And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth…

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Jackson E. Connor

June 2011

This dissertation titled

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth…

JACKSON E. CONNOR

has been approved for

the Department of English

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Darrell K. Spencer

Professor of English

Benjamin M. Ogles

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3

ABSTRACT

CONNOR, JACKSON E., Ph.D., June 2011, English

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth… (191 pp.)

Director of Dissertation: Darrell Spencer

This dissertation is divided into two sections: an essay considering contemporary mythologies and a novella.

Approved: ______

Darrell K. Spencer

Professor of English

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3

Artificial myth ...... 5

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth ...... 27

A Prologue ...... 28

. . . Monday ...... 40

ARTIFICIAL MYTH

The last time I worked full-time for a blue-collar crew, one of the guys – Dave’r, shaped like a tee-shirt stretched too far at the waist, hanging low over baggy jeans too tight through the thighs – said of me, “Degirt1, that boy don’t have no common sense.”

And I had three simultaneous reactions.

One: hurt, because I wanted to be respected by my numbnut monkey peers.

Two: pride – I don’t want anything he’s got.

Three: epiphany: this was the first time I had ever thought of common sense as subjective. Cleaning all three filters on the quickie saw when it sputtered to a stop was obvious to Dave’r, because he’d done it before, hundreds of times – or something very similar, while I knew next to nothing about oil, gas, or air filters. Common sense, to me, suggests something more akin to: you’re always going to be in debt if you spend half your skimpy paycheck at pool league each Wednesday, and he’s probably not going to be able to lottery his way out of it.

Turns out, in the year I worked on that particular crew, I never developed their common sense (nor did I want to) (though I desperately wanted to). I quit that crew to move to Utah to go back to school to learn how to write. Common sense became a different phenomenon in grad school. Mostly I was expected to have better manners, to talk badly about novels I used to like, and to know with certainty the difference between difference and différance. Between paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Between text and work. Nor did my new peers have any better understanding of how an internal combustion engine works.

1 A derogatory laugh of Western Pennsylvania. 6

It would take another several years before I learned to talk about “common sense” as a social construction. As it turns out, what is common to us is often that which we have learned, rather than that which is natural or necessary. It’s common sense that one should not eat raw pork, that one should not mix bleach and ammonia, that one should wear a rubber – our culture privileges these notions such that they become as necessary and irreducible as the Coriolis Effect, inertia, geocentricism.

In the meantime, I have learned that ideas such as “common sense” are socially constructed notions. I believe that, in many ways, history, society, and culture have replaced biology: ideologies often make design look natural such that humans become convinced that these designs have always been here, will always be here. (Or, at least, I believe that biology and society are so bound up that they are almost indistinguishable at times.) And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . reflects this belief, for if there is one thing at the heart of the text, it’s the human struggle to live in a world that society has invented / is inventing, a world that this same society constantly strives to convince us is natural and necessary.

The text is a cosmos that resides in what Tzvetan Todorov calls The Fantastic, never letting on to the reader whether the events are marvelous or uncanny. In the open pages, for instance, Pedascule drives along the winding roads of a green spring-like

Pennsylvania December. This weather could be the result of an unseasonably late fall or an early spring, an unheard-of warm winter, perhaps some early effects of global warming – any of which would indicate the text is uncanny, explained through the unusual physics of the world at large. Or this could be a December that the Whacky and 7

Obtrusive Poet God has set before Her or His Creation just to screw with it. We never know. By creating a world that is slightly different (physically, historically) from the one the reader knows, the text forces its characters and readers to consider contemporary

American myths – of masculinity, class, money, language, beauty, common sense – all these and many more come into question through what Roland Barthes calls a demystification process.

A much more obvious example of how the textual cosmos is different from the world in which the reader lives is the cultural moment that acts as an objective correlative to the fulcrum within the text. In “Tuesday” around noon, two enormous planes fly into two very tall towers in New York City. Though the text never signifies them as such, it is clear that a relationship exists between these towers and the historic Twin Towers that

collapsed 11 September 2001. Unlike the historic collapse of The Twin Towers, the event

occurs closer to noon in And the Mountains Labor and Bring Forth . . .. Presenting and

undermining this culturally pivotal moment in American history is one way the text

prepares its readers to engage in the creation of new myths to counter old myths. It makes

the extremely familiar somewhat strange. It shows its hand as artifice.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . .: An Artificial Myth

The two sections of Roland Barthes’s classic text Mythologies work together to

expose the nature of contemporary mythologies. In twenty-eight short essays on

contemporary culture, Barthes attempts to give concrete examples of twenty-eight

cultural moments that are often taken as natural rather than as constructed. The essays

address topics from professional wrestling to toys to plastic and are meant to look beyond 8

the surface-level reading of such events and to consider the ways contemporary French

folks read these symbols as inherent and permanent rather than as artificial symbols

designed (even if unknowingly designed) by contemporary culture to maintain the status quo by creating a manageable truth.

In the preface, Barthes writes, “The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the ‘naturalness’ with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (Barthes 11). For instance, in his discussion of

“Striptease,” he notes that “Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is

stripped naked” (84); what then is sold to the public is the “delicious terror” of nudity.

What sells to the public is twofold. First, the owner sells the idea that sex sells. Second, the owner sells the idea that what customers are buying is, in fact, sex. Meanwhile “the decor, the props and the stereotypes intervene to contradict the initially provocative intention and eventually bury it in insignificance” (84). The decor, props, and stereotypes

are designed to appear natural, necessary, erotic in themselves, but what they are is an

effect of history. The contemporary culture pays to be convinced that these erotic displays are not cultural but biological in origin. Thus, when the woman is naked – all the

accoutrements stripped away – nothing is left but the self, which is no longer sexualized

because the artificial structure is stripped away. This entire act constitutes the myth, the

structure of striptease passing itself off as a natural form.

In “Myth Today,” the second section of the book, Barthes attempts to systematize

the topics he discusses in the first section. Through this process, he uncovers the ways 9

cultures (specifically 1960s France but all societies by extension) learn and teach

themselves to believe in cultural signs or myths as natural, and he posits that the only

way to counteract this influence is through the subsequent creation of conflicting

artificial mythologies.

The first step that Barthes takes in his discussion of the development of cultural

myths is to talk about myth as a system of language. He writes, “But what must be firmly

established at the start is that myth is a system of communication, that it is a message [. .

.] it is a mode of signification, a form” (109). The importance of the formal nature of

myth is that considering it as such, rather than as “an object, a concept, or an idea,” helps

to expose its artificial nature, helps us to understand that it is designed rather than

inherent. Perhaps the most difficult aspect of addressing a myth is convincing others that

it exists in the first place. “All men are created equal,” for instance, creates an American

myth, such that for one to suggest that all men are not, in fact, created equal would be

equivalent to challenging “The Declaration of Independence.” If, that is, we suggest that

all men are not equally encouraged to pursue Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness under the Constitution, we can easily be pointed back to “We hold these truths to be self- evident . . . that all men are created equal.” When I present the idea of contemporary mythologies, I often quote from The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn’t exist.” A quote that I have no doubt has appeared in literature much older than the 1995 movie and that, in this way, creates its own kind of mythology. 10

In order to counteract these myths, we must first recognize their falseness before we can posit a counter-myth. In And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . the text asks, “Would it make you feel any better to know that we are inside The Poet’s head?” Here Pedascule questions the fundamental principles of existence by calling into question the creation of the world around him. Barthes writes, “all the materials of myth

(whether pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance” (110). And the Mountains Shall Labor and

Bring Forth . . . goes further than implying a signifying consciousness and supplies one to the characters and readers as well. Yet, while They share many attributes, The Poet is not the God of contemporary religions – rather She or He exists only within the text.

“That they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights,” functions in just this way, creating a God that is very much like the Christian God of the era, while also being quite democratic: this is an omniscient God Who knows all of what is to unfold, Who meanwhile encourages us to make our own decisions. The contradiction demands that you can’t have it both ways; the myth suggests, oh, yes, you can..

After he establishes myth as ***language***, Barthes discusses myth as semiological system. Unlike Saussure’s semiotics of language, which describes the interaction of sign, signifier, and signified, Barthes calls his study a “second-order semiological system.” We must accept Saussure’s notion that semiotics is the relationship of the signifier and the signified to form the sign. For Barthes, “That which is a sign

(namely the associative total of a concept and an image) in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second” (Barthes 114). Barthes gives the example of a magazine 11

cover showing a young man of color in uniform saluting a French flag. He writes, “I see

very well what it signifies to me: that France is a great Empire, that all her sons, without

any colour discrimination, faithfully serve under her flag, and that there is no better

answer to the detractors of an alleged colonialism than the zeal shown by this Negro in

serving his so-called oppressors” (116). In many ways, myth functions rhetorically as a

preterition: denying the importance of an idea by drawing attention to it. The myth

created / reinforced through Barthes’s example is one of equality, one that refutes

objection before objection is posed: it is as if to say, “How can you say our formerly

oppressed peoples are still oppressed? look how happy he is to serve alongside his former

oppressors.”

After explaining the ways that myth is a system of signification, Barthes shows how myth transforms history into nature. The great danger of myths such as these is that

they are designed to appear truthful, inscrutable, above rebuke. Any objection concerning the intent of the magazine cover could be interpreted as an attack on patriotism, on

France, on people of color. So thoroughly do these second-order semiological systems

prevent rebuttal that – to those who do not bother to interpret the system – readers /

viewers tend to believe in the nature of the myth, rather than to understand the historical

context leading up to the moment of the photograph: that is, they see the magazine cover

as a form rather than a structure:

As a total of linguistic signs, the meaning of the myth has its own

value, it belongs to a history: in the meaning, a signification is already

built, and could very well be self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of it 12

and did not turn it suddenly into an empty, parasitical form. The meaning

is already complete, it postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory,

a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions.

When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind;

it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the

letter remains. (117)

Such that when we attempt to enter into conversation with a myth, we find ourselves examining an apparently empty shell of language. Which is to say that often language itself seems natural, organic, rather than yet another historically structured social system of representation.

Most people within a particular culture are either unaware of myth, willfully ignorant of the system, or unconcerned about the effects. For those who choose to read the second-order system, the rhetorical strategies of myth-making, myth-producing, myth-reinforcing can leave one feeling helpless. A reader / viewer without Barthes’s background and schooling might suggest that equality does not exist within France as presented by the magazine cover only to have the argument shifted away from the myth and back towards the objector, creating a logic similar to: “Look at the photo – that’s equality – if we stop talking about it, it will happen.” Conventional wisdom would have it that you can’t eat your cake and have it too, but the fact is that myth does. Myth always has it both ways. Myth rejects potential objections to its claims before it even states its claims, making any interaction with the myth difficult, often seemingly impossible. 13

Barthes, however, offers a way to counter the effects of contemporary mythologies. First,

one must approach a myth dynamically. Then, one must reconstitute the myth.

Barthes offers three ways to consider myth: 1. “focus on an empty signifier,” 2.

“focus on a full signifier,” 3. “focus on the mythical signifier as on an inextricable whole

made of meaning and form” (128). The third focus creates a multifarious signification: “I

respond to the constituting mechanism of myth, to its own dynamics, I become a reader

of myths. The saluting Negro is no longer an example or a symbol, still less an alibi: he is the very presence of French imperiality” (128). He argues that the “first two types of focusing are static, analytical; they destroy the myth, either by making its intention obvious, or by unmasking it: the former is cynical, the latter demystifying. The third type of focusing is dynamic, it consumes the myth according to the very ends built into its structure: the reader lives the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (128). In becoming a reader of myths, in focusing on the mythical signifier, in thinking of the myth dynamically, the reader is now able to enter into a conversation with the mythographers.

By addressing the imperiality represented by the black soldier, Barthes becomes a mythographer himself, raising himself to an equal ground with the creators of the second- order semiotics.

After a reader decides to approach a myth dynamically, she or he can now reconstitute the myth. Barthes explains the results:

It thus appears that it is extremely difficult to vanquish myth from the

inside: for the very effort one makes in order to escape its stranglehold

becomes in its turn the prey of myth: myth can always, as a last resort, 14

signify the resistance which is brought to bear against it. Truth to tell, the

best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to

produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a

mythology. (135)

Barthes turned the established myth – see in this photo how France is free and equal for all – into an artificial myth: see here how the colonized remain colonized. The photograph of the young soldier provides evidence of the overwhelming extent of the

imperializing nation – this young Algerian has been forced to accept a culture that

belongs neither to him nor to his ancestors. He has been made a part of the war machine,

such that he is now obligated to continue future oppression of his own and other peoples

or suffer the fate of the colonized outcast, which fate, one must imagine, would be worse

even than becoming an oppressor himself.

Barthes calls this secondary myth a third-order semiotics. No doubt, creating a

myth to counter the system already set in play would not have the equivalent weight of

the primary system. Nonetheless, this third-order semiotics, this artificial myth, at least

gives the new mythographer a language with which to engage the established myth. This

artificial myth is the final step in the demystification process.

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . designs new mythologies

that might counter existing mythologies for both characters and readers. Do these new

mythologies effectively create an alternative to the new nature established by myth? At

best, this creation would take many years. Or we may never know. Certainly, for the

characters, who might only know of the idea of myths only peripherally or, more likely, 15

not at all, the idea of creating an artificial myth with which to counter previous myths is unlikely.

Pedascule, the protagonist of “Monday,” is thoroughly trapped within

contemporary American myths of sex. Our culture places the highest value upon sex,

such that most systems of conventionalized morality insist that a couple be legally and

spiritually bound before they engage in sexual intercourse. At the same time, we make

the act so taboo that merely the words we use for sex – fucking, screwing, sucking,

blowing, jizzing, et al. – are among the most profane in our language: a daytime show

can use the word “murder” a hundred times, but a single “fuck” elevates even the most

docile film to PG-13. The language becomes inaccessible, dirty, naughty, bad, dangerous,

such that, while our sex education in schools suggests that “if you’re not mature enough

to talk about it, you’re not mature enough to do it,” we deny “decent” people the

language even to talk about it. This and other rhetorical strategies go to great lengths to

reinforce a paradox of language and expectations that function as a cultural myth of

morality. On the other hand, our culture creates an environment in which sex sells (or as

illustrated above, the idea that sex sells sells). We peddle sex in movies, in music, in

magazines, so desensitizing ourselves to its presence that sex is often an innocuous

offshoot of the product at hand.

Pedascule and the unnamed woman of his text have spent the last thousand days

living in the same house, as if under a spell, bound to each other, both as liberator and

both as captor. As “Monday” comes to its end, Pedascule reflects on the beginning of his

stay with her: 16

Day 1: He wakes up in a hospital where she tends his broken fingers and

explains that the world has not yet ended – in fact, he’s quite lucky to have

gotten out of this mess with so few injuries – but that his car is in very bad

shape.

Day 2: She gives him a couch to sleep on until he gets his car fixed and

maybe his fingers heal up.

Day 3: She fucks him.

Day 4: She fucks him.

Day 5: He contacts the company he had plans to work for in California

and explains the car wreck and the car’s condition and his condition, and

the company offers to fly him out and ship his car when it’s ready, but he

wants to take care of it on his own, so the company accepts this and

extends to him an undefined grace period and wishes him a speedy

recovery, and she fucks him and fucks him and fucks him. . . . (122)

We quickly see the importance of sex to their relationship. In fact, even a hundred and twenty-two pages into the text, there is little else between them other than sex and memories of sex. So important is sex that these two characters basically commit their lives to each other as a result of it. In this way, sex has become the socially constructed myth – a false commitment, an obligatory gesture, a signifier of love – that has replaced reproduction. Sex, this now socially constructed system of representation, has the importance once designated to continuing the species. Sociology has replaced biology. 17

As Pedascule’s memory of the past thousand and one days comes to an end, he determines to leave the woman and so rebegin his life where he left off, upon the road to

California. Nonetheless, in the end, “He says, ‘You can’t leave me, baby. You’re all I’ve got’” (142-3), and he’s back in the trap. Pedascule resolves two entirely conflicting emotions by engaging in the exact behavior that brought him to these two conflicting emotions in the first place. Sex, the fundamental biological impulse of our species, has become so culturally laden with significance that Pedascule finds himself inextricably bound to the conflicting notions of sex as more important and less important than it really is.

In fact, in this very moment Pedascule thinks entirely of Angelina Jolie – so much so that the text indicates that he is actually having sex with Jolie, rather than with the woman with whom he lives. In this moment of coitus – which represents the very foundation of their relationship – the one constant in his memory, what little identity he grants her falls away, and she becomes nothing more than his imagination. She becomes entirely, in fact, the object of his imagination, the physical embodiment of the future he believes that she kept him from, that she keeps him from. When he thinks of sex with her, it is not with any real lust, certainly not with any desire to reproduce, but almost as a rhetorical strategy of avoidance.

In fact, when the woman becomes Angelina Jolie, the entire intercourse becomes masturbatory. Earlier in the text, during Pedascule’s shower, “The car is old and brand new and Angelina Jolie sucks his dick, begs for sex, wants sex from him more than she wants to make movies or achieve fame. Please, he thinks, she says. Doggie style, he 18

thinks. Please please please please please” (113). Clearly, the climax becomes so

unimportant to Pedascule that it is signified in almost the exact language of his

masturbation: the repeated pleases.

As the sex ends, Pedascule is no longer in the present moment, but he creates an

alternative moment – he constructs a world in which he is not with this woman but with the famous actor Angelina Jolie. By imagining her, he recreates the myth of his own

success: that is, if he had gotten back on the road, rather than staying with this woman, he

might actually be with Jolie, rather than in this dilapidated house. At the same time, his is

a world that is created for him by the media: “He watches her spine and scapula and hips

move at unexpected angles, and thinks of the many times he’s seen her naked in movies

or almost naked in movies, him her her” (145).

All told, the depiction of the sexual intercourse in And the Mountains Shall Labor

and Bring Forth . . . reduces sex to the level of masturbation. The text makes no claims of evaluating this behavior, but it is clear that the relationship at hand is not healthy or productive but is in fact limiting and oppressive. Perhaps, in this way, rather than peeling back the myth of sex – which makes it socially both more and less important than it is biologically – the manuscript further exacerbates the myth in both directions. By equating sex with masturbation, Pedascule indicates that sex is perhaps even less important than our contemporary culture suggests. At the same time, when Pedascule thinks of unprotected sex as a sign of love, we realize that sex has become a signifier and is valued

as much more important than the mere continuation of the species. 19

And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . often works to peel back surface layers of myth, such that (whether we read the text as critical or accepting of myths) the underlying systems of language and semiotics are exposed. The result of this is that the characters and the readers must “focus on the mythical signifier as on an inextricable whole made of meaning and form” (128), existing in a world that is the combination of the myth and the process of the myth, such that they (characters and readers) live “the myth as a story at once true and unreal” (128). Ultimately, And the

Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . confronts this false nature and forces it to return upon itself, always with the potential to undermine the myth with a new myth.

On a personal note. To suggest that the artificial myths revealed within And the

Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . are any better, more helpful to humanity, more powerful than the previous myths, I think, would be irresponsible, dangerous, and no less a social construction than the established conventional myths. Rather, what I would hope from the process is that the text continues to undermine the notion of common sense, that we continue to recognize and explore the false nature of knowledge as a social construction, that we recognize in our own lives the false natures that are stripped from us and packaged with trinkets and stereotypes and sold back to us as necessary and beautiful.

The characters in And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . (and, by extension, we readers) all live by semiotic systems built up around us that we continue to build up around us and the people with whom we communicate. But And the Mountains

Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . creates a world that forces us to deal with what happens 20

when our second- and third-degree semiotic systems fail. The text also juxtaposes other

contemporary systems with our cultural myths. For instance, given a rate of acceleration, a maximum speed, and a duration of time, the Pedascule in the Prologue can tell you the distance he has travelled several minutes down the road. He does not need a computer or a note card. When his semiotics fall apart, though, as the result of entering into this new artificial mythology, he tries to fit the moon into the hole for a foundation of a small residential home.

By bringing into question everything from modes of appropriate behavior to laws of physics and the language of math (systems that seem so true, irrefutable and natural, but, in fact, are simply highly valued systems of knowledge), And the Mountains Shall

Labor and Bring Forth . . . forces a reader constantly to reexamine what is real – this paper? these words? these characters? this foundation? The Poet God? What is form?

What is structure? What is biologically necessary and what is historically motivated? The new ontology becomes an examination of the rules by which we live our lives, whether we know those rules are in play or not.

When And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . was a single-celled organism, I called it Mason – thinking it would be a thick, obnoxious, slogging novel based largely on my experience working on a masonry crew. My experience after a year on the crew: I believed none of my coworkers had ever said, done, or thought anything they would care to repeat or could hope to expand upon. The first line I wrote for Mason:

“‘I am not fucking yelling,’ he yelled.” I didn’t know who yelled it, or what he was yelling about, but I was certain this was the opening line of a masterpiece. The line is 21

gone from the text, buried in notes and drafts and revisions, but the difficulties implicit in the line remain. The problem is primarily this: the characters – Boss Mason, Colonel

Killer, Pedascule B.S., Del, Phaethon, Gone – don’t know how to act, how to behave,

how to be. The world, that is, is beyond them.

Living in a world that is constantly being constructed around them in, a world that

they are constantly constructing, they are uncomfortable in their own skin. The characters

find themselves bound to conventions – money, family, appropriate behavior – and they

all recognize this trap to some extent, though the extent to which they recognize it makes

it look, feel, seem natural, rather than contrived. In the fourth chapter of the novel

“Thursday,” Phaethon – a muddle of uppers and downers, painkillers and pain – can’t scratch an itch, can’t even be certain whether or not he’s itchy. While Phaethon spends his days slinging mortar, picking tiny bits of cinder block out of his sandwich, scraping the gray-orange clay from his boots, he also imagines himself a rockstar of sorts. His white shirts – truly so white they’re almost golden, casting a light of their own, small second suns – and his gold necklace and two-hundred dollar pants: these things confine him while they promise liberation. “Dress this way,” convention tells us, magazines tell us, music and television, the media (a kind of new nature) tell us, “and you will be this way.” But the truth is: not even the people who are this way are this way. Phaethon knows this – he recognizes this in “Monday” while looking at the Playboy:

Phaethon lips the words to a thousand songs, watches the hard airbrushed

corners gloss and crinkle. If the world were made of medicine, she could

love me. I’d walk her down paths of red and peach prescription. . . . The 22

magazine, he knows, is so far away, a different world from another time.

Print and photo, real only in the sense that it is what he makes it. This

woman isn’t real. This place is a setting. Like what-do-you-call-it, the

world is a stage. (30)

He recognizes this, even if he doesn’t want to. Even if what he wants is to believe the lie,

he sees this false nature that has been packaged and sold to him. These trinkets, this

airbrushing – he buys the idea that sex sells.

This new nature cannot be confused with a second nature. It is not something like

a deft physical ability, a mode of thinking, a quick understanding at which one becomes

so adept that she or he performs the activity without thinking consciously of it; it is a

learned nature, to be sure, but usually associated with the body. The new nature of And

the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . . is a conditioned way of thinking that feels to the thinker so natural that she or he, if asked, would respond that her or his

behavior is natural, normal, just the way it is. Language, knowledge, beauty – all such learned things – are conventional, but, because our developing consciousness has largely forgotten that such things did not exist before consciousness, we often think of them as indelible.

The world has crept beneath Phaethon’s skin, through convention and billboards and his father’s demands that he be a man – a concept that is always already contradictory within the text, an unwinnable battle within a society that demands specific outcomes and punishes equally those who attain the outcomes and those who fail, a cultural myth promising liberation while providing only confinement – all the false 23 promises of society, all our cultural myths, America (in part and parcel) wheedles around in his veins like inaccessible fleas gnawing not for sustenance but seemingly just to piss him off while pretending to be DNA. Eventually, he digs the tip of his trowel into the skin over his sternum and makes an incision down to his navel. “He bucks and shimmies, crawls forth from this husk of skin, a meaty tendonous self born of himself”

(“Thursday”). Phaethon struggles every day to escape the self that we have made for him.

The pills he takes, the earphones full of pop rap that drowns out the old nature (“He took his first step at around eighteen months, but he learned to walk when Boyz in the Hood came out on tape”). He is bound to these ideas, and he recognizes the prison to a certain extent, as do all the characters. But what he’s not fully aware of, what they’re not fully aware of, what we learn only as we slog away through the thousand pages of the text is that this particular prison is consciousness. The great gift of Prometheus is its own curse, as with all symbolic systems, liberating only as it confines.

Consciousness is a panopticon of language built of cells made entirely of words.

The bars are designed through incomprehensibly random, ancient and ever-changing, arrangements of phonemes and carbon pigment. The Earth is the stuff that falls from our fingers to our mouths when we’re hungry, that flows forth from us when we shit, that we push away and push away until we ultimately become. But the world – the new nature – is the symbolic system of representation that we bind ourselves to, that binds us to our responsibilities (perhaps the obvious consequence of a world that has killed off its gods), that we have created to create us as if only to help keep the Earth – muddy detritus that keeps the characters bound physically to this spot – at bay. 24

All the characters have experiences similar to Phaethon’s autoflaying, making

themselves and being made through convention. Each character takes on different forms as the situation demands it. Pedascule shows up to work in “Wednesday” with his hair down, wearing a canvas robe, his arms opening up to forgive his crew, talking about mustard seeds, which (it’s clear) he knows very little about. “Tuesday” opens with Del at

home in his mind living his “real life,” waking to the world through which he must slog

in order to get back to sleep and reality, which crumbles a little more every day. Colonel

Killer, in “Friday,” is a pile of John Wayne quotations. Gone isn’t sure whether he’s

singing or whether he is the lyrics. Boss Mason is always half here at this moment and

half in the moment of Phaethon’s conception, unsure where he ends and his son begins.

Meanwhile, the great gift they give to the society in which they are stuck is the

literal, physical, actual structure they build of the Earth, in the Earth– building this

foundation is what they do in the world to convince themselves that they are something

beyond this body, this panopticon of language. It is no great surprise, then, the damage

done to each of their psyches, their ideologies, their selves in the chapter “Tuesday” when

two airplanes crash into two enormous iconic towers around noon – it is no wonder they

feel so frail that Phaethon reverts to youth to fetus to sperm to atoms and empty space; or

they so wish to feel frail that Boss Mason acts as though the Earth is not swallowing them

up as it swallows them up; or they so wish not to feel that Del dissolves into water and

fall into the watery trench; or they so wish to affect change that Pedascule grows

enormous beyond signification themselves in order to deal (or, specifically, not deal) with

the event; or they so wish to be a complete person that Gone lives a full life full of many 25

lives in the space of a brief moment and returns naked and aged and otherwise the same; or they begin to articulate the trap of language such that Colonel Killer finds himself lost

within the myriad innumerable new traps he must create.

This conflation of old and new nature is how And the Mountains Shall Labor and

Bring Forth . . . proceeds. This is where the writing comes from: like the characters in the

text, the postmodern human condition instructs us to behave while it punishes us for

behaving as such; people born with a penis are taught to be brave or tough or impenetrable or just bad motherfuckers, and are subsequently incomplete human beings, bodies without emotions, able to knock the next guy’s teeth out but incapable of telling their dads and their sons that they love them. People born with a vagina are taught to be tender and compassionate and caring and dependent, and then made to feel little for lacking initiative and schooling; people born with neither or both sex organs are ignored and taught to believe that they are not human anyway, that they are not natural, that they should just goddamn die. These and similar myths build up around us and are built up by us and build us up for every ideological concern that we have. Ideas of money and class and race keep the crew bound to convention similarly.

The iconic collapse of the literal Twin Towers is often seen as a pivotal, a life- changing, a genetic event. Meant to beg Americans every day, “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?”: the day is designed to be a moment of unification, but, the truth is, such a unification goes against the American myth of rugged individualism, so intensely that the characters of And the Mountains Shall Labor and Bring Forth . . ., reacting to the fictional equivalent of 9-11, tear themselves variously apart trying to be 26 ruggedly individual and a dedicated member of a unified society in which we all pull together as a team. You can’t have it both ways. And yet that is what myths suggest, that is what language suggests, that is what culture demands – that we have it both ways.

AND THE MOUNTAINS SHALL LABOR AND BRING FORTH . . .

A Prologue

Pedascule, recently Bachelored of Science, steers the old green Jetta along the currents of

Interstate 90 West. The low hills of upstate New York fall away behind him. The future

all around him, up ahead of him, off to the sides, and now, just the distant hum of his tires

beneath his feet, hummmmhnh. Four-and-a-half years of Higher Education and

Internships and Kissing Asses and Now He’s Free to begin. He thinks This, now, this, this

this this is the first day, for the first actual time, of the rest of my life. The rest has all been

practice. The rest: clods of dirt and roots and small boulders, aggregate, moss and rot,

bones and dust and layers and layers and layers of ashes: a base at the base of the rest of

my life. This, now, this. Life. Cruise controlling through the slow rest of the world, he

lights a smoke, slim-finger flicks the ash towards the windshield, and watches it lift

through the slightly open window. Whoosh, he thinks, though in fact the motion makes no discernable noise.

Four-and-a-half years of college fall into and out of his head and that was not a life of moments but of movement, not a series of experiences but an experiment in being human – the early mistakes of his freshman year crash up against shepherding the 29

incoming classes towards the same mistakes; the moment he crawled out of his parents’

brand-new Jetta and climbed the late-summer New York Hillside to his first college

dormitory flows into his final hungover middle finger to the entire temporary unseasonably slimy hometown. The empire of books and computers and small late fees crumbles. He tames his mind’s chimera of lectures and Buddhists and breasts, soft underbellies of institutions and marvelously frail coeds. Hidden fistpumps of triumphs and regrets meld into one another and fade away like so many pebbly ripples in the vast and breathless waves of a hurricane. Fighting the urge he’s been fighting since the West

Coast called him back and called him back and finally offered him the salary he’d anticipated, he refuses even to think the tune “California, here I come” and shakes his head hard against the notion. Pedascule, B.S., he thinks to himself, slams his palm delicately against the C.D. player, flicks his butt out the window and jams, baby, yeah yeah yeah.

“Yeah, yeah, hell yeahyeahyeah,” he says, referring to the c.d. “Yeah.” He lights another cigarette and fake flicks ashes through a crack in the driver side window. “Uhm,

uhmuhmuhm. Yeah, yeahyeah.” The sun floats on up there. Floats bright and warm-

wintery on a slow-moving day, the road pulling along underneath him. The world

funneling him on and on while the brown horizons and the gray lanes and the neon and

scantily-clad future open up all around, a bowelly, soddy smell – silt dredged up from a

slow-slow-slow-moving stream. He blows smoke, pounds his palms on the handed-me-

down steering wheel of the Old Jetta, a graduation present, alongside a few thousand

miles worth of gas money. Better fuel up. The Jetta pops and swerves through the great 30

big blue-and-brown world, the sun high overhead, the crests and troughs among and

between the I-79 Southbound stream. The Jetta hops onto an off-ramp, into a parking lot.

Pedascule swipes Dad’s credit card for a carton of smokes and a bottle of rum and a half-

dozen gallons of gas. He asks for a bar, a pub, a joint, a saloon, and gets pointed just

couple miles around the bend there. He thanks the old man and flirts with himself in the

tall glass door on the way out – Sharp, he thinks, and scratches the fifty dollar mess of

hair back into place.

Pedascule moves like the pull of gravity across the dulled-yellow-striped concrete. He’s smooth, to be sure. He’s like his own music – like a river’s quick ripple, like a fresh-shinned tree branch, like f prime of three equals the limit of three plus h (the quantity squared) minus nine the quantity over h as the limit of h approaches zero – a beautiful music of theory, a prone and infinite S, a moaning bent back. Smooth, he sits hunched over a thick, pewter graduation-gifted flask with a quote from ancient philosophy about rivers and valleys and the way we approach the world, written in

Hindu, he thinks he remembers his roommate saying, as the rum rolls across his palm and

onto the parking lot. Close enough. The quick evaporating alcohol floats from his pale,

slim fingers, his hand of a thousand books, these hands, which he’s been told could

conduct a symphony of loose-haired, large-breasted angels, call upon dark forces of love and trust, weave Ariadne’s thread into a delicate map of labyrinths that Daedalus himself could never have imagined. He tugs the bottle to his mouth and moves it to his trunk as his door slams smooth and he gas-pedals smooth off towards this mythical around the bend he’d been fingered towards moments ago. With the back of his hand, he wipes the 31 slim-dripping drop of rum from his smooth chin, rubs his cheeks and thinks about shaving again, not today, though, maybe tonight in a motel along the way.

He checks his watch at the edge of the parking lot, checks the odometer, sees a steady 35 mph pulling along the road. The sign tells him he’s crossing a state line as the sunlight sizzles on Lake Erie off to the right, the whole world lights up. Meanwhile, he thinks, at x miles per hour, for y seconds, he should arrive z miles, but that’s obvious, so he thinks:

(x mph / 3600 sph * y seconds * 5280 fpm * 12 ipf) = z

reduces to:

5280(12xy inches) = z 3600

reduces to:

5280xy inches = z 300

17.6xy inches = z

at 35 mph

17.6(35y) inches = z

616y inches = z

“Couple miles” down this bright whitey-gray and winding Pennsylvania off-the-beaten- road road, he skids into a graveled and spring-puddled parking lot and out of his car and checks his watch 517 seconds at 35mph=:

616(517) inches = z

Which he breaks down to: 32

616(500) + 616(10) + 616(7) inches = z

without even thinking about breaking it down so much as just doing it

308000 + 6160 + 4312 inches = z

318472 inches = z

His odometer says 5.03, and he decides to convert inches to miles perhaps on the next leg

of the trip, so he slides out of the driver’s seat and notices but doesn’t notice the thick green woods of this strange state as he skids into the stool farthest from the darkest dark corners of this dark dark bar, a stool amid-stream a flotsam of flannelled and smoky- bearded men and sad, saggy young women. Pedascule, B.S., builder of immaculate and unyielding cardboard bridges, corrector of computer programs designed for two-digit years, future employee of the millennium at High Tech Millennium Software and Design, pushes a bill across the bar with a serious downward tilt of his head, loosens his tie and asks if he can buy a drink for anybody who would celebrate a college graduation. Gas

money made good. He lights a smoke, throws the pack on the bar, chalks a cue, racks the

table, shoots a game, shoots some whiskey, shakes hands and hands, and stretches the cue

above his head and behind his back as the flannel shirts and smoky and sagging men and

women ebb and flow through the stories of his four-and-a-half-year triumph as the

country-musicking jukebox shatters his hold on the future as he dances and breaks and sinks another eight ball and downs another beer and downs another beer and buys another

round as he looks forward to this exact moment in his life.

He re-emerges into the same bright, fecund early afternoon. The dark green Jetta meets him in the bright-gray gravel. His tie stays behind, wrapped around a sagging and 33

flannelled and warm and lithe woman who promised him three wishes if he would just

stay with her forever. The country music twangs stilly into the distance as the heavy

wooden door closes on that world forever. Goodbye, forever, thinks Pedascule, farewell,

forever. Though he can’t be sure about the future, he knows only that this point, “p,”

where he stands doesn’t allow for his presence inside the bar as well as outside unless

there’s something about the speed of light that he doesn’t know. And he doubts that very highly, thank you very much. Though he can’t be sure about the future, if the past is any indication of how the present will pass, goodbye. Forever. A single bead of mid-

December sweat shatters the puddle beside the driver side door and the world opens into itself.

Pedascule leans an elbow on the open driver-side door and pisses into the impenetrable Pennsylvania forest – a bush, a shrub, an ash, a maple – canopies from years and years of forest – a green so thick, he can see his childhood in waves of memory as if on a thick screen of green canvas, and it strikes him to check an almanac about deciduous trees near Lake Erie. When the cop slows along the road to account for the not-from-around-here Jetta, Pedascule raises his arm and smiles and thumbs-up and the cop drives off. A damned good day. Pedascule slams his palm on the c.d. player and the angsty pumping punk crashes into thin air. He lights a smoke and moves – right arm left leg, left arm right leg, and again. And he’s flailing in place bobbing his head. Skanking

into the brand new day, a narrow cartoonish man of a million futures poised at the edge

of now . . . damn, he thinks, that’s good. He pulls the flask from his pocket, still skanking,

and twists the cap and the rum hits the back of his throat from two feet above his head. 34

He’s a television commercial, selling himself to the world. If life were like me, you

wouldn’t have to buy anything, but because it’s not, drink rum. “Yeah, yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah . . . uhm.”

He slides smooth into that driver seat and throws the keys into the ignition. Pumps

the gas, revs the engine, idles out of the parking lot – no need to showboat. Back on the

road, he winds along the bright beaten path and ends up on I-79 South. The punk music

pumps. He flicks the butt of his cigarette out the driver-side window and cranks it tight, exhales the last lungful of smoke off to the side into the vast tiny cabin of the world in

which he moves down the road. Three single drops of rain hit his windshield, and he

thinks out of the clearish blue sky, The universe is a blue sky with a single small cloud on

which the sun floats ahead, and I am a single raindrop. Shouldn’t somebody be writing

this shit down? The yellow lines ahead, pretending at a vanishing point, over the crest of a hill, around a hill, the myth of a horizon, on and on and, “Yeahyeah, yeahyeah.” He small-skanks behind the windshield. He leaves a trail of cigarette butts to the past. The

Great Erie Lake falling away behind him as he glides down I-79 South to I-80, where his future holds 2544 miles of that great interstate, three left turns, and an apartment on the bay.

Meanwhile, right where he is and in other places, the Earth spins on, inclining people and other animals to eat and reproduce. He sees the world in blues and greens and opportunities, and the world does not see him. It rolls on. He sees the universe in patches and instances and heartaches and touches, and the universe is atoms and empty space. He knows all this as well as he knows the distributive function of multiplication, and yet he 35

sees himself as important, as meaningful. Though he’s been trained not to see himself this

way, he sees himself as a god or, at least, as a god function, creating the world and

moving through it as such.

When the forth, fifth, and sixth raindrops hit his windshield, he cannot distinguish

them from the other ninety-seven thousand that hit at that moment. This sheet of rain falls

so fast and hard that it forces the dust and pollen and leaves and mites and very small

rocks up into the air and down onto the Jetta’s windshield in a thin layer of mud, which

the rain washes away almost immediately. Pedascule breathes deep and remains calm and

godlike, reaching for his windshield wipers. He flicks the switch, and the sitting water

shatters and the rain stops. Blue afternoon sky up ahead, and behind him the beginning of

the world ends in deep deep dark blue-gray and blue-green and a whirling windscape of silver underleaves.

The heat of the sun rises up from the pavement, and the trees and the grasses and

the flowers and the bugs drink down the water all around. Pedascule empties his flask and

feels the warmth inside him and all around him and finds himself the world and of the

world. He smiles and thinks about a cigarette and thinks I could, I could not, and does

not, glad to be ahead of the storm, master of his own whatever it is. The dark green Jetta

pulls the crest of an I-79 rolling hill, and Pedascule looks off to the left and off to the

right and from both sides the sky rolls towards him in swirls of grays and blacks and

streaks of white (orange-tinged), like two great purple palms swirling with lifelines and

lovelines and fingerprints, and this is how the whole world could be in one’s hands, he

thinks. He crests another hill and the horizon sits dark. Black clouds solid across in front 36 of him, held at bay by a single orange streak while the blue sky narrows and shortens and narrows and shortens, a self-reductive geometrical pattern.

He pats the breast pocket of his button-down blue graduation shirt but leaves the smokes where they are. He flicks off the c.d. player and on his headlights. He rolls up the windows as snug as he can get them and battens down the door locks. He breathes deep the stale smoky air and holds that breath while the interstate pulls him along. The blue sign by the side of the road offers a rest stop in two miles and another in thirty-four, and, time and space being relative, he decides to ride this one out. The blue sign by the side of the road says, “Rest Stop 1 Mile,” and the interstate pulls him on. The blue sign by the side of the road says, “Rest Stop Next Right,” and the tractor trailers line up along the off ramp, a heavy row of headlamps in the dark midday. Pedascule raises his left eyebrow in what he believes is an ambiguously smug gesture. He pushes the slim bonehill knuckles of both hands together, and a dozen small pops break up the sound of the engine and the tires and the silence of an afternoon full of promise as formulas for coefficients of friction and velocity and mass and rates of acceleration draw themselves on the muddy windshield and wash away to streaking wipers. Pedascule believes life is a complicated series of simple equations and that a lightning bolt is a concentrated atmospheric discharge of electricity that can travel at the speed of sixty-thousand-miles-per second.

And the great gray and black and white palms of storm cloud blot out the last baby blue up above and close in around him, a tiny conscious bug of a god, but (he tries to shake the thought) a mighty bug-god, nonetheless. 37

The first wave hits the Jetta from the left and pushes the car onto the rumble strip

and blots out the remainder of bright day. Then he is in a car wash, the blown-water on

metal sound comforts him, and he feels the safety that is 3,230 pounds of German

engineering of metal and plastic and rubber and, yes, of course, combustible fluid. And

just as the rain washes the world away, the wipers draw it again in a blurred and distinct

swath of dark gray trough of highway between the green green waving hills. Pedascule leans the steering wheel to the constant left, holding steady against the wind and rain. The taillights of a less fit vehicle shine up from the median, but he knows it might be more dangerous to stop than to drive on, and he takes note of the mile marker to call emergency services for said disabled vehicle at that next rest stop. The wind relinquishes and the rain slows to a steady downpour and a single streak of ionized white light brightens, dims, and disappears like a multi-filamented bulb. He realizes he has not been breathing and pats his breast pocket. I could, I could not. And he flicks the c.d. player back on and back off. No need for that right now. He settles into his own racing heart. He glances down at his flask and reminds himself to fill it up as well at that rest stop.

Thunder stops his heart and the burst of lightning shatters the world. He hears the science-fiction arc of lasers, and the second wave hits, this time with less force and more surprise. The rain and wipers enter their on-going authorship / erasure, giving each other meaning against the clear and uninvolved windshield. He leans the wheel harder to the left as the wind picks up and the ground swells beneath him. The darkness that was the horizon brings night to this afternoon. Thunder cracks again and the lightning brings the cabin of the car into clear relief. The dark dashboard wraps itself into the doors, and the 38 gauges spike into red zones and (!) and Wahrschau, and the road is silence and the air is silent and the rain is the world, and he is in the palm of the world’s hand. At this moment there is no word and he knows the future has past. He thinks clearly, though not in any kind of language, I am in hell and I am hell. And the lights on the control panel go dark and the gauges never existed, and the thunder crashes in his chest and in his head and in his gut, and the lightning is his spine as the ground crashes all around him, spraying mud and glass and grass and plastic, and the palm of the world balls into a fist, and what was once the brand new Jetta, and what was once the old green Jetta, and what was once the safety of a 3,230-pound mass of modern industry washes up against a series of trees and comes to a rest . . .

. . . and some time passes . . .

. . . Monday . . .

. . . Pedascule, B.S., pulls a gob of last night from his cheek and flicks it onto the ground.

He coughs and sputters a touch of sand or something like it onto the carpet beside him.

The clock radio rings through him and it is of him and it is the beginning, the source, a sound coming to him from a great distance, from a great time and vector. He cannot open his eyes. He opens his eyes. The clock radio owns him. He drops his hand on it and brings his hand to his face. The calluses catch on his hair and his beard and he lets the world come into him with a headache. A banshee is little more than this moment. A Deep knot holds in his chest, and he scratches the surface, and he reaches for a smoke, and he clenches his fists and touches his knuckles together.

He stands and winces at his hands and his life and what he might have done last night with this woman lying beside him. Piles of clothes and shoes and dishes. The box fan in the window shakes the world down. Plastic blades rattle the window sill. Window sill rattles drywall. Drywall rattles the floor, the trees outside, the moon. He pulls on his 42

jeans and his boots and kicks the used condom under the bed. In the kitchen, the real

mess leans in towards him, and he sneaks past it to the front door, not bothering to look

for food. His world is a wall. On the other side of the wall, another wall. On the other

side of that wall, a third wall. And these walls are named money and things and lack. To

date, he has not looked past the third wall – at some point, hope becomes hopelessness,

and, for now, he assumes, the world opens up beyond that wall, and, when he’s ready for

it, he’ll open up with it.

The outside lands on him. The heavy late-summer morning rests across his

shoulders like the great calf that is growing towards that great bull which someday, he

might not be able to carry until nightfall. With a thick diamond-blade fingernail, he etches a hash mark in the sidewalk, denoting his thousand and first day upon this deserted universe. He starts to wish he hadn’t drunk so much last night, but ends up wishing he had a drink instead. He digs through his pockets for a cigarette and a lighter, thinks about

quitting, throwing the whole mess into a deep gorge and walking away, clean. He drags

on the cigarette, balls his hands into fists, imagines the great thunderous cacophony that

would ensue if the cracks in his hand made noise.

His car won’t start, the electric urge he doesn’t understand urges on and on and

nothing. He gives it gas and it doesn’t start. He closes his eyes and thinks, specifically,

Oh Precise Poet, get me to work today, and I promise, I’ll learn more about cars

tomorrow. The battery cranks out energy and the spark plugs, he thinks, fire, and his car

won’t start, and then, the crumpled and mostly smoothed-out Jetta has started, but that is

all beyond him. 43

Pedascule, B.S., believes he is cosmically just some guy, just another character in the great plot. At the same time, he believes he’s writing his own destiny. He doesn’t believe in Point A or Point B; he’s not entirely convinced that motion is a real thing; he arrives at the jobsite with a 20 oz. Styrofoam coffee and a donut and a great emptiness – a hangover that is more than he is – a rift in what he believes to be his soul. He opens the door and listens to the guitar and Eddie Veddar whine down the final line of “Rats.” Last week’s storms fill the earth, fill the air, fill the trees, and the morning sun saunas it all. A limestone boulder the size of all that is poetic floats down the hillside, biding time. The storms, he believes, are the same every year – they bring you to this place, they take you from this place, and the place is always the same, always different. Green or gray. Too wet. Too stagnant. He stands and sweats alcohol and smells the woman in the mud pooling and pulling at his boots. He tastes her in his beard and loves her and spits and wishes death on her or himself and shakes his head at the notion of a self that might somehow retrieve its self from the near and distant past.

He looks into the hole in the ground and feels dubious. His hair falls around him, over the rolling hills, covers the light from the sky, and the birds’ calls calling each others’ names. His hair tangles in the roots and branches and brush. His hair splits great limestones and drains the deepest springs, pulls the sun down from its high horse and crashes it into the moon. He plans his escape but worries that the fourth wall might be a mirror or some other trick of light, worries that finding oneself thoroughly trapped is much worse than finding oneself a prisoner of one’s own device. The donut is gone and 44

the great emptiness grates. The coffee is hot. The air is thick. And he moves back to his

car and wouldn’t trade it for any couch in the world.

Pedascule, B.S. sits on the hood of his car, trying not to think about throwing up.

His right leg crossed at the left knee, left elbow pushing a smaller dent into a larger dent.

3,230 lbs of car, plus 1.3 X 1025 lbs of Earth push back against his elbow with equal and

opposite force. Though he wonders why his elbow doesn’t dent, he knows there is more

to physics than the words we use to postulate. If The Scientist / Artist Poet has taught us

anything, it’s that words and things are like young lovers who rub up against each other until they’re chafed and sleeping, not knowing enough to unzip their pants. The air wears like a flak jacket, pushing down and in and in and in. He wishes for a moment to step to the side and let the heavy air fall away from him, but the thought of standing also nauseates him.

Pedascule’s heart knots up inside his chest. His shirt hops to the irregular rhythm.

He lies back on the hood of his sad, ripply Jetta and closes his eyes. His pulse pushes

waves of heat through his body. He can feel the blood as though it’s coffee, too warm, or

the ocean, too much, drawing through him, pulling his organs, pooling in his organs,

forcing him to breathe. He breathes in deep. As much air as he can take, until it hurts. He

breathes all the way in. He tries to clear his mind but can only see his heart in his chest,

trying to get out. He can see the blood moving through him in long streams ready to burst

his seams. He wants to run a thousand miles. He wants to sleep. His veins rise and fall.

He can feel his heartbeat bumping his neck against the collar of his shirt. He exhales. He pulls the collar of his t-shirt away from him. Breathes in as deep as he can, fills his lungs, 45

tries to think of nothing. Tries to think of anything that is not this moment. He is very

aware of his teeth right now. He is what happens when worlds collide. He is a one-legged

man in an ass-kicking contest. He is what happens when the sink won’t drain. What

happens when you’ve had too much of the hair of the dog that bit you. What happens to a

polar bear in a sandstorm. A duck in an oil slick. Cat in a dog park. Dog in a lion’s den.

Lion in the cross hairs. He’s a semi-solid rot. He imagines he’d make great compost.

Still, his heartbeat beats his thoughts into a thousand-car pileup – bumpers and guts and

slick concrete and burnt flesh – gathering them at the base of his skull, ready to burn in a

heap of lost ideas.

To the east about fifteen feet, a foothill of the Appalachian Mountains celebrates

its one-hundred-sixty-five-millionth birthday all alone. He watches the hills work their

way across the bottom of the sky, and it’s been like this as long as anybody could know,

great distances confusing themselves against small things. He thinks about throwing up.

The sublime, every moment, becomes subtle through perspective.

Off across the lane there, a woodchuck waddles though some tall grass. It stands,

and Pedascule notes the dark line darting from his eyes to his ears. He wonders if it is inappropriate to assume a rodent’s gender. He knows no source text for this information, adds the question to a list of things to ask The Caring and Socially Conscious Poet whenever they cross paths. On the other hand, The Inevitably Incurable Poet probably doesn’t give a rat’s ass. If the woodchuck can excuse the pun. He says, “They don’t compare.” The woodchuck looks around over the tall grass and sees things just about how he left them on this first emergence without rain for weeks. The mud has a current. 46

And this is the woodchuck’s plight: to get through such things and to be a tough little son

of a bitch. They don’t scurry when something bigger comes their way, he thinks.

Pedascule sits and watches the woodchuck. All shoulders and rump and teeth, and

he fights the urge to get a hard-on that he attributes to nature, rather than the flesh and

organs slinking through the mud across the lane. He can’t keep his eyes open. He can’t

keep them closed. He flicks his cigarette butt into a low orbit around the earth.

It might not look like it at this point, but we’re building a house here. We’re

making something of nothing, putting shutters on mountains and molehills, wiring the

four corners of the earth, plumbing the great tide of time, creating a certain specific thing out of an iconic theoretical nothing. Pedascule, the hoddie, hates the walls he’s built

around his life but loves this moment before the day when the emptiness could turn out to

be anything, even good. He leans to the side of the hood and dry heaves for a while.

He sits up and takes a drink of coffee. The first thing we need in order to build a

house is a hole. A house makes any hole a home, but you need the physical absence

before you create a sheltering presence. Pedascule knows that Zeno was right what he

said about masons only ever getting half of the job done, and then getting half of what’s

left done, and then getting half of what’s left done, until they die, which they never do,

because they live half of their lives, and then half of what’s left, only ever earning half of

what they’re worth on the dollar.

Pedascule rolls a pile of chew between his fingers. He wants to chew it. He

doesn’t want to chew it. He rolls it between his fingers some more. He shakes a hangover’s muddle to organize his life. He worries about money but pushes past that 47 wall. He wishes he had more things but climbs beyond such thinking. He wonders what he lacks, wonders what’s out there in the world. He puts his hand on this wall, closes his eyes, leans his ear against it, thinks about a fourth thicker, taller, invisible wall. He spits chew into the Earth.

He sits on the hood of his car, prying orange and pasty mud from his boots with a stick, chewing tobacco. A constant tax on the poor, he tells himself. I know, I know, he thinks, don’t start. He can’t deal with his own tired arguments about society and value right now, so he pushes the chew with his tongue deep into his lower lip until he decides once and for all that chewing tobacco counts for one serving of the vegetable group and that he owns no regrets.

7:15 a.m. He picks up his imaginary cell phone to call Boss Mason and remind him that he doesn’t own a cell phone, so he’s going to show up at work at the time they decided on the day before, which is why he is here now, rather than experiencing some other Zen: dreaming of the dead in their infinite accusation or masturbating in the shower; which is why he is hungover instead of sleeping it off or nestling deep inside the woman next to him; which is why time moves so slow when we’re at the bottom of the tower or the base of the hill – because the people who control our money own our time, and we sit here growing older and watching days pass while they sleep in, ageless, and their old money sleeps in, making new money at the top of the hill where time moves faster. . . . But. Boss Mason’s not old. . . . It’s a metaphor, he thinks. . . . For what? . . .

Let it go. Let it go. He lets it go and spits tobacco into the upper atmosphere – a tiny outer ring of an unringed planet – and tries to remember if he’s sad or mad or lonely or hopeful 48

given the events of last night, but all he remembers about last night is on display in the

museum of his resent past: a white garbage bag full of beer and beer cans, an overflowing

ashtray with a concentric circling hole of butts down to the ceramic center, a full

prophylactic toed beneath the bed. His lover. His bane.

The woods hem in all around him, all the time. They are around us all, and he

wonders if that would be different if the woods had been named after a philosopher

instead of a capitalist. What would his life be like if he had shipwrecked on the shores of

Platosylvania instead? The woodchuck across the way shakes his head, would probably yell, “Quit your pissing and moaning,” if he a.) understood spoken systems of symbolic

representation and b.) could read minds while c.) giving a shit.

The big empty. Lack. Need, and yet, he shakes his thoughts. Empty, and thinks,

all good homes begin with a hole. Pedascule looks into the hole before him and says,

“Your ass is ours, Big Empty.”

7:22 a.m. Monday? Why not? Other people are doing other things. We might just

as well begin filling this hole. Monday, the alpha to the paycheck’s omega, the first step

of a thousand mile journey, Act I scene I, the moon’s day. Could it be any other day, any

other place, some other material? No. Events only line up as they do, or at least that’s the

only way they have lined up to date. The hole couldn’t care less about Pedascule’s

Metonic notions. Holes do not fall prey to the pathetic fallacies that so much of Nature is

fond of – they do not envy angry clouds or respect joyful hills – certainly not today,

anyway, for holes lack emotion, just as, strictly speaking, the are defined by what they

lack. On the other hand, thinks Pedascule, This Monday could, of course, be a different 49

Monday in which I am a different Pedascule, and he starts to think about Angelina Jolie but thinks better of such thoughts.

Things (t) have happened before this Monday (p). Other things (t sub 1) will happen afterward. Few of those things matter much to the structure and shape of this upcoming foundation. He has only the capacity to affect (t sub 1) within the distance he could travel at the speed of light if he could travel at the speed of light. Unlike a language that gives only as it takes away, which means only in that it does not mean, which relies on meanings from the past and the future rather than anything that could happen at this moment, a foundation means nothing – it does. It does not represent, stand in the place of something else, symbolize. It just sits there. The end.

That old azure Dodge station wagon kicks itself in the ass and onto the jobsite with its obvious last leg. Pedascule knows the car, the speed at which it arrives, the smell of miniature cigars and oil burning. He knows, as he knows any form whose shadow or echo or lingering odor he is aware of, that this car carries a mass of slump, a massive slouch, a sluggish, wondering, predictable soul. Colonel Killer stoves his thumb crawling out of the car. He says, “Shit.” He wiggles his thumb, shakes his hand. He says, “What the hell’s up?”

And as well as Colonel Killer knows that nothing on Earth Pedascule tells him could be worth listening to, Pedascule knows that nothing he says is worth saying.

Pedascule says, “All things moving forward at the same rate they’re falling.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.” 50

Pedascule thinks of holes and holelessness. Vice and desire. He thinks, Monday,

Monday; dah dah, dah dahdahdah. The White Goddess out in the sun in the rain in the bright sunshine. Go on. Time, motion, futility, the being used for base purposes. Later in

the week, he thinks, I’ll think more on this. His pulse hammers inside his head. For now, he spits, stares off across the acres and acres of atoms and empty space, starts counting

the molecules: one, t-. . .

Colonel Killer says, “Ain’t there nobody else here yet?”

Pedascule says, “Guess not. Got the time?”

Colonel Killer fishes through a number of pockets, inspects several nearly empty

packs of little cigars, pulls one from a pack, lights it from the dwindling embers of

another, tosses the smaller on the mud and rock beneath him, hocks some phlegm, spits.

He says, “What’s that?”

Pedascule says, “Nothing.”

Colonel Killer says, “Well, seen that storm moving in this morning?”

Pedascule says, “Doesn’t look like a storm. Feels like one.”

Colonel Killer says, “Ain’t no storm. Weather Channel says it’s moving in this

morning. Gotta get my toolbox.”

Pedascule watches after the Colonel, wide-bottomed and unfortunate. A bricolage

of nutrients, elements, and electronic impulses, economically unviable, a touch gamey,

unhappily married to an unhappy wife, a poor father to poor children, a lousy son of a

woman who, by all accounts, is quite a bitch. The Colonel humps along. No woodwork,

thinks Pedascule, would have such things crawl from it. The man’s saving grace is his 51

own bastardry. That is, the illegitimate son of John Wayne is still, somehow, the son of

John Wayne, and Pedascule respects that.

The Colonel ambles away, wondering in his own manner how life could have

brought him to this moment, whether or not his children are happy, how he has become

this thing with these hairy knuckles and pockets full of half-packs of itty-bitty cigars, when his taxes are due, if his car is ready for another quart, what the day will bring, and where he put his toolbox.

Would it make us all feel better to know we are inside The Poet’s head, that we are playing along in Her / His Great Unpredictable Artifice, being directed left to right over and over towards some greater purpose? Pedascule leans back on the hood, thinks,

Yes, this would feel better, then, No. No, Hell help me, no. He cakes his bumper with mud from his boot, wishes he were a drunk, stops thinking for just a moment about the rest of the world. And we all disappear.

Colonel Killer finds his box. Colonel, that’s what these guys call him. Some people get a title never having snugged into a uniform, without ever having stood at attention or given an order. Some people are called Lefty, though they’re right handed; some are called Hairy, though they’re bald; Shorty, though they’re of average height;

Rocky, though they’re quite smooth. Sometimes form follows function and names mean

something. Other times, we just are as we are. And so he is.

Our Colonel, our block layer, the Killer, has never had a moment of anything

military about him, from his shape to his dress, though he did try a flattop haircut one

time. It was crooked and patchy. Besides which, if the Colonel knows anything about 52 giving orders, it’s that the only time he can get his dog to sit is when he says, “Come here, boy.”

Pedascule breathes in. The deep, heavy air of late summer sits all through him. It is easier to believe we are all made up of the stories we tell about ourselves in this kind of weather, where the air weighs heavy, serious about itself. He spits a long stream of everything he knows into the mud beside his car. Pedascule creates for the Colonel tales of wonder and awe, of depravity and bad luck. He makes the world too much for the man, erases that life, and makes the man too much for the world. He gives these stories to the

Colonel, hoping they will make something of him.

No avail.

Colonel Killer wanders back to where Pedascule sits twisted on the hood of his car. A bright white and enormous pickup truck bumps and strains onto the jobsite, slides a few feet on this Monday mud in the midst of our patron’s driveway, idles while a steely song plays itself out. When the engine stops, the Colonel turns to Pedascule and says,

“Tah. They’re here.”

On this day, this Monday, as it were, in, call it, early September – Monday,

September, arbitrary names for places in time that would probably come around with or without names – Boss Mason and his crew arrive, sleepy, anticipatory. Or, without the name, perhaps the day would not have come around – have you ever thought of that?

Pedascule spits straight up in the air and begins calculations for the diameter of the Earth given the distance (d) in inches the spit travels horizontally and the time (s) in seconds it 53 took the spit to travel up and land (d) to his left, and Yes, he thinks by the way, I had thought of that.

The crew is thankful for a new job, a new job site. A welcome change from the monotony they had fallen into during the past several weeks, an enormous series of angles and mismeasurements, a testament to our skills as bricklayers, hoddies, sentient beings. Here they find a hole, calling for four ninety-degree angles and over two thousand twelve-inch blocks.

Boss Mason and his son, Phaethon, slide feet-first from the bowels of the great white truck. The two spotless deep-tan men in spotless deep-blue denim and spotless deep-white t-shirts hit the ground feet-first on the mud. Pedascule motions to spit but nods instead, taking into consideration the wind factor, which there is none to speak of, but he’s glad to have thought about it anyway. In Egypt seven thousand years ago, he knows, someone looked at his shadow in a well and guessed the circumference of the

Earth within a few feet, so he continues his calculations, wishing he had an abacus. He and the Colonel watch the two men make their way out of the truck.

Phaethon says, “What time did you tell them to be here?”

Boss Mason says, “Seven-thirty sharp. Goddamnit, Del’s got the transit. What time is it?”

Phaethon says, “Ten to eight. You should dock their pay for this. They should be here when they’re supposed to.”

Boss Mason says, “I know. This time I’m going to. I’m sick of this shit. I try to treat them nice, and it don’t ever work.” 54

Pedascule spits mostly past the hood of his car. A small spattering of tobacco

juice and grains, a dribbling pattern of saliva smattering, maybe, at best just a few

dropped dots of fluid on his bumper. He wipes them off with his steel-toes, smearing the

jobsite mud in clumps and globs, replacing a miniscule blight with a minor blemish. He

remains innocuous. His opinion is neither solicited nor freely given. He carries a few

final digits in the tail end of a long mental Algebra and comes up with an Earth that’s two-hundred-twenty-seven miles around, give or take a couple hundred yards. Same answer he got when he X-ed, Y-ed, and Z-ed the curvature of a steady stream of piss a few weeks ago.

Boss Mason pulls the dipstick from beneath the hood of the mighty mighty white beast, wipes it with a tissue, puts it back into the engine, pulls it from beneath the hood.

Perfect, he thinks. Dead nuts. He makes a mental note not to be so anal retentive. Had he said that aloud, he thinks, Phaethon would have told him to make another note not to sound so gay. He closes the hood, turns to Phaethon, says, “Fuck you, faggot.”

Phaethon sits on the tailgate, headphoned to the unwavering rhythm and smooth smooth blues. Oh, he thinks, oh baby. Sex, a pale thigh. A thin sweat on his forehead, the day fading away to a world of slow slow juice. Life would be perfect if the world were made of medicine. He slips a pill from his pocket, takes a sip of Mountain Dew. He imagines making love, wooing, or otherwise romancing some young woman. He eats an apple.

Boss Mason says, “You hear me?” 55

Phaethon lips the words to some nigger music, some lame comefuckme call to

black culture. Boss Mason thinks, Whose kid is this? He says, “Give them a call. Find out

where the hell they are.”

Phaethon says, “I’ll tell them you’re pissed.”

Boss Mason says, “Yeah, I’m pissed.” He stares at the hole in the center of the

surface of our world, not that pissed, though. Whatever. “But just tell them to get here.”

Phaethon presses a button on his cell phone. Pedascule listens to one side of the

same conversation he’s heard one side or the other of for the last 924 days, “What’s up? .

. . Where you at? . . . When you leaving? . . . Dad’s pissed . . . He said he’s gonna dock

your pay . . . Gone got any bud? . . . All right.”

It’s a decent hole. It’s been a while since anyone’s dug a good hole for us. Boss

Mason thinks he’ll let the backhoe know how much he appreciates the effort. He closes

his eyes and sees the foundation, a finished product with corners dead nuts and joints so

straight you could check your level on them. He sees a transparent finished set of block

walls in his mind, overlaying the backdrop of woods and hills, the world. He opens up a

notebook, pens through a checklist.

Phaethon says, “I hate laying twelves.”

Boss Mason says, “Go down in the hole there and set up the transit. I want to see how close they dug the corners of this damn thing.”

Phaethon slides down off the tailgate. He crawls onto the tailgate. He stands. He looks around. He says, “Where’s the transit?” He lifts a bucket of rope, a pulley, a hook.

He kicks a toolbox towards the cab. He toes some plank. He shrugs, opens a can of chew, 56

dips in, puts the can away, spits. He looks under the bucket of ropes, the pulley, the hook,

kicks the toolbox towards the tailgate, spits on the rope and pulley. He says, “It ain’t back here. Is it in the cab?” He jumps down off the tailgate. He opens the front door. He looks

underneath a sweatshirt, a set of jeans and a t-shirt nobody on the crew will claim though

they’ve been in the cab of the truck for three months, some blueprints, a Playboy. He

spits under the floor mat, thumbs through the Playboy. He says, “Hey, Dad. Where’s the

transit.”

Boss Mason thinks, Dumb Shit. He checks some tools off the list, got it, got it, get

by without it, lost it, where the fuck’s the transit? Keep looking, dumbass.

Phaethon lips the words to a thousand songs, watches the hard airbrushed corners

gloss and crinkle. If the world were made of medicine, she could love me. I’d walk her

down paths of red and peach prescription. He says, “Hey, Dad. Where is it?” The

magazine, he knows, is so far away, a different world from another time. Print and photo,

real only in the sense that it is what he makes it. This woman isn’t real. This place is a

setting. Like what-do-you-call-it, the world is a stage. It’s too much to wrap his head

around – he snaps to, finds himself on the verge of tears, thumbs the bag of pills in his

pocket, one of which, he is certain, will take him to that stage where every photo would

be the photographed, each word would push through to the thing, and he could live in a

place of soft, shivering women who dream of walks on the beach with him and pasta the

size of boulders. He says, “Hey, Dad, check out these tits.” 57

Boss Mason looks up from his notebook, turns from the hole, sees the outline of

the female form, thinks, Christ, I’d crawl a mile, says, “You find the transit?” He walks

off towards an ancient Rose of Sharon.

Pedascule spits, turns to watch Del’s gray truck pull onto the mudlot. The

driveway – a hole of its own, brimming over with the dug-up orange and oily water of sand and clay and the dead skin of the heavy machine that dug it – the last chance to turn

around before the workday begins: Pedascule knows, Del doesn’t believe in it ever being

too late to call in sick. The truck spins sideways a touch, retches, corrects, would swear if

it could, grinds into four-wheel drive, and parks. The truck looks tuckered out, beat

down. You’d imagine someone would holler out for the hundredth time, “If it was my

horse, I’d a shot it a long time ago,” or sing, “The Old Grey Mare, she ain’t what she

used to be,” or matter-of-factly say, “Time to send him off to the glue factory, bud,” or

any of a hundred other stories about horses that are not stories about horses.

Gone slips out of the passenger-side door. The truck nods and resettles. Gone,

with a slim, trim not-much of a mustache, punctuated with a cigarette in the corner of his

lips, smiles and is in fact happy to be here. Baggy cargo shorts held up by a belt whose

tip pendulums from kneecap to kneecap as he walks. He wears a t-shirt with no sleeves

that reads: “Conception begins with the first drink.” He says, “Only five more days till

the weekend, boys.”

Colonel Killer says, “Yeah, really.”

Gone says, “I guess it’s just a manic Monday.”

Phaethon says, “About time you two showed up.” 58

Gone says, “I wish it were a Sunday.”

Phaethon says, “We couldn’t start without you two.”

Gone says, “My I-don’t-have-to-run day.”

Del crawls out of the driver-side door with his cell phone wedged between a

shoulder and an ear. A donut in one hand, coffee in the other, a lit cigarette in both. Del

says, “What’s up? That sounds good. What do you want me to do with this? Did you guys get started yet? Tell Dad I’ll bring it. Don’t set that there. The plant called, said the

truck ain’t coming till later. Okay, Mom. Don’t set that there. Okay, Mom. This is going

to burn me. Yeah. I love you, too. No, I’m not smoking. I love you. Come get this. Bye,

Mom.”

Del ends the call with his chin on a red button, lets the phone fall into his shirt pocket.

Phaethon says, “Where the hell you been?”

Del says, “We were running late. Gone, what do you want me to do with your cigarette?”

Gone says, “You can have my cigarette when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.”

Del says, “I don’t want your cigarette. Did you guys start yet?”

Phaethon says, “We can’t start without you. We been here all morning without a transit.”

Del says, “You can’t use the transit until you clear some shooting paths. Gone, why’d you hand me this cigarette?” 59

Phaethon says, “Well, yeah, but we could have been done with that if you’d of been here on time.”

Gone said, “You said you wanted one.”

Del says, “I said, ‘I have one.’”

Gone says, “Then why’d you want another one?”

Del says, “You told me to hold this one.”

Gone says, “I had fun Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but it’s all over now, and it sure is Monday.”

Colonel Killer says, “Great. Here we go already.”

Gone says, “Here we go. Nah nahnah. Nah nah nahnah.”

Phaethon says, “Well it don’t matter. I guess we’ll just get started now.”

Gone says, “Here we go. Nah nahnah. Nah nah nahnah.”

Pedascule says, “They any good this year?”

Gone says, “Nah nahnah nah nah nahnah.”

Phaethon says, “Hell no. They got the same team they had last year except they lost all their good players.”

Gone says, “Pittsburgh’s going to the Super Bowl. Here we go.”

Colonel Killer says, “Yeah, really.”

Del says, “Forget your coffee this morning, Colonel?”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.” He rubs his shoulder blade, drags his little cigar, wishes he and/or everybody else was dead or something else. 60

Del drags his one smoke and field-dresses the other for later. He says, “Hey, man.

Not everybody can be me. Don’t let it get to you.”

Colonel Killer says, “Really.”

Pedascule says, “Let’s get this done, so we can start.”

Del says, “Heard about your wife getting married. Isn’t that weird, your wife, but you’re not her husband any more. Fucked up. Anyway, even though she found somebody a hell of a lot less miserable, I’m sure yens two is still cousins.”

Boss Mason walks back, zipping up his fly. He says, “Okay, stop fucking around.

Let’s get some work done. Truck’s gonna be here at ten.”

Del says, “Just fucking with you, buddy.”

The crew moves towards Boss Mason’s truck for shovels, a water pump, a raison d’être. Boss Mason tells them everything they’ve always known about life and had no need to ask: that they gotta get the water out of the hole, that the trench around the hole needs to be mostly dry and plumb before the truck gets here, that ex-wives are a bunch of dumb cunts and, no doubt about it, more trouble than they’re worth. Some of the cubes of block sit sunken in the mud. Boots thick, slick, and heavy with the sticky muck of the site, the crew crawls variously into the hole.

Phaethon says, “Maybe if I stick that trowel up your ass, you’ll wake up a bit.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

Phaethon says, “Go stick your dick in the mixer, that might help.”

Colonel Killer says, “Hmph.”

Pedascule says, “Phaethon.” 61

Phaethon says, “What’s the matter, did you let Broadzilla be on top last night?”

Colonel Killer says, “Yeah, really.”

Pedascule says, “Phaethon.”

Phaethon says, “Poor Wittle Colonel, you want to lay down and take a nappy?”

Pedascule says, “Phaethon,” his shirt sweat-soaked deep gray. “Hey, buddy, did you tell the rest of the crew about your nickname? Long story short, fellas, but

Phaethon’s done a lot of neat and nasty stuff in his time, but nobody ever points him out as Phaethon, Renaissance Man Extraordinaire or Phaethon The Mighty Who Once Passed a Sobriety Test Drunk or even Polymatheon. But one time. One time, right, buddy? One time, he gets caught fucking a pig . . .”

Phaethon’s heard the joke, one of his favorites, but that last pill, he’s not sure, maybe the one before, something’s got his veins snaking across the backs of his forearms.

His throat’s dry and the shovel weighs two-twenty-five (at which point he burps a little, because, normally, he can easily bench two-twenty-five twelve times, but at this moment, he can’t even bother to pour piss out of a hole). His skin feels loose over muscle and bone, and he wants to call it a day, drown in the mud, which might be heaven for all he knows. He says, “Go to hell,” knowing meanness can carry him through a tough time better than any savior, strolling along the beach.

Pedascule says, “I’s just finishing up. One time, that’s it, Phaethon and the pig were in love, you know, so who are we to judge? Nonetheless, my man’s been a pig fucker the rest of his days.” 62

Phaethon chuckles, sucks some saliva back through his teeth. The shovel weighs the right amount now, and he sees the mud he’s dumped on the bank. Goddamn. This is a big job. Insurmountable. Just right. He scoops another shovel full of mud from the trench and watches his forearms light up with veins and tendons. There could not be a more perfect place for him at this moment. He dumps the shovelful on the bank. He says, “I fucking hate this shit.”

Colonel Killer, pretending to light a little cigar, watches Pedascule push a five- gallon bucket on its side halfway under water, watches him lift the bucket, and watches him dump it on the bank. Except for his crooked nose, the kid’s damned near symmetrical today. Which bugs the Colonel a hell of a lot, but not as much as having to be rescued from the boss’s son by this college twerp. He stops pretending to light a little cigar and lights a little cigar.

Gone has the water pump by the nuts and shakes the living hell out of it. The extension cord wraps around his throat and right leg while the hose batters him about the head and chest.

Boss Mason looks up from his list and says, “My money’s on the pump.”

Del says, “Watch that left, brother.”

Gone hops on one foot, kicking at the motor with the other. He switches feet and tries to duck a blow from the hose. Life is like this for Gone. The hose catches him again in the left ear. He uses the pump’s momentum against it, drops his shoulder and extends his arms while his legs go more or less limp. The motor lands in a foot of water in the trench, the hose up over the bank pointed at the gutter, the extension cord hits and 63

bounces off the three-prong outlet on the generator. Gone says, “Damn near.” The crew is

pleased.

Meantime, Del doesn’t entirely believe in the hole. He’s got his legs crossed

Indian style and he floats three feet above the water. It’s not a hole if it’s full of

something. This one’s full of water. Can’t be a hole anymore than the water can be rain,

because the water isn’t rain unless it’s falling and then it’s not water but rain. Eyes

closed, mostly closed, he imagines the back of his hands. Ain’t no hole – it’s a tiny lake,

a waterway to itself. He imagines his arms and his chest and his legs. Ain’t no hole. He

imagines the world around him not so hot, not so humid, not so muddy, with seventy

virgins.

Boss Mason says, “Quit. Fucking. Around.”

Del splashes into the mud puddle under the weight of seventy virgins – legs and

lace and soft tiny feet – who quickly move on, scatter across the hillside like so many

does – rusty red-brown with white-flag tails trailing their forms – who are there suddenly

and gone suddenly. Del says, “The world is a mud puddle.”

Colonel Killer coughs up some phlegm. He says, “Think we’ll get it cleaned out in time? I think we ought to call and cancel the truck. Go home and wait for this place to dry up on its own.”

Del says, “Well I need the money. So I’ll paddle a kayak around this hole for eight hours if Boss’ll pay for it.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.” 64

Gone shakes shards of tobacco and four thousand chemicals from his fingers, shoves what remains into his lower lip. He says, “Want a dip?”

Pedascule says, “If the water were any deeper, I might take one.”

Gone says, “I’m going for a dip.”

Pedascule says, “Just playing with my tool, while my dip pumps.”

Gone says, “Who you calling a dip?”

Pedascule says, “Who else is draining Boss’s hole?”

Gone says, “Hey, I resemble that remark.”

Pedascule says, “Okay, dipstick.”

Gone says, “Dippity doodah.”

Pedascule says, “Careful with your diphthongs.”

Gone says, “Dippity A.”

Pedascule says, “My, oh, my.”

Gone says, “It’s a shit-eating day.”

Pedascule dips his shovel in his water. He splashes his water on his bank, watches it run back in, splash, watch, repeat. This is my life, he thinks. More to the point, this is his job. And he shakes his head, having expected none of it. Pedascule thinks about digging himself out of debt, and thinks if you’re in the hole, how the hell can you dig yourself out. That’s the problem with Capitalism. Too many people with too many shovels.

Gone thinks, this is what I’m doing right now. He spits between his top front teeth towards a cinder block that rocks from the impact, falls from the cube. He pulls up mud 65

and water from the mess. Is a shovel just a shovel when it’s not covered in mud, or is it

only a shovel when it is covered in mud, and when it is covered in mud, where does the

mud end and the shovel begin because it can’t be a shovel without the mud, but if you

separate the mud and the shovel, you just got a stick with a metal hand on the end. No, he thinks, that ain’t right.

Pedascule says, “Hey, Gone.”

Gone says, “Don’t wear it out.”

Pedascule says, “Hey, buddy, Do you ever think maybe there’s more out there for

you?”

Gone says, “No. You?”

Pedascule says, “No.”

Boss Mason taps a Penguins pencil against a Steelers notebook. The cloud cover

sits there, low. Heavy. Over our heads and in our lungs. Boss Mason knows this is a sky that could collapse and wash away forty-eight manhours of work in forty-eight minutes, fill this trench with more of the same. Or it could pass, clear, rise, or simply sit there.

Low low over our noses. Christ, what he wouldn’t pay for a way to predict the weather.

Not to a tee, but, hell, there should be some way to know whether or not to even have his crew show up for work. Save everybody the time, him the money, and them getting pissed off at him for making them come out and stand in the rain. But he can’t tell, not yet, and who knows when that truck’s going to show up. He taps the pencil on the notebook. Christ, he wishes it were a prayer, what I wouldn’t give for a machine that tells 66 me whether or not to call my crew to work and can also fill me in on when that cement’s going to show. The lack of sun notwithstanding, it’s fucking hot out here.

A woodchuck humps out of his hole in a field across that street. They don’t bare their gums when they moan and squeak. Were he conscious, perhaps he could pity the poor bastards who let their own hole fill with so much water. Oh, well, perhaps he would think, survival of the fittest. Anyway, better their hole than mine, he might think. Maybe he’d treat the crew with the same amazement they dole out to themselves. He could slap them on the backs and encourage them to be the best doggone humans they can be.

Maybe he’d say, “That’s what you get, fuckers.”

While the rest of the crew finishes clearing the trench of water and debris, and

Boss Mason runs his muddy pencil back over his muddy list, Phaethon sets up the tripod for the transit; he pulls the three telescoping legs out and plants then in the ground, guessing at level. He puts the head unit on the tripod. He adjusts the legs, then fine-tunes the whole unit until the bubble is dead center the circle. If, over the course of building the leads for this structure, the bubble shifts to the edge of the little circle, the measurements could be off by half an inch from one corner to another. Or half a foot. Or six miles. It don’t matter. The point is: keep it level.

A couple dozen turkey vultures fly overhead. Gone says, “Keep moving, Ped.” Do them birds ever land, he thinks. He doesn’t think they do, but he doesn’t know exactly what they do when they’re not looking for dead shit to eat. You look up, there’s nothing between you and the other side of the universe. You look up again, there’s forty birds. By the time you remember to check to see whether or not they landed, it’s just you and 67

infinity again. The birds drift in and out of the haze. Gone hefts some water out of the

ditch and imagines an in-air vulture collision, crossed flight paths, one injured, one dead,

authorities have no leads concerning the cause of the incident. Gone says, “One local

official says, ‘Shit happens.’” He spits. He shovels some water on the bank. He says,

“That’s my funday. Whoah-ew-oah. My I-don’t-need-a-gun day.”

This is not what Pedascule had expected. The air wears heavy in the autumn. By

this point in a parallel universe, he’s working on his tan, schmoozing with the world’s

elite – actors and actresses, boxers, promoters, Playboy bunnies. He throws a shovelful of

water on the bank, imagines hitting Gone in the back of the head with the spade, making

a break for it, imagines hitting Gone in the back of the head with the spade just to point and laugh, imagines hitting Gone in the back of the head with the spade and pressing his heel to the tool to take off Gone’s fingers. But he likes Gone and can’t figure why such things cross his mind and drifts back to the beach where Angelina Jolie is very impressed by his pecker and wants him to run off with her to Godknowswhere, to a place with white beaches and daiquiris and dark men in white shirts and long pants bringing him condoms and cheese and buckets of beer on ice. Now, that’s the life. Though he hates sand and the ocean and waiters, he’s certain all that would be worth it for a bj from Angelina Jolie. He throws a shovelful of water on the bank, wishes he had a beer.

He looks up at some turkey buzzards circling around. He hates birds. He tries to recall his other future and gets a little stuck in it, throws water on the bank. He wishes for a beer or, at least, a fucking Messiah to come along and turn his body into beer. Is that how that works? Whatever, you get the picture. It’s always possible, I guess, to get out of 68 this debt, shave this beard, and get back on the road, he thinks. I’ll be licking sushi out of

Angelina’s cooter by spring. Though he has no idea what famous people lick off each other, he’s sure it would be expensive.

Boss Mason inspects his hole, stands with his arms crossed over his belly, wishes he had more time for the gym and to take care of his yard and to watch television, then shakes his head. Imagines a house. He sees a coming to life and wants to move on to the next step, to hell with this one; the trench has put up a good fight to stay wet, and he’s willing to concede, hates to see his boys clambering around in this mess, getting their asses kicked so early in the week. Boss Mason says, “Let’s clear some shooting lanes.”

Del says, “Can’t we just set up the transit outside the hole?”

Phaethon says, “But I already got it set up there in the middle – it’s ready to shoot.”

Del says, “Would you rather move a four-pound transit out here and set it up again or move eight ton of blocks all through this mud?”

Gone says, “Sounds like six of one, I’d say.”

Boss Mason says, “He’s got a point, dildo. Make it so.”

Phaethon says, “Eye, eye, mother fucker.” He grabs the transit by the throat and drags it close to where the hose drains over the bank.

Pedascule says, “Sixty-one, couple dozen of the others.”

Phaethon thinks about throwing a little fit. Like he can’t find a place to set the transit because it’s all too muddy or maybe he suddenly can’t get the tripod to telescope 69 right or he could fake getting stung by a bee. But he fingers a pill out of the bag and swallows it, waiting to see what happens next.

Gone says, “Sixteen tons, couple cousins and your mother?”

Pedascule reaches his shovel out and taps Gone on the jeans under his scrotum.

He says, “You’re it.”

Gone says, “Oop. Good game, buddy.”

Pedascule says, “A tap in the sack is worth two in the bush.”

Boss Mason says, “You guys grab a lead. Del, take the tape around. Phaethon, write down the measurements.” Boss Mason walks towards the transit while Phaethon walks to the Great White Truck for a pen and the Playboy.

The crew moves sluggish through this pit. Their boots and pants soak thick with orange and gummy mud. You could spend all day leaning on one foot to scrape off the other, then setting the other down and scraping the first, and etcetera – a fool’s endeavor, perhaps. The moral is, always let your left foot know about your right foot. Pedascule,

Gone, and Colonel Killer pick a corner apiece. The Colonel lights a miniature cigar, pulls his handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his forehead, blows his nose, folds up the rag, puts it in his pocket. Gone kicks a few fallen, muddy-clumped rocks out of the trench.

The trench falls back on itself in gravel and sand and clay and grass and infinitely unique combinations thereof. The banks push into the hole, the hills push in on the valley, the air weighs heavy on the world.

Gone is worked to silence. He watches for places to land, should the universe turn on its side. Should gravity change its mind and pull left instead of down. Gone wishes he 70

were inside – in his house, in a grocery store – where there’s always a place to land, even

if gravity pulls the complete flip and lands him on the ceiling under the couch under the rug. A childhood fear, that the laws of the universe would liquefy and show us all who’s boss, like for real. He also worries about a world without friction, such that a body in motion would just fucking stay in motion, outside force or no, such that the world becomes a humiliating kind of skating rink ruled by the nimble and wry, while he slides around on his ass all day, pratfalling to cartoon drumming.

A cave’s the place for me, Gone thinks. He imagines himself two hundred and thirty thousand years ago with long hair on his shoulders and a wife with a long, broad jaw. He’s carrying a bone, probably the femur of some animal much bigger than himself.

He takes good care not to let the fire go out and the world doesn’t exist to him. There are no mysteries or fears or words, just this place, here and now.

The crew watches Gone crouch around, hop to the side, scratch his head, then his belly. He opens and closes his mouth, moves through the trench a little sideways with his hands almost in the mud, dragging the shovel along beside him. He feels the eyes on him, straightens up, pounds twice on his chest, says, “Ain’t you ever seen a monkey in a mud puddle?”

Boss Mason sighs, thinks for a second that he should say something about not screwing around or taking life seriously, but he shrugs and puts an eyeball to the eyepiece of the transit. He adjusts the lenses, stabilizes the legs, screws the head onto the legs tighter, hikes up his jeans, curses at the mud that won’t let him stand well. Everything is stable or, at least, equally unstable. He looks through the lens. 71

Del meets Gone at the corner of the hole. Gone props himself against an earthen

bank. He asks Del for a smoke. Del hands him one. He asks Del for a light. Del hands

him one. Del tells him he’s got to get the rest of the water out of the corner before the

cement truck comes. Gone tells Del no thanks he ain’t that thirsty. Del tells him he’s

serious. He asks Gone for a chew. Gone gives him the can. Del takes a dip. Gone’s pocket chirps. Del says, “Is that a pink-breasted nutsucker singing in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me.” Gone says, “I’ll show you a nutsucker.” He reaches in his pocket and answers his phone. He says, “’Sup?”

Boss Mason says, “Quit screwing around, you two.”

Del hands Gone the dumb end of the tape measure. Gone says into the phone,

“Hold on a minute,” and puts his cigarette between his lips, tilts his head clear to his

shoulder to trap his phone, and uses both hands to place the tape as close as possible to

the rebar stake that signifies the absolute corner. Del spits onto the bank. Wintergreen

saliva dangles from blades of grass. The sting in his lip, the surge in his heart, the clarity.

He bends the tape in the middle and holds it steady, perpendicular to the uneven earth.

Boss Mason says, “You got to hold it straight. It ain’t going to be a good measurement if it’s all off to the side.”

Gone says, “Tell him the tape’s straight, but we ain’t so sure about his son.”

Del says, “Which way does it need to go, Boss?”

Boss Mason says, “Left. More. Left. No. Left. Goddamnit, Del. I said, left.” 72

Gone holds the tape to the ground with one hand and raises the other with his thumb and forefinger out. He says, “Del, show him this. If you hold these two fingers upside down, they make a seven. That’s how you know it’s your right hand.”

Del says, “This is left.”

Boss Mason says, “Not your left, dipshit, my left. Don’t you see where I’m pointing?”

Del moves the tape left. Right. He moves it wherever Boss Mason tells him to, because the hand that signs the paycheck rules the compass. He moves it backwards, forwards, higher, lower. If there were additional, readily accessible dimensions, he would move the tape into those and then good luck taking a measurement, Boss, I’m out of here.

He closes his eyes and moves the tape as Boss tells him. He imagines the back of his hands. He imagines his arms and elbows. He imagines his home, his real home, void of human nuisances.

Boss Mason says, “Hey, Del.”

Del says, “Yeah.”

Boss Mason says, “Oh, nothing, buddy, just checking for assholes. Hold the tape there.”

This ditch doesn’t have to be precise anyway, is what Del doesn’t get. It just has to be within a half inch or so. Hell, they’ve poured into ditches that were two inches off, made most of it up with the concrete and the rest on the first seven courses of block, but he’s not in charge, and nobody’s asking. It’s not worth the argument. Del says, “How’s this, Boss?” 73

Boss Mason says, “Okay. Del. Hold it there. Ninety-three and a quarter. Okay.

Del, move over to the next corner.”

Gone lets go of the dumb end of the tape and says, “Okay, I’m here. What’s up? .

. . Yeah, I seen the game last night . . .”

Del slouches off towards Colonel Killer. He wipes the retracting tape on his t-

shirt, careful not to let any mud into the guts. Gone flicks his cigarette into the puddle at

his feet, traps the phone again to his shoulder and says, “Uh-huh,” grabs his can of chew,

and snaps his finger on it, packing the tobacco all to one side. Del hikes through the

trench, leaning forward a bit, trying not to get stuck while he tries not to make a show of

looking like he’s trying not to get stuck. He moves over to the Colonel’s corner. The

Colonel drags on his miniature cigar, keeps it trapped under his walrusian mustache,

wipes sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm. Gone puts a chew in his lip,

returns the can to his pocket, grabs the flat shovel, and rebegins removing water from his

corner.

Colonel Killer leans his head back a touch, squints, imagines himself sitting a

horse while audiences worldwide sit in rapture, waiting to see what’s next. He stands at a

short remove, watching himself, waiting to see what’s next. In the meantime, he thinks,

80% chance of rain, 100% humidity, 92 degrees by this afternoon. Heat index puts that up there even higher, like, what? 95? 98? He blows a blue and thick white stream of smoke out of the other corner of his lips. Local on the Eights showed a massive green pattern just off to the left there, like a fucking siege, like battle of, what do you call it?

No, wasn’t the Bulge. Leningrad or Stalingrad, some damned commie place probably, 74 like Custer’s last stand, that mass of green trailing clear off the screen there, probably clear out to middle of Ohio, and it’s just sitting there.

They said it oughta be hitting us this morning but it might not, which is why

Colonel Killer is certain he could have been a weatherman, because you make your money being a hundred percent certain but one hundred percent unaccountable that the world may or may not be the way you’re saying it’s going to be. Or not. That’s the life.

Maybe I’ll go back to school for weatherman’s degree. Colonel Killer thinks, Tah!

That’ll be the day and blows smoke up in the air. Or like Del who couldn’t give a shit if it rains or if the commies dropped a atomic bomb on his head. It’s just another day and he could take it or leave it. Wasting his life. Dumb kid, living some fucking fantasy life, building worlds in his mind. He’ll be fat and old, shooting pool with me any day now, and that tan will fade them tattoos, and then he’ll be trying to scoop up somebody’s sloppy seconds, and he’ll stop hassling me about Petunia and my life and my dad and he’ll have his own damn problems for once to wonder about and probably a fat bitch of a wife to hound him up and down his own block every day and he won’t be able to spend his evenings staring at the back of his hands or whatever the hell he says The Improbably

Dreamlike Poet tells him to do.

Colonel Killer says, “Think it’ll rain?”

Del says, “I don’t know, bud. I wouldn’t mind going home, I’ll tell you that.”

Colonel Killer says, “I know what you mean. Wouldn’t want to dig this trench out again, though. Plus I need the dough.” 75

Del imagines himself on his couch in his house watching tv. He says, “Well. It

don’t matter much.”

Colonel Killer says, “You spose you oughta measure my corner?”

Del says, “I spose.”

Colonel Killer says, “Okay. Give me the dumb end. Kinda fitting, ain’t it?”

Del says, “Here, you can take the measurements if you want.”

Colonel Killer says, “No, thank you. Not with Boss in his mood. He’ll motherfuck

me up and down like he caught me in bed with his old lady. Tah. No offense, but it’s

better you than me.”

Del says, “You sure?”

Colonel Killer grabs the silver end of the tape, puts his miniature cigar in his lips,

squats, says, “Tah,” drags, blows smoke, says, “Hope you been practicing left and right.”

Del opens up the tape, extends it above his head, doubles it over, moves it to what looks like level, holds it steady, says, “Okay, Boss, what’d you get?”

Boss Mason squints through the transit, adjusts the lenses, leans back, checks the bubble for level, leans in, squints through the transit, says, “Ninety-two and three-eights.”

Colonel Killer says, “I’ll be damned. He didn’t motherfuck you even one time.”

Del says, “Maybe he’s starting to like me.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah,” and lets the dumb end go.

Del leans into his hike again through the trench, slouching towards Pedascule’s

corner. He takes care to wipe every tiny pebble and muddy chunk and grain of sand and effect of time and tide from the tape before he lets it recoil into the tape box. Pedascule 76

watches him approach. Pedascule watches Gone use the flat shovel to scrape mud from

his boot and toss the mud onto the bank, then switch feet and toss the mud onto the bank,

then switch feet, then spit on the bank, take a deep breath, and switch feet. Pedascule

watches the Colonel light a new miniature cigar with an expiring miniature cigar, then throw the spent butt into a cube of block. Pedascule watches Phaethon on the phone, saying, “Sup?” and “Yeah” and “Man, that’s bullshit,” and watches Boss Mason say, “I

ain’t paying you to talk on the phone, you little prick,” and watches Phaethon grab his

jeans’ crotch and tug, and watches Boss Mason shake his head and mouth sharp

consonants. And the heavy air kneads his scalp.

He thinks about this exact moment. He thinks about this exact moment and lets

the world fall apart inside of him. He uses his mind as a social prosthesis and tries to

recall the name of the guy who had written the article about minds as social prosthetics.

Which doesn’t matter – the name, the article, so much as the fact that he believes this

idea of mind as brain function (b) equals the amount of energy our brain and body put

into securing our position within a society by being either a.) helpful or b.) detrimental to

the people with whom we come into contact to the extent that the resulting effects (e)

change our brains and bodies – that our mind functions as such, a social prosthesis,

consciously, unconsciously, occasionally in ways we’ll never know and maybe we don’t

want to. All that, perhaps – and this is his own further inference – and this is what

religions call a soul.

Pedascule watches these people, his prostheses. A little bit of coffee comes up

from his stomach into his mouth. He swallows. He spits. He opens a can of chew and 77 dips. He thinks, I am a modern marvel, a scientific masterpiece. I am the fruitful years of intense study dedicated to creating a better world for five semi-retarded slugs who never once, never one of them, not even by accident on a single occasion have ever said, done, or thought anything that he would stand behind, care to elucidate, or want to repeat in front of a judge. He spits. He focuses intently on how to get out of debt, which amounts to an iconic dollar bill sign and an encyclopedic history of movie scenes during which you can see Angelina Jolie’s tits or almost see Angelina Jolie’s cooter.

Is it any easier to believe that we are all inside the Poet’s head, that She / He is in control here, writing or reading, which, of course, reading could be looked at as writing, performing The Poet Function, but which, forget it, is too much, so would it? The voice of The Syntactically Astute Poet God breathed through the muse. Makes about as much sense as a General Theory of Relativity or laws for quantum physics or the idea of mixing together sperm and eggs and getting a baby. Gone’s right, though he himself thinks he’s just goofing: we’re just as likely to spin off into fucking way outer space tomorrow as we are to walk through this orangish prison of Earth and Need. It is easier, he thinks, to just believe that he only thinks he has the reins or to think that he has the power even to hand over the reins, while some Puppeteer Bard in the meantime pulls him along through the universe, a minor character in his own life, a cut-rate recycled tragedy.

At the same time, he’s still not entirely convinced that anybody is going to survive his death. He’s certain that there is no way to prove that there is consciousness beyond his own, unless, of course, the Poet writes him an afterlife in which he has the chance to watch the world unfold in the wake of his departure, but wouldn’t that break 78 the rules his particular Poet has established? Pedascule watches Del open the tape measure. Pedascule pulls the bottom of his t-shirt up to his face and wipes sweat. From a- hundred-seventy-three-and-three-eighths inches away, Del pokes Pedascule in the crotch with the dumb end of the tape.

Del says, “You’re it.”

Pedascule says, “What do you think would happen to you if I died?”

Del says, “We ain’t got time for this right now.”

Pedascule says, “I mean, what if there really is no Poet or if The Poet just writes us up and crosses us out and leaves us crossed out because She / He knows we’re necessary but knows we’re never enough? How would we really know?”

Del hands Pedascule the dumb end and bends the tape back in on itself.

Pedascule says, “You know, when I was a kid, I used to think that I’d been sent back in time to live with my ‘parents’ who may or may not have been sent back in time, and I myself was some sort of robot or alien who was supposed to catalog everything such that when my living time caught up with my actual time, I’d be a real-time encyclopedia of the past (x) years. I mean I didn’t know Algebra abstractly then, I don’t think, in any real way, but I had a vague, concrete notion of variables, and I probably wouldn’t have signified the variable as such, but I’m talking ideas and feelings here, not actual formulas. And I resented my future self or, I guess, my future progenitors, though

I’d have called them my ‘real parents’ back then, because I didn’t understand why they had chosen me or what exactly I was looking for. You know how hard it is to be pissed at 79

something you made up, despite the fact that you know you made it up and that even if it

was real, there was probably a good reason why they sent me back anyway?”

Del says, “Yep.”

Pedascule says, “I have to admit, I admire my young self – his capacity to

reconcile present and potential future while other kids his age were working hard to wrap

their minds around the function and aesthetic of peeing in a toilet vs. on the floor or the

walls or their feet. On the other hand, I rather admonish the collective unconscious of a

world that would allow that poor little shit (him/me) to believe for so long in the farce of

a present tense. I mean, now, here I am farther from my birth, closer, etcetera, and I don’t

know a damn thing that could be useful to any future moment of the species. I mean I know pi out twenty digits, and I’ve given girls orgasms, but we have to figure that IF I a.) exist AND b.) am here THEN c.) my future peeps know all that shit. What if I get to the future and they’re pissed that I didn’t learn a damn thing? Will they send me back again so I have to make it through the whole fucking 1980’s as an adult? I barely survived The

Brian Adams during the first go-round. Imagine if I had to listen to another ten years of

‘Cuts Like a Knife’ again for the first time at my age. I’d shoot myself in the face. Then we’d all be screwed. Know what I mean?”

Del says, “Yep.”

Pedascule says, “The question then would be, if you could go back in time and meet Einstein and kill him so that your future particular self, your younger version (so sort of the past self but not really) certainly couldn’t go back in time, because time hasn’t 80

been invented mathematically yet, well, then, like, it’s uhm. It’s a philosophical question,

Del.”

Boss Mason says, “Ninety-two and three-eights.”

Del says, “You got her, Boss.”

Pedascule says, “What do you think, Del?”

Del says, “Just read the texts, man. That’s all we really have. Don’t worry about the rest.”

Boss Mason says, “What did we have on that first corner?”

Phaethon says, “It was Gone’s corner.”

Boss Mason says, “No shit. What did we hit?’

Phaethon says, “What?”

Boss Mason says, “What height?”

Phaethon says, “Oh, nine and three-quarters.”

Boss Mason says, “What?”

Phaethon says, “Nine. And. Three. Quarters. Dipshit.”

Boss Mason says, “Nine feet? You trying to tell me those corners are off by sixteen inches? I don’t think so, numbnut.”

Phaethon says, “Nine and three-quarter inches.”

Boss Mason says, “The tape was over Del’s head. How the hell do you figure that could come out to nine inches?”

Phaethon says, “I don’t know. I just wrote down what you told me to write down.” 81

Boss Mason says, “I sure as shit didn’t tell you to write down nine feet. Let me

see that paper.”

Phaethon makes his way to Boss Mason, the air so thick, he wonders if he should

doggie paddle out of here, make a break for it. Outside the imaginary boundary of this

yard, there’s a ditch. Across the ditch, a road. Across the road, another ditch. Across the

ditch, a field. All imaginary boundaries with misleading but necessary names, and in a hole in a small clearing in the field, a woodchuck lies on his back in his home and

measures the dimensions of life by clawing his ceiling out a touch and packing the pawful of fallen dirt against his walls.

Boss Mason says, “Jesus, that’s what you have written down here, too. That

obviously can’t be right. Christ, it’s got to be damn-near eight feet.” He pulls the back of

his forearm across his face and flicks the water to the ground.

Boss Mason looks to Del, lurching forward through the trench, trying to get to the fourth corner. He says, “Del.”

Del looks up. If Boss’s checking for assholes again, he’d just as soon not volunteer a response.

Boss Mason says, “Do you remember what height we hit on that first corner?”

Del says, “Ninety-something.”

Boss Mason says, “Ninety-what?”

Del says, “Which corner? Gone’s or the Colonel’s?”

Boss Mason says, “The first one. Gone’s.”

Gone says, “Don’t wear it out.” 82

Del says, “I don’t remember. Ninety-something.”

Gone says, “Don’t remember what?”

Boss Mason says, “Well, do you remember the Colonel’s?”

Gone says, “The Colonel’s what?”

Del says, “No.”

Boss Mason says, “Jesus Christ.”

Gone says, “Jesus Christ what?”

Del says, “How’s come?”

Boss Mason says, “We’re going to have to remeasure it. Numbnut over here forgot to write it down.”

Phaethon says, “I wrote down what you told me to write down. What the fuck else am I supposed to do?”

Phaethon imagines his father dead. He sees him lying in a pine box shaped like a rectangle with tits. Boss Mason, after more than a quarter century trying to trick time and tide, building (like the third pig, Phaethon’s often thought) with steel and stone: houses, sheds, garages, banks; bricking walls, fireplaces, chimneys, facades; stoning fire pits and businesses, silos, and sheds and, in general, trying to outlive himself in and of his work,

Boss Mason resting in a glorified pinecone. The old man rotting to sod, breaking down to goop. His other fine qualities seeping out into the ecosystem as such.

This is life, Phaethon thinks. Death is life, he thinks. Oughta call it lifedeath or just not talk about it at all. With his left hand in his pocket, he fingers open the Ziploc bag, pinches a pill, pulls the pill and the can of Skoal Berry flavored chewing tobacco 83

from his pocket, takes a pinch, swallows the pill, thinks All things have very little say, in

the end, how they’ll end up. No essential change. Just dust as they had once been water.

Boiling where they had once been frozen. Like lifedeath, and here I am, building great-

bigger buildings, so we have more and safer places to go until we die and we are

ultimately safe either way, because, you know, whatever, dude. He spits, sees the old man

more-or-less sleeping in the coffin, except for the eight-inch trowel Phaethon imagines

having stuck so deep into his spine even King Arthur couldn’t pull it out. He laughs a bit

to himself. I should have been a carpenter.

Gone says, “Write down what?”

Boss Mason says, “He was supposed to write down the height for that corner.”

Gone says, “This corner?”

Boss Mason says, “No the other corner where you’re standing, dumbass.”

Gone says, “Ninety-three and a quarter.”

Boss Mason says, “We can’t just guess at it, dipshit. I could have guessed from

the air-conditioned cab of my truck.”

Gone says, “Ain’t a guess, Kemosabe.”

Boss Mason says, “How’s come you think you know the height?”

Gone says, “Because I was holding the tape to the ground when you said, ‘Ninety-

three and a quarter,’ and I thought I better remember that, because it would be just like

the two of them to fuck it up, and I didn’t want to have to get back on my hands and knees in this mud just so you two can have fun fighting for a few more minutes. So I made up a little rhyme that goes ‘Nah nahnah nahnahn, dada dada, Nah nahnah nahnahn, dada dada 84

Ninety-three and a quarter, Nah nahnah nahnahn Boss Mason’s a big fat whore, Nah

nahnah nahnahn, Phaethon’s a little prick, Nah nahnah nahnahn, but I got a ninety-three and quarter-inch dick.’ Then there’s a guitar solo.”

Phaethon laughs so hard, he has to consciously not swallow his chew.

Pedascule has his imaginary hand resting over his empty snow-white heart in admiration, seeing The Poet’s great work coming to life before his eyes.

Del says, “Is that ‘Bad to the Bone?’”

Boss Mason clenches his fists and says, “I’d fire you on the spot if I wasn’t fucking your mom every Wednesday night,” and unclenches his fists.

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

Del says, “You want me to go back to The Colonel’s corner?”

Boss Mason says, “Yeah, after you remeasure Gone’s.”

Del says, “But he just told you the height.”

Boss Mason says, “Take the tape back over to Gone’s corner, and measure it again.”

Del says, “I’m at this corner. Can’t I do this one, then move over there?”

Boss Mason says, “Get your ass back over to that first corner.”

Del throws out his chew and spits. He squeezes the tape with his right hand, and his veins and tendons and tattoos and muscles behave like a Celtic engraving of a

Gordian knot. He tries to break the tape in his palm such the guts would spill out into the trench, springs and a few screws and blood and emptiness. He closes his eyes and lowers 85

his head. He imagines the back of his hands, his forearms, the world. He imagines

swallowing the world like a drop of salty water.

Pedascule watches Del trudge through the trench. He watches the Colonel scratch the side of his ass with a piece of rebar someone had left in the mud. The Colonel pokes the ground with a shovel, spits on the grassy bank. He watches Gone spit out his chew and smile as Del approach with cigarettes. He watches Boss Mason and Phaethon as they, without noise or appropriate motion, continue the shit that Chronos started with Chaos, that Zeus picked up, the way humans finished off the gods – take that, Fuckers – and the gods called out, “Walk out that door . . . don’t even think about . . . I’m talking to you. . .

.” And this is another day, he thinks. Pedascule, B.S., thinker of many things, he thinks of

himself, who should be at a different place in this real life, who should be getting a blow

job from a secretary (trying to make it in Hollywood, just working at his office while she

waits to hear back from agencies about her portfolio). Some blonde, for sure, with

unconscionably enormous breasts. Monsters. Gazoongas. A shorter woman, top heavy,

like she’s going to tip right over and the only thing that could hold her up is my dick in

her mouth. He brushes the shovel handle against his crotch. Pedascule hears a splash and

“Cocksucker,” and opens his eyes to see Del wiping gobs of orange clay from the shiny silver tape measure.

Del smears the mud from side to side of the tape with his t-shirt and spikes it like a football back into the mud. He picks up the tape and spikes it again. He steps out of the trench, sets the tape on the top cinder block of the cube and lifts a twelve-inch block over his head. He brings the block down on the tape three times and dents it lengthwise three 86

times. He throws the block over the ditches and roads and fields, and it lands in an

abandoned parking lot near the Iowa-Nebraska border. He throws the tape at his old grey

truck. A spiderweb grows across his windshield. He watches the tape measure rebound

off the truck into the air and out of sight into the weeds. He breathes hard. The crew

raises eyebrows.

Boss Mason says, “Glad he didn’t drop me into the mud.”

Del steps out of the trench and slugs towards his old gray truck. He closes his eyes and imagines long spears and swords and a gun the size of Orion’s Belt and imagines the body parts of everyone he’s ever known lying around the trench, the hole, the block, the blood, and him walking off into the next life. He sees himself punching, kicking, tackling the rest of the crew. His fists, feet, and self slipping off his targets, falling into the mud. He opens his eyes, clenches his hands, grinds his teeth, pulls his

elbows tight into his side.

Del becomes a great fist wrapping this small world. He squeezes the tri-county

area in the palm of himself and watches the rivers and streams spill out between the

fingers that are of himself. The trees and the hills roll into one, and, under the earth, there

is nothing but a lie, no journey in the center, no core, no magma, no other side, no hell.

All lies, what he’s heard, the solid liquid center, the gaseous pockets, the circles and

circles of worse and worse people spiraling down to the middle – lies lies lies – and he

hefts the ball that is this small world and judges it against the worlds that it holds

together. He ball-in-hand tosses it to see what falls through his fingers and what flattens

in his palm, and he is his palm and he is his fingers and he is a great big thing, and his 87 boss and his crew and his crumbling, cracking, sad sad truck are of this earth and they are this earth. Great cracks of knuckle and vein and scar tissue redirect the world, and Del is these things and is these things’ pasts and futures. And he hears, “Sure am glad he didn’t drop me in the mud,” and the world comes back to him in words, and sure as he’s heard,

“Sure am glad he didn’t drop me in the mud,” he knows, he’ll soon hear, “Tah.” And then the silence that goes along with seeing someone slouch off across the world. Rivers and mountains of veins and skin push against this Self and his body is a dried-up tool, left too long in the sun and the rain.

The words that are the world and of this world come back to him and back to him and at him and at him and at him from the past and the future and now and now and now, and the world is a tunnel forever being built, echoing itself and of itself from farther and farther and farther and farther. The hills wrap up in the corners of his eyes, off to the sides there, the horizons, the edges of the earth, what he calls early infinity. The trees and the boulders fold in on themselves and wrap him in them and he is of the earth and he can no longer breathe and he breathes dirt and the sky falls away for this little world and he breathes dirt and knows what this is to be of the earth. He breathes in the past. He brings in decay and shortcomings and successes and millions of tiny worlds that have no use for things like success and self. His shoulders grow roots, his fingertips dig into the earth, he pushes against the rot of past generations – the detritus renews – and his Self bursts forth from his chest and pushes against the earth as the earth continues to fold and refold on itself and he breaks through to the world and pushes against this old sky and leans towards the sun and sheds the husk of his Self and steps forwards against the slick mud 88

and heavy day and sure am glad he doesn’t care he didn’t doesn’t care drop me in doesn’t the mud he doesn’t care one little tiny little bit.

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

And the crew silently watches the slow, slouching Del move toward his truck and his tape and whatever else he can find. The breath from the Colonel’s “Tah” still unsettling the fat-orange-headed man’s moustaches, Del turns to the crew, drops his head towards his shoulder, and says, “Did anybody see where I put my tape?” They breathe out as one finally breathes out when one breathes out after not realizing one was holding one’s breath. And they pause, as if for a commercial break.

They look at each other. They look away from each other. They wish they were many things, but they are not those things.

Del finds another tape in his truck and returns to the corner at hand.

As though returning to their regularly scheduled program, Boss Mason says, “For

Christ sake. Would you keep that fucking tape straight.”

Del says, “You got her, Boss.”

Boss Mason steps back from the transit, names the measurement to Phaethon. He says, “Okay, Del, go back over to Pedascule’s corner.”

Del says, “What was it?”

Boss Mason says, “Let’s go, we ain’t got all day.”

Del says, “What was the height?”

Boss Mason says, “Ninety-three and three-eights.” 89

Gone says, “Good thing we didn’t listen to me. The whole universe would have been off by an eighth of an inch.”

Boss Mason says, “Good thing.”

Good thing. Gone shrugs, drags his cigarette, follows Del to the unmanned corner.

The crew takes the measurements of the last two corners. The corners are all within three- quarters of an inch. That will do. That will definitely do. In fact, there have been jobs when the crew has had to dig some corners down four, five inches and then level out the trench in between. What Boss Mason wouldn’t give for a backhoe of his own. The measurements taken, ten o’clock break time having come and left, Boss Mason says,

“Hell with it. Let’s take a break.”

Boss Mason and Phaethon walk like a father and a son to the white Chevy Pickup truck. The rest of the crew tosses aside shovels, wipes some sweat with forearms from

their foreheads, wonders how damn hot it’s going to get and if it’s going to rain today and

if they should have worn shorts instead or a raincoat. Pedascule wanders off to piss

behind a bush. Gone asks Del for a smoke and a lighter. The Colonel turns over a new-

used five-gallon bucket beneath a shade tree, despite the fact that the sun hasn’t said

“Boo” all day.

The rest of the crew joins the Colonel underneath the tree, quiet for a spell, some

eating, some smoking, some dreaming of better days either up ahead or long behind, and

Boss Mason starts talking about Godknowswhat, inventing himself for his listeners. The last of the morning fog burns off, and the sun might shine down or there might be cloud cover. The woodchuck out there in the field, he’s still not sure what to make of the day – 90 should he forage? should he stay in his hole? – he doesn’t know the legend of his shadow nor the date per se. Perhaps such faith in meteorology would embarrass him. Perhaps he’d be proud or indignant. For now, he stares off across the field, waiting for the day to go on or for something else to happen.

See, Boss Mason’s been called to the job. There’s only one man for it, that much is certain. For once, the rest of the world has caught up to him in thinking, in knowing, in believing, in feeling, in articulating, communicating, vitalizing, recapitulating, enunciating, in short, in a word, the world finally fucking gets it: Boss Mason is our man among men. The job: a new Colossus, a monument of such presumption, that no civilization could ever live up to it, a brick and block statue, a steel and stone edifice, a green and gray monster, from the ground up, the monument should weigh enough to change the rotation of the Earth, with its right foot planted twenty yards due east of the

Statue of Liberty, its left foot wearing the Gateway Arch on its little toe. It should be tall enough such that Americans on vacation in Paris can, in a sense, see their homes from there.

Boss Mason won the bid, bells go off, confetti falls, the best mason for the biggest job in American history, in the history of the world, the solar system, you get what you pay for, and they’re paying big for this one.

Boss Mason views the blueprints, bells go off, something, of course, is not right.

He cannot quite figure out whether he is obligated to pour the foundation or is another crew in charge of such things? But he works that all out and sharpens his trowel on a rock. 91

Boss Mason has the first leg of The Great American Man built and begins the

second, bells go off, an alarm perhaps – is one of his crew hurt? Couldn’t be, but how embarrassing: that his underwear is hot pink (despite the fact that the 80’s have long

since passed) is not so bad, but that the world will now know that he shaves his legs,

feminine, so embarrassing. Try it one time, just one time, he’d like to tell the world, but

he reaches across himself for a sure answer to how he could have attended work so long

in his briefs, he asks, only half a man at this moment, only half himself for his unsure

voice, Boss Mason asks, “Hello?”

The Voice says, “Boss Mason?”

Boss Mason says, “Hello?”

The Voice says, “Boss Mason, this is D___. D___ from the carwash. I was just

wondering how much of an inconvenience it would be to change that front wall from

twenty-four to twenty-seven feet. See, we’d like to put in a window in there, and we

already got the window from a different site, but we need the wall a few feet taller, so we

want you to just go ahead and make the dimensions on that front wall a little taller.”

Boss Mason says, “Hello?”

The Voice says, “Boss Mason?”

Boss Mason says, “Who is this?”

The Voice says, “Boss Mason?”

Boss Mason says, “Yes.”

The Voice says, “This is D___.”

Boss Mason says, “Hello?” 92

The Voice says, “D___ from the carwash.”

Boss Mason says, “Hey, D___.” He clears his throat and curses himself for being not quite awake enough to be too tired to answer a phone call. He says, “What can we get for you, D___?”

D___ says, “I need you to change the dimensions on that front wall, so we can fit a window in underneath it.”

Boss Mason says, “Well, D___ . . .”

The crew snacks on coffee and cigarettes or coffee and carrots or they’re not eating but looking down at their feet wondering about motion, gravity, their shoe size, river dancing, thinking about thinking about doodoo doodoodoo thinking, tomorrow, a paycheck, beer, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, breasts in general, life cycles, colors and contrasts and the sounds of such things, breasts specifically, notebooks, pens, wasted life, wasted space, waste in general, fingertips, forearms, mountains, and men. The reverie of this crew is unpredictable, unreliable, and if it could be documented, you can imagine, moments like this, perhaps, The Great Unnamable and Unnamed Poet pumps his fist with pride. There was a phone call this morning. Now there is a story. Two things are one thing. Two names are one name.

Boss Mason says, “So I told him, I says, ‘It’s hard to add three feet vertically. It might be easier to add two or four.’ He says, ‘Well, two ain’t big enough, and four’s too much.’ So I told him we could do it, but we’d have to put four-inch slabs on for a top course, and we talked over where he wanted the window, and he asked what kind of block we’d use to butt up against the window. He says, ‘Well, does it take a different type 93 of mortar to put on a lentil over a window?’ This sonofabitch woke me up at five-thirty this morning to talk about mortar – he don’t even know the difference between Type-S and Type-N, and he probably thinks it’s called Portland cause it’s made in Oregon.

Christ, I felt like telling him to go to hell, get a new mason, but it’s a big damn job.

“He kept me on the line for damn-near forty minutes, then I gave him a real rough estimate on how much it’ll cost. I heard that sonofabitch shit his pants over the phone. He says, ‘Well, that wasn’t in the original estimate.’ I says, ‘Well, neither was them four courses of block.’ He says, ‘Oh.’ He says, ‘Well, how’s come it’s so much for just four courses?’ I says, ‘Well, it’s just an estimate, but you figure four courses around each wall is going to come to quite a bit.’ What the hell did he think he was paying me eighty thousand dollars to do? Get a suntan?

“Come to find out, that dumb sonofabitch hadn’t planned on running the other three walls up the extra three feet. He asked me if we had to do that. I told him we didn’t have to, but his roof might fit on there awful funny if one of the walls ain’t the same size.

So he hems and haws and says, ‘Hell with it, Boss, just keep it at twenty-four feet.”

Del says, “He wanted a extra three feet for a window?’

Boss Mason says, “Better fucking believe it.’

Colonel Killer says, “Tah. You should have told him you couldn’t do it and just hung up on him.”

Boss Mason says, “We’d all be out of work if you was my secretary.”

Pedascule says, “What were you doing up at five-thirty?”

Boss Mason says, “I wasn’t up. I was sleeping.” 94

Pedascule says, “Why didn’t he call when you were up?”

Boss Mason says, “That’s what I asked him. He told me he tried but I’m

impossible to get a hold of in the day, and he doesn’t like talking to answering machines,

says it’s too impersonal. I said, ‘You can’t get a hold of me, because I’m out building

buildings for dumb sonofabitches like you, and if you want it to be more personal, I’ll

send you a picture of me in my tighties that you can look at while you leave the

message.’”

Gone says, “Whoa. Did you really say that?”

Boss Mason, stares away from Gone, shrugs, starts to say one thing, nods, says,

“Fuck, yeah.”

Gone says, “Damn.”

Boss Mason runs his palm down his course thick scruff of a face.

Phaethon says, “When I have my own crew, I’m not turning my phone on until afternoon.”

Gone says, “Hey, I meant to ask you, what is the difference between Type-S and

Type-N mortar?”

Boss Mason looks at him like he missed the entire picture.

Gone says, “Why do they call it Portland? Come to think of it, why’s an L-shaped chunk of metal called a lentil. Aren’t lentils something you put in soup?”

Boss Mason shakes his head as if to suggest you know there’s a reason why they call some people dumbfuck and it ain’t because of the questions they ask so much as 95

when and why they ask the questions and the answer to all of those things is you missed

the en-tire point.

Gone says, “Who the hell are they to tell me what I’m supposed to call Portland?

What if I want to call it Atlanta or Uncle Phil’s Magic Stick-To-Itself Wet Dust? This is

America, I should be able to call things whatever I want.”

Boss Mason breathes out a little bit, lifts his ball cap with thick left hand, pushes

the sweat from his forehead back into his tight-short-knotted curly hair with his left

forearm as if to say Lord help me the ocean is big.

Pedascule says, “Come to think of it, what the fuck is vitalizing?”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah. You stumped College Boy, Boss. You must be smarter

than I look.”

Boss Mason spits a small cotton ball onto a Dandelion. He says, “The Poetite is

dumber than shit for sure. Why just the other day, I told him to grab the notch trowel out

of the bed of the truck, and he looked at me like I’d asked him on a date. Turns out he

doesn’t know a notch trowel from a spud bar, but his first problem was that he didn’t

know the difference between the front and the back of the truck. Dumb shit had the hood

up, like he was checking my oil.”

Colonel Killer lights a miniature cigar with a Zippo, tosses the pack onto the

lawn. He coughs a couple times, hacks something, chokes it back, takes a long drag. He

looks down at the snowshoe of mud on his boots, sniffs, sniffs again, blows a snot rocket,

exhales, and says, “Tah.” He kicks his boots together a few times. He says, “So, Boss,

when’s that truck gonna get here?” 96

Boss Mason says, “Fuck if I know. They’s supposed to be here already. Thank

God they’re so unreliable or we’d a been making rock soup in that trench.”

Phaethon says, “They’re lucky it rained, or we’d have been ready for them hours

ago.”

Pedascule says, “Hell kind of luck is that.”

Phaethon says, “Better luck than anything you’re likely to end up with.”

Pedascule can’t argue with that. In fact, the statement being such a logical

clusterfuck, the fact that he understood at all troubles him deeply.

Del says, “We still got some things we can do until they get here.”

Gone rustles some potato chips out of a little bag. He bites down on his

mayonnaise and onion sandwich, eats the chips, drinks from his soda, stares past the crew back at the hole. You just can’t help looking at a hole, he thinks. If there is anything in the world that speaks to potential, it’s a hole. Oh man, what I couldn’t do to that hole. In his youth, surely, he could have made a fort of such magnitude that no neighborhood kid, except those in the club, could enter without risking his life. If he had only had a hole like this when he was a kid . . . but for now, hell, he’d love a swimming pool, a pond even.

Gone says, “Hey, Boss, everything else aside, that’s a great looking hole you got there.”

Boss Mason says, “It ain’t the first time I’ve heard that, you know.” He’s been up too long today already. Much longer than he’d have wanted, feeding dogs, getting his lunch ready, checking blueprints, changing plans, scheduling meetings, working out, well, doing abs, well a couple dozen sit ups, better than nothing. Not a Thank You all day.

Gone fucking with him is the first time anybody’s even fucked with him all day. Maybe 97 the crew will lighten up a little more now the fog’s lifted – fuck around with him a bit. A car drives by. Boss Mason says, “Nice Sunbird. You guys know what Pontiac stands for?”

Pedascule sinks deeper into his Self. Please. He thinks. No.

Boss Mason says, “Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac.”

Gone says, “That’s just wrong,” and laughs.

Del says, “I don’t get it.”

Colonel Killer says, “I heard that one before.”

Phaethon says, “Fucking niggers.”

Boss Mason says, “Let’s get back to work.”

Gone and Pedascule go back to the hole. They grab their flat shovels and continue pooling water over the bank. Boss Mason grabs the stakes that he’s brought from the bed of the truck. He sends Del and Phaethon off to one corner to pound in one stake so it sticks out sixteen inches above the ground. When they get that one done, move onto the next corner.

Other things happen.

The crew prepares the footer to the best of their abilities, or at the very least, as much as they want to.

They talk dirty about women with large breasts and men with small penises.

Some work gets done.

Some members of the crew tell stories.

They consume tobacco. 98

Maybe someone tells a joke.

Meantime, this heavy humid life ducttapes their hands behind their backs and

stands on their neck. Punches them in the kidneys. Drinking water’s little help. Before you know enough, you might pray for rain on a day like today. Then you learn a little about how rain on a day like this would be like pouring water on the coals of a sauna, trying to cool the place off a bit – it just don’t work that way. Tap water on a grease fire.

Rain, right now, means more humidity, there’s no escape. Meantime, go ahead and drink

a gallon of water. End up looking like one of those cartoons gets all shot up and drinks a bottle of whiskey – water trickling out of your pores like a sieve.

This day is heavy, hallucinatory, sluggish, hellish heat. The crew moves on the job slow-motion motion, trailing tracks of salt water stains across the hole in the earth.

Dogs pant off in the distance somewhere, letting out a howl once in a while at a car airconditioning past. The howl, heavy with atmosphere, pushing through a feeling like a gallon of water to the square foot, ooowwwwrrrroooooow sounding an awful lot like a long exhaled, “Goddamn” as it travels slow and unnecessary to anything within earshot.

If it is heard and understood, a neighbor dog, half mile off, might howl back, a vast indistinct exact communication, howling, “Yep. Goddamn.”

The crew slouches through this airbound muck, this spellbound, hellbound, weight of a day. Might as well. Tomorrow, more of the same, says the forecast. They are used to it by now, this time of year, Indian Summer. In spring, predictions had claimed a flood of a summer, like Biblical rain, wet all week for months, but it never came. Just the threat of flood. In June, the spring backed off and the summer rain fell halfway to the 99

ground and stopped there in a haze of not-quite fog, a just-shy-of-rain humidor for

humans, a half-fallen deluge, caught in low orbit, head level, foot level, self level. A

hundred square mile greenhouse over central Venango County. You should have seen

this year’s tomatoes, though, by God, big as your head, bet your ass.

When you get home, take off your work clothes, leave them out; next day, they’re stiff as cardboard, a solid sheet of salt. Even the trees slump over a little bit, windless, tired, about tempted to give up the ghost to barometric pressure. Were a limb to snap off

a tree, you’d likely not even hear it hit the ground, for it wouldn’t so much fall as sink.

Entire hillsides of trees almost sighing, and if you didn’t have anything better to do than listen to it and you were so inclined to lend an ear, it might sound an awful lot like this:

“Just goddamn.”

But the crew has something better to do, at least something good enough to earn them a paycheck, so they plug away, preparing this hole in the ground to receive about a billion cubic yards of cement, wishing, each in his own way, for an explanation of his own life or the world around him, nothing too explicit, just a tidbit of an idea why to push on in weather like this. No answers are readily available, and they can thank Their

Ambiguous Amorphous Poet, if they wish, because, chances are, an answer to Why go on? might sound an awful lot like this: Why not?

And here we are: the fog has burnt off, the water in the air rarifies, the ground beneath our feet boiling. Our socks a cottony stew of flesh and crud. What the hell does rarifies mean anyway, thinks Pedascule. A pathetic fallacy, no matter its poetical / rhetorical status, should at least make sense. There are lots of things in the world that 100

apparently make plenty of sense that Pedascule just does not understand. How does the

drive-thru attendant know a car has arrived to place an order? What exactly does it sound

like when a dove cries? Who listens to the “music” Phaethon’s always mimicking? And

for as many books he’s capable of reading or lectures he might attend on such subjects,

these are some things he feels he might never ever know.

Pedascule takes his can of Copenhagen from his back pocket of his blue jeans. He

should have worn shorts. Holding the can in his right hand, he smacks it against his left

palm, packing the product all to one side. He opens the lid, takes a good look at his vice,

and regrets tobacco; he shrugs, puts the dip deep between his bottom gums and his lip,

presses the mess tight with his tongue, the regret fades to a minor pleasure as the desired

effects hit his blood stream – he’ll quit someday, that much is for sure, but today is not the day. He looks at this crew – he’ll quit someday, that much is for sure, but tomorrow

doesn’t look so good, either.

Pedascule spits a long stream of juice into the mud, looks at the hole, says,

“What’s next, Boss?”

Boss Mason says, “What do you think’s next? We gotta get this hole ready for

that truck, so we gotta plank paths to the corners. You want to push them wheelbarrows

through all this mud?”

Del says, “Why don’t we just have the truck back up to the hole?”

Boss Mason says, “Well, that was the original plan, but with all this mud, truck’d

tear hell out of this yard.” 101

Del looks at the 300 million cubic miles of dirt he thinks he’s standing on – this

hole’s guts – piled on the lawn, dozens of trees – this hole’s former surface – lying on top of each other, the cubes and cubes of block – this hole’s future – stacked in the middle of the mess, the four vehicles parked in the yard, the half-dozen oversized men wearing shovelsful of ground on their shoes, the great-big rocks and gentle rolls of this place. He lights a cigarette and laughs. He says, “We’re not really planking this off?”

Boss Mason says, “You’re fucking right we are. We don’t want to tear up this yard.”

Del says, “Ain’t no yard. It’s a fucking swamp.”

Boss Mason says, “Quit your bitching, and grab them planks. It’s been too long a day already to put up with your shit.”

Del says, “Whatever, Boss.” Del says, “We’ll see if your fat ass is pushing any of these wheelbarrows, prick,” but he says it so quietly that he’s not sure if he just thought it or whether he put it out into the world.

Gone says, “Hey, Boss, I don’t think we got enough plank to go around your hole.”

Boss Mason says, “I don’t need you fucking with me, either.”

Each member of the crew takes trips to the big white Silverado, pulling sixteen- foot planks and eight-foot planks from the black rack above the bed of the truck. They pace off – muddy paths to the corners of the hole – trying to make the boards not so much level as barely not-suicidal. The irony is not lost on most of the crew that they are trading off something that is something only in that it is named “not nothing” for something that 102

is not only not nothing but something only in that it is, in fact, negative. The irony is not lost per se, though it does register as a deep lugubrious, swift kick in the balls. They prop rocks underneath the boards and push mud out of their way with their boots. The eight- foot planks are the easiest to stabilize, but they are the least likely to not sink in the mud.

When they do reach the corners, they have to be careful not to push mud and rocks and sod and blocks and insects and each other and empty space into the trench, because such things would be a pain in the ass to get at once the concrete sets up.

The whole process of mapping out paths to corners takes a good long while. It’s slow going, the barometric weight of the day pushing down on them is amplified by a more tangible tug from the weight of the mud. The crew, in the midst of doing their jobs and carrying around minor gripes with one another and the rests of their lives, wears the sky and all its implications as a jacket and all the Earth as boots like so many tiny

Atlases, and they push through.

As the last planks are put in place. The crew reconvenes. They smoke if they got them. They chew tobacco and take long drinks from water bottles, thermoses, or pop cans. The crew picks up old conversations, rattles off box scores and movie plots and general nonsense they likely read in the paper, while Boss Mason considers sending some of them home. He contemplates while he fake-reads another checklist. He doesn’t know when the truck will get here, but it doesn’t make any sense at all to have all six of them standing around staring at this hole while they’re on the clock. He supposes he could send them home for a couple hours and call them back when the truck gets here, but, no.

Pedascule would surely go some place where nobody has ever heard of a phone. Del 103

would turn his off. The Colonel would be at the bar and, subsequently, in no condition to

drive back to the site. Gone would answer and love to help but would have no way to get a ride back out. Boss Mason would be stuck there with Phaethon wheeling a couple dozen yards of cement down into this hole, leveling it out, laying rebar. No fucking way.

Besides every crew member will bitch and moan if they get sent home or they’ll bitch and moan if they stay. They need the money, they need the work, they don’t care about the money, they don’t care about work.

This is America, thinks Boss Mason, the land of capitalism. Nobody on the crew has anything bad to say about making money – for the most part they all want a little more than they have but just enough to buy some very nice things they don’t need. As long as the only things they can afford are necessities, how can they truly feel they are being paid their true worth? How can they not call themselves slaves? Boss Mason, though, he has lots of things he doesn’t need, and he knows something that the rest of the crew doesn’t know yet and may never bring themselves to figure out: these things he has

– forty acres, a mule, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house on Big Sandy Creek, a

Hamilton pool table, a two-year old Cadillac, an outdoor grill with two extra burners, two work trucks, three mortar-mixing machines, forty-thousand-dollars’ worth of masonry equipment, two purebred Labrador retrievers, a large screen television with a satellite dish, another house in town that he rents out but where he keeps tools in the garage, a fiancé with great big tits and her own Sports Utility Vehicle, a computer with Internet, a secretary, a maid, life insurance, health insurance, steak when he wants it, Red Label

Whiskey when he wants it, Pay-Per-View when he wants it – none of it has made his life 104

any better, any deeper, richer, or more worthwhile. Still and all, he’s got his, and – but

now, that he has grown to know another something that the rest of the crew doesn’t know

now and won’t know for some long long time if ever – he wants more.

A lot more. He has been working his ass off for twenty-five years in the masonry

business. He’s paid the piper. He deserves everything anybody else is liable to get. He’s

been working his ass off while a bunch of Jews sat on their Jew asses, lending money,

buying, selling, trading – let’s face it, not making anything – except a shitload of money, while a bunch of niggers got jobs they weren’t qualified for because of affirmative action despite the fact that they’ve been equal for fifty years, while Mexicans are coming into this very country this very day by the millions and taking our jobs and not paying taxes.

We were here first, and they get all the money. That’s why when Del asks him – “Boss don’t you think it’s time to take that sticker off your rear windshield, now that you got your name on the truck?” – Boss Mason can say without hesitation, without doubt, remorse, second guess, or any further thought than the last forty-four years worth, “We were here first, if they ain’t gonna learn how to talk right, they should fucking get out.”

The sticker has been an eyesore to some of the crew members at different times, while it doesn’t bother others, and others yet get a chuckle out of it. It has caused some clients a nasty regret for having hired a crew, while others have hired them because of it.

Some travelers have honked, as if to voice their approval, and yelled “Woooooooh yeah” or “Wooohooo” or “Yeah Buddy,” while others have crossed their arms or frowned very severe disapproval. The sticker is stark black with white knifey letters in a serious in- your-face font, and Boss Mason bought it in Miami, where, he says, you’d understand if 105

you’d ever went there. The sticker represents the backbone of the American blue-collar man, it is a sentiment since seventeen seventy-six, a testament to the strength of this great country and a deterrent to the threat of outside influence, it is praise to those who have

gone before and inspiration for those yet to lay hands on tools, it’s love it or leave it, it’s

my way or the highway, it’s either with me or against me, the sticker is in your face in

unapologetic caps: “SPEAK ENGLISH OR GET THE FUCK OUT” it says, unabashedly

insulting everybody who can’t read it. And Boss Mason means it, by god. He’s been

building quality masonry for twenty-five years; he’ll be damned if some wetback is going

to come in and take his job – have you seen the way they live? Do you really want them

building your house for you? Makes sense, don’t it? I mean if they ain’t gonna learn to

talk right, they ain’t got no right to be here.

Boss Mason says, “And Jews,” and thinks, don’t even get me started on Jews.

“You know, they don’t even have a country? They just wander around to other people’s countries taking the money and resources and leaving or, worse yet, staying. They killed

Christ, for God’s sake. I mean look at history. You’ll see, just about everything that’s

ever went wrong in a country, you’ll find a Jew in charge somewhere.”

Del says, “I don’t think I’ve ever met a Jew. Have you ever met a Jew,

Pedascule?”

Pedascule – his fists balled up like bricks pushing his beard deep into his face and

over his eyes and around his ears; his elbows on his knees – says, “Just one.” And he’s

about to say, “Jesus,” though it would probably be lost to the world at this moment, but

he’s interrupted. 106

Del says, “How about you, Boss – know any Jews?”

Boss Mason’s trying to remember when he stopped thinking and started talking,

how he got into this conversation, what he hopes to achieve by getting involved at all. He says, “Why would I want to know a Jew? They’re a bunch of conniving thieves. And their women are all whores.”

Del says, “If you don’t know any, how do you know what they’re like?”

Boss Mason says, “Christ. Here we go. Have you ever seen an atom?”

Del says, “No.”

Boss Mason says, “How do you know they exist?”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

Del says, “That seems different to me.”

Boss Mason says, “No, it ain’t. It’s the exact-fucking same.”

Beautiful, thinks Pedascule. Good for you, Boss Mason. Del is stumped. Del is thinking, I’m not saying they ain’t there. I’m saying, how do you know what they’re like?

But he doesn’t know how to put it into words. Pedascule wants to put the question to

Boss Mason, but by this time the conversation has shifted, and Colonel Killer is saying,

“Look it up in the dictionary: ‘Nigger’ means ‘a lazy person,’” and Pedascule was

impressed with Boss Mason’s absurd argument, and, he knows, just because your

argument is ridiculous, doesn’t mean you’re not right, too. And even if his employer

couldn’t answer his question, and even if Aristotle and Stephen Hawking were here at

this second with encyclopedias and diagrams, the point is moot, because Boss Mason

isn’t looking for an answer to his question – he’s looking for love and respect and 107

acceptance in the form of more stuff more stuff more stuff. Never mind that Jews killed

Christ if it helps your argument or that Romans killed Christ if it hurts your opponent’s.

Never mind that Boss Mason is an atheist and a turd. Never mind that a hundred years

ago everywhere in America Boss Mason would have applied for a job, the sign would

have read – “Help Wanted: No Dagos No Micks No Jews.” Never mind that Jews had a country of their own for thousands of years. Never mind that when Boss Mason gets to heaven and meets his great-grandmother – who immigrated to this country tired,

trembling, and illiterate – she’s going to come upside his face so-fucking-hard for not

knowing how to speak Italian that he’s going to wish he’d gone to hell anyway. Never mind the obvious syntactical errors of the sticker itself and the grammatical errors Boss

Mason employs on a minute-by-minute basis. To all intents and purposes, for the good of

his own mind, for the sake of working for an idiot boss on an idiot crew, in the name of

The Great Unchanging and Unchanged Poet up above, Pedascule distracts himself with

show tunes to avoid arguing with an idiot who would be arguing with an even greater idiot. He thinks, never mind, and sings “The more I know, the less I understand about lo-

oh-ove.”

Boss Mason says, “How’d the black guy prove to his white neighbor that his

property was better than the white guy’s?”

Colonel Killer says, “I used to know this one.”

Boss Mason says, “The black guy told him, ‘At least I ain’t got no filthy-ass

nigger moved in next do’ to me.’” 108

There’s something not okay about all this. Del’s not there yet. Hasn’t arrived, though he wants to, he doesn’t want to. He hates the arguments almost as much as he enjoys them. He wants to show others the errors of their ways of thinking so he doesn’t have to focus on the ways of his own errors. He lives for the angst that he’s dying to relieve. He closes his eyes and imagines the backs of his hands; follicles and flesh describe symbols just the other side of signs; the answers arise and fall away only to leave no trace of meaning or intent, and he imagines the backs of his hands. The words that would prove him right just don’t come to him, and he doesn’t understand why everybody else can’t just accept that he’s right, that these jokes are wrong somehow, cause, like, what if I was black? What if you was? he thinks. He knows what he’s talking about. He just can’t say it. Why can’t Boss Mason see this world?

Del says, “You’re full of shit.” He lights a cigarette.

Colonel Killer says, “What’s long and hard on a black man?”

Phaethon says, “Second grade.”

Del’s fought the good fight. He’s tired just now and would rather be at home smoking pot. He laughs a bit. Second grade. That is, after all, a pretty good joke, because you expect the answer to be “his dick,” which is what we all fear anyway – that ultimately our dicks will be too small and therefore we’ll be inferior men – but he’s not sure it still isn’t pretty insulting to blacks and wonders why it might be funny to have a small dick. After all, shouldn’t blacks feel complimented about having big dicks?

Colonel Killer says, “Notice I didn’t say ‘nigger?’” 109

Pedascule pushes harder on the sides of his face, digs his gnawed-down fingernails into his scalp, thinking, If Hamlet could live through bad dreams, I can make it through the day. And he prays to Society’s Muse, The Great and Patient Poet, please tell me what, but he’s not sure what to ask of The Eloquent and Analytic One, Who responds: “Rather than think of the joke in terms of race relations, Pedascule, analyze the form, the function, the effect. This joke, on the surface of things, appears to be insulting to black men because they appear in the prologue. However the reason this joke is funny

– whereas, ‘What’s long and hard on a trailer-park man?’ would not be so funny (despite the fact that blacks and low-income whites tend to share everything from oppression to poor grades to, believe it or not, relative penis size) – is because of white paranoia where it concerns the gargantuan nature of black genitals; more to the point, ultimately, whites fear that their power rests in the phallus or the symbolic representation of their genitals, and a larger size must mean a greater power, which is why so many lynchings begin or end with a castration. The joke relies on a fear of sexual inferiority on the teller’s and the audience’s part, and, well, the joke came to the right place. Many working- / lower-class white men fear Asian intelligence, black sexuality, and Latino work ethics, which is why jokes about such groups tend to undermine or reinforce stereotypes about such things respectively. While upper-class whites, on the other hand, because they often deny class relevance, tend to. . . .” Yeah, yeah, thinks Pedascule, I don’t have all day. Pedascule says, “If there is a group of six people on this half of the state with smaller dicks than this crew. . . .”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.” 110

Gone says, “Now, you’re just being obvious.”

Phaethon says, “Speak for yourself.”

Boss Mason says, “Your mom told me it was a good size.”

Del says, “Am I less of a man if I’ve got a small penis? And why is it funny to be

unmanly? Does that mean being a woman is funny? What about hermaphrodites or eunuchs or people who have been tortured?”

They all laugh.

Nobody gets it.

Boss Mason says, “Do you know how to save ten drowning niggers?”

Before he can keep himself from getting involved, Del becomes an accomplice, saying, “No.”

Boss Mason says, “Good.”

Del laughs, feeling he’s wrong or that the joke should be about him not knowing

how to be helpful, thinking I’m not laughing with this crew; I’m laughing at myself

somehow, though he’s not sure whether that makes him feel particularly better or worse,

nor is he sure whether it’s supposed to or should.

Colonel Killer just wishes he could explain to Del and Pedascule what it means to

live near blacks. They’d call a spade a spade, too, if they’d spent any time around them.

They’re unclean – filthy, in fact. They stink, and they always end up taking jobs that

should go to more qualified white guys, or at least someone who knows how to apply the

working end of a bar of soap to their asscrack. Blacks get the good college scholarships,

and, given the chance, they’ll rape the living shit out of white women up and down the 111

coast. Why don’t they stick to their own women – they don’t even mind being raped,

believe me, when it comes right down to it. Nigger bitches always want the dick, don’t

matter what they tell you. He lights a miniature cigar and lets these things dissipate with

the smoke, blows out his digressions. If you’d lived beside them, he thinks for sure, you’d know.

Boss Mason says, “Okay, niggers, back to work. I ain’t paying you to stand around telling jokes.”

The crew shuffles its feet. The crew sways a little and resettles, pushing aside rocks with their boots, lighting smokes, hocking loogies. Pedascule puts some tobacco in his lower lip and realizes his hands are covered in orange clay, mud, and spit and shit and he is the earth and he is of the earth, and, ultimately, maybe he should wash his hands. He thinks, what’s the use, spits, wipes his forearm through his beard, kicks the heel of one

boot against the toe of the other, switches feet, switches feet, switches feet, shakes his

head, spits, says, “Oooooh, back to work. Going back to work. Got to prove to Phaethon

that I’m not a jerk.”

Gone says, “I don’t want to work. I just want to bang Phaethon’s mom all day.”

Del laughs.

Phaethon says, “Fuckers.” He reaches into his pocket for a pill, pulls out three

instead, a hollow thrumming noise rises somewhere a hundred miles deep in his head,

and maybe these will help amplify or negate the noise.

Colonel Killer leans to one side, adjusts his pockets. 112

The planks are in place, the trench is cleared, all the ground work for pouring the footer is complete. Boss Mason walks to the white Chevy Silverado and sits in the cab.

He makes a phone call. Phaethon says, “Who you calling?” Boss Mason raises his middle finger to his son. The deep deep thrum fills him up.

Del says, “So I guess we’re just going to stand around with our thumbs up our assholes.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

Pedascule grabs a shovel. He grabs a palm-sized flat rock. He scrapes the orange clay from the metal. He says, “Could switch assholes.”

Gone says, “Already did.”

Colonel Killer says, “Stay the hell away from mine, peckerhead. There’s only room for one thumb up there.”

Phaethon. Silence lies empty.

Pedascule scrapes the orange clay from a rock onto a shovel.

Del says, “Do you think we really have to use a cement truck to pour this footer? I mean, don’t you think there’s got to be a better way?”

Gone says, “Can’t find a better man. Can’t find a buttered ham.”

The crew shrugs Del off. Again.

Pedascule carves his initials into a muddy shovel with a rock and says, “Del, if you lived in a cave, the first thing you’d do would be build a table for your DVD player.”

Del says, “Just imagine digging this hole without a backhoe. And think about how much fuel that truck burns getting out here with the cement.” 113

Phaethon. Silence fills him up.

Colonel Killer says, “Me and the old man used to do jobs with nothing but a

spade shovel and a few wheelbarrows with iron wheels. Now that’ll put some hair on your ass.”

Gone says, “Is that what you really want, Del? Even more hair on your ass?”

Pedascule scrapes a shovel clean with a rock.

Gone says, “I mean, I’m trying to figure out how to get the hair off mine.”

Phaethon. Silence gnaws at the hillside.

Del thinks, That’s not the world we live in. We can’t go back, and, if the world of the future holds for us a technologically barren hunting and gathering society, we’ll

readapt the way we have adapted to a technologically burdened one.

Pedascule retraces the history of Western Civilization onto a muddy stone with a

shovel, beginning with a slimy single-celled organism, reaching into itself and pulling out

a rib and throwing it into the mud and fucking the result and fucking the result’s offspring

and so on through the mud and trees and harnessing fire and language and growing that

big toe that helps us stand up so we can see over predators to prey etcetera past the

mixing of these and those that lead to roads and plumbing and gods and monsters and so

forth up to the insober moment that lead the narrator of this history into the hands of the

sky and the world and cast him away to wake in his own wretch and loneliness to be

scooped up by a young ancient bitch goddess, whom he loves by not loving, but the

narrator changes the world to a new future a new fiction. 114

Del says, “No, I mean, don’t you think you could make a machine that didn’t burn so much fuel and could do the same amount of work? Like it would burn no fuel – there’s energy in the air and in the rocks and in the sun.”

Colonel Killer says, “You are insane.”

Phaethon

Gone says, “I thought that was Minnie Mouse.”

Or are the way things are the only way they could be?

Hard to say.

Colonel Killer says, “No, Minnie wasn’t crazy, just fucking Goofy. Tah.”

Pedascule traces the hieroglyph for sleeping at a rest stop, then another for him making love to Angelina Jolie on the beach.

Del looks at the backs of his hands. He says, “We’re made out of energy, too.”

Phaethon is scared silent as the drugs take hold.

Colonel Killer says, “Just pick up your shovel? Use your damn energy to dig your damn hole. If that’ll get you to shut up, I’ll agree with you.”

Pedascule eats something off Angelina’s belly, licks her variously, holds her throat in his palm and pushes away her chin with his thumb.

Del says, “I mean they built the pyramids thousands of years ago, and there are all kinds of amazing buildings built before the backhoe and the cement truck like the white house and those castles in England.”

Silence washes over Phaethon like a gentle breeze through mist. 115

Colonel Killer says, “They didn’t know shit back then. If the Egyptians had

known how to use mortar, they wouldn’t have needed all those big-ass rocks.”

A much simpler time, Del tells himself? What about predators? What about

Western PA winters? Those are bad enough inside his house. He can’t imagine trudging through them without at least a tent and a torpedo heater. And wolves, well, okay, he’d have a gun with him. And he’d eat their meat and wear their fur.

But Del says, “But they built them. Without mortar, and they didn’t need heavy equipment. And they didn’t need guns ’cause they was vegetarian. Pedascule, tell them

how they did that with the logs and the ramps.”

Pedascule’s hand slips, retells the story of a car crash in a rain storm. He has a

hardon and he’s certain he should be someplace else. He looks up from his world and

says, “Space aliens did it.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah. See if it ain’t in a book, he ain’t gonna know it.”

Del says, “Anyway, can you imagine building the foundation for those pyramids?

Each one of them must weigh as much as every building in Franklin put together.”

Pedascule tosses a flat muddy rock into a rose of Sharon, places his foot on the

spade, and buries it into the ground.

Colonel Killer says, “There’s no way.”

Gone says, “No way to weigh my curds and whey.”

Boss Mason walks back from the truck. He says, “I thought I told you fuckers to

keep working.”

Del says, “There’s nothing for us to do right now.” 116

Boss Mason says, “Well, clean off the goddamned shovels. Wrap up the pump. I

shouldn’t have to hold your peckers while you piss.”

Pedascule moves off towards another shovel. Gone walks towards the pump.

Phaethon says, “Who was you on the phone with?”

Boss Mason says, “Concrete plant.”

Colonel Killer sees a concrete plant in his mind, the tree on which money might

perverbially grow. He shakes his head and laughs. He watches a pebble of sand and

limestone fall into a pocket of earth, sprout sprouts, climb through the dirt and the grass,

maybe flower occasionally. He wonders whether it would need thorns or poison but

figures the fact that it’s a living rock would protect it from just about anything that might want to eat it. He watches it grow in his mind, spread out across the fields, a weed, yes, but a useful weed, harder than hell to harvest, though, if you let it get too thick at the base. They’ll overrun an entire field of corn or wheat, become a parking lot. Maybe he’ll plant some of his own, start a patch out back, keep it watered, some little thing he could care for that The Old Lady wouldn’t be all the time trying to take over. Before long, he could buy some land, start his own strand, raise up the tallest, mightiest concrete plants in all Western PA. Make himself a dime, wouldn’t he? Hell, he thinks, shaking his head again. Hell.

Phaethon says, “What’d they say?”

Boss Mason says, “They ain’t gonna be able to make it out here till this afternoon.”

Phaethon says, “Well, what do you want us to do?” 117

Boss Mason says, “Get your ass back to work.”

Del looks around the site. Pedascule squats with the spade of a shovel rested between his feet, the handle against his inner leg, scraping a rock down the metal, cursing, scraping the metal down the rock. Gone has the pump cleaned off, nearly wrapped up, ready to put it back in the truck. The Colonel wanders off towards the hole to light a miniature cigar. Phaethon picks up a rock and tosses it deep into the woods.

Del looks at his hands. A ball of mud the size of a ping pong ball hits him in the cheek. No one in the world takes credit for this. Del’s hands and forearms and elbows and biceps and triceps and shoulders and neck and head and ears and face and chin and chest and torso and pelvis and legs and knees and shins and ankles and feet and toes melt and disappear and the world feels no different for it.

Boss Mason shrugs, guffaws, opens his cell phone, closes it, moves around a bit.

Can this go on? Of course, for how long? Long as it takes. How long’s that? Won’t know till we get there. Fuck, he thinks. Nothing else but bright overcast, natural soundlessness.

Fuck fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. Wonder what if, can we, maybe . . . ? Fuck. If I

sent half them home. Boss squats, finds some string, the original borders of the hole, the

demarcation for future digging and construction, the original structure of this house. He

grabs a broken twig from the ground and begins wrapping it up. He moves his right hand

back and forth with the string, while he raises and lowers the twig with his left hand,

spooling the string, not an Olympic event, to be sure, but a talent that Boss Mason, over

the years, has grown to really admire in himself. He watches his crew. What if we . . . oh .

. . well, hell. He stops spooling the string, reaches in his pocket, and lifts his cell phone to 118 his ear, in the meantime flipping it open and pushing the button and preparing a conversation. He needs to get through to his fiancé who won’t know any better what to do while they wait for the truck, but she’ll be charming. She’ll be calming. She’ll be in the middle of something that isn’t what he’s doing. She’ll say, Relax, honey, relax.

Things he already knows. He knows to relax. Knows to breathe deep. Knows to find things and focus, and, yet, he knows, too, he needs her to tell him these things in order to believe them. With the phone trapped between shoulder and ear, Boss Mason spools the string again, he notices, just like breathing.

Her voice asks him to leave her a voice mail.

Fuck he thinks. What the fuck? Boss Mason says, “Hey, honey. Well. I was just – well, I thought you’d be there – I’s calling to leave you a message I guess. No. I wanted to. To. I was wondering. I expected you’d be here on your day off. I just. I was. Ah fuck.

I gotta go babe. This string’s starting to unwind. You should fucking be there on your day off. Whatever. See you tonight.”

Boss Mason continues spooling the string, the phone still trapped. The string catches his thumb. Fuck. Breaks his rhythm. Spools. Catches his thumb. Fuck. He closes his eyes, raises and lowers his left hand, moves his right back and forth. Catches his thumb. He says, “Fuck.” Throws the string on the ground.

Gone says, “Hey, Boss, need a hand with that line?”

Boss Mason says, “It ain’t a fucking line, peckerhead.” He stoops to pick up the string. His phone falls from his shoulder and lands on the muddy orange clay tip of his boot, leans to the side. 119

Phaethon says, “Why don’t we just go to lunch? This is retarded.”

Boss Mason says, “We just had a break,” leans toward his toes, reaches his fingers toward the phone, which leans, wobbles, slips, wobbles, leans toward the muddy watery world.

Phaethon says, “Whatever, dude.”

Boss Mason bends his knees and takes a deep breath. A drop of sweat rounds his eyebrow and slips to the end of his eyelash. The sweat quivers with each beat of his heart, threatens to fall forever with each beat. His phone seems to have lodged on the tip of his boot, wills itself to stay above the mud, while it struggles to fall into the mud. If he were aware of the fact that his pinky toe pushes against the ceiling of his boot with an equal and opposite pressure exerted by his big toe against the soul of the same boot, he might realize the futility of such an exercise – trying to affect external change through sock and steel and leather and mud – but odds are good he would continue on just the same.

Another drop of sweat rounds the corner of his eyebrow, slides to the tip of his eyelash and hits the first like a cue ball breaking the rack. A cascade of sweat falls from all parts of his face and his cell phone tips off the toe of his boot. He lunges, dives almost, palm first into the open air around him, feels a pop in the small of his back or neck or knee.

Sweat pours into the puddle around him. The sound and heat and sight of the world rise up around him. He stands erect as quickly as he’d bent down and raises a fistful of sweaty cell phone. He says, “Fucking right,” and pumps his fist twice beside him.

Phaethon shakes his head, thinks, That was awesome, says, “Fucking weirdo,” and looks away. 120

Boss Mason looks around. Apparently, no one saw that fucking awesome catch.

He wipes away some sweat with the sleeve of his t-shirt. Boss Mason moves his hands

again, spooling, the rhythm of it, the skill, takes him out of this world of small victory and small loneliness. His adrenaline takes him to many worlds. Some long in his past,

some he still hopes to see. There’s the one where he’s a millionaire, humble, revered,

charitable. There’s the one where he’s working on the same job for the rest of his life, a

job his son will carry on after him with the same sense of reverence and misery and,

above all, security. There’s the one where there’s none of this, the noise, the motion, Boss

Mason floating in space without even the sun or the stars, even his name is gone from

him, his body, there is nothing to refer to, nothing referring to it – this is a world of

exaltation and horror that he desires, a world he fears. He spools the string. A creeping

wordless haunting notion comes to him, and his past falls away and his futures fall away,

and he’s left with these two hands full of sausagey fingers spooling string. He puts words

to the world. The future’s there, he thinks. They’re all there. Boss Mason says, “Fuck it.

Let’s take a break.”

Gone says, “Back to work. Go on break. Back to work. Go on break.”

Pedascule says, “This is my life.”

Del lights a cigarette, grabs a stick, scrapes some clay from his boot, says, “Wish

I’d of worn shorts.”

Phaethon opens his phone, pushes a button, puts the phone to his ear, says,

“What’s up?”

Colonel Killer says, “I’m fucking starving.” 121

The crew moves to the shade tree. The fog has completely risen and resettled,

risen again, and there is no sun. The heat of the day is airborne, not the product of direct

light or standing on asphalt. It’s just there, nothing to do about it. Their jeans are soaked through in their crotches. Their boots white and salt crusty above the orange and oily clay. They sit down and go about their lunchtime business, throwing out chews, stubbing smokes, opening sandwiches, cracking cans of soda. The landscape is something similar to still. Wind, at this moment, would call a better price than gold. Across the road, in the field, the tall grass shades the opening of a woodchuck’s hole. Inside the hole, lying on his back, a woodchuck occasionally scrapes some dirt from the ceiling of his burrow and allows it to fall on his stomach. He does not think in these terms, if he thinks at all, but if he only knew life’s myriad curiosities, he would think, Not bad, this is not bad at all. Or he wouldn’t think that one bit.

Gone stops chewing his sandwich, tilts his head down a touch, says, “You have gotta be kidding me.”

Pedascule says, “What?”

The gravel on the shoulder of the road shudders a touch. Tiny gobs of mud rise.

The Colonel turns his head one-hundred-thirteen degrees north-northeast, raises his eyes to the treetops. His viscera jars. Before any one of his five senses conveys a series of data to his brain, he knows lunch’s over. He closes his eyes, exhales. A single stream of black smoke rises above the trees down the road. The cement truck downshifts and groans. In seconds, The Colonel can hear individual gravel popping and crushing beneath the tires, 122

can see sheaves of paper floating above the dashboard on the airconditioned air, can

smell the oil burning on the engine block. The Colonel opens his eyes.

Boss Mason nearly falls out of the cab of his Chevy Silverado. He moves fast

over to his crew, says, “Fuck it. Let’s get this footer poured, then we’ll eat lunch.”

Pedascule spits.

Gone laughs. He says, “That’ll take all day.”

Phaethon says, “I ain’t going back to work until lunch is over.”

Del says, “Let’s eat lunch. It’ll take that driver that long to get things set up.”

Boss Mason says, “No, by God. When I say get back to work, you get the fuck back to work. Or go home. See if I care.”

Del feels a pang of hunger and thinks, See if I care.

Del closes his eyes, thinks maybe he’s angry, and thinks, See if I care.

Del’s worn out and wants to kill his boss and thinks, See if I care.

Del moves off across the lot to his truck.

Boss Mason says, “Where the fuck’s he think he’s going? We can’t do this

without him.”

Gone says, “You done did it now, Boss.”

Del reaches into the bed of his truck, undoes some bungee cords, pulls his upside

down wheelbarrow towards him, and sets its front on the ground.

Boss Mason says, “Del.”

Del turns the wheelbarrow over and rights it, pushes it to the site, thinks, See if I

care. 123

Boss Mason says, “Well. Fuck it. You guys get to work, too.”

The crew groans.

Boss Mason walks over to the road where the cement truck rolls to a stop.

Staggering. Stuttering. Fumbling. FfffffwwwwwoooooooooooTahh. The engine turns off and clicks. The truck sits there. Boss walks over to the driver side window as it rolls down. Boss says, “Hey, man. Good to see you. We got it all set up. We’ve been waiting around all damn day. Thought you’d be here sooner.”

Truck says, “Well, Boss, I don’t know what they told you over at the plant, but

I’m not The Poet. I ain’t writing this text. In fact, I’m at the mercy of that retard at the front desk answering phone calls. Then you got the plant owner’s sons playing crash’em- up derby in the pit with the backhoes down to the pit. In the end, I could run twice as fast and still get my job done in the same amount of time. You’re lucky I got here at all.”

Boss Mason laughs. Chummily. He says, “It ain’t your fault.”

Truck says, “Which corner you want to hit first? I can get you those three corners, but that far one, you might need to rake it over or push it. I don’t think I can get past that fill.”

Boss Mason says, “You think you can get all them corners?”

Truck says, “No sweat.”

Boss Mason says, “Well, I appreciate that, and I’m sure you can do it, but I don’t want to tear hell out of this yard.”

Truck sits there for a minute, as if silence will allow the obvious to go unstated.

Boss Mason says, “We already got the planks set up. We’ll just push the cement.” 124

Truck, says, “Well. Okay, Boss. This lawn ain’t exactly manicured. I can hit them first three corners, might even do this place some good to get some straight ruts so’s the

water can run off a bit.”

Boss Mason says, “We’ll push it just the same.” Being right, Boss Mason knows so deeply he doesn’t even have to think it, always outweighs being efficient.

Truck says, “Your call, Boss.”

Boss Mason moves to where his crew has reassembled with their wheelbarrows.

They clear a spot to catch the cement as it comes out of the truck. They reapply chews,

relight smokes, resume the day. Sweat has long since stopped trickling down their backs.

Rather their shirts are thoroughly wet, every inch. Though the day is definitely just about

fall in its sky, its foliage, its smell, it is the middle of summer according to the heat. If

they’d of thought about it, the crew might have mother-fucked the Four Seasons’ lack of

common sense.

Colonel Killer looks off under the shade tree at his recent past.

Gone says, “Motherfucking fall, what month is this, anyway?”

Boss Mason stands next to the wheelbarrows, waves the truck on back, keep her

coming, keep her coming, cut her left, a touch more, bring her on back, come on now,

you got it, come on, twenty feet, straight back, touch left, back back back back.

Del says, “Boss.”

Boss Mason waves his hands, bring her on. Fifteen feet.

Del says, “Boss. We don’t want it all the way back.”

Ten feet. 125

Del says, “Boss, that’s good.”

Eight Feet.

Del says, “Right there, Boss.”

Boss Mason holds his hands all the way apart.

Del says, “Boss, don’t forget about the chute.

Boss Mason brings his hands about four feet apart.

Del says, “We ain’t gonna have no room for the wheelbarrows.”

Boss Mason: two feet.

Del says, “Shit.”

Boss Mason claps his hands together, says, “Okay, bud, hold her there. That’s great.”

Truck’s windows roll back up. The sound of air conditioning shrinks away and is gone. Truck’s drum speeds up, rolls fast. Boss Mason grabs a section of the chute off the side of the truck, sets it in place, moves to another section, grabs it, sets it in place. Four sections in all, the chute is out over the hole, ready to pour the entire foundation, so whoever holds the chute’s gonna have to stand clear off to the side over towards the wheelbarrows the whole damn time. Damn Del for trying to take over the job. He should have just left Boss stop the truck where he wanted to, rather than try to tell him what to do, so he for damn sure wouldn’t do it.

Colonel Killer looks underneath the shade tree that casts no shadow. He can see that he forgot to wrap his sandwich.

Boss Mason says, “Okay, boys, get them wheelbarrows lined up.” 126

Truck’s drum spins harder. Spins harder still. The chemical heat of concrete

steams up from inside.

The Colonel doesn’t think about lunch.

Gone flicks his cigarette into the mud of the muck of the hole. He asks Pedascule

for a chew. Pedascule stares off, hands him the can, waits for the cement, thinks the

footer in cubic inches, multiplies length, width, depth, converts cubic inches to cubic feet

to cubic yards, multiples cubic yards by the weight ratio of the average mix of water and

limestone and gravel per cubic yard. Gone says, “Thanks.” Pedascule takes the can back

from him, takes a dip himself, finishes off the calculations, As near as he can tell, the

approximate mass of this hole is soon going to increase by 1.617X10^23 lbs. Fuck, he thinks.

Gone says, “You about to fart or something?”

Pedascule says, “How big would a hole have to be to have the same mass as the moon when it’s filled up?”

Gone says, “Pretty fucking big I’d say. Like maybe twice the size of your mom’s cunt. Maybe bigger.”

Pedascule says, “Bigger than this hole, though, right?”

Gone says, “You being serious?”

Pedascule stares off.

Gone says, “Hell yeah, bigger than this hole, but don’t forget, the moon would weigh four times as much on Earth as it does on itself.”

Pedascule says, “I’m talking mass, not weight.” 127

Gone says, “Same difference.”

Pedascule says, “No. Mass is the amount of matter – it’s unchanging – it’s how hard it is to push something. Weight depends on how close you are to something else.”

Gone says, “You say ‘Potato.’ I say ‘Tomato.’”

Pedascule says, “What’s that mean anyway: ‘Same difference’? Just hearing those words put together makes my skin creep up the back of my neck.”

Gone says, “It don’t mean any more or less than anything else I’ve ever said, but that don’t change the fact that you ain’t getting the moon in that fucking hole. It doesn’t matter how close you are to something.”

Pedascule spits. He sighs. He looks off across the hills there. He checks his math.

He checks his math. He checks his math. He gets 1.1617X10^23 lbs. He’s been looking at the moon off and on for decades, and he’s not convinced he couldn’t get it in that hole.

He thinks, Fuck.

The drum on the back of the rig spins like hell. The Archimedes screw inside the drum starts tossing out hunks of gravel and gray liquid rock just about ready to let the mess roll down the chute. Del says a quiet goodbye to the hole and pushes the chew deeper into his gums with his tongue and thinks, So we begin. But begin, what a nonsense word. What is it that we – better yet, I – know about begin? I know only theory and myth

– big bangs, Adams, Eves, Canes, Abels, gas and flux, heat and combustion, spontaneous

Genesis. That is the point of Media Res. You begin in the middle of things, as did I, as did we all. When the sperm found the egg – the union of which created me, The Sullen

Poet’s pen to the paper’s self – this was not a beginning. It was a continuation of an 128

attempt or mistake or destiny that is the culmination of all things gone before. It is an

exponential examination of evolution. Del began with his mom and dad, who, between

them, had four parents, themselves the offsprings of four couples begat by four-square

progenitors brought about by a different thirty-two folks birthed by a chess-game’s-

pieces-worth of gene pools and so on back to apes who had traded gills for opposable

thumbs – the barter a result of osmosisizing single-celled organisms that mutated as a

response to the stimulus of a willing environment that came into being on a recently

barren rock, cooling from its billion-year terra-forming plan of slowing motion in space

placed in the vast darkness by an exploding gas or a lonely god, and then, poof, here I am

shoveling water for Christ’s sakes, pushing liquid rock around in a wheelbarrow,

continuing work that will someday be a different beginning of a home, a great good-for-

us, the drum rolls the Archimedes screw hard and concrete rushes down the chute and

hits Phaethon’s wheelbarrow, wrenching the one handle against his calf and the other into his torso, sending it into the hole, spilling concrete, pushing dirt back into the clean hole.

Truck says, “Watch it now, boys.”

Phaethon says, “Je! Fucking! Sus!” Not hurt so much as, well, I think we can all agree, What the fuck?

Boss Mason says, “Goddamnit.”

Gone says, “Praise be to Allah. Hey, Del, what do you Poetites say to curse a moment like this?”

Del jumps down into the hole, grabs the wheelbarrow. He says, “Relax. We gotta fill this part of the footer, too.” 129

Boss Mason says, “You should’ve fucking been ready.”

Phaethon says, “Truck should’ve fucking told me.”

Boss Mason says, “It ain’t about that, you little prick. You should’ve been ready.”

Del flips the wheelbarrow over, the wet concrete rolling off the sides. He grabs

the legs, puts the frame against his stomach and leans back. He leans forward, moving the

tool as though it were an arm that had fallen asleep, gently, yet, smooth and quick. His arms tighten and release, pipeline veins, sinews and stress, his sweat-soaked shirt strains against knots of muscle and scars of his body such that a perfect symmetry of tattoos rises against the cotton running the gauntlet of his torso, his body outline an anatomy lesson, a

Thank You note to The Aheadthinking Poet Above – the crew catches Del in these moments and they hate him, a body, they hate him, this body the way a body’s supposed to be put together, they hate him, the nuts and bolts of human machinery lined up too

well on this one, they hate his beautiful, useful, efficient body. He says, “Relax.”

Boss Mason spits a cottony white gob. He says, “Don’t you fucking tell me.”

Gone says, “Whatever, dude, don’t relax then.”

Truck says, “Anybody want to set another wheelbarrow under this chute? Or should I just cut her to hell loose?”

Gone says, “Fill her up, bud.”

Phaethon says, “That’s what your mom said.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah. Good thing he’s got a short memory.”

And in this manner the footer is poured. Two hours of strain and shove, a constant

start-stopping motion as the crew pushes wheelbarrows around the planked hole, spilling 130

puddles of cement here and there, strain and release, blisters, rocks in the shoes, longings

for something beyond themselves, while they dump loads into the trench. Boss Mason,

meantime, lays two sixteen-foot lengths of rebar side-by-side in the hot cement, works

them down half a foot, overlaps two more sixteen footers by a few inches, works his way

around the footer in this manner, reinforcing his notions of strength and permanence,

tying the project together, smoothing off to the level of the corner stakes – they drink

quick drinks of water and pop, chews cut their lips deep, they sweat streams down the

cracks of their jeans, they spit, they blow smoke, splashes of gray and orange cover their boot, planks wobble and readjust, the ground settling into its orbit at this moment after four billion years, the heft, the heavy sound of the truck’s drum diesel-spun. Gone sings,

“Something, something, something” – Pedascule scowls thinking about what a stranger would see who looks at him and he’s happy that the stranger would rather probably just go fuck himself than ask anything of this hairy, muddy mess – Boss Mason thinks back, thinks way back and forgets his past – the Colonel puts it all out of his mind – Phaethon curses and relishes each moment – there has to be, they think, something else, one single strike of lightning, a thunder burst, the sun still hidden by haze, no rain, no cloud, no motion but what they create, knees give out, muscles spasm, their own universes, two birds fly by medium-sized, nobody knows how much more is possible, the unending ache. The crew sprays off the wheelbarrows while Boss Mason sprays down the chute, removes a section of it, sprays down the chute, removes a section of it, sprays down the chute, removes a section of it, sprays down the chute, retracts what remains, sprays out the inside of the drum while the truck turns the Archimedes screw on high; the crew 131 smoothes out the footer, somewhere else by now, they spit, they gnaw, they rise up hands on their knees, brushing the dirt and dust and sand and sweat and gravel from their jeans, shaking the mud from their gloves, pushing their tools to the hose, squatting, soaked clear through, throbbing, the weight of the day hits them full.

Gone says, “Should we spray these things out?”

Del says, “Go get a bite to eat. I’ll take care of this.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah. Thanks.”

Pedascule says, “I’ll help out.”

Del says, “Go get some food.”

Boss Mason slips twenty bucks in through the window of the truck, a job well done, tells some sort of joke. You take care now. Be seeing you. So forth. Boss Mason pounds the cab door and turns, holds his hand up in parting, walks to Del, says, “Why the fuck are they sitting down?”

Del says, “I told them to take a break, that I’d take care of it.”

Boss Mason says, “I ain’t paying you three times as much as the rest of them so’s you can carry shovels to the truck.” He turns to the crew, says, “Hey, monkeys, get your asses over here.”

The crew sits beneath the shade tree casting no shade. They drip. Thick and slow and certain.

Phaethon says, “What the fuck? Del said he’d finish it.”

Boss Mason says, “What the fuck? What the fuck? Whose name’s on the side of the truck?” 132

Gone says, “A. Chrivelli Chevrolet.”

Colonel Killer says, “Tah.”

Pedascule says, “I don’t like being called a monkey, Boss.”

Boss Mason says, “Put what you like in one hand, and I’ll shit in the other, and we’ll see which one fills up first.”

Pedascule says, “I like it when you shit in my hand, Boss. What do I do now?”

Boss Mason half smiles, his cheek pulling his right eye low. He says, “Okay.” He looks at this footer which looks damn good: level, plumb, and true. He says, “Okay.” He looks back at his crew who pushed hard for him today. He says, “Tell you what.

Phaethon and I will cover this shit up. You guys just head on home.”

Gone says, “For real?”

Del says, “Me, too?”

Boss Mason says, “Especially you. Prick.”

Pedascule says, “What time tomorrow, Peaches?”

Boss Mason says, “Seven a.m.”

Pedascule says, “Just like this morning, eh?”

Boss Mason starts to say something but dumbs himself to silence. He looks at the hole and lets the heavy day settle on his shoulders, lets the world look right at him for all that he’s worth and all that he’s done, lets The Poet take his best pen strokes, lets himself forget about himself forget about himself forget about himself forget while Phaethon has his headphones back on, sitting on the tailgate of the great big Silverado. My God, thinks

Boss Mason, what a machine. He allows himself a momentary pride. 133

Phaethon looks at Boss Mason.

Boss Mason looks at Phaethon.

As Pedascule’s cruddy Jetta squeaks around the bend, the crew has vanished, leaving a scatology of chew spit and cigarette butts in an otherwise empty world. As he grips his steering wheel, he imagines watching himself from the outside. The blood pulsing through the veins raised against the muscles of his forearms. The hair, the beard, the scowl that keep the world at bay. Pedascule, B.S., believer in things, doer of some, thinker of others, the brain and body, the full-deal human specimen coated in layers of dust and dead skin and clay and cement, allows himself a moment’s reflection, pushes the tape into the tape deck, then plans his evening.

The mushed-up Jetta, a constant pull off to the left, a screech and thump thump thump thump, a flailing failing desire, a mutt of quarter panels and bumpers, a limping driveling seething scrod. The Jetta pulls off to the left, pushes the world out in front of itself, wishes it could just goddamn die, wishes it had agency of its own, wishes it could hear the world whisper to its end. Pedascule ignores his car, thinks in planner form, thinks in months of days, days of half-hour increments, plans his evening. Like this. Off work early. Two p.m. and out. Home by two thirty, showered and dressed by three, biceps, back, shoulders until four-thirty, cook some chicken, but wait, set the chicken out before rinsing off in the shower or after, whichever, but be sure to set it out so it thaws.

So shoulders, back, biceps at three until four-thirty, four-forty-five, whatever it takes.

Cook some chicken, chop up some lettuce, some carrots. Cook some beans, why not, make it a nice meal. 134

The thin gray road pulls along underneath him. The world pulls him to the side,

like a gravity off to the left, right there on the other side of the ditch, like the moon hefts

itself off from the side of this obnoxious, joke of a road. Certainly, he thinks, they won’t

have any roads like this in California. But only The Winding Interchanging Poet knows

how long it takes to get to California. He lights a cigarette. He blows smoke. The wind

always pulls through the sad, sorry Jetta with its doors that don’t fit into themselves, its

plastic-wrapped windows, its rusted and burnt-out holes. California, he thinks,

California. A mythical land. Like the world drops off just this side of Ohio and his past is too damn heavy to carry across the chasm. He stacks his past up against the present.

There’s a moment, he thinks, that holds him where he is, but he can’t remember that moment, can’t imagine a way to move beyond something he doesn’t know or won’t think of, which is more to the point. It’s your own fault, he thinks, but tries to determine if a self needs a second self in order to communicate, and if, in fact, he is saying to himself

“your own fault,” then who’s blaming whom and who’s to blame, and let’s not point

fingers here. The Plain Indifferent and Random Poet had been against him in a moment

of deep need. The Ever and Undying Poet, dead as She/He may be and erased as history

has left Her/Him, clapped Her/His hands on his old-but-smooth-smooth car, snatched him

up like a warm, sated fly and smashed him against the cold, slippy world.

He cranks the rearview mirror so as to stare himself down, thinking he sees and

cannot see himself, sees things in terms of Pearl Jam, so much clearer, the tape deck says,

Pedascule says, “So much clearer.” He doesn’t need to dwell in these moments, in this

past, he thinks, and plans his day: after working out, I’ll get out some chicken and grill it 135

up, so much clearer, and we’ll have a nice dinner and we’ll be happy and get to bed

early, watching watching, maybe fuck for a while and maybe read a bit or watch an

episode of t.v. and drift off early so we won’t feel like woodchuck shit tomorrow

morning in my rearview mirror.

Morning.

Fuck it. Morning. What a terrible place to wake up. He moves on beyond these thoughts, thinks about this evening, and he’ll talk to her about figuring a way out. Maybe

for both of them. At least, he knows, he’ll offer for both of them to get out, but what he

means is how do I get out of here, and are you going to weigh me down on my way out?

Still and all, maybe after dinner tonight he’ll dump her. Maybe tonight, he’ll cook dinner, eat dinner, fuck her for a little while, and start a fight. Pedascule says, “I gather speed from you fucking with me.” She’s not, after all, pulling her weight, not after her promises

of steadiness and splitting responsibilities around the house. Like if he cooks, she’ll clean

or do the laundry. He dichotomizes. Yeah. Not likely. One. The other.

The sky’s all around him. He turns on his windshield wipers, and they streak the

mud of dust and heavy air across the windshield. He needs new wipers and some wiper

fluid. Why can’t it just goddamn rain? But he doesn’t care if it rains. It won’t change the

rest of his life, might keep him out of work for another week or two, but fuck it.

Soybeans, so much clearer, that’s not the lyrics. He’ll be back on the road heading West

soon. He’ll convince her to stop drinking and to get her old job at the hospital back for

long enough to save up the money to fund the trip or for him to start feeling good about

leaving her. Either. Or. 136

Road signs promise a sharp left-hand turn. The road delivers. A road sign promises a deer leaping into the air, but we all say things we want to mean and don’t deliver. A road sign promises a hidden driveway – Pedascule thinks, well, it’s not hidden now that there’s a sign – and he sees no driveway, and isn’t sure whether or not he stands corrected. Early

afternoon. Tired, he thinks about taking a nap. But if he naps, he won’t do the things he

wants to do, and he’ll drink late into the night and end up fucking her without a condom

and sleep in a sweaty, messy self. He reschedules his evening: brew coffee during a

shower, lift weights, cook dinner, get the chicken out before (or after) shower, cook

(already said that), fire up the grill while making the salad obviously. Pedascule spikes

the breaks and bills and balls and fast-food wrappers and a thirty-two oz. Gatorade bottle

half-full of chew spit fall off the seats. His cigarette lands on his pants. The sharp white

tail of a young doe flicks into the ditch at the side of the road.

don't crowd

congregate until they're much too loud

fuck to procreate til they are dead

drink the blood of their so called best friend

they don't scurry when something bigger

comes their way

don't pack themselves together

and run as one

not even so much listening to the song as knowing the song, as the song is his life and of

his life, the lyrics run through him, through his silence and stunnedness, his stupidness. 137

Pedascule says, “Fuck,” and his heart is intense, and he tries to set his spitter up straight, and his cigarette falls onto the floor mat, but spit’s everywhere. He holds the plastic bottle out the door and drops it in the road. He grabs a work shirt and sops up some of the mess. They don’t compare. They don’t compare. The cigarette smolders, and he can’t find it. His heart is immense. The forest green shirt with BOSS MASON: twenty-five years of quality in yellow stitching drips spit and mortar chunks, and Pedascule drops it in the road, makes a note to tell the crew he should get a bonus for advertising the company such.

He drives on, thinking about death and wondering why such things are such bad ideas, given, after all, the fact that some days, if he’d have been more conscious at some moments, he’d have gunned the engine, clipped the deer, swerved off the highest cliff he could find into the thickest tree careening to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and here he is covered in his own saliva and other stuff while, apparently, his ass is on fire. He drives off, grabs his chew from his back pocket, takes a dip low over the steering wheel, and closes his eyes around a promised and delivered sharp right turn. He opens his eyes and the world’s still all around him, so he shrugs, looks for a spitter, remembers leaving the bottle in the tight middle of the lousy crappy narrow gray road a mile and a half back.

He spits onto the floor mat, steps on the cigarette butt.

The heat of the day pushes through the windshield, through the cracked and chipped and misaligned windows. And at least the sun would make this heat less humiliating. Instead, the world looks like quiet and is nothing but loud. He rethinks the doe jumping into the road like a picture of a postcard of a deer jumping into the road, and 138 just like that, gone. The cigarette has burned itself out in the mud and dampy floor mat, and if Pedascule had thought about it, likely he would have thought, fuck it all anyway.

Burn me to the ground. Not thinking of it, though, at this moment, he breathes deep, says,

“Small town predicts my faith,” pushes his tongue into the chew pushing into his lower lip, and imagines a flat colorless line without the rest of the world, without his mind or body, without anything or nothing, and breathes out but thinks, Goddamnit, thinks, I can’t imagine nothing, because nothing is a conceptual reality, but so is the line, but the line is necessary, let it go let it go let it go and imagines a line and breathes in deep.

Breathes out. Imagines a line. Breathes. Breathes breathes breathes breathes

The gravel driveway crunches underneath the crumpling, shaggy, once-green

Jetta, a camouflage of rust and dust and tiny tiny limestone bits. The gravel driveway slides beneath the car. The gravel driveway pulls his boot across its surface. It’s been waiting there all day like it had some place else to go but was trying to avoid going. The mud from his boot picks up chunks of limestone and dust. Particles, really, all of us. The phrase “conceptual reality” repeats in quotes in his head. “Conceptual reality”

“conceptual reality” “conceptual reality” Pedascule thinks, What am I? A fucking fortune cookie? He shuts off the car. The music stops. He steps out.

He scrapes the mud and rocks from his boots with the bottom step of the sidewalk. He stares up at this house, this place to store his body. This, he thinks, is what happens to all finished projects sooner or later. Things won’t stop fucking falling apart.

He says, “Hearts and thoughts, they fade. Fade away.” 139

In the meantime, we fly around this place like line segments perpendicular to an

imagined tangent on a great big theoretical circle of a world. Here we go, walking along

at more or less ninety-degree angles to the earth in the day and more or less the objective

correlative of the tangent in the night, never really a part of the bigger picture. Just this:

more or less line fragments. Never a part of the full story until we sink ourselves into the

swamp, dig out our six feet, the only real estate that’s actually our own (though we tell

ourselves we are rich, wealthy beyond belief when we write our names in cursive on

grass with riding mowers over acres or hectares or hundred-square-mile plots or sign our

marks in black ink stamped by a notary public, whatever).

The skin of this house peels itself back against the stories it holds inside, trying to

spill its guts, trying not to spill its guts. A beige chipping paint chipping off an older

colorless paint chipping off an older red or green paint chipping off an older green or red

paint chipping off a primer – the dark gray knotty wood beneath, sunburning, itchy,

exposed. Helpless. Years from now when the last embers of this structure burn

themselves out, we’ll find that the degeneration had occurred from within the body of the

house proper at relatively the same rate that it occurred from without – a double-edged

rot like a disease that affects the blood and the skin and has no mercy whatsoever for our

souls.

Pedascule has made surgical incisions into this old oil mansion, cutting back lath

and plaster to check for bad electrical connections or condensation on buried copper pipes, some sort of neurological or asthmatic concerns. Mold under the wallpaper.

Wallpaper under the drywall. Drywall under the primer. Primer under the paint. The 140

world is not the kind of place in which one can go on as one has set out. Rather, we must adjust. Rather, we find ourselves adjusting. Rather, we are adjusted accordingly. Agency is questionable. Desire is a social function, the necessary result of closer to thirteen and a half billion years of reaction to events occurring 10^-37 seconds after the purported Big

Bang on top of limitless, timeless time before time.

He’s almost certain at this point that the place has stopped breathing, but the fact is he has no definitive evidence. Despite hours of holding a small resilvered mirror in front of various orifices, he’s not certain he hasn’t seen the glass fog up just ever-so- slightly. Just enough. Proof, he thinks, and breathes deeply, knowing that he needs to replace that window that she broke out with her shoe in a moment of anger and replace that other window that she broke out with her shoe in a moment of ecstasy. Life is a constant paradigmatic event, constantly replacing this with this with this such that constants constantly change meaning such that this and this and this and that never means what it would have meant had it found, ultimately . . . but he drifts off, thinks of

what The Musing Wistful Poet might have expected when he gave Prometheus language

and told that old gray prick not to share it with us. Or was it Adam or was it Eve or was it

even the knowledge that hurt us so bad? Does knowledge lead to knowledge or does

language lead to language or language to knowledge or knowledge to language, or are we

just outside of ourselves, looking in at lives that would have gone on this way whether or

not we know or talk?

He turns his back on the house and holds his forearm upon the horizon and

imagines it extending infinitely in either direction and imagines himself to scale, 141

reshaping the hillsides into plains, reshaping the plains into riverbeds, reshaping the

riverbeds into Angelina Jolie, and holding the Earth against himself, the breast, the

breath, the magma pulse within the mud and rock, and an erection presses against cotton

and cotton against denim and denim against the impossibilities of touch and distance. He

shakes his head and scrapes mud from the soul of his work boot on the side of the

cracked and raised hunk of concrete that, much evidence suggests, was once a sidewalk.

He spits tobacco. He moves on.

One would think, he thinks, one would have a fifty percent chance of turning the garden hose spigot on each time one turns the handle clockwise or counterclockwise.

More to the point, he’s fairly certain, the direction is standard and mostly unchanging from spigot to spigot, though, he’s heard, one must turn the handle in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. He reaches out and tightens the knob. He tries the other direction and feels fairly certain that he’s not sure whether he actually did tighten it down that first turn or just didn’t try hard enough. A car honks in the street. He looks up.

He looks back at the knob, can’t remember which way he turned it first, and so tries

again. And tries the other direction. And the first again. He thinks about getting a pair of

channel locks out of a tool box in the basement, but he needs to spray off before he goes

inside, and the world curls around on itself, making everyfuckingthing

imfuckingpossible. Directions mean nothing at this point, and just this side of crying, the

spigot opens up to his pressure. He vows to remember from this point forward for the rest

of his life, time without end, to never again, not once, forget which direction one must

turn the handle in order to get the water to issue forth from any given garden hose, and 142

the water issues forth from the nozzle and hits him in the ass. Which pisses him off. Hot

sticky, stinky, tap water sprays him in the crotch as he turns, and he reaches to turn the

knob off and, instead, increases the pressure.

He tames the great cheap sunfading green and garden hose, redirecting the spray

into the deep weeds she insists is a yard. He looks off down the hill as the water roils

down through the weeds, sliding along the saturated surface to the street. The hills, he knows, will someday wrap up this mess of devastated, dying, or dead houses and push us all into the river that will eventually puke up the asbestos and cedar and fiberglass and copper and carbon into the Gulf of Mexico and other places. The planet someday will recycle the parts, perhaps reshaping us into fresh oil for more dinosaurs to drown in or where additional gods and poets drown us. The sun will someday fry it all to a fucking crisp and then freeze-dry it and store it away in a slowing but not collapsing universe to drift alone, listless, breakfast table in an otherwise empty room. Something, he sings, center of her own attention. . . . The Poet, wise and well-versed, someday will put a period at the end of existence. But, in my humble opinion, thinks Pedascule, thinks

Pedascule, not someday soon enough.

The shades go diamonds in her hair

Panting room something song

He sprays the mud to pieces beneath his shaggy, graying steel-toed boots. His socks soak through and this is just the way his life is and he can live with it. He sings into the nozzle, “Don’t call me daughter. Not vic-tor-y.” He unties his boots, sprays off his hands, turns the knob one way, thinking to shut off the pressure, and, though he is not 143 initially convinced that he is shutting off anything, he continues on in that direction until the garden hose is reduced to tears. He says, “Not fifty-three.” He crushes the heels of his boots with the toes of his boots and leaves the soaked and soaking mess heaped on itself on the front stoop, promising himself, again and again, to get Del to come over and fix the railing on this place. The pictures left will remi-e-i-e-ind me.

He checks the day-planner in his head. He’s ahead of schedule. He’s going to crank out this workout and continue on into the future. He crawls into the shower to rinse off the salt and mud and limestone dust from his life, the remains of his day from his body. Quick rinse, he thinks, but the world hates a quick rinse when it has time for a good scrub. So he masturbates. He thinks about Angelina Jolie. He thinks about some fictitious world that is this world and that is other places. He’s on the beach in a bedroom driven along in the backseat of a car, a limousine, a sedan. The car is old and brand new and

Angelina Jolie sucks his dick, begs for sex, wants sex from him more than she wants to make movies or achieve fame. Please, he thinks, she says. Doggie style, he thinks. Please please please please please. He washes his dick with shampoo and wishes he’d rinsed straight off and gone to his workout. He rinses quickly and not as well as he might have wished, and that’s all okay.

No towel. No coffee. No, wait a minute. Get the chicken out of the freezer. He slides across the torn and peeling linoleum over the damp and rising too-thin plywood over the cracking and rotting joists over the emptiness over stagnant water atop the cracked and cracking cement floor over the crust, the mantle, the core that cannot hold.

He’s naked, but in a slightly different world, he’s halfway through his fourth set of bicep 144

curls about ready to turn on the grill, rather than sticking naked to whatever she spilt on

the floor last night.

So he washes his feet in the sink and slips into gym shorts, running shoes, and a t- shirt with the sleeves cut off. He takes some plates off the c.d. player and carries them into the room of mirrors. Sets the radio on his bench-press bench, checks to make sure

Pearl Jam’s Vs. is in there and that she isn’t playing another trick on him like when she put Whitney Houston in that one day and The Backstreet Boys in the other day – not fucking funny, he’d told her, though it was very funny. He closes the c.d. player and presses play and Go.

The music is very loud, but it sounds very very loud from very far away, a quick bass guitar, he’s guessing. Pedascule pulls his arm across his chest, pulls his hands up behind his back, twists at the waist, does a jumping jack, touches his toes, turned to my nemesis, a full on fucking god – the lyrics themselves no longer lyrics so much as life – as he watches a reflection of a reflection of a likeness of himself shadowboxing, like a past self fist-fighting another past self. He puts twenty-fives on either side of the bent-arm bar

and sits in the preacher’s chair. He cranks out fifteen reps without hearing a word of this

song, though he lips every word. On each stroke, he thinks, he’s not pulling the weight up

so much as pulling himself closer to the earth, pulling himself down, breaking himself

into smaller bits of himself, and he stares in the mirror on each stroke until he’s almost

unbearable. He wants to yell, “What?” to spring across the room and break this mirror

over every other mirror, to destroy this room and every bit of his past and every self

which is not this very self that he sees when he closes his eyes. 145

I’d rather be with an an-ni-mal. He says, “I’d rather be, I’d rather be with, I’d

rather be with an animal,” He adds tens to both sides. He pulls up the weight fifteen times to let his muscles know what’s to be expected of them. He says, “One two three four five against five five five five five against five,” though he has no idea whether those are the words or whether those are even words or how the song might change if the words weren’t really words but an instrument designed to sound like words. He shadow boxes.

Mother reads aloud, child tries to understand it. He adds ten pounds to either side of the bar and pulls it up. She “One” holds the “Two” hand that holds her down. “Three” She wears on I “Four” don’t know “Five” . . . The Pictures kept “Eight” . . . will remind me . .

. “Fifteen.” He feels a slight resistance and points at the mirror The Shade go down and points off to the side while looking at the mirror and says, “The shades go down,” and touches a finger to his head as though he’s warning someone or predicting this present moment. And he stares at a self and looks at a self’s back and another’s side, and he is of himself and around himself.

He wonders what he’s pointing at and sees his past, sees a certain threat, something he can overcome with these muscles and this meanness. He adds ten pounds to either side of the bar and looks mad into a mirror, tilts his head in, pulls his eyebrows together, watches the veins rise on his arms, his shoulders, his neck, his forehead. Pulls up fifteen.

He drops the bar on the rack. Fuck he thinks the chicken, and in thinking it, thinks it ungrammatically compared to how he might have wanted to think it, such that, had he said the same words, it would have come out “Fuck the chicken” (a command) rather 146

than as he had wished “Fuck! The Chicken!” (an expletive, an exclamation). And he thinks, Well, that might have been worth saying anyway, though it would not be the point

he wants to get across. The utterance, the fact that he did not utter it notwithstanding,

would have gone unheard anyway for his lack of an audience. And, again, he wonders

about the notion of a singular self and if such a thing is possible. The guitar, he realizes, might be a car crash or a dry leaf scraping softly along the concrete, and everything is just right, though he feels light, empty.

Pedascule stacks the bar for a total of a hundred and thirty pounds, and now he looks at himself seriously in the mirror, tells himself, “Spin me round, roll me over, fucking circus,” calls himself gods and devils, a monster, an animal. He spits a long

stream of tobacco close to an empty beer bottle on the floor, promises to clean it up

sometime. Stab it down one-way needle pulls so slowly. He grunts. He adjusts his head to

the music, thinks about being pissed off, watches in the mirror a gaunt version of himself wheedling up against this chimera, this castaway, this masterpiece of flesh and bone.

Drains and spills, soaks the pages, fills the sponges. He sees that scrawny pimp, who

tossed daddy’s money after haircuts and imported beers and who never feared anything

the GAP might have to offer him. He resents the runt in his past and envies him. He says,

“It’s my blood.” He sees him walking out of college with grants and funding and patents

pending, enough running money to get him half a year into a new world without so much

as needing to ask for a paycheck. He sneers at this pale sleek self whose paycheck waited

for him nonetheless. He pities that learned and pasty peckerhead and what he might have

been. Painted big, turn it into, one of his enemies. He sits in the chair and leans down to 147 grab the bent-arm bar as though it were that past self, something he could run his fingers through, and stares into that full-length mirror, says, “It’s my blood, it’s my blood,” and hates that peckerhead, as he pulls that first rep up, wonders how far he could throw that weaselly self, one, It’s, two, my, three, blood, four, five, It’s, six, my he’s pulling, he’s pulling, a garden hose vein in his biceps shakes and pulses and pulls and pulls blood from all over the world into this very moment where nothing has ever meant so much, seven, blood, he says “peckerhead,” lets the weight down slowly and braces his feet against the future, his quads flex and spit staggers out between his teeth and the walls are red and the mirror red and the floor and his past and the music are red and fill the pages, suck my lifeblood eight. He fights gravity, allowing a slight tug to get the bar started, holds the bar, pulls against the negative rep, thinking nothing in the world except this bar cannot return to its resting spot, thinking gravity can’t get me now, thinking peckerhead, peckerhead, peckerhead, pulling, thinking, you stole my life and the bar hits the rack.

Pedascule stands and, using his momentum, pops the bar to his chest. The music is there and a decent memory, not necessary as he fights gravity on a second negative rep, thinking about pounds per square inch, work exerted in Joules, lies, he thinks, all lies, none of that exists as such because it only exists as language and, click, the bar hits the rack. He stands and rips the bar to his chest for his third and final negative which falls against dead muscles thud, pulling at his shoulders and chest into the rack. Clink. He stands and turns his back to a mirror and turns back and calls his reflection his blood –

It’s my blood. It’s my blood – as though Eddie Veddar had planned ahead for this exact moment in the universe. He has nothing left to flex, though he’d like to see his new self 148

fully and passionately, he’s left with fully pumped muscles that will go no further. And

the guitar and the symbols and the drums. His past self is gone. The song is so loud he

can hear Eddie Veddar breathing. If he were his past self, he knows, he wouldn’t want to

fuck with his current self. The song winds down haphazardly. He walks to the kitchen for

water.

He opens the refrigerator and quickly sees she’s forgotten to fill the filtering jug

with water again, so there is no cold water. No juice. No soda. The only cold thing is beer

and the thought of drinking warm tap water is not too much for him, but why drink warm

water when a cold beer will do just the same. He opens the beer and walks back to his

weights. He thinks about the future, this night, the West, himself, now enormous with a

college degree. He dumps the beer into the kitchen sink.

He’s pulled up a total of five sets of biceps curls from the preacher’s seat with the

bent arm bar. He pulls his arms tight beside his body and watches the veins rise against

the world, like blue pvc pushing blood around this monstrous, quaking flesh. He moves

to the lat pull downs. The preacher’s seat soaks with his sweat. He closes his eyes and

thinks of that twerp with the college degree and how easy it would be to snap that

fucker’s neck, and Angelina Jolie would love him. And so pulls the world down around

him – two sets of lat pull downs, imagining himself pulling that old self off Angelina and beating that self stupid while she masturbates on the bed. The album becomes one note, each song his favorite, each moment perfect of itself and how it relates to the next moment and the rest of the album. How the album relates to the world at large. 149

He starts a third set of lat pull downs and thinks again: The chicken the chicken

the chicken the chicken. And can’t recall what rep he’s on. He retires the bar, walks to the kitchen, removes three boneless, skinless chicken breasts from the freezer, puts them on a plate, puts them in the microwave, types in an uncomplicated series of instructions, which he does not ultimately trust to produce thawed meat in 16:20 . . . 16:19 . . . 16:18 . . .

Long enough to finish a few more sets. He puts in a chew, answers the phone on the first ring. Telemarketer. He says, “No thank you. No thank you. No thank you.” And hangs up. A wave of nauseous exhaustion rolls over him for lack of protein. He should have

eaten a scoop of peanut butter. It’s too late. He moves on, regains his desire to weightlift

the world into oblivion.

He resets the weight on the lat pull-down machine to his own body weight and

prepares to crank out another set of fifteen. He stares into a mirror and puffs out his

cheeks, breathing as if to bring oxygen to his lungs which will in turn supply his muscles

with the oxygen they will burn off in an energy exchange thus producing the pull on the

bar and the fatigue in his lats and arms and obliques. The veins rise to the surface;

tendons twitch. He breathes in sharp and fast. He pulls down eleven times, stutters, and

runs absofuckinglutely out of gas. He stares into the mirror, breathes in hard. His face

turns red, his body lifts up off the machine chair, his legs cramp under the brace that

holds his body from the upper atmosphere. His hamstrings cramp tighter. Tighter. The

bar falls up from his hands, he falls to the floor, his hands fall to his right hamstring. 150

She walks in to find him thus rolling on the floor, to find him pushing against his skin, his pain. She recognizes what’s going on and doesn’t hesitate to mock him. She turns off the c.d. player.

He says, “Cramp! Cramp!”

She says, “Pizza! Pizza! Your turn. What else are you holding? And I’m not going to believe you if you say, ‘Penis, Penis.’”

He smiles. He says, “Hello, my dove. I miss you like the intestines of a shark miss a very specific intestinal parasite that can only be found in the intestines of sharks.”

She says, “You do go on. Let’s celebrate.” She sets the pizza on the table in the kitchen, which he can see from where he sits on his ass. He thinks, where the mighty often fall, and watches her ass as she sets two grocery bags beside the pizza. He’ll have one slice and then get back to his workout. In the thousand and one days since he came to

this ridiculous part of the planet, she has put on weight in various places that is repulsive

and appealing, pleasing to the touch, suggesting on the other hand that she has not been

taking as good a care of herself as perhaps a health care professional would suggest. He

can’t remember the last time she went for a run or did a sit up. Her ass pushes against her

too-short jean shorts, and blood flows to his dick. He thinks, Not now, pecker. He’s

embarrassed that she’d wear clothes like that to work, and he wants to fuck her against

the kitchen table, wants to break the table, wants to fuck her on the torn-up and moldy

floor. He wishes she’d at least wear a shirt that pretends to cover up her tits. He wants to

put her head in the freezer and fuck her from the oven. He says, “Celebrate what?” 151

She pulls a 1500-milliliter plastic jug of Captain Morgan from a grocery bag and a two-liter of Coke-Cola from another. She grabs two glasses from the counter and rinses it’s-hard-to-imagine-what out of them. She fills the glasses with ice, pours the rum over the ice, too much, he thinks, or not enough as the case may be, and fills the glass with

Coke – fills the glass twice but never empties it (Eureka! Eureka!), thus enacting the theory of displacement. Pedascule’s arms are worked, his body worn. He’s very thirsty, wants some sort of reward for making it through this motherfucker of a day, wants something for making it to this moment. No, not displacement, some other thing about filling a cup with large molecules and filling it again with more compact molecules, and he wants to tell her about this miracle of the universe, but she hands him a glass, sits against the wall beside him.

He says, “I’m sweaty and gross.”

She says, “A shocking revelation.”

And he loves her.

He says, “Celebrate what?”

She touches the rim of her glass to the base of his and says, “An idea.”

He says, “Do I have to have one to join the celebration?”

She says, “Not tonight. Look. Let’s move to California. I think it’s time, after tonight of course, to start saving our money. To stop eating out. To be more healthy. To get on with our life. I’d have a hell of a better chance of finding a job there than here. I’m sick of talking about it. Let’s do it. Give that asshole two weeks’ notice, and let’s get out 152

of here. All the things we say at this moment, imagine me saying them, but imagine me

meaning them.”

He says, “Okay.”

She says, “The truth is, buttercup, I love you, and I can’t live like this. It’s not all

your fault. I could have asked you to quit drinking so much a long time ago or I could have got you to stop buying your coffee on the way to work so we could save money –

I’m just saying there’s a lot I could have done, too – but, the fact is, I need you to commit to getting the hell out of here once and for all.”

Not all my fault? His temperature rises exponentially as his heart pumps hard against tired flesh. He’s not convinced that it’s not all her fault with her promises and her promising career that she bailed on when he started picking up some slack. His past thousand and one nights run through his mind chronologically and quickly in waves, in memories, in sound bites and smells:

Day 1: He wakes up in a hospital where she tends his broken fingers and explains that the

world has not yet ended – in fact, he’s quite lucky to have gotten out of this mess

with so few injuries – but that his car is in very bad shape.

Day 2: She gives him a couch to sleep on until he gets his car fixed and maybe his fingers

heal up.

Day 3: She fucks him.

Day 4: She fucks him.

Day 5: He contacts the company he had plans to work for in California and explains the

car wreck and the car’s condition and his condition, and the company offers to fly 153

him out and ship his car when it’s ready, but he wants to take care of it on his own

so the company accepts this and extends to him an undefined grace period and

wishes him a speedy recovery, and she fucks him and fucks him and fucks him. . .

Day 6: They sleep in, waking intermittently to smile at each other and end up watching

t.v. all day, talking for hours about, well, nothing and everything, and they

actually seem to like each other; to interest each other; to agree on major issues

like the how pretty sunsets are and not-giving-a-shit-about-the Beatles or baseball;

to disagree on cute things like who’s a good actor and whether or not there is A

Fine and Prolific Poet or many Poets or no Poet at all and if there is One does She

/ He care about Her / His characters or just draw out their threads endlessly and

leave them be; to have hopes and dreams beyond making it through until payday;

to long for love, deeply and seriously, in ways neither of them ever pronounces or

projects but ultimately they both think the other can sense that longing maybe

because of the way they squeeze each others’ hands or brush their thumbs across

each others’ eyebrows occasionally.

Day 10: He calls Home and talks to his dad who is a.) surprised he wrecked the car but

glad he’s not hurt too bad, b.) ready to wire money to get him heading back out

West, c.) not interested in this nurse or whatever, d.) not even a little interested,

e.) pissed off that his son is willing to stake his future on and forsake his years of

intense study for some nasty small-town whore, f.) hanging up now. 154

Day 12: He mentions that he likes all the mirrors in that one room, indicating he’d like a

bit of explanation, and he doesn’t make a joke about them, so she fucks him.

Day 15: He proposes to stick around and work for a while, even after his fingers heal up,

until the two of them have enough cash and can move to California (without any

help from his folks, because that’s important to her), where he’s sure his

company’ll have another job they can give him, and they’ll be spending their

weekends on the beach, buying lunch for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Day 18: He takes a special interest in just how good-looking she is, because he had never

noticed before, and he wonders about fame and beauty, because here she is in

some sort of hospital scrubs and bright white and gold running shoes, a complete

10, with sharp tits and a killer ass and this entirely magnetic face, and there’s no

way anybody in Hollywood or Europe could look any better.

Day 19: He thinks about this very moment and wonders that he has no anxiety for the

first time in as long as he can remember and believes that maybe The Poet has

written this script for him – despite the fact that he has never believed in the

Poetic Fallacy that She/He works intentionally – and he doesn’t care about his

father or his former future potential employer – rather, he is simply here and now.

Day 21: She can’t believe how fat she’s getting and tells him that he should leave before

they ever even go out together, so they don’t ever have to break up.

Day 22: He acts more tender than before, though he feels manipulated.

Day 23: He feels more tender than before, and she fucks him.

Day 24: He is more tender than before, and that or something like it repulses her. 155

Day 25: She buys groceries for the first time since he’s been there, and he cooks these

most amazing steaks she’s ever had (though he’s not at all pleased with the cuts)

while she cooks baked beans from a can (which he’d thought she’d been kidding

about), and they drink a bottle of wine (which she thinks is delicious, despite the

fact that it’s cheap and corked, and he chokes down), because she wanted a fancy

dinner.

Day 36: She explains the reason there are eighteen mirrors and nothing else inside the

one room: it’s just that she’s always felt, oh, I don’t know, like there was

something else. Out there.

Day 38: He tells her about why he was heading West and insists that they head out there

as soon as he heals up, and she agrees that that would be awesome, so they dream

out loud about the West, in which he is successfully wealthy, working in the field

in which he was educated, which he finds exciting in practice but boring in

theory, and she doesn’t really understand anyway, so they agree not to talk about

it, while she gets licensed as a real healer like in yoga or something, rather than

being the health industry’s bitch twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five.

Day 39: They pick up his car from the shop, and it looks like hell but runs well enough.

Day 40: She buys an atlas and a case of Heineken, and they drink late into the morning,

drawing possible futures in various highlighters across the great and winding

interstates of America.

Day 41: She gets scolded at work for coming in hungover, and she tells him to fuck the

West, to grow up, and to be realistic. 156

Day 42: They move around each other in small circles like binary stars revolving around

some unnamable, untouchable mass.

Day 43: Okay, look, sometimes she needs to be convinced that she really does exist and

really does matter, and the only way she can think of to do that is to be utterly

entirely inside herself, and the only way she can do that is to have the mirrors

with their moldy and chipped frames and the splotchy and darkening glass,

because some days she is moldy and splotchy, but she needs to see every angle of

herself in the same way she can see every angle of something entirely outside of

herself so she can like believe that she has value as a thing – he says, “Like a

commodity value?” and she says, “No, not really,” and he says, “Like a raison

d’être?” and she says, “Forget it, I knew you wouldn’t understand,” but keeps

talking anyway about vanity and necessity: so like, anyway, that’s what’s up with

all the mirrors.

Day 56: While she’s away at work, he spends hours in these mirrors, and he becomes his

childhood and he is in his childhood watching this present self as though he’s

always known he’d end up in this very room and somehow he knows he has, and

he sees his future self and he watches himself in the future watching this present

self watching himself watching himself watching himself watching himself

watching himself weeping though he doesn’t know why.

Day 59: His fingers heal up – more to the point, they must have healed up some time ago,

because he is unaware of any pain and can’t recall any restriction. 157

Day 62: She’s had a rough day, so she smokes a bowl as soon as she walks in the door,

and he doesn’t like pot but smokes it with her.

Day 63: They smoke a bowl first thing in the morning, and they clean the house.

Day 64: The house isn’t as clean as they thought, so she calls off work, and they smoke

pot all day, promising each time that after the next hit, they’ll clean the house.

Day 65: After work, she smokes a bowl, but he’s bored with it.

Day 66: After work, she smokes a bowl and tells him he talks too much and needs to

learn how to listen, for Godsake.

Day 67: She’s sorry and promises never to smoke pot again, despite his insistence that he

doesn’t care at all what she does as long as she’s happy.

Day 68: She just takes one hit after work, fellates him in ways he’d only vaguely heard

of, and they drink a six-pack.

Day 69: She admits that she doesn’t love to go to bars but thinks it’s time he should meet

her friends, so they both end up puking out of the window of her truck on the way

home, and he doesn’t remember even one thing about her friends except that upon

meeting each of them he remembers how unmemorable each of them is.

Day 70: Still drunk in the morning, and sweaty and vomitous, she climbs on top of him,

and they have the worst sex imaginable, like a tree trying to fuck a much smaller

rock.

Day 71: She comes home four hours late from her shift, smelling like the bar they went to

the other night, wraps her arms around his neck, smokes a bowl, and passes out. 158

Day 72: He stands in the room with the mirrors and watches himself watching himself

turning sharp quick angles to tell himself to go fuck himself.

Day 73: They lie on the couch and watch television, and the world seems just right.

Day 76: She introduces him to her cousin, who works for this mason who needs another

hoddie.

Day 77: He starts work for Boss Mason, and she fucks him.

Day 78: He works and she tends his breaking and stained body.

Day 79: His hands come home from the job torn and skinny – the shear exhaustion of

manual labor something he’s never known – unsure if he can go on like this; she

calls him a pussy, tells him to grow up, and drinks herself to sleep.

Day 80: The strain of life courses through every tendon to his fingertips and toes; he can’t

be bothered to shave or even comb his hair: to which she responds by drinking so

much that he eventually holds her head above the toilet, showers her off, and

worries that she might have alcohol poisoning.

Day 81: She’s sick all day and he tends her, brings her tea, brings her toast, listens to her

talk about her childhood, and learns for the first time that she turned down an

athletic scholarship to study at Brown and play center on the soccer team because

she was in love with a steel-mill worker who took her virginity at seventeen and

promised the moon and everything holy but ended up sleeping with her cousin.

Day 87: He realizes without talking about it that the only times she’s ever been out of the

county was when she played competitive sports in high school. 159

Day 93: She takes him inside her without a condom, and she thinks this indicates a

deeper level of commitment, and he thinks she must have used some other form

of birth control but is too embarrassed to ask.

Day 97: He hasn’t listened to a punk album in 98 days and wonders whether or not he

misses listening to punk but decides to stop listening to it, and now that he’s been

listening to country since he told her sixty-three days ago, when one lives in

Deliverance, one should listen to the music of Deliverance, which curled her lip to

the extent he thought she might spit on him, and, though he hears her repeat the

line every time she puts money in a jukebox to the joy and pride of all her idiot

friends, any attempt by him to reproduce it or its sentiments ends coldly.

Day 99: They drink two bottles of wine and laugh and rub each other’s shoulders, and he

tells her it’s time, and he’s ready to head West, and she weeps and admits that

she’s always known he’d leave her as soon as he could, but he tells her no no no

no, he’s not leaving her; he wants her to come along like they’d planned, and she

says she knew her town would never be good enough for him and that she loves

him but he should just leave now before he knocks her up and gets stuck with her

– in the end, he sleeps on the couch, drunk, with no clear indication of what she

wants from him.

Day 100: She wakes him with fellatio, and a promise to head West as soon as the two of

them save five thousand dollars, proof of their commitment to each other and the

venture. 160

Day 106: He doesn’t even know who to call to find out where she is, and running on

almost no sleep, because he’s been sitting by the phone all night, he smokes

cigarette after cigarette, unable to hold a single thread of thought, knowing she’s

probably fine, but where would she be, and he hates her and misses her but hates

her too, and when she shows up around noon, filthy and sweating whiskey, he

holds her close and forgets the world and its rules.

Day 107: After work, she does sit-ups for like an hour and eats like three pounds of

carrots while he drinks a six-pack and promises to give up smoking.

Day 108: After work, she does sit-ups for like an hour and eats like a bushel of celery

while he does a few pushups and cooks fat-free, boneless, skinless chicken.

Day 109: He picks up a weight bench and a smattering of rusty and duct-taped weights

from the side of the road, and she coaches him through three sets of embarrassing

bench press.

Day 110: He asks her if she knew that one of the guys on the crew is John Wayne’s

bastard son, and she says, “No shit, it’s the first thing we learn in elementary

school,” to which he says he doesn’t understand what she means, and she says

he’s a self-righteous prick who should go back to college, which he’s still not sure

he understands, so she says fuck it and acts like she’s going to the bathroom but

goes to bed instead.

Day 105: She tells him he needs to get more hours, because they’re going to move to

California and they need money. 161

Day 109: He asks her what she meant the other day when they were talking about John

Wayne, and she says, “Baby, we’re all John Wayne’s bastards somehow,” which

he gets but isn’t sure how that lead to the go-back-to-college snipe.

Day 110: Are you fucking kidding me? Didn’t you just tell me the other day that I talked

too much, and didn’t listen!, he thinks.

Day 111: He says, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m. Look. I was wrong. I’ll do better. Like the

horse from 1984. I’ll do better.”

Day 115: She tells him he needs to spend more time with her.

Day 135: He wonders what she does at work – like, for sure, he knows she works in a

hospital – but there’s no way to broach the subject with any couth at this point.

Day 149: He admits to saving a bunch more money than he’d said in a sort of a travel

fund and they should have at least enough to get out West and get started there in

a couple more months.

Day 150: She quits her job so they can move to California and celebrates with her

friends, buying three hundred dollars’ worth of shots for a bunch of dumb fuckers

she’s trying to shake off her finger like just so many drying goopy boogers on the

tips of her fingers, and she gets a D.U.I. on her way home.

Day 151: She fucks him and fucks him and fucks him and is so sorry so fucking sorry.

Day 152: He’s smothering her, she tells him.

Day 192: He tells her that the bricklayer on his crew is really into a lot of different kinds

of religion and meditation, and how he went on and on about a Single Great and 162

Versed Poet Who apparently scribbles out our lives for us endlessly, but she’s just

nodding while watching tv, so he doesn’t make a big deal out of it.

Day 201: Her D.U.I. night and subsequent expenses have drained his funds, which he’s

never even mentioned to her, but he tells her that he’s ready to start saving again,

and she tells him to stop making false promises about the future.

Day 242: He brings her an ancient mirror imported from a hidden fissure in Petra that he

found in a pile of castaway junk in that cruddy antique mall downtown and

recognized from watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and she fucks him

but doesn’t really fuck him, more like does what he likes until he cums, then she

cries herself to sleep, but he’s too fucking tired to find out what’s up.

Day 243: The mirror, see, reflects perfectly, 100% light after thousands of years, and it’s

the best way that he can think for her to see how beautiful she really is, which

makes her weep, which pisses him off after all he’s done for her.

Day 244: He doesn’t get what her problem is, and she still doesn’t look at him.

Day 249: The guys on his crew tell him it means everything.

Day 250: The guys on his crew tell him it means nothing.

Day 251: The guys on his crew are like a religious text, for God’s sake – they could mean

anything.

Day 258: He borrows Colonel Killer’s deer-hunting rifle and hangs the ancient mirror

from some duct tape from some string from some duct tape on a tree and draws a

careful bead on it. He reflects off himself, thanks his god for himself, wishes 163

death on himself, imagines all of himself, pulls the trigger twice fast, wroooom,

wroooom.

Day 279: She hasn’t mentioned the mirror to anybody in the world, and things have gone

back to the way they were, so he keeps his mouth shut and enjoys the blow job.

Day 365: He realizes he’s been here a year and thinks of that year as a circular event

which shocks him until he thinks of each of these past days as smaller circular

events in which stasis rules and nothing gets done and he eats just to have

something to shit out, and he thinks back over his days here and realizes again

that whole months have past unaccountably, and shock turns to devastation, and

he begins an acre worth of tiny calculations to determine who he would be if he

had woken up in the hospital and caught the next flight to his other life.

Day 374: She gets a new job, they get drunk, and she fucks him, which makes him think

that he can’t remember the last time they fucked.

Day 389: The idea of days without change or progress – where one morning could be the

previous or the next – keeps him up late into the night, watching but not really

watching television while he smokes cigarette after cigarette, his heart beating

hard, and he resolves to change his life somehow.

Day 390: He shaves his head and his beard, and it’s not enough, and it’s way too much.

Day 391: He admits he doesn’t like running but has always wanted to run a marathon; she

laughs at him because he hasn’t gone for a run with her even one time since

they’ve been together, not once. 164

Day 392: He resolves to run a marathon and buys shoes, shorts, socks, a watch, and a

subscription to a running magazine; she laughs at him.

Day 393: He gives up drinking and smoking but not chewing or coffee; she laughs at

him.

Day 394: They go for a run together; she mocks him because he can’t keep up with a girl,

(which sentiment, he finds, I don’t know what, he tells himself, just fucking

wrong).

Day 395: She belittles him for getting beat by a girl.

Day 396: He resolves to become a better runner than she is and goes for a run.

Day 397: When she says she was all-conference three years in a row, he thinks, yeah.

But. You’re a girl, and he goes for a run.

Day 398: His heel feels like somebody with a nail gun is pissed at it.

Day 399: He does sit-ups ad-infinitum, though he hates everything about sit-ups,

including people who do them.

Day 400: He tries to go for a run but stops a while and just looks out over this hill for the

first time since he’s been here and regrets everything bad he’s said and imagined

about this place.

Day 401: His new watch / altimeter / split-counter / heart-rate monitor tells him he’s

doing great.

Day 407: His new watch / altimeter / split-counter / heart-rate monitor tells him he might

as well be licking his own balls. 165

Day 419: His new watch / altimeter / split-counter / heart-rate monitor tells him he’s

world class.

Day 421: She laughs at him and tells him he’s a world-class asshole, and they get drunk

and fuck and fuck.

Day 425: They go for a run together right after work, and he has to stop and lean against

a post because he hasn’t eaten for six hours and because he moved eight cubes of

block from across a big trench up onto the second tier of a scaffolding – she runs

backwards like Apollo Creed and calls him a pussy – she laughs at him.

Day 426: He brings home a case of beer and buries his running shoes under a black

walnut tree in the back yard and doesn’t talk about running any more, and she

seems to get it, immediately, and either smirks or smiles consolingly – either way,

he wishes she’d die.

Day 477: At the beer distributor, he realizes he doesn’t even bother asking her if she

wants to drink tonight.

Day 491: He wakes up sober, after a night during which neither one of them felt like

drinking, so, for no apparent reason, they didn’t drink, and the sobriety is its own

kind of hell.

Day 505: He finishes reading the third book Del has leant him about The Writings of The

Eternal and Encyclopedic Poet, and he’s got to admit, though the scripts are

purportedly the Language of the Transcendental Signifier transcribed by humans,

he sometimes gets a chill from the words alone and really likes the stories. 166

Day 555: Her parents’ dog dies, and she knows she shouldn’t be this emotional, but she’s

also emotional because he’s there and she wouldn’t be able to make it through this

day without him, and thank God they didn’t go West, and she asks him to promise

to never leave her no matter what, and she fucks him for hours and drains him,

and they lie there drained and lie there without any need to ever be filled again.

Day 556: She calls him the most selfish person in the world for eating the rest of the

Cheerios and says, “That’s it. It’s over,” and he sits there beside a little puddle of

milk and three Cheerios, trying to remember the last time he saw her eating

breakfast, cereal, or Cheerios.

Day 557: He’s perturbed and leaves a message on her cell phone, telling her he’ll try

again later.

Day 558: He tries again, and she doesn’t return his call, and he’s hurt.

Day 559: He tries again, and she doesn’t return his call, and he’s pissed.

Day 560: He tries again, and she doesn’t return his call, and he’s hurt and he’s pissed and

he’s heartbroken and he’s frustrated and he thinks about suicide to teach her a

lesson.

Day 561: She doesn’t return his call, and he goes to the bar where they sometimes go and

makes a show of not missing her in front of one of her friends, who can’t believe

how brash he is, and then he fucks this friend of hers on the moldy, duct-taped

backseat of his weeping Jetta.

Day 562: She doesn’t return his call, and he feels guilty and ashamed.

Day 563: She doesn’t return his call, and he thinks, fuck her anyway. 167

Day 564: She doesn’t return his call, and he doesn’t care.

Day 565: He doesn’t care one little bit.

Day 566: Not even a little bit: e.g., a cube of blocks slides off the tongues of a forklift and

almost breaks every bone in his body, tearing his tendons to confetti, damaging

his brain permanently, paralyzing him from the eyebrows down, disfiguring his

face to the point that even his dental records would be useless, leaving a very

important piece of himself there in that particular hole, taking from him

something that a thousand years of reconstruction and a thousand full-time doctor

and nurses and donors and inventors and theologians could not replace not with a

thousand thousand thousand thousand dollars and all the atoms and empty space

in the Western Hemisphere, but the cube falls a couple feet ahead of him and he

has to hustle even to scrape his shin on one of the blocks and. He. Does. Not.

Care.

Day 567: Gone tells him the phone number for where she’s living, and he leaves a

message with her roommate telling her that he hopes she’s happy and that he’ll

stop calling but that if she ever needs somebody to talk to, he’s there for her.

Day 568: He falls asleep at an intersection on the way home from work and drifts into the

back of the car in front of him; if the car in front of him had not been there, he

would have drifted into the woman pushing a stroller across the street in front of

the car in front of him, and that’s too much to take.

Day 569: Way too fucking much. 168

Day 570: He buys a complicated puzzle at Wal-Mart and drinks a case of beer all day,

thinking maybe he’ll kill himself when the puzzle’s done.

Day 571: He finishes the puzzle but doesn’t kill himself, and she doesn’t return his call.

Day 572: The guys on the crew tell him that they’ve heard reports that she’s fucking

someone else.

Day 573: He goes to the bar and can tell by the way her idiot friends look at him that

she’s fucking somebody else.

Day 574: He doesn’t care if she is fucking somebody else; whatever.

Day 575: He makes a list of all the women he might fuck now that she’s fucking

somebody else.

Day 576: The guys on the crew tell him that now she’s fucking a different guy but the

first guy doesn’t know about it.

Day 577: He can’t believe she’d cheat on this dumb bastard that she’s cheating on him

with.

Day 578: What. A. Cunt.

Day 579: What a whore.

Day 580: He’s over her.

Day 581: If she called right now, he’d hang up on her.

Day 582: If she knocked on his door, if she slipped a note under his pillow, if she wrote

him a song that got played on MTV, if she called a press conference and revealed

to the world that she’d been working a secret mission for the FBI in which she

had to pretend to cheat on him in order to prevent some atrocity but now she’s 169

ready to get back to her real life with the man she loves and the-man-she-loves is

him, if she introduced him firsthand to The Poet Who Writes Their Lives, if she

revealed the secrets of happiness and success, if she loved him, truly loved him

and finally couldn’t ever for another minute live without him, he would walk right

by her out the front door and never look back.

Day 583: He plans a fishing trip with his crew, of all people.

Day 584: He goes fishing with his crew, and he ignores the racist jokes and drinks beer

and smokes pot and passes around a bottle of whiskey, and they’re a family

except they get along, and there’s not a single place in the rest of eternity he

would rather be than right here right now, so he doesn’t think of her or Angelina

Jolie one time, and he goes off into the woods by himself and thinks over the last

583 days, and he feels a great calm

Day 585: and so returns to the campfire to help finish off the whiskey but finds the rest of

the crew passed out in camping chairs and tents, so he stokes the fire and finishes

the whiskey himself and watches the dawn come up and sleeps until the evening,

at which point he throws up a lot but doesn’t mind.

Day 586: He doesn’t feel quite like himself, but he doesn’t mind.

Day 587: He remembers where he was going 588 days ago and determines to get back on

that road and work so hard and so well that he catches up to that other potential

future within the next 588 days. 170

Day 588: He hears new reports that she’s fucking somebody entirely different from the

first two guys – in fact, the steel-mill guy who took her virginity – and he

remembers her as though she’s someone in a tabloid, so he’s not really interested.

Day 589: He hears she moved to Pittsburgh to be a stripper, and he’s not interested in

seeing her naked or saving her from the world’s depravity.

Day 590: He swears he sees her car drive by, but some guy’s driving it, and he’s not sure

why but it makes him ache, and that makes him laugh.

Day 591: He answers the phone on the third ring, but somebody hangs up.

Day 592: He answers the phone even though it hasn’t rung.

Day 593: He packs up his shit and tells Boss Mason he’s quitting in two weeks.

Day 594: He unpacks his shit and shows up abashed at work, and that night he calls her

and calls her and calls her but doesn’t leave any messages.

Day 595: He forgives her entirely for whatever’s gone on over the past forty days and

forty nights and blames himself for whatever’s happened between them and is

ready to start over with her, and he calls her place but her roommate answers and

tells him to stop fucking calling and to get a fucking life already, because she’s

moved beyond him and he missed his chance to be the hero and he should have

treated her better when they were together – besides, she’s engaged to this guy

who she’s loved since high school, and they’re getting married soon, so get a

fucking life or just goddamned die, whatever, and then she hangs up on him.

Day 596: He doesn’t call off and doesn’t go to work and drinks whiskey all day and does

the dishes and resolves to get a fucking life or commit suicide. 171

Day 597: He can’t remember what she looks like, and yesterday’s drinking makes him so

physically sore he thinks he might have taken a run or got into a fist fight, but he

doesn’t remember.

Day 598: He feels Zen.

Day 599: Nothing can touch him.

Day 600: He doesn’t sweat; he doesn’t shiver; rain rolls off him like sand down a pile of

sand.

Day 601: He quits smoking, chewing, drinking, drinking coffee, and swearing.

Day 602: He’s nauseated but doesn’t recall feeling the world opening up in this way since

he was a child.

Day 603: He stands in the room of mirrors with nothing around him but mirrors and

nothing inside him but mirrors, and he sees in himself how the world speaks

through him, what it says to be this height and this color with this beard and these

shoes and this hair and these scars, and, for the first time, he is himself and he is

of himself and he is the word and within the word such that all that talk about The

Ever Presupposing Poet finally makes sense.

Day 604: He wonders if this is what hell feels like and wonders if he’s supposed to enjoy

it this much.

Day 605: He proselytizes to his crew about quitting their vices, and they make jackoff

motions while they think he’s not looking.

Day 606: He is free and has forgotten her. 172

Day 607: He feels her all around him, smells her in his clothes, sees her in his rearview

mirror.

Day 608: He hates her.

Day 609: He forgives her but thinks about ways that he could kill her and make it look

like an accident.

Day 610: He weighs life in prison against the pleasure of killing her openly and without

remorse.

Day 611: He eats a handful of caffeine pills and smokes cigarettes while he chews all day

running his hand through his hair, and it’s not his hand, and it’s not his hair, and

the sunlight burns through him and he doesn’t mind; then he pukes for two hours

and doesn’t sleep until the next afternoon.

Day 612: If he could lift his wrists to a knife, he would slice them.

Day 613: He buys a Playstation and a large screen plasma television and promises to do

nothing but go to work and play Playstation until he can afford to get the hell out

of here.

Day 614: She’s drunk when she wakes him up late that night and keeps him up until its

almost time to go to work with a discussion about the ways in which human

communication is unpossible and inlikely: “You know what I mean,” she says,

and just before dawn she starts to suck his dick like a promise fulfilled but falls

asleep after a few minutes. 173

Day 641: He’s never felt such an absolute calm involvement with humanity – so settled,

so circular, so content and clean – his heart pounds painfully and he smokes

cigarette after

Day 642: cigarette until about two minutes before he’s supposed to wake up for work,

when he falls asleep.

Day 654: He buys a really nice weight set and starts a regimen.

Day 667: He thinks about taking that Playstation out of the box and hooking it up, and his

heart pounds so hard he has to kneel on the thick grass out back and punch the

ground.

Day 752: They resolve to get in better shape, another step towards feeling good about

leaving.

Day 753: They buy memberships at the YMCA and work out for about a half hour and

shower and go home and eat salads.

Day 767: He finishes the last of the old books on and of The Always Already Present

Poet and sees Her / Him in everything he does and sees.

Day 806: Today feels like the day they first met, and he’s in love again and depressed

because progress seems like a nasty myth.

Day 811: It feels like the third and twelfth days they were together, and nothing can

surprise him anymore.

Day 848: It feels like the eighth, eightieth, and six hundred eighteenth day they were

together, and he wonders what kind of sick plan The Poet has for him. 174

Day 1000: They drink themselves to the edge of passing out’s empty void, and she fucks

him but he’s not convinced it’s him that she’s fucking, so he imagines she’s

imagining fucking the steel-mill worker, whom she can never have the way she

has him, so she fucks him as though it’s their first time and she’s trying to

convince him that she is the only thing he should ever want or need to fuck again

or like she’s trying to convince herself that he is in fact that best lay she could

ever have, which she is, but we all need convinced of our superlatives from time

to time to remind ourselves why they are in fact so super.

Day 1001: She mixes him a strong drink and sits down to bitch him out. Him! The

fucking one who’s been here all along. In fact, he thinks, this is perfect. Let’s just

end it now, and I won’t have to drag your cunt around the world with me, and I’ll

get back to my life, to the next best first day of my rest of my life. Not all my

fault. If I’m such a bad guy, just fucking leave me. Maybe it’s not any of my fault.

She drinks half the glass of Captain Morgan and Coke. She says, “The thing is.”

She looks across the room and says, “The thing is.” Well, what? She says, “What

am I trying to say? The thing is. If you can’t. If you can’t commit to leaving with

me. If you can’t. Well. I’m going. I’m going to leave you. There’s nothing left for

me here.”

And he imagines a world without her. And the world is California. And what a

great way to end this relationship, the two of them desperate to end the relationship on good terms once and for all. They can just move on. Get drunk tonight, eat their pizza, walk away from this crumbling tesseract of a house, folding in on itself as it spills out of 175

itself, a constant self giving birth to its self. Maybe even shake hands. Split up the

possessions the same way they got them all: yard sale and split the profit. He takes a deep

drink of his Captain Morgan and Coke, and it hits him like a ton of Captain Morgan and

Coke, and a deep calm fills the world such that music must be playing somewhere like

Metallica or Mozart, and it’s all of the same element. And she smiles easily at him, hoping, he thinks, that he’ll make the right and obvious decision to walk away from the

whole mess with a handshake and a kiss on the cheek and a yard sale. He smiles, a

heartbreaking smile full of age and wisdom, she sees. He glances up and sees in the

mirrors around the room that this is what the world wants in a farewell, a genuine act of

contrition and condolence, a serious kindness, a deliberate concession. She smiles big,

too. He says, “You can’t leave me, baby. You’re all I’ve got.”

She breathes in deep, leans her head against the wall, reaches into her too-short

shorts for a cigarette, breathes out, lights the smoke, inhales sharply.

The weight of the day piles up in moments, and the fatigue wears so heavy he can hardly move his lips to speak. He says, “I can commit. I can do better. I’ll stop smoking and chewing, and I’ll brew us a pot of coffee each morning. We’ll fix this place up on the weekends. Just. Don’t. Leave.”

She blows smoke out through her nose, while drawing on the butt in her mouth, a trick he’s not mastered. She finishes her Captain Morgan and Coke and takes another drag on the cigarette. She smiles without her eyes as if recommitting to a lost cause, as if

acknowledging that he has answered her prayers, as if she’s doomed and sinking slowly

to the center of the earth and she is out of reach of any savior, as if she’s being knighted 176 holy and certain, as if she remembers something she thought she’d forgotten forever, as if she’d finally coerced the myriad and infinite miracles of this vast universe into a tight tiny shell that she could wear forever around her neck, as if the dam has burst and washed away all our sins, as if she wishes someone would get her another Captain Morgan and

Coke but doesn’t want to ask for another drink, rather shouldn’t there be someone who just wants to take care of her without asking or having to be asked, as if remembering something she promised herself she’d forget forever, as if she’s leaning against something sharp sticking out of the wall but doesn’t want that to become the topic of conversation or even a distant concern, as if Pedascule cannot know what as she sets her glass aside and drops her cigarette into the ice, the heat of the day rolling off her in thick droplets, down her neck. Light curls of hair fall from dark knots pinned to themselves and each other, light curls casting thin shadows on themselves, light curls pointing in and in and in. She moves onto all fours and straddles Pedascule, places her hands on his shoulders, the collar of her shirt brushes his nose.

The weight of the day releases him, releases from within him, and the release is so entire that he can hardly move his lips to speak. The rum has amplified within him. He is not of blood. He is not of body. He is of the rummy vapor of release. She kisses him on the mouth and they drink each others’ rummy sweat. Veins rise to the surface of her neck, and she is the strange familiarity that she was when she first took care of him in this way, when she first sat over him, around him. Him enveloped in her need to take care of him.

And she moves like that, the know-how-to-move turned off by the need to move. Her hips, her pelvis, her pubis, her thighs move in waves against him while they drink each 177

others’ rummy sweat. Her hips her pelvis her pubis her thighs, and her hands claw at his

face and they drink each others’ rummy sweat, and, lithe, her shorts and underwear are

off and his are pulled down and they drink each others’ sweat and he is in that world that

is not this world but maybe the one right next to it. The microwave timer dings like some

joke making a joke of itself. The daylight still bright and the mirrors throwing the light

around, making the world a world of light and open places. The world opens up and

opens up and her hips her pelvis her pubis her thighs he’s deep inside of her and the

motion is the motion of the world and the world is a world of want and a world of him and she begs him in a quick moan like a small confused animal and she begs him by pulling his head into her chest and their sweat is viscous and consuming and his head slides on her chest as her chest slides on his head and she begs him holding him there please please please in quick breaths, the collar of her t-shirt catches on his beard and chin and nose and her hips her pelvis her pubis her thighs. He fucks her and in fucking her recreates her in his own imagination. She leans way back and he is in this other world on the beach, the rough worn hardwood sticky floors, the backseat of a limousine on the way home from the beach and Angelina Jolie leans way back her head back her hands by his feet and begs him please please and he pulls her hips closer and she pulls away, closer and she pulls away, rivulets of sweat run down their upright bodies, and sex and sweat take on the world. And he is famous and wealthy in the Malibu sun, and he thinks of her as Angie, yes, fuck me, Angie, he thinks not daring to say it out loud, to scare her away with her own name. Lithe, she shifts her weight and faces away from him, her hair dark and curly falling from dark and curly pinned up knots. He watches her spine and scapula 178

and hips move at unexpected angles and thinks of the many times he’s seen her naked in

movies or almost naked in movies, him her her. He watches her face in the mirrors with

her eyes closed, her head down, her mouth open, her head up, while her hips her pelvis

her pubis her thighs swing in ever more terrifying motion, and the him in those mirrors is

him and is also who he might have been and who he might be, and they mock him but he

is irrelevant. And the self that is this self is inadequate, so he constantly forgets this self,

but he’s also necessary so he constantly remembers. Her breathing confused, she starts to

shiver and please please please. Please. Please. PLEASE.

She leans back against him, soaked through by sweat and sex and need and need

and need. And he is not this world and not of this world. He is dice shaken in the great sweaty palms of gods who have long since committed suicide. The future is a myth and

the past is a lie. There is only this moment and the ground beneath him and she moves

slowly now against his pelvis. They are too full of this moment to speak or think about

speaking, and this is the only place and they are the only people or the world shook down

all around them it could not touch him. He has made it to this other place. He has made it

and he was right and Angelina Jolie does love him, does want him, does need him, and

she is filled up with him, his sex, his sweat. His emptiness is her emptiness. His future

her future. She rocks back and forth slowly and forward and up. She hurries to the

bathroom and he wishes quickly that he’d worn a condom and lets the wish go so as not

to invite nature into this world. As if conception begins with conception.

He pulls his shorts and his underwear over his penis and moves his hand around

on the surface. He is so entirely drained and so completely full that the motion is beyond 179

him – like the story of The Poet walking beside the guy on the beach, he is almost certain

that this is one of those moments when he is being carried by something outside of

himself. Or that he is outside of himself carrying himself, which, according to The Poet’s

writings, is also equally as likely. He grabs his glass and walks into the kitchen, leaving

the outline of sweaty feet along the grainy hardwood and the sticky linoleum. He grabs a dirty glass from the counter and rinses it and fills it with ice and fills both glasses with rum and Coke and carries them to the table with the pizza and the grocery bags.

He eats a slice of pizza and looks at the mess and decides tonight’s as good a night as any to clean the kitchen. He’ll get started on that when she gets back.

He eats a slice of pizza.

The sun through the leaves through the window is like living in the ocean just

below the surface, and he feels the great calm of millions of square miles of himself

floating in such openness, floating in such emptiness, floating such that he not only is

floating but is the floating where the world is within him where the world is far removed

from him. She walks back into the room, wearing a different pair of shorts equally too

short. He thinks she changed her shirt and vows to pay more attention next time she

changes her shirt so he can comment on the change. She presses her forehead against his,

pulls the back of his neck towards her. She couldn’t know how sore he is, how her tight

tug causes him a great deal of pain, and it’s worth it to him regardless. He says, “That was fantastic. I feel like we just met.”

She says, “That’s how you treat your strangers, no wonder you don’t have any

friends.” It’s a joke and a jab, and at a different moment it would have started an 180

argument. She sits down beside him and drinks her drink. She says, “Look at this dump.”

She takes a deep drink and indicates the room with her bare foot. She says, “I can’t go on

living like this.” She lights two smokes, hands one to him.

He says, “We need to quit smoking, too.”

She drags deep and says, “After tonight. Okay, baby.”

He leans over to kiss her and she turns her lips away from his and he kisses her

cheek instead. Most of a black olive is stuck in his beard just below his mouth, and she

indicates this with a finger flicking at her own chin. He flicks the olive onto the floor. He

smokes and drinks his way across the dining room part of the kitchen to the kitchen part

of the kitchen to the sink to turn on the hot water. He moves the pile of dishes onto the

counter amidst other piles of dishes, empty liquor bottles, smashed beer cans, dishware

covered in aluminum foil covered in candle wax covered in cigarette ash covered in

cigarette butts. He pulls the stopper and the gray and greasy water spirals out of control.

He returns with the c.d. player and Pearl Jam’s Vs. comes on again. For the past few

months, he can’t get enough of these songs I swear I never took it for granted, and she

thinks it’s cute and she thinks it’s crazy that he can listen to the same disc incessantly for

months at a time. He spills dish soap in the sink, fills the sink with water that she always

says is too hot and he should turn down at the water heater, but each time he thinks of it he’s busy doing dishes or getting a shower or on break at a jobsite. should have pulled the

alarm The water steams and adds moisture to a moist day. When the sink is full, he puts

the dishes back in.

She says, “Are you fucking kidding me?” 181

He says, “What’s up, baby?”

She shakes her head, takes a long drink, stoves her cigarette on the counter. She

says, “Asshole,” and walks into the t.v. room. He thinks the guitar screams and knows

notes play individually in some sense and in a different sense they play together, like

taken out of context a note has a different language than placed into the world. But he

doesn’t know enough about music proper to understand how this song takes itself to

climax and falls to silence.

He laughs, takes a drink, listens to the television getting loud enough to compete

with the c.d. player right beside him. He realizes she is, in fact, not kidding. He drops his

butt in an empty bottle, runs an inch of water in it, and walks into the other room. He

says, “Baby?” why would you wanna hurt me

She drinks her drink. She watches television. She pulls on a cigarette. She’s a

million miles away. She has nothing to do, wants nothing to do, with this world. That’s it,

he thinks, I’m out of here. He throws his hands up to the side and says, “Baby?” I’d

rather be with an animal She won’t hear him, would rather die than acknowledge him.

He realizes at this moment: she hates him hates him hates him for what she’s

become/becoming. She fucks him like that like heart and soul like everything she has left

after a long fucking day. She needs to talk to him about the future and she fucks him and

he does the dishes. She fucks him and takes his cum and has to hope she’s just not pregnant, or fuck it, she’ll get an abortion without him or raise a baby without him or kill

herself and the baby without him or rot away from the inside – guts and teeth and glands

falling through her – without him. Better off all around without him. She’d fuck him 182

again right now if he’d let her. She’d fuck him for a thousand years and take all his cum

inside her until she’s fat with it, a thousand pounds of his cum, and she’d keep fucking

him like a banished goddess who has to work him up to exhaustion and orgasm and drain

him of his cum, at which point he becomes rejuvenated and she has to fuck him again like

Sisyphus and the boulder and the hill and the boulder and the hill and the boulder and the

hill, constantly riding his cock for his pleasure until he is done and begins again. She’d

fuck him to death if he wanted her to. And he does the dishes. And he throws his arms up

like it’s not enough like she should fuck him and spend the rest of the night telling him how great it is to fuck him.

He says, “What did I do?”

She says, “Can’t I just watch some goddamn tv. I just pulled a six-hour shift. I’m

too tired to fight. Just go do the goddamned dishes or whatever”

He says, “Fine,” and drops the dishtowel from his shoulder to his hand from his

hand to his foot from his foot to a far corner of the room. He needs to get away from her.

He goes downstairs to the laundry room, leaves “Daughter” playing in the kitchen. The

least he can do is some laundry while he figures out how to get out of this house with this

bitch and this burden. He puts armloads of laundry into the washer, shuts the door, turns

the knob, pushes the button. The machine starts its predictable filling. He remembers he’s

forgotten detergent. He stops the machine, fills the soap tray, shuts the door, turns the

knob, pushes the button. He leans against a floor jack in the center of the center of the

basement. He looks around at the empty, moldy shelves and the uneven cracks in the

concrete floor. He picks up a pack of smokes off the counter and puts one between his 183

lips. He doesn’t have a lighter. He throws the smoke on the counter and listens to her

walk from the living room to the kitchen, thinking she’ll either walk downstairs and thank him for doing the laundry and the dishes and for putting up with her (she’s had a rough day but didn’t mean to take it out on him), or she’ll start washing the dishes as an apology. He forgives her immediately. After all, he could have been more sensitive. She has had a long day. He doesn’t hear but knows she holds the hand that holds her down.

Maybe he should have said more about her fucking him and how nice that was or something about her shirt. She fills her cup with Captain Morgan and Coke and walks back to the television. fucking bitch

He feels his heart beat beat beat and fill up with blood and his shirt recoils and a river of blood pours through his veins through his forearms and groin and toes. He digs his fingernails into his palms and pounds his knuckles against the knuckles of the other hand. He pounds his great gray knuckles against each other like cinder blocks pounding against each other, chipping and hollow. His heart beats steady streams of lava through his veins, burning the surface of the skin. Sweat streams from his forehead and lips and chin. He grabs the floor jack with both hands and the house groans against his pressure.

He thinks his brain will melt. He pulls the house towards him and up, lifts the center of the center of the house half a foot off the ground, a foot, three feet, the veins in his arms in his neck in his knees pull against the pressure. He’s not breathing, and all his oxygen’s spent. He sets the house down, screeching and moaning, and he falls on his ass and such a thing becomes a trope. The walls are red. The ceiling is red. His hands and the floor jack 184 are red. His thoughts are red. His breath issues forth in thick red clouds, and he falls all the way back, his legs at bad angles, his arms out to the side. Eternity is red. And he laughs and cries when he thinks of himself shaped like a red lowercase t. He thinks of himself thus: t

He thinks of her finding him dead on the floor, smiling and tear streaked, thus: t

and he laughs and he cries to think that she would be without him and without him. And she would be happy and she would be heartbroken. And the rest of their world could fall off the end of itself, and from that moment forward, she could speak only of him as 185

and he creates a world in which he is t

such that when she mentions him years later and a stranger says, “Yes, tell me about him,” she’ll smile wistfully, drag on her cigarette and say, “Well,

t.”

Maybe occasionally someone will say, “You mean, like 186

T?”

And she’ll say, “No, nothing like that,” and she’ll weep or she’ll laugh and she’ll think about the past and wish she had treated him better. And that will be how he is. He wants to tell her this, and he sits up and wants to run to her and tell her the funniest thing that he’s thinking, but the tv is loud and she’s a crazy bitch who’s had a rough day, so he’ll clean the kitchen and do the laundry, and tomorrow, before she gets home from work, he’ll be gone, and she’ll never have to hear from him again.

The window over the sink has fogged and runs with sweat of its own. feels so manly with arms. He pours himself some more Captain Morgan and thinks that maybe

the Coke is going to keep him up and keep him angry or maybe it’s the Captain Morgan,

so maybe he shouldn’t drink the Coke this time and maybe this should be his last Captain

Morgan, so that he doesn’t get so drunk that he forgets what he’s mad about or

apologizes to her such that they make up and get on with their lives. always keep it

loaded He pours the Coke and decides for sure this will be his last drink of the evening.

He’s right. No sense putting himself in a position where he might do something stupid, and he starts scrubbing the dishes. It is a terrible thing, he thinks, what age does to us. 187

Our legs specifically, but our minds as well. He wonders for a moment where that

thought came from and to what it might refer, but just for a moment.

The c.d. player plays through the entire album – each song his favorite until the

next song comes on – and he thinks about getting another disc, but, come on, it’s Vs., and

anything else is just going to frustrate him in the ways that it’s not Vs.. He thinks maybe

he’s tired of this album, then realizes he just hasn’t listened to it enough. He’s dried off

his second dish rack full of dishes and has drunk two more Captain Morgans and Cokes,

because he’s fine, and it hasn’t started hitting him yet, and, hell, she’s had at least two

more, and he’s spitting chew in an empty bottle full of cigarette butts, and, occasionally,

he puts a smoke in his lips and remembers he’s got a dip in and consciously decides that

he wants the chew more than the smoke right now and he spits in a bottle full of cigarette

butts and chew spit. He drinks his drink. His sweat comes on so thick it has its own tide

affected by the moon.

Occasionally, he says, “I just wanted to scream, ‘Hello. My God it’s been so

long.’”

He’s moved everything from the counter into the sink, from the table to the counter, from the floor to the table, such that, he’s pleased with himself to report to himself, that, if he were to mop at this moment, the floor, at least, would look great. He’s filled up two garbage bags and set them under the table, while the third bag fills with some of this and some of that, and the c.d. player goes on and on in its way, tying the songs it’s playing with songs from the past, and those with songs from their own past, tying Pedascule in this moment with other parts of the world listening to this album at 188 this moment, tying himself to himself becoming himself, leaving himself behind, and he wants to tell her about all this, because he’s drunk and he doesn’t fully understand what he means, except in as far as he believes he’s onto something, and he knows she’ll get it.

Such that, as she walks through the kitchen, he’s ready to weep and hold her or hit her across the face with this Teflon skillet, break her fucking nose, but she doesn’t move that close and she doesn’t apologize and she does nothing to egg him on or help him out, as though she is neither here nor not here, except that he believes deeply and seriously that she is here, despite the fact that she is both here and not here, filling up her glass with ice and then Captain Morgan and then she opens a new two liter of Coke and fills her glass the rest of the way, setting the two liter closer to him than he had expected, neither offering to fill his glass nor indicating that he’s had enough to drink nor acknowledging that he either is or is not here, as if she can’t forget him because she’s never known him, as if his presence is a lack, as if he could only be himself if he floated off into nothingness, as if he is the single grammatical error on the part of The Poet Who (it has been said) is the Opening Capitalization and the End Punctuation, as if they are both ghosts moving through the emptiness the other leaves behind.

He spits. He lights a smoke. He takes a long pull on his drink. Darkness has set in, and the heat of the day has pushed itself all inside himself. His heart pumps thick black blood through his veins in waves, and if he weighed ten thousand pounds at this moment, nine-thousand-eight-hundred-twenty-two pounds of him would be blood and the rest would be bones and skin and other organs and excrement. He blows smoke and can feel the blood lining up and moving through his calves and his quads and his glutes, and he 189

can feel the floor pulse with him. He watches the water rattle down the windows as his heart beats and Eddie Veddar moans or screams or it’s a guitar or drums or what’s the difference – language is language? He watches the night turn to day and back to night as quickly as his heart beats, watches A Big Bang and the Universe Collapsing and back again as his heart beats, and he is in that moment waking up from the hospital with her fingers on his pulse, and he drags on the cigarette and spits chew into a bottle full of cigarette butts floating in chew spit.

The table and the counter and the stove are clean, and he wonders how this could have happened, considering at any single instant he must be stasis and movement of any sort is mostly impossible, and he thinks about digital and analog motion and doesn’t believe in any of it – that this self is somehow indicative of and entirely different from this self. So he has had another drink or two, he thinks, or has it been more? and he is ready to mop and go to bed, or he is ready to crawl into the tv room and apologize for whatever, just whatever, which would probably be seen as a very big gesture, but if it’s too big or not big enough – and she rejects him – he’ll just turn from her and kill himself.

But she’s the one he should kill with the cutlery or the cooklery. He resolves to go talk to her and deliver some sort of ultimatum, the details of which he’ll work out as he moves through it. He pours himself a drink, for The Poet Alone knows how long this will take, and runs his finger between his bottom lip and his gums. Come to find out he’s already thrown out his chew, so he lights a smoke, leaving the other one burning in an ashtray, and walks into the t.v. room. She is not there, which reminds him – Only The Poet knows why – that he left the load in the washer and never got moving on the laundry. 190

The moths fly in and out of the house through the broken-down screen in the busted-up screen door. They flutter in the light to the inside. They flutter to the outside.

They move about independent of want and desire. Pedascule drinks his drink, tries to drag on his cigarette, but the cigarette is empty, and its cherry smolders on the ancient hardwood floor. He steps on it. He thinks this would be a great moment to quit smoking forever and flicks the butt through the broken screen and lights another cigarette. He sways some in the heat and moves in front of the box fan in the window, pushing sand against sand, and stands there, swaying. He wants to lie in bed beside her and fall to sleep, to hold her in the heat, to sweat and breathe her breath and sweat, to wake up in the morning absolved and forgiving. He drinks his drink and moves back to the kitchen which is a different world than the world he walked into this afternoon. The clock is unintelligible. Almost certainly lying. He sets his drink on the counter and thinks about finishing it and thinks about refilling it, so he stoves his butt on the ice in order to limit his choices to a certain degree.

He moves to the stairs, pulls himself along against gravity and the future. He brushes his teeth and pees and stares into the mirror for a while. He pulls at his beard and sticks the handle of his toothbrush and eighteen Q-tips into his beard and thinks it’s high time to shave, to find his way off this island, to peek over that third wall that keeps the future trapped firmly within itself. He empties his beard and pulls the band from his ponytail, and his hair falls over his face, mixes in with his beard, spells itself out for him like a personal history, saying, explicitly, “You are here,” but pointing also to the past 191 and the West. He pulls a chunk of dried concrete from a clump of hair at his shoulder. He thinks about showering and thinks about throwing up and brushes his teeth instead.

He moves to the bedroom. His t-shirt is thick with sweat and shakes with his heartbeat, and he wishes he hadn’t drunk so much caffeine, and he wishes he were dead instead of sleepy, and he wishes he could throw up and run a marathon for the next three hours until it’s time to go to work. He takes off his shirt and his shorts. The blood pushes in streams, and he thinks maybe not everybody’s blood moves through their body like this, like maybe he should get checked out, but he’s young and so so sleepy. He thinks of himself and has nothing good to think about himself. She is motionless, in another place, and he wishes she was dead so that he could love her entirely, love her without the conflict of having to hate her, love her in a way that would allow her to love him, love her and think only of her. He wishes she were awake, so he could say just this to her. He tastes that he has brushed his teeth but can’t remember brushing his teeth. He wishes he’d taken the microwave out of the chicken. He shakes his head. The microwave out of the chicken. He can’t get it right. The microwave out of the chicken. He pulls the bed under him, lies down in a tight corner so as not to disturb her, wishes he were inside her or her inside him or that the moon would fall through him into the basement, and the fan moves the air like a hand moves sand against sand and it settles on itself. His heart beats hard and he’s certain he won’t be able to fall asleep. He wedges one foot under her sheet and falls asleep. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

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