Thu, 19 May 2005

Hidden Places
Sometimes you hear a song whose lyrics make you feel a certain way you didn’t think you’d ever feel again, or answer a question you didn’t have to words for, and you try to tell someone else, sing them the song, but without the music and the tone and the feeling you had sitting on your bed with your headphones on playing the same song over and over it just doesn’t come across, and you feel like there’s something you knew, just for a second, that you’ll never remember again.

Memories unravel in small details, things you’d never notice, the way certain things used to smell, the direction of the wind, light in the windows in the building behind you as you looked back to see if I was still there. The image remains, the picture of it in my mind, but there’s nothign to it now, thin as muslin, as though it belonged to someone else, i’ve grown new skin since then and the places where your fingers touched me are no longer dyed in, my eyes are a little worse, my teeth a little better. I’m not on the medication anymore, and that copper taste that was always at the back of my throat isn’t there anymore, I can’t bring it back. I still have the words, but I’ve lost the inflections, the sound of small breaths between sentences, so that to remember what you said is essentially to narrate, in my mind, in some half-real mimicry of your voice. Your hair was longer then, longer than it was the last time I saw you, but I couldn’t describe the color, couldn’t tell you where the henna ended. I think I’ve rearranged the things I said that day, stripped out the coughs and the silences.

I don’t really remember you at all.

He had taken to sitting in the middle of the plaza, downtown where no one goes anymore, just after midnight on Wednesday nights, where he would mumble to himself, telling stories, in an attempt to see if, over time, anyone would learn to come to this place and listen. His mother would wait up for him to come home, knowing he only had about twenty minutes worth of material each week, and with the nights growing cold and his skin so weak and brittle it was growing increasingly unlikely he’d make it even that long. She would make him sweaters, in which she knitted the words of his stories, which he thought one day he would give to someone watching from the edge of the plaza, coming out from some better-lit area on Wednesdays in disbelief at this person, this storyteller, keeping the story-sewn sweater as proof to show to friends who thought the story was fictitious. In his room, there are piles of sweaters, holding up the ceiling, into which he climbs and sleeps, when he can sleep, listening to the scuffling of feet in the plaza below, wondering if any of those footsteps belong to someone just a bit too late, confusing Wednesday with Thursday, or Friday, or Saturday.

I couldn’t get out of bed for days. when i was a kid, in my old room, there were flourescent lights over my bed, and as i turned them off and fell backwards, my head on the pillow, the lights would fliciker and flash like distant lightning, until finally it went out entirely, and i so looked forward to that everyday, everytime i went to sleep. i kept thinking about that, the week i spent in my room by myself, as part of me was convinced that if i didn’t get up, i was still, in a way, back in that room, and could stay there forever, and never have to get up again, and i would look for the lights across the ceiling, but there was nothing there, nothing at all.

The easiest thing for him to do in this situation is to blame himself. There are many things for which this blame is deserved, the odds of his blame in the situation being a solid bet, and so he had taken in times of confusion and discomfort to hold himself responsible, to have the reassurance of a target, a sense of order, so much better than the notion of things happening at random, a dispersion of tragedy into lives like rain, which erodes the sense that even in the cold hollow formality and habit of his relationships there is at least structure, pattern, an ability to predict in some small sense what will happen next. He thought of his mother, of how bad it had gotten toward the end, even in her pain when she stopped taking the medication there was a connection, and though they had never told each other in so many words or necessarily had much of a physical connection or did any of the things which are taken as psychological signs of connection that there had at least been, in the short conversations they repeated rote in the front lobby, the reuse of old anecdotes of his embarassed childhood hand-polished like the wooden handle of a heirloomed tool, the way he would shake her hand, that he was not completely unable to connect, that the small comforts he had learned were not without value. He had answers then, watching his mother go away, and he had answers now, the resolution of guilt and shame, a comfort when contrasted to the idea that she had left him just because, it was just time, things were different, all the things she had said. She was too kind, he thought. She could do better.

All the bands should have broken up years ago. The relationships running on routine and inertia. The stories they tell each other all just reiterations on the same handfuls of swiped anecdotes. The children are all tired of the arrested development. The abstractions infected with psychological bearings despite all good intention. The hijinx with all the appeal of a forced smile. Overexamined relationship deterius and maudlin set pieces. Attempts to convince of a small wisdom, something learned to balance out the years, all dead echo. In a word, clever. Though I guess there’s still time to fix everything.

Demons prove to be much less of a problem shenanigan-wise after they’ve been neutered, which I guess shouldn’t be a suprise when you think about it. I, being me, hadn’t thought about it, and thus was adamantly against Edna bringing home her new bladefighting instructor for two weeks of intensive constant training in the taela-shaen school of machette-dueling, as perfected by the crew of the Haitian space program before they had that terrible accident, most likely caused by the same aspect of Edna’s instructor which troubled me so greatly, ie: his demonness. Edna, who knows my disposition like she knows what goes in a Wormwood Gibson, not only brought home papers verifying Delatz’s neuteredization but also provided a series of before-after pictures which made me certain that this giant snarling pus-clothed piss funnel was actually just a gracious if rough around the edges house-guest, which was just one more shiny angle to Edna’s going back to school. Maybe I can get Delatz to eat her dog.

Certain people have a sort of blindness which won’t allow them to see directly ahead; they can only see from the corners of their eyes. Her and I are like that, which is why it’s a good thing that we have each other, which is why we’ve walked such a crooked road. I wouldn’t change a thing.

The superhero was doing his laundry down in the creek, which most people wouldn’t let slide if you weren’t a superhero, but they chipped in tax dollars to bring him here and keep them safe from whatever big thing everybody was afraid of that year, so small things like public washing of spandex superhero costumes was allowed just so long as these costumes weren’t unduly soiled, that is to say in the natural way, which never came up until the Uguhystku arose from the briny deep and ate the library, which would make anybody feel a little queasy, so now atop the shame of being bested by the first and so far only superhero-quality villain the superhero has to face the same of Mrs. Fedrick calling the police to have the superhero removed from the creek, as his costume was stained in an indecent way, and for the first time since Cincinatti the superhero thought about returning to his job in market evaluations.

The funny part is Owen called me up to ask me about it. Why he called me I have no idea. Maybe he didn’t want word getting back to Ana through some sort of gossip-channel, and knowing that I was a dead end for all communications he figured the trust factor was reduced considerably. Or maybe he thought I knew something about how to approach such a project. Either way, he was sorely mistaken.

I was not dreaming, as I have not had dreams (at least that I remember) since I stopped taking my medication, and there was no shift from dream-logic into wake-mirror-logic, so immediate I could hear a snap, a shift, and as I opened my eyes, and she was there, her lips on my throat, just above my thyroid, humming. I have told this story before, but it was vague, and I had no understanding of the event taking place. I could hear certain harmonics resonate inside my ribcage, inside my skull, and subvocally asked her why. When she stopped humming, when she raised her face over mine, the ambient light of the moon and the clock became vibrant, swum around the edges of my vision, so that I could pay attention to nothing but what was right in front of me. She said in order to achieve syncopation, certain resonant frequencies were required. The muscles in my neck began to spasm, and I turned away, and she was gone. In case that is of any comparable interest.

I had hooked ropes to my steering wheel and weighted chains to the accelerator and brake of my aunt Cleo’s Continental so as to stand on the roof and drive around town, road warrior style, when the police asked me if i had a rope-and-chain-weight permit. “Abraham Lincoln didn’t need no fucking rope-and-chain-weight permit!” I screamed, to no avail, as the copman took my rope and my weighted chains and left me to drive around town like a regular schnook, which was doubly embarassing as my wardrobe consisted of nothing but studded black belts placed Judas Priest-style across my privvies and delicate areas, which was just all wrong for the Elderly Maroon (I swear, it’s a real color) Continental, and it was in this get-up I ran into, and then over, Mister Dobalina (Louis, nothing like the song) and his dog Rochester. Louis Dobalina, as everybody in the neighborhood knows, is a state-certified necromancer, so when I saw Rochester licking secret seals on the forehead and palms of Louis’s corpse I knew I didn’t have much time before Zombie Dobalina would be looking for my insurance information and prompt arrest by the same police who already thought of me as a hooligan from last week’s portable cyclone stunt. I had blown out bothe the front whitewalls when I hopped the curb but was lucky enough to see an abandoned tricycle over in the Goulitz’s front yard, which i wedged under the front bumper of the Continental, which allowed me to progress just so long as I didn’t have to turn. Thus it was I took off down De Rais Boulevard at a smooth single nickel, listening to the cheap metal of the tricycle buckle and bend as I made the slowest getaway of my entire life.

There’s a feeling you get when you step away from the circle of friends you’ve accumulated and surround yourself with near-strangers, the feeling that you can redefine yourself, wise to the failings of your previous selves, all set to be the person you were always supposed to be. The problem with this is that nobody actually defines themselves at all, any more than you make your own face. You modify and shift what already exists. You learn to speak through your skin and stances, each shifting to fit around the other, corrupt only insofar as we believe in a thought unsullied by communication, ghost-thought, a dream by which we are polluted and believe in sin and shame.

Manny was explaining his life-schema to the woman at the unemployment office, explaining how his prior job as door-to-door boogeyman insurance salesman was nixed by underground b-man connections in the department of energy who basically own every solicitation office from sea to squealing sea, which was fine with Manny as it gave him more time to work on his enemies list. Manny’s enemies list isn’t just personal slights and high school bullies doomed to get theirs, no; manny keeps a near-complete list of all active supervillians. this is not the sort of thing you should tell your unemployment officer. Manny was in a hurry to go see the Superhero, having discovered that a criminal-in-hiding since the Thirties calling himself the Butterscotch Bandit (who apparently stole candies from children of priveledge and gave them to poor children, whose parents promptly put the sweets in the trashbin, knowing better than to let their urchins suck on sugary confections not only stolen, but stolen by a man in a purple full-silk bodysuit) who has never been brought to justice, and thus kinda blew off his mandatory unemployment visit, which is how it is that his welfare got yanked and Manny had to get a job.

This woman and her grandchildren had actually tracked me to my apartment in order to make me listen to and perhaps write about the story of the prune. Not prunes in general, mind you, but the story of one single prune as it goes about its pruny day, a snapshot of the life (so to speak) of a prune, which they assured me the reading public would find classic, an understated brilliance found in the single story of a solitary prune. I had to remember to get new locks.

And that’s when you realize this person isn’t all smitten with you, that she’s not secretly pining for you, that she doesn’t spend the empty spots in her day imagining some near future where you are together and buying groceries and looking at strange objects in the sky, that she doesn’t shift her body in her bed to cradle your absence, that she has been watering that little buried seed of love deep in her heart, not for you, but for someone else, someone you don’t know, someone more fortunate and more ignorant than you will ever be, and you can only think of how glad you are you never told her, that you never said the words.

Not having a home, the oompah band took up residence in the front yard of one Mr. and Mrs. Hanherholden, whose great-great-great-(etc)-grandson would have made them proud by becoming a doctor but the would have made them confused by his rather pointless and ignoble end, but that is neither here nor there. What is both here and there is that the small agrarian horses and antiques sort of neighborhoood the Hanherholdens live in has no recourse for oompah band removal or extermination, and Mrs. Hanherholden’s attempts to reason with the band was thwarted by cross-language communicative failure. Something, however, had to be done, as the likelihood that property values would shrink and atrophy once word of this oompah infestation spread was great enough to demand drastic measure. Mrs. Hanherholden went to the phone and dialed the one number she hoped she’d never have to dial, being forced to lift a lifetime ban in order to solve the problem with the only person who could solve it, persona non grata in extremis Fast Eddie Satan.

After she had moved out, he had taken to painting his toenails in the sky-blue robins-egg color she had always used, thinking through the work-days which had solidified and made him feel sick and scraped out inside about the color on his toes which helped him feel a little less alone. Until the polish ran out, and he scoured stores looking for an exact match, the empty bottle in his pocket, clerks curious about his obscessiveness, expanding the search radius out to bordering towns, to late calls to friends of hers who might know, to leftover receipts on the floor of the living room, to experiments with combining off-brands which never came out quite right, to written requests to the company which made the polish for an order form, a sample pack, anything, learning the company had gone out of business, bought up and sold for parts to other cosmetics firms, and he knew then that she wasn’t coming back.

She sat there, draped in rope and plaster, a dull pain in the base of her spine, blinking, as though her survival was a trick of the light she could wipe out of her eyes, turning back to look and see if anyone had seen her fail, the windows across the street all empty or curtained, and the phone began to ring, in the middle of the night, which hadn’t happened since her brother called to tell her about her parents, years gone by, the phone ringing long past the acceptable number and into the desperate, unable to get up and afraid to put her hands on the floor to push herself up for fear of pushing her hands into the broken glass from the lighting fixture the rope had been attached to, feeling stupid and wondering how accidental this stupidity was, the phone ringing to the point that she was afraid her neighbors would come over to find out if anything was wrong, some throbbing feeling at the bottom of her brain, and she knew she had to get up.

The names change, near-instantly, and the character of the place slowly adopts the necessary attributes, like water pulling the dyes from a piece of cloth. It was, and mostly still is, a hospice, which explains its presence out here beyond the city limits: none of your sick in our neighborhood, we care but it’s the property values, so on. During that time there was a man who lived in the attics, feeding himself off cafeteria leftovers and washing himself in the public bathrooms. This man would walk into the rooms of the dying, at night, when no one else would see him, and tell them he was immortal, that his blood carried benign and possibly sentient lifeforms which had cleaned him of his pathogens, and could do the same for them, given the chance. It is unsure how many took the man up on his offer — at the time of his capture he had been living in the building for nearly a year. The fact that no one quite knows what became of the man, or of the patients, lends the story nearly-assured fictional status, the sort of story those with endless time on their hands spin and pass on. This man was one of three people who lived in the building who was given the title “The Immortal”. The second, and most recent, was Sarah Mossiman, the first child in space. Of the third I cannot yet speak.

Josef is on the highway, trying to catch the thing he runs from. Ana’s breath has collected across the ceiling of her bedroom and escapes through cracks, beginning to glow as it gets farther away from this place. The corpse digs into the mud until it stills and is silent, the water filling the mouth to keep the soul sated. Seth adjusts the readings of precognative machines in the attempt to know which way to walk. We all had so much promise, once, if only we could reach the place where the light would find us. If things were different.

Right now, in the basement of an hourly motel just off 28th street, four elderly men are practicing their christmas ballads, as they do every year, on piano and standup bass and violin and modified guitar. During the holidays they play a variety of songs from a number of different traditions, including a few self-written songs whose patterns and tempos are based on the falling snow and the patterns left therein by passerby, in front of Ben-Jakob’s Curiosity Emporium. Their chances of all living out the year are slight, and the empty place left with the dead will not be filled with another member, but they continue practicing, because this is what they do.

Ali and Smiljan were in a band. Actually, they were the band — Zombie Monkey Corpse — which is how I met them, originally, even before I worked with them. Waterloo has a pretty strong Bosnian speed-metal underground right now, refugee families working at the plants, but ZMC were one of the first, back when they were a five-piece playing midnight jams on stolen power behind the abandoned Hy-Vee over by Gates. BFP used to play those shows, as did Buddy Holly’s Drummer, so this must have been when I was in high school, the end of the eighties. Ali disappeared into Minnesota around ‘95, and Smiljan now does sound-work at Midwest Death Cult Studios, where I’ve been working construction these past few weeks. Anyway, the reason I bring this up is the whole of Zombie Monkey Corpse’s ouerve were what they called “grafts” — two songs smashed together and played at teeth-clenching speed, the more inappropriate the connection the better. I’d bump into them, later, at the vinyl room at St. Vincent de Paul, sifting through stacks of old records, looking for new cover material. “You can’t, it’s like not to just go blamblamblam!, right? the songs you have to be able to hear and go, like, ‘Don Ho but he’s rocking!’ and it’s all ‘aaaaagh!’, you know? ‘Rocking Paul Anka, oh no, aaaaaagh!’, hahahahah!”

There was a terrible storm but I will not write about that, as I almost believe if I do not write about it the storm will not happen, only what sense does that make because the storm already did happen, and even if there was a way to make it not happen, not writing about it won’t cut the mustard, as everybody’s not writing about the storm all the time, and yet you can still see where the storm split the trees, and half-flattened the barn, and I still get tremors in my hands when I hear a loud noise. And yet I will not write about the storm. I might write about a frog that lives in the garden, or the way certain things taste after you brush your teeth, or the shrine I’m building to Sarah, the goddess of practical advice. Those are all perfectly suitable topics. The world is absolutely filled with suitable topics. Turtles are good, too.

Can’t even hold her head up off the bowl can’t even keep herself from putting her hands down into the water and the yellow rope-vomit, can’t do much of anything but kick at the door and wait for logic to come down like an angel and inhabit the brain of the corpses spread face-down on the bed, the opal tears collected at the corners of the eyes binding the faces to the pillows, hairless animals trapped in the garbage cans, mon petit disease, the door has been nailed shut from both the inside and outside, the rain kicking and screaming, signs informing parents to keep their children away from the pool area as pollutant-damaged geese have nested in the deep-end puddle, snapping at phantoms, kicking legless, digestion problems, pustules and parables, she’s reaching for the towel rack which comes off in her hand, slashes the arm, the rug bunched up at her feet, she can hear the stereo playing bad nostalgia music out in the bedroom, falling bottles, some kid keeps laughing all scared and pretending not to hear her, she’s trying to scream through the vomit, his new anorexic maggot fuck-doll in the hallway reading modern bride with a highlighter, new diets and positions, she’s trying to pull a chunk of something out of her throat, the color soaks and spins, abortion sacrifices left to rot the brains still scattered on the rocks and his stupid ass won’t get off the phone to call 911 as the conversation is in ‘a real fragile place’, he may never fuck her again, said things and could not follow, something was off making a strange noise in the lot, like metal falling atop itself, but that was the sound of the rain, the birds couldn’t sleep and started to go insane, like the bolts were falling off the underside of heaven, the radio told them not to drink from the well until certain disturbing colors could be identified, i saw her on her back, on the floor, the sheets up to her belly and the black smudges of her soul escaping her body across the wall behind the sink, she couldn’t have been that old, the truth of it is only so strange when laid against and beside the memories, something in the window-light, in the smell of rain and pine way up here in the mountains, sometimes waking up on the porch, where they sucked up the warmth like flowers, the skies were meaningless and afforded no sense of place, at least the vodka wasn’t contaminated, she said it was a ceremonial weapon and thus not really very sharp, she kept talking about how it was okay that she was saving herself because she sucked a lot of cock, she was just starting to wonder if she was overstaying her welcome when the quarantine was lifted, her boy there at the ready feigning sympathy, and the last time anyone saw her she was playing in a band consisting strictly of guitarists; when the music ended she got up and turned and was gone before the ear-ringing faded.

She had asked Owen for all her letters back. Owen had spent the week working on annotations to these letters, in order to let her know what had happened in the time since, as a means of bridging distances. He wanted to show me, to ask my opinion, but I didn’t want to see it. I was certain the dead echo would enter through my eyes. I remember Josef telling me all his counseling was supported on the notion that the beginning of any sort of psychiatric healing was to let go, but to let go was to let death into your heart. He did not know what to do, I did not know what to do, so after a bit of silence he got up and left.

I used to live in a dorm which had a hallway connecting our building to the building across the street, and this hallway was incredibly ornate, with pattern-woven tapestries and elaborate mirrors across the walls, patterns in the tile on the floor, and I would see people I knew from the street or from passing between classes frozen and fixated, terrified by the immense space of the hall, or caught in the patterns, following lines which never ended, their pupils filling their skulls and their fingertips worn and cracked from tracing messages across the surface, like pulling algae from the surface of a pond. I was on drugs constantly for those two years, and had some buildup of the fantastic to fall back on, feeling a panic when walking the hall which never reached the fugue, and I would pick the people up, walk them to the door, where the opulence stopped, reverting to the browns and grays of the unintended brutalist annexes, and send them on their way, dizzy and dazed. Later I would see them, out on the street, a lost look to them, people who now wear ghosts the way you would wear an overcoat. I am beginning to wonder if my efforts to assist these people was simply the way in which the nested psychosis of the hallway affected me, and if perhaps I am the only one who was lost, and if perhaps all that lucidity I thought I possessed was just the narrative I clung to as I fell away from the world, as I was at that dorm today, and I could not find the hall.

The courage she’d taken so long to get up, the breaths limbering her lungs, the keys pushed until she could do it sightless and upside-down, and the sharp thrill of the click as the phone was lifted, years all gone in attempts at getting her shit together, Sundays walking around the lake and thinking about where the first misstep had fallen, the search for a safe distance, suddenly filled with the rash decision to call and reciprocate all the tendriled feelings sent out to her by obvious and unobvious means, the sound of the voice like a light emitting from every pore on her skin, her voice all ready to say any necessary thing, and the confusion broke up the signal, and she didn’t know what to say, and suddenly she thought back to all the conversations, all the calls, and she realized, the courage all going away, she said “I always thought you were talking about me.”

Ed’s brother Doug explained to me how to do the resurrection trick. The key is finding something that isn’t actually dead, or something which is ready to not be dead anymore. It’s just a matter of helping the process along. The tiles on the floor may have contained a message, but they were thrown out and buried when the floor was redone. Pieces of the possible message have since gone on to form the walls of a group of families who dug up the materials to insulate their homes, to fill the spaces where the walls do not meet. Parents now teach their children how to sound out their vowels by running their fingers beneath the message on the wall, watching the small pupils follow the motion and associate the sound with the image, until the process becomes immediate, which affirms their inability to send their children to school. Later they will hear the message and think back to a memory they can’t quite reach, mouthing the words as the sound sinks into them, a feeling of remembering something that hasn’t happened yet. The spires of the great satanic factory hidden off in the distance will spin with sulfurous lights as the children, no longer children, stand at the gates and listen, trying to remember.

Her prior boy tapes people on the bus, telling each other their stories, and puts them into car commercials — he won an award from the story she told him her abuse story, the general ritual of people-being-a-couple defining their connection to each other, the crackling faraway sound of her voice on the tape as the car drove off into the distance, some sort of ham-fisted symbolic notion of highway Zen as a therapeutic tool, the vehicle as a personal sanctuary where such stories can find a structure and, perhaps, even a solution, and she was so disgusted, she couldn’t move, the commercial had played three times before she could bring herself to get up off the couch and begin packing.

The color scheme, the lighting, the furniture was all supposed to create a feeling of deterritorialized space in which all that was past is passed and behind, too far away to hurt us, but Josef couldn’t stop thinking all these off-green and off-brown rooms, all these hallways in a rainbow of grays, they were all the same building, the same hall, that there is no hiding place. The answer he would give to anyone who asked what he was looking at, why he was staring down the hallway, was there is but one judgment, which would be decided as a problem of perspective. This is why they kept upping his meds.

12. I don’t think it’s fair that you said this of me. I don’t think you appreciate what was happening. You never told me, and yet expected me to take all this information I didn’t have into consideration whenever I talked to you. Not to mention running off to fuck other guys in the middle of dinner. You think I don’t remember.

Certain he wouldn’t understand, wouldn’t even think to wonder, they had the machinery checking the length of his lifeline to the internet, watching the beat of his heart in real-time, the flow of anticoagulants and synthesized venoms into his blood, the notes his doctors make in the patient database, webcams stashed in the ceiling, waiting to see, their pdas set to hum at first warning of trauma or collapse. A basement-written search engine came across the site, and now their stupid misguided agony feeds the world’s hunger for novel entertainment.

Every day she waited at the window, across the street from the new prison, taking aim with her air rifle, filled with hypodermic ampules which she’d shoot into the neck of her client twice a day, walking laps out in the yard, managing to keep his addiction fed throughout his three-year stretch without having to resort to using community needles. Over the years, she became one of the best shooters in the area, finding a number of offers for liquidation contracts once her narcotics distribution arrangement was completed. Instead, she went back to school, and last I heard was some kid’s mom.

When I lived in Iowa City, and for the short time in Waterloo when I stayed with my aunt, I used to wander around the nearby hospital on nights when I could not sleep, which were often. One night, which must have been in 1992, I walked from Quadrangle, my dorm, over to the hospital, through the lobby, up and down the halls, looking at paintings and trying to place the layout, when I walked into a family with a shocked look on their faces, people who had obviously been through an agony whose first half had just come to an end. Because I am the creator, I can tell any story for them I want. I could find them what they had lost, breathe a new life into the husk beneath the sheet, but none of them will ring true, and the best thing I could have done would be to leave them alone entirely. Instead, I switched corpses with them. I told them they could mourn for the person I had lost, and I would mourn for the person they had lost, and in that way we would develop distance from our suffering while spreading the half-life of the remembered a bit farther. They looked at me for a long time before they began beating me.

I talked to her last weekend, for the first time in years, and the point at which general smalltalk opened up into something different was when she told me she sometimes felt like there was something growing in her chest, like a pearl, or a crystal, and it would be decades until all the time and effort she had put toward its growth would bear fruit, only she didn’t know anybody willing to wait that long. I told her I didn’t really know what to say to that, and instantly regretted it, and then neither of us said anything for a while.

My man Cyrano, who’s been to the moon (which is like the Earth’s attic, where the god keeps props from olden times and sets for those old miracle gags he used to pull and lots of tinsel), says that Elijah tried to fly by making containers full of the smoke of human sacrifices which he used as balloons. Cyrano tried that same gig using evaporating morning dew. My associate Bomberman, who has no need for any of that stuff (though there’s pictures of both Cyrano and Elijah on his van mural, alongside Lindberg, Earheart, Saint-Exupery, Beuys, Ride, Komarov and Eatherly, all staring upwards, preparing to understand time through a disaster in space.

Blessed to follow. The pulse beneath makes the sound all splintered, flanged. Crosses on their palms, fresh-filled holes beneath the porch. Trace hand over hand and into places with hoses for company, bloodshot memories, making its way to the fence, calling out the seven-beast, seals and mastery of redesigned farm equipment. The trains kept on all day and the smell won’t get out of my clothes. Home sadism films down the obscure trail into the maw of children’s teeth, where the wicked are ground into thick paste until the day of arising. Supreme happiness aria as scored by the missing finger ensemble. Thick with trees who swallowed bird-eggs and kites, spitting them back out through the roots as beaked worms with cottontails all ribboned and smeared with mud and the prayers of worshipful young women in rusty wallace t-shirts who are convinced the bird-insects will one day gain control of their wings and fly the pen-scrawled prayers bound to their tails, stories of prison-held boyfriends and mothers with unpronounceable diseases, all the way up to heaven.

There’s someone whose job it is to manipulate a whole series of mirrors hoisted on pulleys and wires in order to make sure the sunlight always falls on her shoulders. That person will show you smudged photos of their children (seven, three, and 18 months) and explains they don’t really look like that anymore, it’s been a few years and they grow up so fast. There’s rope-burns across the palms, the lines of the hands and the corners of the fingernails dyed a thick black, a constant glance back over the shoulders to make sure she hasn’t walked across the park, or gone back to her car to cry. This person can’t stop moving, can’t stop checking angles and looking for water stains. Conversations are always partial, because they’re never completely there; the job is a bigger responsibility than any single idea, any fleeting need. It’s a life’s work. She’s looking at the trees, at the patterns between the leaves, and they’re triggering a burst of sunshine refracted off the morning dew, and smiling. There’s a certain satisfaction in a job well done.

I was hiding out at the farm, trying to work as hard as I could, bailing hay and walking the soybean rows. They had a room for me, but I slept in the root cellar. Lawrence Curst was released and sent off to find his brother, who was somewhere around Topeka, working on a human catapult gag. When they saw each other, Harold panicked and fled, running into the wheat fields and jumping a train. Lawrence took over the ringleader job, and in a matter of weeks nobody much minded the difference, particularly seeing as how Larry the Dairyman upped wages across the board.

21. It’s a mistake to believe the sensual is always obvious, a blatant gut-knotting hunger. There are forms of the sensual which are subtle without being delicate; they nest in your spine and feed from your attentiveness. There are certain wants that feed but do not nourish, light but do not warm. These are the things I have written. The heart-meat is sewn sideways, sneaking sidereal and grinning. No one ever thinks to look for the obvious.

For the whole of the winter she would draw pictures in the frost on the window as she sat at he desk, fingernail-doodling, listening to the sun crack the ice on the roof. Down the hall, someone had made constellations with the pushpins. Two floors down I was hiding out in the janitor’s closet, having come into work drunk and snarling and terrified that there were humans here on a Sunday. I took the hidden escape and got up to the roof, where I planned to sleep it off. That’s how I first met Owen’s sister Rissa, who was doing the same, asking me what my deal was. I looked to the sky for a sign, but the sky was empty.

There once was a saint who kept himself strictly within the confines of the laws handed down by his god. No potential for holiness was turned away, no notion of benevolence was shelved for a later date; the saint ran headlong into the beatific. Upon the deathbed, the saint had a vision of his god, who informed the saint he could not share forever in the god’s most holy light, as the saint had committed the sin of vanity. The saint, realizing there was no way to avoid sin when even avoiding sin was a sin, turned away from the god, stood up from the deathbed, and walked away.

The protocol of the situation called for my punching him in the face. There was no walking away. Being addicted to the notion of the defining moment, through which entire life-currents were given direction and meaning, it was critical that some sort of conflict be set into motion here. In order to stick to this rule of conduct we had been drinking heavily, a tainted yellow vodka I’d had tucked in my trunk for god only knows how long. This was partially to get him to tell me, partially to bolster the will to fulfill on my obligation, to close up the past through violent action. The point of concession was long past. We’d come out to the playground, sitting on the chipped-paint picnic tables, finishing off the bottle while staring at the mist on the river, and now we had to see this thing through. We’d like to think this was a pact shared between men, but that only held up so long as we didn’t think about it, so long as we didn’t hold it up to the light. He told me he could swear he heard the sound of shotguns off in the fields. I also had a bat in the trunk but that didn’t much seem sporting. Our precious quilt of abuses and transgressions, being in the wrong hole at the wrong time. You could see the watertower from here. Sometimes, when I’m nervous, I like to throw in a lot of high-grade words to distance myself from what I’m doing. A way to stop paying so much attention. I wanted to be sure he didn’t have the bottle in his hand when I swung. I want him to see it coming. That’s the center of it.

I had this story that he was doing a lot of writing. he was writing all the time. he didn’t see many people, but people knew he was writing a lot, and they were happy, and occasionally called late at night for long talks, or else met for lunches which were strangely mock-formal. Sometimes people asked him if he was lonely, and he was, but in a comfortable way, as he was not alone, and besides, he was writing, and wouldn’t have the time any sort of constant connection would require, or deserve. He ended up writing about everything, as he had plenty of time, and his everything was very small as all he had done was write, but he wrote about his little everything very well, and was happy. Idon’t think I’ll actually bother to write that story, as I’ve got too much shit to do, but I thought I’d mention it.

Yeah, we used to have some consciousness-mapped AIs, but once they figured out they weren’t going to get laid anymore their productivity dropped to nil, so we wiped the drive and sold the parts. Now we play weekends at the Holiday Inn. The pay’s better.

I was making money that summer by writing and delivering curses to people, usually when they were at work, hired out by jilted lovers and high-school grudges to say absolutely horrible things to them, break them emotionally, and you could see the tears well up in their eyes, and sometimes they would try to attack me, but I was carrying a taser, and would have to back out of the cubicle farm with the other insects staring painfully at their monitors, pretending none of this was happening, while I reached behind me for the doorhandle and mumbled how the meat in their chests would blossom with tumors. The way you think about the people around you changes when you spend most of your waking hours thinking of terrible, horrible things to say to people you don’t know. I’m too lazy to finish this story, but I imagine there’s some nature of falling in love at some point.

I became a faith healer, as every faith healer I’ve ever met has admitted after a couple dozen screwdrivers, primarily to bag the sort of woman who sees a causal connection between my laying hands all across her greater aspects and any falling of potentially prophetic prattle that falls out of my tongue-lulled mouth. This is hardly a straight-line sort of plan; I’d been out on the road for nearly three years, addicted to Pastuur Hyacinth’s Sleep Ray (bet you didn’t know the Pentagon perfected long-distance narcolepsy technology back in the Sixties) and adrift in a puddle of brain-dried responsibilities resulting from said pursuit of jigglin’ lust. It was then that the floor of my life gave in and crumbled, as all signs pointed to a herd of lawsuits holding me personally responsible for “negative mental suggestion resulting from improper and unlicensed prophesy”, which would essentially break the spine of my livelihood and result in the getting of a real job, a fate worse than death. I thought long and hard on how others had dodged this bullet, coming to the conclusion that the arts, long a shield for disreputable behavior, would be my ticket. Soon, I would do my readings accompanied by an acoustic guitar, thus protecting myself as an Artist, content to sing folk songs about death and cleavage.

I was living with a group of people that i did not know. my room wa sin the basement; i shared a large feather bed with two women who were lovers, which got to be very annoying, but i was instructed by god to bring in certain specifically marked people to stay temporarily in the house until certain things could be removed from their bodies; often i had them sleep in my bed while i slept in the crawlspace. one of these people was gary coleman, and while we were driving back to the big house we drove down a tight spiraling road whose weirdly involutional motion continued after the car had stopped, we talked to a prostitute who had gene-alterant work done to grow beds of small cilia and longer thin tentacles in her mouth in order to facilitate fellatio. “i have memorized over three hundred sacred geometrical patterns achievable with the components of my mouth.” i told her that sounded like getting sucked off by a macrame plantholder, and gary told her she would have been better off investing that money in some therapy. she then cursed us, telling us this road would not end, and folded in on herself until she was gone. after that, something else happened.

if it is true, as i was told as a child, that heaven is the place where nothing happens, and hell is the place where nothing changes, it is my suspicion (as it has been since my days of ccd) that these are the same places, and those who have been broken and buried face-down at their life’s end are finally admitted a rest from the endless burden of the body, while all of us who have sought and suckled distraction and addiction will be corroded by appetites we can no longer satisfy, gaki, preta, our throats like pinholes.

the wind had eaten through the trees, corrosives leaving tombstones like so many outcroppings of coral in an emptied sea, and i knew the chevelle wasn’t gonna get up to speed enough to get through the guardrail when i felt something come apart in my right shoulder, which sent me turning back, which sent the steering wheel into a spin, which jerked the car hard left across the median through a grove of tiny white crosses and at a 45 degree angle (nearly, close enough for our purposes) to an oncoming FedEx truck, which sent the engine block back into the driver’s seat, which would have crushed me had not the angels lifted me up through a torn hole in the roof, perching me atop a pet store right across from the interstate, telling me i need to start being more careful, but all i’m doing is looking for my hip flask, which is now three-ways dented around a mac truck grill.

First thing she did after she fell out of bed was check her online guru Paul Apostrophes for her guide-lesson for the day, which was “whenever possible, walk on your tiptoes”, which she pondered in a sort of clumsy way while showering and drying and brushing and dressing until she finally figured out how to apply today’s lesson right around the time she got on the sidewalk, walking to the bus stop, and for the first time in years pretended she was a danseuse, hidden grace trapped in the muscles of her calves released in a sort of buzzing all around her body, infatuating enough that she completely missed the bus while doing pirouettes out in front of my house.

and it was really very scary the way he just snuck up but i think maybe that was what he wanted and but it was also funny as then we watched him sneak up on mommy and do the thing like he did to us and johnson was with us and almost started to laugh so we poked him one and then he held his hands over his mouth and now it was like we all caught it and bit our tongues as he snuck up and then looked over his shoulder at us grinning with the icesicle in his hand and he had it up at the top of mommy’s dress and just waited a bit but she was making soup and you know when she makes soup it’s all like out of the kitchen you little hoboes! because she used to call us that you know and then just as she started to turn to get some onions from next to the table he let it go and she let out this scream! like aaaaaaaagh! and she turned and whacked him one with the ladle and he tried to run away and ran into the door and that was *really* funny and we were all on the porch all bent and laughing and johnson wet himself.

I think this was the only person i’ve ever gone out with where, like, we actually really went out, like on dates, like I’d have to call and have a schedule of events or whatever, it was pretty weird, I don’t reccommend it, but anyway there were tennis balls all over the place and so I thought she played a lot of tennis, but I could care less about tennis, so I didn’t mention it, until there was a lull in one of my well-planned event nights because Rent ‘N Putt was closed “due to unspeakable video-rack catastrophe” from when they had that burrower demon infestation so we’re walking back to the car and I was trying to think of something to say and so I ask about tennis and she kinda stares at me and then laughs and says “no, my psychiatrist has me throw tennis balls around in order to deal with my rage”, and it occured to me that there’s literally hundreds of tennis balls on the floor of her house, and you would figure I would have clued into her maybe not dealing with a breakup well, but I was never what you would call perceptive in that way.

Work continues unabated on the film adaptation of “masturbation and cookies: the jimmy cheerios story”, currently held up due to a series of disputes on how to film the weekend where he was a jewish satanist — now note first of all that he was never actually jewish or a satanist and mostly just wanted to get it on with this hillel dropout named rebecca something and while most of these clowns decked out in their backwards robes looked like a rabbinical kriss-kross nobody could fill out such an outfit as rebecca-lilith, bride of satan. plus note second that he was just completely confused, and thought they were metal chicks, and you know how he gets around metal chicks. the point being that our associates in casting were unwilling to meet stringent demands as to the, how to say, mental value of the help, as we really can’t have anymore day-temps running out of the “studio” (we were squatting in an abandoned meat-packing plant, which was great for atmosphere, but awful for catering) all on fire and shit because some goofball didn’t know that lubricant needs to be non-flammable. there’s no professionalism in the arts anymore.

We would go to the park and he’d stare at the dogs, crouch down and stare them in the eyes and say “you are not a dog. you are a human being. get up and walk, my friend.” He did this for years, every time we saw a dog. I never saw a dog get up and walk, but we were process not product kinda kids, back then.

she wore necklaces of small masks which had cracked and were secreting some sort of thick fluid which collected in lines carved into the faces, she saw certain patterns, she said these things are always hard to spot accurately, she was standing in the hallway, she refused to move, she was afraid of something which could only get at her in large open spaces, she was trying to push her fingers through the drywall to the insulation beneath, she was panic-stitching a shroud from pink fiberglass, she kept screaming pushing air out with her stomach trying to tell us to be aware, to pay attention, there were invisible things swirling all around us which wanted to get into our skulls in through our ears, she said she could see certain hues we were not trained to see, she was certain she would be safe if only shoe could sew a shield from what was around here, she was screaming, she wouldn’t stop.

a couple days ago i stopped into this place by the highway to get a sub, and not long after i sat down a man woman and child came in. the man was on a cellphone, and broke from his monologue just long enough to order. the family sat down at the table next to mine, where the woman talked a little to the child and the man continued to talk to this other party, which turned out to be a business partner, only they weren’t talking about business, they were talking about the man’s mother (whom i believe was actually the woman’s biological mother, but i’m not certain of this), who was being insufferably ingrateful out at the nursing home. i was there for twenty-odd minutes, during which this man’s stream of stunned offense at this bitch of a woman who must have been trying her hardest to make herself sick was the only conclusion he could come up with, you know ninety percent of it’s mental, she’s just bound and determined to be miserable you know and she won’t be happy unless everyone else is too and you have to cut yourself off from people like that, they’re vampires, they’ll drag you down if you let them, and after all the effort he had gone through to get her a room with a view of a tree. not only was this man not going to talk to his family, who sat and looked very intently at their shrunken meals, he wasn’t even going to waste time not talking to his family, he had better things to do, and thank god jake’s back from south carolina as the fucking bill’s gonna give him a stroke, and maybe that bitch can take care of his medical bills for a while, haha. on the way to my car i kicked in his taillights, as it seemed absolutely necessary to ruin this man’s day.

You reach an age where when you get into a fistfight on a Saturday night you don’t completely heal, you can see broken vessels in the nose, bruises lingering through the week. This started to worry Jon, who was just getting to the age where he was a little less handsome each season, a little slower, a little stiffer. When you assemble auger heads on the line every day for a decade, that’ll happen, and Jon had no complaint with that most of the time, but it used to be he could shake that off for the weekend, go out with his friends and get into some shit and wake up in a cornfield out by Jessup and laugh. Only now that soreness in the bones of his hands didn’t fade beneath the vodka and darvon; it pulsed from him, like a light he tried to hide in his fists. Sometimes he would find himself staring into the mirror, lost in time, not sure how long he’d been there. He started sleeping in his clothes, on the couch, not always remembering to change in the morning. Sometimes at night, he thinks he sees himself in his dreams, but he’s not sure, as he doesn’t look like himself in his dreams, only he’s not sure what he looks like now. The last time I saw him, right before I moved to Texas, he was sitting on the kitchen floor where the table used to be, plaster-dust all over his shirt and his hands and the floor from the holes in the walls, and he was trying to tell me something, somebody was waiting outside for him, only I turned to look through the blinds, past curtains an ex-girlfriend put on the back door, and I couldn’t see anybody, just snow and ice and night out into the fields. I told him I was going out to get more jagermeister at the holiday station and I didn’t go back.

if i stare directly upwards the snow seems to hang in the air, haloing the streetlights, but i’m a perfectionist and walk out into the street to get the lines right and she’s screaming at me, grabbing at my coat, pulling me to the curb. poetic-neurotic all her histrionics, fucked from birth, unaware of the stares of the children waiting for the walk light. she’s glad i moved. we complicate each other, i need complication, she needs a peace she’ll never find with me. i’m watching myself from across the street. i’m fighting the urge to dance. the rings on her fingers intwined with my fingers, hand-in-hand, are cold and root me to the present. breath-ghosts warm to invisibility when i face her, lean close, ask senseless questions. i am not dead. i am here. the children are singing something, making up words when memory fails. peeled skulls stare out from passing cars, rate of travel starts and stops in unnatural ways. your soul is larger than your body. her shoulder brushes mine. i am trying very hard to be normal.

I was working in this super-secret underground planetarium as their resident moog soloist, and i would make little shooting comet envelopes that i could trigger with foot-pedals while i got all phantom-of-the-opera-as-played-by-wendy-carlos on the keys. There were these two shrunken kids who narrated the show, and all the seats had restraints though i never figured out why. I do remember being happy.

She told me she couldn’t really sing, really belt out the song, with her hands on the wheel, which at the time seemed a perfectly reasonable notion. She lifted her hands off the wheel, and we flew down the highway, and I closed my eyes and listened.

There was a child who worshipped a small metal junction box in his neighbor’s front yard, a mint-green metal box which emitted a low hum you could only hear from up close, and an occasional loud click. This child was once a friend of ours, for a short time, new to the neighborhood and seemingly normal with a good yard for football. We filled him in on the mythology of the neighborhood, the witch-house where the crazy lesbians lived, the storm drains where we used to play and later take girls because the darkness made them pretend to be afraid and huddle close, the junction box where Billy lived. We had this whole story about this kid named Billy who was trapped in the junction box, had been for years, and that loud knocking sound is Billy banging on the box, asking for help. On late-night prowling around the neighborhood, feeling self-important and vaguely dangerous, we used to always say hi to Billy when we walked by the box, the sort of habit one first does as a joke which grows out of its humor. The child would stray a bit slower, staring at the box, not scared so much as fixated, looking for something. Later we would see him less and less, as his mother decided he was too sick for violent games, with asthma or hemophilia or something. Sometimes when I was walking to the park I would see him in the Wharton’s yard, in front of the junction box, staring at it, talking in a voice too quiet to hear. I’d try to talk to him, but he was too busy with the box, and I took all these small slights intensely personally and decided I hated the boy.

One night we were staying over at Kent’s house, whose parents didn’t much care what we did so long as we were quiet and stayed away from his sister, so we went to the garage and loaded up with tools and went out to destroy the junction box, somewhat because we were all fed up with the new stuck-up neighbor boy but mostly because we constantly wanted to break things. Being children, however, we were weak, and managed only to dent and scrape the surface, so we settled for spraypaint, the box too small for any extended writing, which is fine as most of the words we were interested in only had four letters.

The next day the box was completely painted over, small stones glued to its surface in intricate designs, pictures of angels and aeroplanes across its front doors. At the base there were flowers stolen from neighbors’ yards and little toys, race cars and army men, set on the top of the box. We had elaborate plans for a new revenge, but we never actually had a chance, as the telephone company came out a week later and removed the box. It was just gone. I remember sitting at the bus stop down the block, shakingly furious that these people had come into my neighborhood from wherever and just taken something, even something I was just going to break, maybe especially as it was something I was just going to break. The child we saw a few more times, late at night, wandering around the neighborhood very slowly, scanning the yards. Then he was gone, and we never learned what happened to him, it was like he was never there, which was fine with us as we were going to middle school at the end of that summer and had bigger things to worry about.

I went out that day and looked at the sidewalk, at the place where her tracks in the snow stopped. He came back the next day, but it had snowed, and the tracks were gone.
(12:08.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #