HOUSE OF ALL SENSES

There is the wind.
It bellows in the void, the big empty abyss. It tumbles upwards out of it, spilling up into the world, silent and mysterious and searching. It comes low over the Roanoke hills, tumbling across the cold banks of creeks and rivers, through the high valleys and around the ridge.
There is the wind moving.
It rolls over the flood plains and the leaning fields of dead wheat grass, its hollow laugh echoing out of the long empty straights of the two lane highways. The wind is whipping, wandering along the slender spines of old forgotten roads, besides the beaten foot paths, past abandoned train yards full of corrugated cars and ruined iron stacks, rusted metal all warped and ruined.
There is the wind moving along.
Scratching the doors of the solitary shacks and the shotgun houses, whispering through the windows of the battered brick apartments, the wind claws across the mud-soaked walkways littered with planks of plywood. Through the clotheslines and the kids drinking beer on the big backyard cellar doors, over the strips of package stores and gas stations, coffee shops and red-light intersections.
There is the wind moving along, rising.
It comes shooting under the highway overpass and into Downtown, its big hands spreading, gathering everything up, everything from the empty office-buildings to the side-street-vendors calling out their prices, the parking garages filled with the midnight hipsters and the lines of traffic jammed down every street like dominoes.
There is the wind.
Somebody opens the door and it follows them in, and sitting alone at the tiny table near the bar I can feel its long lone gust of exhaustion. A last gasp, a collapse. I wonder how far it’s come to find me, this wind. I look around the room.
It’s a bar, a long hollow chamber of a bar. Huge chandeliers dangle from an angled wood ceiling. Everything is stained red velvet and maroon, the light gleaming off the wood paneled walls and floors. The tiny round tables scattered like little islands are all nearly empty.
The place is nearly empty now, and I lean back and flip a quarter in my hand. I light a cigarette. I listen outside to the wind. There is something wrong in here, but I don’t what. I don’t why or when it happened. I feel sick and afraid. I smoke my cigarette and wait.
Behind me there is a woman walking towards the jukebox, the double tap of her heels over the red-wood gleam. The dead empty clicks of her coins dropping into the machine.
Then silence.
Just the wind.
The theme from ‘Cape Fear’ blares out so loud I turn around in my chair.
She is there, standing against the jukebox. She is wearing red. Her face is familiar. I’ve never seen her before. I turn back towards the bar for a moment but everyone else is gone. Trying to think, my thoughts swimming through the music’s overwhelming blare, I turn back to her.
She spits into the air, the music swirling and growing around her, covering her like a shroud, no other sound now save for the blaring horns of the ‘Theme from Cape Fear’. I can’t even hear her heels as she comes to me and sits, the chair scraping against the floor.
She leans in and opens her mouth, as if to speak, and the music stops.
There is the sound of the wind.
She doesn’t move. Nothing moves at all, save for the smoke rising from the lit end of my cigarette. I turn in the chair, I look everywhere. There is no one else here. The wind moves outside, screaming, falling and rising like the breath of some long buried creature, and suddenly the woman blinks.
She blinks again, and again, and again and again.
She blinks ten thousand times.
The wind grips the door in the entranceway and shakes it, and for the tiniest moment my eyes turn to see, and in that moment or maybe the next, the place is full. Full of people, full of sound. The laughing clash of crashing pint glasses, the rising smoke of a thousand cigars. A Jazz band plays off at the other end of the bar, people dancing and shouting, the waitresses darting like flies.
The woman sits across from me, digging through her purse. The lit cigarette is still in my hand.
“Are you ready to leave,” she says, not looking up at me.
“Yes.”
“You know,” she says, staring at herself intently now in her make-up mirror, putting on lipstick. “It isn’t like those boys from Winchester. It doesn’t have to be like that.” She shuts the mirror with a crack and purses her lips. Eyes flicker up at me. “We can do it slow.”
“Slow is no good,” I say, taking a drag off the cigarette. I’m looking around for the check.
“We only have the one knife,” she says.
“So?”
“So why should you get to be the one?”
“You think you should do it?”
“No,” she says, leaning in. “We’re a team. I think we both should do it. We’re in it together. We do them together. This isn’t like Winchester.” She sniffs and looks around. “We’ll take turns.”
“Together,” I say.
She opens her mouth, as if about to speak, but instead she just starts to scream. The theme from ‘Cape Fear’ abruptly blasts back on, making me jump, making me drop the lit cigarette that’s been in my hand, making me turn back around towards the jukebox and in that moment everyone is gone again.
The bar is empty again. I’m turned around in my chair. The music is blaring and furious and full of fear.
I turn back around and the woman is there. Smiling and smoking, leaning back in her chair.
I lean back in my own chair. I light another cigarette, that blaring music swirling all around me. I look down at my hand and that’s when I become fully afraid.
It’s disintegrating, my hand. It’s coming apart at the seams. Up my arms, my tattoos, my shirt sleeves – of it is decomposing, crumbling. The wind is moving feverishly now, coming under the door, invading the room, coming for me, taking me. The music is blaring, getting louder, droning on and on and growing.
I look at the woman across from me, I try to speak but my mouth is gone, my eyes are going, it’s all decaying and stripping away, and the woman starts to laugh a little to herself, as if she’s embarrassed for me.
As if I made a bad joke, or something.
The music stops. There is the sound of the wind.
The pieces of me are blowing all around the room in the wind. The woman stands up, her chair scraping the floor, and she dusts herself off and goes to the door. The wind coils around her like a snake, like an animal it purrs in her ear. The wind rolls through the room, collecting me up, my dust and ashes, my scattered fragments.
With the wind I blow out the door. I am scattered through the innter city streets littered with cars like dominoes. Past the side-street-vendors and the empty-office buildings. I’m all gathered up in the wind, all the pieces of me. I rise along.
There I am.
Over package stores and gas stations and intersections. Through the kids drinking beer on the big backyard cellar doors, through the clothes lines. The wind carries my dust across the mud soaked walkways littered with planks of plywood and the battered brick apartments, the shotgun houses and the solitary shacks.
There I am, in the wind.
My dust is cradled in the wind, past abandoned train yards and beaten foot paths, the slender spins of old forgotten roads. I am whipped along, wandering, these fragments of me spread out along the long empty highway straights and the leaning fields and the flood plains.
There I am in the wind, moving along.
Back around the ridge and over the high valleys. Tumbling across the cold banks of creeks and rivers. Silent and mysterious and searching. The wind carries my dust into the big empty abyss.
It throws what’s left of me into the void.

There is the wind.

DRIFTING

Awake before the dawn, we stripped underneath the cold sheath of gray.
Sleep still held us in its swinging arms as we swayed slowly, trying to wake, trudging along the dirt floor in our perennial daze.
Hands gripped the cold stone. No roof to separate stars from staring. The sound of sirens flooding in from past the Amarilla hills that were now buried somewhere in the deep blue-dark.
“I can see my breath,” Pruntz said. “Jesus.”
The others sniffed and smiled underneath the slow film of sleep, all of us feeling like we were for the first time being born from the empty shapelessness, finally formed from some shifting smoke cloud.
“There es no hot water,” one of the Bolivians said. His name was Manolo. “No en here, no this base.”
“Surprise surprise,” someone muttered.
Already outside there was the heavy west-end traffic, the headlights like a thousand pairs of eyes, like a long winding snake through the plaything of the city.
“How long does it take to get there,” I said.
“Oh, Chay,” said Manolo. “It .. uh… It gun take, vay long time, man.”
We smoked cigarettes huddled around a map littered with the red arrows of war, the sun now out and frightening, the sky a dead starch curtain hanging on a line. Already the sweat and the tingling fear, the mosquitos chattering around our heads, the toucans strutting around the cement corridors bawling out to each other every now and then.
From somewhere there came the faint crying thud of a grenade, the distant popping conversation of machine gun fire.
I sighed.
They fed us Coca Cola and chocolate cake and wrapped cold strips of salted ham in tablecloth napkins for us to keep in our packs, practically pushing us out the door, the machine-gun sounds much closer now. With every callous heave of a muffled gunshot we could hear the shattering glass, the screaming chaos, and Maykin said he thought they would burn the whole town.
“No,” said one of the Bolivians. “Es good, es good,”
“It’s definitely not good,” I said. “They’re blowing things up.”
“Es tu Americanos,” said the Bolivian. “Es why. Es you no Americanos? Then no problem. You see? Yes? You country, it … uh … monopoly. It play us, like a game.”
It started to rain; the sky was a soft green.
We pulled the hoods of our plastic ponchos deep and low over our faces to hide our foreignness and moved as a single unit through the bulge of the city center, weaving through the chanting crowds of rioters.
“Es the gas tax,” said Manolo, his hand around my shoulder as we went through the thick crowds, sliding through throngs of screaming citizens soaked by rain and burdened by international taxes they were no longer willing to pay. I kept my head very low.
“Es too high,” he said. “President Mesa is puppet to USA Corporate Interest, people do no longer desire his office. Entiende?”
“Yea.” I had to shout just to hear myself. Someone in the crowd hurled a Molotov cocktail.
Past the bus station on Northside and through the Avinos market place we continued on in silence, all of us, thirteen foreigners and a handful of Bolivian Missionaries who had volunteered to take us out of Santa Cruz all the way north past Trinidad City, to a tiny grid-road town made of dust and clay called San Ignacio.
When the rain stopped we had reached the wet rim of the central circle, through the worst of it, although Manolo and the other Bolivians said that the protestors were burning roadblocks and throwing hand grenades at international businesses.
Into the rusted beds of two old blue pick-up trucks we went, sitting on our rucks, the Bolivians fit with shotguns.
“Keep.. uh… keep eh the hoods on you, et least tel we arrive La Santísima Trinidad. The riot es no so bad en La Trinidad City.”
I fell asleep somehow in that tunnel of highway wind, half collapsed against the cab of the truck, my knees against my chest, in between a girl from Germany who spoke six languages and a 17 year old illiterate Bolivian boy who cradled his shotgun like a newborn.
It was called Trinidad City but it was hardly even a town – more just a mess of roads and heaps of three story buildings crammed together for about a few square miles before opening back up to the emptiness.
We drove slowly past the shacks that leaned like books in shelves, past the church towers made of broken brick. We peered out at the wild dogs who roamed through the crooked gutters, the buildings of white washed stone, the peasants who went barefoot with their carts of cabbages and onions. Everything the faded like ancient westerns.
We drove into a huge empty hangar made from sheet metal, the air a cool moist breeze, hopping from the trucks to stretch our legs before we continued on the rest of the way.
“Es you hungry? Es you hungry chyou can come with me to market.”
“I’ll go,” I said, leaving my rucksack in the truck.
The German girl and a boy named Baiden who came from Baton Rouge followed after us, the four of us stepping out into the heat wave, feeling the hot-wet water balloon air that encompassed us and seemed ready to pop.
Monolo led us through the heaving horde of street vendors and customers, zigzagging along streets and alleyes made of mud-caked dust, banging our steel-toed boot-heels against the cracked cobblestone.
We ordered Rice with chicken and bell peppers, drenching our plates in b-grade ketchup so we could taste something. Cups of black coffee so strong the grounds got stuck in your teeth with every swig. Cans of pineapple juice and a patient stray dog sitting at my feet waiting for scraps.
It was 8 o’clock in the morning.
A man with a mighty beard made from poverty hobbled over to our table, taking the one free seat without asking and smiling as he jutted his hand out like a fishhook.
“Hola,”
Manolo sniffed and stood up coldly. Manolo the Bolivian who hated Bolivians. The German girl and Baiden obliged him, and very soon I found myself alone with this poor Bolivian beggar, who instead of cologne or soap smelled like old tarps drenched in ether, like a washcloth found at the bottom of a trash bag filled with old clothes. He smiled at me.
“Le gusta aqui,” he asked.
I nodded and fed a small piece of chicken to the stray dog at my feet. I said,
“Este es un país hermoso.”
“Ah,” he said, leaning back and smiling, slapping his leg with his palm. His fingernails were long and gray. He seemed very pleased. “Es bonita."
“Si,” I said. “Mi país favorito hasta el momento.”
“De donde es usted?"
“Los Estados Unidos."
“Ah,” he exclaimed, slapping his knee again. He leaned in spoke in an excitable whisper. “Los Estados Unidos!?”
“Yes.”
“Y Donde has estado?”
“No muchos lugares.” I said.
I took my entire plate and placed it carefully on the ground for the stray dog. I took out two cigarettes and held one out to him. He shrugged and took it, leaning in to share the match with me.
“Donde has estado,” he said again, settling into the cigarette.
I shrugged.
“Como ya he dicho … no muchos lugares. Inglaterra. Panamá. Suiza.”
“Suiza!!”
“Si.”
At that moment a long line of townspeople came through the marketplace square, all connected by a thick farm chain that they had tied around their waists. They were chanting anti-US slogans about the gas prices, clapping their hands like seals in unison.
The old man nodded at them.
“Pertenecen al ejercito. Hay un gran movimiento, ahora.”
The man nodded, agreeing with himself, and we watched as the line of protestors snaked through the market, rearranging the crowds, diving everything. He chuckled softly and then suddenly extended his hand.
“Bueno,” he said, standing. “Gracias para el cigarillo.”
“De nada.”
“Que son muy inteligentes,” he said, nodding again towards the protestors.
“Si," I said.
“Pero … usted sobrevivirá.”
He winked and then dissolved back into the crowded market.
I sat there for a while petting the stray dog before getting up and going back to the hangar.

CONFESSIONS FROM THE FEVER

In black hoodies they congregate on their street corners, calling out across the avenues amidst the cold dreary daze of the fading afternoons. People swearing and smoking in the pre-dusk light, the sun sinking now beyond the towers and the projects out by Harvest Avenue, the muffled bass beats of old 90’s hip hop hits echoing off of every block, a curbside serenade, a hymn for the coming night.
Bike messengers and young boys navigate the old potholes that litter these inner-city roads like little pools, tiny minefields mixed within the old snow and sleet and the muddy gravel that collects like ash.
They weave through the gridlocked traffic like spirits through an old haunted citadel, standing atop their bike pedals, looking out at the maps and routes before them.
 Dealers bustle through the throngs and crowds, calling out the names of their potions like salesmen on wallstreet offering up stocks.
"Got that Kneel-Down. Got that Kneel-Down ish right here. Right here."
"Got the Fever, Fever. Got the Fever."
"Temp-tawn, Temp-Tawn."
"I got the Fever here, I gotchya Fever right here."
The blue #40 bus comes hissing through, its motor clanging in big gulping breathes. A siren wails for the smallest of seconds, the familiar red-and-blue washing the faces of all the passer-byes. Sunlight streams through the cracks in the brick and mortar, the sun almost gone, silhouetting the drug dealers and the single mothers and the cold-and-lonely crack-room dwellers as they all dart to their destinations, all a single purpose, a single mind, one single vision.
"I gotchya Fever right here."
And there like a jagged piece of glass hidden amidst the sand; like a fragile egg untouched amidst the fallen branches; like Christ’s own head buried beneath the crown of thorns; this is where it lies:
The Parlor.
I sigh and lock my car door and look around at the heights of Hartford around me.
How many times have I made that drive? How many miles along the same freeways and inner-city streets littered with the broken concrete and the gunslingers and the poor ones?
The dealers stalking single girls, calling out to the gangbangers.
"Gotchya Fever right here, now."
 I’m covered with tattoos now and my friends say I have a different kind of Fever. That’s okay. But the drive into Park Street gets me every time.
They say this is the rim of human-kind, down here on Park Street, far below the poverty lines that the Republicans and the politicians and those unfamiliar to suffering like to mention at their convenience. If I’m honest with myself … I thought those things too, once.
The first time I came to Park Street a young Puerto Rican man assumed that because I was white I was there to buy drugs, so as I parallel parked outside the tattoo Parlor he opened the passenger door and hopped inside, sighing in the late-July heat, waving a hand through his hair tied back into a pony tail. Stenciled tattoos of Spanish names all over his sleeveless arms, his veins robust and popping out as if they were trying to escape his body.
He smiled and shut the door as shock gripped me and I assumed that this was what all those novels were about, those moments that collect like cold coins in your stomach swimming around.
“What the fuck,” I said.
“Eh?”
“Get out,” I screamed. “Get out, Get Out.”
“I thought—“
“Get the Fuck Out of the Car,” I said, opening my own door, ready to meet this man in a more primitive way.
Thoughts crossed my mind in single words – Gun. Knife. Soul. Death – but as the young Puerto Rican drug dealer and I exited the car I realized that he was smiling and laughing in embarrassment.
“Yo,” he said, his hand a fist covering his amused mouth.
“What the fuck.”
“Yo I apologize, yo. I thought you was all tryin-a sneak on suttin suttin. Thought you wanted the Fever. You know?”
“No.”
“Shit, nigga,” he said. He covered his mouth with both hands. “Yo man really I apologize I thought you wanted to hit on suttin.”
“Nah,” I said, still silently terrified, just wanting a tattoo, nothing more. “I don’t do drugs.”
“Shit, nigga,” said the Puerto Rican man. He slapped my hand, clutching it, genuine and smiling and shaking his head and chuckling. “Everybody do drugs. Ain't chyou hearing that shit?”
In the distance the dealers call out,
 Got the Fever here, I gotchya Fever."
“It’s alright,” I said. “You just scared the shit out of me. I thought you were gonna rob me.”
“Hell naw dawg,” he laughed. “White dudes is my best customers. White dudes all got the Fever. I apologize, dawg. Don’t see too many white dudes round here less they tryin-a cop on suttin.”
“It’s alright,” I said.
“Shit, man.”
Johan –my tattoo artist—says I’ll get a real run for my money, getting my tattoos on Park Street.
He’s been at the Parlor for about four years, dealing with a clientele base whose foundations are made up of young hoodlum drunks and spur-of-the-moment wall-art lusters.
“It’s rare we get dudes coming in with real art, real artistic integrity, like, you know what I mean?”
Johan likes what I bring in so I get it for a discount.
We listen to old reggae tapes that are half-muted from the weight of time. Ornette Coleman live at the Golden Circle. Wu-Tang 36 Chambers. We talk about old stripclubs, we wonder aloud about the dichotomy of man. We argue about what shots get you the drunkest, we trade stories about Switzerland and France.
Johan carves me up, the mask and the glasses inches from my arms, changing his gloves every few minutes, the boombox in the corner flipping these old tapes over. This little room is a world of change, a sterile field of white walls and gleaming floors. From the time I walk into the Parlor until the time I walk out, I’m lost in this little world. The realities of environment around me cease to exist. When I am in the chair – despite the pain – I am happy.
I am lucky.
I am fortunate.
I am doing what I want.
I am doing something that means something.
But every now and then I am reminded of the true nature of things.
We take a cigarette break and go outside to find ten thousand police cruisers, an ocean of racing red lights, a crowd of two hundred people frothing at the mouth shouting and chanting and hystericalin tongues.
“What happened,” Johan asks a kid on a bike as he lights the stub of a half-smoked cigarette.
“Them dudes robbed Ray-Mays,” the kid says, nodding at the tiny liquor store across the street. The police whirl around a young woman covered with tattoos, the handcuffs tight around her as they shove her into the back of the car.
“Her too?”
“Yeah. And them two dudes in that other car, over there.” 
“When,” I say. “Just now, they robbed it?”
“Like ten minutes ago.”
“Jesus.”
"Dudes is all jacked up on the Fever," said the kid. "Fever gets you crazy, like. All got the Fever round here."
"Jesus."
“It’s nothin,” the kid says, spitting and starting to bike away.
A black man blazing out of his mind came into the shop once while I waited on the sofa in the lobby. He was so high there was drool coming out of his mouth, he was leaning like flower stem in a slow wind, eyes half closed, glazed over, remnants of food or trash in his shoulder-length beard.
“Shush wanna get a tat … do …” he muttered. He struggled to swallow and almost fell backwards, reaching out for the wall. “Howabouts some … body buy me a …”
“Think it’s time for you to go, hoss,” said English Pete, the Parlor’s clerk. He sweeps the floors and makes the appointments. He’s two hundred pounds and has broad shoulders. He’s got a shaved head and bad teeth and he looks like a shit-kicker.
“Shush wanna tat…do…get some Fever, man...”
“Get the fuck out or I’m gonna beat your junkie ass.”
English Pete looked at me and shrugged.
"Goddamn Junkies," he said. "Fever this, Fever that."
There’s the man nicknamed ‘Dread-Ex’ who rides around South End on a bike selling calf-skin wallets that his wife hand makes in their crummy one-room apartment on Whaler Ave.
There’s the crews of school kids skipping 8th period, skateboarding through the main streets, stopping traffic and throwing snowballs at the crossing guards.
There’s the stumbling junkies that wander the wide sidewalks, tripping on the weeds that grow through the cracks, holes in the knees of their old jeans, heads red with Fever.
Fever Fever Fever.
And there’s me, in the Parlor, as happy as a man can be.
"Gotchya Fever here," they call out to me, as I go to my car. "Fever, Fever."

THE MARLIN AND THE MORNING AFTER

They were in the bed.
She stared at the stained ceiling that loomed over them, counting the old yellow rings of water marks, eyes tracing the chipped dry wall that had long ago peeled and hung down like the skin of an animal.
“It’s really a shithole,” she said.
“Hm?”
“This place.”
He moaned his agreement. She passed the crudely rolled joint back to him and he took it slowly. She leaned up on her elbow and looked past him out the open sliding door, watching the distant silhouettes of birds through the rolling fog that drenched the balconies and the apartment blocks. The couple in the next room argued.
“I kind of like it,” he said. He rolled over and faced her. “It’s got a certain character to it.”
“What does.”
“This place.”
“We just .... with the doors open.”
“For the whole world to see,” he said, handing her back the joint. “It’s too foggy out there to see anything anyway.”
“People have ears.”
“Fuck em in the ear.”
“That’s a line from Goodfellas.”
“Fuck em in the other ear, too, then.” He sniffed and watched her smoking. Their eyes met like two nervous animals seeing each other for the first time. She smiled timidly.
“What.”
He touched her face with the back of his hand.
“Nothing.”
“What.”
“You look nice.”
“Gee,” she said, handing him the joint. It was almost used up. “Thanks.”
“I’m serious.” The wind blew in from the open sliding door.
“We’re inside of a cloud,” she said, nodding outside to where the fog was still sweeping in. They were on the fourth floor. The city was blanketed in this cold cobalt mist.
“You do look pretty,” he said. “You did before, too. That’s how I knew it was you.”
They lay together naked underneath a white comforter filled with cheap feather stuffing. It collapsed over them and outlined their bodies like plastic. She still leaned up on her elbow.
“You knew it was me,” she said.
“I knew it was you.”
"But how?" she said, turning over onto her stomach. She propped her head up with a forearm. “How is it possible?” He passed her the joint.
"I don't know. It just is."
"I don't remember you."
He turned to her, eyebrows slightly raised. "I thought you would."
She passed the joint back to him.
“Well.”
“It’s okay,” he said.
"When I saw you ... you looked so familiar. I couldn't stop staring at you, because of how familiar you looked." She spoke distantly and turned onto her back. She watched the ceiling fan spinning. He traced the skin of her forearm with his hand. She looked at him. "Did you know that?"
“That I looked familiar to you?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew that you looked familiar to me. Something … uncanny.”
“Strange, right?”
“Like it was out of a dream.”
“Yeah,” she said.
"I know when you left, I spent about three hours trying to find out who you were."
She let out a small burst of laughter.
"No you didn't."
“Yeah I did. I went around asking people if they’d seen this beautiful girl I had just seen. They sent me to her but she didn’t want me, so then I came to find you.”
She hit him playfully and he laughed.
“Ass.”
"I did, I swear I did," he chuckled, pretending to massage the place where she'd hit him. He put the smoking remnants of the joint out in a glass kitchen bowl on the bedside table. A car passed down on the street below with rap music blaring, a ghost save for the sound and the slow tires over wet pavement.
"Didn’t you feel like we would see each other again, though?”
"Yeah, but ..." He shrugged. "I couldn't wait, I guess. I saw you at the airport and I knew that I recognized you, but at the same time I knew that I had never met you. It was … a sucky feeling."
“And you just let me get onto a plane and disappear.”
“I was scared.”
"I can't remember the airport, at all,” she said. “Except that when I saw you again last night, I instantly recognized you, and I knew right away that I recognized you from all those years ago.”

"I did too." He laughed. “I thought about you a lot. The girl from the airport that I knew I had dreamt about before even knowing she existed. I thought about you a lot.”
“You’re a smooth talker.”
“It’s all true.”
"I was definitely there, though," she said, eyes locked on him with admiration. She wiped his lip with her thumb. "And here we are. I thought about you too. Not all the time. But I did.”
“You did?”
“Yes,” she whispered, staring at him. “Like I said, I just … felt … such a connection to you. Like we had already known each other for a long time. Then when I saw you last night …”
“Yeah.”
“What year was that?"
“What.”
“When we saw each other for the first time at the airport.”
"It was 2005," he said. "Right before hurricane Katrina."
"How do you remember that?"
"I left New Orleans a few days before they announced a statewide emergency."
"You saw the future," she said.
"Well actually you weren't half as pretty as the girl I saw at the airport, you jus-" a barrage of slaps and hits fell upon him as he started to laugh loudly. Her face was frozen in a pretend-shock; mouth open and smiling, eyes wide and aware.
"You ass, you ass" she said, abruptly smashing him with a spare pillow. She laughed. The floor was littered with the clothes they had stripped off of each other the night before, and she leaned down to her jeans and pulled up a half smoked pack of American Spirits. She lit one.
“Wanna split this?”
“Yeah,” he said. "I can see the future, you know."
"Oh yeah?"
"Yeah,"
"Oh yeah?" She leaned in and kissed him and then handed him the cigarette.
"You said so yourself. I'm precognant."
"What's that."
"Like…” he blew smoke through his nose. “Did you ever see Minority Report?"
"No," she said. "What's it about?"
"It's about this guy. He meets this beautiful, mysterious girl, and he knows, somehow, that he's supposed to be with her. But she disappears, and he doesn’t see her for about six years, and when he finally finds her, she turns out to just be this ... really mean blonde girl who constantly beats him while they lay in bed together an-”
Again an assault wave of punches and playful slaps struck him as she realized he was full shit.
"I can't believe you!" she exclaimed. "Three! Three times, I believed you."
"I'm gonna get you a fourth time,"
"Nope."
"Yup, four times for me."
"Never."
The couple in the next room had stopped arguing, trading their annoyances and agitation for the blasting acoustic sounds of Bruce Springsteen's album 'Nebraska'.
"I think I dreamt about you," she said, laying her head back against the pillow.
"I dreamt about you."
"Do you think that's something that everybody says?"
"Probably."
"People try so desperately to feign romance," she said. She turned to him. "I think being honest in itself is romantic."
"I dreamt about you. More than once. Before I saw you at the airport in New Orleans in 2005. That’s why … when I saw you, in New Orleans … I just froze up. I was so … terrified? I guess. I guess that’s the right word. I couldn’t believe you were real. I had dreamt about you. And there you were. And then you were gone.”
“But we found each other again,” she said. She wrapped an arm over his chest, her fingers fanning out over his shoulder. “In a bar in downtown Dover, Delaware.”
“I missed my plane,” he said. “It left two hours ago.”
“That’s okay.”
“I dreamt about you.”
"I believe you," she whispered in his ear. He looked at her face.
"You were a fish, in the first dream."
"A fish?"
"A marlin."
"Like a swordfish?"
"Yeah." He turned back to the ceiling.
“Is this another joke?”
“No,” he said. "You saved my life in the dream." He looked at her. "Then you turned into you. Like the real you. That was the first dream. That was before 2005. Before I saw you in the airport.”
“And now it’s 2011.”
“And now it’s 2011,” he said.
“And now I'm in a bed with you.”
"I know," he whispered. A driver outside hit the horn repeatedly.
"Why was I a marlin, I wonder."
"You were a lot of things in my dreams."
"What else," she whispered, her nose and lips against his cheek. He could feel her eyelashes move when she blinked.
"A statue, in one. Holding a musket."
“What?”
“You and two men, like colonial men. All holding muskets.”
“Was I naked?”
“Yeah.”
"Oh was I," she laughed. "Was it awesome?"
"This is better."
They lay quietly.
“That’s a real statue, you know.”
“What?”
“Three men with muskets. Here in Dover.” She looked at him.
“I can’t explain it.”
"I must've dreamt about you."
"People told me ... so much," he said. "That 'blonde girl was symbolic for God or love or passion or jealousy' ..." He rolled over to face her. "I'm still expecting this to be a dream."
"It isn't."
On the second floor, Bruce Springsteen was singing about Atlantic City. Outside it started to rain.
“It’s gonna get cold.”
“Do you want me to shut the door,” he asked.
“No.”
"What do we do now?"
She smiled. He smelled her hair as she put her head against his neck and shoulder."It doesn't matter what we do now." She closed her eyes, listening to the music through the walls from the next hotel room. "We can stay here forever,

POLAROID (snippet)

(first few pages of a new 40,000 word project I'm working on, Its about two dozen interconnected short stories with character cross overs and subplots within subplots etc etc yeaaaah dawg)




When he opened his eyes he was holding a gun his hands, and he realized with a shocking jolt that the shrieking alarm clock sound that had ripped him from what he thought was his sleep was actually the woman screaming.
He turned, noticing in a passing glance the fine architecture of the place; the cut bronze pillars, faded and off-white; the calming peach color of the walls; the dead-black marble floor and onyx countertops. The cavernous ceiling that created echoes of everything. Then he saw the people, spread out on the floor around him, each lying face down, their palms interlocked behind their heads.
The woman with the voice like a fire-alarm was screaming because she was covered in blood, the gash in her forehead like a canyon cut into the floor of the Wyoming flatlands, and she sat in the center of the bank floor on her knees.
He didn't know how he got here, but he knew what was happening.
"Hey!"
He turned, seeing a man in a tailored black suit with a submachine gun and a Frankenstein mask, motioning at him frantically.
I’m wearing one of those, too, he thought. And then, I’m confused.
Confused cocked his head, his breath loud and claustrophobic, filling his own mask with heat and nervous apprehension. Frankenstein Mask motioned furiously for him to come forward, and he did.
"What the hell is wrong with you," shouted Frankenstein Mask, his voice muddled beneath the mask.
“Eh?”
“I said what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Confused shrugged. He felt the weight of the pistol in his hand. “I don’t know.”
"Jesus Christ,” said Frankenstein Mask. “Get the drawers,"
Like an attack dog following its masters orders, Confused mechanically climbed over the bank counter in a fast robotic motion, furious for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. He found the teller huddled in a whimpering ball on the floor.
"Unlock these drawers," he said, his own voice like the dead empty click of a vending machine. She hurriedly went to her feet, a tiny gold key in her hand. Confused watched eagerly through his own mask as the she opened the drawer, as if he had been waiting for this. "Get back on the floor." Where are the words coming from?
“Okay,” she whispered. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“Shut up.”
“Please.”
“I said shut the fuck up.”
“You good,” called Frankenstein Mask.
“Yeah.”
Am I, he thought. What am I doing here? How did I get here?
From behind him appeared another man, also wearing a tailored suit and carrying his own submachine gun, a black duffel bag over his shoulder, the strap tense with the weight. The man wore a Brown Bear mask that looked professionally made. It was terrifying even without the other accessories he carried.
"Hurry up," said Bear Mask.
Confused looked down at the open drawer, and with a second nature that was foreign to him he began to quickly place the stacks into his own bag, empty and light.
"90 seconds," shouted Frankenstein Mask.
“We’re alright.”
Confused watched as Bear Mask hopped up and over the onyx countertop, heading towards the door. Confused emptied the drawer into the bag, the pistol heavy in his sweaty hands. Why am I here? We need to go, now.
"Move it out of there, man" yelled Bear Mask.
Confused assumed that Bear Mask was talking to him, and as he hopped over the counter, feet hitting the floor in seemingly programed movements, he realized he could not remember his name.
The three of them smoothly, quietly stepped over the frozen, unlucky citizens laying on the floor in pools of cold-panic sweat, sweeping across the large hall of the bank towards the front entranceway. Confused started to trot ahead, not knowing why, but knowing.
Confused stuffed the pistol into his waist and rearranged the duffel over his shoulder and as he reached the second set of doors he pulled off his mask, glancing at it as he tossed it aside, seeing the red features, the devilish grin and bulging eyes, the long black plastic mustache and the tiny protruding horns at the top, and then he was suddenly outside, the sun glaring and hot.
The sounds of the city were overwhelming, shattering the silence of the robbery he had just participated in and only half remembered
The three of them gently entered a waiting car, a black ford Taurus, shiny and clean and professional. The man at the wheel was older - easily 50 – a neat white beard and a short white pony tail. Confused entered the back passenger side seat, next to Bear Mask, as Frankenstein Mask slammed the front passenger door and the Older Man perfectly, seamlessly merged into the traffic.
“What the hell,” said Confused. “What the hell just happened.”
Frankenstein Mask turned and pulled off the disguise, revealing a pockmarked but handsome face with a military style short cropped buzz cut. He turned and looked at Bear Mask. Confused turned to Bear Mask as the driver sped up, just beating a yellow light.
Bear Mask looked back at Confused. In the front seat, still turned towards them, Frankenstein Mask lit a cigarette. Bear Mask after a moment removed his own disguise – a light skinned black man, young, also with a military cut. He grinned at Confused and then rubbed his eyes.
“Do you know where you are?”
“No,” said Confused, desperately trying to remember.
“Do you know my name?”
“No.”
“Good,” said Bear Mask, turning away from him to crack his neck. He nodded at Frankenstein Mask in the front seat. “Looks like we’re good, Sergeant.”
“Good.”
“No snags,” asked the old driver. “In their, I mean.”
“He froze for a minute,” said Frankenstein Mask, staring at Confused.
“I saw it too,” said Bear Mask.
“Had me worried.”
“Worked out alright.”
“Scared the shit out of that poor clerk, though,” said Bear Mask. He nodded at Confused. “Why’d you do that, man?”
“Someone tell me what the hell is going on?”
“You tell me.”
Confused looked at Frankenstein Mask, and noticed the Old Driver kept glancing at him in the rearview mirror.
“I can’t… I don’t know.”
“You do,” said Bear Mask.
“Who are you people?”
“Think. Come on, Hardy.”
“Hardy?”
“Just think, Private,” said Frankenstein Mask. “Just relax.”
“We just robbed a bank.”
“Forget about that,” said Bear Mask. “Just think, Private Hardy.”
“Is that me?”
“Just think.”
Frankenstein Mask smiled and blew a plume of smoke into the backseat. Confused coughed. Confused felt like he might cry.
“Just stay calm,” said Bear Mask.
“Calm?”
Frankenstein Mask reached back to Confused and put his gloved palm on his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, old friend.” He turned back in his seat, facing forward again. “It’ll all come back to you.”
“Like a polaroid,” said Bear Mask, the young black kid. “You’ll be alright.”
Confused looked at each of them, and then as he turned towards the window, all went black again.

A QUIET CONVERSATION IN THE CURIOUS CRYSTALHOUSE NIGHTCLUB

"But what you would do, if I offered it to you?"
Beyond their small table the aristocrats laughed. Delrayne looked around the place and picked his fingernails underneath the glass tabletop. Pimps and cravers, lunatics and liars and businessmen. Women that looked cut from a magazine.
“Everyone’s for sale,” he muttered to himself. He glanced at the pack of cigarettes on the glass tabletop, half-smoked. “Ain’t nothing for free.”
He looked at the crystal chandeliers. The waitresses were all dressed down in the most diminutive little red miniskirts he had ever seen, carrying trays of swordfish and baked stuff shrimp, toxic shots of whiskey or vodka. The place was a hive.
"Delrayne?"
Delrayne turned. The man across from him grinned wildly, flashing impeccable teeth. A sturdy jawline and dominant cheekbones held together a smooth, handsome face, slightly bronze and cleanshaven. The man's hair was slicked back, like a short black wave. He stared, and grinned. "What would you do? If I offered it to you."
Delrayne cleared his throat.
"I guess at least ... guess I’d have to consider."
The man across from him smiled broadly. Nothing’s for free, Delrayne thought again, staring into that eager smile. Through the cigarette mist Delrayne watched the tuxedo-clad jazz band erupt suddenly into a forties-style shuffle. The dance floor throbbed and seemed to breath, swingers in fluid motions twirling their lovers. Lovers leaving lovers to find new lovers. Everybody just a guttural machine underneath their veils and diamonds. Delrayne sniffed and glanced again at the man across from him as he licked his teeth, sipping from a wine glass.
"Considering it," the man said. "Considering it is good." He lowered his head and flicked his eyes at Delrayne. "Do not for one second underestimate the power of what it is I offer you."
"It's hard to believe."
“Why?”
“Because,” said Delrayne, eyeing the dance floor as a black man twirled his partner literally up over his shoulders. People cheered and the whole place was a pulse.
“Because why?”
“It’s funny-paper business. It’s movies. This ain’t real life.”
“Delrayne.”
“I’m ain’t even sure,” said Delrayne. “That this is real.”
"Have I not proven to you that I am real, in this world?" He slapped his own wrist with his hand. "Flesh and blood? Like you?"
"There’s other explanations," said Delrayne, reaching for the pack of Lucky Strikes. A beautiful cocktail waitress was beginning to lead ecstatically happy couples onto the checkered tile of the dance floor near the stage, the lights like a hundred spotted suns. The smell of sweat and liquor.
"What other words exist in all the languages of this earth that you could use to describe it, then?"
"I could be dreamin this," said Delrayne, lighting a cigarette. "I could be … whatchyou call it.”
“Delusional?”
“Yeah. Delusional. I could be delusional.”
"What," said the smiling man. "Like in a hospital for the insane?"
"It’s possible I guess."
“You talk about movies and funny-papers.” The man laughed. “And hospitals. You sound like the crazy one to me.”
“Ain’t no way you can prove to me that this is all real, is there?”
“Well,” said the man. “Watch me.”
The man across from him chuckled deviously. Amongst the noise and commotion in the place he held up his hand and snapped a single time. Many people were dancing now; loud waves of laughter erupted up from the ocean of movement and music. From the crowd, a hostess approached their tiny glass-top table, wearing practically nothing at all, the silver shoes showcasing somehow-erotic feet. She stood politely at the table, looking at them.
"Can I help you gentlemen this evening," she asked.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" asked the smiling man. He waved a hand over his jet-black hair.
"Beatrice,"
"Beatrice," the man winked and made a pistol with his hand, pointed at Delrayne. "This is my friend Mr Delrayne."
"Pleased to meet you, Mr Delrayne."
"Why don't you give him a kiss, Beatrice." said the man.
In a single, swift movement, she removed the lit cigarette from Delrayne's hand, placing in the ashtray as she sat on his lap. With one quick swift caress her arms were locked like entangled vines around his neck, her lips pressed against his, her tongue gently forcing an introduction he was not expecting. When he realized that she was kissing him, Delrayne leaned in, kissing her back, his arms roaming around her bare shoulers and the back of her head, the bun of blonde hair.
The man across from them laughed, as the Jazz Band picked up the tune, shifting into a real heavy, fast number.
Beatrice leaned back and laughed and stood up and as she disappeared back into the heaving crowd, Delrayne sniffed and looked at the man across from him, his eyes surprised.
“Well,” said Delrayne.
"Do you see? That didn't feel so insane, did it?"
“Well I don’t know.”
“It felt good to you, Mr Delrayne. Didn’t it.”
“Well I guess it did.”
“I’m sure it did.”
"You coulda fooled me, though," said Delrayne, reigniting the lucky strike. "This could be some sort of ... Brothel, or something."
“Are you inferring that the women here are whores, Mr Delrayne?”
“Well I don’t know.”
The man laughed. "Do you think for one moment that this is seriously a brothel?" The man waved around the room. "Because I don't think it's a brothel."
“I guess I don’t think it’s one neither.”

"Getting that woman to kiss you is no challenge at all; would you like to sleep with her? In this room, or in a suite upstairs? How about convince her to marry you in less than a minute? Or would you like her life-savings bank account number." He smiled widely again, his eyes slanted down. "It’s a simple thing. All humans are. The power that I offer you can do much more than manipulate a woman into kissing you."
"You ain’t even manipulate her, really" said Delrayne. "You just ... told her. And she did it."
“She obeyed.”
“She obeyed,” said Delrayne, blowing cigarette smoke out of his nostrils.
"As I said," the man lit his own cigarette now. "That example is merely a spec of insignificant dust against the foundation which holds the infinite options available to you. Are you following me?”
“Well I guess I am, yessir.”
“Do you want to have women?”
“Yessir. I suppose I do.”
“Fine." The man waved his hand casually. "Have any woman in the world you desire. Have every woman in the world if you desire. Fame, money, power, glory; build empires, or bring them down. Do you dream of these things?”
“I suppose I do.”
“That’s good,” said the man. “I think we may possibly be standing on the precipice now. About to jump into the abyss of our agreement.”
“I don’t know,” said Delrayne. Then more to himself he said, “This ain’t like Georgia no more.”
“You don’t know what, Mr Delrayne.”
“What that word you said was.”
“Which word.”
“Precipice. I never heard that word before.”
“It’s irrelevant.” The man ashed his cigarette and cocked his eyebrows. “And no, you’re not in Georgia. Forget Georgia. Forget America. The entire world is yours, if that’s what you wish.”
Delrayne turned towards the dance floor as the band finished their fast number and the crowd roared into applause. The black saxophone player approached the microphone, smiling genuinely.
"Alright alright alright," he exclaimed, and the dance-hall crowd roared back in response. "We wanna extend our gratitude for ya'll coming out to the Curious Crystalhouse Nightclub to spend some time with us here on this evening.”
the crowd again roared with approval. People all over the club were getting up from their tables, expecting a big wing number next. "And of course; we all up here in the band wanna tell you all that we look forward to seeing you again soon."
Delrayne rubbed his nose and snuffed out his cigarette. The smiling man was watching the stage intently. The black saxophone player conferred quickly with his band mates, laughed, and turned back to the microphone.
"Happy New Years Eve 1959, everybody. This one is one we wrote especially for you all,"
The drummer slammed the toms abruptly and the band slid right into a dancy rhythm that made the whole place swing and clap like a swerving car wreck. Delrayne turned back to the smiling man, who was already grinning as he stared at him.
“Delrayne,” said the man.
“I just ain’t sure.”
“Do it.”
“I ain’t sure yet.”
"Shake my hand," the man said. "And it's all yours. You already know the catch."
"Yea,” said Delrayne. I’m afraid I do.”
“You do.”
“I know the catch."
"What good is your soul to you, anyway?" The smiling man lit another cigarette with the smoking stem of the first. "Are you using it? Is it that important to you?"
“I guess I’m not.”
“Then give it to me. It’s a win-win arrangement for you. You get rid of something that you’re not even using, and in return …”
“I can get whatever I want.”
“That’s right.”
"What about death," said Delrayne, picking his fingers under the table. "What about when I die?"
"Blackness," said the smiling man. "It’s just blackness. I promise you. This doesn't change a thing."
"Then why inna hell you want it from me? If it's so meaningless to you."
“Not meaningless to me,” said the man. “Meaningless to use. I can use it. I need it.”
“Why.”
The smiling man smiled and shook his head, shrugging. "These are issues that would take me far too long to explain. No offense intended, of course.”
“Yeah.”
“Delrayne,” said the man. “Shake my hand. It wouldn't make any sense if you didn't."
Delrayne bit his lip, looking around the room. His eyes found Beatrice the hostess; she glanced over him as if she had already forgotten the kiss.
“I …”
"Give me your soul."
“I …”
“Do it. Give it to me. Imagine everything else in the world at your fingertips.”
“Aw, hell,”
“Give me your soul.”
Delrayne leaned forward suddenly, his hand extended.

THE ARTEMIS AT SINGAPORE

Their ship was a wooden heart pulsing through rising waters, the waves lapping at the stern like some lost tribe of children seeking a mother’s refuge. In the wind that blew beneath the thunderstorm the echoes of their heaving carried low and long, and those who waited on the shore heard no sound but the laughter of these lunatics lowering their ropes for the tying. Whole streams of foam fell over the sides, further soaking the crew in their colorful array of clothing. Men wept with hysterical hilarity, calloused hands clutching ropes and knots as they watched the swinging masts and the city beyond the shore. Eagerly, the crew continued towards the shore. Their square top sail had been stripped to shreds off Puerto Princesa, and five days later they lost four men in a storm southwest of Manila.
In Hong Kong Captain Landstrum had taken ill, his breaths clapping against his throat like an old animal growl. Twenty miles out of the port at Guongzhou they gave his body back to the Sea, his pale stare disappearing into the blackness.
They would all be filthy rich, those who were still alive.
The ship scraped against the dock and the men aboard cheered. Shouts in strange accents shook hands with the sharp cracking of the squall overhead as the crew began this ancient procession. Long had they all been lingering at sea like birds lost from their flock. Each man was his own world entire. Their first mate was a one-eyed opium addict called ‘Half’ who hailed from some horrible shithole hidden somewhere along the coast of Chile. With his cold eye open he kept a close watch on his crew – it was his crew now that the Captain had been buried – and he intended to indulge himself in an old Irish whore at a cleaver’s room called The Bassoon.
He looked out past the men busy on the deck and stared at the long silhouettes of spires that stood proud through the drifting smoke. Singapore loomed. Half sniffed and spat and shouted out his orders and studied his men.
There was the Japanese harpooner who had been picked up in Java; the Indonesian Priest named Parapret who had tattooed his own torso with colors unfurling like clouds, swirling in spirals; the wheel-man from Wales whom no one could understand. There was the Buddhist from Burma – named Shovendra – who rarely spoke unless speaking a prayer over a passenger, or a corpse. The oarsman from Ireland with his thumbs cut off at the knuckle; the mute boy from Bangladesh; the angry American whom the crew called ‘Temptress’ on account of his accidental run-in with a hermaphrodite in Hong Kong.
The men, as they unloaded, started singing. Half grinned in low gloom, knowing the time of day by the way the light hit the water. The crew unloaded their catch, feet busy down the ship’s ramps, their voices like an old rug soaked in bourbon and set afire as the storm thundered overhead. Rain fell like vats of urine being poured over the side of God’s rowboat; cracks of lightning scoured the open waters like tribesman’s spears. Half went to starboard side and looked down at the land. Down on the ramps, the Algerian tradesman and a harpooner from Denmark named Normanander negotiated numbers with a dockside bookmaker. The Algerian – whose eyes were always seeming to be starting with an evil intent – smiled and tilted his head back slow, a long understanding nod following the smile. Normanander looked back at Half and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and Half nodded. They would be paid in full, then. Half watched the Algerian wave a hand over the fresh stubble of his shaved head, his purple tweed jacket starting to tatter at the shoulders and wrists. The Algerian followed the bookmaker across the thin strip of cobblestone the lined the dock’s edge, lighting his pipe under the steep fabric-overhang of a seamarket shop.
"Peppers,” the Temptress called up to Half, the first mate, now in charge. “We need rice, and lemon,” he replied.
He snapped at the Japanese harpooner, his hands dancing in the air as he made the sign to go below deck to fetch the dead Captain’s coin purse. The harpooner rushed back up to the top-deck, most of the other men starting to descend down the ramps and into the outskirts of the far-east city, where they would haunt it’s halls and alleyway and barside bathhouses like old seafaring spirits just released from the bottom of an abysmal well.
“We make-a-ha-leest,” the Japanese harpooner said to Half. His English was mumbled and spoken rapidly. “Ev-er-y-item, on leest.”
He and the American called Temptress were in charge of resupplying the kitchen stock for the next leg out. The cook was an insufferable Indonesian hunter who had made a living on dry land by selling hyena’s in Africa’s great midlands. He too, could barely speak English, the common language amongst these men.
“Listen,” said Half, his Chilean accent strong and noticable. “Irewan is crazy bastard. Do no let him convince you … to spend monies on women. No these monies. You want women? You use you monies. You no use these monies. Si?”
“We’ll meet you all up at the Bassoon, after,” said Temptress the American. A tattoo above his right eye read ‘RPE, NY’. His left ear had been clipped off in some knife fight near the Kelladona pass, in the mountains of upstate New York.
"We won’t let that crazy bastard cook tell us what to buy.”
Half and the Japanese Harpooner went back below deck to fetch the Irewan the cook. The American leaned against the rail, looking out.
All the others had dissolved into the streets, save for the Burmese Buddhist, who sat meditating amidst the abandoned ropes and equipment that had been left scattered on the deck. The familiar smells of iron and ore and whale meat were mingling with the foreignness of Singapore’s dockside kitchens and peddle merchants, soiled sheets and open sewers.
The Buddhist’s eyes were closed, and he appeared to be smiling slightly, sitting in the full lotus position, like a praying mantis.
The American had actually seen a praying mantis once, in Panama, before his wife had been killed. “American,” said the Buddhist, his eyes still closed. His English was near perfect, his body covered by oversized trousers rolled up to the knee.
“You staying with the ship?”
"I will stay with the ship, Sir,” said the Buddhist, nodding, his eyes still closed. “I have much to do inside of myself.”
The American spat.
"That’s fair enough,” he said. “I got much to do inside of some particularly loose and beautiful women, so we on the same page in that respect, ain’t we.”
"Yes,” said the Buddhist, his eyes still closed.
“I think you’re one crazy bastard, too,” said the American. “Hell I think you might be the craziest bastard of em all.”
Finally the Buddhist opened his eyes. He smiled genuinely.
“The fool believes what he thinks, and not what he sees. The wise man believes what he sees, and not what he thinks.”
The American sniffed, and started to laugh.
And our boot heels going slow along the soaking cobblestone

44 FLOORS

They’re screaming as we cling to the soaking overhang, reflections in glass cast off by the sun.
It’s strange now clinging to these moments up here, after all of the dreams where I’ve walked with you. Soon we will be beneath the muttering alarm of a thunderstorm, the soft rumbling sounds sweeping in under the sunlit haze, our reflections in the glass. Men with megaphones on the ground make muffled sounds with no resonance, the meaning lost amidst the fluttering of wings from a flock of birds just beyond our parapet.
Fire engines and flickering sirens scattered amidst the bottom crowds like the silhouetted clouds at dawns light, like horseflies through the eaves. You hold my hand, the storm up over us now.
“Est diu deorsum,” you say, voice caught in this high risers wind.
“Sic?”
Looking down at these dots of humanity, each one like a sparkling particle floating along the ocean. Our reflections in the glass, the hazy slanted sheets of sleet and rain, the wind gust like a gut punch.
Down below us the crowds call out for us to come down,
'come down from there, from your own perch above our perfect world’.
Strands of your hair whip around in the wind, scented streamers floating around us like a shield.
Swallowing, you say, “Esset adhuc vos?”
It is a very long way down, down to their perfect world.
“Utunam adhuc.”
Knuckles are bloodless now, white like the hands of a living ghost leaning out over the endlessness, the finish of rusty metal shooting through our fingertips with a savage electric surge as we are left wondering, Is this the last thing we feel? This metal railing? Is this it?
Your eyes close as the covering of the storm cloud crosses back over us, shadows playing butterfly, the fluttering of wings. Our reflection in the glass.
“Sciatur Quia Ego Dilexi Te,” you say.
“Scio.”
“Semper dilexi vos.”
Leap like a bird.
Fluttering wings.
Empty glass.
The earth is rising, falling down, tumbling. The distant ground seems to be opening, groaning.
The scattered crowd screams.
Semper dilexi vos.

OFFENDER

Warning/ Disclaimer: this is the strangest thing I have ever written.
The characters are vultures who are speaking East End London Cockney English.
I am fully expecting everyone to dislike or be unbearably confused by this, so no worries.
Maybe someone will enjoy it.




Two vulture-birds perched on a bare branch. Claws pinched into bark, heads clucking. Beaks torn and grinning like the scowls worn by the oldest of men. Their bald heads pink and shivering, looking out with crooked eyes.
The oldest one sits on the left. “They aint but squids,” says the Elder. His voice is old and English, all shrill like a flayed lung.
“Eh?”
“Squids. I’m tellin-ye. It aint but fora fuckn joke thays even talkn to im at ol.”
“Then why,” says the other, the one called Lamentation. His deep croak bellows below him, bottomless, abysmal. “Why would ay waste ay time?”
“Sul for show,” says the Elder, his hairless head darting forward and back. “Ay tryina get im ‘a see that they luv-im.”
“Nooo,” says Lamentation, his deep voice full of doubt. “Why would ay tell-im that ays his friend, only-a leave-im and forget-im?”
“They dunt like im,” says Elder. “Theyre liars.”
There had been a fury in one of the Royal bird clans, its regal followers sent amiss about an atrocity committed by one of their own.
The guilty bird had no longer been called by his given name, instead now only spoken to as ‘Offender’, and many thought it was well deserved. Offender had begun to go stray, to say things that weren’t popular with the Prince Bird or his patriarchs. Without permission or pass this rebel one decided to eke out an existence on his own, seeking a solitary life amidst the fire and flame and stress of this enormously barren world.
The Prince Bird and his patriarchs had declared an injustice, making claims against Offender’s ignorance and ignoring the young birds innocence. They had publically shamed him and pushed him away. Until now.
Now they seemed to be seeking a truce, constantly asking after him, their wandering hive searching the well-bottoms of the world.
Elder clicked cold toenails into the cream colored bark, half-whistling an old hymn he had heard from an African traveler. He cocked his head back and forth, pondering the situation.
Lamentation took a deep breath and spoke.
“It uzzant make sense, notta me."
“Whats-at.”
“Ay av sent im away from em. An en ay av called im this an that, in front uf us all. In front uf all the birds. Now ay is sayn-at ay luv him. An at ay is his friend.”
“Ats what Im sayn, you big stupid bird. Ats exactly what I been sayn. Theyre hypocrites. Alla em. Cant stand im, dont even like im, not even remotely, but ay gut it all twisted in ay mind like theys the good ones.”
On the floor of the earth a snake slithered through grass. Elder widened his eyes to watch, half interested.
“Well,” said Lamentation. “What-a we do?”
“Offender hasn’t dun nuffin. Hes innocent, he is.”
The old bird sighed. And then he unfurled his enormous wings, cracked the long string of his neck and cawed loudly before erupting into the air, into the stormclouds. Lamentation watched him, and after a few moments followed.

KATRINA ACROSS THE RIVER

These were the pre-Katrina rains, the boiling-black-cauldron colors of swollen clouds above us, pregnant with their wash. We spent those afternoons leaning forward over the steering wheel, the wipers dancing back and forth frantically while the waves of rippled rainwater seemed made to cripple us. In silence we drove on towards the Texas border underneath that thunderous canopy, and it was shortly thereafter that a thousand people died in one of the worst storms in our history.
I’d been down there for two weeks, down in the south, driving with Baiden from Baton Rouge to El Paso and back, chain smoking in a fever dream of daisy fields and die-hard drunks who couldn’t get enough of a northern boy’s accent. Every night we danced along the branches of inner city Texas streets, bar-hunting for blondes before backtracking towards the truck with half-empty bottles we’d borrowed while the bartenders back was turned.
We stopped in Conroe just as the wet blanket of a storm was on the verge of sliding in over the sun-blue dome, our shadows soon to be lost underneath the cold cobalt grey above, the sound of smoldering powerlines buzzing in an omniscient way that always makes you wonder whether it’s the electricity or the bugs.
In San Antonio we stumbled around the river walk with our hands reaching out to grasp the warm stone of the old buildings, fully aware and dirty and drunk under the swinging scythe of the midsummer sun that bore down like an alien spotlight.
I bought a pair of nikes from a shirtless east-european who called himself the Genius Love Poet, the full chest-tattoo leaking over his shoulders and traveling down both of his arms like a swirling colorful stream. The shoes were ruined in the rains that followed hours later, rains that were ravenous for the surface of the earth, starving for ground, seeking only to soak.
In Dallas I woke up laying down on a loveseat that belonged to some southern belle who called herself Sahara, my feet dangling over the edge like crooked fishing wire, the drone of the living room AC like a ships motor cutting through the silence. Outside the rain had started to come down in rivers, rivulets slashing violently down the sliding glass door of Sahara’s living room, collecting there at the cement patio, gleaming in the low light.
“Well well,” she said from another room. I opened my eyes to shards of glass, the throbbing in my head a catastrophic strobe light. “Thought you’d never wake up, boy.”
Her voice floated slow like mist over rolling hills.
“I don’t remember anything.”
“Aw, honey,” she said, walking into the room wearing short shorts and a tank top revealing a flat tanned stomach and a belly button ring. “That’s alright.” Kneeling beside me, taking my hand, she said, “We had a good time nonetheless. But ya’ll need to get back home. There’s a big storm coming.”
Coming through Austin the sky looked like a broken mirror, like cracks in a cellophane ceiling. We did shots of Captains with a rodeo clown named Jeremy, the three of us regularly erupting into the Pearl Jam classic with the same name until the bartender told us to get the hell out.
“You all gotta see ‘a bats,” he said as we carried him out. “’A bats, man, I’ll tell’a what, ‘a bats.”
“The bats?”
“Under’a bridge. ‘Ats where ‘a bats live. ‘Ats right, ‘ats right.”
We checked him into a cheap motel and put a puke bucket by the side of his bed, and by the time he’d woken up we’d long dissolved into the shadows of the night, our silhouettes long under the screaming street lamps of the city.
On the last night we drove through a torrential rain towards the airport, everything hazy and blurred by the curtains of rain that perpetually had followed us. Across the highway, and across the river, there stood an enormous factory, its tubes and slides and towers lit up by ten thousand lights, and in the distance there it seemed to be some ancient façade or some futuristic castle.
“Is it on fire,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
“Eh?”
“Is that thing, across the river, is it on fire?”
“No,” he said, struggling to see through the rain. “It’s not. Go back to sleep.”
“Alright,” I said, begrudgingly.
“We’ll be at the airport in an hour.”
A week later he was dead, and the factory across the river on fire was gone, knocked down in the storm.

CENTURION

(this is a rewrite of an old story)



He had survived in the Teutoberg Forest by managing to crawl into a cart full of the dead bodies of his friends and commanders. They had all been slaughtered there, the whole army, almost to the man. The victory chants came down from the hillsides, the sound echoing through distant ravines and hills spotted with tiny fires. Blood drenched Germanic barbarians wheeled the carts full of dead Roman soldiers to enormous lime pits, dumping them there and laughing as the contorted bodies of their grandest enemies went tumbling lifelessly on top of one another.
The Legionary had prayed to the Gods; he had prayed without ceasing to every name he could muster in his memory.
After two days and nights in the pit he had accepted this fate, but soon after he felt something rummaging amidst that mountain made from the dead flesh of the thousands of Romans. Someone whispered to him;
“You are alive, Legionary?”
He did not move. He licked his lips, parched and swollen and cut open throughout. The whisperer spoke again.
“If you are alive, Legionary, then leave this place with me.”
“Where would we go,” he whispered furiously, through clenched teeth.
“Anywhere but here, we will starve here."
"We'll die of thirst," said the Legionary. "Long before we die of hunger."
"I'm not dying here."
The Legionary slowly had turned his head, finding the master of the voice to be a large soldier who lay on top of the pile. Stubble lay underneath the encrusted dirt and grime like grass turned brown after a heavy snowfall. The man's face had been recently disfigured, a fresh open scar reaching down from his bloody temple, over his eye, down to his chin.
Flies collected in enormous black clouds over the ocean of dead.
“The guards are gone, now,” said the scarred-face Roman. "I'll not die here. Not like this."
The Legionary had nodded then, after a moment. The one-eyed scarred-face Roman offered his hand and pulled him up, and then there came a blurry vision of days that seemed to have been melted together, as the two wounded Romans went were hobbling carefully through the ruined German forest, looking for any other outpost of survivors they could find.
That was almost 25 years ago, he thought now. 25 years. He had been just a child then -- no more than 16 – a simple Legionary who by luck had one of the few who had survived that terrible and atrocious betrayal of Rome. Hundreds of thousands had perished, and the Legionary – now a Centurion, a commander – had not seen such brutal and horrifying combat since.
He shifted his weight to scratch an itch under his heavy shoulder armor. If there was anything at all that he could take away from his experiences against the Germanic tribes in Germania, it was that at least the land had seasons.
In Jerusalem there was only the sun, and the scorched earth, and the dryness of the desert that lifted up and bit out at you like a wild animal who floated on a vicious wind.
He sighed, monitoring the crowd that surged through the mazes of tiny streets below, as hundreds of cheering onlookers followed the criminals as they struggled through the city and up towards the Skull.
It was a day for executing.
Sweat glistened in between his muscular legs and the high straps of his leather sandals. He squinted under the short visor of his helmet, the sun leering over the earth like a mourning father holding a torch, staring down into the grave of his son.
They judiciaries had positioned him and 13 men under his command at the top of Golgotha, the rocky hill that overlooked the city, called the Skull. Some of the Legionaries gambled behind him, cursing and giggling; he did not mind so long as they attended to business when the procession approached closer. He cracked his neck, looking down at the three men whom they would execute that day, each currently carrying the burdensome tool of his own destruction through the roaring, angry mob of crowds below.
The procession reached the bottom of the hill, and as young children and eager onlookers raced ahead of the criminals to the top of the execution ground, the Centurion called back to his men in a vicious tone that sounded more the barking of a wild dog.
“Get that cleaned up there,” he called. “Get into your damn formations, you fools.”
The Legionaries were swift and on their feet, some of them still grinning. He knew that most of them loved this; he was young once, and would have loved it back then. But the young are foolish, and too quick to deem what is good.
The criminals approached, struggling. Random citizens in the crowd spit and threw rotten food; some kicked out at them ferociously. The Centurion palmed the handle of his sword. His face was expressionless and rigid.
When the soldiers who had escorted the slow moving pageant through the city reached him, the Centurion nodded back towards his men. They spread out in unison in groups of three, each group attending to a different man. The took the crosses off of them and laid them flat and in alignment with the deep post-holes they had dug that morning. The criminals wept, and bled profusely. One was adorned with a strange sort of hat that had been fused together with branches of thorns. The Centurion raised an eyebrow and stepped forward.
The man had been tortured almost to death, to the point where the whipped skin on his neck and shoulders and back and flank had peeled completely off in certain areas. Both of his eyes were almost swollen shut, and his mouth and nose dripped blood profusely. Bruises stained his entire torso and both of his legs, and his forehead had been deeply mangled by the circles of thorn-branches that had been shoved onto him.
The Centurion knelt down as the man lay there silent, panting furiously, his breaths bubbling with blood.
The Legionaries grabbed the man by the arms and laid his body in line with the ‘t’ shape of the cross.
“Aulus,” he said to one of the soldiers.
"Eh?"
“Nails.”
The Centurion bent down to the dirt to grab the hammer.
The other groups had already started, and the high pitched wailing screams of the two criminals on either side of him only made his head ache more intense. He removed his helmet for a moment to wipe the sweat away with his leathered forearm.
“This is the man,” said one of the Legionaries. “Who claims he is the Christ.”
“The Christ?” said the Centurion, raising his eyebrow again. He looked down at the destroyed corpse of the dying man. “This is that man?”
“You 'aven’t 'eard, sir?” said Aulus. “We getta do him in.”
The Centurion handed the hammer to a young Legionary who had dual scars on either side of his mouth.
“You do it.”
The Scarred-Mouth soldier grinned wildly, and The Centurion for a moment thought he might be sick. Pullio, his second in command, was already hoisting one of the thieves up, and the crowd roared with approval as the thief screamed in absolute pain.
The Scar-Mouth Roman knelt carefully over the Christ-claimer, and let a long trail of spit fall down into his face. He held the nails over the mans wrists, and began to pound the hammer through the bone and into the wood. The man tried to scream, but choked on his blood, and coughed heavily.
“Lift his head up,” shouted Aulus. “Don’t let him choke to death, you feckin idiot,”
“Get uff it 'en,” replied the Scar-Mouth. "I don't tell ye'ow to do your job, do I."
The Romans began hoisting the second thief into the air, as another soldier began pounding a nail into the mans feet. The Centurion leaned back, making eye contact with Ailus.
“Good,” he said deeply. His face showed no emotion.
“You’re a king of men, eh,” said the Scar Mouth, as he wrapped thick rope around the mans forearm and the wood. “All hail'a king.”
“The Gods gonna surely turn you into 'eir house slave, you feckin King,” said Aulus. The man who called himself Christ had tears in his eyes.
“Quiet,” ordered the Centurion. He rubbed his face, staring at the mans eyes. “Lift him up, carefully.”
The Legionaries were not careful, forcing the bottom the cross into the hole hurriedly, causing the man to scream out in pain.
“I SAID CAREFULLY, YOU SWINE,” screamed the Centurion. “Sons of Dis, carefully.”
He turned and pushed through the crowd, telling them to get back, get back. Several women wept. A Legionary stood several yards away, both hands cradling a spear, staring with obvious discomfort at the scene of butchering and death.
The Christ-man’s cloak had fallen off, and Aulus had reached down to grab it. He motioned to Pullio and the Scar-Mouth and several others to the foot of the mans cross.
“I like 'is,” he said excitedly. “I 'fink I’ll keep it.”
“Bloody hell you will not,” said Pullio. “Throw in for it, if you want it. I want it more.”
“I’ll frow in,” said the Scar-Mouth, kneeling. “Whose got dice?”
“I 'ave,” said a Roman Sergeant, approaching with an enormous grin. “What are the odds?”
The Centurion spat and took many steps backwards. The three men who hung on the crosses conversed to each other, but the Centurion could not hear what they were saying. The Christ-man called out; it sounded as though he was asking someone for forgiveness. Thunder boiled overhead.
The crowd began to disperse as the men on either side of the Christ-man passed. The thunder became louder, and clouds seemed to form from nothing. It became somewhat darker, and the Centurion glanced at the group of women who wept.
“I thirst,” moaned the Christ-man. “I thirst.”
The Centurion stepped forward, towards the laughing Legionaries who gambled at the foot of the cross.
“Aulus,” he barked. “Give this man some water.”
“My water?”
“Will you argue with me?” threatened the Centurion. Aulus obeyed. Suddenly lighting cracked, vicious and loud and surprising. The Legionaries glanced up, noticing the threatening nature of the sky. The Scar-Mouth stood.
“Rain!” he exclaimed.
“This aint normal,” said Pullio, staring up. “Something strange, about this.”
The thunder roared as if the Gods were arguing with each other in the ancient language of old. The wind became a howl.
The Centurion looked up at the Christ-man, who was staring at him. The Centurion tried to break the man’s gaze, but found that he could not. The man struggled for every breath, having to lift his body. Still he forced him to hold his gaze.
The Centurion took off his helmet, eyes still staring into the Christ-mans, as it started to rain.
“Finished,” whispered the Christ man. His head rolled back, before slumping forward.
Instantly, horrible surges of lightning seemed to strike simultaneously, as the rain began to pour and the wind became villainous. The Legionaries scattered, leaving the red cloak and the dice and the money to blow away. Several of the weeping women crept slowly towards the Christ man, lifeless on his cross, and they began to wail. The Centurion still stared at the mans face. One of the women looked back at him then, her face horrified and locked in a river of tears and disbelief. The Centurion swallowed, feeling his heart to be heavy. His head pounded. He breathed very deeply, and quickly.
“Surely,” he said quietly, as the weeping woman looked at him. The Centurion shook his head in disbelief. “Surely this man was the son of God.”

THE WORST DREAM I HAVE NEVER HAD

She followed me along the airport terminal towards the hour of my doom. The tiled floor was spotless, shining with the fluorescent lights reflecting off of its waxed veneer. Crowds hurriedly moved past us in the opposite direction. Down at the end of the half mile stretch of straight corridor, I could see that the lights were beginning to flicker out, sparks jumping from the ceiling panels like dancers. Beyond the flickering lights there was only darkness.
“We must turn back,” Larissa said.
“No.”
Slowly things began to morph into darker colors; tiny mounds of swamp mud protruded from the corridor floor, now covered with a light film of slime. The white walls started to transform into vines and thick foliage before disappearing altogether. The fluorescent lights flickered out completely, leaving us in a dark gray haze of wandering, barely able to see our own steps or what was underfoot.
Soon the mud was up to our ankles as we navigated the near total dark, stumbling together over wet roots and bog muck, our hands outstretched in front of us so as to prevent a forward fall into the grime. Large shapes of creatures almost entirely unseen slipped across our path, and somewhere out in the abysmal blackness beyond us we began to hear human screams. Amidst the suckling and clicking of mandible mouths, prey caught in pairs of grasping spiked forelegs shrieked and squealed, sudden bursts of screaming cut off by low groans, bubbling gasps of breath as the half-dead victims disappeared beneath the mire.
“Please don’t do this,” Larissa said. “They are eating your guests.”
“They won’t eat me.”
“She promised they wouldn’t eat the guests.”
“I’ll speak to her.”
“What about your children, what are you children going to look like if you do this?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
We came to the rim of a shallow rectangular pit, where the wedding guests waited in the blackness, nothing more but barely visible shapes silhouetted against a darker backdrop. Three crooked wooden stairs led down into the pit, where small pools littered the dirt floor of this nightmare arena, the water in them deep and terrible.
For a moment I knelt beside one of the pools, my hand held gently over the bubbling, boiling water, the fumes stinking like ragged meat, like rotten bones.
“She’s down there,” I said. I reached into my tuxedo pocket and pulled out a cigarette. “It’s almost time.”
Larissa turned and carefully joined the other guests, who could not be seen in that deep black dusk. Silhouettes and shapes of strange creatures slithered along the rim of the pit; the wedding guests were kept silent by these unknown keepers of awe, terrifying them into stillness.
I stepped away from the bubbling pool and watched as my bride to be emerged from the reeking liquid, thick rivulets of foam and foulness slipping off of her skin. Her body was the hairy bulb of an enormous spider, the legs like eight tentacles searching the ground, their puckers popping with a sick sound. At the end of each withering leg a giant claw violently thrashed at the air, as she snailed back from the pool into near-total dark. I couldn’t see her face. I turned to where Larissa and the other guests waited patiently at the other end of the pit, but I could not see them.
My spider bride cackled, her mouth sucking and spitting, clicking gratuitously. She went to submerge herself again in the water, and again I saw the thick leathery thorax, the huge shaggy circle of body, the hair long and tangled and full of smaller insects. Slowly she began to disappear down in the water, and I knew the ceremony had been completed. The slithering unseen guards of the wedding pit began to disperse back into the marsh, back into the swamps.
I knew more of my guests would be eaten alive on the way back to the terminal. Larissa appeared out of the black shroud, and together we went up the wooden steps and began our journey back through the hellzone.
“It’s done,” I said. “This is my home now.”
“You’ve made such a terrible mistake.”
And there in the murky stadium of darkness all around us, I began to scream.

WILDERNESS POEM

The crooked stream extends
like a broken finger,
blood spilling from the open wound
of the river.
Shallow on its shoreline,
its knuckles angled
as it slowly turns to rot
under the ice.
Fires scattered across the ginger
hillside like
freckles
on the pale shoulder
of a pretty girl,
trees bare amidst the empty remnant
of a forest.
Looking down from the bluff
onto winter,
out beyond the shy stranger of dawn
twisting its distant waistline of shadow and mist,
twisting sweet horizon.
Through a pale fog it’s hard to tell
if the islet is really land
or part of a dream,
a mirage through morning smoke,
separating the lake
like a jagged bone curved sharp through the skin.
Blue vapor daze,
dead weeds crushed underfoot,
quiet brother of wind moving through the wilderness.

DOING THINGS ALONE IN A WORLD WHERE BEING ALONE IS CONSIDERED LONELINESS

when I was younger I was in a play called ‘The Wind Moves’. I had no experience acting -- no experience with any sort of public performance whatsoever – but the description given to me through a friend sounded interesting and so I joined the throngs of weary strangers silhouetted under the streetlights, joined together in a low cloud full of cigarette smoke and the soft murmurings that occur when strangers assemble. I suppose looking back on it now that I was alone even then, standing impatiently under the round eyes of the street lamps as the small crowd slowly inched forward towards the check-in stations that were just inside the doors.
When you reached the back of the line there was a man wearing a green baseball cap handing out brochures that gave a brief description of every role available to the public. As I read over the names of the characters I looked around, wondering if anyone else had noticed the strange names that filled the piece of paper in all of our hands. “The Devil” and “The Dealer”; “Hammerfall” and “Henry Day”; “Tulip” and “Gatekeeper”.
‘What the hell kind of play is this,’ I had asked.
A black man with a leering eye that seemed as though it constantly misunderstood something turned back and snickered at me.
‘You don’t know, man?’
‘No.’
‘Man,’ he said. ‘It’s a play about good and evil, about the end of time and the beginning of time.’ He nodded his head, agreeing with himself. ‘This the first time Hartford Stage done something like this.’
Leering Eye and I both went on to get parts – I was a young cocaine addict called ‘Fresh’ and he became ‘the Black Angel of Death’ – but throughout our 5 night tenure as ‘actors’ we rarely saw each other and had no scenes together. My character was one of the only few who survived the ordeals of the middle act, and so therefore our characters never met. But in between scenes some of the cast would collect in an old side balcony that was unused for the audience, and it was here that the Leering Eye told me something very interesting.
‘I’ll tell you something, young man.’ He whispered like a mouse sneaking underneath the kitchen door while the cat slept quietly. ‘You gotta go see a play alone.’
‘Alone?’
‘With no interruptions, man, no friends distracting you … you just experience shit different when you by yourself.’
After the last night of the play, I never saw him again, but I did take his advice. A few weeks later I woke up at 4 in the morning and drove down the haze littered highway into downtown Hartford and soon I was on a bus bound for Manhattan. The play I saw was called ‘In the Last Car’, and it was about a kidnapping and Stockholm syndrome, and it was in a claustrophobic little theater where the heat and the perfume swirled together all around like an aerial sentry around an awestruck audience.
Leering Eye had been right – it was different when you were alone, it was another thing entirely. I’d laid out my net and caught every detail, held onto every thematic suggestion and heard every word spoke, understanding it all, missing none of it.
Since ‘In the Last Car’, it’s become somewhat of a trend for me to traverse the entertainment world all my lonesome. I turn vagabond whenever a favorite band releases a new album, disappearing for a few hours to understand alone the messages that cannot be conveyed when companions are busily blabbing in your ear.
Most people that I’ve talked to don’t do this.
My friends Rooney and Swimmer went off like ballistic missiles, spearheads of smoke skyrocketing in every direction as they furiously argued that only losers go places alone.
“Only losers do that shit,” said Swimmer. “How the fuck you gonna go eat a meal alone? You’re 21 years old, man. Talking about doing shit like some old lonely man, by himself at the counter of the diner.”
I’ve eaten alone at the counter of a diner, sometimes with a book in hand and sometimes with nothing but late night patience and a need to be somewhere other than my apartment. It’s not so bad.
There’s snags and exceptions to every rule, and this rule of self is no different. My friend Goose got angry when I suggested that he go see Nine Inch Nails by himself. When I went alone to watch Black Swan in the theater – not knowing it was filled with lesbian crotch diving and weird masturbation scenes – I sank down very low in my seat, certain that the packed crowd around me thought I was some desperate pervert come to kick his rocks off.
But sometimes you just need to be alone.
For perspective, for those quiet things that come like silent stars appearing with dusk, no voices or opinions to sway us in our thoughts. It’s not healthy to be consistently alone, traveling like some wanderer down old roads, but sometimes there is no other cure to the manic chanting of this world.
Most people I’ve met, when confronted with the possibility of being alone, react with a sick sneer and shocked scoff, as if to say ‘I’m too good for that, I couldn’t be seen out at the movies, or in a bookstore reading, or surrounded by people who are together while I’m by myself.’
But if we are not comfortable in our own skin, if we cannot handle ourselves, how will we ever be able to give anything to anyone else? If we do not know ourselves, taking to time to wash our spirits, enjoy our own company, how will we ever love?

THE TOURIST

reading 'The Inferno' by Dante Alighieri



hooded myths guard halls of masked incense, candlelights flicker from the locked rooms of the wasteland within. I admire the dark tower, see how it looms? One minute our king and the next our demise.
They stand apart in in its breadth, without eyes they see through disguises imminent.
torch the funeral pyres, my arrow aims for the skies, an archer of fire.
Who would walk alone in this world?
Who could bear to be alone?
But for you …
I will go now into them, those long dark dreams where the quest for this hollow queen begins.
I will bring to you all your rest, or else carry you back to your bed where the brightness threads through an open curtain in a perfect colored world where you can dream of fields without fences

RELIEF WORKER

We pointed a flare gun at the stars, mesmerized by there stoic statuesque embrace, held captive in the worlds of our heads. Earlier that afternoon we had ripped the wood paneling off of the window frames and taken them out completely, only to find it made no difference; summer is hot; South America is relentless.
Karsus had come up after hearing all of our noise and saw the three huge gaping holes in the walls and told us to put curtains up.
‘De people see you from de outside,’ he said. ‘Coverid up.’
We left the rooms stained with sweat, like dogs shedding away our coats, out onto the wet tile of the balcony that stretched around the school like a deadline.
Over and again we went over our inventory, the things we were forced to carry through the dark nights of those hot days. Heavy rucksacks like weeping children strapped to our backs, bags filled with the bricks of things.
Plastic gloves and flashlights. Ponchos and cigarettes.
In the streets of Santa Cruz we watched the farmers tie themselves together with chains, brandishing signs that rebelled against their government. We thought nothing of it, our shoulder dull from the weight of our box cutters and containers of butane, bic lighters and heat tabs.
Can openers and several bars of shitty soap.
Jaron spat and cussed in low Louisiana drawl, hefting extra laces and bug juice, toothpaste and carpentry knee pads. Trip tens and packs of bungee chords, blue jeans and blankets.
Out on the tiles we went shirtless laying on our backs, just us and the maps that God had long ago made in the far above, tracing constellations with our fingers amidst piles of plasma bottles and packs of Atropine.
Avinza and Dopamine tablets.
Butterfly stitches.
I stretched my hand out over a coupling of empty blood bags, looked left in a half drunk sleep to see the Malaria tablets spilling out of my ruck. Up above just the stars like a thousand headlamps of explorers who weren’t coming back.
Needles and thread, surgical tape.
‘Which ones?’
‘What?’
‘Which ones do you think hold other worlds?
The ash on the stem of my cigarette forming a leaning tower, ready to crumble like old testament cities, ready to lay in ruin until washed away by the floods that God makes in a rare burst of fury.
‘Chest seals,’ I said. ‘Stitch kits and syringes.’
‘Waterproof sharpies.’
‘Tourniquette bandages.’
‘Regular bandages.’
‘Gauze bandages.’
‘Gauze rolls. Gauze tape.’
‘Electrical tape,’ it became a game.
We recited these things until they had no meaning.
And then when the killing started the constellations faded, the explorers disappeared into their caves of black space.
And we were left with only what we carried in our rucks.

MUSIC

It binds us in a rapturous chain, keeping us in its circle of fire, mesmerized, sometimes alone. The slow dragging, feet shuffling underneath a coffin, the calm lull and then the crash of cymbal, footsteps coming undone.
I first remember music as a boy with my father.
Up on the third floor of the house, way up there in his tower he’s got a room of music up there, stacked and folded and boxed up and taped, roped around and kept in a disorganized frenzy.
“Let’s listen to this one.”
The crying child of a guitar, weeping sadly amidst the cold train of a drum beat pounding along the track, the bass a fuzzy benevolent friend making my head bend, wondering in amazement, What is this thing? What is this I am experiencing?
Jimi Hendrix picks up all the pieces with his hand, he is a voodoo child.
My father fast forwarding the tape deck, until the sweet pummeling of ‘Celebration’ came to life with its soaring verses, images of women in long summer dresses skipping through flat fields under the looming moon lit covering, an awning of dancers reaching back in unison, black women carrying water with heads bobbing amidst their half step rhythms.
The voice of Richie Havens like an old chain gang cuddling me to sleep, his baritone whisper lending me life, handing me dreams worth living for, the power of soul submerged in a line of words sublime … can one man do this?
“They’d sell his body like they do used cars.”
My father stopping off at our apartment on his way to work, handing me discs bearing names and symbols that would come to define me.
“This one is great,” he says. “Just go up to your room and listen to it.”
There is the clanging of strange instruments and harmonious dribbling sound effects as I am swept away by Radiohead.
The charming lustful glance of a song by Nat King Cole, whisking me like an old lover into a world of barsmoke and polished wooden counters.
“This is Joni Mitchell,” he says. “This one is called ‘Last Goodbye’, it’s by a dead man named Jeff Buckley.”
The shaping of realities, the twisting tourniquet of colors.
There is the introduction drumbeat of the Doors ‘Who Do You Love’ like a howling Indian ceremony, the tremulous wavy slash of gently guitars and that deep crooning voice I’ve come to consider a friend
Made out of human skull. Tell me who do you love?
Up on the room in the third floor of the house, the music room, my father dusts off the old jacket of a record bearing a few dozen faces. The sound fades in, a soft accordion and a soft spoken crowd, and then I’m mesmerized by the marching kick and snare, the rugged creaking of the lead guitar, listening to history, having it form in my ears, hearing the strange sounds of the past that will etch out my future.
“It was twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper Taught the band to play …”
On the long rim by the edge of an English field I wandered alone, hearing long lost testaments, stories about women choking on the fumes of their widow-dom, making love amidst the funeral pyres, walking aimlessly while pondering the crash beat dance hall progressions blaring through the soft foam against my ears.
I remember listening to Ryan Adams ‘Political Scientists’, staring into the dying embers of a bonfire, the pale daylight a stranger around me as I was transported to another realm, hallucinating ghosts that came up from a murky ground where men once carried the bodies of their friends.
I was sober but I was drunk off of the music, lost to its wave, a victim to its shipwreck that went crashing against the rocky shoreline.
Sitting behind a drumkit as the frenetic chords of ‘Lapdance’ simulate sex in my headphones, the drumbeat sneaking in like a thief in the night as I realize that one day I too can contribute to this movement of lovemaking, this movement of sharp courage that rises and falls like a mountain range, this movement of bare knuckle brawls and stripclub anthems, sweet crescendos of acoustic grace and replicated drumbeats.
My dad takes me up to the third floor, he’s got a room full of music up there.

THORN TO THISTLE

Clearing through pine and the thorns in the thistle. They sang like a kingdom of sirens, a sorrowful serenade trying to uplift some old ancient sorrow, senile and permanent.
They call me to surrender my footsteps, as they lure me into their hiding, then with my ceasing they start their laugh in silent musings. 

We’ve got him now, have we. 

Like some lost game of sport they wait for my move; a slow step through the long grass, out of their circle, and as I go slowly stepping they all go calling again, crawling along the stems, communicating their wish. 

I am Odysseus amidst their fortitude.
They play and laugh, My step so quiet, all are quite serious. 

Hearing the crickets in the thistle is like listening to Greek gods
laughing over a cup of lightning.