ham-radio operator, and a marine archaeologist. These three men had spent most of their lives on the back streets of Sarasota, Florida, yet every Friday night, when they got together at the flight surgeon’s house for beer and poker, each had unusual stories to tell. The flight surgeon enjoyed recalling the time his aircraft’s instrumentation malfunctioned on an evening flight from Bermuda to Fort Lauderdale, sending him so far off course he was lucky he didn’t run out of fuel. The ham-radio operator mentioned the Cuban ‘numbers stations’ he picked up on short- wave which, he suspected, were sending encrypted instructions to communist spies in North America. And the marine archaeologist bemoaned his many failed attempts to find Spanish treasure galleons off the coast of the Bahamas. Tonight, however, the poker game had to be cut short because the news channels were reporting the appearance of a strange figure at the River Entrance to the Pentagon in Washington, DC. The figure looked humanoid but it didn’t behave that way. Enthralled by the images on TV, the trio wasn’t interested in playing cards, but nothing, not even news of the arrival of a being from outer space, could stem their drinking. The flight surgeon had removed a bottle of Johnny Walker from the piano bench where he kept it hidden from his wife, and the three were taking turns toasting the televised alien. The marine archaeologist said he’d suspected humanity wasn’t alone in the vast cosmos. What he encountered on his dives off the coasts of Puerto Rico and Bimini Island, in some of the deepest waters of the world, was as otherworldly as anything an astronaut might see on the moon. There were underwater limestone caverns where treacherous currents pulled twenty-foot sharks hundreds of miles from their breeding grounds, and ruins of lost civilizations located at such abysmal depths that no man could see them, even in a bathysphere. The ham-radio operator mentioned the hundreds if not thousands of bizarre, unexplainable sounds and noise-patterns he heard during his nightly scans of the short-wave bands. Even white noise revealed, if you knew how to listen for it, aural structure reminiscent of disembodied voices. In his turn, the retired flight surgeon recounted the time, on a routine flight across the Atlantic, his plane became trapped inside an unshakable, greenish fog. The water, the sky, and horizon blended together, and the crew feared for their lives, only to find themselves, ten minutes later, drifting over the Sargasso Sea, hundreds of miles off course. Soon the trio was into their third bottle of whiskey and paying less attention to the TV than to their own overheated imaginations. The ham-radio operator stated--and the other two concurred--that sooner or later all men would do all things and know everything. We would no longer live under the constant threat of gravity and matter. We would transport ourselves to wherever we wanted as quickly as we wanted and then back again, if we wanted. It all came down to what we wanted. By the end of the fourth bottle of whiskey, the ham-radio operator had fallen asleep half-naked on the guestroom bed, while the marine archaeologist and retired flight surgeon were still going strong, not only drinking but eating bacon-lettuce-and- tomato sandwiches. Neither of the remaining two would make it to the end of the fifth bottle, both passing out on the living-room sofa. The following day all three had difficulty convincing friends and family they'd seen an alien on TV.

The Kicks, Man!

1. Tonight I lay awake in bed considering the darkness in a practical sort of way. I was more puzzled than angered by it. This was a dream--I couldn't allow myself to believe otherwise. A victrola grinding away louder and louder, a corridor without exit, a tunnel without end, each door opened, each gate slammed. Yes, I thought, this journey is a dream and an escape from more motel rooms. The individual memories of each blade, each leaf, each flower of the garden. How long had it been since? No? What was happening to my memories? Seduction via Ego & Vanity? An aspirin or something? I reached for my hands to keep my thoughts from moving too swiftly forward, but neither of them was able to pick out useful information. What they showed me couldn’t be true. The utter filth of it. But I had a chance to avoid confrontation along the way, and I’d phone the transportation managers if I had to. Every night I was falling off a bit more deeply, every night gazing at another motel room’s water-stained ceiling. I imagined clouds of soot floating above our nation’s imperial city. Did I dare ask for proper directions? The night was a kind of hypnosis, its regular precision almost military. I imagined an official tour of reconnaissance from the terrace of a penthouse overlooking our nation’s imperial city. Revelations of an irresistible spectacle of large picture-hats beneath striped awnings, cafes of glass-topped tables, crowds on the streets rapidly growing to ‘inaugural’ size. Every night of the journey I lay awake visualizing another detail of the imperial city. I was born and raised and went to college in Detroit. Yet everyone I met on the road was headed towards the same city. The real hip ones hung up on kicks, the ones who made the scene, the ones declared psychiatric 4F--they all knew about the imperial city. What’s out there, I used to ask them, besides leftover prescriptions for one sickness or another? They replied with one word, ‘kicks.’ But I didn’t get it. Most of the places you passed through mainly to get a burger and a shake. The neighboring suburbs were all crazy-quilt. Back then it didn’t make any sense to me. Yet here I was today out on the road, on a journey to our nation’s imperial city. I was the right age, the right height, the right nationality, and I relished the ridiculous. People could marry seventeen times, have Filipino children, employ Iranian house servants. I didn’t care. I figured everybody heads to the Center, including the generals and fat-cat fascists and the defenders of the Theory of Progress. So why not? I dug it all. Clowns! Gypsies! Pirates! I had no family, claimed no friends, kept myself beholden to none. What bond could connect me? The only thing in the world I loved was rock-and-roll music. I didn’t want my life to become a series of evenings with John and Mary. I was manly enough too, even if I did give the impression of a quiet, fat, slow, washed-up, worn-out punk, half mountebank, half wise man, hardly the type to be dangerous to myself and others. My yellow, rabbity front teeth stuck out over my lower lip. My voice was short and clipped, unpleasant to listen to. The last thing you expected from me was lawyer-like formality. But I had enough strength in these gorilla-length arms to lift a keg of nails, and my preferred outfit of off-white corduroy trousers, white jacket, narrow-brimmed hat with a feather in it, and sunglasses complemented my low-key demeanor. With a name like Graham Osbourne, I might’ve been a sexy little Welshman--and I showed it. I proteined up on steak and eggs. I drank a solitary, midday highball. I put a little bourbon in my Coke. How could I not have survived on the road? 2. Nevertheless, a few days later, still on the road, I realized something was happening. My whole massive being was struggling hard against accepting conventional perception, and in some sense I was spending the journey saying good-bye to space & time. I therefore had to move swiftly, even gently--so long as I moved. Luckily I had less baggage to rid myself of than the other guys around here--and I wasn’t about to stop for a half-assed hippie hitchhiker. I pulled over into a shallow ditch and killed the engine. Beyond the windshield the evening was blue and bitter. I gazed off at the desolate vista. The smell of sweat and dog shit was thick in the hot night air. Bloody snot collected in my nostrils. I listened to the hum of a hydroelectric dam half a mile downstream. But nothing was that fucking serious all the time-- though events were turning sour on me. Disruptive Influences. In the last town I was attacked and beaten up badly in the parking lot of a cantina--not so nasty to render me unconscious, and it wouldn’t be in tomorrow’s papers, but sufficient to send me into deep reflection. I recalled the faintest flicker of dull light, swift footsteps behind me, two hooded men jumping from the back of a truck, and the black crash of falling objects, tin cans clattering, glass shattering. Scores of blows were exchanged. The lump on the back of my head throbbed three hours later. Raw pain blocked my throat. But at least I talked them out of clubbing me to death. I was embarrassed they managed to fool me as well as they did. How could anyone think I was greedy beyond my just portion? A screwdriver, some pliers, a fourteen-inch hog knife, and a handgun exhausted the possibilities of my glove compartment, besides which were the two immense boxes of manuscripts in the trunk and the dark green nylon flight bag lying on the front seat beside me. I needed more time to hold down these feelings of violence. I was capable of higher emotion. The main problem was how rapidly my money was running out, and I wasn’t paying anything on those Detroit debts. So as not to forget my obligations, I made stacks of memos to myself and skewering them on a metal paper-spike. I didn’t dare dream of better things for fear of disturbing my precarious luck. Heavy shit all right. My mouth was dry as cotton. I experienced minor attacks of paranoia. Everything before my eyes grabbed the full attention and interest of my stunning mind. Fantastic. An endless river of color, form, and mythological antecedents flowing onward, on and on and on. No way I could remember every detail I saw in those waves. Yet I felt deserted without any great loss. Instead of a gardening job, I was out to save the goddamn planet. In the periodic moments of withdrawal from the immediate, in the medicinal odors, in each case where the secret was breached, death resulted. The Baffling Mystery continued to elude me, its deepest significance obscured by a tangle of more intricate mysteries, the infinitesimal pieces of a dizzying puzzle whose trail I had followed via the Shorter Route across great barren hunks of land. Until I could no longer hear the flow of the garden’s water. Until I became a man stranded without a passport. But the going-backward-in-time thing might work after all. I glanced at my watch. Five minutes past nine. Despite it all, I felt tranquil and justified. Far too late to step aside now, even from a bleeding nose and a delirious face. I imagined a fire smoldering in a sooty fireplace. Then, further beneath, I saw the feeble time of day right before a parade in the gray-shaded world of childhood innocence. I listened to a long series of echoes and thundering street noises. Later, I reached down to roll my trouser legs, and old rock-and-roll songs, the hard-ass-funky ones, began drifting through my mind as I counted out paper currency for exchange at the outermost of the imperial city’s concentric rings of toll booths. I glimpsed artificial light on the horizon. 3. Six hours later I was still whistling, and my stomach felt great. I had arrived. Here was the hope of all life. My dead grandfather, an old man without dentures, would congratulated me on completing the journey. True, gambling was like any other addiction, but this crazy gamble had paid off, and I couldn’t help laughing. The streets of our nation’s imperial city were windy and cold beneath an overcast sky and its relentless sprinkles of rain. Dead stalks cracked underfoot. One twig snapped, then another. I was strolling through the old sections of town. The pavements, footpaths, and roadways were rutted, uneven, thick with shattered bottles. No trees to speak of. All along Old Main Street were the crude frames of timbers and boards, assemblages of boxes, crates, and debris that served as infrastructure for the quickie, production-belt, incongruously-crenellated condominiums interspersed throughout the endless blocks of single-story, red- brick buildings. I noticed a large number of long-handled hoes lying about. Nothing fit together or followed. The hoof and wheel, the mules and hitching posts, the liveried coachmen, the scheduled trains were all forgotten. Yet still included among this urban planner’s hodge-podge were two out-of-business museums, a wooden bridge over a circular stream, pieces of Chinese scenery, gingerbread antiquities, a summer resort frequented by poor Mexicans, several stores selling leather and rubber clothing accessories, tiled tunnels of arrows, spearmint gum machines, and three stagnant canals for emaciated sunbathers whose thin lips were widened by bright red lipstick. Had they replaced the groves of honey locusts with gray rats and starlings? I snickered. Did I dare ask whom? The backwoods folk or the slave-owners or? The tyranny of the majority could be oppressive when it grew beyond the customary-average. You had to be patient, avoid indignation, and show care in consideration of the One Thing. I was in for a disturbing and disquieting experience. My caretakers assured me, however, that I benefited from periodic visits to the imperial city. Its leader was even kind enough to build a gimmick into my head to help me cope. So here I was, entering into a ‘long-range, research-and-critical project,’ technical shorthand for ‘a whole lot of shit’s gonna happen real fast.’ Blood was beating in my templates. I felt a wild, raging uncertainty. It’s going to be existence, I thought, and existence makes me nervous. Yet I understood that a creator must embrace all possibilities. I produced a little red bag from inside my tunic and dangled it over the open ground. Could I be moving so swiftly? I was out of range at the moment. I lacked the gift of stillness. A buoyant impatience tossed me to and fro. I let go with a whoop, and I was off. I had less baggage to rid myself of than the others around here, less historical background, fewer rules and regulations and dietary supplements. My body had recovered from the journey's assault, and the pain was negligible, no worse than a headache diminishing in my skull. My expectant limbs trembled with effort. A blue vein throbbed in my neck. I was thinking hard, and with great cunning I plotted out my brilliant career. The more the merrier. In my fiercely defiant expression were both mystery and revelation. I was on the side of Change now, the Great Show of Unsmiling Severity. This time around I would do it right, playing the role of ‘A Person with Dynamic Initiative.’ No more dull, heedless voices and tight-lipped resignation. My dialogue would be one of communion, the sounds of my words no longer intruding upon their meanings. No more groping for the bedside telephone. I’d be untroubled by dreams. I’d be rich someday, own land and boats, the real goodies of one sort or another. Never would I confuse quality with wealth. And no more dragging around half-dead or rotting skulls on poles about a pit. No despairing acts of rebellion or seeking refuge in numbness. I would be responsive to all forms of public and private assistance, no longer suckered into academic fiddle-faddle, and to avoid getting caught up in the brutality thing, I’d wedge up the leading edge to correct the tilt. I’d eat raw puffins if I had to. No point doing things because other people did them. Kicks, man, you did them for kicks! Mine would be a new song, more melodic than the previous, though still including white meat and gravy, pickled eggs, an occasional scrape of a barstool, and the annual all-night poker game. I was convinced the crisis was over. The good guys had won, and I would die a beautiful death--in that way making up for any shortcomings. All would be merriment once again as I joined the larger circle. My deceased grandfather was proud. Things were as they were, and I was well situated (and relieved no one had witnessed that disturbing scene behind the barn). 4. But this particular evening, little by little, had shaded off into ugly agitation. The people downtown were hurrying off in all directions, their faces hard and inward, many of them ranging through the gap. The shrill sounds of voices funneled towards me--like pigs going berserk at the smell of blood--and piglet-children tugged wildly at the imperial city’s many bell- ropes. It’s going to storm tonight, I thought, and blow a lot of black smoke up some virgin’s chimney. I saw and heard these things with a sort of side-vision. A score of young women in tan dresses and white caps arrayed in a large circle around a great basin of water. A convoy of pickup trucks rattling down the north end of Old Main Street. Brass clappers clanging. The evening smog, faintly luminous, clouded around my aching head. I pushed back my graying dreadlocks, shrugged my loose, heavy shoulders, slowed my pace a bit. My heart shook. Did stagnation await our nation’s imperial city? Entered the dark period of Reconstruction? I suspected the clergy were flat-out degenerate, their pulpit no longer holy, no longer a platform raised above the pews, its labels all scraped off. Force had led to cruelty which now led to ruin. Icons were useful only for firewood. The General Congregation had become an imaginary quantity of old bench-sitters rasping phlegm, and the International Ministry of Religious Cultures’ contemptible annual report should’ve been obliterated, what with its shamelessly fabricated accusations, insults, and slanders, everything plucked out of thin air. The scope of the Ministry’s repentance was infinite, as was the scope of my repugnance for them. But alas, they were not the only ones. Those puking bastards can all kiss my big black ass, I thought. Have any of them listened at the river’s edge? Too damn busy playing with dolls in their backyards. My mind caught at a dozen possibilities, none of which made a damn bit of difference. No bee was there, no white elephants or blue-eyed cats, no touch of the strange freedom from the beehive map of life. One light went on, then another, a third, and so forth, a form of serial illumination that created an artificial dusk. Evil city, boy--and that ain’t nothin’, honey. I moved back against a wall, making two impatient gestures, and lit another cigarette. 5. All of a minute before I noticed where I was. Sparks danced in the air. Jeweled pinpoints of color flared out. Voices rang through an open door. I ducked below the edges of a silk canopy and swaggered into the main dining area, a huge, wide- open, white-paneled space filled with round tables. The walls were hung with imposing oil portraits. I estimated more than a hundred guests, all of them suspiciously done up in their Sunday best, most of them engrossed in important conversations not subject to intrusion. I took off my coat and offered the hostess a vague pretext for my lateness in hopes I wouldn’t be mistaken for an unscrupulous traveler. She guided me to a vacant table setting. I sat down, carefully placing my wallet, car keys, money, cigarette lighter, and penknife onto the table. A cup was brought to me. The waiter drew his chin down, turned his smile in my direction, and dipped a napkin into a ewer of water, thus commencing the rituals of cleansing and purification. When he spoke his voice reached all quarters, yet there was no note, no communication of any kind. Soon his mouth began frothing, his eyes bulging. His lungs gaped for air, dragging it in. His arms shook. I found it difficult to collect my thoughts. I pressed the heels of my hands down harder onto the table, sighed with relief, tried to drink my Scotch-and-soda. For the better part of an hour I sat on the edge of that chair, chain-smoking, holding down the panic. My sarcasm would be lost on these arrogant morons. They took their cues only from other patients. Down went the little pills. 6. Later I noticed the front door was wide open. The dark had driven away the wind and brought forth a familiar world: a gang of quiet madmen with their mistresses lost in the darkness of night. Everyone was with someone else, put there for a purpose, and the liquor had a special quality all its own. The patients warmed and washed their mouths with it. They went cross-eyed over it. They gulped the liquid down till well past midnight. A camel’s stomach holds fifty gallons, a camel in the attitude of sex. The sweat was on them, and like me, they had waited years for some kind of exit. To be wise and very crazy: how every night we lose at least eight hours of our lives. I shook my bed until the windows rattled. There was no pillow! I ran a finger around the front of my collar. I snickered. I had remained silent for the entire duration of the journey, unlike most of the other patients whose tragedies were unspeakable with only music remaining, the melody of unfinished music lingering. Shock treatment? At the twilight border between sleep and waking I encountered memories of an immaculately clean room in a Detroit psychiatric ward, a building with a modest marquee and a doorman, no curtains, rugs, or ornaments. None of the objects was much larger than an ordinary chair. The sovereign state of a clinician’s world minus the making of the Stepford Wives. Hah! I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the journey, but my mind was never on it either. I was anathema and forbidden in the nation’s imperial city, returning home to Detroit to find the ward empty and no explanation for a black Buick station wagon parked outside my cell’s window. 7. In that night's dream, seven pine beams were set into the earth to serve as steps to a strange assortment of titles, 'searching vivid accounts,' according to one blurb. (Back then hippies loved naming things.) I approached one of the racks, took down a sketchbook, paged through it. Literary expressions whizzed and whirled about me with great speed and confusion, swirls of leaping forms and suggestive symbolism, the most inspiring definitions, including ESP-type cosmic messages. I glimpsed manifold images far beyond mankind to paint or scarcely dream, and aspects of a process eternally in train. Here were the latest editions of 'cool ideas for kicks.'

On Whitcomb Street

1. Although the commonsense view of things was beginning to prevail--the deformity had faded, leaving behind it the inklings of grace--psychological forces were yet in pursuit of the game, and as a result, the workers would have to crack a lot more heads tonight, this time over commercial relations with the Russian Empire. These were the young embassy workers, the ones with slack lips, tonight in their usual ‘hotel routine’ of drinking hot coffee and smoking cigars. Boredom gone, stirring nervously, resistant to torture, smoke hanging about them and cloaking their movements, these veritable cranks were obsessed with neatness and order, their eyes drinking it in, coiling themselves up, rolling heads and heals along the ground--‘leapfrogging the tombstones’- -moving so close to the streets and through the darkened alleyways. The most dangerous gang in Hollywood, with a bizarre taste for underground followers as well. Tonight a visit to Whitcomb Street--get the hell out if it looks bad!--and its desperate people in doorways, the gloriously tired, the colorless and haggard, the frisky and hungry, and those shamelessly begging for brandy. The message here was one of victory over humanism. Beneath the whine of gears a-changing, the noise of strain and grinding, no one could any longer hear the birds behind the big glass doors. Water-tight panes of real glass. The root of it all: distraction. Windows displayed in flesh tint. No one got properly aggrieved anymore. Scurried about like hungry mice . . . and was gone--half-filled with rotting leaves--stranding us in the lethargic non-awareness of a sleeping mind. (Exams were scheduled for every Sunday morning.) Gray and brown, gaunt and bent, we spent the evenings in our Christmas games-- while the collective view-screen flickered above the two spinning wheels of objectivity. The main problem tonight was finding a safe, comfortable place to drink, the trick being to get past the drunken stage, to make it over the border--pockets filled with homemade bombs, ‘nice little balls of butter,’ some sprouts too and the black collar round the corpse’s neck. The next day coming home plastered with blood and feathers. Go and die quickly--that’s your job! 2. The ones who loitered on Whitcomb Street wore gold chains around their heads. Big blazes were set on altar stones placed every other block along Whitcomb Street, where the storekeepers agreed to wear those wide-brimmed, oddly-shaped hats (which served to identify them as Whitcomb Street merchants). A cushy job in a liquor store, repair shops, radio stations, fuel-storage tanks, a swimming pool, a bar, a soda fountain. Detectives slumped against police cars and vans. Private bodyguards. Shoeless white-faced kids screaming. A bottle shattered on the curb. While none of the disconsolate passersby appeared to notice, on early autumn nights like this, Whitcomb Street shone brightly beneath the arc-lamps, its endless rows of unwashed five-story condo units offering gilt- edged views onto other worlds. Yet something ominous in the faces of the guests . . . several degrees beyond reproof . . . a feeling of unreality-- government believed them dead? A small girl in the background- -so that day had come, the last stage reached. To be forced to choose was no longer to choose at all, and despite all rejections and refusals, the Whitcombers had shed their clothes in hectic abandon. A dreadful fight, and much abuse. Easily valued, easily moved, easily disposed of, each absorbed in his own thoughts, saying to himself the dirtiest imaginable things. The cops, never ones to overlook minor acts like stains in the carpet or grease on the stove, were exhausted and resorting to guns more often. Lots of ‘unexpurgated evil’ to sort out (blue was the color of intellect: necessary to be dogmatic on those points and insist on going to the sources of information). Covered them up with a brown tarp before the calculations began. It had been a summer associated with the sounds of gunshot and rain running off leaves, ‘an orange jelly mixed with glass,’ the growth of a collective hallucination, a blast of hate, the idiot chain of life. But take a deep breath and let it out slowly, and all would die away in a few years, no worry about that. Taken their land, seduced their wives, a hole cut for the expressway through their bowels. Next spring, dead flesh, and the morning, morning, mornings . . . eat, job, vague plans to build a shelter becoming thirty whole years swept away. Fucking unbelievable. Two men had planted the cross, a third climbing aboard loaded with fruit coming to ripeness--but answered with a blowtorch. Who had nailed Christ’s hands to his feet? What had become of the undisturbed enjoyment of a book and a cigar or a gentleman in a frock coat or brick colonial houses with granite foundations or china-globed lamps or enormous oil portraits hung high on the walls or an afternoon spent plaiting palm fronds? Where were the rosette and the fleur-de-lis? Leaving the rest of us behind with the plastic wheelbarrow, the watering pot, the disc-jockey format, old coined money, pictures made in China and Japan, show tunes from Broadway hits of the last decade, and everything else that happened a thousand years ago, wrought-iron bedsteads, carved wooden chests, straw chairs, mothballs, long- deserted formal gardens, baskets and people, and that darned old admission fee. One theory was that a trade had developed, as it will when there’s a demand, and a criminal had made off with the goodies to the trading ports of the Baltic. (The work-sounds of the storekeepers again.) Caught sight of a blind man walking a plank blindfolded. Outside is a whore and a beggar. How life played its little jokes indiscriminately--until the temperature dropped one moonless autumn night, the lights wavering before dying out. It had grown dark at once! Deep olive shadows, and in a far corner of one of those crowded cafes… 3. An enormous shape in a white nightshirt, he was the fanciest of criminals, delighted with himself and without a hitch in his memory, yet also a man who did not wish to be amused all the time--and one to keep the appointment of ‘knife into the chest.’ His name was Phillip Clayborough. Feeling free and clean and strong, breathing in tonight’s cool air, he was content to sit in the shade and pass the time with songs and revelry and ceiling- high TV sets. A little rice and flour and tinned beef, coleslaw and French fries, the remains of a rabbit, pure 'charcoal appetite,' old dirt, smudged body oil, and liquor was but a shadow in his memory. (It was past six-o’clock, so the state liquor stores were closed.) A dry wistful air hung about this Whitcomb Street café. The place was jammed with clocks, polished chairs, and tables-- from France, or Belgium? A few poles leaned against an unused stovepipe. The signs were stark, and time was rushing right by Clayborough, so he took advantage of it. This was the time. He closed his eyes, knotted his hands behind his head, and leaned back in the chair, looking up at the bright red ceiling of his eyelids. He picked out a ‘thought scrap’ (anything besides blank white paper) and repeated prayers from the Catholic church (the ways inside the garden wood). He glimpsed the altar stone, bare and solid. The evening star was out as well. Both happy and melancholy, with an appreciative smile lighting up his face, Clayborough felt no resentment at having to be alive. He was calm and at peace with himself for the first time in weeks. A matter of petunias? He laughed. A ripple on a rain- swept stream. Or was it a reflex more than anything else that drove the more immediate problems from his mind? What was happening to the wildlife in Europe and why should he feel guilty about it? A corps of robots might emerge from the shadows, but the sounds in his head remained the Devil’s. Clayborough would have his own money, be his own master, by God, doing a man’s job without thinking of other people. How a ‘boy who sleeps in trees’ becomes a ‘man brooding in the moonlight on a coral reef’- -and the cup between his legs had an altogether benign effect. Tonight required caution since the cops were marching along Whitcomb Street, their rifles slung at ease, military bearing, clipped military manner. A top-flight task force. A bit of tear gas in the air to greet the few last-minute arrivals. Trying to send Clayborough’s blasphemous ass up to San Quentin? Mysterious Day Six approached. Must lay in a good supply of plastic cups and glasses. 4. The fact of her running was sufficient in and of itself. A cry for help was the other joke. The gate had changed. The previous name of Belinda Faith’s kept lover was Phillip Clayborough. A head of black volcanic stone with borders of shell and coral fragments, a complexion the lime of burnt coral. Clayborough's skin took on a curious transparency beneath Whitcomb Street’s artificial lights. What was his real hair color? Bought himself a new color TV? It was his head, always had been, always would be. Radiant shoulders gleaming. Blowing a conch-shell trumpet. That was the first time his strange smile floated towards her, above the heads of those who bore him gladly. Such expressive eyes aglow with Greed, the Power, and the Glory. A long nose, a sharp chin, a hatband of shadow across that wide forehead. A rough, hearty creature. A bit twisted too. Good breeding. Belinda admired the man, and she invited him up to her rooms of bullet-shattered walls in the rear of a church opposite the aisle, where they watched it turn milky as she added the water. Coconuts and fish, and other holes of a suspicious nature. The ugly roar of wind and rain against the windowpanes, rising in pitch to a hysterical, unbearable whine. She felt at his neck for the throb of arteries--an accurate judo chop to the left ear. Stop their trembling? Clayborough’s heavy, excited wheezing. He took her high into the mountain meadows. The elaborate ceremony of it all. Her legs limp and loose as willow branches, the nice swell of her hips, teeth so perfect. That bitch had ‘two paws over the threshold,’ and Clayborough was whispering something about a knife and clothesline rope. 5. A good suggestion that made sense to Clayborough at the time: an evening journey to the Outer Regions, where the double rows of machines faced each other across factory sites and suburban real-estate projects. The land of the little eyeless fish. Not a thicket exactly. Over the past week Clayborough’s face had turned dark and common (though the eyes still radiated a characteristically bland sort of self-confidence). The mind behind that face was preoccupied too, with some anger in those preoccupations and overwhelming sadness. The little pitfalls and despairs, the stones and ruts that fate had laid in his path. The third day of the ‘thaw’ and neither was content to sit in cafes and sip hot chocolate. 'A double portion sliced from either side' was how Belinda summed up their failing relationship. The situation was ignoble. Trying to block me out of your life! A tenuous promise, and much too ashamed to admit he was not sufficiently emancipated mentally. Yet she was the only woman capable of helping the man, so she made the effort. Clayborough's health was impaired, his imagination diseased. Still Belinda snatched at hope. Let the ends try the man, she thought, and I’ll call him on his crimes, beat his bottom with a Bible. In a good man it'll be grand. Belinda grabbed Clayborough’s arm. “Let’s go!” she said. He threw the car into reverse, recklessly backing out of an acre of asphalt-covered meadowland into oncoming traffic on Whitcomb Street. So much for the horse-and-buggy stage. Drab, colorless squad cars moved slowly along. Other things too. An electric shock hurling a pedestrian to the ground. Outdoor speakers blaring the National Guard’s trademark grenades-and- gelignite propaganda. Refuse strewn about. Moments of ‘dramatic social disorganization,’ the chance grouping of masses. Neighborhood crowds clumsily gathered on sidewalks, dragging their steps as if through quicksand. A nice little pile, forty of them and one policeman. Over the years Belinda had befriended many of the Whitcombers. She felt their anger and pain, their resentment of private ownership, and she knew how the cops invaded their turf to ambush them. Noble victims in a hopeless war. Nights on Whitcomb Street went that way, and though the slum portions of the ghetto ended several blocks to the north, there was still a bit of 'bleed-over,' a touch of mold on the upper crust. Where were the scents of a home-baked loaf of bread? Wedding suppers served on a cart. Belinda giggled. A payment for what Clayborough had done to her? God forgive me. The moon shone eerie and unfamiliar through the windshield. The color of ancient alligator skin. The sun had set, pouring its splendor over the other side of the mountains. A good evening for a drive to the deserted countryside, way out, as far as the fueling depots for the long-range bombers. “It’ll be dark when we get there,” Belinda said. Clayborough remained silent. She didn't turn around to look, but her face flushed when she felt the vibrations of her own speech through the car upholstery. 6. Clayborough’s army blanket was spread out beneath a tree, with a couple empty brown bags on the grass nearby. Total darkness had replaced the lights of Whitcomb Street, the moist earth had a very nice odor, and an odd silence stretched outward (though regularly interrupted by great black cop cars gliding by). The way Belinda saw it, Clayborough had betrayed his beliefs to save a certain sensibility. She studied him in the glow of the cigarette lighter. He looked anxious and battered. Facial objects were not in their proper places. Clayborough was ‘barely on this side of the border,’ which wasn’t a bad state to be in: California. 7. Down inside the big car trunk with its big lock, Clayborough lay fetal-like in a contoured pouch, the sole possession of an empty compartment, and thus that Belinda Faith would speak to him for the last time. Clayborough’s thoughts were disagreeable, plump and yellow, substances better lived underground. The throb in his groin, a trickle of blood down his elbow, eyes tight with sleep. Could he take his heart out and put it in her hands?--but a paralyzing dread mastered him, uneasiness lodged in his brain. A letdown had come after that long period of tension. Light was screened over the seaward side, ebbed gently from his body, with no time to operate over terrain he knew nothing about. Yet he was confident of escape, and pleasure lit his face as his mind returned to work. He slumped into himself, drifting backwards, further and further into uninterrupted sleep, fluttering over trees, skimming over hollows--the gradual shaping of a hundred details--before his mind flashed back to a land and the burning sign of his old shepherd dog out in the wild. He spent his boyhood on a farm in Michigan, though there was something courtly and Old World about him. Puffed thoughtfully on those long cigars. Triumphant smiles. The optical illusion of talking to himself. Never used his baptismal name, didn’t have to. Clayborough felt his blood draining, and fear wasn’t enough. He’d heard about deathbed repentance scenes and good lives ending without hope--Americans were mad about them. And now? “Slow death,” Belinda said, loud enough for Clayborough to hear through the walls of the trunk, “because you had to drink yourself sober, you fucking bastard!”

Potential Trouble Source

Forward-deployed? Then notify Granny’s Koran: religion is God’s biggest problem. Confederate gray? Okay. Tonight we’ll wander the streets and note the qualities of people. Over there, on the corner, stands an outspoken figure with no luggage. Over here, the Prince of Darkness (a gentleman in the truest sense of the word) blocks the moonlight. What is true, is true for Him-- though His body is a burden and He wants out of here. A renegade Buddhist bent on destroying de$ire? Or a worst-case scenario: a man code-named Ras Tanura whose life is a repudiation of alcohol, a man dedicated to all who do not wish to live and yet continue to do so because they cannot imagine a more feasible alternative. Enter Walcott Farquarson. Walcott knows his way around the neighborhood. He drives a white, featureless, Orwellian Econoline van. Behind the wheel, he wears a headset-microphone. He speaks rapidly into the mouthpiece (to whom we cannot say). Walcott is a good driver. He’s well-rested, alert at all times, and familiar with his vehicle. He has a clear sense of mission. He might work for General Dynamics. Today is Wednesday, Professional Secretaries Day. The neighborhood is unusually quiet. Walcott’s cell phone indicates NO SERVICE. Odd. Very odd. Yesterday he completed filling out a Nielsen Ratings TV Viewing Diary. Today he’s returning it, via mail, to the media-research company’s Florida headquarters. Walcott parks the van across the street from the post office and steps out onto the sidewalk, only to be run down by a boy on Rollerblades who sports more than a dozen facial piercings. Odd. Very odd. The line at the window to buy stamps is long. The man in front of Walcott clutches a grease-spotted container of carryout chicken. The woman behind him compulsively clears her throat. The wrinkled clerk at the window takes his time too, engaging each customer in small-talk. He says he needs to find someone to clean the gutters out and that last weekend he saw genuine Nazi decorations hung in a neighbor’s basement, and yes, his only son Gerry works as a chemist for a cosmetics company. Most disturbing of all is how the clerk sends each customer on his way not with ‘thank you’ or ‘good-bye’ but with ‘au revoir.’ Driving home now, Walcott imagines it’s a bright day over the North Atlantic. Advertisers are busy engineering desire into the psyches of the populace, while bankers dream up ways to alleviate that desire through cheap consumer credit. They do it all for you. At home, in the kitchen, Walcott eats a dinner of Pop- Tarts and Mountain Dew and watches television. Here is a cautionary tale about a man who got drunk and drove into a freeway abutment. There is a report on a highly infectious skin disease making its rounds in the San Jose Correctional Facility. Here is a retrospective on a protest march against the Vietnam War. There is a network version of the Hollywood film, The Perfect Storm. Walcott isn’t a great dancer. He also has secrets he needs to share. But with whom? Here’s a problem--or maybe not. Maybe his secretive personality serves a broader social purpose by activating other people’s imaginations, inducing them to question this strange man’s motives. (Paranoia is a lucrative form of entertainment.) Walcott prefers to pass the days lost in recollection. The memories are plenteous, going back to earliest childhood: an electric train whizzing around the base of a Christmas tree, a rabbit’s-foot keychain, Mother baking a batch of gingerbread cookies, a boat ride around Manhattan Island, the Boston Public Garden. It was a regular conflagration! Walcott’s late wife was a Daughter of the American Revolution. She used to prepare cream-cheese-and-jam sandwiches and afterwards vacuum up the crumbs she’d inadvertently ground into the carpet. She made certain Walcott never became the kind of man to bring his appointment-book to a picnic or blather on and on about the wedding of John Kennedy and Carolyn Besette. In the bedroom this evening a Raggedy Ann doll grins diabolically from the carpet. On the desk are dozens of never- read software instruction manuals and an old computer terminal displaying the Blue Screen of Death. The bathroom is warm and soapy-smelling. Chianti-bottle candlesticks are arrayed around the large bathtub. Walcott disrobes. In the mirror, the texture of his skin resembles a dried-up locust shell. Each night before bathing, as a sort of magical spell against further decrepitude, he mumbles the Miranda warning to himself. But as he eases himself into the bathtub tonight, Walcott realizes his worst fear is coming true--blindness. He closes his eyes. He’ll learn to savor this darkness. He’ll also have to be brave and show plenty of balls and adolescent attitude. Walcott has a plan. He imagines the killer is a neurotic loner with nicotine-stained teeth who drives a Crown Victoria and keeps a large cache of automatic weapons in the trunk. He compulsively masturbates into scrunched-up napkins. But he isn’t the only child of a divorced mother. Besides, truth has no temporal duration or physical extension. It cannot be measured or perceived within this universe. The following morning, Walcott puts booze in the blender and starts humming a song from 1962. The neurotic killer will be code-named Hassan I Sabbah in honor of the inventor of ‘robot assassins.’ He will be a master of numerical pattern recognition. He will live in an inexpressibly beautiful world conditioned by nominalism + solipsism. Потрясающий. Он был в полным отпаде. His is a world of pure perception, of cinema, a world peopled by the likes of Naomi Watts, Jennifer Connelly, Edward Norton, and Benicio Del Torro. Why can't audiences use their imaginations properly. Why are they so easily impressed by melodrama? Here is a NO SMOKING sign. Over there, a drawing held to the refrigerator by magnets. Walcott returns to the road. Soon he'll be home. Meanwhile, the neurotic killer pushes his way through the tourist- clogged streets towards the language-arts building. Walcott’s kitchen is stocked with the four basic food groups, Fruit Loops, Twinkies, cold beer, and frozen pizza. On the TV, a sports announcer peels the paper sleeve from a straw before inserting it into a vanilla milkshake. Rock Hudson dances with Fred Astaire across the floor of an antebellum plantation house. A little boy reads by the glow of a Batman night-light. And the neurotic killer wears a Speedo swimsuit beneath an overhanging belly. Walcott is distracted by the scratching of a rose briar against the kitchen window. Here’s a potential trouble source. But the neurotic killer manages to refill Walcott’s coffee cup. He’s a nice-looking man, in the Cancer-Society-leaflet sense of those words. He isn’t wheelchair-bound or addicted to pills. He was once photographed exiting a cathedral. Walcott spends the afternoon watching himself sleep, while the neurotic killer peels a yellow-and-blue sticker from a banana. Upon waking, Walcott returns to the kitchen. Fries or slaw? Neither. But one last sardine remains in the tin. Walcott lunges for it.

The Promenade

So it was true. She was seeing a lot of new men lately, and her reference point had shifted as a result. I knew it all too well, how invariably our reactions to people and situations told us and everyone else more about our surroundings than about ourselves . . . and about that to which our thoughts will lead. So let the onlookers crush themselves to death beneath the wheels of progress. Returning from a party, the two of us strolled along the Venice boardwalk. The best restaurants out here--where were they? One to promote individuality, I encouraged my friends to be responsible for themselves and for the people who weren’t tough enough to lay it down firmly. Here, by the roadsides, the boulevards, this promenade. Yeah, I thought, Remi would set us back a hundred bucks for dinner, but I’m paying for us both, so let's look for something cheaper. Try it at $10. Venice Beach was a short drive from Santa Monica, but the two of us were hoofing it. The evening would take a bit longer. “I got it!” I said, “Benita’s Frites!” And off we went. I imagined the food topped with my choice of two dozen dips. The evening was looking up. “All the crazies out here-- none of them stops thinking about what they want or how they might come across it,” I said. --And here we were, discussing what we felt like eating for dinner. Did either of us have a single experience or idea that existed solely within our own frame of deeply founded reference? I figured nothing would break down in the end, though nutcases might vandalize the utility plants to ensure their own predictions of apocalypse. All cultures shared the same universals, much like Shiva was the name of the destroyer god of the Hindus and the name of the Jews' mourning period. A reason existed for this evening and every other like it in the past, the future, and whatever was caught in between--though each time around history became the same study of widespread disaster and civil chaos. "Yeah," I said, "this is what we mean by human interaction. We’ve learned the hard way that only deep down inside us is the Real Reason we keep silent about it." So many of the tourists out here were strolling along the promenade with paper cones full of French fries that it made the rest of us feel bad about ourselves. Who were these tourists? Ah, here were some regulars getting the last race from Del Mar on a portable radio and exchanging bets and payoffs, and over there a couple teens smoking cigarettes in the flicker of their flashlights. The promenade served as a long dining table for the sidewalk cafés. And who didn’t enjoy drinking bad coffee from 1950’s- style machines and browsing the used bookstores? At least try to make a difference, but who was responding to our overtures? Well, maybe after we accumulated some meaningful experience. Look at that!--a table of 25 guests (young film-actor types) covered with the finest crystal, silver, and glass a cheapo production outfit could buy. The noisy boulevard over there, here the promenade. A three-block mall of jacaranda trees and assorted topiary. What kind of salary could afford to live in these parts? Technical problems appeared. I was strolling with the one woman at the party who sat across from me at the table in total silence. Were we on our way to my place or hers? I laughed. This is when part of the world is destroyed, I thought . . . and a few schizophrenics out here tonight--though rather than Vietnam, I blamed their condition on dopamine imbalances in the brain. Someone at the party told me this woman had a reputation for sleeping around, and I remembered the young boy who was with her who suffered from a group of psychotic disorders characterized by a general withdrawal from reality. He was 'naturally stoned,' as he put it. Who hasn’t entertained angry thoughts? Yet the clinicians tell us a summary refusal of society is caused by defects in the frontal lobe. Why not go further and postulate an underlying genetic cause? I remembered how strongly I wanted to strike that young boy--to test his impulse- control. Later, at the same party, the woman and I sat together on a sofa and filled in the lost years. As we talked I realized how bad my life had been, incorrectly lived, poorly thought out. I recalled how my deceased father used to walk so sluggishly, how he over- thought the most trivial things. It took him a two hours to consider installing a telephone in our house. Would it be a red phone or black or? I noticed how strange the woman smelled. Not bad, strange. What did the scent put me in mind of? Did she taste strange? She was one of California’s last, but something inside me sank. Depression is a large and powerful beast--no, more like a cage impossible to escape from, an iron cage. If you weren’t careful, it became a way of life, and you crept around your dim apartment mumbling things like “I haven’t seen hope in a long, long time.” No more pipe-dreams, developing illogical thought patterns, delusions, hallucinations, and varying degrees of other emotional, behavioral, and intellectual disturbances cropping up time and again. No escape from the fact that every action received an equal or greater reaction. Nevertheless, I thought this young woman could charm us all to death with that beautiful smile and coy attitude. And though dusk was settling over the city, I sensed lunchtime instead, which meant pizza, take-out pizza from Wolfgang Puck Express. The intersection ahead was flanked by gas stations and a Burger King. When we were young, my friends and I hopped the fences to get at romance. Attached to the world-at-large. Traveling up the coast by bus, flopping out in bus stations for a Coke and candy. But if life had lots to teach me, I had a long way to go, since the main thing I’d learned was that if I wasn’t careful I could spend the rest of my 'young adulthood' (a horrible oxymoron invented by a feckless high-school counselor) in the office of a mini used-car lot--and across the street a used-car lot appeared. Was there another kind of hope? Slivers of light in the darkness. Peering through the cracks of a locked room. A rundown, out-of-business Texaco station, my old teenage hangout. Where would my friends and I meet today? Brightly painted sidewalks, flowerbeds where the gas pumps once stood. Nothing concrete (I enjoyed the pun) could hide what once was there. A sampling from the distant past, precinct reports coming in. The Kennedys gathered at a restaurant decorated with images of food and a dancing bull. More detailed glimpses--of the senator and his wife spending the night and the next day at John Frankenheimer’s beach-house in Malibu with six of their children. Did they realize who they were, their dreams, the way hope could slip through the cracks? Our world sealed from the outside, and if I were you I wouldn’t try reopening it. The following day, June 4, was a day off until late afternoon, and the last full day of his life. The senator slept late, had lunch, then took to the chilly beach with the kids. I'd seen Karma work in my own life many times (I laughed), even during lunchtimes. Right now I watched a nude woman plunge into the waves of the Pacific--pulled down by the undertow. My wicked dreams. Senator Kennedy’s current incarnation was some kind of Mexican fast-food outlet. Inanimate. I caught a glimpse of my companion's pale tummy. Sleeves and pant-legs fashionably turned up at the hems, a black faux-fur vest worn over a tiny white T-shirt, the outline of her nipples visible through the fabric. Her sunglasses had Gucci written all over them. Could she see where she was going? A second woman dove into the ocean off the pier. Was that allowed? When she came to the surface she had a boy in her arms. “Look, everyone, I have found this!” Several guests joined in a sidewalk party game, showing their palms to an important-looking black man who interpreted their life-lines and heart-lines. Another man was trying to use the pay phone outside Pizza Land. It’s simple, I thought, you hold it in your hand, press it against your mouth, and talk--but the man was having difficulty since he hadn’t noticed an Out of Order sign near the phone. All you have to do is wish, and the world becomes your canvas. A Rastafarian character, eyes bloodshot, mouth immobile, wrapped his large hands around a lighter to protect the flame from a breeze and lit up a joint. I tasted the smoke, and it was my destiny-line. Up ahead, a door stood open, the sign above it like a purple bruise on a fighter's forehead. And that evening Kennedy returned to the hotel shortly after 7 p.m., turned on a TV to see what awaited him in the ballroom and in the poorly lit kitchen. Further down the street a little girl in a school uniform opened the front door and, craning my neck to get a better view, I saw she was speaking into a cordless phone. As we passed I repressed a desire to wave or shout “Good evening.” Her father pulled her inside and closed the door. The woman and I crossed at the light and turned right. The air was sweeter over here. Before making an appearance in the ballroom, Kennedy returned to his Royal Suite accommodations. His staff were gathered there with privileged reporters and other hangers-on. Here were several TV and radio stores. Divisions were involved in everything, from the most basic cell divisions right up to reproduction, divisions fundamental to human existence. Warmth building in the back of my throat, and I passed it off to one of the guys on either side of us. Who was my dual? The one who saw how integral the divisions were, leading me onward along the way. I wanted to tell the young woman at my side she was one of People magazine’s 50 Most Beautiful People in the World, but she was busy with a fistful of popcorn. I inhaled deeply as we strolled, experiencing a pleasant and abundant air, and the right rhythm if I paid attention to the breaths, counting them like one of the First People in the World. Several more structures out here, and beside one of them the burnt-out shell of an old Burger King and a service-station attendant talking with food stuck in his mouth. This was where the hookers and pimps hung out. 'Crack' was what they understood. The canvas covering all media from the beginning of being and knowing all the way to the omniscience of our gods, and when you composed lyrics for the scene, a melody flowed right along. People out here playing craps, betting, laughing and jeering. A fight broke out across the street. Nothing major. To create and oversee the map of space-time constructs, I imagined the possibilities were endless. A literature of infinite permutation, and inside LA was the End, and the reader had to find it. Mine was the life of Joanie and Chachie glancing at the words surrounding them, with schizophrenia illuminating the sense by which a lunatic mind divided time. So many dealers out here selling openly. Money changing hands in wads. Groups of men. The woman with me, she was deaf--not that it mattered. I could lip-read. Catching all the newspaper interviews was impossible for me, while the reporters kept track of the schedules that gave meaning to the passage of time. Then there was the science of consciousness. Someone made laws and categories for colors, sounds, and how to put pictures in between them. In the end, no matter how you approached it, the text became static. Whatever you did, the text was immobile.That was all. Forever and ever. Amen. A group on the sidewalk scattered, and I felt vulnerable in our physical and moral world. Schisms. If only to overthrow the obsolete forms of the Real World on the printed page to make it read pretty. Yet the reader was limited by what she imported into that world, with electronics conveying whatever she wished through more than words. My mind was moving. Here was a vacant lot providing access to the storm drains and other adventures. A complex of concrete buildings selling rented storage space ringed with fences and barbed wire. The young woman and I stopped at a coffee shop. I was tired. I stared blankly into the coffee cup for several minutes, hypnotized by the steam. There were other subjects to think about, but later. I was the wireless right now. I laughed looking out the window. Were all the manhole covers properly in place? I felt this way in the summer. I needed two weeks of vacation to pack it all into my head. Summer evenings. Did I have the patience to create another literary masterpiece? Content, words, meaning--those were most delicious. Prolonging each day, sipping cool drinks, chatting, rocking on the porch. What god- awful, warm-smelling, cricket-chirping, watermelon-filled memories! I felt free sitting on this stool here, savoring the coffee. I wasn’t following any old man’s advice. Look around. The Formica-topped booths with torn leatherette benches and the vintage 1950’s-era Wurlitzer. Nostalgic reproductions. All of it rising up and vanishing into thin air. My mind was bursting with fanciful thoughts while a secret sickness ate away at my schizophrenic sensibility. The perpetuation of an evil, and behind it all, an exaltation of daily existence. The grind. Knowing as Being-Real. The sickness of a failed schizophrenic was otherworldly, tangential to the language commonly articulated. I was talking about the world. The jukebox played Del Shannon. I noticed a flickering in the fluorescent lights. Yes, I thought, like everything else in these parts--in need of replacement. Maybe Del Shannon would sing more about it on the next record. The kaleidoscopic patterns on the ceiling called out to me, disconnecting me more and more from the reality of this body, and I wanted it that way, called it 'cultivation.' Most of the pedestrians out there weren't privileged enough to feel it.. Kids splashing water outside . . . introspection keeping me from registering--until I looked up and saw the young woman was gone! I returned to the sidewalk, but she was nowhere to be found. A few more theories on reality, and one of them was simple--that reality existed in my head, and if I destroyed myself, I destroyed the playing world. I saw a little girl on the opposite side of the street. Or maybe what I saw was myself, my dual, a little girl on the other side of the street who was an identical twin. Steel fences. Not the kind of place where you basked in the cocoa-butter sun. No one in these parts had a care in the world. Like being alone in an airplane with three islanders returning from an atoll. Further along, the old baseball dugout hadn’t changed over the years, and beyond that, the park, and coming from a distance, the soundtrack for the end of all time. If the reader's reality were the same as mine she'd be in trouble--though when I died the whole wide world would come to a close. I contemplated testing that theory, but I’d never know till it all came out in the wash at the end. It worked for everyone. I was willing to face that fact, and if it made me special, include me in it. There were more important things to deal with now. Above me, an old DC-3 banked for an approach to an airfield. I saw it up there. Down below, the park had a lake. Young kids dunking each other, screaming, laughing. Out here an evil existed called 'good,' 'the horror of living in denial of effective reproduction.' Up the street, gun shots. I imagined the reports. A gang member fired indiscriminately at rival gang members killing one and wounding two. A rusty chain-link fence wrapped around a ball park. A Coke machine nearby. Who was responsible for the maintenance of our societal ideals, both were and were not responsible for the sickness of which I spoke to myself in this tale? I was jet-lagged. Forgotten what day it was. I removed the earplugs--I wore them when I walked around LA--and cleaned off the ear wax. In my pocket, a packet of Lipton soup I stashed there one morning last week. I needed a vacation, a coral ring, a reef studded with coconut palms. Here was an overdressed black woman who had strayed too far from her neighborhood. She was rooting around in a voluminous green suede Kate Spade carry-all. For what? Unearthing something--that we're all infected. And guess what, there's no cure, lady. I was breaking on into the distance. A vacation. I needed a vacation, a lagoon deep blue-green and tranquil. Invite that black woman along. I’d mention it to my boss. A wanted-poster stapled to a wooden pole. He fled the area, wasn't seen since. An advertisement. 'With our professional staff, our modern facilities and our alliance with many other fine…' I could be angry too. A vacation, forty miles long and twenty miles wide, four times as big as Lake Tahoe. In a convenience store parking lot I watched it develop. The rival gangs were having a verbal dispute and displaying gang signs. A gang member pulled out a 9mm handgun like the one I owned. To fall in love on summer vacation. Cool blue water. Who were their equipment suppliers, and where were the resources for analysis? Here and there in these backyards. I knew somewhere in this world they still flew DC-3’s. Up the back steps of the store. Turned my back against the sun. One of the homeless guys hidden back there had a monster-sized pack hoisted over his shoulder. Asking for old clothes and a used tablecloth. The homeless were increasing their requirements. Soon they’d develop layouts and integrate equipment into efficiently run businesses with obligations to no one. I wanted to return to the winds along the Venice and Santa Monica Beaches. My good friend worked there, with his bike rental stand at the entrance to the main beach parking areas. More failed reproduction systems. And whether you needed a custom drilling machine, a standard panel-saw, or an entire rough mill, someone out here had the solution. A young girl on a nearby porch picked at a plate of melon, apple, pineapple and banana slices. She ignored the sections of skin. Her father peering out the front window was naked. Those types slept in boxer shorts. Sweat pooled in the center of my chest. I imagined the air in that house was stuffy and smelled of sweat and sex. The young girl's father turned, his face becoming silhouetted--and there he was, outside in his boxers, opening the squeaky gate, clumping towards me. I moved on and imagined the little girl’s mother was once young and beautiful when her strawberry blonde hair tossed in the breeze. Then I turned around, decided to return to Venice Beach. Nothing in this direction. I imagined what the family's life became. After breakfast they played on the shores of a lake. Lazy. Sitting on the shore, brushing her hair with an old comb. She felt nothing for him. The booze and dirty laundry. Went on like that every summer. Down here at a lakeshore catching minnows in a rusty Campbell’s Soup can. The little girl’s parents had guests over from somewhere else in the city, and lunch afterwards, all of them eating ravenously as they talked, swallowing mouthfuls of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. One thing was certain--I needed a vacation, a cottage on a small lake. The little girl and her brother sleeping on two cots in a room of unfinished? A sign advertising a new Mexican restaurant. One of the dishes was 'rife with jalapeno chiles.' Up ahead, a rag man emerged, waking up early these days, under orders from the shelter--to keep quiet. On the weekends the little girl’s parents slept late. Awake, silent, staring at the rough two-by-fours that formed the underside of the roof. Juice in glasses on the kitchen table. They found something else to laugh about: her heavy suede green-red cap (last year’s Christmas present). But did they consider solar energy and computerized control of the heat? I laughed. Here was my cornball impression. Overnight the authorities had committed us all to the Principal Loony Ward. A visual result, as the reader can see, and the south-looking sloping face of those top fourteen floors. Against one of the house's walls stood a gun-rack. How big was the budget for that building? The screened-in porch for playing bridge and poker. They smoked a lot but never understood what was so funny about the habit. Another rag man in boots and shoddy clothes hulking towards me, smelling like an abandoned diaper. His bed sheets fell to the ground behind him. Those bare mattresses were cold and unwelcoming. Empty bottles of purified water. A small garden, varicolored leaves and dainty acacia shrubs under which lay heavy iron pots and a formidable painted clay figurine in the shape of a sitting coyote. Once, in Oregon, I spent a day with several loggers. I wanted a job like that--out in the open all day. Swore at Father over it. But I’d encountered one of the walking, weeping dead. Those days Father was coming home drunk, but he passed through all right. Because with logging you were surrounded by trees and soil and riding in a pickup truck, not left with your legs under tables. I sensed I was being stalked. Turned around. Proceed with stately caution, I told myself. Two dogs placed their paws in a puddle. The word 'character' was too cold and analytical to describe people like Father, as if you were committing them to the Principal Loony Ward. And the Mexicans believed the dead wander the earth for a year after they die. Choked at the lip of a fountain savoring their last mourning drink. The time I hitched a ride in the back of a pickup truck with a group of loggers wearing flannels. I looked out through the drizzle. No exceptions for the particularly good, and as for the particularly bad, they were doomed to wander for longer periods of time. A form of repentance--to depart weeping while quietly observing the living. Everyone of us had to pass so much into the night. The loggers and I rode that pickup into a village to drink and talk. Those who killed us grew more--what? When the young woman and I went out the first time, we met on a cold commuter rail-platform beneath the glow of halogen bulbs. In those years, before the war, life was as good as I could imagine. But an increasing energy crisis required a deep second design, and the contract was awarded to an LA firm of architects who made a name for themselves designing numerous buildings in that heavy, glassy style. What a place to begin if you were like me and loved to walk. Venice Beach and the Pacific Ocean. To lift heavy things with grunts. To sweat. A few pints of beer and a shot of whisky at the end of each day. In LA no distinction existed between the living and the dead, nothing as abrupt as in the usual forms of Christianity. Destined to roam forever with those who had taken the lives of others, driving my 1979 Datsun, reading the papers. The cops came upon a victim seated on the curb in front of his house when he was mistaken for a rival gang member. Walked up and shot him in the head with a 30:30 caliber rifle. To Serve and Protect. The Day of the Dead, the most sacred day of the year. Completed a whole year. To be born is learned, and it was so important to make sure of that. After an hour wasted, I found my 1979 Datsun and proceeded to get drunk. But Southern California ends at the Pacific Ocean. Nothing any of us can do about that. Here was the Front Walk again, with its eclectic mix of fortune-tellers. I wanted something to eat, something with grilled peppers and onions. When I returned to the bike rental stands, I was amazed at how easily my friend and I fell back into conversation, as if nothing had happened. He was the same as when I left him, liberating each passerby from his or her sufferings when he wasn’t handing them a brand new bike. A candle store over there. I told my friend that during the long stroll I realized when we’re born our minds are clean slates, and everything that happens to us from birth is raw information. Easily retrievable. Available to anyone. Not private as the conventional wisdom has it. Food offerings left by the faithful. Roller-bladers, guitarists, and tourists taking it all in. The sandwiches. I promised to teach my friend what I’d learned the only way I knew how. And off I went.

The Meanest of Them Shines

I can't imagine being a porn actress for the rest of my life. So let me relate the story of how I became one before I change careers again and forget to leave out the inappropriate details. I. One day, without any prompting on my part, husband Frank tries to persuade me to take an awful job requiring hours and hours of phone and paperwork--which I politely refuse. The following morning, he threatens me with a futuristic-looking piece of bondage gear (whose designed purpose still escapes me), only to return from work that evening and insist again that I apply for the horrible job, yelling it’s the only way to make ends meet around here!--at which point there’s no turning back because on the third day, still confronted with my refusal, it’s a black skillet covered in grease that he shakes at me, and on the fourth day, a rusty pair of pruning shears, and on the fifth, a crossbow, a ‘silent weapon’ that he purchased at a local sporting goods store for purposes other than assaulting his wife. I’m not making this up--I wish I were quoting--and I’d give anything to take it all back, but that series of encounters was a bit of a wake-up call to my eye- hand coordination. Forearms are smooth and breakable, knuckles easily bruised. I told you, Marian, I have no intention of wrecking your summer, but we need the extra money! My husband’s full name is Frank Subick. My name is Marian Subick. The basic problem is there’s no such thing as my summer. So I’m leaving tonight for Little Rock in Frank’s Cadillac Eldorado, expecting to arrive at Mother’s Thursday evening. No kids, thank God, and no one paranoid in the passenger seat. But on the off chance Frank follows me in a rental car--he’ll guess I’ve run off to Mother’s, and he knows her address--I’ve alerted the cops in every town along the way. Progress marches on, eh? The jester turns another a cartwheel. A question of quality control and ironclad priorities: a list of one hundred and fifty different demands I’ve placed on myself. Among them--prepare an ice pack for these hands, dispose of some empty polyethylene bags, change out of these clothes, alter my name, get my professional life back on track, and most important, alleviate the financial strain. I’ve martyred myself to Frank’s altar. The virtue of loyalty has ruined me. I haven’t been generating much income lately, and without any personal savings (which I’ve long since farted away), I can't afford these outrageous Upper West Side rent payments. From here on out, everything is anatomical, inside of me, clamping off stomach walls, feeding on ideas. II. The motel room smells vaguely of unfamiliar things. I run my bandaged hands over the crisp bed linen, but what conclusion can be drawn from that? I feel nauseated, worn down, mummified. The back of my throat tastes bitter. After dialing Mother and leaving a message expect me sometime late tomorrow afternoon, I turn out the lights, strip naked, and fall asleep on the bed, not pulling back the covers. I try to fall asleep, without pills- -but I’ll believe it when I see it. Disturbing noises creep into my awareness. In the next room two men are screaming at each other in Spanish like disciples of a new gospel. Down on their knees begging. Kicked and spit upon. Young men hacked to pieces. Wrapped in aluminum foil. Too much time has passed. When your thoughts are racing at night, get the feeling you’re receiving unsolicited advice from a teen magazine? In high school I used to read Seventeen instead of math books and thick dictionaries. I used to vomit in the corners of the gymnasium. I snorted coke in a bowling alley restroom when I was fifteen and my face makeup didn't hide the bad acne. Hell, I snorted lines of coke off the diving board of my cousin’s swimming pool. Vietnam was a name to us back then. Frank Subick was a neighborhood friend. We all smoked marijuana. We all hated Richard Nixon. We all chanted ritualized, repetitive slogans of nonconformity. I wore tank tops, sandals, and looked a lot like Susan Atkins. Mussolini was enormously pleased. He pulls up my shirt, teases my nipples with his fingertips and tongue, and before I know it, his fingers are pushing inside of me, palm pressed against my warm crotch. Fast forward fifteen years later. Frank and me, with Mother, in Las Vegas, at the Luxor Hotel. I’m snorting coke--and mixing half-vodka, half-vermouth martinis--while Frank and Mother spend the night in the casinos, trying to get rich the hard way, gambling. It’s not even eight o’clock--what could be on TV? A man who tries to murder his wife and collect on the insurance money, Danny Glover in Grand Canyon, a baseball doubleheader, an infomercial for a speed-reading course, an airline machinists’ strike, a Candid Camera rerun. Recall the feeling of hard plastic chairs in an overcrowded waiting room? I know that one too. The body is remarkable how it rebuilds itself. Every operation, every medical procedure can be reversed, provided you have the money, the determination, and the patience. The next morning I awake an hour before sunrise and dress in black jeans, an eggshell-white T-shirt, and sandals. I put my long hair into a ponytail, gather up a few odds-and-ins, throw them into a backpack, and walk out to the car with all the grace of a runway model. Shoulders back, chest out: the beauty for which many a man would gladly cut off his member. Pencil me in a pleasant, foggy, early-morning summer drive. I sense parts of myself stealing away. First to Little Rock, then to Pensacola or Butte or Sacramento or an island full of ospreys and bad weather. We’re not headed to Houston, are we? So many misconnections. Yet you do what needs to get done, and you never leave a body out on the highway because that’s morally wrong. In Tennessee an eighteen-wheeler looms out of the fog into the oncoming lane. I swerve onto the shoulder to let it pass and find myself in the parking lot of a boarded-up Chevron station. Mangy dogs prowl around the gas pumps. Clouds of flies hover over trashcans and a rusty vending machine. Spray paint is everywhere. Tangled foliage obscures the asphalt and gravel. What a place in such a democratic time! I park the car behind the station, walk over to the bushes, and crouch down to take a piss beside a pile of broken-up, pale lavender bathroom tiles. The coincidence is subtly insignificant. III. Afternoon sun fills the dining room’s uncurtained windows. The air is laced with Mother’s favorite cinnamon aroma. Rows of porcelain plates decorate the walls. I sit alone at the table buttering a piece of raisin toast. Mother, even at the age of seventy-six, is a busy woman on the fax machine, which hums and beeps and spits paper out 24 hours a day. In the whole house not a single sound except that stupid fax machine. Native drums beat the air. Once upon a time Mother plied us--my two sisters and me--with cookies, puddings, and sweet coffee served in dainty, flower-covered cups. Today both my sisters live overseas with their respective husbands while I’m escaping from mine, and Mother is obsessed with a goddamned fax machine. I walk into the kitchen over to the counter and grab a handful of pistachios from a bowl. The lemony smell of disinfectant rises from the polished floor. Since I arrived two days ago, I can’t take my eyes off a cork bulletin board interleaved with postcards and snapshots in such a way that every image is at least partially visible. Another address, another roommate, more vacations, more roadtrips. A postcard reproduction of an Ansel Adams photograph. My head resting on Frank’s shoulder. I’m barefoot (the three months we spent in Japan in 1995). In the adjacent photograph I wear a white silk scarf from Bergdorf Goodman’s and cradle a dozen long- stemmed roses. He made love to me like a woman not like a lover or husband. An out-of-focus snapshot I took from the observation deck of the Chicago Sears Tower. Even a tuning fork at the proper vibration attracts male mosquitoes. In most of the photos I’m wearing the same John Lennon-style sunglasses I wear today. What else is supposed to happen? (What about those two boarders who shared the room in our attic? One of them spent the weekends with an ice bag on his head. The other vomited half- digested pork livers all over the toilet bowl.) I go upstairs to my former bedroom, now an all-purpose guest room packed with the childhood belongings of Mother’s three daughters. Threadbare girl scout uniforms, Fuzzy Rabbit, the lid of a coffin, and on the shelves, a bizarre mix of books that ought to be listed in their entirety: two collections of Grace Paley short stories, a Hunter S. Thompson political diatribe, a John Gregory Dunne novel, a Joyce Carol Oates novel, a novel entitled Burnt Offerings, a biography of Oscar Wilde, an introduction to Zen Buddhism, several Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, a Spanish-English dictionary, a textbook on sailing and navigation. I sit down on the bed. I’m feeling a bit bored staying here at Mother’s. The pace is too relaxed now that Frank’s threats aren’t hanging over me, and Little Rock isn’t exactly Manhattan. I should be reviewing my list of priorities or brainstorming employment opportunities but instead God forbid snorting coke crosses my mind. Put it in the flower pot on the front porch--I’ll come by later and pick it up. Little Choo-Choo never lets me down. As if I need to give myself additional problems and manufacture complexity. Anything, even an annoyance, so long as it distracts me--from what? I lie back on the bed. All these years the ceiling hasn’t changed a bit. I return downstairs to the living room. The TV is blaring CNN. The fax machine continues to spit out reams of paper. Mother’s nowhere to be found. I walk into the kitchen and glance at the wall clock. 4:30. Mother must be taking her afternoon walk. I have the house to myself. I prepare a vodka and tonic and return to the living room. After turning off the TV, I sit down in Mother’s armchair to read the latest Rolling Stone I brought with me from New York. But I feel restless. I don’t want to read the magazine at all. I’m about to get up and refresh my drink when I hear a key slipped into the lock of the front door--but it’s the wrong key because the door fails to open. Again the key is tried, giving the same result. A third time, a fourth. No luck. From where I’m sitting I can’t see through the foyer windows, but I realize someone’s trying a number of different keys on the lock. A fifth time, a sixth. Still nothing. My mind races. It’s him? My God, I should’ve stayed somewhere else. We have a great deal to talk about. After many more keys, the door opens. A male voice sounds out, “Hello! Anybody home?” It’s Frank, and I can think only no no no! The jolting fact of no! awakens me with a gasp. My head snaps forward. The worst kind of dream: a nightmare on a sunny afternoon. I'm more tense than before I fell asleep. I stand up from the bed, stretch, and return downstairs to the living room for real this time. The fax machine continues to spit out reams of paper. Mother’s nowhere to be found. I walk into the kitchen to the window over the sink. I’m encouraged to see Mother is in the backyard watering the vegetable garden. I step over to the cork bulletin board. The first photo my eyes fall upon is one of me and Frank playing Canadian doubles. I should’ve considered beforehand what my staying here might mean to Frank. Am I putting Mother and all of Little Rock in danger? A Yankee maniac comes to town to seek out and destroy the wife who so rudely abandoned him. Don’t be ridiculous--if he tries anything, the cops’ll nail his hide to the garage door. A certain snapshot, one I don’t recall, grabs my attention. Mother and Frank are standing in front of the Luxor in Las Vegas. I don’t recall it because I wasn’t there when, presumably, a passerby was enlisted to snap the shutter. I was holed up in our room snorting coke and watching TV. Nothing special about the shot, two tourists smiling like idiots, Mother with the little flourish of her black purse, Frank trying not to pick his nose in public, yet I sense something--what?--uncertain?--anxious?--sexual? I pry the print off the bulletin board to look for writing on the other side. Only the date and Las Vegas. I startle and drop the photograph when I hear someone behind me fiddling with the pantry door. It’s Mother. I pick up the photo, put it in my back pocket, and help Mother with whatever she’s carrying. (Good manners: if you’re born without them there’s nothing you can do about it: smoking is prohibited inside a police station). Mother’s chunky fingers are threatening to explode with ripe tomatoes. IV. Unlike my more intellectual sisters, I have a passion for English detective fiction. Growing up, I was too moody and short-tempered to care about abstract knowledge. I never liked schematic diagrams fobbed off as erudition, nor was I into that Evil Knieval shit. In my world, then as now, warmth travels from one person to another through the lizard dimensions. Or is it the caterpillar fragrance on our fingertips? Or that elderly woman with a church missal and an overweight dog? I’m packing a suitcase. Mother doesn’t suspect, and I’m not telling her, but once you begin you cannot stop. Acceptance means you have to become what hurts you. Or else it may hurt you again. Look down inside the DNA. Alcohol and cocaine never kept me from dreaming, even two weeks before Christmas. Milk and beef jerky were my vitamin and mineral supplements. Frank was also a jerk. What did we really talk about? I chased after him because I had some kind of rebel-boy fantasy--and to think he’s pursuing me like a villain escaped from a decorticated B-movie. V. [Drum roll.] Here I am one week later, driving along Van Nuys Boulevard, listening to Rosemary Clooney on the oldies station. The good news is that an out-of-work actor I met on the Strip has turned me on to a several-thousand-dollar coke deal in the Valley. The show begins in half an hour. I’m wearing Levi’s cut-offs, tennis shoes, and a bright yellow bikini top that reveals the profounder aspects of my ribcage, plastic tits and all. In the wake of Little Rock, Cincinnati, Santa Ana, Hollywood, barbecued chicken, French toast with boysenberry sauce, a last round of margaritas, and several sleazy one-room employment agencies, I'm finally in the San Fernando Valley. Why doesn’t the circus fire me? I’ve heard myself whine. I’ve dragged the clothes off my body. I’ve discovered the best part of Bel-Air is an awful place with a couple lawyers in it where a sheet of beige paper lies face down on a desk. There’s nothing Dirty Harry can do about that. Next stop?--the Middle East. Let’s get some hand grenades to blow up those Palestinian K-Marts and purge the earth of all mathematics: the desert will become an ocean of sand, and the ocean a wilderness isolated.

The Key is Not a Key

Food, weapons, shoes, bodies, shiny entertainment factories, landscapes of faces--all make for a distressful setting. But listen anyhow, kind reader, since it’s the next best thing to being there. The general effect of this narrative will be to excite thankfulness in religious minds and hope in the breasts of all peoples, clients, regulators, and whole communities. Approaching in the distance were several more sirens to replace the ones now passing regularly by the hour. Playing our part, we were a convoy of five ambulances, much like the rest, aiming for the victims of another abstract nihilistic game. We were peasants bound to America. Through the back windows I watched convoys of rescue vehicles streaming down the narrow slip-roads from the mountain peaks shrouded in banks of black clouds. Three parallel series of headlights in the drizzle, each more than a mile long. The Painted Caravan. God, the odors of physiological decomposition, the sprue and sudor--unbelievable!--rivaling the scrofula of olden times. Each series of vehicles turned off the freeway at its designated drive-thru toll-gate. Our own turned right. The driver’s boyish grin in the rearview mirror. Later we slowed to a halt, and I climbed out, scanning the blank horizon. Evening was passing, night falling. I hurried to my lieutenant. Next day the rain had stopped, the weather improved, the skies were fair. Morning again. The flow of the freeways had returned to a normal pace, and our vehicle’s speed easily matched the movement of oncoming traffic. Past a car-bomb wreckage full of heat and color. Heads turned, most in contempt. My girlfriend Alice unfolded a map of Cuba. “Guided to the saloon,” she said. A car full of teenagers pulled up alongside us, its mirrored window-glass giving us back our true selves. The acrid fumes of a cap pistol blew in the window. A voice from behind yelled words lost to the slipstream, and I turned to Alice, telling her to swing around to watch the car’s side-mirror floating off in midair. Might’ve been the moons of Neptune reflecting the planet’s white light there, a beacon for lost-and-found middle- class dreams. The bile rose into my eyes, the peccant humors. But this was more the coarctation of one soul, with planes of glass pinning me inside. My life was the other half of the double bill. I steered sharply to the left, past the front of another multiplex. Squashed a bug. It was like a summer after the shooting of John F. Kennedy. Writers, friends, enemies, critics, posters of coming attractions. An overdue intervention of God into history. The afternoon traffic pointed towards the superstores and the leisure complexes. I sensed the pain another day would inflict, and I was thankful to be homeward bound--into the sanctum sanctorum. Locked the door behind me, stepped closer to the sink, sat down on the tiled floor, slid the hypodermic under my kneecap. A bit later I looked up into the bathroom mirror, drifting into a comfortable daydream. The doorknob rattled. Alice. But I wasn't distracted from the mirror's world: a blend of incongruous aromas and silver pigments, eddying smoke, a black car with symbols on its sides roaring into a parking lot, ambulances backing into a loading dock--eyes wide shut, heart pounding--weird European- looking blocks of houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, arched 19th-Century-style carriageways, unhealthy looking alleyways stinking of the stake, obscure stretches of Spanish coastline, creeks, mud, a river, the smell of damp earth. A ponderous train of imagery, a chemical frenzy, a psychic paracentesis. Tell me, kind reader, who knows all he can see are his own eyes? Who glimpses his soul in a rush of water from a jug on the windowsill or in a new dog food commercial? Someone must be the first to pass the Rubicon. The ambulance drivers tell me that, at least once in our lives, we experience incision and drainage and multiple aspirations of a body cavity, not to mention standardized feelings of discomfort and floating stools--and please bear in mind that blood tends to pool in the lower extremities. Here, the pandiculations of a tired culture where citizens are urged to boil their water for the next 48 hours. So very glad Alice’s green tea meant boiling more water. Alice's braids hung around my face. A drunken starlet with enlarged pupils and gold-rimmed spectacles, hiding herself, tempting a pursuit more aptly ignored. Tonight's meatier challenges: giant palaces of glass and neon looming up ahead, shiny billboards, calligraphic signs, repositories of dialects and gestures, Alice’s bubbly smile and feline grace. In a sudden rush of curiosity, she reached for two mugs near the medicine cabinet, the mugs we kept our toothbrushes in, knocking them onto the floor. How generous. Could any real danger penetrate this cage of metal, vinyl, and glass? Across the universe, a portal swung open to reveal throngs of foreign extraterrestrial types, the Chiefs of the Inner Station who were invading present time. The Sons behind the Sun. The cogs in “cognition." The cyberneticist, the governor, the steersman who guides us, the semaphore at the side of the tracks, the old man at the levers in the opening sequence of Eraserhead. Golem, Inc. Grade 5. The interlock of fast transforms. Pay to the order of. The key is not--overwhelmed by associations, I could only keep my jaw from dropping and muster the necessary willpower against Alice’s aphrodisiac trappings. Oh, the rose fever of an ornate mind! I was dulled by surfeit from a week spent searching for death tokens in the water, and having steeped my flesh and macerated my brain, I finally was lost. Shivering didn't calm me, and the associations continued. Ice-9 Syndrome. Psychic paralysis. The silencer. Spread. Scatter. Sperm. Sphere. The Rome of La Dolce Vita. “Acceptance,” the Manual stated, “and the associations naturally calm down.” My personal fear- dispelling mantra was “There’s room for only one eye at the top of that pyramid!” Alice was crying. Quick sobs, long sighs. No idea what to do. Never thought to see how much of my old life still existed on the coast of Virginia. Not apologetic either. Death-by-hanging. Elevators. Airports. Conflicting psychic arenas. Now headed towards the car park. Huge multiplexes of thousands of people. Pairs of bumbling cops trying to hide physical experience from the rest of us. Not men but a thing. In a seafood restaurant, Alice dreamed of finding him there, her wealthy brother, Joe from Paris. Getting smaller and smaller until our Suburban turned the corner. Jaded hashish-smoking sophisticates, their heads craning outside the blacked-over windows to check out who was inside the Suburban, the way they used to gawk at Italian hot rods. We accelerated off. The beatings, the number of blows not exceeding forty. I couldn’t do anything else to keep Alice from sobbing. I knew her brother would come for me, that pugnacious, self-lacerating bastard, and blame me for his sister’s elaborate sexual perversions. But ennui leads to perversion, and nothing is fascinating when we have nothing to do. Her brother was the red and angry one, the great walker with swords and knives going from house to house like a yellow-flag pissant, throwing his thirteens about. A dogmatic prig. He wanted to take the moon between his teeth. Yet years of abortive and rancid flowers awaited him, leaving him at the Great Climacteric to cogitate over dual skulls. I never asked for help. Well, I did once, but Alice's mommy went crazy with the Strap. The family had to take her away. Enigmatic hand gestures and electronic toothbrushes in a Sherwood Forest of pawnbrokers and magicians. Once I asked the family about Alice’s brother, who lived in a complex of futuristic furniture design, but they didn’t oblige me with an answer. They didn’t beat me either. Beat the crap out of her, that Janus-headed bitch, Alice's mommy--what a crank, a chinch on society, the taplash in a cask, the heeltap in a gutter. Let’s say that evening was a comic exaggeration of bad satire, and afterwards Alice said mommy was gone for good, never to return. She was she wrong. Later my conscious mind grasped what had transpired, the realms of erotic shadings, the public imagery, and I realized it was much worse than the Strap. Cold, inexplicable pain had overtaken mommy, and a couple collection agencies were after her ass. The authorities once used the Scaphism and strappado, Nero the noyade, the Turkish zarb, and the Asian seppuku. Why not throw them all a wreath of olive sprays and hurl the keys into the fucking pit! An actor cast in a ludicrous light, I packed a potent pipe today. The smoldering contents beamed me across an ocean, a whole continent, to Malibu and a parade of surfers and beach girls. The Doors’ Strange Days, a whiter shade of pale, and all tomorrow’s parties. But more in the mood for self-torturing Puritanism, I placed Bach over the Doors, and with an insouciant toss of her hair Alice lowered the stylus. Coma-inducing. The charcoal-filter cigarettes weren’t helping matters either. A pillow anywhere? An Arabian tent? As much as we needed and not one centimeter more. The peep shows, the carnival midways sending their vision-requests to our eyes. A brief delay before our eyelids fluttered open to behold the impossible task of mandarin detachment. Gods lobbing our minds into the upper atmosphere of the bedroom. An eternity later Alice pinched tea leaves into each of the two mugs, and during a wordy lecture on the stylistics of fellatio, throat convulsing, I stared into the distance listening to the rain become tears of sadness and regret. Thank you, Alice, for the hysterical light-headedness, your heart a crucifix of gold in a rose window. Hers was an unusual combination of wariness and flexibility. Bracelets, rings, necklace pendants lodged in the furrow of her breasts, discolored yet full lips, a diamond in the hollow of her navel, a slightly bulging belly, and more. A real charmer. Abstract paintings in vivid reds, blood-reds, her own blood diluted in water. Back in the kitchen, I warmed myself at the electric stove, filled a dented tea pot--and the Fear hit, dark and sepulchral from beneath the gas burners, hissing. Kicked over a little kerosene space-heater in the corner, and a sniff of cherry punch. I went about hard-boiling some eggs. Nothing more than coming and going, nothing more than nothing. Sum One is watching. Alice joined me in the kitchen. My, what a gamy girl, and what a place to tryst! She forced me to raise my head from her crotch. Her thighs had stopped their funny little spasms, and I was able to keep them open enough. Eyes glued to the photos on the bulletin board. Alice’s portrait framed by the borders of a fashion magazine. A Polaroid snapshot taken at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. "You cannot escape me, Alice, I am you. There's no escape. Tethered to the triangles, the way you like it, my turnspit dog." If only to drain the cup of sensuality to its dregs. I savored it. The fish smelled best at three days. Scorpio Rising. Rashomon. Triumph of the Will. How many movies had we seen this summer at the Nouveau Arts Theatre? A Parisian sort of place. Stoned enough to see through the hazy humidity. Canicularis dies. We were operating on many levels here, with too much resistance to make a transition to the land of the living. Head rearing up in a panic to get away from the rest, eyes huge, doom- struck. The long afternoon was fading into a long evening. Alice practiced Bach on mommy's antique harpsichord, and me thinking, I’ll bash it to pieces, cheerfully bash that fucking instrument to bits. I stretched my fingers out. Dancing Alice hoarse-voiced from singing too loudly. Well, I can do the Cockroach. Later, lying beside me under the drab, yellowish bed linens, whistling a moody jazz melody inches from my face, Billie Holiday ballads, Alice said the time had come to rise and shine. Mind somewhere else, I cracked my head against the underside of the bunk. What a way to go, man. Fully conscious, I glanced out the bedroom window. Stony-looking clouds blocked the sun. A gaunt man in dark glasses was coming up the walk, a Secret-Service-type thug who was “thirty minutes too early ,” according to Alice, too early for our party. What the fuck was I doing underneath the bunk? In present time a siren sounded, a Jean-Luc Godard movie or Petulia. Come to find out Alice had invited no fewer than ten of her friends for the evening. Dim those party lights. Gongs crashed. Sleep deprivation was the latest weapon Alice used against me, cornering me under the bedsheets with one of her favorite keepsakes, a plastic radiation test-dummy inherited from her nuclear physicist uncle. My shower shoe, I could reach it. Candy. I picked up a towel, flip-flops, a wrinkled golf shirt, made my way across Alice’s tiger pelts to the bathroom. Stacks of LPs in the garage should be kept indoors, but Alice never listened. How long since I last shaved? I was the bearded barbarian, 'barbigerous' and 'chaetophorous' my words. A voice boomed out over the bathroom intercom, Alice proclaiming, “God wished to behold Himself, for ‘I’ rhymes with ‘eye’!” Those words may have been nothing to the unwise, but to the wise they were more than enough. 18 November 1898, another date scratched in stone, as the blue disc of the World Clock clicked off a new series of circumstances. What would be the outcome of what I did today-- epic works of literature or a cathedral in France catching fire? And the two novels I needed to read. Snow Crash and Flicker. Should I begin to dress or would the contestants come to costume me? Toweling off after the shower, I felt seasick, a chill on the back of my head, like I’d crawled out of a deep pit. Premonitions of the finale? I was my own accomplice. In my younger days I kept a diary of my darker feelings so that I could conquer them, my Dark Nights of the Soul. I was fiercely proud of myself back then, very private, a perfect example of a Pisces. At first I wasn’t a sexual person, preferring intense conversation. Before I met Alice I lived in a one-room apartment, caring for my two pet cats, reading Oswald Spengler, speaking to my friends on the phone in an oddly detached voice. Furniture was sparse, and my rickety bookshelves groaned with European classics. Early on there would be no alcohol or drugs. I bravely faced the boredom and emptiness around me, observing everything like a noble savage, avoiding television, carrying around little notebooks, striving to capture experience. But I was no rail-riding hobo--no, I’d sooner raise cattle or grow tobacco than run the circuit of the art crowd parties. Nor was I above finding personal resonance in a faceless organization. I disciplined myself, working three years as a dishwasher at a local greasy spoon. I adhered to a reading list. But I despised casual affairs while also learning the hard way that sending people away doesn’t solve anything and that there are very few golden opportunities. I strolled through public buildings looking like an American tourist in the Louvre overcome with deep understanding. Yet there were also my unpredictability and manic mood swings, calm and laid back one moment, the next a young savage run amok. The one time I was interviewed on TV I appeared very nervous. The harsh lighting and glimmering plastic statuary gave the imagery a blurred, hand-held look, fashionably under-budgeted. Tonight the air tasted of roasting turkey bird and sage stuffing soft and pale brown, and Alice’s heady perfume. Playing my part, I opened the spigots and draperies--let the sun shine in!-- and pronounced the rule: none of the guests was allowed to touch anything in mommy's bedroom, bath lotions, after-shave, so on, though I caught Alice in there sniffing that arsenal of ugly cockroach poison. Our duplex was a paradise for free-form games and acrobatic cartwheeling. Fewer than three pieces of furniture per room, starkly lit by wall-mounted electric candelabra, yellow and raspberry colors in the carpets, gold in the wallpaper, a dining- room hung in black, a small bottle of Alice’s favorite scent in each room, all with a little luck holding it together. A tremendous improvement over those two-room-studio days. We also enjoyed a fridge chock full of imported ales, a row of built-in bookcases, a fenced-in patio, a yard of cypress and pine, and quiet neighbors. Once upon a time I tricked Alice into dropping the perfume for a weekend, but not anymore. She was spanked for it once, and those mild scars from the wrist-slashing. Repulsion. Seconds. The Parallax View. Was there anyone working up at Esalen that summer who might've had it in for the Polanskis? . . . the word microdot written in Oswald’s address book . . . Jack Ruby with no memory of the assassination . . . how the Santa Anita racetrack became so important in Sirhan’s life. I was intrigued, but I shut off the TV to make way for music. Disgust cannot exist where hunger thrives. Thus, I began every party with the gaping hole in my gut where the whisky went, certain also to cure the persistent dryness in my mouth. Next I put on an early Kinks LP, a captivating soundtrack for kicking off impromptu celebrations. Alice’s souvenir slot machine added to the din. I considered calling mommy, then thought better of it. My damage and my needs equaled my damaged needs. Mine was the exotic nobility of a universal genius victorious in his corruption. Acquaintances criticized my tendency to laugh at the ways of the world, yet I was a reliable witness to their brevipennate dreams. All of mankind’s secrets lay hidden in the limbic sulcus, but if a Philosopher’s Stone existed, I doubted the neurologists would uncover it. Only Criswell predicts, and my favorite bumpersticker remains In- Trance? Well, X-It. A few minutes later I walked into the living room and burst out laughing. Alice was sprawled across the bright yellow sofa. She was preparing for the party by drinking lots of vodka. A whore with her vodka. I sat down beside her, nearly sliding off the cushions, and clutched her about the waist. Eyes puffy and black as pitch, hands shaking in a most unpleasant manner, legs scarcely moving, she was in no condition to receive anyone. The dark fabric of her dress was striking against her pasty complexion. I tickled her. A whole queue of guests--the early arrivals--were waiting to get a glimpse of the passed-out hostess, their shadowy figures approaching the sofa in a calm, single-file line. Alice’s chest rising and falling. I suspected there would be no time for rehearsal. Alice's brother sat quietly on a stool at the kitchen counter peeling an orange, flipping through the morning newspaper. Nothing of importance came to pass, the queue dispersed, and the party got underway. Alice whispered in my ear, “It’s dark and cold and I’m sleepy and very bored.” “You shouldn’t have done that” was all I said and then, as an afterthought, “You’re the life of the party, Alice!” I stood up, leaving Alice to her own drunken designs on the sofa, and walked over to her brother. “Congratulations!” was the only sarcasm he could muster. “You would say that,” I said, “How charming talking to a little birdie.” I wished everyone would vanish, along with the whole fucking world they inhabited. Run ‘em off like a bunch of rabbits. But eventually I found my whisky dreams: rock musicians doing yoga and heroin in a global contest of the minds, its rules rotten to the core yet impenetrable and dangerous. Whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere roaring and rumbling, can be said in three words: the feeling you get when you look towards the west, the depths out there on the perimeter, stoned- immaculate. I’d lost count of the anachronisms in my own life, where the jury always found reasonable doubt. Let’s say I was both flattered and bothered that so much meaning was made so freely available with so few people knowing about it. I know, I thought, aye no. Outside the bathroom I stumbled into Alice’s brother again. “What do you want?” I asked, “it’s not time yet, still more than an hour. You gonna let me through or not?” He laughed and said, “Today we’ll do a particularly good job of cleaning out your abode.” “Fuck you!” I replied, returning to the living room. I hoped the Introduction to the Art of Wine-Tasting would serve as an introduction to my own brand of violence. Teach ‘em all a lesson. A lot of dangerous gossip and the sounds of a stranger scratching at a windowpane certain to keep you up all night. Alice’s drunken antics only added fuel to the fire. What a meaningless game the party had become. I felt oppressed by foreboding disaster. Their shrieks of merriment were leading to a stand-up act with a razor blade. I walked over to Alice, who still lay on the sofa. Our eyes met. Her wan but amiable smile. The two of us exchanged conspiratorial winks. I sensed it was time. Poised for the breaking of the vessels, I pulled back stray threads from the sleeves of my wine-drenched shirt. The final performance would issue from my will as from an overstuffed closet: precarious, in brief storage. They say a red miracle from the past is a rose in the present. Well, I knew my life had been one of changes--I didn’t want it any other way--and I knew about rocks hurled hard through windows. Poison, I thought, what I need is poison. Alice’s brother was feeding Alice a plate of ham and eggs. What the hell did he know about caring for his sister? I paused, collected my whirling thoughts--then picked up an empty chianti bottle from a nearby end-table and smashed it across the back of her brother’s skull. The glass shattered into several pieces as her brother collapsed lifelessly to the floor, cheeks twitching, eyelids fluttering, right ear swollen. I could taste the spilled bottom. “I'm putting forward an hypothesis,” I explained to Alice, who said nothing, taking it all in, chewing on a piece of ham, hardly terror-stricken. The sound of breaking glass did elicit from the kitchen her brother’s entourage of friends. I thought they might rush me. I saw the balls of clay in their hands. Seconds turned into long minutes, but things went no further than a stand-off. I laughed maniacally and said “What?! No one’s armed? No Browning automatics?” Silence. “Listen to that silence,” I said, doing my best to stare down the shocked spectators. I ground my teeth in anger. “Don’t you people get it? It’s a case of over-stimulated nerve centers.” Silence. The performance was my most daring and abstract work yet. I had never felt so alert and protected by the zone. I wasn’t concerned if any of them had the nerve to retaliate either--I knew I would. Five minutes later Alice's brother was coming to, groaning, holding his bloody head in his hands. A spasm distorted his face. Someone had dialed 911, and sirens approached in the distance. The Painted Caravan. So life must come to this, I thought, packed off to an insane asylum. “Well, I tell you one thing,” I said aloud, “I’m not waiting around for that nonsense. You’re each as bad as the other.” Mine was no special nihilistic talent, but adventure beckoned. I put on my shoes, emptied my pockets, leaving the house and car keys with Alice, and swallowed a deep breath of air. Outside the windows night approached, dark and welcoming.

Uncle Clyde

Uncle Clyde’s age was considerable, up in the forties somewhere, and although he had the beginnings of a middle-aged paunch, he was tougher than any ornery Indian sailor-boy. He drank beer and a little vodka on the weekends. He sat on his favorite stool at the long counter of the local pub, laughing it up, his black-bearded face breaking into a wry grimace, his heart beating so loudly you could hear it. His cheeks wore a vivid flush. He and his voice were one as he volleyed those sentences to and fro, leaning forward on his elbows, rising up on his toes, flicking his tongue around his lips like an excitable dog. His arms went out in widespread gestures. His blue eyes sparkled. Uncle Clyde made sure his drinking buddies knew how much he enjoyed smoking cigarettes with a coat collar turned up, a habit he inherited from his deceased stepfather, who was a former president of the American Bar Association. He squinted from behind the smoke as he explained to the other patrons everything he’d learned about the religions of the Incas and the travels of Charles Darwin. His mind had the reliability of a tested and oiled machine. He was a skilled hairsplitter too. Uncle Clyde remembered, like it was yesterday, the sumac thicket where as a boy he saw his first garter snake, back in the days when tricycles had plastic tassels on their handgrips. He recalled working swing-shift at the neighborhood Conoco. He recited the speech he gave when he took his first college degree. He described a village in Crete and the black lightning above it, and the summer he rented an imitation French chateau in the hills overlooking Hollywood, California. He could also bang out the old Soviet National Anthem (though he knew it was drivel). And yes, he was abandoned at a Catholic orphanage when he was a few days old and raised by priests. They had no ulterior motives. Besides, any social movement couldn't be judged solely by its orifices. He was Uncle Clyde: so much for the 500-word limit. (He also kept a long tally of the credit-card debts he owed to ‘the little guys with the comb-overs.’) The afternoon became intense and immensely interesting when Uncle Clyde visited the Red Lion pub. He became a hero for whom the impossible was an achievement. The rules of the mundane world were shifted and changed. Court was adjourned, so to speak. When Uncle Clyde described himself, he spoke of ‘powers,’ the ‘formulation of ideals,’ and ‘portable convictions.’ He was not only an extrovert and gregarious, he was clever and vastly inventive, and descended from Ireland, where they had a sense of humor. It made you think he ought to go into politics (he was far too proud to accept Hollywood’s offers of stardom). But you’d never guess in a million years his real job was to enter felony-assault data into a computer five days a week. To Uncle Clyde insanity was the ability to appreciate reality. He moved through the world and caressed it. He saw more beauty in trees than in any man or woman he’d met, even though, by his own admission, what he saw was a world he might never see again, for the planet was nearly barren now. He acknowledged that his security-conscious generation was caught between two ages, two modes of life, and he accepted that curse. Death depended on how you saw life, while existence began with the laws of genetics, the chromosomal cues directing mankind to make patterns and superimpose them over nature. Time stretched on indifferently, as the center resisted the intersection of all currents. Uncle Clyde imagined little pieces of sheet-metal falling in slow motion over the eternal trample of the marching city and the ever-expanding fringes of chimneys and roofs. He told anyone within earshot how God was a fiction invented by the affluent to keep the poor content, and that if he were to die, he would attend to the matter himself. Only in his wits was there true salvation. He was the right age for it too. Uncle Clyde lacked the sympathy to involve his wife Melissa in so many shenanigans. She never knew when to keep her mouth shut anyway (though she was a skillful withholder of pertinent information). He might piss off to Russia tomorrow without even telling her. His was the blood and rhythm of an ancient eternal breed, the pinnacle of a certain kind of achievement. He preferred rich, highly seasoned food, he didn't waste more than a few hours on sleep, and he long ago quit worrying about it. --When something occurred that Uncle Clyde could not have foreseen. From January till April he visited eight different specialists. They all listened, but the real problem was that Uncle Clyde wasn’t honest with any of them. Thereby hangs this tale. Uncle Clyde had shown those specialists only outward scars, being unable to recount a coherent theory of why he failed to carry out a particularly disgusting act in his early childhood. In the words of Melissa, he was ‘moving towards the mouth of a cave,’ which meant he was full up and spoiling for a fight. Sweet Christ how Melissa hated him lately! She threatened to melt his LP collection in the oven when he wasn’t looking. Yet two people had never tried so hard to be romantic. There were the love teachings of the Kama Sutra, a French restaurant on Long Island, vacations in the national parks, sex by candlelight, twilight rowboat rides, even a Virgin Island resort. Before marrying Melissa, Uncle Clyde sought out at least ten other women, pursued each of them with guarded ecstasy, and each had cost him dearly. Put the lute out of sight when you’re not using it. He would never have married Melissa if he hadn't been so excited about her consciousness-raising groups. At the time, her ideas seemed brilliant, the way she expanded on traditional premises. Later it dawned on Uncle Clyde that Melissa was a dope and a dupe more inclined to shuck off her thoughts than try to fathom their implications. She was awkward and densely ignorant, laughing at stupid cartoons in Parade magazine and chewing packs of Wrigley’s and Carefree gum. Satisfied with terminal unemployment, she spent afternoons in the jacuzzi reading oversized hardback Scientology books, later lecturing Uncle Clyde about the auditing necessary to get a ‘clear’ 7-Up- type personality (as though she could afford it, assuming she could understand it). She was becoming aware of her subconscious reaction to endless lists of words and phrases to help clean up karmic residue inherited from past lives. Yet for all her supposed inner resources, most of the day she drained off Uncle Clyde’s precious energies. Worst of all, her bouts of stomach flu occurred on Saturday morning, when Uncle Clyde was preparing for an afternoon at the Red Lion. To annoy her, before leaving for the pub, he took off his wedding band, placing it on the dresser, and made circles around his ear with his finger as he handed her the snooze pills and the Nyquil. --Because the Red Lion was a different scenario altogether, its walls covered with faded LP sleeves from the 1970s, its booths the color of leftover mustard, a twenty-foot-tall neon martini glass on its roof: an environment distinct from the other life Uncle Clyde was now returning to in his beautifully restored Cadillac Eldorado. Their house was a big old-fashioned saltbox on an acre of rolling lawn. The nearest dwelling was a mile down the road. The ten minute drunken drive from the Red Lion had sent Uncle Clyde’s mind drifting. He made a mental note to flush out the radiator and put in new antifreeze. He glanced at his watch. It was five after five, but Melissa wasn’t on the front porch to greet him (which was not a new gambit). Nor were the lights burning in the upper-story windows. Uncle Clyde let himself into the foyer, removed his jacket, kicked off his cowboy boots, then crept into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The console television, overflowing with vague and misleading advertising, blared at him from the opposite wall. Melissa must’ve turned it up so she could listen from the kitchen, which meant there was no way she could hear him or know he had come home. What Uncle Clyde saw on the various cable channels was sophisticated and modern and egalitarian and lively enough if you were brought up in Death Valley: pink-painted elephants on parade, busloads of Japanese tourists in Orlando, Florida, teenage gangsters walking stiffly with pistols thrust down their waistbands, an episode of Cheers, blood-soaked and perspiring crewmen, a former kick-boxing champion turned actor, an African infection, a Sioux Indian who made metal sculptures from car parts, the assembly and disassembly of an M1 rifle, a low-stakes poker game at Caesar’s Palace, Bonnie & Clyde--all followed by a few minutes more discussion on the depressed condition of the local real estate market. Mel Gibson and Michael Jordan loomed over the cultural landscape. Uncle Clyde watched the TV for a moment that spanned forever, blast after colorful blast exploding through the vaults of transmission-space. So here was the butt-end of the American dream, a rather grotesque comedy whose general message was clear: whichever combatant had more conviction, that one would win. He stood up, walked over to the TV, and gazed fixedly at its screen--this is her true husband--before sliding the wood-grained behemoth up against the kitchen’s closed door. That would prevent Melissa from making an easy escape through the living room. The TV’s cord reached the extra distance, and the blaring continued, louder than the Ramones grinding out a wall of sound. Uncle Clyde noticed an ominous flexibility in his limbs. His legs were quivering at the knees. Could he carry it off? Madness would account for everything. He would claim the planets were putting weird shit into his brain. He got the knife free from his belt and opened the blade. It was old but well cared for. This would not be the first or last time he used its blade on an unsuspecting victim. Uncle Clyde walked back through the foyer to the opposite entrance of the kitchen, where he saw the woman- thing at the counter, its hands dripping with suds and dishwater, sweat between its hideous shoulder blades, and banana-bruises on its knees. Its ears were like melted wax. While Uncle Clyde was away, at work or the pub, this creature was forced to feed off its own substance, unusual and rather disturbing, like some kind of alien substitute for aspirin. On the linoleum floor was a large round tray full of fruit all past its prime. The air was filled with the hot, thick, sweet smell of reefer. Melissa was getting loaded. Only the kick-stand was holding her up. She used to drink and drive, now she only did drugs (like her mother, who choked to death on absinthe back in the Fifties). Melissa's state of mind would make Uncle Clyde’s job easier. Too stoned to suspect another presence, she was working at the counter with her back to him, barefoot, wearing shorts and a long LA Rams jersey. Her red hair was frizzy and damp. As Uncle Clyde stepped forward, he threw swift, nervous glances about the kitchen. His breath became harsher. His throat worked convulsively. He could smell her perfume. Penis breath. A thousand things might’ve happened in that fog of mysterious history, and afterwards it was dramatic to behold. Clothes were scattered around the body, its legs splayed out in a growing pool of blood, the dark center of its head turned sideways. A clear bubble of saliva had formed on its lips and remained there. The scene made him sick. Find something else to stare at. Fires were flaring and spitting in Uncle Clyde’s flesh. His face was crimson. He’d gone totally pyrotechnic. She had screamed and yelled, her voice ringing through the house, the two of them like animals in a jungle, and the reaction from her panic was a thrill of delicious contentment. He heaved a great sigh of relief. The humming of the air-conditioner was melting away his remorse. Uncle Clyde realized that in the morning he could move fresh earth. It would be easy to dig, much easier than putting the body in a car and driving off to the mountains. He kept a shovel by the side of the garage, and Hefty trash bags too. Wrap the body in plastic and bury it like a bunch of dumb rocks. No reason to make a Byzantine ceremonial out of it. Even for the dying there was no etiquette. Sirens weren’t screaming in the background. Nor would he wait out the authorities in the basement. The woods behind the house were unmoving and hushed. Uncle Clyde put his helmet on and ambled down the back lawn through the last windbreak of trees, towards the municipal rocket fields that stretched off into the distance. Uncle Clyde’s ‘real lesson’ began in earnest, selected for him by a Famous Veteran from a treasure trove of 22 parables. This particular one, subtitled The Death House, concerned a ramshackle, out-of-business Tastee Freeze building, where a shaman in a blue jumpsuit who repaired string-instruments lived with nine cats. The pipe must not cross the doorway of the lodge. Rarely did anyone appear inside there, so you sat on the floor wherever you wished if you completed the journey. The building’s windows were huge wooden rectangles that rotated on pivot hinges. A safe was built into one of the walls. A faint smell of liquor hung in the air. Outside on the lawn were morning glories, grass, and clover. Uncle Clyde had never visited the place, never seen photographs, only overheard descriptions. But by his calculations, the building was some thirty hours away, through the noise, heat, and Eakins-like vacancy of the rocket fields, where the loudest sounds were the robots sparking and rolling in their rusted duty-niches among endless rows of Quonset huts, where the signal-lamps ceaselessly turned from red to green, where automatic machines ran again and again through the figures as engines settled smoothly into their work and whistles of steam blew through stale exhaust. Those were the odd remnants of a once powerful and magnificent North American West. As Uncle Clyde wandered, a sense of unfamiliarity deepened around him. He experienced periodic moments of total panic in which he fell, spread-eagled, away from himself, his body growing smaller and smaller. Many risings and settings of dim things, and unremembered visions on the verge of disrupting--what? A swim of faces, a flashing glimpse of water between tall gray houses. No stopping for seven more hours. Uncle Clyde was not a perfect talent, but what was the point of telling himself he had no home or that his destination was a prison? Cracking up would only make things worse. He had to be prepared for any eventuality. So he threw rocks to gauge distances. He fought off boredom by kicking old vacuum tubes over the desolate ground. Hordes of scarlet beetles scuttled out from beneath his boots. The sky was turning pink. It would be very cold tonight, and without a coat Uncle Clyde would grow numb, and soon, very soon nothing would be visible.

The Hanged Man

1. The tower was calm, but I could imagine the headlines: worst man in the world dies, leaves weird pictures. Tacked to the study’s wall above his daybed were seven images yellowed and dried-out like parchment, and beside his lifeless body, on the dusty end-table, cheaply framed snapshots of his mother when she was a young girl. The photos had the look of stills from an old movie. The bed’s comforter was warm, the sheets fresh beneath the body. Bare-chested, jeans open at the fly, dried blood encrusting the lips. At the time of his death he was reading a paperback novel, The Stunt Man, by Paul Brodeur, and the reading-light was still on, as was the radio, a beautifully preserved antique Philco. An unopened bottle of champagne sat on the sideboard, and the morning sunlight was dazzling through the windows--but the lad in the mirror had changed. With the passing of S. Leonard there would be no more incidents or adventures in my world (the way he once gave me things on the sly), no suitable occasions, no uncalled-for gallantries or fantasies about the servants. All of it reduced to a bony gray face and dry old phrases. Left me to the cold marble. The worst morning of my life, and my knees were trembling. I found support on a nearby windowsill, and for a long time I stood there playing with the cord to the blinds, looking down into the inner courtyard. A helicopter passed over, surveying the morning rush-hour traffic on the broad avenues and freeways below. I removed a blue index card from a shirt-pocket and jotted down a few impressions for my private Record of Inward Transactions. Neighbor taking a fat dog out to pee. A delicate black girl with large breasts carting garbage to the incinerator. A young couple with an infant. The garden-boy who left the sprinkler on. The gray haze of kitchen smoke and cigarette fumes blown from an open window across the yard. Red-and-green roof-lights. I wiped the perspiration from my forehead. Except for the four bags of Doritos, a half-eaten Morton’s chicken pot pie, and two empty cans of diet soda, the den was neat and orderly, like a display in a store-window whose contrived harmony perversely emphasized the devastation I felt over S. Leonard’s suicide. Chewed up and swallowed a razorblade. Had there been a mistake in the prescription? He occasionally walked in his sleep. Cold buttons beneath the shoulder blades. Bloody torso with a nodding head. Spaghetti- sauce commercials. We shall see, I thought, we shall see. Divine good flows to us through the most unexpected channels. He may find a little mirror and encounter the Immortals. Hard to say. These things seldom ended in one event--though his death threatened to overwhelm me. A city cop now parked his sedan on the front lawn. The couple in the condo next door, American expatriates from Paris, had come home for the Independence Day weekend and were having the time of their lives, laughing it up, drinking, making love. A party of tourists, but they were dull neighbors, and I felt awkward listening to them through the walls while I went about stuffing S. Leonard’s books, shaving articles, and soggy clothes into an oversized red duffel bag. At least I could save his honor-- and other measures of caution. Carrying coal and wood back and forth was what it put me in mind of. I looked down at my hands for a moment, continuing to reflect. How far would I go? The weatherman on the radio said it was another scorcher. Stony and seasoned. Haze shimmered above the asphalt. I waved a hand through the den's stuffy air. Fan-letters for S. Leonard would arrive from unbelievable places like New Mexico and Kansas, many of them illegible with grief, slips of paper pushed through the slots of a letterbox. One of them posted from his overweight daughter Nina, raised on Kool-Aid, potato salad, and marshmallow sundaes. She used to run the lemonade stall down at terminus eleven. But I'd lost track of her, so I couldn’t relate the bad news. Reception desk blew up was the last I heard. I would also ask that a relative gather up the rest of S. Leonard’s many books by Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Spinoza, Rousseau, Solzhenitsyn, and Berdyaev, and the shoebox of mementos in the hallway closet that held old wedding invitations, bread-ration cards, legal papers, and prescriptions for tranquilizers. Finished packing, I turned off all the lights and went downstairs. On the bottom riser I met the cop, who marched right past me and up the stairs the way cops are supposed to. I mumbled something to him. In the wake of S. Leonard’s death I was adrift again and necessarily followed by a proportionate depression. Swelled then collapsed, suspended, bleary-eyed. The options were finished, run through, exploded. Worse than admitting defeat--like wanting to see the T-shirt I wore but in a different color from all those folders and drawings. A nightmare twinge of sliding helplessly into danger. My life was no longer a part of his life. What did my conscience say? “You should become him who you are,” to exist without camouflage. Thus I found myself drawn into a vicious circle. One must be conscious of one’s motion through life, I thought, since everyone is the hero of his own drama. Incarnation of the Word, Christ’s death on the Cross, His Resurrection. Do you want this once more and innumerable times more? Then perhaps a hidden, unacknowledged desire to show off my talents. Herky-jerky into the past. Far away a pier was swaying gently from the waves that washed against its pilings. Scanning the coastline, I watched myself ten years earlier enter a telephone booth, dial the operator, and ask to be connected with the local railroad station. Getting a bite to eat at a Waffle House, and a night’s lodgings at a Quality Inn, drinking bad coffee till morning, assembling S. Leonard’s notebooks, which explained why a Russian Revolution was necessary to avoid fascist-Nazi forms of neo-collectivism. Later watching the evening news develop on a 21-inch screen. The next evening, a side-trip to the local deli for two big chunks of bread, a wedge of corned beef in between, with mustard. So many distressing recollections of dispensable things. 2. My girlfriend’s feigned looks of puzzlement irritated me more than any other aspect of her personality. Her name was Nina Tarden, mid-thirties, divorced, overweight, the daughter and only child of S. Leonard. Her sunburned face with deep-set, heavily-lidded eyes was swollen beet-red, its freckled skin shrink-wrapped over golf-ball-sized cheeks and a pointy, cleft chin. Her scalp was clean-shaven--none of that ‘hair cascading over bare shoulders’ stuff--her fingernails and toenails polished, with a silver-and-turquoise ring on the right index finger and a gold-colored band squeezed onto the big toe of her right foot. A big lump of a body, but her hands were elegantly small, with fingers long and thin, and her makeup artfully applied. Nina was dressed in a wrinkled, gray, slept-in, tank-top T- shirt, black denim cut-offs, and flip-flop sandals. The idea amused me that many of the local men had trampled over her clothes trying to get at what lay beneath. We had been lovers for close to a year, yet I couldn’t imagine living together in our house any longer. The naked walls clamored for decoration. The showerhead was broken. Let Nina shave her crotch with my razor? I shook the thought away. Superman never kissed Lois Lane. Nina was like a wild animal that had barely escaped drowning, and she was unemployed at the moment because she wanted to make room for ‘quality time’ and give herself an image makeover. Previously, at the end of last week, she’d worked the counters at Lord and Taylor’s. Right now we were far, far away from Lord and Taylor’s. I reached inside a shirt-pocket for the cyanide pellet and handed it to Nina, who put it in an empty, crumpled cigarette pack. The plan was for one of us to pass the pellet off to her father during visitation hours. What he did with it after that was none of our business. He claimed he was experimenting with alternate forms of civil disobedience. I pulled the car over to the curb in front of the jail, parked behind a brown station wagon, and cut the engine. My 4-door Chevy was on the verge of giving out. Not all right getting bashed about like that. I felt terribly dizzy, but it would pass. I shut off the air-conditioner and rolled down the windows. We broiled. Every metallic and plate-glass surface outside the car hotly glittered. The suffocation of near-tropical heat, the piercing, vertical sunlight, scant breeze, a smog alert, and very few pedestrians on the sidewalks. A narrow street, mostly bars, one decent Chinese restaurant, three unoccupied plastic chairs in front of a laundromat, and the city jail. Why weren't retired men sitting bent over the benches? A mile further to the south a red Ramada sign towered over endless blocks of low-slung buildings and adjacent parking lots, and further, ten more miles in the same general direction, were barren, deforested, ski-lift-scarred mountain ranges shrouded in pinkish-orange pollution. A maroon Cadillac with New York plates swerved in our direction, slamming on its brakes. The driver activated the electric window and said, “Excuse me, could you tell me where’s the nearest pharmacy around here?” Nina lifted her hands towards the windshield, then dropped them to her sides, didn’t say one syllable of one word. The Cadillac continued on. Nina was tense and slightly pale (though in her better moods she was the kind of woman you saw in the old paintings in the art museums). She turned her back to me and struck a match, lit another cigarette, held it out the window, rolled her head back and wiped her neck. I was the one who talked a lot. She was the quiet person, she coughed a lot. She was an actress who never let her guard down, but her emotions were of negligible interest to me even while her availability was imperative. “Up for an early lunch?” I asked her. “That place over there has some lovely white napkins and tablecloths. And a bit of green tea ready for us when we walk in.” “No, I’m not hungry yet,” she replied. “Okay,” I said, “then hold down the fort while I go get something. And by the way, have you seen my Chick Corea tape around here?” “No,” she said. “Because I don’t know where it went. I loaned it out to somebody. That’s how it goes with my favorite tapes.” I stepped out of the car. Half a block away a train was coming in from the north, sparks popping off its brakeshoes, heading towards the south-end train-yards. Many things sounded like a train when you lived near trains all your life. You heard a lot of jokes too, and unbelievable stories. But where were the exalted colors of dream-scenery? And the glory of the approaching fullness of the Kingdom of God the pastor preached about at church? S. Leonard said life came down to subtle, incurable inflammations. Hard to say. The interior of the Chinese restaurant smelled so strongly of Raid that it would be difficult savoring the food, and with some trepidation I noticed I was the sole patron. Invisible malady? Men might be gathering outside to arrest me. I shook away the thought. The place was oddly familiar, with plaster-of- Paris friezes and large medallions, a mixture of different furniture styles, a pervasive odor of stale and overheated cooking oils. Junk music. The decay of a strict solitude. An owner sunk into the sloth of the centuries. I glanced at my watch, that portal onto childhood. Friday nights after Glee Club? Scored some hash in the restroom? I couldn’t pin it down. Above the cash register hung a photo of three men in Army uniforms, over the glass counter a chain dangling from a flickering fluorescent light, on the tables chicken-shaped salt and pepper shakers, on the floor at my feet an unopened pack of Camels. I saw receipts from a grocer. Bull semen? Such was my habit of ‘scanning the documents,’ ceaselessly looking for landmarks and new terrain. It drove Nina crazy, but my life was a constant process of elimination. Five minutes later I was seated at a window booth and provided with a glass of water, a set of utensils bundled in a napkin, a small kettle of hot tea, and a laminated menu. “You read my mind,” I said, “I never use chopsticks.” The waitress smiled and said, “Ran out of chopsticks”-- which I found hard to believe. I appreciated the young waitress’s graceful bearing and engaging accent, even if the fishnet-stockings up to her bottom were inappropriate. A bruise on her skinny arm spread out beneath a Band-Aid. Accidents will happen, I thought. More grimaces. I inquired about the drink specials. “Lemonade,” she said. “Oh!” I said, “in that case I’ll have a large lemonade to go with today’s lunch special, . . . which is?” “Mongolian beef with egg-roll,” she replied. “Fine by me,” I said, and off she went. I poured myself a cup of green tea. My hands hurt where there weren’t any calluses. Shit, I thought, bring me a bottle of gin instead, anything to keep the temper down. I had a throbbing headache. My right temple seethed with pain. I stared fixedly at the Chinese Zodiac symbols on the place-mat, directing my subconscious to let the caffeine take hold. Two futile minutes passed. Fighting pain only created more pain. My stomach growled. I craned my neck over the back of the booth, peered into the kitchen to see the cook throw an oval white dish into a garbage pail and then bend down to retrieve it. Internal conflict brought out the best in his cooking. Who was the handsome young man behind the bar mixing martinis? His face told everything: the type of guy who laughed at his own jokes. On- the-job training. I glanced outside at the car. Nina’s head was tipped back to catch the breeze. Reflections in the window-glass of a multi- colored halo. Two well-dressed men met on the sidewalk and shook hands, both looking a little embarrassed. Former employee? Owed him some money? Then a dump-truck rumbled by, laying a trail of dust. The big question before me was whether Nina had the courage to betray her father. My heart was in my mouth thinking about it. White moths floating and flying in the lamplight. A miserable way to start a vacation caught between two immense alternatives. Unlike Nina’s father, I preferred taking the easier route, money being what I wanted. I wasn't greedy or materialistic, I was preeminently practical. I didn’t want a lot of money, I wanted enough money. I was also much less of a dreamer than S. Leonard, who had worked as a copy editor in Boston before moving out west to pursue his life’s dream of managing a dry cleaning business, which went as planned until, shortly after achieving stable financial success, he revoked his intentions and shut the lights off, closing the office-door behind him forever. Thought he was too good for it, or maybe he didn’t want the success after all, because possessions and power make a man all the more frightened of his own death. People are very queer, I thought, so obsessed with greed and slavish conformity they sit around half the day worried, waiting for the telephone to ring, only to spend the night in bed with their wives replenishing the earth. Modern man, helplessly bogged down in a welter of preconceived stereotypes, had surrendered the search for an original soul. I had no trouble understanding that fact, but everyone else did--except for S. Leonard. 3. Things could not keep going on as they had, and over time it dawned on me these were not real situations at all but symbols, and every little thing that happened was getting blown way out of proportion. We may have been living in the times of Christ before Pilate, but the boat was drifting further and further out to sea this time around. The field of force was altered. Having circumnavigated all the capes and headlands, Christendom was content to rest from its labors, perilously adrift on the high seas, oblivious of the polestar. Either I calculated my chances and let secular success alone decide my actions or I imposed a farsighted, self-limiting materialism on myself or I subordinated my behavior to the demands of rationality--whichever, the next step was neither obscure nor difficult. Naked anxiety held me back. I parked the Chevy beneath a large oak tree in one of the city’s parks. Things were getting better, steadily better. I glanced at the car's trunk and was relieved to see it was in the shade. A warm, muggy morning at the height of summer. I was in my usual attire of baggy cotton drawstring trousers, no shirt, and flip- flops. S. Leonard, unaffected by the heat, wore a large horseman’s cloak over a white collarless shirt and black jeans-- the spitting image of an unknown, shadowy power. No matter what the temperature, he wore a robe or a cloak--and not a droplet of perspiration on the man. Superhuman control over his metabolism? S. Leonard’s calm presence struck me as more supportive than the confiding silence of fifteen intimates. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Casual remarks from you won’t convince me of the point. I’m getting tired of hearing about your weekends with the family. Didn’t being around Nina all these years teach you that?”--laughing--“Things have been very different for me after that week I spent in jail, and I'm no longer interested in pretending to be a survivor. It has to be genuine from this point forward, no compromise on any issue, no lying, and if being a survivor becomes tiresome, boring, unaesthetic, I'll take my own life. That’s how it is in theory--and you know my stand on practicing what I preach.” He paused. But your life-sentence is not so severe, I thought, it’s more the protective instinct of a degenerating life-form. Was I witnessing the oblivion of S. Leonard's earthly passions? “Well, you’re not a despairing slave in a stone-quarry,” I said. S. Leonard didn’t smile, which irritated me, so I continued: “I can’t believe I’m the one saying this to you, but it’s too damn early to be planning for a jeweled casket. Where would that leave Nina and me? Those morbid affectations make no sense coming from you. You’re rich and annually growing richer. You have fans, people who respect your work, who read it, who defend it. Isn’t that enough for one lifetime? What’s this sudden talk about being a survivor? Did I miss something? Are we recovering from a natural disaster here? I think your judgment’s grievously impaired.” S. Leonard turned away from me and lit a cigarette, then turned back around. “My work’s grown traditional and insipid and lost its shock-value.” “Yeah,” I replied, “but it only seems that way because your judgment’s impaired. You have a nihilistic attitude towards labor. Where it comes from I have no idea, but it’s obstructing your path to accomplishment.” “That’s where you’re wrong,” S. Leonard said, “about this being sudden, because it’s not. Did it cross your mind why I asked you and Nina to bring me that cyanide pellet when I was in jail?” “Don’t bring that up,” I said, “because it has nothing to do with this. That was a long time ago.” “It was a long time ago,” he replied, “but that’s where it began.” “And you’ve been hiding it from us all this time?” I asked. “Not hiding it,” he said. “Well, you sure had me fooled,” I said, “c’mon, let’s get breakfast at Dunkin Donuts.” “And when we get there,” S. Leonard replied in an oddly detached voice, “I’ll have a surprise for you.” 4. I looked across the table at S. Leonard, my mouth hanging open a bit, and handed him back the pamphlet entitled New Clear Bomb. "It’s impossible what you say in there, that it could all dematerialize at the snap of the fingers," I said. "I think you inherited this messianism from your Russian ancestors. The way I see it, there’s at least half a century left in these kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human beings, and a few random integration events on top of that, and a touchy-feely hallucination generation, and--" “No,” S. Leonard interrupted, “not at all. A genuine sort of intermediatism awaits future generations, though I doubt we’ll see it in our lives. I’m talking about ethical intermediatism--see John Humphrey Noyes, and conceptual intermediatism--see Charles Fort. Mutual criticism and uncertainty. You know about the literary embodiment of those notions in Roger Mexico.” I knew about Roger Mexico--so what? I shook my head more firmly this time. S. Leonard’s ideas made me nauseous, filled me with dread. Waves of anger and frustration were crashing over me. My ankles were stiffening up. The main thing I wanted at the end of this story was a period of time during which I could remember this life as I had lived it on earth. That was all I wanted--memories, and isolation of my new life in a decent sphere. To be perfect as my father in heaven was perfect, and to be perfect was to be one’s own end: telic. 5. I filled out the Western Union money-transfer form. Please pay to the order of the Suppertime. “Okay,” I said, “if you’re gonna convince me, please do it before I wire them the twenty bucks. Draw a distinct contrast between your model and other forms of future unhappiness.” S. Leonard looked at me, smiled, but said “the time for buying things of a permanent nature is finished.” A government agent with a brain-implant? Luddite? Desperation is the raw material of drastic change, I thought, but on the other hand, Christ is Control. There’s room for only one eye at the top of that pyramid. For the first time since I met him, I realized S. Leonard was an odd-looking fellow if not outright ugly, and as ephemeral as a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea. Half-bald. A distant vulnerability to the eyes. A furniture-polish rash, peonies, goatee, a full-length terry-cloth beach robe, and a thin layer of face-powder together composed an image of Royalty in Exile, and I couldn’t help but think of Nietzsche’s behold, I show you the last man. Life was a profane diversion for S. Leonard. He had nobler responsibilities on other, higher planes, and his actions here on earth lay beyond all scrutiny and challenge. A downward, ass-over-teakettle plunge had stranded him in mundane reality, where he must serve out a sentence turning dross into poetry. Formerly one of the Protectors of the Hidden Light. What God hath conjoined let no man separate. Emerged full-grown from a giant, pupa-shaped pod. UFOs hidden at Beale AFB. It was anyone’s best guess what the first initial of his name stood for. Personification of the phallus? Satan: Saturn: Set: Shakti?: Shiva: Sirius: Sophia?: Son: Sorcerer: Sun: Swastika: X. A spiraling flight leading him straight towards the midday sun, a Journey to the East and points beyond in search of a New Jerusalem. Faded copies of Minoan seals, a line of men’s clothes very cheap, a scrawny kid with pictures of Mick Jagger painted on his balls. A modest utopia. Yet death would draw the great wonder back onto their faces and cast the lure into the water. Afterwards, a couple more weeks for making those visions available to a much larger audience. It would be a dangerous profession. No luggage, restlessly going from hotel to hotel, told there’s no vacancies, getting drunk again. Done nothing but damn. Here it was: freedom through rebellion. But the heat of the place, the eating and drinking, the laughter and clinking of glasses, the screen-windowed take-out counters. Too much of it for too long got rough on the old elbows, not to mention the stomach-lining. Empty beer bottles lined up along a windowsill caught the late afternoon sun. Drink specials at a topless bar. A question of accepting one’s multiple roles, the Fool’s Path, and achieving those results intensively, not extensively. One’s mind was set less on playing than on winning the game, and therefore the two of us, myself and S. Leonard, were discussing several of the more devious strategies over cups of black coffee at the neighborhood Dunkin Donuts.

Jersey Barriers

You can either destroy your mind on money or waste your brain on alcohol. The choice is yours. In any case, dreaming remains free, free from gravity, free from morality, and free of charge. Will combined with Patience accomplishes unbelievable things, but Wisdom combined with Patience, that, my friend, is the only pathway to the true revolution beyond humanity. Once upon a time I was instructed ‘to write about what I know.’ Very well. Let’s begin this brief tale with two basic things, a rocking chair and a song on a turntable playing over and over again. That rather autistic tableau occurs within a windowless room of blank walls and hardwood floors, with me at the exact center, rocking back and forth, and the turntable on a stand beside me, and the three-minute pop song playing over and over again. The activity continues, if I so wish, for hours. But that isn’t all I know (though it is all a spectator could know were he watching me from a distance), because I also know a story that germinated in my imagination some years ago to which I add details on a daily basis while rocking back and forth. Until now that story existed only in my mind. Here the story finds its way into print. Once upon a time a tollbooth operator worked at a tunnel leading into Manhattan from New Jersey. Six days a week, eight hours a day, she accepted toll from drivers who didn’t have the exact change. She was a very large black woman, in her mid- forties, divorced, without children, and living alone in a poorly-lit house. For years she’d watched vehicle after vehicle move past her booth, most with New York or New Jersey plates, some with plates from as far away as New Mexico, thousands of rental cars, limousines, pick-ups, moving vans, delivery trucks, motorcycles, once or twice a Department of Corrections prisoner bus. She was an expert at predicting each vehicle’s destination. She could tell you whether it was headed to Soho, to Midtown, to a Central Park West townhouse, to God knows where else. But at the end of each workday she never crossed through that tunnel herself. She lived in Jersey City. I imagine I too once lived in Jersey City. I was born there, on the 12th of November. My mother got pregnant the spring semester of her senior year in high school. It happened during a field-trip, in the back of a Trailways bus, she and my father, two architects of immortality humping each other into total submission while the rest of the students and the bus driver watched. Why couldn’t it have happened on a battery-powered golf cart near the eighteenth green at twelve midnight beneath a full moon?--because I’m like a cross between Albert Einstein and Ms. Eddy. Energy and reincarnation fascinate me. They go hand in hand. For example, 1934 was the year the spirit of John Dillinger reincarnated as Charles Manson. Or consider 1642, the year Galileo’s soul transmigrated into the fetus of Isaac Newton. If you’re famous once, you’re famous forever, lifetime after lifetime. You build up so much inertia it’s impossible to alter your trajectory. Fame becomes a toxic addiction. You fail to realize how you could destroy every human being on the planet, yet still there’d be love. Meanwhile, the tollbooth operator, in her unique way, despised her neighbor, a quadriplegic widower who tooled around his house and yard in a battery-powered wheelchair outfitted with a sip-and-puff controller. From what she understood of his past, this man had once worked for the New York City Police Department, patrolling the Fifth Precinct, where, one unfortunate day, he was shot at close range by a Chinese gangster, shot twice in the upper back, one of the bullets partly severing his spinal cord. He also had a Russian-sounding surname (though he looked Italian). On all accounts, the tollbooth operator did her best to ignore the neighbor, keeping in mind it’s a felony to fire a gun at an ex-cop. What she despised about the man wasn’t his handicapped status or the fact that his wife died of breast cancer last year. She despised his out-of-control drinking and the litter of vodka bottles and beer cans. Like her, I imagine I overestimate the power of authority figures. What is the opposite of ‘right’ anyway? ‘Wrong’ or ‘left’? A psychic in tight blue jeans tried to explain that to me. As I recall, I couldn’t keep my eyes off her tight blue jeans. You wouldn’t want me working in a tollbooth. My presence is enough to blow out electrical devices and drain storage batteries. I’m tapped rather oddly into the morphogenetic grid. It’s like white- water rafting in the southern stretches of the Colorado River-- because that dimension is more about sound than color. There’s also energy behind it all, all apparent phenomena, all modes of knowledge, a single energy, a fluid, if you will, or a fluid, if you won’t. And the taste of stainless steel. None of it’s yours, none of it’s mine. Then why does everyone have his mind made up about what’s ‘right’? That morning the tollbooth operator put on eye-liner and practiced her ‘tollbooth face’ in the mirror. The transistor radio, sitting on the vanity beside her, was reporting a break-in at a local daycare center. She frowned. Her puffy cheeks, flabby arms, and bulging tummy would be the death of her. She considered the likelihood of passing away before her parents, who were in their mid-eighties, healthy and thin, and living in Owensboro, Kentucky. She hadn’t visited them in more than ten years, and they refused to come to New York. But an adult woman had to eat. Watching her prepare breakfast, one would have thought she opened and closed the cupboards with too much force (she didn’t appreciate her own strength). Yet, a few minutes later, she was eating a large portion of ham and eggs at the kitchen counter, watching TV as a man fell asleep in a chair outside an ICU. I imagine I’m one of those ‘sun-eyed children of the marvelous dawn,’ a genuine ‘out-lier.’ I fit the profile. Arbitrary rule and law at least irritate me, at most inspire fantasies of Armageddon. Seems like whoever wishes to appear clever must devise some system which of all systems they declare the very best. (Remember in the Eighties they called it ‘Friendly Fascism’?) And if you don’t like it, you can try to destroy that system or run off to the mountain caves and underground labyrinths of the remote regions of Central Asia. ‘Underground’ fascinates me. For awhile I was obsessed with learning everything about oceanic trenches. The Mariana Trench, located in the North Pacific Ocean, to the east of the Mariana Islands, is the deepest trench on the planet, with a maximum depth of 35,798 ft. (10,911 meters) at 11°22′ N 142°36′ E: room enough for all of Mount Everest with more than 6,000 ft. to spare. At the bottom, water exerts a pressure of greater than 15,000 pounds per square inch! That day (her day off) the tollbooth operator wore a white T-shirt tucked into tight blue jeans. Her hair was pulled back into a loose braid. She was working in the yard, cutting the lilacs and weeding the flower beds, which she preferred to pushing a cart up and down supermarket aisles, where you had to contend with a great multiplicity of food items. The words EAST INDIA COMPANY were emblazoned across the front of her T-shirt. After gardening, she spent the rest of the day inside watching the Weather Channel, passing from the delirium of boredom into the trance of a wild dream about a hurricane off the eastern coast of Florida. I’d rather be mad than delighted, locating my identity outside of civilization and only afterwards beginning to live. How intelligent do you have to be to recognize someone who’s wiser than you? Anyone from anywhere. A careless man from New Mexico. The bazaars of Northern India. The lawless Kazakh steppe. The horrors and abominations of Sodom & Gomorrah. In any case, there’s not enough enriched uranium and plutonium to go around, and radioactivity is a scary thing. When they come for me, they’ll come in haz-mat suits carrying guns. I imagine a troop of Cossack cavalry bearing the standard of Imperial Russia (a two-headed eagle). But that was another lifetime. Today is not yesterday. How many miles of concrete highway divider, up and down the East Coast of the United States, will they inspect with their Geiger counters? How many tollbooth operators will the FBI interrogate until they find the culprit, one Zerempil Taklamakan, rocking in a rocking chair, listening to the same song over and over gain, trapped in the total focus of an alarming form of autism? The pop song I play over and over again is ‘Angie Baby’ [#1 1974], written by Alan O’Day (who later wrote and recorded ‘Undercover Angel’ [#1 1977]) and performed by Helen Reddy (who previously recorded ‘I Am Woman’ [#1 1972]).

Sponges, Paper Towels, Garbage Bags, Gloves, a Hammer, & a Saw

Gregory Hidell’s task was to devise a script using any enemy he wanted, so long as he completed an unbelievable tale about an authentic American hero, preferably a private investigator, who learned the timeless lesson that ‘love is the strongest bond in the world.’ Preparation of the manuscript would require several days. Gregory would also need a flashy pseudonym and a working title, or at least a project name. Another priority was finding an expert with encyclopedic knowledge of film, and since the world’s most creative minds worked in Hollywood, Gregory would go there--but he knew less about Hollywood than the average viewer of Entertainment Tonight. He’d never met a ‘West Coast Agent’ or even a ‘Sophisticated New York Literary Agent.’ It was positively undemocratic. Gregory would be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. Moreover, he wrote such controversial screenplays that his first attempt, a primitive yet charming Zen- type of story, behind each phrase a thousand meanings, innuendoes, half truths, and political distortions, had contained nothing to satisfy the producers. Where were the scenes set in Sherman Oaks, California, involving 9mm ammunition, demolition guys, dead drops, shouts of orgasm, and basketball players, with five TV sets blaring in the living room and a Toyota station wagon parked at the edge of a lot near a chain-link fence, or better yet, the episode where a blonde teenager lets out a scream to send chills up and down our spines, or the sequel to a homicidal maniac standing in a phone booth at a Walgreen’s who’s holding several plastic shopping bags removed moments before from a dark green Ford Explorer? Gregory was enraged at how the producers made him feel like he was violating something precious. Was he witnessing the chronic symptoms of a deadly virus and powerful drugs, or were these assholes desperately trying to set him up? Might they awaken from their dogmatic slumber? What next? A period of hysterical blindness? By the time he returned home, Gregory's head was a-swim with new ideas. Far into the night he scribbled and dictated scene after scene. Power lay in the idea. I. Sweat formed on Gregory’s brow as he described a singles club with good food, live blues, tacky fashion trends, frivolous pursuits, and crimes ranging from possession of firearms to sale of marijuana. Patrons stood shoulder to shoulder along the winding bar or scrunched together at innumerable little tables. Hundreds of Gregory’s friends and relatives walked through the setting. Waiters passed around pitchers of draft beer. A nicely restored Wurlitzer blared Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans.” Concealed tanks supplied clean air to the club’s interior by strictly mechanical means. Sushi chefs had been flown in from Japan. Between sets the drummer and bass player shot pool, while the lead singer, when we wasn’t autographing napkins, humped his favorite waitress in the coat closet. The head bouncer, a real bronto-fucking-saurus, sported a big white bandage across his forehead, a Frankenstein-like scar on his cheek, and an imitation leather jacket that failed to conceal the bulge of a large pistol. The patrons at the bar stepped back, their expressions half fearful, half expectant. The uproar would be instantaneous, sending playing cards and newspapers flying, bodies climbing over bodies. But Gregory had no illusions as to his fate in this den of dark ritual and alien indulgence. He had chosen this moment with care. A technical assistant snapped on the floor lights as cameras swiveled around to document Gregory Hidell’s arrival. He shaded his eyes, scanning the crowded club. The watchdogs weren’t even close on this one. With his blow-dried hairdo Gregory easily passed for a serious young consultant from CBS. He lifted his head, turning it to the side, and prepared to eat his final meal. Two screwdrivers, one grilled-cheese sandwich, three gin and tonics, half a cheeseburger, one beer, and two heavily buttered English muffins completed an Olympic-caliber performance. Harmless fun, gorging himself on swill, enjoying a few extra flavors--while his coworkers whispered among themselves about his three-hour lunches, expensive sexual habits, frequent trips to Mexico, threats to change his name, and more. Gregory suffered terribly from inner reactions to his coworkers’ telepathic probing. The previous night he spent forty- five minutes in the shower experiencing vague and troubled thoughts about his predicament. Losing his job was too nasty to consider, yet he was due a brief sabbatical from the privations he’d suffered these thirty years on Earth. A dark blotch sliding over improbable blue. Were his coworkers fair to engage in put- down humor when he wasn’t allowed to participate? Could they even conceive of the primacy of logic, system, and method, of philosophical acquiescence to the preexisting order? The sight of the stars brought Gregory torment--all those planets with all those beings--but his friends? So what if he preferred secrecy. Not like he was a full member of the Politburo. Hours later, pain grinded away in Gregory’s neck, his ears were roaring from the live music, his limbs were sick and paralyzed, his peripheral vision shot. He was at a stage in the evening where he needed some real flattery, or at least a change of venue, but he refused to dance with the others because he was an artist and an instigator of significance, a poet, a revolutionary at the frontlines of a premature revolution. If only to strip excess meat from the frame. In the bar’s dingy restroom, Gregory stepped into a vacant stall, pulled down his slacks, put on white surgical gloves, and stabbed a hypodermic needle deep into his naked thigh, slowly pressing the blue plunger. Ten seconds passed . . . eyes closed, tiny spasms jumping along his spine . . . licking those lips atop a mountain, never been higher (half the people who injected as much died). Standing up to take a piss was a major effort. The colorful mixture of urine and vomit. Nor did he care that microorganisms might infect him. The latest plague had spread far beyond the confines of this shit-hole, with its damp air of brine, creosote, and rusting iron, its caged-in windows and squeaky ceiling fans. Muffled but undeniable screaming in the adjacent stall. Another junkie hiding from the people he screwed over? Black- gloved hand smashed across his face. Blood and brain matter splattered over the back wall. Both barrels. Gregory licked his lips again, then swallowed. He was breaking out in gooseflesh, and in the restroom’s smudged mirror his eyes were as red as roses. Gone, all gone. Such restraint marked a personal best for him. Cold comfort was better than none. What was a little pain, after all? One pain gave him insight into another pain, because pain was pain, whether physical or mental: a matter of balancing the victims stacked on gurneys in emergency room hallways. Slicing out the pain and fear, replacing them with black areas. Like animals frozen in time. The idea of color shading as form, the idea of triple-canopy rainforest. Gregory’s ideas extended far beyond these walls, and further yet beyond the trappings of meaningless mechanical reasoning. This pseudo-machine was set for sufficient motion, its tachometer needle rising and falling. He could no longer wait to get on with the night’s journey. II. Tonight would be a wonderful surprise. Too bad Gregory had forgotten to tell the cabdriver to wait for him in the club’s parking lot. He would have to walk several blocks to Nicole’s place, giving himself time to think, to analyze deeply one of his more puzzling moods. Time to turn over the plank and plane the other side. So he kicked off, launched himself into the night with a spectacular suicidal leap. On the streets, fog seethed in slow motion, the moon emitted its filmy light, shrieking gulls wheeled low overhead. New weather was moving in from the Pacific. The season was over now, the air congealed with heat, wet, and diesel fumes. Through the windshields of passing cars he glimpsed reptilian faces, their eyes without light, lids without lashes, the scaly hands clutching at steering wheels. Eventually the engines faded off into silence, leaving only the hum of trash recyclers. Ferns. Little birds. Empty spaces with nothing but matter for protection. No place left to descend. Gregory passed block after block of dry cleaners, florists, bakeries, hardware stores, banks, fitness centers, mirrored surfaces of luminal collectors, displays of putrid fried chicken beneath orange heat lamps. His long legs ached with sensations similar to climbing backwards down an attic ladder carrying a ninety-pound dog. But his emotions were gaining strength tonight, risk levels elevating way high, pushing him through personal boundaries, as if he were living far beyond his allotted time. A strange giddiness. The idea that everything out here was so familiar he’d experienced it once or twice before. At least he looked human, and therefore his outward self ought to reflect some inner truths, even on a relative scale. A helicopter swooped low, then banked over the Pacific. The few flickering lights were no more than pinpoints. How insane of Gregory not to have brought his cell phone. He reached into the pocket of his black leather jacket for a couple Maalox, popped them into his mouth, removed a pint of rum from the same pocket and took a swig. He was at a crucial juncture in his life’s mission, a crossroads. The fucking brick wasn’t getting any lighter. Nicole had once told him he was marked by the signs of sex and death, especially death. Look at his daily uniform of cowboy boots, faded jeans, white T-shirt, and black leather jacket. He was not conventionally good-looking, but he was capable of depths of feeling few people outside of poets had yet fathomed, including Nicole herself, despite the many hours she spent analyzing her childhood and adolescence. Gregory never raised his voice, nor did Nicole. Right on. He was fine tonight, clean, high, with excess energy bubbling up inside of him. Not an orgy exactly, though he did behold the sight of men drowning by fire on the morning he labored while Nicole moaned. He held the beautiful heart she carved around their names. Glancing around himself now, he saw a twinkling and headed for that light. No harm would come to him tonight, but he needed time to think. III. There it was. Across the street from a rubble-strewn lot with bicycles chained to its parking meters, about as downtown as you could get, Nicole’s apartment was on the fifth floor of a building that had everything going for it except design. Up the steps to a grand and lovely door with sidelights, a fanlight, and a brand-new weather-proof closed-circuit camera. A beep sounded as a light blinked from red to green, admitting Gregory into the dark, pine-paneled lobby. The elevator wasn’t stuck, so he rode it up to the fifth floor. Maids were smoking in the laundry room. The sharp odor of unwashed bodies. Misshapen lumps covered with foul-smelling discharge. Apartment 537. The door wasn’t locked. No signs of forced entry. He slammed the door behind him, pleased with the clearance between his head and the rafters, then paused to let his eyes adjust. The curtains were pulled tightly, the dehumidifier running full blast, and the smell of an oil lamp burning to hide a lingering sour odor that reminded Gregory of a psychiatric ward. Nicole was out of the shower and wrapped in an oversized towel. She was an extravagantly equipped half-Korean woman with large breasts, soft sandy blonde hair, not one wrinkle, and good clothing for travel. The whole package, as prime as prime could get. A former actress-singer-dancer who cut a record in Nashville, she stopped engines and broke windows by thinking about it. Nicole believed in Gregory too, accepting his unleashings of repressed rage, never in the mood for sentimental aesthetics herself. Her voice seldom choked with reverence, except when admiring Gregory’s depth of knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. She sensed her crucial role in the fulfillment of his plans, dreams, and goals. The two of them smoked lots of cigarettes, guzzled glasses of spring water or cans of lemonade concentrate, and sipped from a number of liquor bottles kept at arm’s length. They snacked on baggies of M&Ms, cashews, Fig Newtons, and Necco wafers. Their memories passed into dreams. Gregory was obsessed with Nicole’s breathing--no escape or getting around it, not with pills or by inhaling a small bowl of sinsemilla. Mornings, sugar donuts for breakfast. Evenings, crab meat omelets were tasty, as was her shrimp étouffée. Other times they ate beef teriyaki on pointed sticks. She was adamant about never using plastic wrap. Nicole had read Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal, in that order. She admired the genius of Gothic art. And her list continued: a white Pomeranian whose name Gregory never remembered, a maroon Dodge minivan, subscriptions to Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, murmurs of ‘thank you’ and ‘please,’ small cups of black coffee, spotless damask and shining crystal, a Ventura County childhood. Fourteen videotapes with stick-on labels were stacked tonight on the television set. Scraps of computer printouts were scattered across the floor. The only wall decorations were maps. Sitting at the kitchen table, still wrapped in a towel, sipping a bit of brandy, her face free from expression, Nicole busily worked on a series of rants for her afternoon radio show. Gregory listened to her breathing, lulling himself into a trance until he lacked the strength to move. Her foot and ankle looked very pretty from the sofa, but the price of it made no difference. Though the motion and act were more tender these days, the two of them wouldn't make love tonight, and the head of his penis wouldn't find the place it yearned for. If only a control panel were built into the model’s chest region. He glared at the slab of female flesh sitting across from him but decided to let the matter drop and take advantage of the mind-rape option. Hot breath on her cheeks, frantic palm strokes, fluids drenching her face hot and sticky. Squeezed off three rounds, the body arching up, jerking, until the bitch was gone. Gun had more kick than he expected. Having fucked her in every possible position, Gregory imagined new ways of surrendering to his lust. Work up a sweat over the older sweat. Thoughtful. That vision gave him strength. He was the king-maker. He’d fuck her blue, generation after generation, right into the interminable future, foregoing the continual talk about the same things, the books, TV, movies, and complaints that she slept poorly because he visited her in dreams of an old Polaroid of a man she once knew. Nicole owed her stellar good humor to antidepressants. Apocalypse was insufficient cause for insomnia. Her picture- window was bonded to cinderblock walls, and she entertained the parochial notion that sexual relationships were monogamous. On other occasions, Gregory ran out of the apartment to sit all night in the car. Or those evenings when he violated the Mann Act by driving young prostitutes across the state line for immoral purposes. Yet he returned to Nicole the next day with an invitation to La Traviata or the municipal art museum. A new day, a new tape. They shared laughs about counting her freckles and dreamed up exotic ways to launder money and collect sand dollars in the surf. There were shaving-cream fights. He sang in the shower with a Johnny Cash voice. Once or twice a week they went to Pizza Hut to discuss their plans over deep-dish pizza. Brief vacations not requiring garment bags or trunks were never out of the question, and they considered studying Spanish and taking up snorkeling. IV. Gregory lay back on the sofa and began flipping through the Yellow Pages. He needed sponges, paper towels, garbage bags, gloves, a hammer, and a saw. He had a logistical nightmare on his hands. Nothing was settled yet, though a poignant appreciation of isolation was moving in upon him. Lately Gregory’s smiles wore a grimace because the nature of Nicole’s phone calls had changed. Any normal man would’ve been excited, considering the circumstances. But had Nicole experienced physical pain associated with electricity? Or a one-way ticket into the realm of pure oscillation? The old exercises helped him. The trick was to empty out the mind. No monkey business. A straight line was the shortest path to any objective, each case had a history, and every expenditure was balanced--not so much a matter of deciding as accepting the inevitability of it all. Twenty million people had died at the hands of Stalin, and the shots of their bloodied heads were spectacular, slicker than life itself. Jesus Christ was also right in line with the Schedule of Progress. And the Arabs had a tradition of holy war, the jihad, with no real mission, no function, no job, no sexual issues--just holy war and a burst of pyrotechnic glory. A hundred different versions, sequel after sequel, a made-for-TV story about the two opposites, Winning and Losing, and their neutralizing force, Murder. It began in 1948. A magic coin in a fairy tale, a glorified psychic, an atrium coffee shop, the Ringling Brothers Circus, California rock-n-roll music, two Heinekens, a can of Michelob, Pakistanis in northern Tehran, a gang of intellectuals crowded into a cellar discussing revolution--leading to a series of computer programs that did computer things and allowing conversations to drift on to lighter topics. For two thousand years mankind had chosen to ignore the rebirth of virility and international pride. Blazes of light were forming in the upper left quadrant of Gregory’s brain. Words blurred. Seconds clicked by. He took a sip of vodka to stop laughing for no apparent reason. Nothing untrue remained in his thoughts, not insane at all, no portal through which autumn light might reach him. Such was his duty, yet he was afraid of himself, wishing he might never return-- because buildings would be destroyed and many people killed in the coming production. And amber warmth would supply the only luster to the several star-like displays. Long muscles showed in Gregory’s arms and legs. Otherwise he was holding it in, not exposing the rage. His power lay in several unlabeled black plastic boxes placed at irregular intervals throughout the civilized world. It would be the end of an empire, the furrows of exhaustion, and the survivors would need sponges, paper towels, garbage bags, gloves, a hammer, and a saw.

The Spherical Art

1. It all begins (began?) in Damascus, that glorious city which, at the dawn of the 21st Century, is the capital of Syria, a Middle Eastern nation of 17 million people, whose national flag sports red, white, and black stripes along with two incredibly fascinating, eternally-twinkling green stars. Previously I thought it all began in Alexandria, Egypt or Samarkand, Uzbekistan, but I realize it’s wisest to start with Damascus, Syria. A most excellent shining carbuncle. Blessed Aurora may henceforth appear. As is their wont in such matters, the Wise (a small group of aging men living in abject poverty) received me not as a stranger but as one whom they’d long awaited. They called me by my real name and knew I was a bachelor of avowed virginity. Weird, right? Among other things, over the course of the following month, they revealed to me ‘the undefiled mirror of the mystery of God’ and ‘the brightness of Eternal Light.’ (Here and throughout, inverted commas indicate the necessity of a semantic code. I wish it could be otherwise, but in these realms expressions of the literal sort create simple distortions. The use of italics indicates something else.) The Wise assured me their information would be an infinite treasure to mortal man only if it were first placed in the proper, let us say, ‘pedagogical’ hands. They believed (or were they certain?) I possessed such hands. The West now awaited my teachings. I should mention here how over the course of my forty- five-year existence, excessive worldly experience had weakened my ability and desire to give reasons and explanations for events that occurred in my daily life. On my view, things happened-- period. Any discussions subsequent to those events were essentially and uninterruptedly beside the point. Every instant of my life I beheld the image and pattern of a world in its eternal developing process, and that vision was sufficient. The fact those old men regarded me as a ‘revolutionary Messiah’ didn’t confound or frighten me in the least. I knew that revolution, like enlightenment, is an individual thing. Each of us must be his or her own Messiah. Anyone who professes to preach the Only True Gospel finds himself yelling at the top of his lungs to uninterested and annoyed passersby on a street corner. Since each person is unique, we must teach each person uniquely. Yet the individual pride of the educated and scholarly masses is so great it never allows them to listen attentively and learn. Were they but attentive, they might, out of all the ideas and theories debated in our modern age, discover the single, effective, generally applicable method of Willed Creation. Such is their opposition to this ideal, the scholars keep and are loathe to abandon the old course, esteeming physics, logic, and medicine, and all the rest of which is but a mere show of learning, while denying the possibility, much less the existence, of the human being’s innate creative force. Thus, in these latter days, darkness and ignorance have descended upon the world (what the Communists used to call мракобесие). Come on now--mere?! Everyday those ignorant dumbasses vomit forth their blasphemies against divinity! What they don’t realize is if they're truly ignorant of something, of anything at all, only someone else can point that fact out to them, for if they had knowledge of their own ignorance, they by definition wouldn’t be ignorant. Ignorance cannot know itself, and pride prevents them from accepting someone else’s judgment regarding their own state of mind. From one point of view, each of us is a bundle of desires yearning to be satisfied, a ‘collection of wants’ whose regular satisfaction generates happiness. Moreover, because we consider happiness the basic criterion of a good life, happiness doesn't call itself into question. As a result, having once found those things that bring us happiness, we are reluctant to let them go, fearing a life without them could bring us unhappiness and despair. Thus, happy people not inclined to alter their lives or question their beliefs. They ask, "If we’re getting everything we want, why change anything?" What, to the outsider, looks like rank complacency, is, to them, mere common sense. But ‘everything we want’ is not ‘everything there is,’ and from the fact we’ve chosen one particular 'happy' lifestyle, we cannot conclude it's the only or best possible lifestyle. Alternatives exist--but who explores them? Not those who are happy with their lives because they see no reason to alter things. That leaves individuals who explore out of disappointment or disillusionment with the status quo. Now, suppose someone develops an alternative lifestyle. So long as a small number of people practice that alternative, few social problems arise. But if a push is made to replace the ‘old’ lifestyle with the ‘new,’ sharp conflicts occur, since those satisfied with the ‘old’ see any significant change as a potential deathblow to everything they live for. Having achieved consistent happiness pursuing one particular lifestyle, and having never found any reason to consider alternatives, they're incapable of imagining a ‘new and improved’ social order. That failure of the imagination, which is founded on regular satisfaction of desire, leads to fear, and fear leads to fight or flight. Yet what I described would never come to pass if, in the first place, we weren’t so beholden to our desires, if we didn’t arrange our lifestyles, cultures, and civilizations around regular and maximum satisfaction of desire. If we were more inclined to look at, laugh at, and detach from what we want, we might find ourselves much less human and more--what’s the word?--divine. We would skate over the surface of life. 2. A rose of five petals. The Wise called it the Great Rose of Creation, the sign of man the microcosm. You’ve seen the diagrams of the invoking and banishing rituals and the cipher (or is it a code?) [I.N.R.I.] in those cheap, mass-produced books available in the Occult section--excuse me, in the New Age section. (Satan Lord of the Heavens Ruler of People scares the shit out of your average consumer.) Make thy body the Temple of the Rosy Cross. It’s too complicated to get into here, and besides, well yes--besides. If in the world he lives, we’ll seek him out. If in the grave he rests, we’ll find him there. MARK MY WORDS! And what about the star of unconquered will? Now you’re talking. We'll attempt sex with eighteen prostitutes on a single night. Here and throughout, the purpose of ambiguity or ‘twilight language’ is to dissuade readers from ruining their lives searching for The True Theory in the world of their senses. We must encourage you to escape from that world, after which you can speak of ‘The Truth’ or ‘The True Theory’ or maybe not, because how can you speak of the unspeakable? At least you'll know, even if in silence, that it’s wisest to unite with those things that disgust you the most--to overcome the limitations disgust imposes upon your sounds of a throat clearing soul. Please keep your eye on the python crawling between the bearded woman’s sweaty cleavage. Never let your attention waver for a microsecond--until you realize how all things strive to persist in their own nature. That striving is, from a higher perspective, one species of ignorance, while from a lower perspective illustrating nothing less than perfection, completion, and beauty. Why not strive upward, vertically, to the higher perspective, rather than lengthwise, horizontally, to perfection? Can't you see how beauty and perfection are inextricably intertwined with ignorance? The plant knows only how to become a plant, not a curbstone or a cloud or a shoelace. Can you only become a human being? Is that all you’ll amount to? But the GREAT DECEPTION is secrecy exists. Naturally, it does exist in three dimensions, where walls and ceilings create concealment (ruling out surveillance devices), but in dimensions beyond three we can ‘walk’ through walls and ‘slide’ through ceilings, and further beyond, 'crawl' through each other’s minds. You cannot hide your thoughts from me, nor can I hide mine from you (and do we ‘possess’ our thoughts in the first place?). Privacy and secrecy cannot exist in dimensions higher than three. It’s supposed to be that way--it has to be that way--for in the beyond all things touch. Now, suppose someone develops an alternative worldview that on a number of counts is superior to the consensus view. So long as a small number of people adhere to the alternative, few social problems arise. But if a push is made to replace the ‘old’ worldview with the ‘new,’ sharp conflict is inevitable, since those satisfied with the ‘old’ see any significant change as a potential deathblow to everything they believe in. My dream? To make outrageousness a reality. (I’ve forgotten how to be paranoid.)

Unconfessed Preoccupations

Part 1. “Even when it’s dark I’m a little tense, but when it becomes brighter, things are that much more misshapen as a result of the common fluctuations between individuality and multiplicity. The great wonders of Light and Shadow, inferiority and superiority, Governor and the governed--and the glamorous prospect of one’s private annihilation, no form, no pigment, no lens, nothing save Totality.” Such are the opening words of a remarkable pamphlet entitled New Directions in Current Research. Although there’s much within its pages I don’t fully understand, I hope to encounter the resolution of I’ll get out of here alive before the true believers can press a second round of installments on me. More than a week has passed since the newspaper headlines warned of a plague of pulmonary and nervous diseases and sudden failures in the petroleum supplies. Yeah, I’m thinking, maybe not right away, but eventually. For now, it’ll be another theory, like everything else in modern-day pop psychology. The genuine truth will immediately terrify those experts. Orthodox sects declared ‘illegal sacrilege,’ courts over- clogged with indecency cases, packs of polyglot laborers crammed into trucks and old buses, coastal cities disappearing into deep, water-filled sinkholes. Mobile shapes hang down from the skies, clinging to their parachutes, while below them not a single square mile of territory remains in its natural state. So that is the dangerous energy of a repressed intellectual impulse? Well, ten years is a long time for a leader to hold a grudge. But the good news is that injecting hormones into various mammals has produced a species of slobbering cur predisposed to pouncing on any unannounced visitor. So much for that roomier cranium--or were those remnants of an earlier masterpiece? Sources of pride rather than regret? No wonder the logical conclusion is survival, no wonder it’s the way we live nowadays. Yet I'm objective about the outcome. Humanity will make good on its balance-sheet, even if it first must degenerate into a freak parade of howling victims. Every week a new public-relations ploy, and most of the people out there are dumb enough to buy one and keep it on the shelf. But I can sympathize, because I have my own noble-hearted streak. Coastal flooding is a generous sort of death, seen, not heard, much like a deep sleep or a blossom stolen inside the bellies of night-roaming fish. Now if they could only design new-and-improved climates. My face squinched against the heat, I stride across the crowded parking lot to my sedan, under my left arm a king-size carton of Kools, and under my right? A laugh . . . between sips of coffee. I’m in fine shape for my age. My body fills a doorway. My neck is massive. The past couple years I’ve let my beard grow long. But my most exotic features are these huge, delicately molded hands, perfect for hunting and tillage. When I was a young boy my uncle nicknamed me the ichthyologer on account of the tropical fish I kept in my bedroom. That flashback imagery returns to me now as I drive north on the Gulf Freeway. The long hours spent trailing a suspect are a welcome diversion from and a significant development beyond my previous employment as a cabdriver, five years as a cabdriver--and still I have the irritating habit of not listening to other people’s conversations when I sit behind the wheel. Then as now, my life consisted of the serial permutation of urban imagery floating past a smudged windshield. Despite that experience, these sharp stabs of sunlight still outpace my imagination, only difference being that as a private investigator I carry a 35mm camera and a registered handgun. The city is as dreadful and seductive as ever, much like my ex-wife. I know another shot of adrenaline would juice up the old nerves, but I’m not abusing drugs anymore (though a couple shots of tequila and a beer everyday after the shift…). I exit the freeway and park the sedan. I’m close enough to walk the rest of the distance without attracting attention. All-day parking for $10.00, then further ahead, a second red-white-and- blue, hand-painted sign pasted to the wall beside an empty lot that reads You no longer wish to take this trip? The empty lot, where I momentarily stop walking, is adjacent to a vacated building that once served as a hardware store but is now 2000-sq. ft. of storage space. I reach into my pants pocket, pull out a piece of paper. I want to make sure I have the address right before making my approach. Splotches of sweat across my back and chest reveal the outlines of a flak-vest beneath my uniform. The September afternoon is sweltering, humid, hardly a breeze to be found, not a cloud in the sky, the asphalt only making matters worse. Some like it cold, like me, but not today. A bank’s digital temperature gauge two blocks down the street registers 93 degrees. Heat like this scorches up the appetites. I need the money. The deal we discussed over the phone is to trade them my .44 Magnum for two sawed-off shotguns and $500. The ringleader’s prior burglary conviction, not to mention he’s a prime suspect in the fatal shooting of a live-in girlfriend, makes me suspicious of him, but let’s say this is a family affair, and anyhow, the most voluptuous ones have a tendency to rot away. I look up. A black hooker with a silver wig is crossing the street in my direction. “Little early for that, ain’t it?” She quickly walks past, doesn’t reply. I turn around and yell in her direction, “What’s the hurry? You work by the piece, you get paid by the piece. Whatever happened to charm, exceptional beauty, and intelligence?” I laugh. Out pussyfooting. SSN 36-25-36. A cocked-hip pose, calf-boots. She’s far too man-made for my tastes, and those wrinkled breasts and cottage-cheese thighs aren’t exactly bursting with young sap either (though nevertheless intriguing in the manner of a rare entomological specimen). When I reach the building I check the address again to make sure. ‘Making sure’ is one of my more nerve-wracking hang-ups, though I have many other lesser ones, like collecting lists of predispositions and fears, and rearranging the living-room furniture. My delicate health is also a liability. I yearn for genuine emotion (though my judgments are seldom charitable). However, I don’t lack the power of reason. I hire a servant, eat my meals alone, and my hat is the only thing I depend on. Yet my Galveston beach-house never gets lonely. The long driveway gives out a hundred yards before the garage. I covet my solitude. Long-time friends say I’ve mellowed in recent years, but I seem the same to me--using myself up with little time for recreation. The highlight of my life is a round of golf at Pebble Beach. I’ve never been the type to get rich off the stock market and become weighed down by a six-month-old baby--and at questionings I always have my lawyer present. My career has reached an interesting stage. The other guys in the department have dubbed me the ‘clean-up hitter.’ I try the building’s sidewalk entrance and find it locked. Uncomfortable announcing my presence via knocking, I decide to loiter awhile. If they want the deal to go through, they’ll show up sooner or later. I light a cigarette. My God, on the other hand I don’t want to scare them. Take me for a mugger? Then from a concealed speaker: “Hit the button and hold the handle.” I do so, the lock buzzes open, and I stub my cigarette out on the door jamb as I enter. It’s hotter inside than out, stuffy as hell, damp, uninhabited. Rows of dirty windowpanes. Odors of sweat, feces, burning herbs, sugar-polluted vinegar. It’s too dark to see where I’m going, much less to see if anyone else is present. I yell out, “Hey guys, I'm too fucking hot to play hide- and-seek. I brought the piece, so let’s get the show on the road. This is not my kind of scene, must be a haven for asbestos and termites.” The place could also use a few 75-watt halogen bulbs to provide what the poets call ‘haunting illumination of the truth.’ I stop moving forward and wait for my eyes to adjust to the dimness. More than a minute passes. No one appears. I can barely make out cardboard boxes piled throughout a large open area that once housed hardware merchandise. A rotting sofa sits in one corner of the room. I step over to the nearest stack of boxes, opening one of them, knowing that such impulsive behavior is bound to get their attention. Sure enough, out of the shadows steps a twenty- something Hispanic male, making a poor attempt at casual menace. “Who the fuck said you could open those boxes?” “Didn’t know I needed permission, and I don’t care what’s inside. Here’s the Magnum.” I unholster the piece, extend it to him. He doesn’t accept it, doesn’t even raise a hand. “What’s the problem?” In a more diffident tone he replies, “Wait here,” leaving me alone again, and vanishing as if through a trapdoor. Perhaps he needs to relay everything back to the manager or the others have fallen asleep. Or maybe they want to irritate me. I yell out again, “Hey guys, I hate waiting. It pisses me off! I refuse to work forty-eight-hour days.” So ludicrous, so ill-prepared, these are the gangster types who spend weekends in the kitchen hollowing out .22-caliber bullets for next month’s revenge-slaying--not exactly certified technicians. But I need the money, so I decide to wait it out . . . and take note of the fly-specks. A bruise begins swelling up behind my left knee, and with each minute I count off, muscular fatigue increases my displeasure tenfold. What the hell could be taking so long? More time passes . . . until far too little stimulates my mind that I begin involuntarily observing its mechanism, how one thought gives rise to another, how silence exists in the narrow interstices between individual units of thought. For a second I become desperate for certainty--then the panic gives way to feelings of empyrean indifference. Are they testing my patience? The morons must think existence is occupation enough for me. Then again, they may not be in full possession of their faculties--not a good thing, since making concessions to another man’s weaknesses is not on my list of accomplishments. Fifteen minutes later the same man returns with the words, “He’s eating lunch right now.” “Who?” “The guy who wants to see the gun--Little Five Points.” Scornful with anger, seething with impatience, I wisecrack, “You’re not a morning person, huh? Try reducing the red-eye? Or a new pair of contact lenses?” He remains expressionless. I ask, “You mean his name’s Little Five Points?” “That’s what I’m allowed to call him.” For the first time I notice the man before me is cursed with the triple misfortunes of bad teeth, roasted-garlic breath, and inappropriate laughter. He also needs a quick, close shave. Yet the sheepish grin doesn’t prevent him from striding right past me towards the exit. “Hey! Where the hell are you going?” “To eat lunch.” I can’t believe it. “Fuck this!” I say, “and maybe you’ll be kind enough to pick up something for me, a reuben, swiss cheese on rye with mayo, and a fruit salad.” He departs without responding. Devil, take it! His banal ugliness offends me, though I realize he’s acting too stupid to be stupid. Something’s up. The heat has become so overbearing I have to step outside for fresh air or risk fainting. If I can’t assuage this anger, maybe I should log some time with a cardiologist. If not cured, at least close to it. Thoughts come floating up out of a dark pool. Shortness of breath, sudden radiance, the wings of a plane turned visible. I grit my teeth, clench my fists, wait for the sensation to pass. The white explosions of cheap fireworks have plagued me since childhood. It begins with blushing, wheezing, eyes tearing, and ends with saliva filling up my mouth, which I promptly spit onto the ground. Houston does bad things to good people, especially those transferred here from Seattle against their own better judgment. I was so intoxicated by the newness of things those first six months, so willing to walk about on the surface of common life without tremendous care or discretion, fully reborn in my second city of American Light--when a transformation occurred that to this day I cannot understand. Many crises rapidly ensued, until I reached a point beyond which I was forbidden to proceed, a locus of siege where my life was relentlessly attacked at its very core. Maybe I need to evaluate my fortunes a more carefully, or hire a lawyer to defend myself, or at least purchase a utility knife and a pry-bar. It’s folly to envy the happiness of others--much better to fashion one’s happiness according to one’s own measure. Exhaling in two sharp jerks, monologue exhausted, I step back inside the building. Hell, I’ll accept a month of sleepless nights in exchange for this bullshit. My earliest memories are of the Malibu hills in flame. Our family stayed in Malibu only one week, but on the last two days brush fires raged. Those memories still work their way into my dreams during stressful periods. That was the first and last time I set foot in Southern California. Such is the odd state of affairs inherent to a man of intense sensitivity--impossible to subdue an overstrained willpower. Also a bad habit of talking to myself when the great open spaces between past and present become unbridgeable. A clinician calls it a ‘generalized nervous complaint,’ but I call it preposterous, how I fail to control my body’s reactions to the environment. My excuse is I was born this way, otherwise what? An invitation to self-discovery? Marked down for self-destruction? A shudder comes over me. I’m tired and sweaty, my legs ache, my mouth tastes terrible. I wipe my forehead with the cuff of my shirt, unbutton my collar. Clearly the deal isn’t meant to be. The day is slowing down another notch or two. I need something to rekindle the dying flares of my passions, a frantic springtime of amoral hedonism, or the cunning of a wild animal barely kept at bay. A copious discharge of chaos. To forego all laws of moderation in pursuit of a career of unparalleled atrocities. To make curious discoveries about myself, evolve beyond me, and then dump the body into a river. Terrifying landscapes would transform into maddening, beastly acts devoid of all rationality--to escape from the furious routine of civilization. I’m sick and tired of the young, mild-mannered guys who are taking over the department. I don't want a new generation that I don’t see eye-to-eye with. Their bitterness lacks all conviction. But youth isn’t the issue here. I worship youth and its sexual prodigality. Yet why must it be accompanied by a lack of transcendental ideals, an absence of the obstinate urge towards the beyond, towards ‘vertical independence,’ a realm free from associations with the collective phrasebook of an Americanized planet that prides itself on breeding moronic forms of optimism? More than one expert is calling ours the great age of barren complacency, this headlong rush of self-oblivious consumption, browsing through life looking only at the right side of the aisle. I’m not sure how it works, but when will that special day arrive everyone is waiting for? A new passageway home, an authentic message from the Last of Men, or at least more unburdensome forms of friendship. Patience is the secret password here. My soul-mates and I must lie dormant, patiently awaiting an epoch more favorable to our works. Until then, long moments will pass without meaningful conversation, which frightens me because I find despair in that silence, not anticipation. I return to the sedan, unwrap one of two bologna sandwiches, and eat my lunch. I'll request the department transfer me back to Seattle--for the sake of my sanity if nothing else, to deliver myself from these brief bouts of psychosis. Part 2. Meanwhile, I want to write a delightful contemporary story, warm, funny, and real, complete with accurate descriptions of empty Minute Maid orange juice cans, ringing telephones, Detroit businessmen, voluptuous call-girls, and sentences like he tossed the matches back onto the coffee table. It'll be the most exciting venture of my life, a kind of telepathy with the Godhead, an attempt at personal salvation, a direct expression of the dynamic Cosmic Energy, a living text couched in archaic symbolism transmitted from mind to paper and thence to another mind, your mind, kind reader. My editors instruct me to describe the events in relentless detail and afterwards to let you, the attentive audience, analyze the testimony and draw your own satisfactory conclusions. Nothing’s worse than the burden of unconfessed preoccupations-- except for the vague sense of dread that comes from violating a federal law, a law left to crumble in the buried-over Hall of Records: 1--that the past is entombed in the present, 2--that if there is a universal it’s a process not a thing, and 3--that momentum and confidence make strange bedfellows, even a little erotic. Imagine huge half-faces of screen-lovers exchanging kisses without touching but asking each other, “Are we on camera yet?” Here goes--presented as a continual jettisoning of accumulated debris, or as links in an extra-causal chain. Take it how you’re able. A bit about the protagonist first. After a successful escape from a stifling marriage, and a subsequent period of near starvation carried out under strict scientific supervision, followed by two more years of anonymity among the tough-minded but grossly under-funded SAS, Society of American Skeptics, a 25-year-old man named Patrick Kramer managed to become the hottest new spirituality act not only in his native Pacific Northwest but nationwide. Having discovered his vocation by accident, Patrick Kramer was unexpectedly transformed into a real Mr. Mojo, Teacher of Righteousness & Jesus as Magic, someone sudden and unknown who tackled the problems of why man is alive and what occurs after death. His unconventional methods were impossible to pin down and difficult to rationalize, as they were derived from a root-race of beings composed of loops, triangles, and trapezoids. ‘Non-sensory ways of obtaining information’ was one commentator’s take on it. Patrick Kramer had mediumistic tendencies as well. Once, in a fever, he spoke a mixture of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and a second incident, when the stench of burning flesh emitted from his mouth, and thirdly, psychometry readings of personal jewelry and fabrics, and many other events of a more extreme character that remain classified, for their expression would bring this writer into conflict with the federal authorities. Over the course of his brief life, Patrick Kramer had expanded upon those unique manifestations, developing them into a form of conceptual art expressive of the mystery of the Original Act. Under the freeway there’s one--you’ll see it--though the idol hangs elsewhere, awaiting destruction by natural cataclysms. Popularity was inevitable, as Patrick Kramer’s recreational events, including Projector at the Planetarium, Slow Whirlwind, and the notorious Small Chill Disease, all evolved, over some five years, into monthly, three-day-weekend celebrations in the Seattle area. The local physicians were powerless to stop his contagious disrespect for the human body and biology in general. When would the city police put an end to his public appearances, arrest him for inciting a civil disturbance? Hide a tape-recorder in his bedroom? Here was the unpredicated ground of gnosis: know this: no this. Odd content hidden beyond a hundred lightly-concealed entranceways. Many qualities distinguished Patrick Kramer from an ordinary human being. The sharp, metallic, machine-like edge of his voice (which he exaggerated by shouting syllables into the microphone as abruptly distorted as three loud guitar chords). His red-rashy, heat-irritated skin. His bushy, black mustache trained to turn up sharply at its ends. The small tattoo on his left hand. When he stood he was a tall, ghostly figure, thin as a British rock star, though at the moment he was crouched over, eyes wide shut, holding his knees in his arms, calmly rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, the expression on his face horrifying. At his side was the blonde girl with the red rose who accompanied him. Lover? Wife? Consort? Part of a trusted cadre of close advisors?- -a matter for further investigation. We heard stories about how the Feds had bugged his psychiatrist’s office. So was this the sequel to that? Too early to say. Based on my colleagues’ descriptions, I expected a bearded man in a suit, yet there was none of that here, only denim cut-offs and a cool-looking Hawaiian shirt to commemorate Patrick Kramer’s emergence from the Cosmic Egg. But was Patrick Kramer truly even here? He was oblivious to the crowd’s growing curiosity, a crowd consisting of students between classes and undocumented workers. Sunny sky, dead-still air, confounded optimism. A Kodak Moment with everything half-price. Or perhaps I was stranded behind the scenes at the latest Disney movie, with an ocean of fire pouring over a precipice. Definitely pay-per-view. I laughed and reminded myself that miracles happen for three reasons--if only I could remember the first two. Back in autumn, before the primaries, when I first shook Patrick Kramer’s hand, he had described himself as an emblem of freedom for the largest voluntary mass migration in American history. He was a gifted, earthbound spirit appointed to a mission, and for all that, he had a genuine capacity for wounding people’s egos. Then again, God is never obtained cheaply: if only to outlast the many diseases of selfhood. “The Perfected One is beautiful, people, very beautiful! So who is he? A Spanish name? A caretaker? More than anything else, he understands his own history.” Patrick Kramer paused, concentrating, nervously chewing on pieces of old olive pits. Chewing was Patrick Kramer's trademark, chewing as the precursor to a peculiar form of spiritual digestion. “Someone who is one part father and one part son, who has organized his dogma, but he’s beautiful in that he’s organized. Organization is a part of him, an organ, if you will. Two nights ago I walked into the Pacific, stood there, and soon lost track of the conscious self. Had I attempted that without prior organization I might've drowned. Dragons and trees, people, dragons and trees--both are encountered on the path to perfection, and the cycles of transmission, corruption, and restoration are known deeply only by those who have organized themselves in advance. Organ-eyes.” A second, longer silence. The lukewarm applause for the manner in which Patrick Kramer had formulated his ideas was hardly more rousing than those old stories told by lonely wives during wartime. I wasn’t the only one growing weary of his oratory. But did we grasp the nuances? Full of high hopes, but what did we hear in his speech? One had to look closely to see the periods between the letters, and the closed captioning, but the rest of his words I failed to make out from this distance. I was listening to Patrick Kramer’s cheaply amplified harangue from inside a car parked five blocks away, on the slope of a hill looking down into one of Seattle’s asphalt-forested valleys. Unlike last summer (Labor Day weekend), this summer we were prepared to watch the festivities go down to the wire. Whether in a parking lot or on a sidewalk near one of the city’s several universities. By comparison, the WTO riots would look like a little-league softball game. Since we knew what Patrick Kramer was planning, we also knew he was not merely a man with psychic abilities, he was a bona fide psychic, his soul dense with marvelous healing powers. Many qualities distinguished Patrick Kramer from the ordinary human being. He enjoyed reflecting on the intimations of his childhood. He drank copious draughts of brandy. He drove a wine-red BMW. He gave the impression of someone engaged in a series of silly caricatures of himself. Past lives? Scrupulous about his payments too. He rented a place on Phinney Ridge in the Fremont neighborhood, which made for an easy commute to his soap-boxing ground near the UW campus. He patronized Starbucks coffee establishments, ate a late breakfast at Denny’s or an early lunch at Ivar’s seafood bar. We catalogued the addresses and phone numbers of his advocates. We mapped out their habits across the King County metro area. Those fabrications and embellishments provided the keenest insights into his character. Interested in Sophisticated Fun? was the title of another one of his pamphlets, with the additional text: “None of this works without the proper mood music: primal tones: mental acts: ideas given form: the world image.” I now received a holographic transmission of a screened- in dining terrace full of roses and late poppies, a distinct air of recently passed celebration but also a disturbing touch of hysteria that accompanies vain efforts to restore balance and composure. Patrick Kramer’s last words hung in the air. I had experienced no sense of despondency or anguish. As if the dead persisted even in a bottle of wine. This was it--the time--but I waited a bit longer to be sure . . . again, nothing. Alone, at peace, far from the world, I reached over for the box of cartridges in the car’s glove-compartment, put a round into the chamber, adjusted the scope--1/100th the width of a human hair--and? Insect whirring inside my ears--released the safety--aimed--pulled the trigger. The heavy cigarettes had soothed my mind. One shot to the strike zone--the carotid,--and Patrick Kramer collapsed in a spray of blood. Necking in cars on hot summer nights--movies, shopping, food--Jacuzzi tubs & kitchenettes--beer, wine, cocktails, sloppy- Joes, hand-tossed pizza--data-ports in each room--indoor pool, landscaping lights--rigged up radio-control cars--Snow White costumes in a school play--rashes, sinus infections--hosted a party in the grand ballroom--riding off into the sunset together. Coil after shining coil of memories, but not a single bit of magic for the rest of us, nor kiss of cosmic pool balls. The city police and SWAT teams were summoned and soon would be combing the area for recent batches of my victims, easily recognizable by their dazed, self-deprecating demeanor. A parade of posturings in this, a crudely semantic sort of universe despite its inviting atmosphere and wonderful table service. A complex situation on our hands here. The downright complicity of it left me stunned. The Narrow Gate through 4 Gray Stone Walls. What had Patrick Kramer’s pamphlets meant to me? His blood hosed down the drain-gratings, flushed into the Sound. How many more fans were still going through the game of dressing up to head downtown? I’m out of a goddamn job? All I did was apply over the phone. Where was the reverence in that? The insistent banging at the door, the wall-to-wall scatter of clothing, the minor arthritis pain, the spilled bourbon--all were part of the business of being a provider. Only the inhabitants of Jupiter escaped from that fate. Yet the role Patrick Kramer played in this story was different from what you found in the more scholarly worlds of Florence and Rome or Cambridge. Patrick Kramer’s new pamphlet was served and did serve my life, justified it: the vinyl limited-edition. I smiled and understood that freewill is for those who prefer the bliss of ignorance. Everything that happens is written elsewhere in a collection of short stories. Patrick Kramer was all about presentation, a fantastically brilliant speaker, despite those bizarre, saturnalian, emotional services. Thus shocked into life the way a child reacts to a death in the family, I was sorry to miss the grand reopening of the city government.

Inconvenience

1. When I arrived at the store, first thing I did was heat up a hamburger in the microwave. A day-old Big Mac. I tried my best to enjoy the flavor, but a line was forming at the register. Lately I'd noticed a kind of fiction-making on my own part. I was imprisoned in a world of prefabricated perceptions and theories similar to a built-in kanji chart where at every turn you’re offered choices of alternate kanji-pictures from a set of menus. I reminded myself those were assumptions of verisimilitude--and their fictitiousness? Well, suppose the kanji were replaced by images and sound: the rhythms of breathing became air-force. My boss’s wife’s first husband, the one shot in the head, was a former Israeli journalist who at the time of the shooting worked out of the Japanese office of the LA Times. He had a second office in LA, where the two of them met. I was making an assumption there, that anti-Semitism was behind the crime. Rumors circulated that the woman's former husband, the vegetable, had been a lightweight alcoholic and a gambling thug. She divorced him. But why kill the man? Well, if her exterior senses had up and failed, an unstable interpretive subjectivity may have been accidental. I turned on one of the store’s two black-and-white TV sets. An NBC news feed, the reportage smothered in a blanket of informational uniformity, with colorless reflections of fields and machine guns presented as if the viewer had never seen them before. Instead of politicians I was presented with movie stars. The politicians were scheduled for next hour, followed by the long-winded but much-anticipated financial reports, after which, a retrospective on 20th-Century history, "when sanity was threatened and terror was near." In the meantime, here was an ad for a defense attorney introducing himself to me on a first-name basis. Robert. Had conflict of interest kicked in? When you’re armed with such nimble perception, as I was then and still am now, you glimpse statistical manipulations operating behind the scenes, which in turn forces upon you a higher, more detached perspective. In the Sixties they had meta-fictions. But today? I wouldn’t describe it as fictions at all, no, more like the examination of the creation of systems, and those systems were transforming and filtering our perceptual reality. But if no true descriptions existed in fiction or nonfiction, only constructions? So the deck was stacked against us from the beginning? That revelation at least deserved a nervous laugh. I refocused my attention on a Honda Civic parked out front. Its driver gunned the engine and skidded out of the lot, nearly hitting a young boy on a bicycle. An attractive Hispanic woman, dripping with sweat and jewelry, then entered the store. Amazing how a single perception transforms the environment. Similar to acid trips and their mode changes. Luckily, the only person in front of me was another young woman idling through our videos. I hated waiting for social relationships, preferring instead to navigate in virtual worlds, disrupting the ordinary balance that exists between ourselves and strangers. For that, there’s alcohol-- even fatigue can generate new perception--yet all perceptions share in a unified meta-fictional experience. One night soon the two of us would open our mouths and do things with our tongues we once thought impossible. I glanced outside again. One of our regular alcoholic patrons was puking up a case of Natural Light on the sidewalk. The city can clean up that mess, I thought, it’s not my responsibility, it missed the parking lot by three feet. These perceptions provided me with a truth of my own: fate does not move us, we move fate--and swerving violently as it exited the lot, a second Honda Civic jerked onto the shoulder, fishtailing in the loose gravel, bouncing up off the road before tumbling down a nearby embankment, falling end over end with grace and in slow motion, gathering velocity. Witnessing the accident gave me a powerful impression that my thought was literally that of another, a different physical sense too, of rails and pulleys going outward towards something. As I stood there in disbelief, I realized that someday, so long as I continued with these psychic meanderings, I would discover my true companion. But the weirdoes who came into our store! A pensioner with purplish gums stumbling through the door, scratching his crotch, his accent not too bad, similar to my grandfather’s, mumbling about the train to Treblinka and how noisy it was, the ‘roar of dying flashes,’ the ‘ideas built from bones.’ I’d seen the movies and summarized the accounts. So instead, my mind grappled for local novelty: brushing against her breasts several times. I was too scared to mention it. The lucid dreaming thing, the depths and roofs of mental disruption, mind set on automatic, scanning the customers’ voices for names and places, hardly looking at their faces, asking to see ID for the liquor, requesting video rental membership cards. All those pages with the designs, procedures, and dollar signs at the bottom were a reversed spell-checker that served to mechanize the processes of free association. I glanced out the front windows again, at the empty diner across the street. In the harsh sunlight it seemed to collapse into itself. Yeah, I thought, another security camera would cost us $5,000 plus extra videotapes. My boss, who wasn’t very hairy or very big, worried about his employees ripping him off, so I assured him I wouldn’t raid the safe because I needed a lot more cash than that if I wanted to change my life. Outside, a third Honda Civic slammed off the pavement, bouncing into the diner’s parking lot. The driver was uninjured. Exploding? That man was no suicide jockey. Instantly a blanket of white light enveloped the diner’s windows, blinding me. I slipped in a blank videotape, still standing behind the register, continuing with an attitude of supposed total unawareness, trying to catch guys who rob us. But if a guy robs us, I’m thinking, he robs us. Besides, my boss didn’t trust the police, the local government, or any other sort of authority. Looking around me, I appreciated for the first time how our store was done up in an unusual Fifties-style motif, with a big jukebox in the corner. The fake coin-operated terminals were absurd. You had to be careful with the customers, at least subconsciously, since each day brought forth a novel truth, culled from the careful observation of people and objects scattered around the store and its parking lot, including the skateboarding vagrants on the loading dock. My boss figured a thief would hit us once and never come back, whereas we, the employees, could rob him steadily, night after night. After leaving he returned to check up on us, glancing around with wide-eyed paranoia like he’d discovered an alphabet in the merchandise and advertisement posters. Our only computer, an old Pentium, offered the customers a fill-in-the-blank personal word processor, same number of typewriter keys they were used to, nothing like an alternative Japanese-style phonetic alphabet. But inside this establishment we used pre-recorded silence to much greater effect and with subliminal screams. Hours later I noticed one of our security cameras was malfunctioning. Repairs would have to wait because it was evening, which included several Hispanic families with small children on their way home from grandma’s house. Preparing for shift change, I went to the back of the store, tossed out the bad milk and bad butter, locked the door to the freezer unit, and returned to the register to find a stoned customer requesting lottery tickets and a rental of our worn-out video of the 1969 Woodstock concert. I paid him no heed, my mind reeling from the problem of how much is infinity and infinity plus one. I imagined the reports of dozens hurt and an unconfirmed death toll. The stoned customer's daughter began playing with our nacho machine. I walked over, scared her off with a wave of my hands, then viewed myself in the mirrored sides. I looked not- quite-human with bright-red bunting. My heart was pounding so hard anyone within three feet heard it. A young Hispanic woman was eyeing me. Blinked several times? After I broke up with my last girlfriend, my coworkers hinted that I should cultivate better posture for some good fun-- but wait! Outside in the parking lot: a sweet young Korean woman. I watched her walk up to the nearest intersection. Soon, I thought, soon I'll see the rest of her, and if she’s anything to view--my heart stopped. A white BMW had pulled into the lot, and the woman of my dreams was approaching it, waving. To whom? Pay attention, man, some guy’s gonna rob us! Two young men were seated in the BMW, both shaking their heads in puzzlement, as if the woman were describing how their father became a naturalized spy. They asked some questions about arguments over, or the right to assume, or--I looked to my right: the soda fountain was fine. My shift was over. I turned off the gas pumps with the switch beneath the register, which I forgot to do half the time, but rest assured--speaking to my boss--no one had stolen any gas yet. Next I did a quick mop up around the door. At times like this, if you substitute the word television for telecommunications, you understand where I'm coming from. Looking up, I noticed the young Korean woman, still standing beside the BMW, had focused her eyes on me. I prayed to all available gods I was as sexy as the rest of the guys in her life, on the sofa, wherever it happened. If only to keep her attention for one more second. The brief respites, smoke breaks, falling asleep beside the televised, mass-media-waged war against the anti-terror movement, all of it recalled in glorious black-and-white. Where were the televised guerrilla theater pieces and the mighty images of rage? Another critical theorist hastening to tell you, kind reader, that we all perish according to the same oppositional activity, without a certain resolute, more confident attitude. The young Korean woman took off her sunglasses and handed them to a passenger, who hung them on the rearview mirror so that passersby noticed her not-so-subtle attention- moves. She was perking up, showing off those legs to the driver, who shifted his razor-cut features and spoke to a third person in the back seat. Who was so gullible, so hard up for attention? I looked inside the filing cabinet my boss kept below the counter, then mopped up stains around the Slurpee machine. Had I been more generous, I would’ve helped that woman wash her car. I helped Mother wash hers. The chill of a small mound of white cream formed in the palm of my left hand. Weird. More of my brilliant ideas, many of them flaky, but each with its basis in reality. I imagined writing the young Korean woman letters explaining how I spent the summer, how things had changed, so difficult keeping track of who you are. She knew many different guys with many different priorities and had a different hand to ejaculate each one of them. She wouldn’t need anything special. Pulled off her underwear and, before putting the heels back on, she walked over to the vanity to get a tube of skin lotion, and she squeezed. I wanted every excruciating detail about every guy she fucked. That information would soothe not inflame me. What each guy did to her, the desperate anal intercourse, and how it made her feel, and what she thought about as each guy was doing it to her when she mounted him. Woke the next morning at the first sign of daylight, glanced out the window. The distance. From what? Machinery? Ordeals? Beyond the window: mountains and tender yellow stars hidden by a smoggy cast, the atmosphere of that perspective eerie. But she left. The guy she slept with, a student at the local college, was an awesome fucker. 2. There I was, putting in so many hours I never got any sleep. By the time I returned home--I put the dishes into the sink to be washed at some undefined ‘later time,’ a phrase that echoed through my head every evening. I pushed Mother's feet out of the way and turned on the TV. Where was Stepfather tonight? Not the type of man who liked being greeted by his stepchildren, nor by his wife, who was on hand only to snore in front of the TV, or, if her pains were flaring up, to meticulously rub a liquid ointment into her feet. Tonight I glanced into their bedroom, and sure enough, his hard hat on the night-stand, and him kicking up his left foot, placing it on the chair, resting it there before he went off to work. He had his own pains. The two of us didn’t exchange any words. It was a well-worn feeling. Hated him? Close to it. I returned to the living room, stretched out, picked up a portion of the local newspaper. The same news with a hundred different headlines and bylines. I lost myself in the text for awhile, discovered some unusual terms, expanded my vocabulary. Mother was awake now, moisturizing the delicate arch of her left foot. I spent thirty minutes reading, afterwards noticing thirty cents, a quarter and a nickel, on the carpet. Not sure how that happened, but I didn’t dwell on it. I struggled to find fresh perspective, which was also the main reason for my walks. One other time I found a full pack of matches. According to the evening paper, information migrated from machine to machine, disc to disc, accomplished without significant loss of quality, but there was also a tendency for digitally stored material to evaporate into the ether, to undergo a miraculous change of state. A bit later, pacing back and forth, and with no lack of revulsion, I watched Mother fingering herself between the toes, vigorously rubbing in the cream. Soon she would lie down on the couch and drift off into the glistening realms of primetime TV until the ten-o’-clock news. Her latest fads included not eating meat and leaving the dirty dishes on the table. Mother handed the day’s bills to Stepfather, and together they ate their preheated dinners of vegetables in silence. I fixed my own food and watched a second TV, a smaller one, on the kitchen counter, so as not to miss the facts and footage of the many ambassadors, doctors, humanitarians, two- year-old celebrities, continuations of a series begun two years ago when Mother was laid up with bronchitis, See Eye Aye agents, bar girls, war profiteers, missionaries, strippers, civilian contractors, pilots, cooks, disc jockeys, rock stars, landladies, generals, Buddhist monks, movie stars, politicians, prostitutes, prisoners, nightclub owners, drug counselors, stories about the war’s participants other than the usual stuff on the grunts, and special scenes for aspiring tourists, civilians, and other military meatballs. After the talking heads were done going at it, an old Cheers episode followed by Night Line. Tired of this, Stepfather rose from the recliner and woke Mother. He helped her up, and after slowly mounting the stairs, they undressed, climbed beneath the sheets, and three minutes of foreplay before she rode him to climax, collapsing onto his chest, as he lay there contemplating the ceiling. Meanwhile, I floated off elsewhere. We were living in the trailers, but we pretended it was Universal Studios. 3. The basement was damp and depressing, and fucking cold in the winter. But I liked it down here because of the bookcases, catalogues, photo albums, scrapbooks, and old radio stations at the end of the dial for when you were in that nostalgic, nightshift kind of mood. On one wall a framed photo of a boy wearing only Buster Brown shoes riding a tricycle. That was the past but also a return to where a future statement no longer applied. Various memories like stand if you’re American or if you’re white--and when they forced us to stand under threat because we weren’t Christian enough. There I was in first grade, bottom row, third from the left. Getting older, growing taller, paging through the photos, across the years, wounds breaking open. My friends in high school explaining how bloodless it was to prejudge, yet governments did it. The first poem written to the first girl I had a crush on. Our footsteps coincided with the universe, and the two of us would live together in harmony and happiness, like Chinese demigods. An essay about a half-Negro Russian poet named Pushkin. If only I could tell a story about the time two FBI agents visited our house, how they traveled in pairs, as federal agents do, or a scandalous anecdote about the tantric religion, or the time I saw a girl wearing a red dress with black gauze and--she failed to nourish my blood. Her mother, much like my own, had a nun’s visage, and to prove it, the two of them wore identical wide- brimmed hats. No one had worn that style in years. Here was the only tantrism book I owned, stolen from the city’s public library. Detailed books on the subject were hard to find and still are. A passerby would never suspect such an Oriental tome was stashed in the basement of a rundown tract house. I recalled the phrases, ‘desire at the very moment it is desired’ and ‘days passing into late springtime.’ Was tantrism not mastering your own circumstances? I would look into it. A tantrist’s desire for a woman was perfected the instant her eyes fell upon him. The rest of the stuff down here was of Mother's childhood and therefore similar to the dossier of a well-behaved citizen. Since her only son was born in the States--speaking to Special Agent Harris and staring at a calendar taped to the side of a filing cabinet--the authorities weren’t permitted to confiscate the little bed-wetter. That was the first husband, on a ranch, the two of them screwing every night of the week. As for the fourth husband, she said he was ‘more in tune with the world’ than his predecessors. Based on what? Nothing registered. I decided to hide the tantrism book upstairs. But first I peered down into the trunk, through its bottom, bumping into more parts of the past but groping towards the future. The pale moon of a vanished highway. An elfin twelve-year-old who desired me. Right now achieving the idea of clasping my hands around her throat. As if the silliest girl in the world fell into my arms knocking me over. A Plastic Man comic, a black-and-white composition book. My hands dusty. Long brown hair framing her narrow, boyish face, rubbing against my? She was a whirling abyss, feeding on my fancy, capturing her prey with thorny claws and razor-sharp fangs. I reached for a cabinet door, letting it slowly swing open. A cloud of dust there, an embroidered something-or-other, photos of our French poodle, an old cigarette lighter, a photo of the first stepfather sliding his hands over his greasy smooth hair as he walked around a fence. That humping, gun-toting fool. Not one for practicing loud music, he dashed my hopes of singing backup, said I was ‘contrary to popular belief.’ In an indictment to a murder case, it is not incumbent upon the prosecution to--did the man complete his law courses? God, how I hated the piano back then--and to think I was a prodigy. The apparatus of an illicit sex trade, verbal garbage about unacceptable commodification, capital, and the coinage ‘over-pimp,’ akin, no doubt, to the Overman. I envisioned a future absent of any particular skill or talent. The previous week I yearned to be free from all my troubles, to push through the Greatness Barrier. If I was in danger of becoming anything at all, it was a side-show, orphan-bashing, gang-raping geek, a gang leader smoking and rolling. Out carousing. Then, like tantric enlightenment, the dust cleared. A postcard from Tori. Accused of being an illegal alien, she cried her eyes out because she didn’t speak a word of Spanish. I imagined the bureaucratic-looking desk with the bureaucratic- looking lamp, and a uniformed guard standing at attention. Her poorly dressed father brushed the shoulders of his white leisure suit, sprayed breath-freshener into his mouth, nervously opened the lapels of his jacket. The last tribunal for a humanist form of fascism. Some sort of pamphlet appealing to a final judgment on humanity. Ours was an informer state where the citizens were encouraged to spy on one another. I hoped the night guy at the store would remove the bad milk and beer. He’d worked there only a week. Something ominous about him too, the gold dollar-sign hanging from his neck, the baseball cap, the horrible laugh, the gap-toothed Elvis Presley grin. If anyone was going to rob us, it would be that son of a bitch. Huckster was written all over him. A barn-yard, finger-sniffing fuck-up. The guy he replaced had been murdered, and the guy before him? I worried that a robbery would scare my boss out of the convenience store business, leaving me unemployed and back at the community college. A gun pointed at a man’s head made him think real quick about a career change, and high turnover is a serious problem in businesses where employees don’t know their job well enough to do it correctly. The new guy was supposed to toss the bad milk, and walk the long aisles looking through the boxes, some long ago expired, others newly so, while the remainder sat on the shelf, unbeatable, forgotten, spoiled. What was I doing down here in the basement--searching for corpses lying in long neat rows with their bodies sliced open? No politics anymore. And if we did, where did we misplace it? Not one girl left who wasn’t nervous when she got stoned. David got me to smoke at twelve. He lived two blocks over and bought it from his stepdad. He fashioned me a pipe from a toilet paper roll and an aluminum foil bowl. On the school bus, moving ahead, I looked to the left, to the right, then smoked it. A habit to remedy all I despised in authority. At a younger age the second stepfather and his buddies were smoking a joint, and after several tokes Mother mistakenly passed the joint to me, then stopped and laughed, while everyone else at the table grimaced. I was eight, and I laughed because Mother sounded so funny. Then she got all serious, told me to wait till I was a grownup. Another time at Chuck E. Cheese’s a friend and I watched our stepfathers finish their joints before grilling the steaks. Shortly thereafter I was sitting at the dinner table with my folks, who told me to try it when I turned eighteen. A thumping sound, another thumping sound, then a third. In the sack again. I watched them do it in the passenger sat, Mother and the man who became the second stepfather. Soon he was on the waiting list for apartments--in Kansas City. Divorced her and left LA. The third husband would be the worst of the four. Not sympathetic, drinking to exhaustion, resembling nothing I’d seen before or wanted to become. Between the two of us it was a close call. An ex-marine dirt-bag with a beef against the world going ballistic over a holding call at a Raiders game. Their loud lovemaking keeping me up at night. He said he wanted it loud, but to me it defied convention. In the morning he was in a talkative mood, mentioning Sunday’s football game--if the Raiders won. That marriage ended quickly. He lusted after a tiny blonde teenager, and although it was wrong on all sides--if the cops found out, he’d lose more than a wife, he’d lose everything--he nevertheless chased after those prepubescent girls. I’d rather pass over those details but do so without harming the flow of the narrative. The only thing he and Mother had in common was the sex, and since she refused to use birth control-- no use trying to work things out with Mother. They tried marriage counseling. I imagine their relationship was described as 'she’s passive-aggressive and he’s manic-aggressive.' No role- playing, no tying up, no candles and foodstuffs. They were bored, unsatiated. Until a young married woman in the purchasing department of? Where the past imitated the future I was forced to conclude the universe is alive, it reproduces--no birth control there--and the present can only precede a poorly calculated future. As for the woman my second stepfather later admitted having lunched with once or twice a week, the crap they discussed, the images, the lofty vices, a narrative processed by machines as trivial as looting the local shopping mall. There the two of them sat, staring at those shitty little salads, forgetting about the rest of us. 4. Several hours passed. Rain started to fall. Some time after midnight I fell asleep. When I awoke, I glanced out the basement’s small window to find it was morning. Shit, I'd be late to work for the second day in a row. No time for a shower. I ran upstairs and out the front door. Mine was the body of a white man scattered in little pieces across the neighborhood. Far off, the sprawling sets of downtown high-rises looked heavy and unused, and the traffic was fueled by money and greed, both in season and out: the thrill of lust without end. Let the old media imitate one another, I thought, because I’m the single user who believes rhetorical autonomy extends to computers. I hoped said autonomy would return to the populace in equal or greater amounts and to the minimart parking lots, the sidewalks along the highways, to wherever else the bloody pools were no longer so bloody. Rebuilding a stretch of highway here, but this part was re- destroyed daily. And the possibility of transactions and fantasies, a serious affair or two, but it was potentially experimentally verifiable that I would back out. To where? A novel I read last week. As I stepped into the store that morning, little did I know I’d soon be kissing that young Korean woman. We’d be doing it for two hours in the sitting room of her parents’ beach house, windows opened over the Pacific. A sudden intuition of the material nature of mind: you receive your thoughts from the environment, from outside going in. Look at yourself in the mirror--again, outside looking in. Funny, I wasn’t hallucinating yet. That would come later, along with infinitely connected and embedded universes. No matter what the impractical difficulties, I would allow biological evolution to guide my actions--because it must be. I sneered at the morning’s first customer as I slipped a Concrete Blonde cassette into my Walkman.

Ars Moriendi

1. In every respite and every postponement ours is a classless society, letting bygones be bygones, and it’ll drive you mad if you let it--but at least the laws of death impart some meaning to the events. Gilt-edged cardboard, light bulbs, base metals, plastic. The experts say optimal comfort is a state of artificially prolonged pain. Life’s humble pacemaker, everyday bringing cosmos out of chaos, Rodney Norton knew scum when he saw it. Gymnastic bodies wrapped in leather and black webbing, spider-like fingers, lengthwise scabs along bare abdomens, chests heaving in the pale light of the subway. Several blades and a corkscrew, predatory eyes, one of them sporting a badly repaired harelip. Standing at the very edge of the red platform, the gangsters made it clear criminal exercises refreshed their souls. Rodney watched their reflections in the convex mirror, doing his job, this beardless little fat man with a red swollen nose. The gangsters spoke rapidly among themselves, rehearsing with the intensity of a troupe of thespians, silent and fastidious. Souls tormented in a purgatory of neon tubing. A grotesque voice came out of the dark. Rodney looked up. Could he spare any change? Chattering away, impossibly blue lips, burning cheeks. Winter was hard on guys like this. A blanket his only cover, a mug of fire for a face. The man lived beneath the thick of it all. A dull sensation, familiar, the sound of a loud grunt. Rodney spared him a quarter and felt a bit better as he waited for time to work its special 4-minute magic. Chambers, closets, caverns of the earth. Who was doing chores for Mother around the house? A month ago Rodney had gagged thinking about those contrary qualities. But he cleaned the bathroom every other day, made her bed every single morning, washed the dishes, vacuumed the living room rug--didn’t cook. Mother was ‘depressed’ about her ‘remission.’ It showed in the blinks and cringes, the slight wheeze through the nose, the way she puffed out her cheeks when she spoke. Nevertheless, behind the bad acting Rodney sensed an uncertainty too horrible even for him to bear. Mother's field of vision was fading, and yesterday she had asked an operator to connect her to her party by reciting a telephone number from her youth, a three-digit number. Radio blaring in the background. Tangential delirium. Rodney would heat up a bagel in the oven and pat Mother on the back. A videotape of cartoons before the movie began. Later, in the kitchen, sectioning a lime for the afternoon gin and tonics, making preparations, relieving Mother's loneliness so that life and libido could flow again. Yet that air of arrogance about her, calling her late husband a ‘desperate and dishonest man,’ measuring her own faults against a much larger scale--not that she was guilty of hyper-probity. Cover-ups, hush money, break- ins, transitory sex. Vintage of the earth. Sooner or later Mother's life would get a bit busier. By the end of his day Rodney was ruffled and sweaty, waves of alarm crashing inside him, fatigue stirring up vain thoughts about his out-of-control drinking, his dull job, and the two Visa bills due tomorrow. He was counting on a strong showing at the casino to make those timely payments. Must avoid the late fees and provide for that extra cargo space. Another trip down to city hall, the ultimate outrage. At least Mother remembered the great radio shows of her day--as proof she wasn’t demented. She remembered the time of day too, even if it meant burning down the house trying. Again taking Rodney by surprise, a ragged-faced man shuffled through the turnstile. Dressed down for the occasion, a belly button for a mouth, boorish behavior hidden behind an extravagant shrug. The types who slept together on the subway cars: ideal for abduction or one week of continuous-drip morphine: lapse into a coma--a peaceful death. Otherwise, terminal sedation on barbiturates. Tabula rasa. Short-cuts to Pair o’Dice. Hastening death. By chance? Prima materia. Rodney was one of Mother’s Little Helpers, and three years running having never paid a late fee, he refused to let his streak end tonight. He watched the gangsters. He was determined to save them, and nothing would come between him and their salvation. The worn, stained, gray concrete? Never been laid? He laughed. The day the government came home to roost was the day Mother’s neighbors borrowed the last of the furniture, wrapping themselves in the warmth of dead bodies. An overdressed, unattractive woman approached Rodney now, or was she a man? Many of the people down here had no cell phone, but only Mother recalled those phones you had to hand-crank--and shows starring The Shadow, Sky King, and Howdy Doody. Did Adolf and Eva die here? Maple leaflets attacking Japan. Ex oriente lux. Hiroshima Atom Bomb No. 1 Obliterated It. Nagasaki Atom Bomb No. 2 Disemboweled it. Commercials on television will have more appeal since they’ll be mostly pictures. Rodney wasn’t the slightest bit interested in ‘synthetic radio,’ a phrase he coined to describe store-bought cassette anthologies of old radio shows. But he helped Mother core the fresh pineapple, idling away the first hour of every visit preparing her favorite fruit cocktail, and grape jelly on the toast. His bartending shift. Rodney wore navy blue work pants and a company shirt with his name embroidered on the breast pocket, and a hearing aid tucked into his left ear to alleviate an injury from those amateur boxing days. Combing the few strands of Mother’s thinning red hair. Together the two of them fashioned memories from the raw material of boredom. Street noises, television fragments, scrapbooks, thought-forms, Akashic Records, names of dead relatives scrawled in the Book of Life. Like the time Rodney was caught stealing the chalice and a bottle of communion wine from a Catholic church--blessed for evermore--and how Father drove a station wagon with the windows rolled down and a handgun at his side. Spent most of his adult life on a cemetery tractor mowing the large open green spaces, afterwards trimming around the headstones. Father said he kept a handgun to get rid of groundhogs, woodchucks, and other ‘regular people’ who disturbed the natural peace of a cemetery. He never touched tobacco, and you never smelled alcohol on his breath. Once he told his son, “I’m 71, Rodney. I’ve got everything I started out with except my tonsils. I plan to be around for awhile,” but not given to excessive good fortune, Father died of a heart attack the following week. The Bread of Life. Father had a special problem too: no fewer than eight planets were skewered. Thursday, November 13, 2026-- remember that date, Rodney, it’s doomsday, the world ends. Nostradamus, on the other hand, predicted doomsday in a year in which Easter fell on April 25, which meant 2038, and the Mayans marked the date in December of 2012, the Great Flood and Captain Black. 12-12-12. Whenever the cost of an article is lowered through economies in production, more people can buy it. Progress is our most important product. The Axis Mundi. “Nope,” Rodney's father said to the agent, “I don’t need life insurance.” Father’s entire world consisted of a series of medals, and he’d gotten two chances to earn them, both World Wars, and military prison. “Most people out there don’t realize they burrow around too much and cause their headstones to collapse.” So Father bought a Smith & Wesson twenty-two revolver and drove around with it, about the same time Rodney sipped from his first pint of Canadian. Father commanded their respect all right, Rodney’s and his sister Ann's. Father averted his eyes from Rodney to scan the pool tables for innocent victims. Father’s fingers showed evidence of a man who worked with his hands every single day, dirt ground deep into the crevices, so deep the skin was never scrubbed fully clean. That day young Rodney left the bar never again to be hurt by Father, and Rodney vowed to do everything possible to make it in the world, even a blood covenant or burnt offerings. A bustle of shoppers in Mother's maternity wear store, but she was too ignorant to listen to Rodney's calls and acknowledge him . . . comatose more than 36 hours. So Rodney signed up for the Navy a year out of high school, adopting Father's dreams of foreign wars, medals, and glory--only to waste four years of his life in a shit-hole third-world country. Rodney's fine arrest record was nothing compared with Father’s, and he returned to the States disgusted with the U.S. military. Rodney and Father standing across a pool table from a cool cat in horn-rimmed glasses. Rodney wearing his favorite oversized T-shirt. Mean People Suck. He was trying to make sense of the scene, but reason was impossible. An illegible chalkboard coffee menu hung on the wall. Rodney spent nine months on a North Carolina Naval Base and another six in jail for several marijuana joints stashed in a sock under his bed, and here he was visiting Father in a fucking pool hall. Rodney then took an after-dinner walk, stood on the railway bridge for awhile thinking some things over, when his figurative rocket came in, flying straight overhead, with an enormous explosion a few hundred yards away. He got a pretty good view of the whole thing, and the only name he glimpsed in the wreckage was his own. The impact site fairly collapsed, stones too heavy, and an ill-placed tunnel brought the rest of it down. State law forbid the use of most pest-control devices out of respect for the dead. The contrast of a dark film had become too much. Rodney sat on the couch next to Father. Who started the tradition of a girl popping out of a cake? Damned if Father knew. A virgin taming a unicorn? A misguided courtesan? Not one to cater to those nouveau aristocrats, Father never got over the prior days of Depression-era hunger. They left him gluttonous in every respect. The old days all over again, a conqueror regarded as a hero who turned out to be an oaf. Little left of the king’s army but a means for men to achieve victory. Endowed with charisma, courage and luck--what else did Father need for the proverbial rise to power? The rise and decline of so many men and societies. Rodney inhaled the mixed odors of poster paint, hair spray, and Jack Daniels: his one-room, cramped-enclave bungalow. The scuffed hardwood floors squeaked slightly. Later, outside, he wheeled Mother up the plywood ramp onto the deck that served as a bandstand podium during neighborhood cook- outs. The neighbor’s collie napped beside a large chicken-wire frame. God, today had become a lonely vigil inside a womb, with Mother happily munching away on a turkey sandwich. Let’s raise the curtains and reveal the shiny black screen. Discussing politics with Mother was like surveying Area 51. Celestial & Invisible Inc. So much for inner sanctuary. Twisted metal and massive shrapnel holes in the corrugated walls of his skull--needed to replace some paneling too--added to the pollution from an adjacent tire factory. But it was worth a couple photos, and Rodney, with an Instamatic handy, set up a shot of the Unborn Son. Strings lowered into corrupted blackness, memory persisting in the Void. All of Mother’s equipment was gone. Greasy strands of hair sticking up in every direction, clothes wrinkled, fingers playing Eanie Meanie Miney Mo on the armrest of the wheelchair, humming Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy." Nothing helped, not even an after-dinner nap. She smelled as musty as the day she left the birth canal. 2. Inter faeces et urinam nascimur. Unchaste Eden. A fecal tinge to Mother's perspiration . . . another day. . . today. . . lurks within. Deterioration thrives, but no one agrees on how to sustain it. A flourishing civilization grows out of the sand, followed by many years leaning sunwards--till the trunk becomes bent. The perfect place for a hammock, and a woman wearing a white bathing suit. Her auburn hair long, free and even-flowing, lightly blowing in the breeze, her legs hanging off the limbs of a tree. Mulatto skin, centrifugal stare, intoxicating perfume. She smokes a slender cigarette reminiscent of a scene from a time- capsule film. There’s also an intelligent fisherman out to sea--and a complex, sadomasochistic relationship between the two of them, you see. Who will imbibe the sacred poison and cut down the tree? Rodney adjusts his sagging trousers at the knee and steps out of the dust-jacket photo. Here is a man immune to the mild precautions of religion, philosophy, music, and science. Carnal appetites in full swing, he needs dollars, the talisman against evil, extinction of the zodiac, mute apocalypse. Inter canem et lupum. Rodney bends over to fill an empty milk bottle with Pacific Ocean saltwater, something to wash down the foul abominations of expensive imported soaps and embroidered towels. With obvious relish in his smile, he stands back up, stretches out those legs, and returns to the hotel. The lobby, though palatial, is more aptly described as trite and phony. Deserted echoes, commingling scents, oil portraits, everything else wicker-rattan--perfect except for the restrooms. Where are the marble sinks? On the radio, a local church announces a last-minute midnight service to heal the sick, perform miracles, and become acquainted with one’s contacts, the critics and millionaires. Secret societies with pagan inclinations joining together at a numerology convention. Harbingers of the devil usurping the moon? Insatiable visionaries? Doomed planets colliding? A government-sponsored something-or-other and a meeting of managing editors whoseleather soles barely touch the pavement as they stride towards the carpool. A UPS truck pulls into the turn-around to receive several packages of rejected manuscripts. I am corrosion of the psyche. An underground skyline of sewers. The ceremony has begun. Rose of the devil, my beloved. Nihilistic thoughts in God’s mind. A young woman with tantalizing hips, black belt around her waist--high priestess?-- joins Rodney in the elevator. She carries herself with the graceful lassitude of a heist artist. The elevator, a scintillating glass cocoon, rises slowly to the 12th floor. Rodney's two-room suite is a veritable cornucopia of antiques. The decorators spent a great deal of time on it, scraping off the old paint, polishing the massive furniture, tables, cabinets, wardrobes, the personal housekeeper, even a piano. The mirrored walls gleam with sheer carnival magic. But where’s the shrunken head in a bottle, the two-headed bear, and the lamb with human balls? Rooms large enough to eat in. Has spring arrived? Calves grazing in the next meadow, fires in crystal balls extinguished, victims pulled from charred wreckage. Elections foretell, angels rhapsodize, oscillating configurations, rapid aliens, genocidal desperation, therapy and pills, wax effigies, notable achievements of mankind, recoup the losses, feeble calls for damnation, the public still loves . . . and other televised litanies adorning the walls. Rubber suits over rotund bodies. Rodney sits cross-legged, elevated above the surroundings. Is this the triumph of our new medicine? A minimal life expectancy, men transformed into beasts, blasted apart, cluttered hearts, feet in snares, self-devouring spells of self- loathing, shadows flickering in the aftermath. On a high platform, in a trance, Rodney counts off time in a metro-tone and reads omens from old cosmologies. Why does God permit this man to sit alone in a dark room, eyes wide shut, counting the ticks off an interior grandfather clock while a baseball-size malignant tumor pulses unknown in Mother's uterus? Blacked-out ergot pandemic. The young woman with tantalizing hips knocks once then enters the suite--with sensuous fullness of force. Her dyed black hair is shaved all the way around tonsure-style. Collecting, Rodney thinks, collecting her postcards, and the scene stands out. Cranberry-flavored vodka, pineapples and banana peels, half- eaten croissants, coffee grounds. A satellite dish, Discovery Channel footage of a deadly jungle parasite. How’s My Driving? If you observe this vehicle. Five wires lead to the ignition--red wire is the main hot wire. An eight-squad mind, a white sandy beach, crystal clear blue water, a palm tree. More sand below. Turns out the woman is on the postcard. Rodney and the young woman with tantalizing hips drive through the night. Two-lane blacktop. Trash blown into a chain- link fence. A motel’s empty swimming pool. Park and pay. Sounds of a transistor radio in the bathroom. Isn’t that Ursa Minor and the White Dog together in the tub, and over there, Canus Major on all fours? Pilgarlics and wastrels, punaises de confessional. The scaly tetter over here, the marcor, the cooper with the barrel fever, the chitty-faced one with the choke-pear. An era before portable phones screwed up the area codes. Rodney turns up the car radio. Love me tender, Elvis. Doesn’t he know? A newspaper column devoted to the activities of the rich and famous and what goes on behind the scenes. Abraham Zapruder and why shots rang out at 12:34 CST. Madonna’s fart poem. Joachim’s Book of the Third Age. Used-up lipstick. Rodney's hands are shaking. He decides to freshen his drink. Cars pile into the intersection. Sirens blaring. Officers wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. A sleazy nightclub, dark rundown little boxes, red velvet tablecloths, sloppily-molded glass candle lamps. Litany after litany. Chainsaw-sculptured honeymoon suites. Bush-league putting greens. Rental kayaks. Rodney's hungry. The two of them stop at an ATM. Hostess Ding Dongs, microwaveable beef-and-bean burritos, large Coke, a turkey-and- cheese sandwich in a plastic triangle, slices of pizza steaming from the oven. A vast and wealthy country! Pure something or other. To Mother's nursing home in Florida? A paradise could exist wherever material progress and spiritual values are properly balanced. Like in the good old days, the LSD crucifixion ceremonies at Devil’s Hole. Believe! Rodney tells himself be- leave! The crimson glow of a blood-red sun before summer returns. 3. “Come outside with me for a moment.” I can only stay a minute. Feelings left hidden in her brother’s office building, that unglassed, stout-walled shrine to capitalism, no atmosphere, mute, one of the many descendents of the coal-black underworld. The submerged rock of? Production values? A brief pause at the entrance before Rodney and the woman with tantalizing hips continue their stroll along the pebbled sidewalk. Oak leaves. I kissed your hand? Humming. Fragrance pressed against Rodney's face. Turning into the park. Evening now. A late-summer sense of well-being, the fullness of time. Lampposts, dark gardens overgrown with nettles, watchtowers, crosses and memorials. Networks of trees, valleys beyond the branches, thick green canopies against a brilliant sky of lavender, blue, and garnet. Mysterious silvery chimes, rustling leaves. The slender engines of nature. Lawn chair smoking a cigar. Conversations broken off, aimless watching, noiseless laughter. A sense of some past existence, the same disappearance off the face of the earth. Rodney looks down at his boots and sees much approval on his friend's face. I’ll only stay a minute. “I can’t imagine love without jealousy,” she says to him, “I can’t bear it.” Self-deception? Auto-suggestion? Stoning the cherries. As she speaks, the woman's voice breaks, but Rodney knows she’ll milk the bad publicity, just as he'll feign disagreement. A recluse lying in a drunken stupor . . . sits an old drunkard ruined. Blackout. Porch steps. A rusty lock. Rodney's bungalow. “It’s a stuffy in here.” Flushed from the emotional reverberations, Rodney opens the bedroom window. Twelve feet above the garden. Credibility gaps remain. Not so much a garden as a mud patch. A pitcher broken at the fountain. The devil’s scoffings. The woman’s brother is a man possessed, an aging, two-bit gangster engulfed in bitter controversy. Royal air about him and a royal pose, Adam’s apple, beard, dreadful hands. A devil cursing his own temptations, enraptured with martyrdom. His bastard origins make him a prime cucumber, and to get back at him, to level the score, the woman has taken her courage into both hands, cheerfully, an act so unbecoming of her that Rodney is shocked. A cab sits at the curb the moment her brother leaves the office, but he ignores it. Enjoying his walk through the park, cologne all through it, a cigarette glowing between long fingers, wiping his nose with a wadded-up handkerchief. Eyes like little balls of wax. Getting late now--the hushed murmur of a child from the hollow of a tree--and night rushes over him out of the dense black foliage. Fate & Circumstance are drawing Brother back to Sister. An animal mistrust. Brother knows the route to Rodney's bungalow. Don’t do anything hasty! The woman nervously tosses back a strand of hair. Her head aches with genuine obsession. “I was up late again last night,” she whispers to Rodney, leaning on the windowsill gazing outside, waiting for Brother to appear. The bedroom is dark except for a single lamp burning on the nightstand. Her rib-cage stands out beneath the black T-shirt, and goose-bumps form on her arms. Chalky whiteness on the skin. Filthy night, and at the corner of her eye, motionless, mere minutes till Brother arrives . . . and hours till the pale blue pre- dawn sky. 4. The whole summer echoes singing. Valid gun permit?-- about to steal it. In the narrow valleys beneath the mountains, driving non-stop for three grueling days. Noble burning, panting, breathless. Figures, faces, beasts, plants. Homeward bound? Two salmon swimming upstream against the onrushing currents of habit, plunging past unknown destinations. Grace as chance in the supernatural glow of heaven. I explained why a woman's soul is covered in black embroidery. Caustic silence, desperate calm. Proper perspective on a general pattern? Brilliant sun shimmering in the late afternoon light, lilac-colored clouds, the whole countryside burning fiercely against distant mountains words cannot describe. White bundles of reflections scorch the eyes. With vicious, looped swings of her sandaled feet the woman with tantalizing hips kicks at Rodney, who grimaces in horror as he struggles to let go of the Cadillac’s steering wheel. Eyes hollow from sleepless nights, blackish-purple discolorations stretched over the flat of her face, the woman wrenches her head and shoulders away from hands reaching to--strangle her? But Rodney hangs on, squeezing those calves, twisting those ankles, pulling, pulling harder, forcing the woman out of the car. It's like goading a donkey, and Rodney has the worst of it, kneeling outside the car in the hot, dusty parking lot of a pool-hall. The candor of the married life. Patrons watch with curiosity, making no attempt to hide their mirth, whispering among themselves. Rodney looks out of place in that smart business suit complete with tie. Someone barely escaped from years of measured routine. The sunstroke of newlyweds? At her throat. Succeed in his efforts? Why not hurled from a passing car or long-range rifle fire or drowned in a bathtub? Rodney's jaw tightens. The woman doesn't understand his jokes or his fierce combination of dismay and excitement. 5. Pure will hacking through pure substance searching without any definite goal in mind. Round-eyed Rodney turns around to behold an odd, squashed, flattened-out . . . He knows it's too late. Mother is unconscious, locked inside. Bludgeoned on the steering column. Unfinished business or? As soon as it leaves the road Mother’s car comes to a complete stop, safe--but at the outermost edges, free-falling into space. Railings crumpled from the high-speed impact. Sensations scramble over Rodney's flesh, a flashback to the simian world and the irrational claims of prophets with inflated egos. Turn off the light! Observed absolute silence along the via negativa. A long pause before Rodney emerges from his own car. He plants his feet unsteadily on the sloping tarmac and begins walking along the narrow shoulder of the freeway to the nearest exit ramp, more than a mile away, where he'll find a filling station. The cloudless sky expands into the distance. Paved surfaces erupt into glaring sunlight. One after another flying past him, these rare marvelous objects, never heard them so loud, one after another, 85mph. Next time I will, he says to himself, next time I will. Not that it matters now that all conclusions are unknown to him. Rodney strokes his chin, adjusts his glasses, tilts his body forward into the dusty wind. It's slow-going, and after a few yards of cautious steps he trips, falls to the ground, catching himself on a short cord piano wire? strung along a portion of the overpass guard-railing. The wire slices into his palm, which he now wraps in a handkerchief. Catching his breath, he resumes walking, reminding himself to proceed slowly, to be aware of these unfamiliar surroundings. The relentless, malodorous whoosh of four lanes of 85mph traffic. The first time he's felt the meaning of ‘streamlined.’ Rodney makes a playful jingle with his car keys. A bit later he removes the wallet he carries in his jacket sleeve and finds $500 cash. A bad habit since he over-leveraged himself on consumer credit: carrying lots of cash and memorizing the locations of every ATM machine in a 10-mile radius from his house. Do you have a minute? A feverish chill forms on the back of Rodney's head. God is out here, he tells himself, God is out here. Repeating it over and over again. Will someone kindly give him a lift to the nearest filling station? Will a cop mistake him for a vagrant and take him into custody? Anything criminal. People drawn and quartered. Nothing comes to pass. Hard and unripe, the freeway in grayish bloom. We’ve had our chat. Pertained to an unknown hour, but Rodney is unprepared for these events. The mid-summer heat is overbearing. The constant risk of being sideswiped by the trailer of an eighteen- wheeler--until, one-half mile later, still less than halfway there, his knees and soles aching, lungs wheezing from the car exhaust that engulfs him, Rodney stops walking and rests. Seconds later he lies down on the gravelly shoulder, squinting into the sun, gasping for clean air. A drugged potion is being forced down his throat, and it borders on delirium, and he risks becoming a second fatality. What does it matter? By now, more than one driver witnessing Mother's overturned car has dialed 911 from a cell phone. Sirens approach in the distance. Rodney turns around and returns to his car, to wait there, keeping watch over the wreckage until the paramedics arrive. Sign of the cross above her. Rodney will never hear the end of it: Mother perished in an auto accident on the way to the retirement community, her mementos once piled ceiling-high in the backseat now scattered across four lanes of traffic. Closed course, professional drivers only.

Peggy

1. Connie’s Birthday Visit Peggy Osterkamp doesn’t feel angry at all now that her older sister Connie has moved back home to Louisville from New York City. It’s wonderful in a way. Tonight, for instance, the two of them, numb on brandy and nostalgia, are enjoying each other’s company in Peggy’s living room. Peggy sits beneath a lamp on the floor, one leg tucked beneath her. The light shows off her long, pale neck and oval blue eyes. Connie is also pale, more so. She’s sitting on the sofa. A beige cat is curled up beside her, one of five beige cats that freely roam Peggy’s house. Yet Connie feels uncomfortable. The house is a bit too warm and stuffy for this time of year, the odor of artificial air freshener is stifling, and the place is a godawful mess, with clothes and newspapers littering the furniture, and dirty dishes and glasses left for days on the floor beside the coffee table. Connie scratches her right elbow and looks out the window. All the houses in this neighborhood were built within the last five years. As a result, there are far too few trees, and the ones there are, are much too spindly. Connie is also dismayed to see the rain still falling. It hasn’t let up since she arrived two hours ago. She remembers she forgot to bring an umbrella with her, and seeing her sister’s mailbox at the end of the drive also reminds her she forgot to bring in yesterday’s mail. Connie makes a mental note of it, then turns back around, her attention returning to the topic at hand. She is careful to smile more broadly now, as she realizes what an inane conversation the two of them are having. Peggy’s answer to Connie’s question is that the country, so advanced in terms of industrial development, is yet so lagging in addressing its people’s sorrows and fears. Look at the solid rows of metal teeth and the tattooed hands and the heads smashed into windshields, and how every time someone opens their mouth, a toad comes hopping out. How can that life be so fascinating? They’re all afraid of punishment, so take away the penalties and everyone wants to steal and kill. It’s like, ‘Get the hell out but don’t leave the money behind!’ For all that, the civil rights movement has had a salubrious effect on Peggy’s overall perspective: she chooses the best sexual partners but the worst men to marry. Peggy’s first husband died five years ago. He sliced himself up with a chainsaw, for Christ’s sake. Her second husband, Anton, hardly more than a fat-faced boy with a college degree when they first met, was one of seven kids from a broken family in Connecticut. He served in the infantry in Vietnam for one month before deserting to Vancouver, Canada, where he enrolled to study electrical engineering. Having completed his degree, he managed to land a job in Louisville without arousing the suspicions of the military or the U.S. government. When Peggy first laid eyes on him, Anton was calculating load factors for the local power company. Connie remembers to congratulate Peggy on her delicious birthday cake, an old-fashioned lemon chiffon made from scratch. What’s so shocking about that? For God’s sake, Connie, what are you doing to that poor cat? Peggy looks at the continent- sized stain on the carpet which resembles a dinosaur footprint. She's appalled. Her sister isn’t behaving herself. 2. Peggy’s Dream Peggy switches off the bedside lamp. She feels restless and uneasy, acutely aware of her body’s substance as she’s never been before. Each nerve, each muscle quivers in anticipation. Her heart is skipping beats, her head aching, her skin flushed. She tries to lie still, hoping the condition will pass--when her body stiffens. She’s paralyzed. Has rigor mortis set in? But she falls asleep--and dreams. Why is Connie crying? Because the body bags are laid out so precisely in the center of the cathedral that no one can doubt the solemnity of the occasion. Of all the corpses, Peggy’s is the only one wearing a bikini and a hooded clitoris. And no one cares a whit! Peggy’s corpse is horribly emaciated, the ribcage its most prominent aspect. Many years of physical exertion have charged their toll. Peggy watches the scene from the ceiling of the cathedral. When a Vincent Price-like voice booms out the last rites, Peggy awakens with a startle. The clock-radio reads 12:45. She won’t sleep soundly for the rest of the night. The aftereffects of the dream linger into the next day. The house and yard have acquired a bleak sort of harmony, and the familiar objects of the kitchen and living room wear looks of tension, and when the clock strikes four, and Peggy retrieves her shoes for the mandatory afternoon walk, intimations of acrophobia launch sweat from her nerves. Or is it agoraphobia? She gets the two confused. Nevertheless, when she steps outside, a piece of cloudless sky smoothly slides into place above her. To pray or be prayed to. Isn’t it the same in the long run? For the second consecutive night a dream jolts Peggy awake. The same dream as last night. Her body is aflame, hot to the touch, with an unusually high fever. She thinks she won’t be able to go back to sleep, but this time she does, not stirring until the clock-radio wakes her the following morning. 3. Peggy Avoids the Christmas Rush Peggy is wide awake now. Her left arm itches inside the elbow. When she scratches she feels something small and soft roll up beneath her finger and fall to the bed sheet. She brushes it away. This new deodorant is unlike any she's used before. Peggy picks up the phone on the nightstand to call Connie but replaces it. She needs to decide what exactly to say. She hasn’t told Connie about the disturbing nature of her dreams. Peggy, Chronicler of Disaster. This time she’s got a pretty austere list too, complete with a 1-800-number at the bottom of the screen. She imagines truck drivers on the Interstate eating their dreary salami sandwiches. Later the same morning, Peggy discovers one of her new nonstick pans has a scratch on it, and as she loads the dishwasher, her mind makes a quick zoom through the vegetable garden. Or will the oven get dirtier and dirtier? And the clothes dryer become self-repairing? Let’s face it, she deserves the rest of the morning off. She ought to hire a maid or live high in the mountains of Utah, fifty miles from the nearest neighbor. Unmarried. Unemployable. Unwilling to vote. But Peggy’s never set foot in Utah, and its terrain might resemble a hotdog on a stick. How about Portland, Oregon? Fancy that. Opening one’s windows in the summertime, having to choose between traveling abroad or keeping up a vacation home. Who knows how many lives would be saved as a result. God must be working overtime. The red light at the intersection is taking forever, and although there’s not a single cop car in sight, Peggy fulfills her civic duty by patiently waiting her turn. The greatest minds in the history of civilization had their finest moments while sitting down, and that would include sitting in San Quentin’s self- cleaning gas chamber. Moments later Peggy steers the gray Chrysler Imperial past the Pepsi bottling plant and into a full-service Shell station to gas up. She cuts the engine and glances in the rearview mirror, smiling tightly. Even at forty she has a young woman’s face. She displays childhood pictures of herself throughout the house, which, according to Connie the parlor psychiatrist, is proof of Peggy's insecurity--and also proof that healthy armpits ensure a healthy body. The station attendant squirts his blue fluid all over the windshield. He’s thorough and takes his time. Peggy becomes restless. She glances down at the fuel indicator to find the tank is three-quarters full. She doesn’t need any gas after all. She leans out the window and gives the attendant a long sigh of exasperation, before starting the car and pulling back into traffic. Her mood improves over money saved. Why not sing along with the radio? An old Roberta Flack song about strumming her life with his fingers. His hands beneath her skirt, moving upward to explore her body, his touch so maddeningly slow and teasing she fights for the last fraction of her sanity. She can’t see his face. Fear robs her of words. But this is real, and she doesn’t want it to stop. The mattresses are displayed beneath glaring fluorescent lights. Peggy likes the store’s new-bed smell, but she hates how the young salesman nervously cracks his knuckles. She detects liquor on his breath, and it occurs to her that drinking alcohol is against store policy, but she doesn't risk embarrassing the kid by asking him about it. Two hours later, having completed her Christmas shopping in the advertised Biblical sense of those words, and with a new mattress secured to the roof of the car, Peggy returns to the laundromat to find her clothes piled high on top of the dryer, which is whirring with someone else’s clothing. Interesting, if a bit insanity-inducing, but Peggy’s laundry is still damp. She’ll have to wait until another dryer is free. She leaves the laundry piled where it is and returns to the car to listen to the radio. Peggy descends four concrete steps, opens a shabby orange door, and enters an overheated half-basement lobby. This is the finest steam-bath joint in town. Peggy spends at least one afternoon per week soaking up the steam and listening to the women gossip over the events of the day. She wears the towel high over her hips so the tattoo doesn’t show and she’s mistaken for a witch. After the steam-bath, Peggy stops for a bite to eat. The restaurant she chooses has a country décor, with gingham curtains and a wagon wheel on the ceiling. The buxom waitresses wear tight blue jeans and embroidered cowboy shirts. After she places an order for a cheeseburger and a green salad, Peggy retires to the lady’s room. She fluffs her hair in the mirror. The young girl standing at the adjacent sink, who’s giving herself a prostitute’s shower with crumpled napkins, looks like she’s drawn all over her face with crayons. Peggy stifles a laugh and returns to the table. But when the food comes, she explodes into a rage. What the hell kind of lettuce is this? And the dressing, even if it is low-fat, looks positively inedible! Peggy demands to exchange the salad for a piece of strawberry cheesecake. Peggy’s reliable Chrysler Imperial loses it muffler halfway home. 4. Connie’s Phone Call Peggy pages though the address book until she finds a phone number that looks promising. She dials the number. A recording indicates the number’s been disconnected. Damn, she ought to learn how to communicate with spirits. Peggy laughs. And she ought to wear black high-top sneakers and socks with reindeer stitched on them. Peggy then chooses a more familiar number and although no one’s home, she’s able to leave a lengthy message on an answering machine. For the rest of the evening, in the dimly lit living room, Peggy waits for the return call, legs outstretched on an ottoman, eyes focused on the telephone. When the call doesn’t come through by three a.m., she goes to bed. But the phone rings around five, waking Peggy from dreamless sleep. She reaches out for the nightstand. It’s Connie. After Connie hangs up, Peggy lies there for more than an hour, still in her nightgown, thinking angry self-accusing thoughts. The giddiness of the holiday season is over, but a thousand indefinite longings are besetting her mind. She may be a brilliant woman, and a fine girl, but she's disillusioned of late and not in the most stable frame of mind. Yet she realizes that no possible world, however brilliantly conceived, could be more compelling than this one, with its mobs of people in the midst of building, struggling, weeping, and kissing. Many years of great triumphs and great lies cast their shadows over the planet. But Peggy feels ashamed over having failed what? She’s embittered, sullen, and? How's it possible for a gifted and intelligent woman to deceive herself? The strangest, most frustrating thing of all id her unwavering dedication to sincerity, an attitude reflected in every aspect of her life. Peggy swallows hard to suppress a sudden feeling of panic that threatens to clog up her throat. She gets up from bed, opens the curtains to the dawn, walks over to the closet, digs out a couple pieces of luggage, and begins packing. Peggy’s been driving for ten hours, stopping only to fill up the gas tank. Unbelievable. Who guessed she had it in her? A dark, rolling stretch of road lined with a dense forest of pines and oaks pushing their limbs out from the undergrowth. A heavy fog hangs over the treetops. Peggy squints into the glare of oncoming headlights. The interior of the Chrysler reverberates with the sound of Peggy’s labored breathing. 5. A Storybook Life Isn’t it crazy? Isn’t it wild? When we pick up the transmission again, we find Peggy standing alone in Aisle 8 of Safeway. Laundry detergent. This part of the adventure will be the easiest for her since she’s still in familiar territory. Yet what an improvement, what a marvelous refinement of taste! The store manager is a competent guy and an OK actor, guilty of nothing, a victim of his age, fragile, dark-eyed, Jewish, his parents suffocated in the self-cleaning gas chambers of Auschwitz. But how many more employees of the month can be framed on this greedy man’s office walls? And the Muzak. Peggy laughs. My God, he has a picture of Johnny Mathis nailed to his bedroom ceiling! If only Tchaikovsky were alive. And let’s not forget the cashiers he employs, with their capes and Batman masks for fooling the security guards into abetting misdemeanor theft. Peggy feels better in the mini-mart across the street. The cashier has a swollen belly and huge breasts that strain to burst free of a faded Miami Vice T-shirt. Her nipples are erect. Her limp is less pronounced than whose? Unlike most mini-marts, here wooden-bladed ceiling fans stir the air, and pillows, cushions, and throw-rugs are strewn across the polished hardwood floor. A tape of classic Latin dance music plays softly in the background. The air smells of licorice. Peggy, reminding herself not to be a jerk to the cashier, leans back on a big pillow and watches the ceiling fan. Then what? A few minutes later the cashier leaves the counter, walks over to Peggy, and sits down on the floor beside her. She introduces herself as 'Rosa, I’m six- months pregnant.' She touches Peggy gently on the arm and asks her what she’s ‘looking for.’ How do you mean? Out back I'm selling my boyfriend’s motorcycle, a Honda 250. It runs and comes equipped with a full tank of gas. Peggy cannot pause to consider the offer before instinct compels her to pay Rosa $150 cash for the bike. Lone women on motorcycles in Montana are a rare sight. Cars pass Peggy honking. One guy waves his fist at her. When no cars are around, she feels more secure riding the lane divider. A couple hours into the journey, Peggy stops to pee at a rest stop. The late-day sun casts an eerie light over the horizon. Peggy imagines herself surrounded by unsavory, low-life characters, and sure enough, as she’s parking the bike, she notices a bearded dwarf emerge from the men’s room. He’s got a huge grin on his face. Peggy is startled. She beats a hasty retreat. She’s hungry. At the next exit she pulls into a diner. The place is pretty empty. She takes a booth all to herself and orders coffee, not food, since she doesn’t feel like thinking about her life too much. But she must look lonely, as the waitress, whose shift is ending, offers to join her and shoot the breeze. Peggy replies by removing the saucer from beneath the coffee cup and waving it at the waitress, who gets the message loud and clear. At the gas station across the street Peggy fills up the Honda. She asks the guy behind the counter if he knows directions to Las Vegas, to the MGM Grand. He knows, though he has to let go of a jumbo-size Taco Bell cup to prove it, and then explains so quickly, with such wild gesticulations, and without writing anything down, that Peggy is dazed by the whole affair. So she asks him where the nearest luxury hotel is. Again he explains without writing anything down, but the second set of instructions is more straightforward. Peggy thanks him before riding off into the night. The next couple hours on the road pass without incident. Peggy pops a few Vivarin and concentrates on not crashing the bike. The Best Western’s only suite, the Blue Room, is available, so Peggy requests it. She may be alone, but that doesn’t mean she should skimp on luxury. She’s lying on the bed, on her left side, her legs bent in a running pose. She imagines running all the way back home, embracing Connie, embracing the cats, embracing what else? She pounds at the bed’s pillows, ashamed of her own cowardice. The journey is now underway. How can she think of such things? She has no idea what’s coming up. Then she remembers something strange and inspirational she read in a book written by a Japanese poet. The scene brings tears to her eyes and helps her understand that here, in the motel room, she belongs to no one, that here is one of the few places on the surface of the planet where she's undisturbed by worries and concerns. Isn’t that what she longed for, what she planned for? To live exclusively in the present and neglect the future? She doesn’t need Connie or anyone else to assure and comfort her about the insubstantial road that lies ahead. Nature may be a mutable cloud, and physics itself the next thing abandoned, but the mind remains the strangest of all God’s instruments. The scenes it chooses to remember are as fantastic as, though far less useful than, those it chooses to forget. Leave us no food, however, and we shed all confines of reason, though we’re proud of ourselves while doing it! The next morning Peggy removes a blonde wig from her backpack. She tries it on and likes the way it looks in tandem with a pair of funky-looking mirrored sunglasses. She’s hungry too, but this Best Western doesn’t have one of a free and convenient continental breakfasts in its lobby. She feels a bit cheated. She’ll have to get bagels and coffee elsewhere. In the meantime there’s vending machines. Peggy spent most of last night staring out the window and getting introspective. Blah blah blah homelessness, blah blah blah unemployment. All very liberating circumstances and the optimum conditions for a rich, full life. To be poor and raped doesn’t constitute the only justification for the existence of bikers and truckers and state troopers and tourists. Maybe Peggy’s messed up. She’s eaten an entire package of tiny powdered donuts. Peggy fabricates a different story for each biker, and each biker does the same for her. This particular one has a large bruise on his temple from where his wife hit him with a bag of dog food. A thick silver chain links a wallet to his pants. He has the hairiest ears Peggy’s ever laid eyes on. He also looks a little desperate. Peggy imagines accompanying him to the Sturgis Biker Rally. Together they gallop across the storm-filled heaths of time, shouldering the toppling burdens of hope and despair. The biker tells Peggy that, although young girls are cuter because they resemble little boys, he prefers the larger bodies of mature women. Peggy says not to worry about it and reaches over to kiss him. Once they’re undressed, the biker gets on top of Peggy and slips his erection inside her. There’s no foreplay. After two or three minutes of fucking, the biker has shot his load. He rolls off Peggy and falls asleep. When he begins snoring Peggy gets up from the bed, dresses, and goes out to the lobby for a cup of coffee. She slumps down on a comfortable sofa. She feels blank. The evening is taking shape in her mind much like an evil comedy played out at the heroine’s expense. Peggy has stopped at a 24-hour truck-stop near the I-90/I- 94 junction, but it might as well be Mayakovsky Square. She feels trapped, forced by some nameless and unconscious unease to spend her time at the place where she feels most unhappy. According to the dissipated waitress, burgers are their specialty but everything is good, and they will not serve rare hamburger meat anymore on account of ‘bacterial scares.’ But bacteria are the last thing Peggy’s worried about, so she insists on a ‘bacterial burger,’ slipping the waitress an extra $10 to emphasize her sincerity. The waitress, whose name tag says Jen Stewart, smiles, takes the bill, and slinks off to the kitchen. Peggy imagines she’ll split the money with the cook. Idiots? How come Peggy’s the one sitting at the table, while they’re the ones in the back doing weird stuff? The only other person here is a state trooper who looks much too young for the job. His uniform has creases in strange places, as if it were freshly removed from its original wrapper. While waiting for the order, Peggy asks the trooper when his shift ends. He says it has. The two of them have absconded to Peggy’s motel room. Peggy’s sitting on the trooper’s lap. He’s jiggling his knees up and down so that her whole body jounces back and forth. Peggy’s breasts leap out of the scoop-necked T-shirt. Her nipples are erect. The trooper takes one, then the other, into his mouth. His hands come up between her legs, and he’s delighted to find she’s wet. Five minutes later he slips his dick inside her pussy, humps her for awhile, then changes his mind, and stops. He greases up her asshole instead, with KY jelly. Five minutes later he wipes his cock with tissues before dressing. That trooper might as well have put a quarter in the machine and pulled the handle. After he leaves, Peggy showers for a long time, lying down in the tub to let the warm stream wash over her. Peggy awakens the following morning to find her motorcycle has vanished, likely stolen by a desperate vagrant. Peggy can tell this particular trucker is a real moron by the way he looks out the window at everything they pass with the same stupid grin on his face. He must weigh more than 300 pounds. His fat back covers most of the front seat. Looking at him, Peggy feels something twist in the pit of her stomach. He’s one of those guys who get turned on by salacious gestures only to cum all over their britches. In all her experience with morbidly obese men, Peggy can think of only two times where the liaison included explicit sexual acts. For an instant she considers reaching over and grabbing the man’s crotch, but then remembering how strong her grip is, she decides against it. The trucker sheepishly glances at her. Peggy smiles at him and says in a husky voice, “We’re almost there. Be patient. It’ll be worth it.” She rapidly flicks her tongue at him. He’s astonished and smears the sweat off his face with a grimy fist. The bed’s sheets have cowboys, ponies, and trains on them. Never has the ancient biblical saying, ‘Man does not live by bread alone,’ had such a convincing ring of truth as it does this morning. Peggy has duct-taped and handcuffed the drunken trucker to the toilet in the motel room. A macho bore. A sexist pig. Does he think Jesus sucked cock?! But Peggy’s back hurts too much to yell at him. Then tan his hide with a bundle of wet thorns or jump up and down on his feet. But she doesn’t trust decay, and she doesn’t count on pies in the sky. So she strikes his face with a hairdryer, and she might go to jail for it, but she doesn’t care. The trucker is yelling and sobbing, taking short, hiccupy gulps of air, struggling to breathe through the blood that flows from his nose and mouth. Soon parts of his face are missing. Peggy forces herself away. She’s breathing hard. She’s taken the prank a bit too far. A large pool of blood has spread around the toilet. The trucker must think she’s a sick fuck, if he’s not passed out, and Peggy stuffs his mouth with a T-shirt to be sure. If she were a hardcore sadist, a snuff job would be the ultimate thrill. A possible homosexual tie-in wouldn’t escape her either. This man proves that, like everyone else on the planet, truckers are animals cursed with the capacity for dreaming. With them, however, suffering is a habit, and what seems unendurable to others they endure readily. Choking exhaust fumes. Vast expanses of nothingness. Cornfields. Grain elevators. Gray buildings set far in the distance. Peggy runs her hand along the trucker’s pants pockets. She digs out a ring of keys. To his rig? A sense of desolation invades Peggy’s mind as she steers the eighteen-wheeler down the Interstate. What’s happening to her? Since it's impossible to stop thinking altogether, Peggy decides to think and analyze rather than speak. But all the travel has created an indescribable salad of impressions in her head. The road is exercising its hypnotic charm, conning her into believing that heroic, stubborn self-sacrifice is unprecedented in world history and deserves to be ranked right up there with the Spanish Inquisition and the War of the Roses. No ID, no fixed address. By the standards she previously adhered to, Peggy is incoherent. She might give out razor blades on Halloween or swerve to hit hitchhikers or comb her hair with urine. She might arrive in New Orleans by nightfall. An ethereal reddish glow seeps from behind the half- opened door. A headless black rooster lies crumpled on the threshold. Peggy slowly pushes the door open, steps over the rooster carcass, and enters the room. Her eyes are drawn to an altar in the middle of the floor. Cowrie shells are glued to its surface. A partially smoked cigar protrudes from a make-believe oral cavity. An enormous man in a blue embroidered shirt appears from the opposite doorway. He must weigh over 300 pounds. He’s holding a plastic bottle of Coke. A priest! Haw! If he is, he’s the only competent one in all of New Orleans, and an impossible character at that. He says he hates the very thought of a peaceful life and he despises money. Peggy imagines he’s one of those idle cynics who run full-steam ahead, skittish as a racehorse, unsettled, restless, mocking everyone and everything. He stinks of perfume and carries heavy brass knuckles in his pocket. As he speaks his eyes bore right through you. He’s telling her about the time he traveled on the roof of a train to Kazakhstan. He was fifteen. Peggy feels like writing a poem about him but instead, twenty minutes later, she’s making desperate jabbing motions at his skull. The bullet lodged in the priest’s head is Peggy’s ultimate act of justice. And how belated! She’s forgotten about the ‘natural history of souls’ that is recognizable in the symbolism inherent to the world around us. Peggy realizes that something more open, something harsher is needed and that the youth must not be left unarmed in their battle against ignorant authority. ‘The youth,’ as Peggy calls them, must be given the proper weapons for struggle against their future and their past. And what the world needs is a fucking trumpet blast. A lump forms in Peggy’s throat. She hears the air-raid sirens, yet she’s gripped with exultation to see people in the streets of the French Quarter hugging each other, crying and laughing. They’re swallowing straight from the bottle and kissing greedily between swigs. A wonderfully cloudless life is forming on the nearest horizon, and there's no longer any need to fear the coming day. All you need are effective methods for overcoming yourself. Yet pain is the only thing keeping Peggy conscious. 6. The story could’ve ended there. It should’ve ended there. The ruins of every civilization are the marks of a murderess trying to express herself. But in the end tomorrow arrives. If the reader's not satisfied, if you want more, try to imagine an August dawn and a previous night of dreadful explosions rocking a city, bridges and streets blown up, and many innocent people killed. Keep going in that direction and see where your imagination takes you--trust me on this.

Mogz & Peeting

1. When God finds a minute Some folks begin their dreams with a job as a waiter, or on the edge of a roof at the barrel of a gun. Other folks, having yet to graduate to nirvana, proclaim the illusion of the universal quest altogether. Still a third group asks, “What revisions would you make?” As for me, I’m unwilling, unable to rest within those confines. I prefer motion through a keener realm, a genuine change of altitude. My dreams, colored by desire and pounding with the wing-beat of irrepressible power, are designed to provoke and baffle the inquisitive. I pursue no profession but subsist on remittances from self-consciousness. Yet my editors continue to request a story I once proposed but long ago abandoned, something entitled The Droppers, set in Newport, Rhode Island, with a plot involving fuming nitric acid, vampires, a deranged Great Dane, and the opening sentence, “‘A Worm!’ she screamed.” --Metaphorically speaking, of course. Nowadays conventional reality is rendered foolproof. Neither vice nor art remains. In their place: the blind will of submerged savagery, the last phases of an unsuitable name, hypnosis and inertia, the mummy of convenience, single-minded commitments, and Theocritus but like a fruit. All without a vestige of agreement because unification begins on a higher plane. Then where is continuity, and how do I come to suffer from this lack of cultivation? Consider a flint ax found by a farmer, or any manufactured object of stone or iron, the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or the U.S. Treasury. The more one takes, the more one finds. Thus, the lengthy process of a cultural experience dying of its own absurdity. What aberration, what obstinate blindness--and of such unholy dimensions! While I cannot vouch for the completeness or accuracy of the story here contained, I am the only person able to form an adequate opinion of the experiences it describes. When you’ve read it through to the last SENTENCE, having resonated with its incidents, bestialities, and sensualities, struck frantic by hysteria and clumsy gestures, only then hand the story over to your spouse or minister, or recommend it to the fossiliferous systematists for filing in their six-drawer filing cabinets. My agent came by yesterday with a tip. She’s getting me bargain rates. A year’s lease for one dollar is the big thing now. A new place to hide, that’s all--if the gamble pays off. Bless her little opium-eater’s heart. I saw her lips move and her eyes cast heavenward, yet I don’t understand what she offered me. Too bad the law can’t clamp down on barbiturate dealers. In any case, the gulf before me is inevitable and near. I will awake, though only when this story reaches its proper conclusion. I hear the mock-pious voices of the sentimentalists as each one whispers or mumbles or dashes himself against the nearest wall. My thoughts dwell on the same topics. Confusion has given way to flatulence. Memory revisits me. It’s over now, I’m free. Yet I await further intimation because I have to play along, describing the darkness of a rotting autumn evening. Spine rigid, eyes staring, feathers at wrist and ankle, I smile and watch the birdie. Mixed odors of an unwashed body, cheap cologne, garlic, and hair oil. I’m tired, haven’t been sleeping well. I’ve taken more pills than I care to realize. Yet every corner of my mind is conspicuous. A light across a thousand years to one evening, this evening, judging by the silence. How I wish I had the time to visit that lovely altar, but it’s far too late, and I don’t think any more talk tonight would be of much use. 2. Where I stand in a meadow in order to see it While engaged in the various scenes of life, in Massachusetts, in Michigan, in Japan, in France and Germany, my chief recreation has remained walking. Over tufts of earth and low bushes. Past wharves and docks and factories where mattresses, candles, and soap are made. Along boulevards of chestnut trees. Through rain, snow, and sleet. Fields littered with haystacks. The lights of a roadhouse. Small rooms empty and untidy. Bare feet on blue tiles. At every turn hunger greets me as I wait for evening to draw me in. Proof in science is no easy matter, but I know trickery is no crime, so normally I’m seen disappearing around a corner, in flight from a gang of hereditary nervous disorders. A strange man of yellow complexion dressed in the antiquated garb of a bygone day. My first name is Mogz, pronounced as spelled. Although many externals will change over the course of this story-- mannerisms, habits, jargons--the following qualities remain constant: my china-blue eyes flashing with the incalculable sparkles of reason, an aggressively prominent Adam’s apple bobbing up and down, and a voice coming from nowhere. Those are constant, even painted on yellow paper. My tendons stretch and groan, my cheeks twitch with every drop and ray, my mind is like wax in these hands. Distinguishing between subjective and objective phenomena is a delicate task for the inspector of lodgings. Yet I never doubt for an instant that my magical side is a gift and a means to invoke the sacred name of humanity. Without one poignant cry, months elapse within seconds. “It’s the wind,” I tell the lodgers, “only the wind,” as I rush through doorways and phantom flames pursue me. In the spaces between shadows I pull levers, push buttons, throttle then disregard. My voice vibrates across the heavy blue silence, through rhomboids of sunlight and sheets of aluminum. Entire realms of morality and religion fade away into imaginary causes. Looking up now. Glass breaking over the edge. A cloud right above me. Reflections: people in motorboats, milk with knives in it, a blueprint for sulfuric acid, drops disappearing into a doghouse twisting onto the sides of a cathedral, angels and saints on my left shoe, Episcopalians through the throat, sailboats between the lips onto a mottled shag carpet wide as a black refrigerator. Windows blow my hands off. I’m athwart Arabic and Phoenician: horses, trees, houses merging into vast, orbitless worlds: mad displays of ostentation and wealth and instruments of culture: the same expressions, the same casts of countenance. The next moment, having taken full advantage of that six- second pause, I resume wandering the labyrinthine passageways, knocking on walls, glancing into closets, calling down stairwells for my associate, Peeting, an artificial man destined for the stage, with those burning cheeks, that dry mouth, and those downcast eyes. The holy stigmata of reds and yellows become the essential oil of an art, the obscure operations of life. There isn’t enough money in the world, not every disease has declared itself, and I work nine hours a day--yet Peeting has come back to life. The sound of smithy hammers. A mouthful of pine needles. Meadows flooded in dew. Where the hell are the roses and the lake? How about those ears? Whatever I say to Peeting, the note must resonate with the rush of an outgoing bullet. He dresses in ordinary clothes. You’ll see--he knows a great many curious things. We were very good friends once upon a time, but he has a jealous disposition, and lately his advice isn’t so sound. Overindulgence has worn his senses to transparency. Peeting kills with a knife, and I don’t like guys who use a knife. I like to lean on a stick when I walk. 3. A Policeman's Hands Somewhere between listlessness and desire terrible things will happen. Thus I’m obliged to respond to the calls of my body. Flesh can do without me, though I can’t please without it. Word made flesh. I see no interest in discussing the matter further. Yet, if my soul dissolves at the same rate as my body, pitching me forward: a solid little piece of geometrical harmony. What’s the other half anyway? The distant marching of time--the pocked surface of a dead planet--foliage with edible animals living inside--nomadic herdsmen wandering over a wild earth? Resolved from the noise of peripheral motion, a three- dimensional image projects onto an invisible screen. Do you see this? Can you read that? Whose fire-blackened ruins are deceiving me? It’s sacrilege, God knows, this errant likeness of Peeting: a chic slope to the forehead, watery eyes, shaggy red- gold hair, long white beard, stomach as round and hard as a leather basketball, crepe-sole shoes, rolled-up plaid sleeves, hands much too small for such long arms. How insolent! How epicene! Not a straight line to the man. Put yourself in his place. Does it suit your fancy taste to separate the rim of fat from the lean red meat until all fear is vanquished--and to let the Arabs get drunk on it? Peeting, a god without charity, a heretic among heretics. An emergency room, a strange car in the driveway, a military secret--a column of white skin. Phase Two. Hey Peeting, it’s full of bugs down here, dead pupae and larvae, rotting piles of citrus rinds, pecan shells. Booby-trapped? Your scent lingers. Why hulk in the darkness? A small window illuminates the closet with feeble light. An army cot is set up against one wall across from a table littered with unwashed coffee cups. I take note of a sink without a drainpipe, a full-length mirror, rusted sprinkler heads, a kerosene lamp with a white shade, two .22 rifles, a heavy glass ashtray, a chrome-plated motor, a beautiful fur coat, a cupboard full of old medicines, half a dozen suitcases, a small trunk, skates and Frisbees, and piles of old magazines and painter’s rags. Lovely stuff, isn’t it? Each thing with a special and different value. But are three TVs a good investment when there isn’t any electricity? ‘Peeting,’ the name barely discernible through swollen lips. Two jabs to the head, feint with the left, overhand right. What did we fight about? I return to that evening late last autumn. A sharp squeal jolts me awake. Musty darkness envelops everything. Blood is rushing to my crotch. I badly need to urinate. My brocaded bathrobe is drenched and muddied. Nibbling on my lower lip, teeth chattering, trying not to vomit, I mutter a final appeal to heaven before a tremor of dry heaves shakes my body. I squirm out from under the tarp, struggle to my feet. The brown grass is slippery. Smoke hides the sky. Twilight. My eyes adjust to the surroundings. A small clearing covered with tree stumps. A few steps to a woodpile, but no-- Peeting runs up behind me, laughing. His words come out hard and slow: “Why’d you fire me, Mogz? The young girl--is that it? Is that it, Mogz? Why’d you fire me?” He’s smoking a cigarette. His appearance is astonishing. Champagne soaks his white tuxedo, he’s armed with a machete, his eyes are shaded by yellow-tinted spectacles, his lips encrusted with blood. I suspect nerve-damage to his face. Peeting, you don’t have to worry about me. This time I’ll get what’s mine. You’re like the rest of them. Even you are scared of me. 4. If I make it, I'm going to have plenty of reason to believe in thirteen, too When evening arrives I perform my visits. Ideas connect with images as I check for information over the course of the night. An inspector of lodgings speaks loudly because he's very busy. Everyone comes at his own hour, but no one comes to me except as to a confidante, directly, without intercession of the clergy. Many of the lodgers have incurred debts too heavy to pay off all at once. Arrangements must be made, and reductions to installments. Otherwise, I put a stop to what’s going on. I'd like to be synonymous with pleasure and well-being, with delicious food and glorified light, but I’ve got to take it all so seriously, and the bribes amount to only a few hundred dollars. Contemplate the image of this wanderer. I’m not Ulysses, I’m an ordinary man--brilliant and talented, but not one whit more than a man. What words are adequate to the just delineation of my character? So flexible and so stubborn is the human mind. All I need are new interests, new outlets for my talents. Coffee break’s over. I flatten myself in the dust, put an ear to the wooden floor. The murmur of men’s voices, musical and energetic. Am I hearing something I’m not meant to hear? I stand up, rub my forehead, and keep on going, stepping through two S-shaped arcs. I cannot cease to be vital. I’m walking straight ahead, looking at nothing but seeing everything, my pace a careless and lingering one. I work nine hours a day, and though my knowledge stops short of absolute certainty, I cannot lose sight of my purpose. God has become the object of my supreme passion. Where would He have me go? What drives me to rescue these events from oblivion? Still I consent to live, for I suspect the importance of these events will become manifest in the sequel. As I pass doorway after doorway and walls checkered by shadowy forms, I imagine children sitting over cereal and cold scrambled eggs watching me as I pass. The outlines of their faces remind me of inverted cones. Hair matted, teeth large and irregular, cheeks pallid and lank, breasts sunken, their organs attacked, one after another, liver, kidneys, spleen. It’s boring to hear them pray, yet they pray a lot. What frenzy seizes their splayed feet? I imagine their mothers, buried in perplexity, waiting on doorsteps, mounting steep staircases, and their fathers who never shave their sideburns. I imagine these families waiting for a train going somewhere. All they have to do is step aboard, sit down by the window, and look out at the countryside. How I wish the past were as dead to them as it is to me. Salty soup--to make them thirsty. A tickling of lather on their cheeks. To inhale the scent of wet grass, to drink absinthe in Paris. No picture needs a caption because you can see the scene, in fragments, by implication. Room after room of guarded treasure, honeycombed partitions, pentagonal architectures, customized sculpture, eccentric whims, private formulae for complete contentment. So flexible yet so indefatigable is the human mind: one of the great waste places of the world: the internal suction of a detestable infatuation: no deliberation or method about it. The impossibility of escape from the necessity of choice becomes intolerable, sets the teeth on edge. So I dip my tongue into a pool of liquid chocolate, I tuck a quarter beneath the edge of a pie plate, I stuff a change of underwear into a camera bag, I play the piano with two fingers, I scrounge around for more charcoal, I inspect a young girl’s festering heal, and I don’t like the idea of driving clear across the state in a snowstorm. 5. Those little metal things you hold between your thumb and forefinger Recent events, not easily explained, suggest the existence of some danger in the lodgings. Peeting is behind much of it. He’s the pulp of the fruit. I glance through the jalousies of an upper-story window. Bullets fired from a sniper nest on the roof above me chisel out pieces of concrete in the facades across the street. I’m bleeding a little. I daub my face with a towel. I must’ve hit my head on a sharp overhang because I’ve lost my cap. There's also a sensation of swimming, and when I close my eyes and the sun’s out of sight, it’s like watching movies on a 21- inch screen. Images so terrific, so forcible I think I’m half asleep anyway. The primeval brilliance of twisted corpses, a long needle through my chest, from jade to aquamarine over a grassy knoll half a world away. A brass bedside lamp catches my fancy, followed by three silver tea services, an empty crystal decanter, and a white magnesium flash. The mental malnutrition is total, but I’m not here to discuss my condition. Come light when it will, I’m safe. An hour later I’m wide awake again, lying prostrate on a weak-springed mattress. I’m cold, and dreams lurk in the corners of my mind, but I feel responsible again for my body. Daylight falls through the windows in thin, gray-green shafts. Household noises vaguely reach me. The sniper continues to fire his weapon, providing any curious lodgers with an inexhaustible fund of window-side entertainment. I take a tissue from a box on the bedside table and wipe the sweat from my face. This is the best place to take an afternoon break. I walk over to the nearest window, remove a felt-tipped marker from a shirt pocket, and jot down a thought on the windowsill. ‘Every person in the world lives at least two lives’--only morbid self-consciousness prevents us from realizing that truth. In the olden days, many a man was scalped or killed as he fumbled with powder and ball. Injuns came up the trail from Texas, and there were women and children to attend to. These days, the chief attribute of my occupation is walking. The idea of progress has taken root in my mind, the idea of getting progressively closer to Peeting. Where to? I enjoy the stale, swampy odor of the golden-green corridors, the elevators banging up and down their shafts, and the dirty children climbing over balustrades. Kerosene lamps burn at each landing of the staircase. I enjoy staring down at the patterns in the carpet. I enjoy the portraits hung on walls behind a series of vacant desks and the green, plastic-covered sofas. As I run up and down the stairs--and I don’t have the right kinds of shoes for this exercise-- I carry a tiny transistor portable. News of victories and defeats, words of leadership and unity. I hide and lose and find myself again and again. I’m looking for him, and what words are adequate to the just delineation of his character? Peeting didn’t retire by choice. He’s forty-two years old. He was fired, afterwards drifting off into a private world of peaceful melancholy. At least I had the kindness not to laugh. Yet his impetuosity compelled him to resort to misrepresentations and untruths. You’ll see--he claims to know a great many curious things. I wish I could tell the story more simply, but to impute his acts to the influence of demons is rank absurdity. Sounds skimpy, doesn’t it? But when I stop thinking of Peeting, he ceases to exist. The whole thing so easily turns into a play of mirrors--and a fine figure of fun it makes of me! 6. The Sunday morning seductions of brewing coffee and frying bacon The passion that devoured my youth has, over time, maddened me, and to this day no reasoning can relieve my distress. If it’s true that a dangerous light smolders in my eyes-- but why dwell on the effusions of concealment? I’ve seen other dawns, and I’ve longed for the length of nighttime too. The memories of what I once aspired to return now and again to haunt me. Father was a great, hard-charging man with a truly terrible reputation, an awesome embodiment of swung fists, bent teeth, and popping neck veins. He appeared out of nowhere with a can of Lucky Lager and a manifesto to live. He could undertake anything and accomplish it. He was a skilled inventor as well. I recall our large, dome-ceilinged living room, and TV-dinners cooking in the kitchen, and that gray split-rail fence--it looked rowdy. I inherited my forward-tilting gait from Father but failed to follow up on his cleft chin and suntan. Mother was a poet with a wire-puller’s face. Her eyes without moisture, her lips overgrown. She seldom deviated into either extreme of rigor or lenity and therefore risked a life of cumulative horror. She walked with quick strides, yet she paused in doorways. Her shoes were narrow, low-heeled, and black. Her small, flat eyes roved restlessly. She never guessed what was happening to her. My heroic brother pursued a thrilling, lawless life. His colors were hard and violent. Tormented by an insatiable appetite for self-destruction, he placed the blade in different positions while maintaining a profound silence. Hence his ambivalence on so many things. Few men are more sensitive to public and private events than he was. One morning I watched him get into his Buick, tie back that tangled blonde hair, grip the steering wheel, and drive off. He would reach his objective, then vanish. I dreamed of becoming a lyric writer. I repeated those words incessantly, 'lyric writer, lyric writer.' The bittersweet taste of hands over one’s ears. Pretty ambitious for a little guy like me, but I pursued that passage. Each pale and mangled literary form I crushed to my bosom. Thick sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, homemade cookies with fresh fruit, and many other astonished questions. I wore a beaded belt across a black velvet jumpsuit. I cruised the Jersey asphalt. I was henceforth carried to this city, to these lodgings, the Central Lodgings, where I learned to adhere to the extravagant schedules of the creative arts. A showman by temperament, and a prankster, I never tired of conning and rehearsing my productions. Life in the lodgings moved from day to day, week to week, year to year, while I awaited my second puberty. Six years of uninterrupted happiness--before I realized how restricted are the passing hours, how one-dimensional is time. What language is that? What bloody deeds? I came to envy every form of life that is timeless, especially those suited to the climate of Southern California. Yet the lodgings seduced me with its endless corridors at right angles to endless stairwells, its rows of doorways and windows, its railings and galleries, its cupboards and closets, its series of lights and lamps, its shafts through ceilings and floors, and the lodgers themselves, wedged in between pension checks, welfare, ladder-backed dining room chairs, and dressing-tables crowded with cosmetics bottles. How about the guy downstairs who cut his hand open in carpentry class? Or those thin young boys who occupy the one-and-a-half room apartments? Or the couple who moved in from Perlova Street? Are they Jewish? Is that how Jews look? Here was a chance of getting into the real money, the moment of awakening. How could I leave it all behind? 7. Accidental breakage protection Damnation takes some getting used to, but as the story advances, my inquietudes inexorably increase. Yesterday’s rain becomes tomorrow’s decay. I'm in a neutral room with dark-brown linoleum tile. Greenish- gray light trickles through the cracks of the closed shutters. The cheap alarm clock on the bureau shows 11:15. Not leaving until I finish digesting this coffee. I lie flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling for two interminable hours. I imagine the soft whistling of the sea off Coney Island. A lunch date with my agent sounds good, an ‘urgent engagement.’ I recall leering down the front of her blouse and ogling her flesh- tight pants. My agent’s name is Mesi, and she’s maniacally serious about her hairdo. The status-group feeling is also important to her. The deal is, I give her my creations to market, then she denies the whole thing. Damn clever people, agents: ten percent of anything is better than nothing--and they sign away your rights with such deceptive humility. Simple as symbolic logic. I get along so well with them. The mind can seize a thought more readily with an added dash of liqueur. Some people need what you give them, others don’t--I don’t. As an inspector of lodgings, I keep track of things, property, people. I write things down. I describe present conditions. I follow up on complaints, careful not to use rude language with gentlemen of good manners. I ask certain questions--“Does that rotten blanket keep you warm in the winter?”--and give voice to particular commands--“Go find yourself a place to catch some sleep.” I rarely use force, though I must resort to my wits in order to exhaust the malice of my foes. I prefer the wind in my hair and the smell of the sea to a door that leads into a cellar, but I haven’t the privilege to change my subject matter, and sights, sounds, and smells are just that: sights, sounds, and smells. I draw in a deep breath, stand up, skitter over to the nearest skylight, jerking it open. Outside, police sirens make their deafening noises. Helicopters are being alerted. Above me on the roof, tramping footsteps, ejecting cartridges, a great deal of shouting. Another sniper is wildly shooting into the darkness. The crazy fool must think soldiers are coming at him. He fails to realize his moment has come for leaving, for turning aside from this life. Will he leap to his death rather than succumb to their commandments? Three sharp explosions follow one another by split-second intervals. A chill crawls up my spine. The cops, who as a rule dislike inconsistency in a land without castles and ghosts, want to throw up a hundred-foot wall around the lodgings and declare it an asylum. This place is no Utopia, but I don’t think it’s wise to overestimate the lodgers’ store of goodwill. And the ruckus overhead is sinking my brain into a fit. I steal across the threshold, then down the nearest staircase. You cannot imagine the effect produced by such saturation of light, the little dots dancing and bobbing and ricocheting off lines. Your mind splits into two separate parts. The prospect of the future excites your loathing. You break down once, but it isn’t an act. I turn into the third consecutive corridor. A covey of barefoot girls skipping along, giggling and screaming in the yellow-ochre light, eyes as big as blue gumballs. Sweet- looking kids, undeniably Anglo-Saxon, playing hide-and-go-seek amid baroque pieces of streamlined architecture while their parents pretend to be rich and lazy. I’m feeling calmer now. My eyes are drawn to a large carving on a nearby door. I imagine the great fields and blue lakes. Over space I bridge the manifold forms of time. 8. Physical stamina is not a part-time job Lamp in hand, with brisk self-confidence, I go from room to room without opening the shutters or pulling the curtains. I know all of their names, and each of them has many. Desire drives me out on these fabulous excursions. Nights when it's impossible to sleep. Looking for Peeting. Disconnected phrases of music bounce through the walls. Flames quiver on tabletops. Shadows cluster in cloakrooms. Drug addicts pull me aside by the sleeve, begging me to interfere with the existing order of affairs on their behalf. Women toss their heads to shake the rain from their hair. I imagine the clouds are gone and the night has a brightness to it. The storm has passes. A last drop of water strikes my hand. What to do is what is done: a superhuman effort minus the cumbersome luggage. Tomorrow I’ll visit the monkeys, Tuesday, the lions. Schedules, schedules. I love having time on my hands--it makes me feel expensive and daring. Strange how the past few Sundays something has come up. A group of vagrants barricaded themselves behind a counter. A slot machine went missing. Coins were stolen from a box on the votive candle rack. A man pressed his face against a young girl’s throat. A hand grabbed my ankle. I squeezed hair oil onto a toothbrush. Tonight the atmosphere has an emptiness whose confining limits extend to become the lulling sounds of a waterfall at dusk. Hours hence, when I return to my personal chambers, I collapse through the centuries. Later the same night, having finished ironing my shirts, I look forward to a bit of extended relaxation, as I bite into a petit four and take a sip of red wine. My bedroom’s walls are decorated with off-white-rose-colored wallpaper, and I enjoy the large double bed with a television mounted at its foot-board. Large white sheets are spread over the furniture. I’m pleased my books are arranged on the shelves as I left them, that the grand- piano is open, and that my bust of Cicero needs dusting. The crackling of flames from the wood stove bursts upon my ears. New ideas, new images rush into my mind, transporting it to prodigious heights. What wine will suffice to make me drunk? How can I not feel awe before that receptacle? For a brief moment I pass through a series of occult associations. I’m absorbed, dissolved into humanity--I become the creator without the created--I gird myself with a lightning bolt--until I’ve resumed consciousness of my true situation. At last I’m ripe for some other form of existence--and without the smallest relic from the past. A queer sort of extravagance: five stages from ritual to romance. Yesterday I received a letter, a basket of grapefruit, and a wedge of imported cheese from a good friend who’s in Phoenix on business. He thinks I’m sick or something. From his letter I gather that the more or less normal life he’s been leading the past year has been the key to his contentment, but I think he’s complacent, so I’ll do my best to knock him out of that stupor when he returns laden with insolent wealth. He’s been away a good deal from the lodgings, in Phoenix, where he doesn’t have to wear fur-lined gloves and stand on an icy street corner waiting for the traffic light to change. He finds himself more acceptable in the desert, or he’s forgotten that the east is where the sun rises. His name is Lareh. He’s a thick-wristed commercial photographer who spreads his arms wide in exasperation. He’s young--twenty-six? He’ll turn up in the suburbs of Orlando, Florida, transformed at once into a man of sorrows or some similar species of gratification. 9. Sleep deprivation There’s been a great deal of talk about me lately, and it isn’t finished--it’s only begun, the whispering, smiling, and snickering over the inspector of lodgings: a ‘recluse’ with a ‘chip on his shoulder’ whose ‘paperwork is piling up.’ ‘He thinks he can run our lives for us,’ with his ‘shakedowns in the most unlikely quarters,’ his ‘prowling about unknown in corridors late at night,’ his ‘blue pencils and orange-colored paperclips,’ his ‘fetish of knocking on doors and exposing himself.’ What do they expect me to do about those rumors? No one, including myself, is in the position to disprove his own authenticity. It’s solely their voices, and it’s all I can do to bow my head and follow, with equal humility, the examples of the inspectors who preceded me--though I do enjoy showing off when it’s dark and late at night, and shadows are fuming up the hallways, and I’m dressed in my favorite blue shirts with the red and green buttons. Murderer? What murderer? How do you answer a question like that except in unprintable words? Peeting’s specialty is girls. If he can’t find a knife, he uses an iron pole with four crossbars. He touches himself. He stands in the same place for days. He’s clearly not home. I imagine the blood rushing loud in those ears as he holds his head down and touches her breasts with his gloved hands. They discovered his latest victim earlier this morning in the billiards room, naked, sprawled in a chair, with both arms lopped off. I wish to God I knew what’s going on. I recall the lodgers pressing forward, staring at the body, and a priest down on his knees, head bowed. I felt a stab of dread and guilt each time I glanced at the victim. I’m too much of a thinker, but I shouldn’t have let Peeting do what he did last night. That bastard isn’t smart enough to hate anybody. Thought-transference or hypnosis perhaps: the master’s head nodding forward, fingers clasping a slender chain of gold--to dazzle, to captivate, to drive the color from his cheek and the power from his limbs. I shudder to think Peeting wanders alone, undecided and unmolested, through empty passageways, down staircases, looking, searching, impelled by a most unmasculine curiosity, until he recognizes the soft dark eyes, the golden hair, the slender white-robed figure. There’s nothing else suitable to say--that’s who he is, and he does it all without permission from the front office! Does he flee the murder scene posthaste or smoke a cigar and smile bitterly to himself? Does he stand alone at a deep window? I imagine the frosted-glass panes with gilt markings. He may have a suitcase or laundry basket tucked away with a change of clothes, or access to a battered fireproof safe, or a white badge and wobbling pince-nez to mark him as an auditor. He’ll show no signs of disturbance or upheaval, nor will he find it difficult to acquire money. It’s a matter of taste and timing. I suspect Peeting wants to inform me we’ll meet again--soon, and for at least twenty minutes. I welcome the opportunity: at the topmost layers of muck I set my apperception to work. After hanging up the phone, I grab my suit jacket from the back of the desk chair and rush out the door. I’m experiencing a new, lightheaded sensation, a phosphorescent glitter. I’m excited, full of energy. My crazy, spherical world is quivering back into life. Eyelids become enlarged, rooftops change to treetops. Large red letters on a green background: there’s only one thing left to do, Peeting! The second-to-last intermission has begun. I check my watch. It’s 8:35. What an ominous conjunction! Then, from the distance, comes a low, bristling rumble. 10. No black is as black as a bottle of ink Though Peeting takes enormous strides, he cannot afford to take lengthy walks. He no longer adopts the word ‘solitude.’ Hardly an evening passes without someone dropping in. He keeps a good ear to the ground, and he recognizes the many voices. Not that he’s been idle lately. He keeps a very busy. More than that, less than that, he doesn’t want. If he pauses, even momentarily, he puts those fingertips to his temples, rubbing, massaging. If he sits down, he folds those hands in his lap to keep them from shaking. If he falls asleep, he does so without turning the lights off. The ordinary colors aren’t enough for him. He uses a palette knife as a scalpel. He’s akin to a painter. He also has a splendid sensitivity to textures, and he’s watchful when coming dangerously close to putting those fists through glass. Peeting's infallibility can be irritating, however, and, for all that, he cannot concentrate on one thing for any length of time. He falls into long silences. He fills a saucepan with water or pours half a glass of wine. He grabs a handful of olives, popping them into his mouth one at a time, spitting the pits into his other hand. He waits until he hears her disengage the dead-bolt lock. He sets down the wineglass, stands up, turns away from the door, and walks to the sagging workbench, where he sharpens the greenish blades of his knives on a large, smooth stone. The air smells of grease. The refrigerator hums noisily. A single bare bulb dangles on a cord from a crossbeam. The room’s shades of green change with the time of day, but this time Peeting’s awake, alert, a bit twitchy. The rosary he’s holding he’s held since he was fifteen, and the paint-splashed floor, the sacks of clay, the red ropes and green ropes of bristled paper--yes, yes, everything in the room is large and kindly, as in a fairy tale. And if he’s dressed in black tonight--like smoke reluctant to leave a chimney--he’s also wearing a gold chain around his neck, and if she asks silly questions, he’ll offer her the wineglass on the coffee table, and if she removes those knee-length leather boots, there’s nothing much he can do about it. Her big thighs, yellow as butter and clean as life unlived, stick out in opposite directions. They’re soft all right, though not soft enough. Her silk handkerchiefs and gold earrings. Her dry laughter. He peers into those brown eyes, not believing what he sees, yet it’s a look he recognizes--once it was in his eyes, when the pills were stuck in his throat. What’s she trying to say? He can’t make it out, but if he could, would he dignify it with an answer? It’s best not to say anything that might cause offense: the more you give it, the more it asks. Peeting falls into another long silence, brooding over the various ways to desecrate a holiday--on a wide canopy bed hung with red satin draperies, in the entranceway to a narrow vestibule with the star of Bethlehem dipping and bobbing and candles flickering in angels’ hands. He settles on a ruler and a bottle of ink. Though none of the girls’ faces has a name, each will be a giant to Peeting. He is overwhelmed by how they sit together on the front benches and receive those presents. Nothing shames them. They say what they mean, delighted at the surprise of learning something they already know, their final moment assumed under the pretext it belongs in tomorrow’s portion. As for science, it’s not advisable to pattern the ancillary combinations and small accidents into a series of fetishes described as ‘small fortuitous circumstances.’ Yet that is what puts the concept of time into their little heads. 11. Six-left-four-right-all-the-way-around-to-five-to-open Do you hear? A rumble that says, “Nothing in these lodgings is hidden from God,” is also a rumble that deserves strawberry cheesecake. As I stride through the rubber-tiled corridors of the basement, past strange objects and pieces of clothing, brisk with self-confidence, I detect an increasing yellowness in the air. Two yellow lines form an incomplete triangle. Two yellow streaks merge behind opposite windows to reveal a yellow circle decorated with barbed edges. Yellow handbills, blue-and-yellow streamers, newspaper clippings, crepe-paper pennants. To wake up in a new country, as after a long convalescence--such is your first impression on checking into the lodgings: a weird compound of lust and indifference. Why flounder away in the outside world with your head tilted to one side, worrying about public records, marriage licenses, and unilateral disarmament? In here, shadows dance on walls. Small- arms fire echoes in all directions. Boys hurry out of their clothes, cavorting in their underwear, wrestling each other for towels--and the women, with their scarves, evening skirts, and elbow-length gloves. You might encounter Yassir Arafat’s Ivy League choir, or a life-size self-portrait inside a glass box--assuming Peeting doesn’t get to you first. Twilight finds me in my bravest attire. Let us say twilight finds the man outside himself. I’m meditating on the master, filling in gaping holes with iron and lead. I’ve come with the nails, and from here forward it’s easy, a snap: the most powerful pistol in the world pulverizes my adversary. I’ve spoken to the king and queen about it. I'll also speak to the witch-doctor. No grammar, no punctuation, his legs amputated, but at least he’s not a criminal lawyer with a social conscience. If Peeting left his knife in the fire--wouldn’t that ruin his evening or release some energy from that tight-lipped expression of his? I want him to feel it, the whiteness in my head that creates international incidents. I want him to come down hard on me, reduce my speed at the end of the day. I want him to see it. The deformed mouths, the crossed eyes, the skin rubbed raw, the unbelievably short miniskirts. The whole bloody circus. Three swords with silver hilts. A black cloak’s fiery red lining. Signboards and electrical cables. Scarlet stains, hand-prints on the walls, rust-red hatchets. No flounce scalloped so deeply. No dark side to his detachment. The Great Dictator needs blood. He blows out those cheeks and puffs, awaiting the next sacrifice. She’s too young to shroud herself in sables for a lifetime. She’s a blooming paradise of flowers. Do you hear? The panic-stricken intake of breath. The cries through shattered windows. The insistent hammering on door no. 37. Void, away--away! Get your hand out of there! But he’s not there. Peeting’s not there. Only a television blaring in an empty lounge. A very long time. But I must go on. Then, like a feat of magic, a pair of white doors opens before me without a sound, and beyond them stretches a corridor lit by blue-green night-lights cool as a refrigerator-car. My pistol holster is open. As I step through the doorway, I’m overwhelmed by a sickening, medicinal stench. I recoil two, short, trembling steps. Intolerable pain. There’s no room to maneuver here. But am I following this thread of events backward from end to beginning and, by some mishap, dreaming a deadly dream? I no longer know whether the events I relate are effects or causes. 12. Six-left-four-right-all-the-way-around-to-five-to-open (cont'd) I only know that since midnight’s approaching, it’s best to hurry. Then I recognize the blue-green glow of the corridor. I don’t merely see it, I recognize it. As an inspector of lodgings, I should recognize it and yet not recognize it with such revelation. I’ve passed through here before but only passed through, never pausing, en route to--where? Lodgers aren’t permitted to live in the basement. Where would I be going? I shrug my shoulders and prepare to walk the length of the corridor to a second pair of white doors at the opposite end. I say ‘prepare’ because I’m not moving and must therefore first accumulate the energy necessary to take that initial step. Do you know what it’s like to be left to yourself, given up to your own devices? Walking or sitting still, looking up at the ceiling or into a coffee cup, it’s the same thing: no torrential rivers, no soaring mountains, no trees. All the doors are locked except for the ones at the end of the hallway. Yellow stained- glass windows, a battered refrigerator, a sudden attack of amnesia. You can’t have a career like that. The whole thing becomes a chore without enormous satisfaction, a throwback to the days of practical jokes, a piece of blue organza. You twist your phrases until your head falls to your chest. You clutch your stomach. Your tongue shrivels. Your eyesight blurs into an incandescent metal plate. Programs, tapes, microphones--all are ready to let it happen. Over the course of my wanderings in these lodgings, I’ve witnessed scores of deaths, and in each case, an electrical force was released at the final exhalation. I can’t figure it out. A built-in storage unit to receive and contain power? I also can’t figure out these plastic bags full of hair, slippery-looking fruit rinds, cardboard boxes, necklaces, earrings, bottles of 100-proof vodka, and these cigarette butts, nor the blue-green shards of glass embedded into the wall and the cloying smell of disinfectant. You don’t think I know diamonds when I see them? The shadow of a sword, for instance, whereas the phonograph on the desk I ignore--even to glance at it produces intense irritation. I can’t figure it out: three hundred pages, ten floor-plans per page, entitled The Central Lodgings. It’s Peeting’s handwriting, a solid block of words, and the sketches twinkle with a thousand lamps. A statement of self-assertion, an affirmative break with tradition cut, set, and written without home, without farewell. I imagine myself gloating over specimens of Peeting’s blood, the silvery crimson spurting from his chest, drenching that shirt front, the lifeless body crumpled on the floor. A reviving warmth flows through my body. I’m breathing hard. I feel ravenously hungry. A bowl of fresh caviar, two filets of smoked sturgeon, a silver ice bucket. Do you hear? The shrill bugle calls. A distant band playing a march or a glass falling off a table. I have my contacts, and I have commitments back in London, and not without restraint but because of it I warn my friends to watch civilization conquer men from within their cell walls. Have you a better solution than iron railings along boulevards? Nobody has. The Greeks believed in it, as do certain African tribes today. Kennedy isn’t buried in this country. He’s dismembered and destroyed. It’s too big, I can’t take it, and I can't explain what these pages mean, with no grammar, no punctuation. Risk what?--I’m not doing anything. A gaping mouth with burning edges disturbs my work. Thundering through mists, roaring over bridges, everything blurred for one evening-- until I encounter a gray, standardized face set against a black- green backdrop. 13. At the pivot point The pendulum swings in eternal oscillation. You don’t think I know the difference between a hallway and a corridor, a stairwell and a staircase, a doorway and a portal? You don’t think I can worm my way through small openings or become lost in subterranean passageways with bolted shutters? I’m so full of raw talent it’s impossible to remain indifferent. Never again shall the world break into fragments and burn before these eyes. My sort of language--how it keeps coming back! Wind tears at the roof of this scraggly house, and the breath of two men mixes together. “Awake,” says one of them, and “Sleep,” the other, while a third much greater man subtends them both. The afflicted will be healed, the ugly made beautiful. A chuckle rolls from my belly. It’s like any night when you can’t fall sleep. You watch the fireflies and listen to the crickets. Tomorrow morning I won’t even remember these basement passageways. At the opposite end of the blue-green corridor, I open the second pair of white doors to find another corridor, this one of the more conventional, poorly-lit variety. Brownish-black shadows, a tinge of indigo to the corners, doors spaced periodically along the two walls, puddles on the carpet, shrunken plaster, crumbling art-nouveau impedimenta, and a funny kind of view, as from the operating end of an opium pipe. Memory has become an annoyance to me and is so great to be borne that if a thought touches my mind, and it’s a recollection, not a ringing in the ears or a gramophone record, nothing else gets put right afterwards. Pies precede the salad, jellies dilute the vodka, saliva turns to mayonnaise. The circle is narrowing, the shimmer of unstable matter threading into skeins and scraps of material. I pray I’m not too late, but I know which door to try. I’m not an abstractionist, and mine is not a barbaric state of mind. I put one hand on the crank and turn the wheel. Seeing the interior of the room brings me back to my senses. A feeble light seeps through the small, dust-covered window near the rafters, yet the walls have a scarlet glow. The smoked-blackened ceiling rises upward into nighttime’s infinity. A red-upholstered chair sits in the center of the room. Guardian amulets are hung about, and the concrete floor is as bloody as a slaughterhouse. Then I notice the flick of a tail in a far corner. I hear the shuffle of feet. A black-skinned creature, the type that devours meat with its blood, approaches me from the shadows. A crude-looking copper cross hangs about its neck. Its eyes change colors, the pupils rotating like wheel-spokes. Its breath is fog. I’m compelled to kneel before the creature, and as I do so, closing my eyes, it places over my shoulders a black cloak with a fiery red lining. From my kneel, I freely assume a prostrate position on the bloody floor, without any sense of disgust. Such calm spreads over my body I feel a surge of something I can only describe as love. A rhythmic pricking begins in my thumbs. I open my eyes, and I recognize this second place. I also know the time has not come to return to the place I departed from. The darkness that envelops me is not as fiery as it was moments before. I squirm out from under the tarp and struggle to my feet. The grass is slippery. A stifling smoke hides the sky. My eyes adjust to the surroundings. A small clearing covered with tree stumps. I need to urinate, so only after relieving myself on a nearby woodpile do I return to the tarp and pull it back from the ground, to reveal my walking stick. Picking up the stick, I walk towards the path I was following before I passed out beneath that tarp. Then I hear footsteps behind me. 14. Hills and forests and remote horizons It’s Peeting. His eyes are bloodshot, his hollow cheeks flushed red, and blood encrusts his lower lip. He’s very angry, striding right up to me and stopping only when his nose nearly touches mine. “So that wasn’t enough of a beating? Is that it?” he asks, “Then I’ll ask you again. Why’d you do it, Mogz? Why’d you fire me?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I reply, wiping my nose on the back of my hand. “Too bad, because I want to know, and that answer isn’t good enough. Is it the girl? Is that why?” His chin is covered with a heavy growth of reddish hair. His face sits too high on his neck. He nervously wrings those hands. I’m far too disoriented to engage in any kind of conversation, but I feel a dread coming over me, a fear spreading into every drop of blood in my body. Neither frosted glass nor drapery can protect me from Peeting. Nothing works. No answers to his questions satisfy him. No argument can exhaust the man. Though he longs for indisputable explanations, disagreement and conjuncture are what sustain his will. The worst part is that I can’t escape from his rage. He would threaten me with knives and hold me at gun-point until I startle at every twitch in his face. He would subject me to the most extreme forms of isolation and confinement until the simple act of walking is synonymous with the survival of the fittest. He would beat me senseless until I eat from his hands like a dog. All to what end? To deny me my free will to test a philosophical hypothesis? How many dreams and nightmares must I describe to him? How many more visions of otherworldly symbols until he’s convinced that ‘reality’ is a sham, that ‘truth’ is mere convention? How many more visits to those endless corridors and alcoves, how many more encounters with Peeting’s alter-ego? I may soon behold the Messiah--if I’m not first devoured by a mouth of yellow teeth. I shudder to think that Peeting himself doesn’t know where this will end, that he’s as trapped inside his data as I am within his laboratory. And to think he recruited me over twenty other potential subjects because of a superior memory and a finely-honed literary imagination. I turn away from him and stagger along the path. The latest version of my left leg is malfunctioning, my eyes are watering, I’ve got belly cramps. Peeting’s behind most of it. “Now where are you going?” Peeting yells. I don’t respond. “Do you know where you are? Of course you don’t.” He’s right--I don’t, but I keep walking anyway. “It appears additional reinforcement is needed.” I hear footsteps rapidly approaching, footsteps sublime, brutal and boundless. I know what’s coming, but how can I prevent it--how can I prevent anything in Peeting’s solitary world? A sharp blade stabs into my heel. My knees give way. I pitch forward. The horizon draws together into a deepening darkness. No birds, only distant points grave and black. --A sharp squeal jolts me awake. The cheap alarm clock on the bureau shows 8:30, giving me enough time to shower and shave before I perform the morning visits. The lodgings are unusually quiet this morning, an indication that Peeting has lapsed into a period of immobility--though I doubt it signals an end to his atrocities.

Chicago, Sir

1. I roam about the world in search of my final, definitive expression. A scene from the past, a quotation from a dream, a conversation with stranger who’s about to get up and leave. I’ve made many a posthumous appearance, and how easily accomplished in the summer, when you feel you could live on a mixture of sun and air alone. You’ve seen me, out of the corner of your eye, in those Canadian Government Travel Bureau photos, and when you first got wind of my death you didn’t want to breathe again. But maybe the cloying odor of those roses reminded you to recite the Lord’s Prayer at my bier-side. In theory, we all live happily ever after, a royal future awaits each one of us, and we all could be celebrating at least a premature victory this very moment. Then what has changed, and where has my center gone off to? It’s as if I fell into a hole and kept falling until I landed in another world. The stench of petroleum is suffocating down here. I desperately want to smoke, and I've looked about me for matches in the dark, though I’ve yet to summon the courage to light up. Somewhere a celibate weatherman remarks that he who has lost all ties to the world is affected only by the changing of the seasons. Then who or what can obligate that person to the strict codes of secrecy? Fair enough. I’m free to reveal my true name. Thane Teckenbruch. Spell it as you wish. I understand there’s a touch of showmanship to my name. My parents preferred it that way. Back in the Fifties, children of science were idolized by romantics, and the technology of hot-air balloons and electromagnetic waves went hand-in-hand with more esoteric knowledge of hypnosis and spiritualism. Imagine the geographical juncture of the borders of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran. Simple peasants gathered around volcanoes of iron. Among other things. I try to halt the parade of images, but to no avail--when a single moment of time is picked out from the others and stopped dead in its tracks. Aha, I got you! As in real life? No, as in the literary arts. And look at what odd tricks are played by pure coincidence. (This sort of treatment leaves little room for ‘realism.’) Because every story must, in some manner, be figured out, and all its details scrutinized carefully, the writer is apt to surprise his characters red-handed. If he does so, he'll discover that characters not kept busy with work tend to vanish from the scene altogether or, at best, spend much of their time sleeping, which can shock an unsuspecting writer. The important thing is to get the characters moving as a class of workers, to give each of them specified tasks to complete, to compel them, on pain of extinction, to adapt to the writer's mode of creative production, and, most importantly, to encourage their intercourse in every conceivable direction. One-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become impossible for any particular character. Pushed to its limit, this technique of ‘multidirectional intercourse’ merges all the author’s characters into a single, unified character who exists here and now. Following literary tradition, we refer to that unified character as I. But if we go one step further and merge all the I’s created by authors in the numerous national and social literatures, we arrive at the single I of world literature. In any case, every author worth his salt must know how to twine living rope out of his phrases. Please keep in mind that I have but a single refill for my ball-point pen. When that begins to run out? I’ll plunge the knife in or pull the trigger at the end of the following paragraph. 2. Genuine political concepts remain antagonistic to the realm of ordinary discourse. It's not clear, however, which side is engaged in mythology. Regardless, the politician must be called to the carpet. What do you mean when you say [***]? You don’t talk like the rest of us. Are you concealing something? Radical subversion? It's incumbent on society to expose your dirty tricks. Political discourse ought not be over the heads of us common folk! The politician is thus forced to argue and analyze in a manner he would consider infantile within the sphere of his own expertise. His choice of words becomes associative and affective. Despite appeals to reason, he is forced to evoke pleasant associations of a non-rational character by appealing, on the subliminal level, to the basic drives of hunger and sex. The difficulty here is that the ordinary citizen’s daily life provides a far too restricted sense of reality. How can such a person be expected to grasp the subtleties of domestic or foreign policy if he is constantly preoccupied with his own petty concerns regarding himself, his family, and his immediate occupation? Political information is plentiful and readily available, yet that doesn’t matter, for even if he possessed the curiosity and perspicacity of mind, the private citizen still lacks the time to devote to study and analysis. Without the initiative that comes from immediate responsibility, a person is not compelled to understand the complicated arguments and decisions that underlie national policy. In enlisting support, the politician therefore resorts to underhanded tactics. He bypasses the conscious mind. By repeatedly linking a specific noun to the same few adjectives, he converts his platform into a number of hypnotic formulae whose purpose is to fix a single, positive meaning in the subconscious minds of the electorate, who in turn associate those formulae with specific attitudes, aspirations, and social institutions. Opposition to the prevailing direction of discourse is then seen as highly suspect, even dangerous. Hyphenation becomes a useful means of reconciling the irreconcilable. Abbreviations serve to avoid undesirable questions. Presuppositions assume the form of suggestive commands that are evocative rather demonstrative. The immediacy and directness of those commands then impede conceptual thinking, as concepts become abridged in fixed formulae that appear to be self-validating. Rights and liberties next lose their traditional content, differences between the given and the possible are flattened out, while, in extreme cases, the density and opacity of everyday objects evaporate. Ultimately, the social world is rendered more and more dependent for its objectivity on a private citizen who is but a specter of the individual once blessed with reason and memory. The fault may lie with a society that expects hypocrisy from its leaders while simultaneously stifling the expression of corrective opinions in the name of moral convention. Perhaps there is no place in the established order for men and women of original conviction. Or perhaps society is enduring a catastrophic form of dogmatism founded on the basic fear of social change. Only by means of total skepticism can we reclaim the rigorous political consciousness required by any genuine form of democracy. Citizens must be trained to respond to and defy all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse. They must learn to put into practice a thoroughgoing analysis of all aspects of political activity, both domestic and abroad. Pursued to its proper end, this training will raise citizens to the level of agitators and political revolutionaries. Prudence will dictate that governments long established shall not be changed for light and transient reasons. In any case, complacency cannot be swept aside by a single speech. A collective discussion of past mistakes and delusions is needed, and it must begin now. We are approaching a critical hour. The ‘social revolution’ will not be a conspiracy at all but a spontaneous movement. It has begun. 3. I imagine the President of the United States sits with sagging shoulders at his desk in the Oval Office, while outside more than a thousand cops fill the streets. They’ve trapped a sniper in a building across the way. The lone gunman has been firing bullets all afternoon, chipping away at the facade of the White House. The cops can’t find a way to communicate with the shooter. They also haven’t figured out how to incapacitate him. The gunman has an unlimited supply of ammunition. Although he’s not yet shot a single a person, the fact that his sole target is the White House has caused some to suspect he may be trying to shoot the President or White House staffers. Since the gunman refuses to communicate, no one can be certain what his motives are or whether he’s even in a proper frame of mind. He may have lost his virginity and consider himself the largest flesh-eating land mammal in the world. He may have spent his boyhood in the wild and rugged mountains of western North Carolina, hunting, fishing, and trapping. Do you know what a transvestite is? Although the tendency when shooting down on your target is to overshoot, being elevated off the ground has its share of advantages. For one thing, with a good pair of binoculars you can watch your game approaching long before it’s in shooting range. Secondly, pedestrians pay little attention to what's going on above them. Thirdly, the gunman’s body odor is carried off with the upper winds, far away from the crowds of nostrils below. It’s tough being a sex symbol. Even if you’re a politician and you’ve seen it coming, fame chews you to exhaustion. Ask Tom Cruise and Sean Connery. Death is in the apple, and you’ll see other things too. Heady stuff. The American people expect so much from their presidents. Acting on stage? Conventional wisdom once held that the American people never negotiate with anyone seeking her ends through acts of terrorism. How times have changed! I can’t squeeze the air from my ass. I’m straight faded. Fear has pumped me up with adrenaline and so greatly reduced my reaction time that I feel safer and more secure than ever. I’ll kick anyone’s ass to prove it. The coffee arrives. Caffeine is an important ally, a gift nature gives only to the mature intellect. Editing Mr. President’s State of the Union address is a fun pastime. I enjoy listening to the results from the gallery of the House of Representatives. Rarely do great beauty and polemic facility go so well together. Lovely, isn’t it? The Fortune 500 is demanding to forcibly commit Mr. President to a mental institution for seventy-two hours. Later the same evening, Mr. President walks past the wrestling mats and weightlifting paraphernalia to a central door in the rear wall of the Oval Office that leads to handsomely appointed Turkish baths. The time must be right for another full-moon bacchanal. Do you want the NC- 17, R, or PG-13 version? 4. The rapid proliferation of low-cost video sensors provides a valuable opportunity for increased surveillance. The cameras have become so small they’ll fit anywhere. If you’re not doing anything wrong, it should make you feel safer. Citizens being monitored 24/7 know that if they commit a crime the odds of detection due to time or location monitoring are very high. Updates of their movements through urban areas, either on foot or by transport, are possible every 10 seconds. Police officers can demarcate exclusion zones. Imagine the employment of yet higher density recording media combined with an increased number of sensor feeds. (This inevitably leads to particle-sized sensors designed to detect the presence of larger, more conspicuous types of sensors.) Better yet, consider capturing and reconstructing the electromagnetic radiation emitted by digital equipment. Computer cables, phone lines, and poorly grounded electrical systems all act as both receivers and transmitters. Pост недоверия одного человека к другому. Параноидальная страсть к оружию. An increasing number of medical records are sent to India for conversion into computer format. Smoker withdrawal rates are calculated by all major tobacco corporations. Watch-lists are indexed by license plate number. Rental fleets and trucking companies use satellite positioning systems to track cars and cargo. Cell phones are monitored in cars without the driver’s knowledge. You hear a voice through your radio ask, “Are you OK? Are you all right? Who got sucked off?” Дефицит контактов между людьми. Психическое расстройство. Одержимость бесами. Since a sophisticated pedophile or terrorist will be able to shield or remove locator devices, tracking of vehicles across extended distances using fixed surveillance cameras will become key to providing actionable intelligence. Sensor resolution and image encryption can then be determined by the contractor in accordance with government standards, which are classified information, the publication of which is forbidden in the United States by the National Security Agency (Fort Mead, Maryland). Bсе они страдают от ожирения. Практически неотличимы один от другого. В конце концов исчезает не только уважение к другому, но и к самому себе. El pueblo vive bajo un estado de terror y nadie está seguro de dónde vendrá el próximo ataque. If you find a way to solve all NP problems in polynomial time, the NSA wants to have a chat with you. Whatever became of the Neurophone? Others were informers, like обратная сторона myself, trained to recall minute details under hypnosis: cубъект подсознательно отвечал на все вопросы анаграммами. Как хитро! 5. Every behavior is useful in some context. Every person has his own strategy for everything he does. My fictitious daughter has been babysitting since she was ten. She's earned three thousand dollars. Last week she signed up for the role of Jesus in our church’s annual play. Today I’m devising a training manual for her crucifixion. No one will believe any of these claims. Most government officials will go out of their way to deny them. Nevertheless, I have a feeling the United Nations will be contacting me soon, and maybe they’ll listen for once, unless the defense agencies jump all over me first. They scratch at the surfaces with their gritty little fingernails. Their voices take on a condescending tone. Yet their message is never clear from the public record. What happened? How did I get here? When I opened the door I saw an empty apartment. Then what? Short answer. Shadow memory. No more stalling. I’m running out of time! Satellite communication is redundant because we’re always communicating. The best way back to reality is to destroy our perceptions of it. Optimism must fuel that effort. Optimism will be our fighting advantage. We can accomplish anything if we break our task down into small enough pieces. There's no failure here, only feedback. Is my vision narrow and focused or broad and open? Do I feel heavy or light? What about internal sounds? The primary function of fashion is to sell clothing. Thus small children reject a newly cleaned blanket. trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored 6. That son of a bitch is in here somewhere. I saw him. You mean the guy who cracked your skull and fucked your wife? Yeah. He asked me if I could get him some porno, cigarettes, and beer. I said sure, so long as he paid me in cash. (The porno arrives like the newspapers, tied in a bundle and tossed on the front step.) Next thing you know, the knucklehead walks into a bank with a telephone, not a pistol or a shotgun, but a fucking cell phone, cleans the place out, and they don’t lift a finger. That was the day I learned there’s an entire life behind things. The composite image was a size 38D cup. For six months I couldn’t sleep. Every evening I died, every evening I was born again, resurrected. Look at me now, jerking off while I listen to country music. I prefer the least possible amount of responsibility, and I want you to hit me as hard as you can. Maybe you forgot your medication today, mental boy? Not at all. How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? Myself, I’d rather be mistaken for a dead guy than a murderer. Now, where was I? This odd combination of immobility and flightiness prompts me to count every passing year as two. I live as if on a desert island. I read the myths and fables of Oceania. I sing in my sleep. La-ilah-illa-l-lah La-ilah-illa-l-lah La-ilah-illa-l-lah La- ilah-illa-l-lah La-ilah-illa-l-lah. When my cellmates ask me what art is, I laugh and tell them I’m powerless to explain my texts, since they're closer to the work of a jeweler than to a drawing or painting. Even the most precise epithet can spark off a whole wildfire of thought or cause tachistoscopic images to appear as blinding flashes of light, similar to the Poetzle Effect. Today, for example, I had a daydream that revealed the place where I was born. The air, the leaves, the rain, the blackberry bushes. The stones had a sharp, heady smell. Peculiar phallic shapes were embedded in the foliage. 11th of June!? My birthday. A police report made on the scene of a murder is also written in this manner, with a detailed list of all injuries to the body. Have you read in the papers, “She died in her sleep”? Let me assure you, the face is flat, one-dimensional, without a single line, shadow, or dimple. The straight coarse hair is a wig. The eyes are detached from their brows, as if they were peering through sockets from behind the head. The arms and legs feel frigid, and although the flesh gives way to the pressure of my palm, the body as a whole does not respond. I call out her name again and again. I cry and scream. I try to force life back into the body. I push her head away, but it falls back onto my shoulder. I hold her face up to peer into those dead eyes, but spittle drools from the lips. I feel nothing except a terrible revulsion for Paula. And the pianist in the next room continues to play those chords. Paula was a prostitute who heard voices. When I first laid eyes on her, she had clambered down from a Gray Line tour bus and stood there for a moment, looking about her in bewilderment, while other passengers jostled her from behind. I watched her intently as she moved along the verge of a grassy slope conscious of placing one foot before the other. I experienced a brief moment of near-panic, a strong desire to turn around and leave, but I became aware of the utter smallness of Paula’s breasts and their urgent need for protection. The sun was affecting my mind, so I put an arm up to shield my eyes before deliberately walking towards her. I imagine in the brilliant afternoon light I presented a rather forbidding appearance. Paula later told me I filled her with horrified nostalgia. Is that recollection an inside joke or something? God, I hope so, considering how long I’ve wished I might draw in a deep breath late one night and wake up the following morning to some higher life. Tell me again, Paula, in grown-up language, about the time you had appendicitis. You sound a lot like Dr. Seuss now that you’re drunk. Omigod! And your Cocoa Puffs are soggy! 7. Bartok and Breughel can help me out here, as can Velimir Khlebnikov. The automatic forward motion of time creates the illusion that an otherwise empty existence is being filled and made meaningful. The days no longer follow each other needlessly but have a united purpose. Life in prison fuses into a single lamentation. What are you hurrying for, kind reader? The month of October is behind us. Thus we grow like a lot of weeds. Longtime frustration nourishes an awe of the enemy. Names get lost or forgotten. Lolita, Gertrude, Suzanna, that sort of thing. Or the serial number on a gun is scratched off. Paula sharpened her knives in the daytime before going to work at night. No taller than this, Paula was, but strong-minded, and blessed with the memory of a whale’s belly. (Her unkempt curls picked up currents from the air.) Her face, though given to a pale phosphorescence, was blemished by scars and lumps. Her long nose ended in a forked tip divided by two bulbs. If you took her clothes off, as I will below, you saw more eccentricities, including two little flowers tattooed on her kneecaps. A latter-day Cleopatra, a black card, an ace in the hole. I’ll have sexual intercourse with her--you wait and see! I’ll crack that hairy little safe of hers, and she’ll live to regret she didn’t kill me at the time. March is a variable month. This year I imagine March is cold like in 1942. What’s wrong with a bald head, Paula? I stand before you like a medieval executioner. I've sold myself to them to become one of the specialists who live by the Falangist motto: gravediggers, hospital orderlies, crematorium and morgue attendants. If I don’t look at the corpses first, they visit me in dreams. Once I was beaten up for stealing a shirt from a cadaver. Another time I saw a woman turn white before my eyes, as if milk were poured over her head and face. I know the perverse are hard to be corrected, as the number of fools is infinite (and mostly male, for some reason), and everyone of them sits on the edge of his seat. Laughter is forced. Talk is loud. When the lights dim and the curtains part, the audience holds its breath in collective anticipation for the performance. Afterwards, comments include ‘agitation,’ ‘anger,’ ‘rage,’ ‘persecution,’ ‘fear,’ ‘extreme annoyance,’ and ‘upset stomach.’ Over the course of the subsequent week, half the audience reports nightmares relating to the nature of the performance, the actors, and the anamorphic set design. To get my point across to audiences who overindulge in self-protective obstinacy, I resort to ‘figure-ground embedding.’ (In this regard, I’m employing a means common to advertisers and public relations specialists.) My paragraphs serve as decoys for the real message, which is hidden in ground elements like landscapes, personalities, reflections, and symbols. For example: Paula’s body is a gross distortion of ebony-black musculature. Her elongated labia snarl corruptly. Her eyes are blasted from a sow’s backside. Her scent is heavy with excrement tonight. Urine stains decorate her nightdress. I feel those thighs beneath the fabric. She’s wearing elaborate garters. I roll the stockings down her legs, then run my hands back up along those thighs to her pubic pelt. She squirms. Her breath catches. She reaches for my prick. From the folds of my scrotum protrudes a long penis of reptile bone tipped with carcinogenic pincers. Word comes down that I’m hated by many of my fellow inmates. I reply by ostentatiously wiping my bottom before pulling up my trousers. Tracks and dung help the stalker identify the species, and by their freshness tracks also indicate proximity to game. What is North America’s largest herbivorous game animal? 8. My prison cell is not large. There is enough room for a single bunk bolted to one wall, with a small table and stool set up opposite. The floor is flagged. The walls are made of large blocks of green stone. A single window, with bars of rusted iron, is set high in the far wall to provide me with a patch of blue sky when the weather permits. Occasionally a bird flashes across that space like a brief hallucination. Try as I might, I cannot escape the low- frequency background hum that pervades my cell. It’s part of my punishment, a subtle hypnotic effect, and I suspect the hum is layered with pacifying subliminal messages. We know our minds work on two basic levels, the conscious and the subconscious, and if the conscious mind is subdued, the subconscious mind can be activated for programming. Techniques of hypnosis activate the subconscious mind. Under hypnosis you cannot be programmed to do anything you wouldn’t normally do, but how well do you know what you 'normally' wouldn’t do? If you're not given to rigorous self- analysis, you'll have little insight into your subconscious predispositions to various immoral behaviors. You may deny the existence of the subconscious mind altogether. You'll then be shocked to discover that under hypnosis you're susceptible to a number of immoral and irrational impulses. You'll likely rationalize that shock by blaming the hypnotist for putting 'evil thoughts' into your head. If, however, you're given to personal growth rather than to projection (and lawsuits), you'll defuse the shock by accepting those evil thoughts into your personality with the understanding that those thoughts, no matter how vivid or real, are never dictates for outward action. Indeed, further self- analysis reveals that evil thoughts aren’t so evil after all and the guilt you feel regarding them is an expression of fear of your own deepest instincts. You're thus forced to address the issue of self- control, or self-mastery. Having taken the preliminary steps of confirming the existence of your subconscious mind and accepting the shocking reality of its contents, you now bear full responsibility for its outward expression. On the one hand, you have access to a huge, infinite range of subconscious tendencies that may be expressed as useful outward behavior. On the other hand, if you exhibit useless, repetitive, or injurious behavior, you cannot blame the environment or other people because you know that your behavioral tendencies originate in your subconscious mind. You got yourself into the mess, even if you don’t remember how, and it’s your responsibility to get yourself out of it. (If you’re a slow learner, you can hire an expert to assist in that reprogramming.) The prison chaplain has supplied me with an entire roll of lovely, thick, orange-colored packing paper. I write my paragraphs in the boldest handwriting, without having to economize for space. How marvelous that the paper is not white but colored orange. The black letters look so alert, so eloquent. Cutting the roll into strips and pieces is an enormous pleasure. Lesbian feminist science fiction? An education novel, the so- called bildungsroman? Or will a single pattern emerge, from paragraph to paragraph, from plateau to plateau?--intensifying the reader’s emotional response right up to the end of my life sentence. 9. My sense of confinement disappeared quickly. Within a week, I couldn’t tell whether I’d been in prison ten months or two years. At first I experienced intense sensory excitement in the area of sexual fantasies. More than once I achieved spontaneous, non-ejaculatory orgasm. With the passage of time, those emotions thinned out, allowing the acuity of my mental processes to increase manifold. New patterns of thinking emerged. I saw ideas and concepts as parts of a gestalt rather than as independently postulated entities. The prison doctors suspected that image-clusters of neurons, whose true function had been suppressed by social convention, were activated into rapid firing. How extraordinary! When I first lay down on my bunk, I experienced trouble finding a comfortable position. Eventually I settled on folding my hands behind my head. It became clear that the most pressing problem with solitary confinement is its total subjectivity and the fact that the relationship between the prisoner and the outside world is significantly deteriorated. A prisoner, even if only for reasons of survival, is forced into altering his normal mode of consciousness. His visions, hallucinations, distortions, and deformities of cognition remain his, and because he cannot make their intensity known to another person, he becomes trapped inside his own subjectivity. Debilitating forms of asthma and claustrophobia are also not uncommon. But there’s a proper method to surviving solitary confinement, and it isn’t freaking out. First you achieve a state of suspension. You feel your body separate from the awareness of your mind. Then you arrive at a moment of total centered-ness. You may remain there forever in theory, because you're no longer essentially a human being and therefore no longer a prisoner. The first and most important discovery I made in solitary confinement is that awareness cannot be confined. The prison guards fail to understand that point. They see what they are trained to see: walls enclosing bodies. They are obsessed with the safekeeping of the wrong set of keys. The prison guards are also required to have cleanly shaven heads, huge sideburns, and sunglasses straight out of Terminator 2. Today in the mess hall I heard two of them discussing the music of Jimi Hendrix, how the sounds Jimi made, no one can make them anymore, and they both wished they could’ve seen Jimi play in person. Having spent the last year in solitary confinement, I’m positively starved for conversation, so I couldn’t help but incline my head in the guards’ direction. When I looked up from my chow I saw the two men glaring back at me. The largest one asked if I’d heard Jimi play. No, I replied, my voice cracking horribly from disuse. The two guards broke out laughing. They sounded like terrified pigs squealing before their slaughter. My voice must be three octaves below Paula’s. Where the hell are my papers? What papers? My orange-colored packing papers! Paula shrugs her shoulders. Beethoven also showed a distressing carelessness in the preparation of his manuscripts. It would be many weeks before Paula lived fully in her own body again, before the severe pains in her breasts and pelvic region faded into occasional aches. At one point she became so desperate she hired me to help dress and bathe her. Those vinegar baths left us both smelling like a salad bar. Oddly enough, during this time she was so troubled by intense and unquenchable sexual hungers, she arranged for me to perform oral sex on her every night for three consecutive weeks. Later said she felt degraded by her own prurient curiosity. I come face to face with Paula’s fabulous genitalia. I see ditches within ditches within ditches. Pods open and close. I sense the advent of a massive universe. Tits may be beautiful, but pussy’s more practical. A remarkably pompous statement. Ancient civilizations once smeared dead bodies with honey as food for the soul. Honey was even used as an embalming fluid. But the best way to hide is to blend in, to become part of the background we see everyday but pay little attention to. Brownish hair, brownish eyes, medium build, five-foot-nine, a detached and cold demeanor. Nothing extraordinary about my behavior or appearance. 10. A ‘mystery girl’ is a long-shot possibility with prostitutes. But I find Paula extremely attentive. She gives me manicures and pedicures. She greases my scalp. Paula was born in Momence, Illinois. For this reason, I inexplicably call her my Laguna Doll. Ever since we met, I’ve tried to cure her of the habit of wearing leopard-skin clothing, though without success. Much like a cottontail rabbit, Paula relies on two basic stratagems for survival in the underworld: absolute immobility and headlong flight. Also like a rabbit, she is primarily nocturnal. During the day she prefers to bed down in her ‘nest.’ If she doesn’t get enough sleep, blue circles form under her eyes. Paula reaches into a side drawer and pulls out a condom. She opens the wrapper and slips the rubber onto my erection. After sex, Paula is careful to pee to avoid getting a bladder infection. Enough about Paula. Soccer is great, but let’s not neglect the bow and arrow. Equality before and after the law. Lenin argued that only the Bolsheviks of his own faction represented the needs of the Marxist party. Russian sailors had mobbed and abused him, arousing feelings of a homosexual nature. By that time the harshness of Lenin's father would have driven him to intensely idealize his mother. A real Russian bitch. Big tits. I take out a roll of dark bread and a half-liter bottle. I make a toast. Here’s to memories of a luxurious life! Negative for significant quantities of cyanide. Negative for barbiturates, carbamates, and other sedative-hypnotic drugs. Negative for amphetamines, antihistamines, phencyclidine, benzodiazepines. Negative for natural and synthetic narcotics and analgesics. Negative for tricyclic antidepressants. Negative for heavy metals. I could rather put my foot in it and let myself be carried away by exotically repugnant fantasies. Fucking awful, doctor, fucking awful. Go on, swear a bit. You’ll feel more at ease. Swear words have their own special sparkle, which is why we’re drawn back to them again and again. Each syllable breathes lecherous joy and excitement. But I’m no murderer. I’d sooner die than kill (or get killed). A murderer makes a fine mess of things. He kills the wrong person with the wrong weapon. Then tell me, does a killer feel any pity? Paula’s not listening. She's going on and on, laughing, saying “You won’t shoot, you won’t shoot! You don’t have the balls. You won’t shoot!” So what can I do? If legends are so good for ticket sales, I can wait for the fucking movie. The process of total recall is a total waste of my time. The eight-to-eight balance ought to make that much clear. But because the vector of my own tendencies has developed through so many eons in the past, I'm qualified to say the world is a known quantity and distance means nothing whatsoever in the realm of telepathy. Let us forego daydreaming about things that cannot be said and get on with our journey. We’ll get our release. We’ll learn about black magic. 11. The brain never forgets. It remembers and it is ready. Chicago, Sir. How ironic living within viewing distance of the Dan Ryan Expressway. I'd always yearned for immense street knowledge. I was older than the others, in my thirties. Not that it mattered. Here rank and seniority carried no privileges. Everyone was expected to do the same as everyone else. There was no argument among the men. One look around the room made it clear each of us was dedicated to a single purpose. We were well conditioned and trained, having been subjected to a great deal of psychological testing to determine our tolerance to pressure. We could run and swim several miles, make explosives from common household ingredients, and speak several foreign languages as well as three American accents (Bronx, Bostonian, Oklahoma Panhandle). We could kill a human being with our bare hands. If captured, we were programmed to self-destruct, to take out as many targets as possible before terminating ourselves. We had each been involved in at least one homicide somewhere along the line. We had each incited more than one ‘domestic disturbance.’ Our speed and machine-like precision were amazing to behold. We sacrificed everything to accomplish our missions. God have mercy. Think about it, Commander. What would you do to accomplish your mission? I hadn’t felt this good in years. I was on a solitary mission, focused and blending in with natural grace. To the casual passerby I looked like another down-and-out guy destroyed by drugs and alcohol. I rarely showered or shaved. My clothes were ragged, disheveled, and filthy. Paula and I lived on the south side of Chicago in a single-room occupancy hotel, a so- called SRO, which was a great place for privacy and anonymity because people didn’t want to know what went on in those kinds of hotels. The list included winos, speed dealers, coke heads, prostitutes, perverts jerking off to porno videos, a clinical schizophrenic who smeared shit on the walls, a poltergeist suffering through withdrawal, a gang of fat biker chicks, the usual folks sucking on their Jim Beam and malt liquor, smoking their dope, and let’s not forget my neighbor Omar, a nervous pencil-faced dude who burned all the zits off his back and ground his teeth to the gum-line. Two years of steady drug use had evaporated the fat off his body and most of the muscle tissue as well. He never closed his door, and one evening I peeked inside to find him crouched over the kitchen linoleum picking fungus off fried chicken bones. That SRO was a riot, literally. Knives flashed. Gunfire filled the air. Every day a festive occasion. Tonight I had the place all to myself. Paula was out turning tricks. I lay back on the propped-up pillows and focused on the opposite wall’s hypnotic wallpaper pattern. With each breath I relaxed more and more, until I slipped into an altered state of mind where nothing left seemed to matter. When I awakened from my trance feeling fresh and revitalized, I opened my diary and wrote out the rest of the mission as I had seen it in my imagination, putting in as much detail as possible, all the while keeping in mind that words don’t mean anything other than what we let them mean. At the south end of the Loop is the financial district of Chicago. This is the home of the Exchange. Please imagine that building’s facade decorated with a Nazi flag, several KKK posters, and a billboard-sized sketch of Catherine the Great’s vulva. And across the street, yours truly peeking through the blinds of an upper-story window. That’s me in my State of Personal Excellence. Shooting a rifle at this distance is as natural as breathing. The targets drop with each squeeze of the trigger. One shot. One kill. An unbelievable scenario. The lung shot is deadly, the heart shot seldom quicker, but nothing equals the brain shot for sheer drama. The reader himself has split open a moose head or two to get at that highly nutritious mass of grayish nerve tissue. The delicate flavor goes well with scrambled eggs. Soon the first television crews will arrive on the scene, and the reporters will puke their guts out. I feel calm as I drive away from the bloodshed. I might be a Charles Manson clone blessed with the mind of an intricate, biological computer. I might've been hypno-programmed at the Esalen Institute in 1968. Or I might be something more prosaic, say, a Chicago Cubs fan, and on a rural route near Warsaw, Wisconsin, I might strike a dairy cow, but I if I do, believe me, I'll keep on driving. Hello, Thane, perhaps you can use the enclosed cash.

I Clean My Gun & Dream of Galveston

1. “ . . . a numbing sameness of repetition, because there is no real time . . .” In the opening scenes we’re never actually present to hear our voices echo through the script. Instead, our emotional paralysis is an exercise in hypnosis, a test of patience, an ancient Zen charade of unnoticeable motions and physical variations on the ways-in & ways-out we’ve grown accustomed to over a number of years. It’s an age of security, of taking refuge in routine for maximum effect when even minor thoughts of change become terrifying. Most of the traditional features of human beings remain properly installed yet without one discernible emotion except greed and fear. It’s the embarrassing secret of looking at our own film-- but is it genuine celluloid? At the film’s first public screening there is no real time! Clocks slowing down, slow motion stretching every detail to its utmost limit, tension gathering tension--to culminate in nervous breakdowns and boardroom showdowns. Additional footage of the newest members of the audience, their images assigned to corresponding cast mates, were then spliced into the frame-count flow, tightened around spools, and stored in vaults. Relying on little in the way of introduction, dialogue, or plot set-up, the latest film mythologizes the moment America rediscovers itself in a heady rush of consumption. The leading man is made to sleep through most of the scenes in a haze of static. He sees himself reflected in a mirrored façade, a perfectly sculpted body holding her in his arms, his black lover, who owns the most extravagantly tasteful business in the city. The two characters grow on us. The stunts are irritating, however, not to mention a second premise involving family abuse (including many of the scarier behavior patterns of sports fans). In any case, the Friday Critic has to answer truthfully, otherwise his peers won’t respect him. A total zero in social life, he’s hired for his penmanship, to verify the existence of two additional copies of that year’s most profitable script whose several murders are equally real or unreal, filmed in that venerable style, which is the real function of the murders--to make violence extremely visible, the frenzy of a human will frustrated by numbing sameness. By the end of the movie, the screenplay has given shape to the common rage in possession of a large number of Americans. The Prince of Darkness makes for a tasty meal, flexing those claws each morning, polishing that body in a vintage mirror. He gets his dose of notoriety through mere outrageousness. His publicity shots are taken from a single perspective. Lots of weird stuff going on there. Flesh-eating zombies, frogs yanked out of some guy’s head, and four up-close puking shots. 2. “ . . . it'll be worth all of Plutarch’s Lives put together . . . ” If only to compose a cinematic autobiography, say, The Art of Virtue, and distribute it to the local theaters. A script, a storyboard for fabulous films. We actors audition for the easiest roles featured in future sci-fi books, including the role of an outraged son who encroaches on his elders’ territory. It makes for a savage formula. I’ve heard about it myself, which is why I’m visiting the recruiting centers in the hills fifteen miles north of the city. Our quarters are cramped, and the skinniest actors are implicated in many slayings. We enjoy lots of super-gory close-ups of bizarre animals, lagoons infested with cretaceous monsters, hot jungles pushing up through tarmac--spliced into a series of images of sexually alluring women striding down featureless corridors-- dissolving into a high-angle shot of a previous life, across cloudy skies, to fill in the void, to compensate us for the wasted time-- until the director reveals himself. He’s a master of the A-list, a genuine Image Cluster. He passes out the Questionnaires, three of us pencil in our answers, we hand them back, the director makes necessary corrections and orders the cameras to roll. The presidential limousine disappears for a brief second behind us. I’m the still photographer in the front car, a white four-door convertible. The driver, who suffers from freeway claustrophobia and lacks the diligence for this type of work, is considerate as hell, talkative too, but his is such a singular sort of behavior, patterned after the habits of his youth, that he forgets to compliment me on my modesty and disinterestedness. A green sign up ahead blocks my line of sight, but when the presidential limo emerges from behind it I’m ready for a shot. I clench my fists around the camera body, trying to hold steady against the jarring of the road, and bring the device up from my lap, past my throat, pressing its titanium back against my nose and forehead. I adjust the shutter speed and begin shooting. The President, in the car behind us, does not appear to be saying anything. He remains stiff, upright. He wears a back-brace to support himself in a vertical position. I get off five shots before noticing my arm, fatigued, is sagging to the left. I pause, resting. Thinking I’m finished, the driver turns the wheel to the right then swerves back into the left lane. I look at his reflection in the mirror and see an oddly frozen expression of fear. His thick, shoulder-length hair flies up again as his mouth lets out a horrible scream. The blood flowing down the back of his neck makes it clear he’s been struck by a bullet. I put down the camera and place my hand on the driver's right arm to help steer the car to the shoulder. I’m terrified, helpless in two lanes of traffic, watching as the driver’s body sags to the floorboards. Several seconds pass. My body is bent over the back of the front seat, my right hand on the wheel, the other on the driver’s headrest. After an imperceptible forward motion of his head, the driver turns to utter some words, but only spittle forms on his lips. He passes out. The glory and the dream and the importance of regulating our minds. Had he known about improving his reputation and character--but he waited too goddamn long for the time and inclination to do so, and without a single concluding reflection to show him the way out of this fucking mess. Never learned how to steer the limousine either. In an effort to grab something, some image, anything to outlast the fateful afternoon, I release the steering wheel, letting the convertible swerve where it may, and return to my camera. The President’s Secret Service agents leap towards the sedan, but I wave off any subsequent attempts. This performance is mine, mine alone, an unending source of pay and preoccupation. 3. “ . . . Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you what to do and what to say? . . . ” Amazing, the density of detail in that performance--and such volatile scenery! The producers tell me it’s the apex of material postmodernism, the Riddle of the Ages, the Great Conundrum, the First Step into Space--that we must look for alternate dimensions in which to exhibit our talents and discharge our urges. Truth be told and it shall be ours is an open-ended, unpredictable universe, streaming right across the void before your very eyes, kind reader. How Miss America is falling in love with her squeaky-clean machines and the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It’s been a long incubation period, too long, and some of the producers are advocating radical recombinations. Yet, for all its conservative anti-aesthetic drift, the film’s a mere revenge melodrama. “Well- crafted movie,” they tell me, “a story based on a suitcase of manuscripts.” How fortunate that its hired director is in full possession of all the valuable tools and a couple formal innovations as well. Why would he risk it all? Random factors. Lots of cinematography tricks here. The sweetest pastry shops in Paris are used to hook the audience on the story. Supernatural colors explode beyond the eyelids. The audience is swept out of time and whirled through space at supersonic speeds: cobblestone gardens, street signs, billboards, newspaper kiosks, aerial landscapes, lakes stretching to the sky, cocktail parties, political rallies, the high corners of a vacant room, an old signal tower, whatever you want to see: journeys through mirrors, self-evident realities, sudden shifts of weather, spooky sex, copulating couples on rows of brass beds. If we can predict what the characters will do, so much the better. How fascinating to watch them become automatons. I’m not searching for the executive editor, I’m looking for the books, the scripts, and I will not coexist with flies. I want to convert our contemporary pop-cultural environment into self- intersecting pictorial codes and set up new locations from which to derive novel contexts of meaning--and if we encounter soiled schoolgirl’s underpants? What is pleasurable? Where did the Jews come from? Those scripts don’t jibe with the lifestyle of the average Westerner. Does he know it’s possible to remove the universal emotions of fear, guilt and lust, to place them into a characterless context and translate their meanings into indistinct images? No intervening stages--rather, lit with gaslights, like in olden times, a wind as bitter as cold coffee, a ghost of a morning, dim rows of buildings, faded pink walls, no emergency exits. This is the Film Academy. A young man at the entrance steps forward, flickering in and out of focus. Scar tissue. A weird game-show set up on a big video monitor. Hundreds of laminated video rental cards dangle from the studio’s ceiling. Near the cameras a suffocating odor of cigar smoke. Fat man languidly turns to us, mumbles, “Welcome. We represent the Film Academy. We’re looking for a few good screenplays.” 4. “ . . . hours of insanity and escape . . . “ and I’m thinking I think I’ll close the window. A screenwriter sits alone on stage, reading aloud in an irritating monotone, hoarse and phlegmy, his voice set on the edge of delirium. His contradictory hypotheses are muddling up the minds of the audience, but as far as I can tell, the guy's reading from a philosophy book. A blissful counterstroke to the mundane. A real bullshit gesture. He’s laying down ‘firm motions.’ I’ll do my best, but I apologize in advance for not discussing any results involving the ceremony of invocation. Bloated and exploded, older yet innocent, the screenwriter expounds on all manner of exotic vermin: Culture, Truth, Beauty. None of the usual claptrap, though listening to the lecture unfold is a physiological tedium which, over several hours, becomes the acutest of agony. He complains about young girls from a past film offending his present-film prejudices. He yearns for enthusiastic students. He begs for a constant companion. He bashes his over-critical enemies. He’s rapt with messianic conviction. He screams from the depths of his Trance of Sorrow. By the end, he’s soaked in perspiration, his hands clasped in automatic rigidity. Throughout the lecture the audience has become aware of a very strange fact. Silence. Blanketing the auditorium. Silence. The world breathes in, the world breathes out. You pick up strange broadcasts slicing in, slicing out every one-thirtieth of a second. A complete breakthrough is occurring, and the audience is stunned, spellbound, speechless, somnambulistic (including a few coughs of panic). Listen! he exhorts us listen! Paradoxically, the silence becomes louder, more difficult to characterize as silence. A dazzling run of sub-vocal words, hums, whistles, and spasmodic jerks fills our heads with a communal daydream. The tension mounts. I sense the crowd is on the verge of exploding into debacle. Yet the lecture is a mere piece of collective autobiography composed in a style that mimics the little streets of Tokyo. Having shut off the projector bulb and altogether dispensed with the lecture, debunking the entire subject as ‘an instantaneous form of illusion,’ the screenwriter embarks on endless, purple-prose descriptions of the interiors of an elegant chateau. At one with the One, a superficial superman trapped in today’s action-comedy. He embodies a wanderer browsing through rooms with the task of rescuing a helpless man who’s trapped in a hidden chamber. His path is sure, but upon finding the helpless man, the screenwriter is shocked to discover it was himself he was looking for all along. His end is sure (despite the bad stunts: they failed to peg out the locations in advance). “I found you here once before,” he exclaims, sealing the man’s--his own--wounds. Thus, his path is the end. The description jump-cuts to the interior of a taxicab. The screenwriter sits behind the wheel, concentrating on an object attached to the dashboard. In the rearview mirror, we, the passengers, glimpse the eyes of a man of scholarly extremes. Light’s gone out. A crazed creature viewed as nuts because of-- what? As commonplace as a garage sale, those boring lectures on film theory. Myself, a fan of the contemporary thriller art--and this fan is very baffled by what follows. 5. “ . . . because of what they did to my friends . . .” A few dozen sheets of paper is all you need to get started, even if it’s grease-spotted newsprint, plus the correct rules of the creative art, the indents and spacings, no break in the rhythm, and before you know it, you’re absorbed into the flow of the scriptural tide. Satchel in one hand, umbrella in the other, there he goes, floating through different places up and down the street, keeping the wide sidewalk to himself while battling the infernal powers of darkness. A large man, the type who gets caught in doorways, an alert man as well, all four burners flaming in his brain. No surprise he’s got problems with boredom, and he willfully memorizes every insignificant detail of the doors and windows he passes. The steel grillwork of a pawnbroker’s door. Down some steps into a sub-basement. An unusual character: perfectly motionless, a big red patch on his foot, an old rag, a teapot, sunlight dancing through the holes of his cap. He insists on the continual movies, the ones paid admission for in states of hunger and exhaustion, ones like ‘an innocent man wrongly accused’ and ‘a lizard with its head bent to the side,’ movies with insipid camerawork and gory dance numbers. Crimes of the Future. Searching the city for precious valuable objects?--no, rather for deeper identification, and he finds a few desirable spots--the long vacant bench over there on which to contentedly sleep the hours away. Monday through Friday he crouches in the corners of the building’s foyer, reading stains on the ceiling. Other times his feverish laughter echoes through the toilet stalls. Vast drawings, preconceived notions, frightful acts of bloodshed, the silence of Japanese society. His friends criticize him for self- repression and conformity in sex, yet he’s candid about and manifold in his personal problems, a hairsbreadth away from opening a set of double doors to find himself in a huge auditorium filled with students, many of them chattering in threatening tones. He celebrates on that big day, and the lobby’s hardwood floors are decorated in subtle Indian-influenced pornographic designs. Mind-numbing though elegant. Unable to establish regular living patterns in the subway or railway stations, the man becomes a public-transport loner. A life of rooms, rows of enormous empty rooms with broken mirrors and abandoned paintings repeated along endless dusty corridors. Burnt patches of shrubbery. Hours spent hunting down back issues in dusty stores. A mind ornate, tortured, brimming with geometric shapes in violent comic-book colors. Sitting on crowded commuter trains is not his scene. The authorities officially outlawed that raging sex, forcing him to advertise his wares on ubiquitous pink flyers. Note: we’re careful to conceal the presence of the hired hand who wrote the screenplay, the majority of it, maybe threw in a plot to spice things up--but his impeachment is unjustified. 6. “ . . . --photo falling--word falling-- . . .” A reel of barbed-wire to keep everything secure within the bounds of Film Scripture--I need that. I sleep the hours away, once in awhile visiting the kitchen to inspect the contents of my brass pots. A bland, tasteless mash. This morning I notice the maid’s pulled the sink away from the wall for a thorough cleaning of the rotting food from past meals. The kitchen reeks of an oven-cleansing liquid. Across the countertop are seven precisely arranged cylinders of gold-colored metal and titanium. Here and there: cast-iron conduits, knee-high stacks of cafeteria trays inherited from my brother’s failed restaurant venture. I awoke today feeling agitated--it’s the dreams, I know it. I vaguely recall a clock chimed in the middle of the night, and full moonlight reflected off a small leaf-clogged pool: a signal to open the roof-hatches for entrance to the nocturnal insects. I waste away the afternoons on well-thumbed packs of cards and prized first-editions of English detective novels stuffed into clear plastic baggies to ward off the strong odor of damp plaster and decay. Killing the time counting my surroundings, enumerating the details in a dumb kind of wonder. Blue dominates the confession scene. The gutters need repair. The supports of the front porch are rotten, termite-infested. Changing for the better in the most vicious way imaginable. My hands nervously caress the scar tissue, tracing the sutures of my shaven head waxed and gleaming and the five moles on my lower back. In the last war I sustained a small wound to my hip, not to mention a couple bouts of food poisoning. An unusually furnished house--the hall of machines--and an unending source of preoccupation to my maid and groundskeeper. More blankets to rebundle, more wastebaskets to kick into the corners, more wrinkled clothes to gather up from the footboard of my bed. The sandstone bust on the mantel that needs a weekly dusting. The sawhorses and lumber stacked in the basement. The garden benches with their warped and broken back-supports. The old tool shed now a shelter for hives of bees. It’s my calling. Though few of my friends fill their time reading aloud in low voices, I’m my own best commentator. I prefer the repetition of recitation over stone-cold, air-conditioned silence any day of the week. Kennedy is slammed violently backward to the left rear of the automobile where he rebounds off the back of the seat then falls to the floorboards. Mrs. Kennedy climbs onto the trunk. A default on the frontier myth? Slopping down all that beer, reading without pause in a well-practiced monotone, reciting abstruse passages from an odd religious tract, or this one: three catatonic stories empty of any persuasive detail, nothing sensational, morbid, or erotic. Entire shelves of books I purchased years ago at a neighbor’s auction, books imparting wisdom preserved for men like me, the ancient ones with pegged legs. My son drops by for dinner. He looks ill, his self- confidence drained away. A strange, intent expression fills his narrow face. I find myself withdrawing from his presence. I uncork the wine without thinking as he impulsively reaches for the brandy bottle. He’s been scouting locations, spreading the Word, his own particular area of filmmaking expertise. He once practiced the piano. I once worried about his pants. Today he’s a dead person slouching in a chair, his face an empty canvas, a fleck lodged in the corner of his eye. He’s talking to me but I don’t think it’s in English. He’s still searching for ‘viable alternatives’ while remaining the sole judge of my astonishment. A parody of my own impatience. Did I forget to pay this month’s property tax? I’ve perfected the knack. I know when to pause and when to pay close attention. The entire right side of Kennedy’s skull explodes into a halo of blood, a pixelated image of fractured light, blood, and excrement. My energy level’s far more than what’s in these words, and the humming of approaching unconsciousness is the most frequent feature of my plunge into the deep sleep of the Lands of Power. A strong gust of wind sets the crepe-paper lanterns swaying. 7. “ . . . and an unprecedented multiplicity of truths overwhelms the population . . .” A cinematic renegade with no moral or psychic awareness breaks America out of its near- catatonic existence. From up here, there are only little flashes of what’s happening down below, but the crude outlines of the flickering images conjure up approaching reunions, treasured photo albums, critical work documents, radical switches, high- speed jolting rhythms inside a train car, senior administration officials, financial seminars, Roman Catholic rituals, sultry gardens, hand-painted tables, loss of one’s innocence, massive storage bins, computer-generated dinosaurs, several restaurants and small businesses, grunge performance masterpieces, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the understated presence of industry-types gawking at a soundstage in silent awe. Lots of amusing scenes on them too, those tight little T-shirts marked with stains of beer. Shufflers, slouchers, remarkable passengers honest and pure, their hurried voices dropping in, dropping out of a mosh pit of high-speed patter and fast-cash nostalgia. Unexpected twists become a bittersweet journey through youth’s idealism: vigorous opposition, the discomforts of tear gas and pepper spray. Corpses beautifully preserved are valued as museum pieces with not a stop sign in sight. A nifty storyline too, hard to resist, complete with a super-smooth cast of more than a dozen characters whose lines are retrofit to a Jimmy Webb soundtrack. The recently hired engineer-choreographer is working overtime, channeling voice-patterns into a ham-radio apparatus. He asks his wife, “Can a genie go back into the bottle?” then continues, “I can’t decide whether I want to be famous or retire to the mountains.” Image makeovers abound. Lots of straightforward advice too, and lists of contenders--with several hokey premises. My personal favorite: the non-drowsy talk-show host struggling everyday to meet his responsibilities, by far the least memorable, most nondescript guy of the bunch. The film’s cavernous sets consist of five oppressively minimal floors of galleries, a hand- gilded café, and an overpriced giftshop. Custom-made posters taped to the nearby walls ask Considering studying abroad? News is, they’ve made contact. Figure it out for yourselves! Common misuse of the phrase ‘begs the question.’ If convicted . . . free information available on investment strategies and retirement planning. Go Where Life Takes You! Everything’s possible without wires. No deaths occurred at oral doses up to whatever mixture gets you high at the time. No more annoying glitches. Profit Over People--Why? It’s good for you too! Think Different. All of us a little more righteous than God Himself. Who’s bankrolling this shit? A tasteful production design, with no need to be too concerned about empty savings accounts or defaulting on loan payments. A pastoral mural of rolling hills and trees, the distant rumble of modern transport, a late-day sun, cold ocean waves, private baths, cozy nooks, meticulous hand- craftsmanship, all of it offering more laughs and tears than an English pattern-book, though just barely. 'Plain preposterous' is how the executive producers describe the investment (so self- defeating at the beginning of a project). Oh those endless, sleepless nights! The wicked dreams of a stranger offering me a purse full of money. Enormous forces pressuring me to surrender to the mainstream and shut my fucking mouth. (Machine- washable fabrics, huge discounts on magazine subscriptions, open-ended commitments.) But I’m a sensible, surrealistic man. As I see it, the film’s extras serve as ‘summer replacements,’ supplying embossed backgrounds and exquisite details to the most traumatic event of the last half century, an event I took part in.

Three-Zero-Four

The Unlimited Pleasure Chateau is a good place to go in times of winter emergencies, though I can’t take Director Carter all that seriously--I consider him a desk clerk rather than a savior. Nevertheless, tonight I'll pay my respects to a dying man who is a long forgotten friend, lend an ear to his farewell spiel, and, I hope, manage a genuflection before his private tabernacle: one of the few uncalled-for gallantries in a lifetime of rough days. If the man fails to understand half my words (he’s deaf as a tree), I can at least give him something to hold on to, say, the promise of multiple endings, a fabulous day in the Far East, or a final inscription like I came by last night. I’m the kind of recruit the bureau doesn’t find every day. I attend their briefings. I sign what they ask of me. I’m no zero in their system: I want to leave a written record. Yet none of the dying man’s associates had the kindness to warn me about the winter night I must first cope with, sloshing my way through the muck, the gusty winds nearly carrying me off to the blackish- gray horizon. It’s an unearthly cold, with clumps of snow- covered shrubs, bits and scraps of neon light, fire-escape ladder- rungs descended from darkness. The gray wash of the city’s streetlight sinks downward, submerging itself beneath the slick surface of the sidewalks. But far beyond these streets, beyond the tollbooths, causeways, stubble fields, and out-of-bounds markers, way out to where dawn can never return--hauled through darkness. The mood tonight is broken, unformed, dangerous: someone famous wants to be forced into falling from heights off which anchor chains were long since dropped. Gone underground 1917-1942. I see a reflection there lodged in my mind. I was my own agency, a little on the Red side. A Communist must work hard to recruit believers into the brain trust. A Communist must be prepared to give up everything. A Communist, one night, in Paris. A Castro look-alike. The whole busy air of international transmissions. A second Communist, a man from the Daily News, and the many other Communists in cafes complaining about lack of publicity, and every other Communist dedicated to liberating humanity from the gang, the crowd, the faction--the group. The great theory come to life, mobilizing, massing, growing. Absence of crimes or conflict in property was no small thing but a deception of sorts, like the latest cycles of violence, robbery, and debt, this terminal auction of phone-number exchanges and creaky floorboards. The whole shebang could go up any moment. Still, such fun poking about in the shops, hanging out, taking our time, and, above all, whispering disrobe and receive it. The hammock, you might say, is parting at its head-string. SAC gone on full alert, raids on Cuban installations, the Book Depository thing--all about as pleasing to the eye as the bare space on the back of a credit card. So many gaps remain in the scheme it’s useless deciding upon a firm course of action. Over the coming decades, the irony has soured into a bitter piece of folly: we could’ve skipped the whole goddamn century. If you please, let’s have 1928. Again. My face tightens. I’m terribly cold. I hear nothing out here tonight. But I’ve heard nothing out here for 51 years. Some people think I’m cynical--I’m sorry--but don’t say the fault’s mine they fixed it in the end. The different angles, directions, generations. A little physics and mathematics, wall maps, documents, clippings, three files of projects--all of it committed to memory. (Even the skeptics praised my photographic memory.) My first writing job was the deepest of cover operations, a roman à clef that included a great many ‘high-sounding phrases.’ Writing short stories and novels would become my stock-in- trade. Words poured into me like unceasing gushes of water. I never lacked motives, only happy endings. Then why am I kissing up to the editors by choking off my latest replies? They’re running this thing for me? (Like I’m having a peach of a time playing an intruder in my own flesh.) They want my death most of all? I ought to throw it back in their faces, every one of those fucking texts, undermine their paranoid search for the ‘true equation’ of the story. It’s enough to drive you loony. I’m so unsteady on my feet these days, I feel rather Rip-Van-Winkle-ish and winter-bitten, living off the thin air of memorial metaphysics. My ankles throb. My body heaves with sharp, irregular breaths. A few minutes to spare for reassembling the fragments, though two chunks are gone, and what little remains is hardly of first- order relevance. I light my last cigarette and manage a smile, hastening to affirm myself, when what I take to be a shifting gust of wind becomes a stray cat brushing against my leg. Full-fanged, flea- bitten, a red scar on the bridge of its nose, its fur a sticky, dark- brown stuff, its old eyes from a photo on the wall. The creature steps over two lines, vanishing into the snowy darkness. The night is full of many new things, prostitutes mostly, telephone poles, and rows of windows onto drab parlors. A city of open wounds. (High-powered rifle in that window? The shadowy figure of a gunman? Two blurry men taking target practice, aiming rifles at a woman crossing the street?). More excerpts from my philosophy of the world as a shooting gallery. I pause, looking down. My pants’ cuffs are muddy. Will I arrive on time? If I make it to dusk without once falling in a ditch, but if--put me in traction and everything will be fine. I begin the ascent up steep Lawrence Hill, supporting myself on rusty railings, ducking beneath low-hanging pine branches as I go under the black trees towards rest. Good thing I carry nothing with me tonight, no packs or parcels, none of my canvas bags. Most of the things I own are boxed up in my sister’s garage. My sister’s knobby, ashen face comes to mind, the unsteady whisper of her voice. Weekends we talk and smoke till daylight drives us back outside. We talk about the soap operas, talk about her rare blood type, talk about the unpleasant heaviness in the upper part of her legs, talk about her favorite high-heeled shoes that make her feet swell up. Doctor, isn’t that the beginnings of another scab? The brightly colored pill that puts the spring back into her step. My sister, gorged on fried chicken and sleep, isn’t out here braving the cold. I find myself at the head of a large avenue lined with parked cars and hemmed in by banks of snow. I have all four lanes to myself. The air is solid, the sky lightening up. I glance at my watch. Sunrise will be soon. Straight ahead are two small churches and an elevated highway, and across the street, The Unlimited Pleasure Chateau, flanking its main entrance two lions’ heads biting rings of bronze. Its cheerless facade is overburdened with mosaic and tile. I gladly miss out on the esoteric architectural references. The baroque is no longer a passion of mine. Walls are walls is the way I see it. I ring the brass doorbell. At first, the night-guard snubs me, but I persist, and after a few words and clumsy gestures, a large foot-long bolt is thrown back from a second interior door, and I’m admitted into the cavernous lobby. The guard accompanies me inside and, in a detached-sounding voice, he explains the function of various toggle switches arranged in several rows beside the nearest doorway. Is that after-shave lotion? He looks at me piercingly--his eyes ‘professional’-- emphasizing every word, speaking his English rapidly without pause, as though he fears I might interrupt him. I oblige with feigned looks of puzzlement and amiable contempt. He expects clear, military-style answers. He expects men in dirty raincoats. I’m right at home. Let’s skip the obfuscation, I’m thinking, seeing is believing. At the end of his long recitation, I reply with a faint whisper of assent, feeling like I’ve barely survived two days of coma. So much for the package-tour. I leave him behind, slipping through a series of archways and steel-edged stairwells, finding my way to the third floor, to the guest rooms, where . . . what? Am I preparing to move into my room (room 37) even before it’s cleaned and painted? The doors of the nearest chambers are also wide open, their interiors in semi-darkness, walls the same pale color, as if faded, and obscurely lit in places by candlelight. Exposed pipes cast shadows over brown cupboards. The odors of stale cigarette smoke and years of diets of one type or another linger throughout. But at least the inhabitants are supplied a basin where to wash themselves. (The management covers all housekeeping expenses too.) The elimination of outer distractions has intensified my inner ones. I'm dizzy in the presence of so much vacant space. Where’s Director Carter anyway--I ought to speak with him--and the dying man I’m to pay my respects to? Never seen him, never heard anyone speak about him. Something more than the loss of a leg? I don’t want to mystify or seem rude, but how has Director Carter escaped so easily--and where to? One of those Caribbean yachting parties? I try to be frank with myself, plain as plain, but I see only pitched reflections in my conscience. Ears plugged. Head pressed into a pillow. All roads lead to Rome? Once I was a master of such resting places, of finding a rhythm and living beneath it. Why fend myself from a habitual sense of freedom? I recall how my parents enjoyed a drink once or twice a year, how daylight eclipsed them. Friday evening went by without a hitch. Their glances meant President Eisenhower though neither dared mention his name. They were in no mood for other people’s parties--they held tight to the hand-grip. Limply she lay in the crook of his arm. What were they expecting, a complete shooting script of spectators, kids waving, and the expressionless face of a swarthy short-order cook? I crammed my nights with the idleness of thirst. Lots of rural children did back then. At first it was moonlight and champagne, those objects of a thousand longings, a bit later turning into fatigue and alcoholic drag. Can’t remember dinner. Did I wire him the fifty dollars? If I pretend to get hysterical or, on the other hand, speak as little as possible. Step by step. Will the witnesses, those who lay an ear against the wall, approve of my outbursts? But after the shouts come repeated knocks on the floor, while down the hall a phone is ringing. I edge my way around the room to the door. They’re going to sacrifice me to Satan, then laugh about it. Hah. Dragged behind a train, or a deep knife wound, or a pale horse drinking stagnant water. I struggle to find a sequence of cause and effect. My jaw muscles tighten, eyes roll back, arms around my throat. But nothing else happens. Approaching since childhood, the life- force now flows back into my chest. I must pull myself together, put a stop to this physical thing, jump off it in an irrational manner, making final replacements of confused reveries with stable meditations and obliterations of burning phrases. Each story has its share of false memories, so why fall back on symbols now? Only so many subplots to choose from: 1) People spontaneously formed in the void, 2) People lied to in a systematic, calculating manner, 3) People secretly pumped full of opiates, reduced to biofeedback vegetables and dead little blood- sausages. Lines are forming, the beat is there, and any unlucky ones are shot on sight if not first brought to trial. The authorities are sucking out their old blood, putting in new, pledging them to token nonconformity, so that later they think only in sound-bite hymns (subconscious loyalties preventing them from thinking otherwise). But their batteries expire. Followed by? A ninth- inning rally? No. The anonymous bodies of pregnant women, cough-drop wrappings, instructions to squeeze the tube hard in the middle, and padded expense accounts. A lightning-rod is ascended without difficulty--be sure you’ve got a nice doctor on standby. Meanwhile, the world’s largest TV stations sound out the vividness of the natural condition. Split chunks into the pile for stacking. Impact studies. Crazy people with a difference becomes a reliable commodity.

Zeek

It’s 8:31 a.m. I’m really, completely awake. I’m the true author of these pages. This is where I'm found. Outcomes here range from recovery to death. Along the way the reader has met a recovering drug addict, a schizophrenic civil-rights activist, a few freeters and twixters, and a young man who saves the day. Good luck to us all. Outside my window: Wilmington, Delaware. There I was born. There I shall die. A profile in silver. Inside here: an unreliable narrator obsessed with recollection who suffers from irritability, blurred vision, slurred speech, memory lapses, nausea, and hallucinations (one more dose, one more drink). He also confuses jet-lag with microsleep because, long ago, he sacrificed his intelligence for the sweet taste of wisdom. He’s locked-in. The alphabet is read out to him (alpha, bravo, etc.), he blinks at the right letter--and Jesus of Nazareth can go straight to hell! Some readers will search out the safety of the Canadian wilderness, and others construct a materialist utopia This man prefers a Scripture-quoting ventriloquist’s dummy to a bubble- gum-blowing contest any day of the week--and please take note of the crepe-paper banners dangling from the rafters of our high- school gymnasium. It’s so easy to fly through a window, so easy to step into any one of the 42 tangent universes scribbled over with the 72 names of god. Hypnosis pulls you in. Wisdom pulls you out. Depersonalization sends the message. The ancient Greeks put two rivers in Hades, Limerence & Confabulation. The narrator puts a third at 55 Central Park West. Lately the Japanese have proposed a fourth called Hikikomori. Let us sit down, take a sip of tea, and have a bit of bread. One man’s mind deserves our complete and utter attention. It’s four a.m. All the people have gone away. He’s seated at the foot of his bed holding a shoe. Turn me on, dead man. None of this is me. Copy’s my right. I can be reached at 111-567. 1. My name’s Zeek. I’m ready to cooperate, to do good for evil, but first I gotta get outta trouble and learn how to make some money. You ask if it gives me pleasure. I don’t know. But the intermediate grades of color at the end of October turn me on. I haven’t been inside a mosque for more than twenty years. Now that I'm here, I don’t know what to say or how to behave. I’m impressed. The imam appears tough and very righteous, with a penetrating stare, sunken cheeks, and elegantly chiseled fingers. Has this man made mistakes or done wrong in his life? Has he, even once, thrown down the Koran and run upstairs to the safety of his bedroom, fearing for his own sanity? Does he regret never having married? I make a swift, thorough scan of the premises: classy though a bit subdued. This is where, if you aren’t careful to pray and confess, all hell breaks loose--and hell is a murky place to be. I’ve been there. Floating face-down in an empty swimming pool. The spirit remains awhile in stillness. Wind-scattered. 2. It’s ridiculous. There were skunks too, actual skunks! We unloaded things from the back of a wagon, walked barefoot along the path through a meadow. It was Sunday afternoon, a sweltering Fourth of July. I saw myself as my own son. I saw Marcie lift the lid of the icebox. I admired the curve of her breasts and recalled how they rubbed against my hairy chest when we made love. I climbed over the fence and walked around to the front porch. I went into the kitchen to get more ice. My drugged-up father sat alone at the table, paging through a phonebook, alone because Mother died last November. Returning to the picnic, I thought of the other places I wanted to visit, the other things I wanted to do. A canary shaking its feathers in the sunlight. A farmhouse burning in a field. A robed monk perched on a three-thousand-foot crag. I was smiling too, because here was a subterranean sea-change. I saw the unavoidable tendency of everything particular to emphasize its own particularity. I saw how Nature made us individuals, begging, expostulating individuals in a land where everyone was cordial and ceremonious. Maybe my ancestors came from Scotland, maybe they were Quakers, and maybe I grew up one- hundred miles from Jersey City. Maybe I had bad experiences as a boy, a brush with death or a fierce attack at the breakfast table. And maybe, at the end of five weeks, if my nerves held up, I would leave Kansas City and pass through Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. 3. One commences then cannot stop. It’s like a religion. It’s like espionage. It’s like Marx fucking Malraux. How much longer can I cope with Marcie’s dark, jaded looks and that smoky, chaotic kitchen? Her arms and legs and ash-blonde hair, ridiculousness piled upon ridiculousness. Five more proofs of the existence of chaos and/or the nonexistence of God. How was life today? How would it look tomorrow? Styrofoam? In Philadelphia? You must be kidding! If they’re going to kill us, let them kill us in our beds, let them feel young watching us die. 4. I understood and I approved, but I wanted a minimum of government, less government, with every surface shining bright. Such was the tune of the real revolution, a true test of the System, that one could only conjecture--yet, the Iranians, they wrote music in colors. They were as far forward as you could get. They saw the stupidity of dying in an unsuccessful attack. They didn’t say it, but they didn’t like it either. You, Mr. President, you can’t say, 'self-absorbed.' I know you think I’m wasting my life, waiting and watching as they send up bombers time and again. You’ve made your impatience perfectly clear in those impeccable emails. But I’m not complaining because I’m one of the best- looking soldiers in the field. Such is the shepherd of Progress. Burnt toast, dead insects, ein 1979 verstorbener Pakistaner, quaint Christian colonies, churches, steeples, bells and all, and angular bits of glass. The time of universal peace is near. A powerful mixture of pity and sympathy, two parts the former three parts the latter, and a bass-note in a music-box of children's voices over and over again good night! good night! good springy, full of fun, generations of children's voices immensely valuable in the market sense. Never looking back. Like heavy yellow drops of pancake batter, like snug little nests filled with eggs and the shuffle of motorcycle boots. 5. Looking at everyone there, friends, family, and neighbors arrayed haphazardly around the Independence Day picnic blanket, I realized this democratic experiment had proven itself a fraud and a failure--and don’t you talk to me about killing! I never thought about it, much less spoke about it. Let them go, all of them, let them go at the government’s expense. They’re incapable of distinguishing their anxieties from the facts at hand. 6. Few things interest me so much as the insane. And what about it, Billy Jack? A howling of Irish wolves against the moon. A withered branch green merely at the top. Symbols, networks of symbols, and patterns too--those are the language of the maniac and the cryptanalyst, not of Moses or Elias but of Jesus only. A forked radish. Ragged trousers. Jewish scriptures. A small black velvet cap. The 21st Century continues to plague me with those Interstate billboards declaring LIBERTY TO ALL INHABITANTS! So the first thing I did on January 1, 2001, was make a big mistake. And what about that? 7. Marcie’s neck was broken, her dress in disarray. I’m not kidding. I want to be straight with you, Mr. President. The sky has cleared. Lights are burning everywhere. The front door opens onto a spacious, infinite hallway (Book IX, Proposition 20). 8. ‘Go home, Daddy,’ she says, and I do, walking away slowly, majestically. A heavy-set man with a god-awful hammer. Oh, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts in here!

Exquisite Corpse

1. Diana comes to me in a dream. No assassinations, no vigilante stuff--though the top half of her head is wrapped in gauze. She awakens, slowly, timidly, on a mortuary table. I’m standing at her side, preparing to ‘set her features,’ as we say in the business, when her eyes open wide, her lips break into a smile, and her hands reach out to touch mine. I awaken. I don’t think luck has much to do with it. Dying was good then, it’s good now, and fear shall not be the end of it. Mark my words. Chronology, sir? Life after death? Expanding tunnels of light? $10,000.00 Hell Bank notes? Or a Technicolor memory- picture displayed over your favorite closed casket. Hers was a life filled with ordinary joys. His was a low-sodium, low-fat diet with lots of fruits & vegetables. (Marat too had a brother and natural affections.) The architects say everything loose or poorly attached to the North American Continent rolls into Southern California--which explains my presence here. (God, how I hope the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows is securely bolted to the ground!) This morning I showered and shaved with dazzling speed. Twenty minutes later I face three cadavers riddled with M16 weapons fire. One of them also sports two fractured ribs and a broken nose. All three are Latin-American twenty- somethings. They were members of an LA gang known as Defixio. But I don’t ask questions, not the same questions as a homicide investigator or a forensics examiner. ‘Malice aforethought’ is not part of my active vocabulary. After the funeral, all three corpses will be promptly incinerated, one after another, serially, because in every state of the Union it’s illegal to cremate two or more bodies simultaneously in the same oven. My mortuary table is so clean you could get a baby to eat off it. The radio, at the moment, broadcasts a Janet Jackson song. Outside, in the funeral home’s large, vacant parking lot, teenagers play street hockey. Inside, hot air escaping from the chamber causes a flame to flicker. Does Langley know about this stuff? Mortuary science isn’t complicated. A red light blinks off. A pair of black leather Reeboks appears. Before you know it, they’ve given you a number and taken away your name. You’ve become invisible. How’s that possible, Diana? I look at the floor and see it needs sweeping. Cranberry sauce. 2. This evening, as I stack groceries on the conveyor belt, I notice amid the tabloids a book entitled 1000 Names For Your New Baby. The toddler on the cover has a smile sweet enough to make a dead goat rot. He’s a wonderful little man wrapped in swaddling clothes. His biological mother was a statue of the Virgin Mary with the words TOP SECRET stamped across her forehead--then a cockroach crawled up her arm. I can’t explain why, but everything’s been a blur to me lately. Normal people don’t rush about the world the way I do because they’re sick or wounded or improperly fed, their backs sore, their legs swollen. I, on the other hand, am cursed with health and vigor. I take my challenges with me, wherever I go, without trace, without ties, without farewell, my arms and legs swinging faster and faster. When I pass bus stops and mass funerals, violent quarrels break out. When I side-step the city's streets, houses lean sideways. A flower-seller offers me her largest roses the very instant a young, crewcut Hispanic man grabs my arm. The eternal clic-clic-clic of phenomena flows right through my fingertips. I glance at nothing seeing everything, and anything I want to know is mine: the smell of cooked cabbage, the shrieking of police sirens, the screech of brakes, the rounded curve of an eyelid, light bulbs along a sign’s edge, wild dogs in an orchard. I travel without black suitcase, without reference from ambassador or consul, without cooperation of governments. I obey sunrises instead of timetables, locations of stars instead of clocks, weather patterns rather than appointments. Through tilled earth and open meadow, past northern villages ablaze in poverty, over asphalt curdled with rain, I arrive to witness the remains of battle. All five senses smashed to flying splinters, the sweeping out of vertigo--an inner will drives and directs me. My nostrils dilate in the wind. My shirt is flung wide open to the overripe, dwindling light. I have to know everything, I have to speak with a heavy German accent, and I have to live in a large Victorian mansion. Fair is fair. I bought a bus ticket once to Montreal, and I sat between two Palestinian women. Did I violate a rule of the Geneva Convention when I told them I was the son of a well-to- do family from Nagasaki? (Nagasaki got nuked. No surprise there.) This evening is what the French call ‘the blue hour.’ The sky is cobalt, the stream is running high, and the grass is lush and fragrant. Layer upon layer of space. The ripples and eddies of sunset branch off in all directions. Confluent pools and streaks of vapor, slight marblings of a lemon color. The voluptuous pleasures of a stone basin. The stench of rotten livestock. The roaring grows louder as the battlefield comes nearer, a gigantic roaring that darkens the leaves, swallows the hills, and fatigues the fortunes of the road. The pinkish layers of last daylight teeter precariously over endless blocks of smoking buildings. The crooked faces, the held breath, the black folds of survivors who struggle from the ruins that now draw me in. Neon beer signs decorate the walls. The bartender wears a ring depicting the Uroboros. (His pupils are hidden behind large Oakley sunglasses.) My timing’s dead-on. I’ve been sitting at the bar two hours, precisely how long it takes to cremate a human body. Various personae parade through the streets of my mind: John Wayne, Mr. Natural, Mr. Hankey, Tyler Durden, Mickey Mouse, Porky the Pig, Sir Lygophiliac, Superman, St. Pauli Girl, Capt. Malcolm Reynolds, Ashy Larry, Carl Spackler, a stick figure, a walk-in, a harlequin baby, a promiscuous US Army lieutenant, the resident scumbag, Ontario’s Information & Privacy Commissioner, R. L. Stine, Joseph Merrick, Frank the Tank, Tony Wilson, Abraham on his pilgrimage to Mecca, Lyle Bland, UFO Phil, Carlotta Valdez, Tristan Reveur, Mohammed Rafi, John Titor, Gord, Papa Ubu, Des Esseintes, the Silent Flute Man, Casper the Friendly Ghost, The One, Clive Wearing, Bob, Mr. Polygraph, JC Denton, Nancy Reagan, Darrell Standing, Stuttering John, S. A., Paul Erdös, Huckleberry Hound, Dr. Slump, Assertion Thru Structure, a Pakistani pop singer, a Maltese Jew, Ned Ryerson, Max Cohen, Allah Toe, wurde 1966 hingerichtet, Marcus McBear, Ivo Shandor, Torg, Diamond Dave, Doctor Lucky, Rubber Johnny, Papa November, Kid A, D. B. Cooper, Sparda, Phineas Gage, Sweet Jane, Sweet Caroline, Screwtape, John Crichton, the Earl of Kent, men with hands of blue, and Miss America. I remember, as a child, paging through National Geographic magazines in search of topless native women. I remember my Schwinn bicycle and the Tastee Freez down the street. I remember choosing chocolates from a Whitman’s sampler. Independence Day was around the corner. So much activity, and so much buyer’s remorse. Chalk the strap, man--chalk that strap! In death we achieve a state of relaxation unavailable to us in life. The backdoor of the ambulance swings open. The C-130 cargo plane touches down (though neither the Joint Chiefs nor General Westmoreland knew it was happening.) Such is the curse of an active imagination. I prefer a UFO-doomsday-cult or flesh- eating bacteria to the Y-shaped incision of an autopsy. Past night-empty platforms, shacks, warehouses, lumberyards, and factories, past street sweepers pushing confetti into gutters, past tram conductors gray and anonymous with wrinkled faces and wrinkled clothing, past soldiers drinking in cadence, past glassy-eyed courtesans whose bathrobes are fallen from shoulders behind half-drawn curtains--to a narrow, slippery terrace--and into the dark corridors of a vast mansion hung with tapestries, lamps burning atop each staircase, each niche of light a valley of escape, each crook of shadow pleading for ebonite silence. Having triumphed over flesh and blood, they exchange their desire for the sweat of fear and the immeasurable laughter of tyranny. Orbital progressions of slate-blue stones. Curved blades of flame. The ultimate flight of castles. Clouds clutch at the moon, angels surface on a lake, and behind the rows of silent blue windowpanes teeth gleam from the depths of shadows. Long false teeth. 3. Dressed in green pants and a strawberry-jam turtleneck sweater, brandishing a paperback edition of Euripides, a worn leather backpack slung over my shoulder, I’m prepared for the old and the new. Wednesdays are my favorite days, and such a fine, fine day this Wednesday is. The air is crisp, smelling as it does after an electrical storm, bitter and sweet all at once. A brisk walk from the funeral home is richer when you’re preoccupied with the wonderful things life has brought you. It’s morning. Rows of orange containers line the loading docks. Ships are moored off the wharf. Cranes are poised hundreds of feet above me. A shipment of caskets has arrived from China. Here we have Force mixed with Compassion. How transformative! Someone moves away, gets married, and dies. Someone else holds his breath until he passes out. Those are the limits of civilization. Their lives can’t touch mine. If a curtain shifts in an upstairs window, if a row of framed snapshots lines the fireplace mantel, if a desk drawer overflows with appliance warranties and instruction manuals, if the postcard has a Canadian postmark, it’s still not right for a man to know the date and time of his own death. Let him seek green fields and flowery nooks instead. Winter’s almost gone. Summer’s coming on strong. I pick up a potted plant and put it down again. Ten minutes later I’m driving a Dodge Ram pickup through the traffic-choked streets of Los Angeles. Mozart’s on the CD player. What’s going on over there? The Dating Game? I pull over. Above the house’s front door, lights spell out SEASONS GREETINGS. Cords of split wood are stacked against the garage. Yellow crime-scene tape cordons off the yard. The air smells faintly of sewage. Thank God Belgium’s in the Eastern Hemisphere. Otherwise the trees and grass would be glazed with ice, and there might be a power outage! I take a shortcut through the park. Except for pine trees beyond the quadrangle looming dark and lofty, I cannot remember seeing a landscape so barren. I press a thumb and forefinger into the corners of my eyes. If I can decipher this scene, nothing worse can happen to me. A dark cinema is like a cavernous hole cut into the earth. Decisions form slowly in these dimensions. The projectionist is half crazy anyway--or more than half, depending on the day--as he struggles to fill in that black-edged picture frame. It’s easiest for me to recall visual impressions. Rachel was pretty, very thin, and pale, with a hoarse voice, a milky young neck, and eyes as black as ink. She was given a small closet in the kitchen passageway to sleep in. She ate from cans, from dishes and bowls and plates, but was allowed no cutlery. She drank water from our new pitcher. She napped each afternoon. She was provided a bottle of capsules for her little blisters. I’ll never forget the rattle of her house-keys when she took them from her purse, or that clean smell of lemon soap. At 8:31 a.m. her breathing stops. 4. Imagine democracy votes itself out of existence. Imagine we choose to have no choice--for the sake of a little peace of mind. We’re overqualified for this reality anyway. We’ve better places to be than the Home of the Free, lands bereft of unusually virulent bacterial infections, lands of morning glory & midnight sun, where pink neon signs mean something else and we haven’t done the balloons yet. (Oh dear, he has a nonspecific delusion!) Let’s get out our camera-phones and strip ourselves down to the core essentials. Consider the time I tried to take my own life. Emotion was choking me up, making speech difficult. The two of us were alone in an abandoned Quonset hut. She wore a fringed leather jacket and had long brown hair. She was tall, athletic, and her skin had a healthy glow to it. She liked Valium because it helped her relax. That day we walked many miles, sometimes holding hands other times not, through green fields of cows chewing cud. Her pigtails bounced between her shoulder-blades when she ran. Two weeks later she was killed in a gas explosion. "Oh yes," the doctor said unenthusiastically, "this is a curious relic from the bygone days. The sign of a fish with a ring in its mouth. God forgive me." The doctor wore a long burgundy coat with shiny buttons. His arms were crossed over his belly. His teeth chattered. A minute of silence passed before he gestured at a clock-face robbed of its hands. I was startled. This is what’s become of time--a fucking Promised Land?! Today something deep inside, something I’ve never known, a fire within, compels me to live. Pas de problème. Tout va bien. I’m the Secret Asian Man. You can’t fire me because I quit. Life may be a waste of my time, and I may yearn for the Pre-Conception. But I’m willing to get a little bit older and little bit slower. It’s my calling--to teach you all differences. Anyone there? Hello?