Decay

She had been defecating quietly in the corner for an hour before Rob hollered. The guys by the door grabbed her up by the arms, thinking she would slump limp between them. But she smiled, trustingly, conspiratorially. The gesture was like any of the girls, chin brought to the shoulder, top teeth bared, eyes red but not blank. The breath was less promising, but Jim, who had her left arm and her frank open face turned towards him grinned.
“You need some mouth wash”
In heels she was taller than both the men at her arms, and her legs, strong, struck out at the concrete with assurance. They let her go, amused. And she stood, gripping the edge of the plastic shoes with her toes, smiling. The light above the door provided humble spot light for her shiny eyes. Now and again the beam was interrupted by insects. A cloud of bugs was barely visible surrounding his head now, like an agitated halo. He hadn't moved when the other guys had gone to pick up Jesse or Diamond or Chlamydia or whatever the girl's name was. He sat down on the over turned plastic pail and resumed his cigarette, watching their progress with her long, unambitious limbs.
“Christ that stinks.”
“Yeah, this corner bad, Rob.”
“She needs, she needs one them menthol things—”
“A cigarette?”
“No like the commercial, with the music and the kids”
“mint? You mean a mint? Nah, that's not the stink I'm talking about”
She was still teetering somewhat, the left foot ankle twitching and rising as though the heel was stuck to the ground with gum. A cigarette had manifested between her fingers, but the other hand as yet did not seem disposed to lighting it.
Jim, who was watching her more intently than Bill, as if her crooked movements might burst into beauty, stepped forward and lit the end of her new appendage.
“She gonna burn herself.”
“Nah she's okay. Just been a long night”
“Hell that. we got three hours—” Jim eyed Rob, still sitting in his halo. Rob watched the girl's torso, which jagged slightly out, as if disconnected from the shoulders and hips. Jim rustled through his jacket pocket and withdrew slightly damp transparent rolling papers. Without moving his gaze, the thick fingers blindly twisted the paper around moist pungent leaves.
“—and you weren't here when she did burn he damn leg. In three places! Put the damn lit end in her thigh like she was putting the thing out.”
Jim hit the joint.
“How much you figure she makes?” Bill took the pass, but was studying the thighs with purpose.
“What—when she's working or when she out here?” Jim had already appraised the wad wound round the garter, colorless in dull light. Or perhaps generally colorless.
The door opened and Joe, grinning, Chinese noodles dangling from open the upturned lips, stood. He had a way of keeping his mouth wide when eating, which like a bull dog panting, gave the impression of benevolence beamed at who ever he turned his head towards. He did that now with the girl, who shook her head, only slightly out of time with the music, and smiled back. Joe leaned into the door frame, and the unobstructed light pelted the girl's face. The music, now unmuffled, seeped sticky over the men, stagnating the already motionless bodies. The girl, though, began to oscillate with greater frequency. Jim stared somewhat transfixed by the hips, the thighs rotating in the sockets.
“How can you eat out here with the smell?” Joe continued chomping, unperturbed.
“Maybe he brought it.”
“Nah, it was here. Stank and still stinks. Shit, Rob, you gotta clean up back here. Like a dog park.” Rob had retreated from the circle,engulfed in the bug cloud and spelling dilemmas of a text message.
Jim's jaw hung unhinged as he leaned towards the legs, his thick fingers nearly graping the garter, when the phone flew forward, striking his forehead.
The plastic pail upturned as Rob stood, scattering beetle bodies and crushing one into the concrete. Rob grabbed the pail, in one gesture bringing it off the ground and into Jim's face and neck.
“I wasn't taking it!” The roach corpse slid off the pail as Rob started to bring it up again for another swing.
“Look!” Jim thrust his hand, soiled knuckles and finger tips at Rob's face.
“She's fucking shitted—” Jim's ecstatic proof collided with his nose and Rob brought the bucket back around. Bill saw it, dark on Jim's hand, shimmering from Rob's nose and cheek as he stood in the light of the door frame. The garter and it's bulge were also visible now, sliding. He laughed, nodding his chin at Joe, who catching the glance, leaned casually back into the club looking, and rolled forward on his heels, out of the door frame, shutting it behind him.
With the light gone, Bill moved forward, pushing Jim's form, already cowering before Rob, on to the edge where the concrete met with the gravel. Rob's shoulders had already started to release, dropping back into place and Bill, watching this movement, laughed and kicked Jim's shoes.
“Come on, get up.” Rob didn't drop the pail, but held it with a loose grip. Jim didn't move, didn't turn over, but let out a groan. Bill laughed again and seeing Rob's gaze dropped down, looked over his shoulder to the girl, standing as still as she could manage. Rob bent, and Bill moved quickly towards her.
“Help me get the sack of shit up.” Bill nodded enthusiastically to this command, though Rob's back was to him. He stuck one hand swiftly in his pocket, moving back to the men.
“You want Joe to bring her in?”
“Yeah.” Joe had her arm and the door open when Rob looked back around at them.
“Clean her up.”
II
Paris, late but excused, thought that she didn't look like the grinning corpse of a tractor accident, but something of the girl, sitting before the mirror stalked in on her mind, giving the impression of up turned earth and a head several feet from shoulders and torso. She moved closer, pulling out her makeup bag, but then feeling nauseated at the idea of sharing lipstick or mascara.
“Where's your bag, Jubbie?” She paused. Outside the club the club the girl was called Melanie or so she said, but it didn't matter except to the men, who always hounded at the real name. But Jub or Jubbie had evolved from the prior dj who couldn't spell. His call sheet had been passed around the bar on a slow night, the cramped illiterate attempt at names drawing more attention than the stage. Jew Belly was finally recognized as the girl now sitting at the dressing table in front of her. Paris realized she couldn't think past that name.
Melanie-Jew Belly sat, hands and forearms laying on the long flat surface before the mirror. She shifted ever so slightly, from cheek to cheek as if her butt, substantial as it was, couldn't find steady ground on the chair. The movement was slight, and like her hands which were still except the left thumb, the impression was of a child strapped to the roof of a moving vehicle, sick but so accustomed to the movement that it is without protest. The left thumb lifted up, down, not rapidly like a twitch, but continually, reflectively, as though it hadn't quite decided which position, up or down, was the better.
“Hey we need her.” Rob's narrow face hung disembodied through the curtain. Paris nodded and he withdrew. She tried avoiding looking at the girl directly, because she looked back, even a glance at her through the mirror would find her trying to smile. Paris concentrated on lips and decided to leave them as they were. Falling asleep in her lipstick had produced a series of pimples around the frame of her mouth, which with the next days layer of powder applied, appeared as bubbles or froth around a dark red jetty.
She then moved her eyes to arms, as sometimes girls wound keys to their lockers around their wrists. Hers were bare, though, and Paris was drawn to the thumb, still motioning restlessly. The nails on the left hand were chewed, but the right were manicured with press-on acrylics, too long and painted light, shimmery cream. Paris crossed her arms, leaning with her back to the mirror.
The eyes were the only thing she could do now, quickly, that would help. Grabbing some tissue and hand cream from the dressing table, she wiped away the blue beneath the eyes. Someone's Visine lay forgotten on a folding chair, and Paris squeezed the liquid liberally, pealing the upper and lower lids back with her nails. She paused when she realized the other girl wore contacts, the left of which sloshed toward the corner of the eye, doubled over and threatening to slip out. She guided it back with her nail, pressing against the iris to make it stay in place.
The sound of sirens surprised her and she hurried over to the sink, still watching the other girl. Jew Belly-Melanie rose as if beckoned by the noise. She touched the back of her cropped hair reflexively and smiled at Paris, who watched her slide through the curtain. Only lastly did her eyes drop to the legs and the scattered streak which ran down them.

tough

Erica wore her beauty aggressively and her aggression beautifully. She performed an impromptu tap dance as the Sinatra song ended, but even this ironic gesture revealed skill and training. In the silence between one music beginning and another ending, kept her hips in motion. Ed—Mr.Ed! she thought half hysterically to herself—shuffled across the carpet. He bore two drinks, one to serve as an apology.
She smiled, but turned to hide her teeth in the pole. Head Like a Hole began in all it's murky subdued glory, and she couldn't help smiling wider, shaking her ass at the little man enticingly. She hadn't really been offended when, half and hour before, she had stopped giggling and risen abruptly. But the moment, his comment, had been too good not to use for her own purpose, and so she narrowed her eyes, muttered the one racial epitaph which hurt him, and stalked off haughtily. She let him see her sit with Rose, her back to him. Once, and only once, had she brought her chin to her to her shoulder, glancing with slitted eyes at his ridiculous figure. Even without turning completely she could tell his lip was trembling and his ever-damp palm greased the side of the glass.
Now she turned from the poll to face him fully, allowing the eye contact which he had become so greedy for. The music shifted, Trent Reznor assaulting the handful of bar patrons with steel-voice nerves. Erica reflected that even the crummy jukebox, frequently broke and with a depressingly large selection of country music, couldn't repress some music. Just like you, stupid. She threw herself down with abandon, tossing her long, fantastically blond hair over the edge of the stage, before raising her face a quarter of an inch from Ed's.
He sucked in his breath, and she hid her satisfaction in another convulsion, this time allowing her hair to trail over into his lap. Pathetic, she thought. Like he might start whimpering at any minute.
But that was exactly how she had planned it. The morning, with offensive daylight pouring through her sheer curtains, had brought that abrupt realization of the necessary money. Erica had weathered this, and her roommate's complaints, with a certitude born out of years of strife. Clara had threateningly waived bills while the two sat in the kitchen, and Erica had gazed, expressionless, back thinking at the college girl, worried about her little college girl troubles. Her silence silenced the other girl petulant complaints, and the two had sat, Clara feeling righteous but becoming disconcerted.
After her cigarette and coffee breakfast, she had gone back to the futon which served as her bed, and lain thinking about who would be a juicy squeeze. When her mind had settled on Ed, she allowed Clara to turn the TV on and accepted the jay, which the other girl had anxiously offered as amends. In the happy haze, and Clara's growing relaxation, she had picked through the stories he had told her, his sick wife and distant son. She had let his words drift through her head, and stretched out, finally happy for the sun, when she fell upon her strategy.

Am I political yet?

Shortly after returning to America, to live now, in the country I had never really resided in, yet carried the passport of, I came across an article on Zlata Filipovic, the Anne Frank of Sarajevo. I wrote her a long, irate and (I am sure) self-pitying letter. Zlata might have been a year older than me, but as a survivor of the Bosnian conflict, she have infinitely more meaning capital, which is a short hand way of saying: she mattered, I didn't.

Before returning to America, and learning how you can generate & eat off your own hate for years, I had felt this distance between America and myself. It wasn't a painful experience, just a feeling, I suppose which arose from wanting to enter a contest and realizing the rules specified living in the US (what was this mysterious contest of which I can only remember the rules? What I wanted then escapes my now, only that vague knowledge of not being able to participate remains.)

While I will maintain that before America I had shame, but not yet hate, I do have to admit that in every confrontation with other kids that had more value than me, I had that first twinge of dislike. Maybe dislike is even too strong; the action was one of turning inward, of rotating away from the outer world, which gazed in unison at the momentary superstar---in grade school this ranged from broken arms to winning the Fire Emergency Awareness Poster contest. Flannery O'Connor writes about garnering attention as a kid by training chicks to walk backwards and loving the attention. I believe she says something about wanting to hang on to that moment, or never quite living up to it again. I know that I never got that moment, kept thinking it would come (but why?) and every day which rambled into my further mediocre adventures caused my to construct ever more bizarre fantasies of mattering.

And they were (are) weird fantasies. In that burrowed place (which I maintain to this day! usually while looking straight at someone and nodding), anything might emerge. I might be, say, a spectacular martyr, with my shirt cut open in the emergency vehicle, revealing achingly beautiful breasts and toned abs to _____.Or, here was a another favorite for months: I ride towards ____, and am nearly clipped by a car full of raging men. Perhaps they have leaned out of the vehicle and in a sexual pass, nearly toppled me from my bike. I am outraged. The taxi behind me, in which ______ sit, watch with wonder and horror as I speed up my bike, and swing (what?), possibly breaking the window or, at the very least we would hope, scratching the paint job.

Of course. There is also: standing in a coffee shop back in ____, speaking on the cell phone in a foreign language, unrecognizable (how? let's suppose suddenly thin or with dramatic long hair. or nice clothes) to ______, who merely see my extraordinariness from afar. There is that moment, oh, *that* moment, when I am recognized, _____ comes to my table. Any one of several things could happen. Maybe, I politely can't remember them. Or: I am polite, modest, while ____ rushes in with a thousand minor accomplishments meant to impress, I nod and give the slightest version of my life. Just as ___ goes to depart, a teenage girl stumbles up to me a little breathless and embarrassed, asking I could sign her copy of my recent book. And I flash the smile of, oh yeah, and I /do/ have meaning, afterall.

I do. right?

And this is just it. If we were to draw a chart, one line moving from right to left without variation, without movement, would be the value of my life. A second line, zig-zagging dramatically, steep up, then a drop down to the line, then immediately back up, higher this time: this line is my consciousness, or evaluation, of my own value. Mostly I avoid confrontation with that not mattering, not via action, but perpetual fantasy.

Zlata, wherever she is now, frustrated this desire for meaning by jolting me into the awareness that my lack of value was not only what I suspected --that I simply was mediocre, without natural talent and only vague ambition-- but that even this reality didn't matter. My /non/-ness, my not-being was not only my own nature, it was circumstantial. We might say: given my historical position as a privileged person exempted me from the world stage of meaning. My life was was not, had not, would not ever, be in danger of genocidal maniacs. The most I could hope for was a traumatized childhood. But I had already missed that. No incest. No lusty priests looming through my psyche(not that I'm a catholic. or a boy). Nor was I particularly talented, or friendly, nice, personable. I had all the traits of genius --irritability, anti-sociality, tongue-tied awkwardness, absolute devotion to my own inner world-- without any of the requisite ability.

So I took my nothingness for a metaphysical problem.

Slavoj Zizek expressed the terror that animated him to extremes in Astra Taylor's doc as a terror that he would cease to be. He might be one of the few people I've heard be honest enough with this here/not here fear, the horror that we might be a thing or no-thing. Mostly the association existential crisis is that of death. That being is being-towards-death (a clumsy handling of Heidegger, undoubtedly, but we must not let that slow us down). This, though, the terror that I will cease to be, does not nearly tackle the experience. I am not confident that I am /now/, in my being now. In fact, my one hope is that there will be a future in which I will exist. But what the fuck do I mean by this? Zizek is explaining a phobia of not being, that then drives him to chatter incessantly, act erratically, garner our attention, making himself into a constant spectacle. Is this, then, not metaphysical in the least, but in fact purely a psychological condition revolving around a need to be seen? To be the focus of the gaze? In my case, we might evaluate a certain pathological strain in that: she fears (that she does not exist), but does not in accordance with the fear (that is, she does tends to hide from view). To be fair, I should say that I hide because every explosive effort to speak, to gather attention does seem to backfire in such a way that prior to speaking with me, people have a better, more positive vision of me. But this is still not getting at the extreme: that I would /not/ speak, I willed myself into non-existence through silence. Then the pain would be /being/ there, but somehow simultaneously absent. Not present in personality. And people notice this. The non-response. I am nominally there, but inactive, inarticulate.

more to come

Edge of Sea

Me, in a boat, sailing.

Sailing and I can see the edge of the sea,

Stretching in front and behind me.

You, waving from shore, at me, in the sea, in a boat, sailing.

You not sure of the shoreline and me, not knowing the end.

Me, running aground of another’s shore.

(Someplace you have not been.)

It ‘s good to be where you have not been.

It’s good to see where you were not seen.

You still waving from your own shore.

Me turning, walking, slipping from view.

The One Survivor

There was no one victim of your unmaking
but there was one survivor.

Why was his deadly portrait kept in a hallowed place?

We were soft then
as yet unformed,
two girls
with wild blue eyes.
One as a ripcurrent in a calm sea,
One as still and silent as the Marianna Trench
filled with strange and deadly creatures unknown to man.

With time, the structure beneath began to emerge.
the dark one became wild and searching
pushing away the madness of worship
seeking a foreign language to speak her grief.
Finding sweetness under the guise of knowledge,
carefully seeking.



This is a totally unedited free-write. Major writer's block at the moment, but I have faith it'll pass. I need to challenge myself and take on something serious. Maybe an epic poem. Or founding a new religion. Or writing 17 books a year like Dean Koontz and Stephen King. Suggestions?

Next

“Next,” she said and the man walked in.

“How can I help you?” He looked at her and sat down.

The seat was small and uncomfortable, even as the bank was large and lush, decorated in an antiquated style that seemed ornamental and overdone. A large mural of chariots being drawn through the clouds and skies was painted across the high ceiling of the main section of the building. The man could see it above the enclosed cubicle/office.

“Actually”, he cleared his throat, “Actually. I was next.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I called you in here.”

“No, I mean I was next, as in before the last person who was in here, the man who just walked out.”

“Yes, he was next and now you’re next. The person behind you will be next, after you.”

“I meant that you took him before me.”

“No, I didn’t. I called and he came. If it was your turn, you would’ve come but you didn’t which means it wasn’t your turn. But now it is and how can I help you?”

“That’s not what I meant at all. That man, that man stepped in front of me just as you called out. He stepped right, right in front of me.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It’s possible. It happened.”

“Even if it happened, it’s not my responsibility. How am I supposed to know who’s standing outside the door?”

“You looked,” he said.

“I looked?”

“You looked. I saw you look when the door opened and the person before me, before him, exited and I saw you look right at me.”

“And what did I do?”

“You looked right at me and said ‘next.’”

“Well, if I said ‘next’, why didn’t you come?”

“Because that…man stepped right in front, nearly knocked me down, right in front of me and walked in.”

She looked at him for a long moment.

“That’s not my problem.”

He looked but the corners of his mouth tensed.

“No apology? no nothing? That’s all I want, a little ‘I’m sorry’, anything.”

“Apologize? For what?” she said.

“For taking someone ahead of me when it was clearly and I mean clearly my turn.”

“Sir, I’m not apologizing for anything.”

“Then I need to see the manager.”

“You need to see who?”

“The manager?”

“Yes.”

“For what?”

“That’s between me and the manager.”

“No, that’s between you, me and the manager.”

“And the man who took my turn.”

“I’m sure he’s long gone by now. sir”

“Of course, that’s why I need to see the manager.”

“Are you going to track that man down, and then what arrest him?”

“That’s not what this is about”

“What is this about? I would  love to know.”

“Rudeness on top of rudeness,” he muttered.

“Rude? Sir, are you calling me rude.”

“Not you, but the behavior, certainly when looked at. Why anyone could see.”

“See what?”

“Rude.”

“I’ll tell you what sir, you want an apology? You want some kind of confession that I’ve somehow treated you unfairly; you won’t get it not from me, not from the manager, not from anyone. No one is going to tell you that you’re right, that you’ve been wronged by this place or by me. Not by me nor on behalf of me. No one is apologizing in my name to you.”

“Then we have nothing to talk about.”

“Exactly.”

“And that’s exactly why I am asking to see the manager. He is…”

“Who told you the manager is a man?”

“He or she is the only one to settle this. The only one who can make this right.”

“I don’t see how sir, I don’t see...”

“Can I speak to that person then?”

“Look, I could lie to you sir but I’m not, I’m going to get up, walk out that door under the pretense that I’m getting a manager but in actuality I’m just going to the ladies room and sneak a smoke and say ‘fuck that man’ (meaning you) ‘fuck that man’ over and over until the butt of the butt of that cigarette is all burnt out and then I’m going to walk very slowly, verrry slowly mind you back over here and through that door and tell you that the manager had to go to a meeting and will not be back until tomorrow. Now I don’t think either one of us really want to do that. You came here for a reason and I’m guessing this wasn’t it. This wasn’t what you wanted to do today was it?”

“Well, thank you for your honesty but all of that, why I woke up this morning, what I was supposed to accomplish today, that was not the point.”

“Then sir, what is the point, what is the point?”

He looked at her for a long moment and opened his mouth.

Providence/Prerogative

For the week:

Providence/Prerogative
you can choose one word, find the intersection of the two, or ignore them completely. Have fun

Mama Willie tells your fortune

Mama Willie tells your fortune


It’s like if you were running hard through the woods, breathing heavy, and then like in a dream it all stops suddenly. Like hitting a wall you didn’t know was there. There’s always one moment when everything gets so still and that’s when things come to me. They just well up in my brain from god knows where and spread out like a blanket. And I say out loud whatever it is that’s come up. Some people call me a fortuneteller. Church people call me a prophet. Mostly because they need me to be. So I don’t disabuse them of that notion.

What would you do if you knew things you shouldn’t know? Or at least people expected you to know them. Wanted you to know. Would you go along with them? Make things up? How easy it is in the name of Truth or the greater good to tweak it just a little. To say, “God told me….” Hell, I’ve done it myself more than once. Nothing is easier. And then that yellow calm inside and out because God has spoken. And no one can argue with God. At least not and live. You just open up your mortal mouth and let out words and put the god-tag on like a sale tag and it makes everybody happy. You don’t even have to take responsibility for what you say. Just wait. And watch. Soon that little drip that dribbled out of the faucet of your mouth will become a rush of water. Then you can watch all that self-fulfilling energy running toward the nearest drain.

I think death must bring it on. Or the thought of death. You start to wonder what portion of all your words have been true. And what does that even mean? You wonder how maybe what some call the gift of sight and others call faith is not much more than you being determined to be right come hell or whatever. Being right is almost as good as being good. Some people don’t have any talent for being good. Maybe not for being right either. But one is easier to fake. You just have to be the loudest, most determined voice in the room. You get yourself a reputation for being strong. People flock to strong. There’s nothing wrong with being strong until it’s your time to be weak. To hurt and doubt and wrestle down the big questions.

Years ago, when everyone else was wrestling them down, you stood there looking pious and saying Just believe like a puritanical Gandhi. But one day you wake up and your loincloth of self-righteousness has slipped. Now it’s your turn. And then pieces of strength start flaking off like rust off a radiator. All your loud-mouthed certainty dries up like piss in the wind. But by then you don’t have the grace to admit defeat. To admit the possibility of weakness or wrongness. Being right is all tangled up with just being. And if one slips, the other just slides along behind. Your brain starts to feel like the Sunday crossword puzzle where most of the clues are tricks and most of the squares are blank and by Thursday you start to realize you’ll never get it all filled in. There’s been no habit of humility woven over the years to cover you when you need it most. You just stand out there exposed with all the nakedness of your need to be right. You have no pocket of quiet to dig your hands into and wait for some light. If you’re lucky, all your words dry up. If you’re not, they keep dribbling out of your mouth like so much spittle. You can stop the drool of words, but then you’d have to do something with them backing up in your head like a stopped up toilet. And the one who has the plunger is the one you don’t want to talk to. Besides, finding a plumber at this hour is practically impossible.

And don’t think Jesus is the plumber. Jesus is the crazy existentialist who stands on the corner and says The kingdom of heaven is here. Is at hand. Is now. Now—that strange word in a time warp. No promise of a future heaven or hell. And what are we supposed to do with that? Think about it later? There is no later. The kingdom of heaven isn’t later. It’s now. It’s black holes and plucked strings and beggars on the back streets of Delhi and cancer patients screaming heal me now, not now, now, not now. It is patient virgins. And a world being borne along by violent men. It’s a gift delivered like a grenade with the pin already pulled.

Un Mensaje

Hablé con el cielo, que respondió con las nubes.

Hablé con las nubes, que habló con la lluvia.

Hablé con el mar, que respondió con la espuma.

Hablo con los árboles, a mi, que sacuden sus hojas.

Hablé con usted. Usted habla en palabras.

¡Por fin! Algo que pudiera entender.

Bus

Somehow the call had never been made and Mandy--JR--had sat irritably in a corner of the bus station before standing up, walking across the long dully reflecting linoleum, and beating the small bald man with a newspaper. It was a Metro daily; a surge of NY loyalty stole across her and she stepped up the pace on the whacks simply out of outrage to have a sub par periodical as a weapon. Cheap ink formed erratic reverse text of the day's news story; a few moments more, and blood began to fleck across the re-print stories on the man's head and face.

No one's attention was aroused. A small boy, at the age where the top of the head comes just below the hip and there is unnoticed spittle from the lips, watched from over the top of his booth. The child's possible brother, at the age between hip and shoulder but no drool, joined him, but the sheer repetitiveness of her whacking was upended by the creaking and then slam of a newspaper stand door.

Mandy, too, was bored by her work, or really, the preemption of her work as there had been no call, and considered that all train stations, even this hovel in Oklahoma, were but reflections of Port Authority. If one could but suspend beneath the eyelids the movement from station/holding cell to another, all bus stations would seem a part of a subterranean network composed solely of electric lighting and linoleum.

She paused, wondering at that underground world partially created by her head, wondering if it was created by her head, or the underlying class distinction. She wiped her forehead, and sat down across the booth table from the corpse. There was few better ways to draw attention away from a corpse than to sit down next to it as a companion. To be fair, the bald man, despite the checkering of newsprint articles and blood across his broad fat head, might not have been dead. Mandy did not check his pulse or breath; it was in her style to be thorough, but beating the old man was more reflex than job. She knew, irritably gazing at the clock and wondering if Oklahoma was EST, that she would be compensated for her travels and there might even be some apology for the miscommunication. Knowing that, however, did not alleviate her from the moment, the series of moments, the monstrous miniature of eternity that now, that was the present of the bus station.

The drooling hip-height child passed, curious about the newspaper whackings, but not overly excited.

Author’s Revenge (Version 2)

With pencil in hand and hole in stomach I go to work. I sit at my desk and perform a slow, methodical erasure. I start with the ending and find my way from there.  I see two figures, very faint with long shadows. They are speaking in low, hushed tones. They have done this before, said these things before. I used to know what the words but memory fails, hearing fails, body fails, mind putters around hopelessly. I continue my work.

I stop. The two figures are slighter now, a pair of shadows against a blighted sky.

I stay up all night, I undo lines, I rewrite, I begin again. Your image moves further away, unrecognizable, unheard. You speak only in mouthed words. I stare at the page.

What was your name? And face? Hands, body, shape? Eyes, hair, scent? I don't remember but there, still, traces of an outline remains.  More to do, more to do. I work through the day and the following night. I write, rewrite, tell and retell. I put words in your mouth then just as quickly cross them out. In one moment of weakness I attempt to reform your image but I don't remember enough to complete the task. So I begin again, the long erasure, marked over, covered over, reformed, melted down, torn up and thrown out.

 I’m not done yet.

There is a Sickness

there is a sickness in you
and it grows
you bear it,
a gentle gun
against splitting skin
even as it breaks bones
you pull it closer, caressing

you curl and cry
to nurse your dissatisfaction
you shake and spit
your careful claws
snake across my heaving heart

You were a coward, you say
an unbearable booming silence tears across the line
jumps satellite to satellite
until it finds my quiet apartment
my bare white room
my mouth opens to speak
I shiver and shake
tucked in the dark bed, a pillow empty beside me

I remember your slender hands
a hank of raven hair, shining like oil on water in a ripping wind
under a white winter sun
we huddled in the car, the throaty rumble
bringing soon the miracle of rushing warmth

I would kill you if I could
even now,
despite your goodness
and explosive smile

Version 2, for MP

Revenge

Revenge of the Reptilian Brain

The first time is the strangest. Endorphins aside, you have to get over the whole self-protection thing and old-fashioned double-sided razorblades are hard to find these days. They’ve been replaced by disposable plastic things. Ridiculous to even try. Progress seldom thinks of the needs of those who occupy its underbelly. Our will to survive has kept the species going for millions of years. Or thousands, if you’re a Creationist. Either way, the conscious choice to take up arms against yourself means battling against all those superior genes picked out of the pool specifically for their ability to protect and defend the host. Like a Crusade of sorts. But the infidel is you. Then again, the mental process that brought you to this point has probably been going on long enough and generated enough loathing for the enemy (meaning yourself) that by the time you draw your sword, it’s all a moot point.

God knows we all need vices. But sharp objects had never been one of mine. When you grow up in a religious household with a mother who is the perfect embodiment of a saint and then at the tender age of eighteen marry a would-be preacher who spends the next twenty years roasting you slowly on the spit of his own guilt, well, you can expect a little scar tissue. After the divorce a counselor talked of the need to heal my wounds. For a while I tried using a little harmless flirting. Beautiful young men of various ethnic proclivities, invariably artists or musicians with large soulish eyes and sweet lips. My wounds proved harder to heal than I had anticipated. Later I added a couple of fingers of Bombay Sapphire and a few fat Vermouth-soaked olives.

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping. I get in my car late at night and drive around Charleston. Just to see if anyone else is awake. I like driving over all the bridges. Seeing the lights puddle in the water around the boats at the marinas. Wondering who owns them all. The bridge to Mt. Pleasant is on its third reincarnation since I’ve lived in the Holy City. This latest one is transcendent in its dimensions. Like a Retro-Post-Neo-Modern Cathedral. Mostly sky, held up with tiny threads of steel. Driving over it is a spiritual experience. Especially at two o’clock in the morning when my car is the only one occupying that particular air space. As I approach the apex I’m a supplicant holding out my hands for the wafer, or no, holding out my tongue. I’ll be Catholic and not touch the sacred host, but let it dissolve slowly as it mingles with the sinful spit of my mouth. Flying down the other side yelling Holy Mother of God in Heaven, I’m a new creation, forgiven, reborn for the rest of the ride. I sleep better after that.

I tried putting myself into a state of pre, semi, un-consciousness where I could live, write, create, without my neuroses always getting in the way. I wanted to get to that place where Henry Miller goes in the middle of Tropic of Cancer after he’s used the word cunt six hundred and ninety two times and has starved himself halfway to India and back and finally has an epiphany about how to live the rest of his life—with complete abandon, all out, like an animal trying to survive this moment. Not stopping to worry about tomorrow’s food or drink or fuck. It’s harder than it sounds.

So I go to the local hobby shop and look over the various Exacto-type knives. I finally choose a # 1 Light Duty. Surgically Sharp. Couteau de précision. La Manche guilloché, á la tete et au milleau du couteau, permt une excellante tenue. I’m not being pretentious. That is actually what it says on the package; although it was made in the U.S.A. Somewhere in New Jersey, I think. It takes days before I feel brave enough to slit the skin of the cardboard backing and take out my weapon of choice. And days more before I feel strong enough to use it on my own skin. Like I said, the urge to protect the self is the strongest thing we know—a bull in a china shop. All brawn and no brains. Just straight out panic no stops survival mode. Your cortex has to take a dart gun loaded with anti-anxiety chemicals to that ancient reptilian part at the base of your neck that says you’ll have to kill me first. Which of course is the point.

I guess that’s why people smoke weed. Isn’t it supposed to calm frayed nerves? Open up passageways to places inaccessible in normal circumstances? I’ll have to ask Andrew. He was one of the beautiful artists. We haven’t spoken in six months, since my mother’s death. It will be her birthday in two days and I’m contemplating a celebration that involves her ashes and weed and Andrew. Our first date was five years ago on her birthday. Strange coincidence. I don’t want to get back together. Just reconnect for old time’s sake. Maybe it will become a Neil Simon Same Time Next Year sort of thing. Every year on my mother’s birthday. I don’t even know if he’ll do it. I don’t know if I want him to. Maybe I’ll just go out to the beach alone. Let her ashes go and watch as they blow and scatter, mingling with the sand of a thousand years. Or maybe I’ll just roll them up and smoke them.

Author's Revenge

With pencil in hand and hole in stomach I go to work. Sit at desk and perform methodically, efficiently. A slow erasure of a long memory, getting longer as the sun sets. A blown out image where once you stood, rubbed out.

Two figures walk in distance, without color and speaking in muted tone.

Good for them. I don't care what is said, what is exchanged. I continue my work. They, now nothing, white blots, blighted landscape, nameless sky, moving further away. And still I work. You, like sky, nameless, sent away but not alone. I stay up all night, I undo lines, I rewrite, I begin again. Your image moves further, unrecognizable, unheard. The background, now bleached of color; bloodless.

I stare at page.

(Are those teeth marks around the edges?)

Your form, now diaphanous, translucent like looking through white rose petals in cold sunlight. What was your name, face? Hands, body, shape? Eyes, hair, scent? I don't remember but there, still, traces of an outline remains.  More to do, more to do. I work through the day and the following night. I write, rewrite, tell and retell. I put words in your mouth then just as quickly cross them out. In one moment of weakness I attempt to reform your image but I don't remember enough to complete the task, so I begin again, the long erasure, marked over, covered over, reformed, melted down, torn up, thrown out and I’m not done yet.

There is a Sickness

there is a sickness in you
and it grows
you bear it,
a gentle gun
against splitting skin
even as it breaks bones
you pull it closer, caressing

as you shake and spit
your careful claws
snake across my heaving heart

you curl and cry
to nurse your dissatisfaction
I am, as ever, your willing victim
and even as you crave comfort,
my soft white arms around you
you lift your head
to the soft shell of my ear
to loose a terrible poison there

which works in silence
until nothing is left of me
but a thick dark pool

You were a coward, you say
an unbearable booming silence tears across the line
jumps satellite to satellite
until it finds my quiet apartment
my bare white room
my mouth opens to speak
I shiver and shake
tucked in the dark bed, a pillow empty beside me
I imagine your slender hands
a hank of black hair, nearly blue, caught in a ripping wind
under a white winter sun
we huddled in the car, it's throaty rumble
bringing soon the miracle of rushing warmth

I would kill you if I could
despite your goodness
and explosive smile

The Misogynist, again

Women are disgusting creatures, JR thought, dropping the line of cord tied to the knob, and stepping through the door.

The bathroom stank, but not of urine, or not only of urine, or even sweat or body odor. Fecal matter was animal, was regenerative. No, here, reflected JR, pushing each of stall doors open with a baton, here were processes outside nature. A tampon, cotton swollen beyond recognition, lay like a ravaged rodent on the first stall's floor. Presumably it had been beached there; the uneven floors lead away from the door downward to the back wall underneath the sinks. Between the slope and uninterrupted flow from a faucet, the puddle had a tide of its own, the waves lapping at the body of the bloated sanitary napkin.

A girl stepped in, tall, with a vague post-goth cast to her wardrobe. She scanned harder at JR's cheerleader baton than the muck on the floor; possibly all the university toilets were this bad. Or not: JR could see the unraveling threads of the goth's knock-off bag. This wing, though not mandated as such, was unofficially all night students. JR watched as the girl walked into the last stall on the right with swagger and came shuttering out a moment later, dodging into another. By now JR had walked all the way to the end of the row of stalls and stood reviewing her own female visage. Possibly this job did not require the costuming, but she donned it anyway, with a certain glee. Thus the cowgirl hat, the designer hand bag, the pink high tops. Yellow hair hung down on either side of the face.

Women are disgusting, JR thought. What a shame to be one.

This can't come back to the clubs, or here, or to George Pfenning, Pfennigan, whatever the fuck his name is. JR had nodded, lackadaisically, in the office. By now she had already started sporting the cowgirl hat and though light-weight, she liked to allow the hat to bring her head forward as if with gravity, in a movement that eliminated all her features beneath the brim. JR liked the dim of the office; the agency had an aversion to electric lights. She sat on the other side of the desk, watching a line of ants busy about the leg, and reflected that only a handful of cases had needed to be traceable back to one of the clubs. The agency was never involved. But it was probably not bad, she thought, for there to be a public face, or the possibility of a public face, as certain situations called for it.

This job was not one. Jr knew details that led, train-track like to her standing in the flooded college bathroom, but that same line of tracks in her head was devoid of trains, absent of motivations. A dancer, Cheri, had lined up a champagne room with a client on the stipulation that there was no cum to be shot on or near her person. The client, drunk or dumb or both, had shot her face. Later in the evening she had feigned not believing his age, and getting his driver's license, memorized his address. JR's thoughts were diverted to the door. The goth kid had come and gone (with unwashed hands) and now a second vaguely goth figure, although a little shorter and broader with bobbed hair, cut came in.

JR suddenly realized that she was going to enjoy the job.

She had seen, of course, photos of Cheri (formerly Kitten, when her hair had been blond and longer and crimped) and recognized the pointed chin and blunt, flat nose. But looking at her now, JR could extrapolate on the girl's life, constructing connective tissue between the facts gathered in her research. The blond locks and silly name had been changed during her first French class. Nasal intonation, hovering half-breathed r, and unspoken ending letters had proved too tough for a kid in school part time and so a second and third class had not followed. Nevertheless, Cheri-Kitten (also: Becci Sparks) had felt inspired, alienated by the class room and confused by the teacher's chattering, but somehow still inaugurated into something ... else. Special.

Cheri had furtively glanced at JR, dropped her eyes, never saw the baton. JR grinned. What was it about the shy ones? The silly kid, who couldn't meet the eyes of another woman in a public bathroom, had reeked minor havoc with her desperate need to avenge her cummed on face.

JR pulled the cord, shutting and locking the door to the restroom. Cheri had stepped into a stall and startled by the noise half turned. But JR was already there, grinning.

Happens (again, but not final version)

The pair had been sitting somewhat motionless, somewhat austere. It may have been that the windows, ordinarily blacked out, had suffered both internal and external trauma during the storm. Now a fragmentary light filtered in, not lazily, but not precisely judging either.
The girl was somewhat still except for one finger striking the table like an agitated piano player. The man too moved, also only a finger, but his in a circle, the same circle, clockwise then counter clockwise, on her thigh.
“Shit happens, sometimes.”
“In storms.” She didn't add 'apparently' and perhaps it was unnecessary. His statement had been generalized commentary on the far side of the room with the upturned tables, the thirteen broken spikes of high heels sticking up from the one table rightly standing. The stage stretched between them and the wreckage, inserting a silence. His gloss, then, was intended in the excellent style of all glosses, as a blurring of that which they studied, but didn't see. But she had brought it back to hours and circumstance and un-abstracted smells.
The shit had come just when the wind howled less, after Candy had climbed monkey-like, wiry limbs scaling framed pictures of past beauties, to the window where she lost a nail but succeeded in peeling back the black paint. There had been a shrieking round of giggles, and Candy's head turned back, nearly three-quarters, grinning at her audience, when the glass shattered and the pile knocked her cold.
“Pig shit,” said one patron holed up to last out the hurricane, and while he was hardly more farmer than the rest of them, no one argued.
The broken window and the clumps which the storm hurled at the building drew the group together in the common goal of plugging the window.
From Candy's unconscious frame, not particularly sexually haunting, at least not to the other girls, it was only a matter of time before all the left heels (already broken off and affixed upside down to a table) were used as a broken open iron maiden to stretch her across. Still, Candy did not wake (it is possible her fra

Exploring (version 2)

            "I'm going exploring, " I said to the woman behind the desk.

            "That's nice," she said.

            "It is nice," I said, "and true. Nice and true."

            "Goodbye," she said.

            Later, I told a clerk that soon I would be in the jungle deep, exploring the undergrowth.

            He said, "Don't get malaria."

            "I don't want malaria, " I said.

            "Better not catch it then," he said.

            I was speaking to a girl in the library.

            "Are you familiar with the ocean? " I said.

            "The sea?" she said.

            "The ocean, the sea, yes. Do you know it?"

            "I think so. Why?" she asked.

            "I’m going there, to the sea. Soon. Tomorrow. Maybe, I hope."

            "Are you asking me?"

            "Asking you what?"

            "To go? To go to the sea, the ocean?"

            I shook my head, "No, I don't think I was. Did I? ask?"

            "No," she said sullenly. "But you spoke, you spoke to me and I thought we were supposed to go to the sea."

            "Together? or separately?"

            She shrugged. "Is there a difference?"

            I looked at her, working up my nerve. "Do you want to not go with me, then?"

            "Yes," she said, "I will be happy to not accompany you wherever you like."

            I stepped outside and saw the same city skyline I had seen so many, many times on so many different days. Days in rain, half-rain, sun and half-sun. The light was downcast and low. There was a man standing outside the building, talking low to himself. "Go, go, go, go, go," he said, more a mouth than a man, a mouth mouthing words. As he spoke, he walked several paces and stopped. "Go, go, go," he said and stopped again. He kept like this, heading south. I wondered where he was going and began to follow his stops and starts. After five blocks, he turned suddenly, lurchingly, and headed north. "Go go go go," he said, nearly knocking me out of his way. I also turned and followed. He walked precisely two and a half blocks and turned, almost violently, south once again and continued. After only one block he swung himself around. When he reached the middle of the block he stopped, facing out and said, "Stay, stay, stay, stay, stay." Then he closed his eyes and said nothing further. After a full minute I was convinced he had fallen asleep like that, standing stiff and in the middle of the street. Suddenly his eyes sprang wide and he walked west, right into the street and into traffic, I tried to stop him but he kept going, cars swerving around him as he went missile-like and determined. I stopped following and watched as he gained distance, moving down the opposite street. I was sure that it would only be a matter of time before he turned himself around and went east, then south then north, west and back again. I had grown to understand his pattern and in that understanding, boredom swelled. I grew tired of watching him like one gets tired of watching a clock tick, at first mesmerizing, then monotonous. I left him there and thought of the girl in the library. I wished I had not lied. There would be no trip to the ocean or the jungle or the desert for that matter. No exotic locales, just gray streets as far as the eye could see, stretching, stretching, horizon to horizon. Grey streets and ashen men moving like clocks, like cars, to and fro, to and fro. Go, go, go, go, go.

What terrible grief did I uncover there, in that long-deserted wreckage?

With the wisdom of long years and many failed expeditions, I observed silently your wounded smile, your careful laugh, your wild eyes. I found you beneath an avalanche of folly and plans long ago gone awry and forgotten.

I glimpsed, then your true self, unmirrored and true.

How quickly you built for me another life, unfolded a fantasy of a darkened cloakroom, moon whispering white across bare skin and warm hands.

You insisted I had found you, had rediscovered you. A cascade of bright longing and secret lusts sprang forth from a heart unstoppered for all the world like a champagne bottle. We laughed and were drenched and twisted in the wet.

I braved the tundra, the rocks and ice. I felt for the path beneath the terrible will of the fog, then grew parched beneath a venomous sun. All the while, looking for you. I waited for morning, licking dew from a few ragged leaves, and by nightfall was lost beneath a terrible seething jungle.

Now that I have lost you again, I only curse the path, look for signs and symbols in the sun and the burning green grass.

Without destination, I turn inward like a broken compass, wait in a willful silence for the phone to ring, for your voice, your key in the door.

Version 2

Delhi New Year

Delhi New Year

It was about noon on New Year’s Day when the elephant walked up to me. I was sitting on a tiny side street in Karol Bargh, a collection of tenements and tangerine stalls that sprawled just west of Delhi proper, a place where any tourist worth his salt wouldn’t know about—but should. I was flying out later that night, leaving India after a three-month stay. But for just these few minutes I was sunning myself on the steps of my hotel, recuperating from my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. I had spent the previous evening packed into a tiny nightclub called The Qasbah watching the frantic revelry of secular Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and probably a few atheists all squashed together in a room the size of a typical American laundry-room. The scene had all the color, smell, and drama of a war zone without the close proximity of death. As a child I remembering hearing my older cousins dramatically intone the phrase Take me to your kasbah. We all knew it referred to that point in their play when the man swept them off their feet and took them to the mysterious region that existed behind closed doors. As a teenager the word “kasbah” conjured up scenes of smoky rooms draped with saffron-colored silk redolent of cinnamon and myrrh where gypsy violinists played the opening strains of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. But since I was raised in a subculture peopled mostly by Conservative Fundamental Independent Pre-Millennial Baptists, what went on behind the doors of the kasbah remained very much a mystery until my honeymoon. Twenty years later as a middle-aged divorcee with grown children, I was still intrigued by the word.
The literal Qasbah turned out to be somewhat disappointing. Everyone was attempting to have fun, attempting to drink, attempting to dance while attempting to avoid the pools of vomit--offerings from people unfamiliar with large amounts of alcohol. There was a frantic quality to their celebration, as if the idea was new and not altogether wholesome, and therefore had to be done quickly. It was unclear whether fun was being had. At one point I found myself waiting outside the women’s restroom. Instead of signs (what language would it be?) there were roughly carved wooden sculptures hanging on the doors denoting male and female. As the minutes ticked by and the women’s loo remained occupied, I took the female effigy off the door and began to study it. Small and stylized, a bust not more than eight inches tall with large Buddha ears, coiled hair, and bare breasts partially covered with a bead necklace. A crude copy of some rustic East-Indian tribal art.
A friend once told me that the best souvenir is the one you don’t buy and I had yet to find a suitable symbol for my three-month stay in India. I don’t know what puck-headed spirit possessed me at that moment. It may have had something to do with the reckless abandon that everyone around me was trying so hard to achieve. I had never stolen anything in my life. Okay, there was the one time in first grade when I lusted after Bobby Wilson’s ballpoint pen. So I waited until recess and pretended to tie my shoe, etc. But that was it. I had never shoplifted as a sulky teen thumbing my nose at the Bourgeoisie Establishment. I had never cheated on God or my husband or taxes. But for some reason, as the door to the restroom opened, I slipped the object into my purse. Back in the U.S.A. when I showed it to my grown children they were shocked to think of their middle-aged middle-class mother stealing this pagan idol from a shady nightclub on New Year’s Eve halfway around the world. I could see they were thinking, “God knows what else she got into.” But even stranger than my stealing it, is the fact that I have never experienced the tiniest tremor of guilt over the incident. My very respectable, very adult daughter told me that maybe I should think long and hard about guilt and my lack thereof. So I did. I can only imagine it has something to do with a life lived full to the brim with the false sort of guilt The human psyche can only take so much apparently. Everyone has a day of reckoning. A day when all the crazy shit our parents told us comes home to roost and we just kick it out of the nest. Or at least that’s what should probably happen. Otherwise, we’re just filling the coffers of headshrinkers. And I’ve never been a fan of organized religion.
The next day I sat on the steps watching the little minutes of daily life whirl around the street in hot dusty puffs. When I first arrived in Delhi this street with its glare and noise and swarming pockets of humanity had looked to me like the wrong side of Bagdad on a bad day. I crept into my hotel room and pushed a table against the door to ensure that India stayed well outside. But during the next three months I had managed to fall in love with the people and the neighborhood felt like home. Across the street I could see the telephone stall where I had made frantic long distance calls back to the USA. Inside the three-sided cubicle sat a wrinkled old woman in a dingy silk sari who spoke no English but still managed to convey an incredible amount of sympathy as I cried into the mouthpiece at those times when the craziness threatened to overwhelm me. Next door was the grocery stall hung with bags of chips and candy bars well past their sell-by date. There was the fruit stand where I bought my daily measure of tangerines. There was the Internet café that gave new meaning to the word grunge. And then there was the elephant. A creature larger than my hotel room. She had simply appeared and was standing beside me. She leveled me with one eye that had more intelligence than most people I knew. She seemed huge and spiritual, more event than animal. I lifted my hand hesitantly. She lifted her trunk. Our separate appendages hung there in the air. Not touching. I felt like Adam hanging from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel watching God’s finger as it reaches out into space, hanging forever in ethereal suspension. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the paint and plaster had not dried so quickly; if time had not stopped at that particular moment with those two fingers so close, but never touching. I guess that’s why we have lightening.
I’m unsure who made the first move, but suddenly my hand was touching the hairy gray roughness and her trunk was next to my cheek. She felt like old leather, safe and familiar. The sun was hot and there was this comforting smell coming off her—clean and dusty like rain out on the desert of the Deccaan Plateau. The noise of the street disappeared and in its place was a silence that sort of sat down beside us. We made a comfortable trio. Somehow this act, this sitting beside the quiet and the elephant, seemed a summation of all that I had experienced in my short stay. It was the reason, formed in matter rather than words, for this longing I had to stay in this country for another three months, ten years. A lifetime would not be enough, I knew, to fill up the empty space I felt inside. Not empty as in existential angst, but empty as in a lack of the unnecessary.
We stayed like that until the owner appeared asking money for his services. Want a ride? How much you give me for a ride? The elephant’s big liquid god-eye held me and I wondered if climbing up onto that huge expanse of rug-covered wrinkles would be to commit some sort of sacrilege. I shook my head at the owner just as a father and his small son came to buy a ride. The owner said some words and tapped with his stick. The gray bulk knelt. The going down was slow and awkward, unhurried, and the child after much encouragement climbed up. But the standing up again was like a displacement of space, an earthmover shuddering into action. The elephant stood in the street swaying back and forth. The little boy squealed in mid-air terror that turned to delight as the whole miracle moved off down the street. Hours later as my plane lumbered down the runway and lifted heavily off the tarmac the miracle of flight seemed somehow a lesser thing.

happens

The pair hat been sitting somewhat motionless., somewhat austere. It may have been that the windows, ordinarily blacked out, had suffered both internal and external trauma during the storm. Now a fragmentary light filtered in, not lazily, but not precisely judging either.
The girl was somewhat still except for one finger striking the table like an agitated piano player. The man too moved, also only a finger, but his in a circle, the same circle, clockwise then counter clockwise, on her thigh.
“Shit happens, sometimes.”
“In storms.” She didn't add 'apparently' and perhaps it was unnecessary. His statement had been generalized commentary on the far side of the room with the upturned tables, the thirteen broken spikes of high heels sticking up from the one table rightly standing. The stage stretched between them and the wreckage, inserting a silence. His gloss, then, was intended in the excellent style of all glosses, as a blurring of that which they studied, but didn't see. But she had brought it back to hours and circumstance and un-abstracted smells.
The shit had come just when the wind howled less, after Candy had climbed monkey-like, wiry limbs scaling framed pictures of past beauties, to the window where she lost a nail but succeeded in peeling back the black paint. There had been a shrieking round of giggles, and Candy's head turned back, nearly three-quarters, grinning at her audience, when the glass shattered and the pile knocked her cold.
“Pig shit,” said one patron holed up to last out the hurricane, and while he was hardly more farmer than the rest of them, no one argued.

Exploring

            "I'm going exploring, " I said to the woman behind the desk.

            "That's nice," she said.

            "It is nice," I said, "and true. Nice and true."

            "Goodbye," she said.

            Later, I told a clerk that soon I would be in the jungle, deep, exploring the undergrowth.

            He said, "Don't get malaria."

            "I don't want malaria, " I said.

            "Better not catch it then," he said.

            I was speaking to a girl in the library.

            "Are you familiar with the ocean? " I said.

            "The sea?" she said.

            "The ocean, the sea, yes. Do you know it?"

            "I think so. Why?" she asked.

            "I’m going there, to the sea. Soon. Tomorrow. Maybe, I hope."

            "Are you asking me?"

            "Asking you what?"

            "To go? To go to the sea, the ocean?"

            I shook my head, "No, I don't think I was. Did I? ask?"

            "No," she said sullenly. "But you spoke, you spoke to me and I thought we were supposed to go to the sea."

            "Together? or separately?"

            She shrugged. "Is there a difference?"

            I looked at her, working up my nerve. "Do you want to not go with me, then?"

            "Yes," she said, "I will be happy to not accompany you wherever you like."

            I walked away, so happy. I stepped outside and saw the same city skyline I had seen so many, many times on so many different days. Days in rain, half-rain, sun and half-sun. The light was low, downcast and made me feel sad. I wish I had not lied. I wasn't going to the sea or the jungle. I wasn't even going across the street. I would go back to my box of a room. I would close the windows and shut the blinds, I would close my eyes and mouth and mouth the words, an incantation, the lyrics to some long ago song not heard for 15 years. Somewhere in the center of that song, there is a safe place. I can go back there if I try, if I try...

            "I’m going exploring," I said aloud but no one was listening.

What terrible grief did I uncover there, in that long-deserted wreckage?

It was you, after all, reaching out an empty hand. With the wisdom of long years and many failed expeditions, I observed silently your wounded smile, your careful laugh. I found you beneath an avalanche of folly and plans long ago gone awry and forgotten.

I glimpsed then, your true self, unmirrored and sure. How quickly you unfolded for me stories of midnight suns and crinolines ripped in a darkened cloakroom, your lips smeared dark.

You insisted I had found you, had rediscovered you, the cascade of bright longing and secret lusts springing forth from a heart stoppered for all the world like a champagne bottle.

I braved the tundra, the rocks and ice. I felt for the path beneath the terrible will of the fog, then grew parched beneath a venomous sun. I waited for morning, licking dew from a few ragged leaves, and by nightfall was lost beneath a terrible seething jungle.

Now I only curse the path, look for signs and symbols in the sun and the burning green grass.

Without destination, I turn inward like a broken compass, wait in a willful silence for the phone to ring, for your voice, your key in the door.

Delhi New Year

Delhi New Year

It was about noon on New Year’s Day when the elephant walked up to me. I was sitting on a tiny side street in Karol Bargh, a collection of tenements and tangerine stalls that sprawled just west of Delhi proper, a place where any tourist worth his salt wouldn’t know about—but should. I was flying out later that night, leaving India after a three-month stay. But for just these few minutes I was sunning myself on the steps of my hotel, recuperating from my New Year’s Eve overindulgence. I had spent the previous evening packed into a tiny nightclub called The Qasbah watching the frantic revelry of secular Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and probably a few atheists all squashed together in a room the size of a typical American laundry-room. The scene had all the color, smell, and drama of The Death of Sardanapalus, without the blood and horses. As a child I remembering hearing my older cousins dramatically intone the phrase Take me to your kasbah. We all knew that it referred to that point in their play when the man swept them off their feet and took them to the mysterious region that existed behind closed doors. As a teenager the word “kasbah” conjured up scenes of smoky rooms draped with saffron-colored silk redolent of cinnamon and myrrh where gypsy violinists played the opening strains of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. But since I was raised in a subculture peopled mostly by Conservative Fundamental Independent Pre-Millennial Baptists, what went on behind the doors of the kasbah remained very much a mystery until my honeymoon. Twenty years later as a middle-aged divorcee with grown children, I was still intrigued by the word.
But the literal Qasbah turned out to be somewhat less than expected. Everyone was attempting to have fun, attempting to drink, attempting to dance while attempting to avoid the pools of vomit--offerings from people unfamiliar with large amounts of alcohol. There was a frantic quality to their celebration, as if the idea was new and not altogether wholesome, and therefore had to be done quickly. It was unclear whether fun was being had. At one point I found myself waiting outside the women’s restroom. Instead of signs (what language would it be?) there were roughly carved wooden sculptures hanging on the doors denoting male and female. As the minutes ticked by and the women’s loo remained occupied, I took the female off the door and began to study it. Small and stylized, a bust not more than eight inches tall with large Buddha ears, coiled hair, and bare breasts partially covered with a bead necklace. A crude copy of some rustic East-Indian tribal art. A friend once told me that the best souvenir is the one you don’t buy and I had yet to find a suitable symbol for my three-month stay in India. I don’t know what puckish spirit possessed me at that moment. It may have had something to do with the reckless abandon that everyone around me was trying so hard to achieve. I had never stolen anything in my life. Okay, there was the one time in first grade when I lusted after Bobby Wilson’s ballpoint pen. So I waited until recess and pretended to tie my shoe, etc. But that was it. I had never shoplifted as a sulky teen thumbing my nose at the establishment. But for some reason, as the door to the restroom opened, I slipped the object into my purse. Back in the U.S.A. when I showed it to my grown children they were shocked to think of their middle-aged middle-class mother stealing something from a shady nightclub on New Year’s Eve halfway around the world. But even stranger than my stealing it, is the fact that I have never experienced the tiniest tremor of guilt over the incident.
The next day I sat on the steps watching the little minutes of daily life whirl around the street in hot dusty puffs. When I first arrived in Delhi this street with its glare and noise and swarming pockets of humanity had looked to me like the wrong side of Bagdad on a bad day. I crept into my hotel room and pushed a table against the door to ensure that India stayed well outside. But after three months I had fallen in love with India and the neighborhood felt like home. Across the street I could see the telephone stall where I had made frantic long distance calls back to the USA. Inside the three-sided cubicle sat a wrinkled old woman in a dingy silk sari who spoke no English but still managed to convey an incredible amount of sympathy as I cried into the mouthpiece at those times when India threatened to overwhelm me. Next door was the grocery stall hung with bags of chips and candy bars well past their sell-by date. There was the fruit stand where I bought my daily measure of tangerines. And then there was the elephant. A creature larger than my hotel room had appeared and was just standing there looking at me. He had more intelligence in his eyes than most people I knew. He seemed huge and spiritual, more event than animal. I lifted my hand hesitantly. He lifted his trunk. Our separate appendages hung there in the air. Not touching. I felt like Adam hanging from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel watching God’s finger as it reaches out into space, hanging forever in suspended animation. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the paint and plaster had not dried so quickly; if time had not stopped at that particular moment with those two fingers so close, but forever never touching. I guess that’s why we have lightening.
I’m unsure who made the first move, but suddenly my hand was touching the hairy gray roughness and his trunk was next to my cheek. He felt like old leather, safe and familiar. The sun was hot and there was this mammalian smell about him—clean and dusty like rain out on the desert of the Deccaan Plateau. The noise of the street disappeared and in its place was a silence that sort of sat down beside us. We made a comfortable trio. Somehow this act, this sitting beside the quiet and the elephant, seemed a summation of all that I had experienced in my short stay. It was the reason, formed in matter rather than words, for this longing I had to stay in this country for another three months, ten years. A lifetime would not be enough, I knew, to fill up the empty space I felt inside. Not empty as in existential angst, but empty as in the lack of the unnecessary.
We stayed like that until the owner appeared asking money for his services. Want a ride? How much you give me for a ride? The elephant’s big liquid god-eye held me and I wondered if climbing up onto that huge expanse of rug-covered wrinkles would be to commit some sort of sacrilege. I shook my head at the owner just as a father and his small son came to buy a ride. The owner said some words and tapped with his stick. The gray bulk knelt. The going down was slow and awkward, unhurried and the child after much encouragement climbed up. But the standing up again was like a displacement of space, an earthmover shuddering into action. The elephant stood in the hot street swaying back and forth. The little boy squealed in mid-air terror that turned to delight as the whole miracle moved off down the street. Hours later as my plane lumbered down the runway and lifted heavily off the tarmac the miracle of flight seemed somehow a lesser thing.