D.S. CHAPMAN

“We are not children any more,” I told him. “We will not be young forever. Our youth has passed us by; it is over. It is all over with now, and it will not be coming back again. We will never be the same again. But please, do not forget me who I’ve been to you, nor forgive me what I was…”

I swallowed a throat full of bile and turned away my face to cry; I could not cry, I have cried now too often. I will need to get away from this place, if I am to survive even one moment longer; I am living like a monster. I will need to go back to the frontier – to Europe, India, Outer Mongolia – the desert, by bus, or the island, by plane, on a boat, in the channel, a sword in my scabbard and blood on my scarf. Why am I still here, in my place in the world, of all of the places I could be? Here, in this merciless fury, of all the houses in all of the towns in the world; I shut my eyes to hide the gory sight of nature. Life cuckolds me; I feel cuckolded. I have done myself in, like a lunatic. I have committed no crime, and then turned myself in for it, and then I was lawfully punished. I cut my hands on the glass and they bled through the night until morning. Blood is everywhere, strange, and streaming, and it makes me feel uneasy. I blanch. There are flashes of lightning in a sheet across the sky at night, and all of the stars are invisible; I am feeling unfamiliar, I am feeling not quite of this world; I am put on upon a bed and sung to, I am drifted off to sleep and slept with. I stare at the moon and pretend its a meteor, falling directly towards earth. I grow small in the vastness of its singular shadow. There is a light in me, and I at will ignite it; but I am running out of fuel I fear, and when I am gone, I will forever be empty. I put on a woman’s clothes and I laugh at myself, and then I hurriedly remove them. I make myself sick, and then I come down with a headache, and I lay about feeling blue with a headache as usual, missing the Bedouins and the Alps and the highway, missing the flesh in my teeth and the animals; my hands on my head, I am laying in bed, massaging myself desperately, explosive with angst, missing the heights and the data, the cold morning water of open delirium, potent, and pure; in a hotel in the wilderness, a poltergeist waits for me under the bed…

“It’s going faster, now. It’s really going faster. Can you feel it, whizzing past your head? It is there, if you listen.” Can you feel the mud, and the salt, and the powder? The paper, the leather, the sand; all, in all passages, in every long-forgotten construct of beauty. It is tight against your heart; it pulls you to a place without violence or peace, another world which can not save you, which does not stand to be saved -; a younger self, a different self, something real and breathing, someone you can be sure once lived, if not to ever live a life again… I tried not to feel this way, I tried to deny it, I tried to put it off; I condemned it, I have always been condemning it, and I have always known it was coming. “I should have known this would happen… Indeed, I think I knew.” I tried to deny it, but I am not in denial. I am clover-rich, and wild; my hands are wings, my skin is wax, I’m glowing from the inside-out; count the steps as you climb them; stare not at the sun, lest it blind you, you must not stare directly at it.

A ghost makes its way through the closets and halls of the leaning cathedral in the misty-eyed forest, dark silence. Names are read aloud in Latin; someone possesses a cross, and they wield it; I weep. All the time I’ve wasted… All the crime and villainy… And loves, and lost loves, and loves that never were; the colors, the moments of color and sun, the first tender step in the forest by day, the first broken layer of ice underfoot in the forest of ice; for nostalgia is a wicked vice, a very pale and angry flood, wind-like, ethereal, but this is deeper than even nostalgia, more sinister, destructive. I am lost in a cycle of desire and abatement. The world has literally been spinning in circles, though they call them ellipses. Nothing ever happens, nor could it ever happen hence; the madness at the door has never vanished from its primordial stance, the crux of melancholy can not be waited out; Isis never rises, Jesus never walks. There is winter at the glass – it freezes, tender, cold; there is summer at the glass – it smolders, molten, sweet; and all is not tender, or good, and the heralds are not proclaiming us. Time is an unwelcome guest and it means violence in the distance. I can remember it all – all of the dampness, all of the bruises, slow and doleful, water-like, unambitious. The memories drip their edgings of sustenance; Spruce, an association I didn’t know you had; Stone, the pier in the sea, Glass, the wine in the glass in the sidewalk cafe, the glass on the strings in the forest, the candelit glass in the hall at a mass with a woman; the atmosphere crystallizes, like time itself is freezing, and a memory hangs, languid, over-reaching, displacing our feet from the earth; portions hover and break, vanguards tank and stumble; I get hard, I lose it, I miss the Spruce, whatever that means; perhaps I mean Cedar. There was dirt in those fields, and there were clothes on those backs in the castles… Dirt, there was dirt in our ears and our fingers. I was not a dying person, then – I am a dying person now.

I cannot live a dying life; languid, hanging, hopeless;- no; but what? I miss the new glory of growing, of knowing too little, of thinking such things as direction, as value, exist; there can be no carnal directive, no immortal path of the cosmos, of heroes, or even of failures; there is nowhere at all to be moving, and if there were, once moved there, what? It is not that nothing matters, because nothing mattering is simply a construct of words. But life – the humanity of life – the condition of utter humanity – the vast pride and the crippling auto-seduction, the self and the master self, the beast and ghost and the missive – it is not a simple play on words. These words – how despicable! Like robbing graves; hands in the corpses, dissecting our treasures from the ether of lives here and after; metaphysicists, abstractionists, isolationists, laissez-faire, smoldering lights; our visions have quickly outgrown us, our expansion has come to fulfill us. We deal too deep in pretty, curious words; simple things, and vain – the game has gone on long enough. What must our fathers, our forefathers, think of us, should they hear the way we spoke and played; what must the Hellenes have thought of our words, and our literature, our masochism, our treachery, our absurd expectations, our cautious ambiguities, our confused and diligent theatrics; forever in dance, spiraling upwards and inwards and into a perfect beam of motionless fury, a light shining blindingly under a veil; what must they think of our hyper-awareness? Well – they think nothing, they are dead; and that is the answer to that.

“We will never be young again; this is our only chance, and everything is changing, and we can never go back.” A crying sound – through the walls, and the floorboards, though muffled, you can hear it; the dead ones, hushed and unwelcome; the fastidious hymn of revival – this is the brave, new world of modernity; something shining, something bright, and intangible. Shame on us for growing older. This is where pain becomes real, and we the recalcitrant  gleam of reluctance. This is where everything everyone has ever said becomes true. We are not immune to the universe anymore; we are not a part of our wildest fantasies. We are humans, old and forgotten, and there are no miracles, nor are there any gods, nor any time to spend the day with, to walk and to sleep in the flowers; there is never enough time, there will never be enough again; art is dead; we are not innocent; culture is in the descent, aesthetics don’t exist, ethics don’t exist; we have blood on our hands; the physical world is again a delusion; beauty and meaning and love are biochemical fiction; happiness is simply deferment, ironic and useless; happiness doesn’t exist. We should not eat anything – we could not if we tried. We must not let our lives slip by us; life slips by us. We are the same and as boring as every man or woman who has ever woken up one day upon this earth a newborn and we are growing old and nothing we are thinking or saying is meaning anything and we cannot even laugh about it, we cannot even play; we are caught in the strange cosmic rush and tide of human life, unbelievable, unimaginable, as every human has ever been, and like everyone else has ever done, we blew it. This is me, blowing it; watch how bad a job I do.

A gift of a sweater and fruit on my doorstep; how generous, surreal. I taste the fruit, their juices, I try the sweater on, because I am chilly. If it weren’t for the spineless bastards in their halls of bone, the masquerade of sluttish whores on the boardwalk in the dead of night, the meandering palsy of childish sin, throneless, and infamous, basic and cruel and ill-mannered, I might be willing to accept life as good, as the way that it is and delightfully. I might then accept this gift with gratuity. Instead, I know better than that, I know what I’ve seen and I’ve heard and the scope of the evil that I have imagined, and I, in my knowing, am bitter, and cold, and my features are severe. I shiver, even in the warmth; I mutter and spit and defile and curl, yet totally to no avail, nothing changes, except I, and insecurely.

The world carries on as it always does, wordless, distempered. But I am not without hope; I know, in my knowing, that the world is not certain, it’s people not sure, and there is room for a certain benediction, a slight malleability. I, by my goodness, might temper it; or at least it, by my goodness, might come to know temperance, whether or not it in turn becomes temperate. After all, with all of this fruit, and all of these sweaters, this juice on my chin and these threads at my neck, what have we to fear, to hate, to distrust of this universe? I don’t trust a goddamned word of it. I am ready to die for my distrust. I hang a basket from the ceiling with rope and I fill it with all of my treasures – chapbooks, statuettes, pens, whistles, skeletons, papers, a banjo, a board game, some coins – and I sit on a stool that I hew out of wood and I guard them, with my gun, against enemies. I am not without enemies, at least not in this earth; enemies, elsewhere, in the grand narrations of gold and hell, of greatness and old crystal spheres, where the trees grow ten thousand feet tall and the mist is a construct of monsters, loud and deep, and fully self-aware.

I am tall; something is trying to topple me. I have this gun, this gun in my hand, you can see it yourself; it is made out of metal. I could do all sorts of things with this gun. I could shoot a hole in a wall with no motive. I could open a wound in a monster. I used to never touch it, or even think about it. But then I started to have dreams about it, dreams of me creeping, in my socks and my underwear, through the house, my gun in the back of my waistband, my fingers dancing down the hilt. I dreamed of the feel and the sense of it, the Abel Ferraran timeless tragedy, post-mortal, my wits not about me, my heart in my throat, my gums and my hairline receding. Someone hits me, and I fall – they’ve toppled me. The wind blows, and I blow across the dry earth with it, weightless, submissive.

“I sometimes run across ancient sayings or pagan writings – even the poets – so purely and reverently and admirably expressed that I can’t help believing their authors’ hearts were moved by some divine power. And perhaps the spirit of Christ is more widespread than we understand, and the company of saints includes many not in our calendar.”

Widespread is the spirit of Christ and many-faceted. Neither faith nor lack of faith nor reason mean anything, outside of their vain implications; neither deism nor disbelief have value. Perhaps the spirit of existence is more nuanced, more obscure, than we understand it to be – we, who understand almost nothing. It is true that the more we learn, the more we see how little we know, and that the most knowledgeable among us knows nothing at all. Perhaps this is because the spirit of knowledge is more widespread than we understand it to be, and only by pretending it doesn’t exist can we do right by it, can we bear its burden in fury and righteousness. There is something more than logic haunting the streets and the deserts of earth, something strange and steadily glimmering. Highly articulate are the mechanics of truth, but there is nothing so bright as the inert universal, the perfect glass orb of the eternal unknowing; nothingness, consumptive – and Holy. I am devout; I bow down on my knees in the name of the Holiest. Like an enzyme, I was designed for the Holy catalysis; shame me, show me glory; glorious, unknowing – the special light of God…

I sometimes find I have nothing to say about anything at all and so I stand where I am, saying nothing, wholly silent, and I find there is beauty and comfort in silence. I sometimes find myself desiring something to eat, chocolate or a piece of fruit, an apple, or a pear, and I find myself buying a bag full of apples or pears. I wait several weeks and then I dispose of the rotting fruit. When there are fireworks, I watch them, and when they are finished, I breathe a great sigh of relief. I am relieved to see things, once begun so, drawn to a close with a moment of silence. The future is a myth and we should be careful with it, lest it overcomes us. Everything is natural, but I am afraid to believe in it. Close your eyes; you are not real. I am determined to wade through the mist towards the light in the distance. I am a traditionalist; this is my claim to tradition. I am blood-bound to perpetuate this particular strain of spiritual gold. Aural dark, a heart of gold; I stay close to the walls when I walk and I make sure to close all doors behind me. When a cabinet door is hanging open I move hurriedly across the hall to close it. Time is moving swiftly now. They are ashamed of the time they have spent, and the way they are spending it; life is now plainer than ever. They have taken all the clocks off the wall – clocks are not fashionable. There are hardly any mirrors, either. There are paintings, and pictures, and above all else, walls upon walls of blank spaces. Spaces painted white and over-arching. On a table in the middle of the room there has been placed a pitcher surrounded by glasses, and into the glasses has water been poured. There is water in the glasses; it spreads the light in all directions. There are colorful figures in the paintings, twentieth-century pictures, tender-ribbed majesty – misery – flight; through the marigolds, over the hills, in the valley of pleasure and calm understanding; god is good, we are calm here, we have little to say, there is nothing to say for us. A monk leads a monkish existence, bare and frugal, but I, like a heathen, lie about in abundance and rudeness and broad defamation, gluttonous, though clean. I abstain from nothing; if I want it, it is mine. I revel in fondant and oil. I take what I want until the world begins to shake, and I can’t keep my vision steady, and my vision starts shaking, everything trembling, vibrating eyes; my head is full with voices and forces and strange apparitions; I inhale; I steady my eyes and I still my shaking vision. I must not lose control of this; I must not give in to the visions. I exhale. Mine is the sign of the snake and I feel like a snake, damned and guilty. My fingers start to tremble, then shake; I bite them with my teeth to still them. I must not give up like this. Calm and broken; carry on, then.

A songbird perched upon my fingers, cocked his head and looked at me; I said, “Yes, you are beautiful,” and I lifted him up to the clouds and he flew into the air. I blew him a kiss and I bid him farewell and when he was gone he sung for me, or at least I assumed he would sing for me. I laid back against my old rolling oak chair and rested my weary head against a pile of books; leather-bound, and canvas, yellow-lip’d and gilded, they cover me in poetry, they lull me to sleep while I’m smiling, thinking not of consequences, nor neither of conduct, expectations, guilt, or potential; dreamily, sleepily, of all the wonderful things, all of the haunts and the romances, the warm water lapping softly against my skin in the evening. I slept, safe and sound, in my house until springtime, warm and sweet, and then I arose, feeling groggy, and pushed my hand through the surface of the water, and felt the water fill my hand; and then I swung open the doors to the rest of the world, full of force, and I was welcomed by the world. But things were not quite as good as they seemed. Let me tell you this: things are never as they seem. I was lost, then, and confused. My hands had turned a pale shade of gold while I slept, and now that I was wide awake they were starting to crackle and rust, and to glisten. The skin was soft but thick, like leather. I held them out in front of me; do you see these hands, I asked myself; do you see them? What can I do with hands like these? What can a man do with hands like these?

In the shadow of the aching cross, electrically lit, in the city cathedral, a woman with her head down prayed, waiting in vain for a hero to rise from the rubble, granite-laced, and save her. The tyranny of life was not real for her; she believed in her own sort of tyranny, composed of a different sort of realism, something patterned, and delicate. Her hands were thin and not like leather; disappearing hands, but wholesome ones, and she needed someone to rub them, make them warm, to bring them back into existence. She wrote poetry about lights; two lights drifting between and breaking the surface light, skimming the subtle translucence; two orbs, two flickering moments brought into presence and contact and caught into orbit; something rings, a raindrop falls; morning rain becomes her. Love becomes her; she deserves to be loved. She waded wide-eyed through the winter alone, fading like visions through portions of frost, a forest of windows and columns of silt, turning the roast over ashes, stealing like wind through the crevice and filling the air; and though she tried to abstain from the confines of sadness and hope, she was constrained to the shadows of sadness and hope, pulling nothing but her hair behind her, slipping her skin through the air and the ice. “You can not save me,” she whispered; “I will not drown.” The ongoing jangle of thunder and lightning, the constant ringing of bells and the clanging of gongs, the hum of violence and the scream of the locusts, may all be very frightening, but it is nothing as maddening as the oncoming epoch of silence.

The world is not always there for me; sometimes I open my eyes to my utter abandonment, nothing beneath or above me, and I collapse in the white-space of eternity. I am overcome by a bad fit of coughing and it throws me from my footing. I lay on the floor bathed in sunlight, feeling pathetic, and repeat out loud a stupid mantra. Pity becomes me, I think. Pity me: I’m monstrous. I could have once been a hero; but I have destroyed that part of me. I live on a quiet tragedy. I am the strongest man in the world and I am horribly, chronically ill – a crippling, insidious illness, trapping a spirit and soul long immortal in this tender flask of ash and water. I am outgrown. I have long been too old for this, too ill to carry on. My heart is so heavy, it will only get heavier; I will never make it; not alone. I need to not be so alone. I need someone kind to be near to me, someone nice to confide in me and hear me in confidence. More than anything, I need someone healthy, some alive to remind me of living. I need to be bonded to fresh blood and happiness, fondness and desire, always in need and unquestioning, secure. I need wealth; something prescient. I need someone warm, someone breathing, to fetter and guide me. I am a vine and I grow on a latticework; if I only had a lattice… A beautiful lattice, a breath in an asphyxiated universe, a fixture at ease in the cosmic fluctuation of time; I stand, unbelieving, with tears in my eyes – I am in love with the world! Beat me open, rip my heart out, call me, Patroclus; I will not feel it, not a thing. I will feel nothing, because I have been bodily compromised; my body is nothing to me. Torn and battered, almost dead – I am on my way now, I will do what I can, while I am able to do it; and one day, when I least expect it, I will die, and everything decent will die alongside me. Death becomes me; I am death-defying. It has singed me charcoal-gold. It has marked me for the rest of my life. The world owes me nothing; I owe it my life. Is this what happens to those who don’t die? Is this what comes of my defiance – is this my poetic irony? My justice, desserts, my reward – is this what I defied death for? This is the price of defiance. It is inglorious, and vain – and it worries me.

Just when I was burning on the brink of oblivion, alone like a meteor in constant flux, alienated, un-tempered, my friend said to me: How about we go see a movie. “I cannot pay,” he said. “Will you take me?” No, I said; I will do no such thing. Maybe another night; tonight is not good for me. Upon his insistence, however, I eventually agreed to. I was doing nothing, anyway. I am never doing anything, not anymore. I wouldn’t mind going on a date. Picking a date up and taking her out. But no; I have not been dating. I have been doing almost nothing.

I fuel up on pills and other sorts of medicine. It tastes awful, all of it, but I can hardly taste it. They change the way I feel, inside and outside, and I experiment with different doses, combinations. Sometimes I get really anomalous and something unexpected happens. This time, it numbs me, and it makes me vibrant. I stub my toe on a nail and I do not feel a thing. There is an aqueous numbness spreading thick through my legs and my lower back, as always, but the rest of me is spiked and languid. My eyes are lined in thick, black hallows, oily streaks of ache and weariness. I shy away from the mirrors and turn off the lights because I can not bear to look at myself. If I look good, I feel wasted, and if I look bad, I feel monstrous.

The movie starts soon. It is time to go. I will have to drive fast if I am going to make it on time. I like to make it on time, although I never do. It is amazing how much I enjoy watching previews, and how seldom I am able to. I am normally such a punctual man… But I am always late to the movies. I do not really like the movies. I could have liked them, fifty years ago… I should not like them, now.

I get in my car. Someone finally offered to buy my luxury car from me, but I turned them down – I decided not to sell it, after all. It was too cool, I was too at ease in it; sweeping, subtle, masculine, stable; my cool avenger, feat of wood and leather; I will need it for a coming life. I decided that I felt better in black, nestled in the powerful bliss of precision engineering, the purity of motion, than in anything less, so it was best to feel better. Black and mighty; like a crystal, brimming with energy, vacuous, ambiguous, decisive – it murders the weak and the sullen, it conjures up blue-hot mythology… So I have kept my car and I have been driving the hell out of it. I drove it yesterday and the day before that. Someone gave me a Rush album; I have been listening to Rush in it.

I listen to Rush while I drive to the city. I am running very late. Rush is good; they remind me of Patrick Bateman. The music makes me want to kill, super-cool, and smoking. Sometimes I feel like Patrick Bateman myself; I feel beautiful, surreal. I dance on tender strings of tension, I tremble under skies of vast and vacant powers, I instill my flesh against the earth, laying my life on the line for it; fleshy though existence seems, we purer souls are fleshless; I have submitted my flesh to the world, to expunge from it, and make my way back to the night. Life had been good to me; I took it for granted. It was ordained of me; I welcomed it. I am not an ordinary man. I am no Patrick Bateman – but sometimes, myself, I - My mind is racing, like my heart. I am feeling partly heroic, and partly villainous, and deeply sceptical of either feeling. Something insistent is pulling on the reins while something fantastic is kicking its spurs. I am dual, so I am infinite. With one duality, many.

There is only one road in the universe that I am on tonight, and it is dear to me, and I hug it close. Sometimes, when I am alone for sure on the road at night, I like to turn my headlights off, and disappear with the night into total oblivion; but I only do it briefly, and I have not done it lately at all. I have yet to disappear from the world. Well… I shall do it. Into the swamp, and the desert; the cool-winded hearth of the crescent of man… I turn off my headlights; I disappear with the night; the universe absorbs me, car and all; and I go speeding, low and fierce, like an animal, as nature intended, half-mad, half-mechanical, into the treacherous transcendentalism of a post-modern world. I am shivering; I still myself. I fall perfectly still. My heart stops. I start it; I come alive. I turn the lights on.

Doubt sets in. What the hell is going on here? Something stinks about this, I think. I have been living irresponsibility. Who do I think I am? What do I think I am doing? I have been double-dealing again, double-dealing all around, and it is bound to come around and get me; and I will be ruined. Double-dealing, like a rat. I’ve been flirting with all sides of the board, mixing my uppers and downers, I’ve been pretending to drink and then drinking, investing both with and against the future of the world, showing my sympathy for both sides of every offensive, every war and power. I mean: I am double-dealing, two-handed, like a snake – it’s selfish. It is bound to get the best of me. It is awful, whatever I’ve done. It has all been ruined. I have brought the earth down around me, around my very shoulders, sad and heavy, old and broken. Time passes; I stand still. The feathers fall from their corpses, a calm wanders between the storms…

I need to go faster! I am late for the movie. It starts in ten minutes; it will take me fifteen just pick my friend up. I could make it in ten if I were only driving faster. Drive faster! I can’t, don’t make me – No, I’m scared – I don’t want to be late for the movie. But I can’t drive any faster. No, I can’t, I’m scared to. In fact, I am driving quite slow. Slower than I tend to go. What is wrong with me? I speed up; I force my foot onto its pedal with my hand. The gods are blind; to hell with it. I am ready for my guide of brier. Brier thorns and fortresses; torture me. I am chosen; as I please. A game of silhouettes and the promise of fortune… I am done for; I do as I please.

What the hell is going on here? The universe is mean and unyielding. Flames of fire, wash my back; swamps of sorrow, swallow my oars; the tinder, with its withering pages, edging out the light, without a prime or name or purpose, without the wild hearts of men; man, glass-hearted, makes a sad companion; and strength, and dignity, and pride, without reason, are good; but faith, without money, or instinct, or harmony, is something to behold; and death, in the all-knowing brain in the vat of the cosmos, to whom we pray, and whom we die for; hermeneutical; withholds its grand embrace, and makes a formal statement: hate me while you see me, love me when I’m gone. I am Carthage, triumphantly marching my army of elephants, and I am sacking half of Rome; watch me, call me: Hannibal...

Do I belong here, after all? I can subsist on chocolate bars and mugs of tea. Do you know who else subsisted on chocolate bars and mugs of tea? Whip my back and punish me; I will drive fast, I will die young, I permit you to miss me only when I am gone. With those bright blue eyes and that wavy hair, he set out to change his stars; and the stars aligned, and he re-aligned them. In Japan, I play a video game. I have never been to Japan before. I have been to India, but it misunderstood it, and I wasted more than a few good moments. Like Burroughs, in Morocco, something strange had overwhelmed me. I, overwhelmed, fell asleep on a bench carved of well-polished marble in the center of an idyllic city overlooking the sea; the sun on my face, someone laughing, I cannot understand a word of it; unable to speak, I got by without speaking; someday, in the smooth black car of our dreams, butcher-block kitchens and everything, it will seem all right, we will be locked in by night by steel and glass and wall-length mirrors, and someone will see us from afar and think: How beautiful… In a barracks, I was growing depressed, and offended by the animals. Everyone is animal. I try to be civilized because I am bodily compromised but they are voracious, and animal. Animal magnetism, offensive and mean, and all over the place. I close my eyes and picture shooting-stars and castles. “Never give up,” someone tells me. I am thinking of Jiminy Cricket. Jiminy is whistling. I whistle with Jiminy Cricket.

I am feeling deaf. I can’t hear a thing. I went to a bar and had a bottle of wine by myself in the corner. I can drink like a fish these days. I feel like men are supposed to feel; drunk, insecure, enchanted. I feel like I outweigh my life. My bones are weak and I feel like Lawrence in his life since Deraa; I feel as though I have abandoned my bodily integrity. Abandoned it, for – what? I was born into this world with two gifts; my mind, and my body. When I was bodied, I wasted my mind; now that I have wasted my body, I struggle to recover what I can of my mind.

On a canyon’s edge I rode my bicycle, afraid of blowing over in the wind, afraid of getting drunk by the sea lest I get salty, to ride on a bike lest I get blown and fall over; I might not survive another fall. I might hit my spine, or crack my skull, and I might cry out in pain.

People come near me; I evade them. I walk around their open arms. Someone brushes against me and I brush their touch off my sleeve. I say something profane and exhale, and I can see my exhalations in the air. It has been a very mild winter, but it is finally getting cold. A woman with very wide jowls kisses my cheek when she sees me. She has been eyeing me and I’ve noticed it and I, in turn, have toyed with eyeing her. But my eyes wander; I keep to my thoughts. I wonder, could I love you? Very mildly, I might. Mild, like this strange and pleasant weather. What very lovely weather we’ve been having, I say, and someone answers: “Very.”

A strange and pleasant boy, with his tassels and luxuries hidden inside his pockets, a fistful of tulips and daffodils and bubblegum stuck to his teeth, with a very strange and pleasant way of thinking. No one sees the world like he does. During the day, he is reclusive and silent, but at night you’ll hear him laughing, and reciting out loud his curious verses. Where does he find such curious songs?

I get high and I go for a drive. I am feeling unbodily and so I drive super fast through the countryside. Someone in the other lane flashes their lights wildly as they pass me. I don’t understand and I pretend it didn’t happen. Another pair of headlights approaches, and they too start flashing. There must be a cop up ahead. I get excited. I hope that there is a cop ahead, and that my country brothers were warning me, my anonymous countrymen. I picture myself drunk, with a bag of drugs in my pocket, turning around in a culvert and going back home for the evening, or taking the highway instead. But there are no cops in sight for miles. I keep expecting them and being disappointed, and I begin to think I was hallucinating the flashing lights. I’ve certainly hallucinated lights before. And let’s not forget the shadows…

I expect a roadblock up ahead, but when I get there, or at least when I think I am there, there is nothing. I realize I’m not where I think I am and then, just where I thought it thought it would happen, the world is flashing blue and white and there are lawmen standing around in the middle of the street, waving their flashlights, their cars in the road. I am relieved to see them; I laugh. I can really believe in my countrymen. I thought they were warning me, and they were, and if I had been in trouble, I could have avoided it. My heart is full of the warmth of anonymity. I had taken propanolol earlier so I am not even nervous, wrapped up in a membrane of viscous ice, and my heart is hardly beating. The officer approaches my window with a silent intensity, flashing his light in my eyes, and he puts his face in my face, smelling me. I show him my papers and am done with it immediately, and I drive away without saying a word. And then I am off again, fast as hell, barreling alone  through the deadly retreat of this ancient expanse of America, scenic and winding, terrifying at night, close-together, encroaching, invasive and pure; and I, like a warrior, cut through the thickness with my eyes half-closed, my mind half-dreaming away; and I, like a businessman, navigate the pressures of life and manipulate, and have my way about it, too.

I go home, ecause I can think of nothing better to do. There is no one to see; there is no place to visit. Yesterday was not very good for me. Today was not great, either. Tomorrow will be even worse; it will be easy, and weak,  and I’ll wind up like I always do, like this, basking sluttishly, at ease in reams of pure relaxation, drifting through abstracts, naked and sexless, concerned with modernity; blue-blooded and pale, wet-tongued, ambitious – neither a genius or a hero, cursed; neither a princess nor king. A tornado tears the night in half and scares me into submission. I load my gun and hold it under my face. No one will reach me, here, in my castle. I am a businessman; what business has anyone here?

I spend the night with the lights on, reading the bible. I was born a Methodist; methodological I, and there is nothing I can do about it. My method is great and articulate, but the way you will see it, inchoate; you will probably see nothing at all. But you might feel a tingle, a sense of intuition; intuitive, a call to action – you will feel enchanted, skimming the surface of light-induced worlds, walking across the earth in a shroud of transparency, pink and blue, pale and gleaming; sculptures of manticores, ivory and gold; priceless rugs in the living room. You will feel it, like an intuition, and have nothing more to say of it; in fact you will say nothing at all. I have been to a rug-making factory in India, and I said nothing about it, and no one spoke a word on the tour. I have seen the crowded alleys cramped and jangling, the dead men laying in the street, the brickmakers and slaves, the dusty, unlit factories; I have seen the beautiful young children working the grand, mighty carpet looms, in still, weighty silence, and I have seen their precious fingers work. I have seen the beautiful jeweler boy dressed in white in the window, cutting gems, straight-faced, tender-eyed; I shopped for gems, and pearls, and incense, and I bought some gold and ivory, and I tipped my men a workweek’s wages. Ah, the world, it spun beneath me; and I, atop it, had my fun, acting animal, man and beast, like a neanderthal, brutish, decaying; but now, I am civilized. I have stopped the earth beneath my feet, for the sake of stability, and promised it progress of my own design, something we can all account for. I have swallowed a poison that killed off the animal inside me and now I call myself a man, because man is not an animal. Man is a concept, a still-birth; and it is indestructible.

Tone-deaf and heartsick. It is all I can do to keep clothed, and keep up appearances, and pretend to be getting healthier. I am trying as hard as I can; not very hard. My standards are slipping, as they have become so impossibly high that only non-existence favors them, and as such, must be abolished. I dress as decently as I can, which is not very well, and I eat the same sandwich every day for lunch in the same lousy restaurant, alone and in silence, and I have the same meal every night for dinner. Meanwhile I complain to my friend but I don’t even mean it. I am dreaming, instead, of all my material acquisitions, and of those I have yet to acquire. I scheme about how to get a subscriber’s edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. I will have one, one day, and everything else I desire, too. And even then, when I have everything I want in the world, I will feel dissatisfied, and at a loss for explanation, and wordless. You will see my face then: you will see it looks the same, but kinder. But I am not getting kind; I am getting miserly. I am drying my skin out, like tanning a hide, and reshaping it.

Time maintains its grueling pace and I do my best hide from it. In the newspaper, they printed my picture and gave a report on me, and I realized how embarrassing it was to be in the newspaper, how inexcusably rude and explicit, and I swore to never be in the paper again. They were kind words about me, and I couldn’t even stand them then; if the words were unkind, it would simply demolish me. Meanwhile my internal world is awash in foul weather, floods and winds and dust storms, and I am confused by all the subtle colors. I feel on the verge of something, some soothing epiphany, some strength, some ectoplasmic awakening, unfolding like a petal; but I have no such revelations. In the public eye, I’m a crumbling lie, and internally I’m ravaging. I scream, and in my scream is the power and purpose and display of ten thousand years of humanity, wisdom compressed and intensified, the magic and the impulse and the demands of a race of arch-angels, condensed in  me – but my screams fall upon deaf ears, and no one listens to me, and I can see no recourse, save dissolution, loving and orderly…

I delved too deep, and woke the nameless fear; it kissed me, and went back to sleep. I have stood here ever since.

My dog is dancing gaily across the yard, pouncing and playing and throwing pine cones in the air above his head, and destroying them. There is a presence in the air, continuous, a melodious torpor is pressed against the back of our eyes, is rubbing our heads and playing with our hair, tousling our hair like the breeze, charming and unkempt. I have been here before – this happy place, this melodious torpor, and I have felt it on my skin like milk or velvet, something I could feel, something ticklish. I tug on a pullstring and summon forth my golden light. I let myself lapse in and out of each leisure at leisure, taking my time, counting the minutes as they pass, watching the pots boil, boiling water, cooking up soup; something to eat – here, are you hungry? Have something to eat. Sit down, and relax; you are safe here. I will tell you all about the legends. I will explain to you the meaning of life, simply follow my syllables as I say them; Allahu Akbar, we’re alive. Come, watch a movie with me – we live in a landscape of movies, of still-moving beauty, voices and colors stream freely in sync; keep on with your heart on your sleeve, and be honest, and you will have enough to survive on. The world is not famous. Things could be no other way. There will be no one to remember this, but us, while we are here to remember it. Times change; animals die, time passes; worms rise up out of the earth, fat and gluttonous, and swallow it whole; nothing is left; storms ravage; and then there is calm. We are new and we are calm, because we were meant to be, and we wait with bated breath our fantasies. Cotton-clad and paradise bound, we left behind nothing but our names and our memories as we forged a new road through the wild abyss. In the abyss, we were lonely, but we brought in the sun and our libraries, and we consoled ourselves amongst ourselves, sniffling quietly, while we read over the saga of man, of our history. And we in our bedchambers grew sceptical, and we began to doubt that history had ever existed, and we began to lose our morals, and we began to re-make morality. We stopped eating chocolate and grease. We stopped having sex in the showers. We stopped hunting boars through the underbrush. We stopped stealing tractors from corn fields. We changed, and the whole world changed with us. We began speaking in tongues. We began writing new poetry. We began re-instating simple truths, and omitting countless other ones. We embraced the eternal meta of reality and became obsessed with it. A once-over; no, I will not work today. A haircut. Two walks to the park with the collar up. Red-faced and blear-eyed, we pushed open the doors to the storefront and warmed our hands against the funeral pyre. Codes; like submarines, fishing. We fished in the ice for the ice-fish, but we only caught an eel. We ate the eel for supper. In the city we sit behind partly drawn curtains and stare at the tops of umbrellas below. It is all so hard to believe… It strains my eyes to look at it, but I can’t look away, and I’m laughing, and wiping the tears from my eyes…

We get by late at night with our own pretty silences, pretty-eyed and crystal-sphered, hanging our heads in sweetness and shame as we beat our dusted palms together; in submission to the royalty of purple urbanity, to the fealty of winter light, and evening, and the purplish light and the fractals of ice on the windowpanes, and the ambient mystical glow to the earth, the low urban magnitude, and we all, staring silently around us, listened to the song of the apocalypse and cried, driving our cars through the desert towards death and dismemberment; life, caught happily, and set freely adrift; and through our reams of perfect light, flashing anxiously across the spectrum of knowable hope, of indistinct blurriness, expansive in vision, we all  begin to wake, and to wonder, and to say, without speaking, “What new sensation is this? Are we, every one, wizards and kings?”  Men linger, and then fall, the folds of the earth open up for to swallow them; very seldom, milk and honey, someone drips out of the darkness, someone knows about the stars. I would grovel, if that is what it all came to, because I need it, I am desperate, and I am in love with it; I would put my hands before my face and pray for it. On my knees, in the hallway, clenching my fists and crying. Things are changing color. The color is drained from the sky. I pour acid on my face to cleanse it. Night falls; I fall into the cotton and silk; time passes…

We share this airspace, soft, expanding; collectively. We share this loneliness, this fatigue, this tireless intensity, our apocryphal and diverse insecurities, wider than the cosmic width and encompassing; beyond us, nothing; a wind canvassing all over the earth; a movie on a screen late at night, a movie on a screen late at night, every night, another movie, the same movies we have always watched, comforting, impossible, real, golden, deftly woven like strands through our world, pearly, iridescent. Take a sample, make it last. Remember the times on the road as a child, driving down the interstate, having pie in the diners and burgers and fries. Remember cassette tapes and radios. Remember when death had no presence. Hold it in your head forever. It reminds me of the time I spent screaming, stumbling on two shredded ankles through mud as I ran from the terror mounting all around me, and then falling, relieved and already asleep, into bed; and into bed, staying, and blinking from the blinding light, and drowning in the luscious, re-assuring light.  I bathe like I’m nude in a mana bath. I love to bathe in bed. The sunlight courses through the air and washes me. I let the bluejays sing my song; I let them lay their crown upon me, let them dress me in my morning gown. I lean out the window and praise the natural world with my velveteen voice. Someone hears me, and they smile; we belong not alone but together.

Would this apple in my hand a dagger, I could cut out my tongue from its tethers and eat it… I am getting very hungry. I  belong in a sphere of frosted aluminum, staring through a circle of glass at the outside world, sinking like a weight down to the very bottom, a cruise ship, over-turned. I fantasize about rape in the forest. I imagine the caves and the waterfalls, and the fires in the fire pits, and I can smell coming threat of rain. I can feel a horsefly on my shoulder; I swat it, and it dies. It falls in a bucket of paint with the top off. Someone has been leaving paint cans all over the place; someone has been painting the roses and apples, stringing the rope through the holes of the portal, hanging our necks from our nubile tree limbs; I feel like dancing, but I am unable to dance. Impotence. My legs are broken; I have dreams that I am a great conquistador, exploring the jungle for the fountain of youth, or that I am a mighty magician, searching for the secrets of teleportation, so that I might never have to limp again; but nothing ever happens, I wake up with a limp nonetheless; the coarseness to each movement, the feeling of sand in the base of my spine, and with it continuous grinding; I feel a warbling pain in the back of my head, muted, patient and thoughtful, I think; “Oh, why me,” as though I did nothing to deserve this. We get by – we must be getting by – by ourselves, by the light of our screens in the night, by belief in the myth and the reason of life, of comforting associations and constant appeal to modernity; these spots, in these well-lit rooms, awash in comfort, are ours to abuse, we have been given them. I dig myself into a rut and get comfortable. This is trench warfare; keep your head down, you’ll do fine. Unless they send the gases in…

The queen of the mongrels spoke to me in her warbling voice and I responded with practiced civility. I engaged with her gently and held her hand and when she spoke, I listened respectfully to every word as she purred through her aged copper throat, and when she was finished I answered her questions with care and respect. It wasn’t until long afterwards that the prince, of whom I had been sworn to protect, told me what the old queen said about me; he told me that she was a seer, and that she had seen my aura, and that my aura was dark. I was furious. Is it true, I said – is my aura dark? The prince said that it wasn’t true, that his mother was a witch and lying, but I could see that he believed her. “And what about you,” I asked; “and what of your aura?” He said that he had a dark aura as well, and I believed him, though reservedly. He would say anything to appease me. He was hurt by my anger. I was furious to learn that the old queen was seeing me, and thinking she saw of my aura a darkness.

I wonder what it all means, what it means to have an aura bold and dark; I ask him, he says it means nothing. I want to know more about it, and I press him; is it grey, or dim, or glowing? Black, like night, or obscure, like murk and shadow? He says he doesn’t know, that it is all made up, it means nothing. I imagine the witch in her robes in the throne room, meeting me for the first time, shaking my hand, smiling kindly, and I imagine her eyes growing wide as the blackness she sees in my dark emanations, my faintest waves of virulent obsession, interminable source in the spring of disease and discontent, distorted, my face in the mirror growing thin and distorted, my skin falling in flaps from the shelves of my skull; I turn the lights up, but they only light my darkness deeper. She can see me; I am standing before her, stark-naked, black as night. Darkness – I mean, really? Is that the way I stand before you? Do I drift within my makeshift shrouds like a monster, ambivalent? I am not the normal creature that I sometimes look like, certainly, but that is not to say I am a creature of darkness. Do you know that I am an angel of goodness and peace? I am the herald of beauty, a civilian of progress and prosperity. Do you know I am lovable? And yet, I am told, that the queen doesn’t love me – I am told that I worry the queen. Well – she has left me no choice! There must be rebellion.

You love me because I am lovable, a ghost in the room with my back to the heater, and you can feel the heat on your back; blackness, flat and morbid, pulling its weight over metal, on thin metal stilts down the damp city alleys, with the wind whipping in from the sea, breaking against our skin, slipping into the opened windows and disappearing; host; they host me, I am treated with distinction, I am honored for my feats, fait accompli. Food is set across my table; I lean over and I eat it. I weigh each morsel in my mouth, savoring, ripping the flesh with my teeth and then swallowing. I am known for my aesthetic sensibilities and my rational intuition, but all that they see in me now is my darkness, new and torrid darkness, and there is no end in sight to it. I feel the spikes sprout from my back and my shoulders. I feel my vessels thick with blood. I have been reading of this disease in the papers; it is a secret epidemic, I have seen it in the movies, I have seen it in the faces of the desperate and the dis-possessed, the last glimpse of youth in a twilight caress… I toss out my words like a handful of candy and watch the children parse them up. All is not measured in darkness and light; colors are misleading. Who does the queen think she is? And the prince – he is beautiful, but weak, and his aura is blue, or purple, or red, or anything other than dark, simply: dark. 

I submit with tender resignation. I sit in the booth by the window alone while the sun sets, playing with my silverware, combing my hands through my hair and clearing the phlegm from my throat. I am standing at the throat of the world and I am teetering, high on pills, unfeelingly. Will someone catch me, if I fall? I fall silent when confronted; there shall be no further confrontations. I am threatened by the threat of undoing; undone, indecipherable, I try to laugh but I am unable to laugh, my skin cracks and withers, there are wrinkles in my eyes; power flows through me, I deny it; I deny myself of time and unity, harmony, pleasure, the fruit of the earth; when the scent is sweet, it sickens me, and it puts me out of sorts. Everytime I close my eyes I see a castle lit up by cool purple light rising over the skyline, in the middle of the city and down from the clouds, and I see the people praying…

The universe in this part of the world is not without measures, and not on the whole unknowable; decisions are made, flannels are cut out of fabric and worn; I am frequently unkind. Something guts me, and I cry; nostalgia sets in; I lose my orientation; I collapse. A feathered chain of souls depletes me of my surety; of nothing, at least, am I sure.

I decide that I want something. I do not know what, but I decide I must want it. I decide I will go to the store. I haven’t been to a store in a very long time now. What does one buy from a store? What is one, with a handful of money, to buy with it? It has not been easy for me to think lately. I am disgusted with everything and I keep slipping off to my faraway places, palaces and seas in the sky with the daffodil kites and the whippoorwills. I had a terrible nightmare about a death in the family – about my father, cold and dead – and I awoke half-paralyzed, dead with sweat, and I spent the morning shaken-up, and I am still somewhat shook-up from it. I took my friend to the cinema and then out to lunch but it got me down; he was sad, and his prospects were dimming, and he was admitting himself soon to a new institution. It was likely I would not see him again for years to come, and as such, ever again. I bid him farewell with a handshake and went home to print postcards with my other friend – I only have two, and just barely – but he was upset with me, and so I wasted no time in getting upset with him. He was sad, too, and his prospects dimming, and I thought to myself, “God, what a joke it all is, what am I supposed to do?”

Nothing worked out, as it never does, and I am feeling sorry for myself, dim and pitiful, weak around the mouth and dull-eyed, and I am thinking deep, repentant thoughts. I try not to think about anything. I want to be satisfied. I want to be assaulted, and die. I want to fly to the Alps and live out the rest of my life with a beautiful asexual who dressed in fine clothes. No, no I do not want that, but I surely want something. I must want; without wanting – what? I want to drive fast, like a man, dressed in black in a black and fast automobile through the black-as-night countryside. I want to put it all on the line for no reason, I want to feel like Icarus, coming close to the myth, making love with James Dean in a moment of private finality… It is raining; I cannot believe it is raining. But then again, why wouldn’t there be rain? Of course there is rain. I drive to the store, and I drive fast and hard, almost dying. I park at the far end of the parking lot and start walking slowly through the rain to the storefront. I am building my nerves. I am standing, for a moment, in the rain, as I haven’t stood in centuries. No – I have not lived for centuries. How long have I lived? Too long. “I have lived - too - long,” I quote dramatically, wiping the rain from my brow, and then smiling. I realize someone is holding a door open for me. I nod, ungrateful, and enter the store with uncertainty.

I wander under the flourescent lights and security cameras in a daze, my fingers gliding across shelf after shelf of indispensable products, toasters and vacuums and dishes and soaps.  I pass an aisle of shaving accessories and a television screen hangs down in front of me. A woman with a soft, reassuring voice says, “I guess I never really thought about soap pumps.” Is that her pitch? It is a very good pitch. I guess I’ve never really thought about soap pumps either, although I certainly have – I have thought about everything. There is an industry in the business of soap pumps and they have installed televisions across the nation, and they have paid to have a woman, with perfect features and bathed in beams of perfect light, to speak of their soap pumps as something superior. I say it to myself: “I guess I never really thought about soap pumps.” No, I guess I never really did. Is that what I want? Would I like a superior soap pump, to go with a bottle of soap? I do not use enough soap these days, I think. I have never really used soap.

I am getting depressed thinking about soap so I stop. I start thinking about business. Everything I learned about business, I learned from television. I learned about branding from a show about advertising executives and I learned about product from a show about a methamphetamine production. Design – manner – tone – quality… The television has had a lot to say. I have soaked it all up like a sponge and I am determined to do good in the world. I explain my odd behavior by calling it Asperger’s, but of course I don’t have Asperger’s – I doubt that it even exists. I call myself obsessive, as if I had ever obsessed over anything. I am beginning to doubt that obsession can even exist…

In the bakery there is a cabinet of pastries. Pastries, I think, I think I like pastries. I lean against the cabinet in admiration and stare through the glass, taking inventory. I open the cabinet doors at last and pick up an empty box and I begin filling it with. I eye the fancy pastries but I take the plain ones, the plainest, most masculine pastries. I select them carefully; I make sure they are unblemished, at least I allow myself that. I take my time and I arrange them in my box so that they are at no risk of disfigurement.

As I carry my pastries to a cashier so I can leave this dangerous place I notice something on the floor before me – a fold of cash. I look around me and see some people, and I think, what do I do now? I bend down and pick up the money and I slip it in my pocket. It feels like forty or sixty dollars, and it’s the most money I’ve ever found in my life. I look around me at the people nearby, thinking them fools, afraid I am stealing their money. Stupid fools, I think. What am I supposed to do? I have to keep this money.

But I am getting sick of money. One of my friends once committed a felony, and because of it owes me some money. He owes me more money than I would once have been able to imagine, let alone be fully entitled to – an impossibly lofty number for someone my age, let alone this man, to be responsible for. If he does not pay me, the court will indenture him in a state chicken processing plant and stipend his paycheck. That’s the rumor, at least. It would never really happen – it’s far too romantic. He hasn’t been paying me, and I haven’t been saying anything. It has been almost a year without payment. But I was not about to pursue it; what could I do? I had, after all, to live in the same world as this person, to breathe the same air as him. I see him sometimes and I think, Hell, I’ll shake his hand, and I’ll ask him, “How are you?” But he never looks up at me and I never get the chance. It is a relief every time. It turns my stomach to thick of owing that kind of money, especially to me – one drunk to another – a blood fund, between felons. Only I am not a felon; no. I am a victim, and I will always be a victim. I have my protections and alibis, I have one reason after another, and they all think I’m innocent. I play along, innocent, but I… I am not innocent… and my innocence lost is what makes me a victim.

As I am paying for my pastries the cashier puts the box sideways in a plastic bag and all of my careful positioning is ruined; the pastries collapse in a pile on the side of the box, pressed up together and smearing. I am handed a receipt and I put in my pocket. I am pissed off about my pastries. I thank the cashier politely and go. My phone rings and I answer it. It is my mother calling; she has called to tell me that she has spoken to Honey. Who is Honey, I ask. Honey is the District Attorney in charge of my friend’s case, and therefore his debts, and his due prosecution. She says she will put him in jail if he doesn’t pay me what is rightfully mine in a timely manner. She hopes he will take out a loan and just pay me off. I don’t like to think about it; a loan that size could break a man… I wish a rich man, like his parents, would bail him out and pay me off. But that will never happen.

I don’t have anything to say to mother; I am put off by her aggression. I reach into my pockets and throw out the receipt from the pastries as I pass by a trashcan. “I want him in prison,” she is saying. “I want him to fail out of school, and go to prison. Otherwise how will he learn? He clearly never learns,” she is saying, raising her voice, sounding righteous, defending herself, working herself into a fury. I am starting to get embarrassed. I don’t know how to deal with it. The whole affair turns my stomach… She wants him to drop out of school? Is that ever the right thing to wish for? But I can understand. I can understand her conviction, and I appreciate her for it. I would be convicted, too. I would take it to the grave with me, if it were my son, my beautiful, baby innocent. I should support her, and see where it leads. “I have to live with him, you know” I say. “The whole thing turns my stomach.” But I tell her to do what she will and I support her, and I appreciate her keeping me informed. I tell her I love her but I must go for the moment. I thank her again and hang up on her. I put the phone in my pocket and remember the money I found earlier, thinking I should count it. I cannot find it, though; it is not in my pocket. I check all my pockets. What has happened to it? I must have thrown it away – with the receipt, in the trash can. Or maybe I dropped it, like the fool that I am. It doesn’t matter, either way. Easy come and easy go. And I sure as hell did not deserve it.

There is blood in me; I can feel it. Have you felt the blood that courses through you? Prick your finger; you will bleed. But you knew that. Everyone knows that. Nobody can go a day without bleeding. Month after month, blood everywhere; skin splits, orifices leak; the rivers run red in the porcelain. And it’s warm blood, too – it’s steaming. Because we are warm-blooded animals, and that is our gift. We are engines. We are a force in the world, warm and precious. And, like forces, we are here in a perfect flurry of forces, exactly in place, being forced upon, and forcing. In the morning the sky runs red and into night runs red again. There is blood in our food and blood in our jewelry and we, when not bleeding, pretend not to bleed. But we, at least I, can still feel it. It is a force to be reckoned. I can feel it under my skin in my veins and my arteries, pulsing away, racing with purpose and pride in a circuit of life; exposed, a single shred in the fabric of faith, a tender resignation – and all is not lost, though we’re reckoned with, and all are not subject to losing; I flail, I live alone, I meditate. I play the sage to my friend and I pretend to be Wittgenstein to someone I love. I am a desperate, bleeding creature. My blood is warm; I can feel it. You can feel it, too. Touch your fingers to me; feel me bleed. I have cut up my skin with a sword and a pear tree, and I have stuffed mud in my muscles and worms in my bones, and I have grafted my wounds with fresh wounds, and I have driven a knife through my calf muscle and cut it all out… Can’t you see, I’m bleeding? I have stuffed my fingers into all of the bullet holes in my chest, in order to plug them; but I will need to use my hands soon, and when I do, well, then I’ll…

Despite myself, I do my best to keep things moving. If I stopped, half the world, it seems, would stop with me. I don’t even do anything; it doesn’t make sense to me. But I seem to be necessary. My business partner is becoming at odds with me and I would meet him at eye-level if I thought he deserved it, but he doesn’t do anything, and he relies on me for everything, and he decries me when either of us fail. I cannot meet him eye-to-eye; I can hardly bear to look him. But I do what needs to be done and business carries on, as usual, and I manage the stakes, and I make sure we pay our taxes. Easy business, everything’s easy, nothing that anyone else couldn’t do, and yet sometimes it seems like nobody does it. At least not the people I know. Well, some of them are capable. Some of them are gentlemen. A gentleman talks me into selling my luxury car and buying something more practical. He says I can store it in his garage in the meantime, so that I will not wear it out any further, for free. I leave the car instead at my parents at my father’s advice and find out weeks later, having found myself a hopeful buyer, that they have been driving it every day to town and have put on another thousand miles. I try to be understanding – if anyone deserves a nice car, after all, it is those two – but I still feel like throwing a fit. My friend keeps asking me for favors, taking too great of a load on his shoulders and leaving me with the bulk of it, while my other friend needs a few bucks. I give him some money and buy him a meal and won’t see him again for a week, when he needs a few bucks, and I’ll buy him a meal. Meanwhile my stockbroker is talking me out of selling my positions, and my positions are cratering, and I am sick with distrust for my broker. The whole world is hostile and untrustworthy. I feel like a pillar of reason and decency, though I know that even I have hostility. I spread a few tendrils through the hostile environment but meet nothing worth getting close to, find nothing safe to touch; there is a boy and I like him, but he’s pathetic and weak, and his world is so rotten it makes me feel nausea. There is a woman in the city who is dying to see me, but I tell her I will never see her again because she’s too old for me, but she insists upon seeing me, though she’s really too old. I see her and it sickens me. I recoil my tendrils and shape a shield around my head. No one will harm me, now. They can’t even see me! I will conduct my business from inside my shell. They can think whatever they want; I am a stone in the wilderness. I am not subject to inspection, or judgment. I am without fitness or purpose. I feel like a Beduoin, fellowless. I do receive once nice message, and I cherish it, and I read it aloud; “It was so good to be around this morning when I woke up I just knew I was in love,” unsigned, though I know of course who write it. I keep my things tidied up beside me and a suitcase packed tightly with clothes, just in case something tragic should happen, and I should be obliged to fly to Portsmouth, or Spain; a death in the family, a runaway bride; sleepless, restless, red-eyed nights, in beds not one’s own; I tap my finger on my knee and wait for the train in the station. It is starting to feel like tomorrow will never arrive – that there is, in a sense, no tomorrow. Tomorrow is when the world will end. Today is when it’s ending, and yesterday is simply a fictional construct. Yes, that it explains it all… But as they say: Mañana…

I once invested ten thousand dollars in a man who said that he could cure cancer and by God, he has finally cured it, and he’s really making money now. He gives me my share of the money; I think, God, what a sick fool I am, what a pathetic bastard, I should have given the man everything I had, every last penny, I would be such a very rich man now if I had only given him everything I had, if I had only believed in him like he deserved to be believed, and not held myself back out of doubt and caution. I lay in bed during the day, all day, with the curtains almost closed, bemoaning myself, fingering the envelope stuffed full of cash, thinking, God, I should have given him everything, if I had only given him more…

I want, more than ever before, to shoot myself. It isn’t funny, but I laugh, because of its outright absurdity. I know how absurd I must sound to the layman, the proletariat watching the news. I can imagine the choir singing slightly off-key for me, slightly in doubt. I mean – look at me! I am like a god! Who the hell am I to die? Every day I get better, I do better, I breathe cleaner with warmth in my breath, water in my body, I heal and I strengthen – and every day I get closer to shooting myself than just one day before. I am a growing, destructive, incommunicable contradiction – the flesh and blood of paradox, conceited and weird. I have piles and piles of gold in the bank, but I should have more – I should have infinitely more. I should be a millionaire, a multi-millionaire, I should have made my first billion on a new cure for cancer, a brilliant, life-changing cure, and I should be a true, American capitalist – I should have been a businessman. I had a chance; I watched the world change, and I did nothing; and now I have missed it, my chance, and I am unchanged. Yes; it is absurd. But it doesn’t make any difference to me. I am depressed nonetheless; I could shoot myself. I laugh at myself while I lay in my bed, stock-still, in pain from my wrist to my ankle. I am laughing hard now. It is true that I am in pain, chronic, pathetic, full-bodied pain, but that doesn’t even bother me anymore. I am blessed beyond pain. I should count my blessings. Yes, I think; Let’s count our blessings.

I have a beautiful family who loves me and who has never done me wrong, and never will, and will always be there for me. I have friends, more than one, who love me, who would take bullets for me, despite my apparent ambivalence (though I am not ambivalent). I have known beautiful women, and they have called me, “Hero,” or they have said so with their eyes, eyes which never left me; but all of that is rotten, now. And why is all of that rotten? They still love me; they still watch me, my every move, with their eyes so full and enchanted they twinkle, and glisten, and I leave them feeling inspired, having not even tried to inspire them. I have even known beautiful men, men who watch my every move, and offer themselves up to me like a lamb on an altar. And although they have trusted me, I have withheld my trust. And why have I withheld my trust? I may have made the wrong choices, but they were my choices to make, and by God, did I make them. Nothing makes any difference to me now. It is a joke, and I laugh at it. It is all a ridiculous joke.

I have lived in many different parts of the world, and I have visited still more, and there is nothing to stop me from living again, wherever I’d like in the world, in whatever house I’d care to live in; on a shore by the sea, on the peak of a mountain, in the city in a studio apartment… I have traveled, alone and empowered, tramped freely over half of the earth; I have driven fast cars without care throughout beautiful countrysides, alone and empowered, exploring the world laid like white gold before me. I have been complimented, awarded, admired, and feared; I have been respected, loved, and desired. And I have danced in the presence of death, throat bared, and I have survived, though rattled, made painfully aware. I am a genius and I have mapped out the world from my birth unto universal totality, and it makes sense to me, and I am not afraid of it. And though I am safe in a sensical world, and though I am well-armed and capable, and though I have friends in high places, and lovers in the slums who would die for me, and though I am cozy with princes, and though I was born a white man in a world of white men, and though I am beautiful, I am hardly immune, least of all from myself, and I am a dangerous critic to have; I will sneak up behind myself and stab me, and I will fall to my knees in silence, unblinking, and I will atone in that instant for all of my sins, for all of my grievances, for I am surely guilty of something, I am certainly deserving of death. Though I am practically drowning in good-faith, good-intentions, good-memories, good-friends, and though I sail in the gold-plated ships of antiquity – brass chandeliers, Tiffany glass – I am closer than ever before to grand, irremediable depression, the scourge of a civilized earth.

Blessed are the pure in heart; blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the persecuted. I lay in my bed in the middle of day with a pile of money, impossibly depressed, plotting suicide. I will never be any more comical than I am in my moments of total depression; it will never get any more absurd than this. Yes, by God, I am hungry, and I am dying of thirst… Feed me, fatten me, fill me with water and wine! Pour the oil down my throat! I am starving, I am desperately hungry, I have never been any hungrier than this. All of this money – as if money could feed hunger! As if money bought water and wine! Water is something intangible; it is evasive, like happiness, and it splashes unfeelingly against our numbest extremities. When absorbed, it is secretive, and if you are wet, you are unlikely even to realize it. I am wet! I am dripping! Tip me over, drink me up! Ah – the absurdity! It means nothing to me – not anymore. Nothing means anything, no, not anymore…

I am what happens when everything goes right; when, for ten thousand years, humanity has worked towards something, an end indecipherable in pleasure and pain; I am what, one hundred years ago, the movers and shakers made certain to make, dreamed longing for, set out to accomplish, determined to win; and they won; and the world did not end, and the Communists lost, and a race of entitlement began. I am the animal who doesn’t work when it rains, or when I don’t feel like it; in fact, I hardly work at all – because there are machines that work for me, and there are structures in place to make sure I don’t work, because work is a weak proposition, and I do not need it. I am the endless leisure and effortless lifestyle, self-assured, well-endowed, non-committal. I am the fruitful product of a successful litigation; I am the innovative and profound technological advancement; I am the new energy, cheap and plentiful. I am the man-made dream, the utopia of capitalist society, the open-door ultimate of modern invention. Life is a very fine thing, and I am on the tip of it, balancing with ease on a perfect edge. God help me; I am practically perfect… What will I do with myself now?

It began with a breath and it ended in utter delirium. The grass moved like worms in the mud underneath me, a symphony, relentlessly, and something long and soft fell like a single ray of light upon me, across my chest. I placed my hand in the light and I played with it; I brushed it with my fingers, feeling nothing. I felt farther away from the world than I had ever felt before, transtemporal, transexual; in the wake of my self, a transient reality, sunken beyond all sense and reference, beyond experience, and in the wake of reality, selfhood. I bathed in the waves of my transient realities. I was feeling prodigal, both ancestral and modern, and something was churning inside me. My skin was a carcass, long-yearning, and it fell loose around my bones and my soul like a tarpaulin, beneath which I’ve hidden my harem and throne.

I try to think up the words for it; I can think of nothing. I am a mouth without words, a mind without thought. I am a process in a puddle of chemicals, I am a form floating in a glass jar; I do not deserve words. I am at loss in my own abyss of obsession, tired of myself, rubbing my eyes until I cry, and then crying, and then rubbing the tears from my eyes, and then falling asleep, adrift in an insubstantial universe, counting the details and processing content, consuming information, crystallized tight in glass and aluminum, bound up at the limbs and silenced, legs spread wide – my universe, vapid and insubstantial, my golden-white pearl in the palm of an angel, of which I have staked my claim to, having found at last a claim to stake, and will defend, and honorably; I, Aguirre. I am the wrath and the beauty of God. I am not without reasons; I do not need a reason. I was put in this position; I was handed this blade, and this pistol, and I was told: “Protect us; you must protect us all.” I have my friends, and they love me, and they tell me not to worry, not to feel guilty, while imparting their worries and guilt. I have my spirits, lordly and gay, and they laugh with me, and they call me names, and they throw rocks at the stupid young things all around me, whom I call children, because they are, all of them, children, who will never learn, and unlearning never age, and will stay in an indolent stasis for mortal eternity. They are ageless; meanwhile, I age. The sand blows at my skin, in my wrinkles, makes me brittle; I dry out, I grow bitter. Someone tastes me, and they gag; I am like dust in their throat, and they cough me up and spit me out, and I do not even blame them. I dance in the arms of the spirits, spectral and sweet, and they possess me, and I become self-possessed, and I lay dreamily against the wall and remember, remembering who I used to be, who I never could have been…

You must not think I am making this up; this is a very familiar story. I suspect you have heard it before. It is warmer than you may remember. It is like a blossom, but louder, and not yet in color, but in neutral half-tones and heroic pastels, with partial, hair-thin outlines. It is the magic of the self-made myth, the romantic consumption of tragedy, plaid, like patchwork, charming and grand – the prodigal constructs of glory and love, the loving young man who came in from the future, clean and well-dressed, cutting an elegant figure, to roll up his sleeves and conduct business, to sharpen and focus the world; your world, the world of desires and memory, dinner and films… I will show you to the pew by the fountain, and I will sit beside you while you pray. Picture it, it is very familiar; the church in the clearing in the woods with the daffodils under the sunbeams, breaking like blessings through still-parting clouds, always moving, making no noise; in a house in the mountains with snow in the trees, the rugs and the cougars and pockets of peppermint candy, making faces in the mirror, sculpting figures in the clay, firing clay, breaking figures with hammers and fists; and the pastorals, where the fruits grow plump and tangy, and the animals graze with their heads to the grass, being soundless, while on a lazy stream we drift on rafts towards the river, night-throbbing, awash in golden, splendid light, taking delight in the symphony of birds and of fast moving water, rustling like fawns in the ruffles of silk printed paisley and gold, despite a public disdain for gold paisley; and underneath a waterfall, naked as he came, Adonis, full of strength and prescience.

I try to write it all down in a letter and confess my brutal past to my friend but I manage nothing more than a signature – my signature, unrecognizable, in thin bands of ink on on paper impermanent, illegible. I am trying my best; my methods are failing me. Tyranny waits in my heart for a weakness and I, without much resistance, abet it. It could be no other way; I am what I – Well, you know what I am. I am not really a part of this world. I am nothing like a hero. Even I do not believe in me, believe what I see when I stare in the mirror, nor do I listen at all when I speak. I am something like a blaze of water, invisible, and when I am gone, I know that none will go with me, and that I, in the evil of paradise, will fall passionately into the tender, unforgiving rush of finality, clean-faced and faint. I await with empty hands the milk-drinking demon of death, drowning in a sea of milk, swimming through the milk to meet me, to sew up my eyes and to suck out my lymph. I stand at the edge of the desert and I speak out its name, feeling saintly, crying softly, trying in vain just to steady my hands, to steady my pace, to stand like a man and not, for a moment, be falling; always, slowly, falling over, always twitching, catching my breath, righting my pose. My hands are getting heavy; I am feeling heavy-handed. They fall to my sides in languor and pity. Pitiful, heavy hands. Pitiful, heavy ego, rolling consciously along, collecting up rubble and leaving a stain of fine slime far behind it. You yourself will have slipped in the slime, will have spoken the name at the edge of the desert, whose ego did roll consciously on, always onward, alone…

But I… I have many names. Call me by a name; I’ll deny it. I’ll say, “But that is not my name; you must not be talking to me.” But I will be lying. I am a pantomime horse in a field of gardenias. I am comical, but I am not allowed to laugh, because that would betray my comedic conceit. Nameless; and I, without a name, walk without danger in the valley of sheer discontent; I am without shadow, my own skin a shadow of pale light and angles, steep and irregular angles; obsessive. I tie up a noose for the undoing; I think, “I will not be caught unawares.” I am already winning; the blood is already beginning to flow. In spite of my thick ruse of comfort, in spite of my shame and my infamy, my waste, my pleasant scent, the scent of my skin in the evening, in bed, against lips… Yes, though I may tremble, I am at heart without fear, and without any trouble, free from the confines of bare commonality, because I walk without pride on the rim of this dream-world, my dreams scribbled onto a scrap piece of paper and folded up, slipped into a pocket. And though I walk blindly, I walk without agony, immune to the pain of the heartfelt condition. I have been veering this way now for lifetimes, and into this life I was chosen, into the singular eclipse of real, unbelievable beauty, the rearing, potent, modal, unparalleled beauty of pure, simple certainty; yes, I am certain. My life is set like a second hand into the next second again, careening and sliding on sand in an hourglass, only a stone’s throw away from the end of the earth, drawn into the  pull of the end of the earth, magnetic, pulling everything into it, and then pushing it away. I am speaking, of course, of the human condition, and everything in it…

I wanted to turn my head and stare at the world as it burned up behind me but I was told, “No, don’t stare, it is not polite to stare.” I wanted to talk about what had just happened and what it all meant, I wanted to study the colors and contours of the landscapes, real and imagined, past and present, and to not be deluded, to not be unsure. I stepped over the corpse of a rabbit and promised to myself not to think about it, but of course I just thought of it. I vowed right then, in the wake of the world as I knew it, to change: to stop eating, to stop drinking, to stop smoking, and to stop having sex; I vowed to re-assert myself, my tradition, my strength and my consistency, unambivalent, and with perfect maturity. My aesthetic sensibilities became ascetic ones, my ethical urges became religious; I could see a perfect world before my very eyes, and behind me, pure destruction. I stepped out of the cult of the shadow and into the mirrored epiphany of god-colored light. I confronted myself in a hallway of mirrors and I tried to do the right thing, whatever it was – but nothing came to mind. I looked at myself and I stared and I said, “God help me, won’t you, please.” I have been cast from the city and cuckolded, and I did nothing to stop it. I certainly knew it was coming, for it was I who created it. I created the world, and made it spurious. Thus made, I placed it under my heel in insult, and I tried to stamp it out; but I lost the feeling in my feet and couldn’t make them do it. The world was saved. Who is this boy reading books by the banister, looking alone, so peculiar? What does he think he is doing? He is about to speak – you can see his chest heave, a glint in his eye, you can see him with something to say – but no, he says nothing. Maybe another time, you think. But there will be no other time, but this one, and this one has been pre-determined. He will make a fool of himself, as we have made fools of us all…

At least I have my heroes. I shall tell you all about them. I shall place their books, and books about them, before your very feet and say, “You really ought to read these.” Let me list them: it gives me great pleasure to list them. I love them with all of my heart, like I love sunlight, or brass; unconditionally. Alexander the Great; Thomas Edward Lawrence, dear Ned; Ludwig Wittgenstein, the honest man; James Dean, my own dearest Jamie; and Arthur Rimbaud, who you will recognize as a poet, if not a prophet and king. You will find certain commonalities to them all; they were all artists, honest men; they dreamt beyond mortal cognition, into the realm of the endless shifting sands, the columns of water and ash, in a place by the sea, palatial, ravaged by dawn and re-constructed by dusk; they were all versed in the truth of the modern condition, the state of the world in the time of mankind, of the animal; and they were all, above all else, perfect, Platonic, made real beyond all recognition; except I, sometimes I recognize them, they are Forms and I sometimes catch glimpse of them, instinctive, like a familiar caress that I don’t back away from him; essences strewn over the earth, in the ground and the tap-water, salt that we lick from our fingers. Hero-worship. I accept it unconditionally. I let it overtake me, force me into the world. It is natural; this is the natural world. I fall back into the loving embrace of the boy-king, godless, with iridescent pearls for eyes and feathers in a golden crown. He says to me, “This world is yours, and everything in it.” I hear the drums but I can not see them. I open my eyes; I can not open them. I flail, unmoving, in hypnotic insistence, awash in the scent of ignominy. Water surfaces; the air shifts; I drown, dry, and standing. I climb the octopus; pearls for eyes. This is the world, and everything in it…

The sky is pan-seared yellow. I am hot as hell. So this is it then, I think. This is the way the world will end. With beautiful weather, weather so nice that you can’t stay inside for the life of you. With spring in the middle of January, tending towards summer. With relaxing, brilliant, sun-induced heat, blue skies, billowing tree limbs, breaking a sweat in the opulent breeze of the world-end and laughing. We will die with our hands in our pockets, falling asleep in a chair feeling special, breathing normally.

Mine is a familiar phenomena. It has been written of in verses for thousands of years. Wrote the boy-poet: It is getting dark once more; red rivers and old bats, caves… cave dreams; I see five bullets and fire; lost in the darkness of kisses; the ending that won’t go away. It has been drawn on a sheet of paper and filled in with colors. The lines are clear and the colors stunning. It is, above all else, beautiful.

I can not believe what I was seeing. What sort of a universe is this? I am certain that I do not trust it. It is too lofty and grand a horizon. I become defensive. I put my fists up in front of my face and I press forward in even, cautious steps. Someone trips me, and I fall. I am in a warehouse, now, with industrial fans hanging low from the ceiling; I break a porcelain vase with a hammer. “You are too sensitive,” I tell myself, although no one is around to hear me.

It is a portrait of Natalie Wood. She is looking at me and I am looking at her. I have been staring at her for hours, unblinking. I put the portrait in a frame and hang it on my wall. She makes me feel lost, all at once whole, all at once hungry. I have sat in a diner, dwelling, dreaming of a finer life and thinking, “How am I supposed to feel?” The skies have opened and then they have closed and, rain and sun, the people suffer. Behind closed doors the rapist has his way with his victim. I have wondered, “Who will win this terrible war?” I have felt compelled to win it. I have studied ancient heroes to learn their secret ways. I have put grease in my hair and I have washed it all out in disgust. I have walked through the valley with the skeletons rising behind me and I have refused to look back, while the skeletons rose, and I chose to ignore them. I have ran in slow motion down wet pitch-black asphalt while buildings exploded behind me, touching hearts, reading novels, threading string. I have shot a child in the head because a dear leader told me to do it. Life has come and gone in cycles; I will come and go just once. Watch me coming, see me leave; cry for me, when the skin leaves my face like a blessing, when the wings sprout gruesomely out from my backbones; oh, my tender backbones… I have fallen into the wrong sort of lifestyle, needles in my arms, virulent tethers long fading, and I have made peace with the man in the sewer. I have run with Natalie Wood through a desert on horses made of glass and I have shared with her the last of my water. It is my secret; I have an infinite supply of water. I am waterful.

I look away; I look at the floor. The portrait falls away from me. I see a crumb of bread on the floor. The floor needs sweeping up again. It always needs sweeping up. I get up to sweep it. I wonder what the floors look like in the house of a man that doesn’t sweep. It must be terrible; skin, lint, hair, dirt, crumbs, leaves – detritus. I sweep this way, and then I sweep that way, and then my father drops by to deliver some bread. He sees me sweeping the detritus up into a square in the middle of the floor. “You are a perfectionist,” he says. I laugh in his face. I’ll show you perfection…

I will never drink again. I will never over-eat again. I will never inject drugs again. I will never speak up for my beliefs again. I will never go out to the movies again. I will  never take a call again. I will never stare into the mirror again. I will never let my hair grow long again. I will never forget to shave in the morning again. I will never be mean to a person again. I will never be mean again. I will never drive to the city again. I will never talk about my feelings again. I will never recommend Abel Ferrara again. I will never be nervous at night again. I will never tell someone they are wrong again. I will never keep a journal again. I will never burn a book again. I will never blame the world again. I will never eat red meat again. I will never buy roses again. I will never express my conviction again. I will never be certain of anything again. I will never play the flute again. I will never listen to everyone’s music again. I will never indulge in bad conversation again. I will never act like a clown again. I will never throw a fit again. I will never laugh heartily again, except alone, watching sitcoms. I will never cross the desert on the back of a camel again. I will never swear in public again. I will never tip less than 20% again. I will never flinch at the site of something gruesome again; I will never consider anything gruesome. I will never turn down a gift again. I will never pass any judgment again. I will never ignore a plea for help again. I will never dress like a woman again. I will never read another work of fiction. I will never kiss another stranger. I will never hug a man without flinching. I will never put a gun in someone’s face. I will never run away from my life in a moment of passion. I will never throw up again. I will never be spontaneous. I will never mention my regrets. I will never leave the doors open at night. I will never climb in through the windows again. I will never trust Americans, because I will always be an American, and I will never pretend I’m not powerful. And I will never trust someone with power again.