Poetry by Poem

2005-09-08T10:45:00.000+10:00

Our Chimney (Our Emasculated House)

Mum tore the chimney off our house. It had been steely, erect, unsinkable in the tile-waves, locks of heat crimping its sides every Christmas after we lit the fire to pretend it was winter while Mum blanched in her memories and we sweated silently over unopened gifts. Smoggy curls, almost bad breath, snaked from its nostrils on Sundays when her swampy sighs extinguished us all, and rolling black smoke, freckled with sparks, spumed heavenward when we made the fire too big and sprinkled on secret handfuls of flour – like little witch doctors repulsing disease. But it’s just a hole now.

2005-07-17T22:32:00.000+10:00

Stair

2005-07-13T22:19:00.000+10:00

Orange

If the world really were an orange; the sun a mouth burning for refreshment; that cosmic palate would find this fruit under-ripe and swollen with sugarless juices, full of pips – an eternity of pips – as membranous and thin skinned as four-day-old soup and querulous in the teeth. But, ultimately, great for digestion.

2005-07-12T16:56:00.000+10:00

Ben the Painter

Ben has painted the same woman ninety-seven times – and only once nude when he filled a monstrous canvas with her foot. Each time he meticulously cleans every brush and palette and then throws them away with the paint. He shows the paintings – to discouraging reviews – and immediately burns them. Lately, people call Ben a shell.

2005-07-04T17:18:00.000+10:00

Washington DC, July 4

2005-07-03T17:40:00.000+10:00

Scuffs in Space

Why do the stars hurt me when they dominate the sky and swallow me into the absent blackness of space? Why does everything that defines me shudder and reach when I tilt my head back on those inescapable nights? A vacuum must fill itself – perhaps the limitless, extra-terrestrial vacuum wants to fill itself with me. Calls to me to take up the bean’s life, minutely bolster its stuffing. But I am already crowding my little corner of space, aren’t I? – clinging like a tiny bur to more accomplished vacuum-fillers. And besides, the stars, when I optically inhale them, don’t smell like that kind of despair at all. Why should I ache for such a destiny? No. I ache, you see: I am the vacuum – the vacant needer. I am drawing the sky to myself. And it pains a vacuum to suck so desperately at another. My soul doesn’t know any better, of course: it thinks it can just see – in pinhole increments, where the black-wash of emptiness has worn away in tiny, sparkling scuffs – what must be the vast brightness of some full universe behind.

2005-07-02T17:38:00.000+10:00

Niagara Falls

Joel thinks he visited Niagara Falls when he was eight – he remembers the long, sweaty ride in the car, the world’s largest fiberglass crab on the interstate and how sick he got on the last night in the hotel. Really, he only saw the falls on TV when he was eight, remembered driving to Toledo at six, getting sick on that trip and a vivid dream of the crab – which he climbed through a hole in the bottom of and played in, glowing red like the rest of the frame-worked insides, until he woke up. But last November when he visited the falls he was so overcome by the nostalgia of it that I couldn’t tell him it was all an elaborate coalition of rusty neural connections. So we watched the water rend the air and collide with itself in a skyscraper spray before melting together and sliding smoothly down-river. And Joel told me it was just how he remembered it, only smaller. It was smaller – of course – because Joel is just a neural connection in my brain, marveling forever at another, more watery one.

2005-07-01T17:40:00.000+10:00

Crickets

Whenever I stamp the ground the crickets stop singing. I am angry about their unceasing, scratchy drone and my stomp lets them know it – know how terrible I am in my anger. For thirty seconds I am their master. I think – how powerful I am, raging lord of the crickets. But it starts again – louder this time. Nothing happened, they’re saying, he’s just giant, impotent Huff. And now I am really enraged, stamping furiously, jumping up and down to make them obey me. I could crush them between my fingers – I think – I could stamp every one of them into little black stains. If I could see them all. But, as hard as I try, I can’t crush the inside of my head where they are clawing me.

2005-03-12T15:22:00.000+11:00

Riverden

23

Nixus and the Surges

(untitled)

Stair

White Hat

Washington DC, July 4

2005-02-24T11:12:00.000+11:00

The Plague of Spies

Our town used to be coated – literally coated – in spies. When I screwed open the blinds in the morning three of them would dive behind our lavender bush. When I stood over the toilet I could always hear one sploshing around, examining the parts in the septic tank. If I wanted to eat toast for breakfast, sure enough, there was a spy clinging to the spring-loaded plates in the toaster and turning a delicious golden brown. They even got into the seat cushions in our car every morning until my mum stopped driving me to school and made me walk – herds of spies tailing me from across the street.
It was a living hell. A plague of spies. Fire and brimstone, boils and darkness, they all quailed beside the pestilential searching for intelligence. And that’s all they ever did – search for information. That’s what spies do, I suppose. But I had always thought they at least stopped to take romantic hiatuses in the Caribbean – or, at the very least, eat. Our torment was unremitting.
Like everything, I suppose, the plague did have its upsides. For instance, if I wanted to ask my mum, on the far side of the house, where the phone was, I didn’t have to raise my voice. Inevitably there were fifteen or sixteen electronic bugs hidden behind my DVD collection and a corresponding group of spies in every other room of the house listening on indiscreet speaker boxes to every word I said. It was like having the intercom we could never afford. You couldn’t turn it off, but then, you never had to turn it on either. And if I called James to see if he wanted to play cricket, I could guarantee Geoff and Bruce would show up too, having heard our conversation on the spies’ phone tap monitors. We made huge savings on our phone bill the first couple of months. But after that, the phone lines overloaded with taps and no one could get through to so much as their next-door neighbour. It hardly mattered: the oval, by that time, had almost completely transformed into a series of secret entrances to innumerable spy bases anyway. By the time you’d climbed the fence, inadvertently tripping every kind of secret switch ever devised, the oval was a honeycomb of potholes all leading to dingy, beeping war rooms.
My sociology exams scores also benefited at first. All I had to do was shake a spy out of my pencil case, grab him by the tiny collar on his miniature trench coat and demand the answer to question 27 (or whichever I was stumped on) and tell my teacher later that the little blighter had disturbed my concentration. Soon, however, the spies began taking interrogation resistance training and I had to use a safety pin to get results. By the end of the first semester they had started carrying microscopic lipstick guns which left a welt on the back of my hand and a few of them even drank poison to avoid being taken alive.
The irony in all this, of course, was that the spies eventually revealed everything anyway. Government agents will give their lives to protect information that, as everyone well knows, will be “declassified” in a year or two and become public knowledge – the sort of thing you might read on the twelfth page.
With our spies, it took six months. Everything they had unearthed in their relentless white-goods stakeouts and septic tank adventures in the early days of the plague promptly appeared on the community noticeboard at Safeway the day after school got out. Naturally, it took up the entire board and about thirty feet of the blank wall around it. In the following months, Safeway was forced to turn their entire back wall into a massive noticeboard and clear out all the ice machines, ATMs and guide dog money banks in order to make room for the flood of curious visitors – everyone in town.
We all found out that a lot more had been going on in our town than we thought: that Toby Jason, the school janitor, had been secretly involved with a feminist-communist-Maoist group that was using his knowledge of ammonia to deforest parts of Mexico. That my Mum and I had hidden detailed schematics for the construction of a satellite super-weapon. That the manager of Safeway had had a sordid affair with the state Premier’s wife in order to keep her quiet about a government coup he was organizing. And that Mrs Redding had developed plans for a surprise meal of Brussels sprouts on Mr Redding’s birthday to get him back for forgetting their anniversary. She vehemently denied it, of course, but no one believed her.
The plague of spies became a plague of information.
Everyone turned into an insufferable know-it-all. Safeway was the new internet. Everything the spies posted there became irrefutable, canonized, reverenced. And everything was posted there. From how many spoons of sugar little Delia Thomas put on her Weetbix Tuesday morning to the formula for the mind-control drugs the school principle had apparently been using on every student that came into his office.
Initially, the more exotic reports were hard to believe. But, even when it came to those plans for a real-life Death Star I supposedly had behind a false wall in my wardrobe, I was soon wracked by doubts. What if it were true? What if I was refusing to look into my heart? What if I had lied to myself all these years? Surely the spies were better at finding things out than I was. Before a week had passed I admitted it all.
“I was misled,” I bawled to anyone I saw in the street, “my espionage days are over. I swear. I swear on my grave!”
But I was wasting my breath – the rest of the town had already learned to live with their guilt, which quickly became a numbing, insurmountable weight. The only sure diversion was absorbing as much from the wall as possible and having as informed an opinion about other people’s conspiracies as anyone in town.
And the spies went on spying – declassifying – revealing – and the town went on soaking up the information. I was implicated in at least four other world domination schemes by the end of the year and every other detail of my – as things were turning out – sordid life were household facts. Not that I was singled out. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. Not in the way of a small town gossip chain, but of an encyclopaedia – the facts were all well documented, the images hard to refute, the source undeniably meticulous.
Safeway soon surrendered the rest of its walls to the spies’ burgeoning reports and our town surrendered to twenty-four hour punditry. People stopped asking questions – why should they? They could read the answer on the walls – and started giving opinions. And giving and giving and giving, until all the spies had to spy on was an endless series of opinions about other people’s problems. When the opinions themselves started filling up the declassification walls in the middle of the second year, people gave up talking all together and sat on the cold Safeway linoleum all day long, fervently reading lies about opinions about lies.
And that’s when the plague of spies abruptly ended. Because when locusts run out of grain to devour, they die or swarm to greener pastures. The spies ran out of information. There wasn’t the slightest bit of intelligence left to be gathered in our town – even made-up conspiracies wouldn’t hold water now that we were all permanently bustled up together in a supermarket. So the spies packed their miniscule bags, burned their top-secret orders and left us – a town of idiots with an abandoned honeycomb for a cricket oval.

2005-02-12T14:45:00.000+11:00

White Hat

2005-01-15T14:43:00.000+11:00

Jana

When you have been soaked in life as long as Jana – so long that your skin is tossed in a pile about your besotted muscles and most of your weary hair has rinsed away – it is hard to climb over the smallest fence. But Jana has just done it and landed with a life-logged squeal.

2004-11-25T11:27:00.000+11:00

(untitled)

2004-11-24T12:12:00.000+11:00

Pieces

My friend is a writer – pretends he’s one, anyway. He gives me his “pieces” – they’re pieces of paper – and thinks he can convince me the clouds are “bubbling with sponged up light” or that being polite is just a “worn out welcome mat – all holes and bare threads”. He thinks its funny, revealing, whatever. I reckon he’s just “feeling out of control” – as my girlfriend always says – trying to put the world in an original way so he can claim it’s his, or something. The fact is – just like the rest of us – he doesn’t know what the hell the clouds or pretending to give a rip about the weather are about. You’re not God, you know – I wanna tell him –you can’t say something and expect it to just be that way. I’m not convinced, anyway. I go ahead and tell him his “pieces” are great, though, and he believes me.

2004-11-23T12:48:00.000+11:00

The Untimely Death of a Telemarketer

One Saturday evening Phil Hearndt sat patriarchally at dinner with his family and complained about his job as a telemarketer.
“You wouldn’t believe some of these people,” he hollered between open-mouthed chews of meatloaf. “We tell them they’ve won a free vacation to the Bahamas – or a three hundred dollar stereo or a flat screen TV and they hum and haw like a bunch of donkeys.” When he “hummed” and “hawed” little bits of mashed potato sprayed onto the table and his twelve-year-old son, Christopher, who burst into gargly giggles – at which his food shot from his mouth, onto his sister’s plate and into her iced-tea.
“They don’t want it,” Phil griped on incredulously. “They tell me it has to be a scam. A multi-national, billion dollar-a-year company scammin’ people! Well how do you like that? Dumb as a damn post.” He waved his fork and some carrots flew across the room. Christopher was almost in tears.
“All they have to do is sign up for a year of service – and we even install the dish and the receivers free – who wouldn’t want satellite TV, anyway? Tell me that. With cable there’s no comparison.”
Phil’s wife, Cynthia, looked listlessly at the dining room wall and said flatly, “well, honey, some people just can’t afford to have satellite.”
“Can’t afford!” Phil erupted, hitting the table with his knife-clutching fist and upsetting the water in his glass. “Dear, we’re offering them a free four thousand dollar vacation – the monthly fee – and you get about three hundred channels – is nothing compared to that. Besides, we have to make our money somehow.”
There was a food laden stream of spilled water running from the bottom of his glass and into his lap. Christopher was cackling so hard he flopped sideways onto his sister, Sara, and started pushing her out of her chair. She shoved him with a scowl and an irritated, six-year-old whine.
“Why don’t you get a new job, sweetie?” his wife asked dutifully. And then the phone rang. Phil exploded from his chair, still in the throes of disbelief at universal stupidity, and strode into the kitchen to answer it.
“Hello?” he complained at the handset.
“Hello, is this mister Hearndt?” said the cheery, plastic voice on the other end.
“Yes.”
“Well, hi mister Hearndt, my name is Holly from AOD Services and I’m calling to inform you that your name was entered into our monthly promotional drawing and you’ve won our grand prize for this month. Congratulations.” Phil turned toward the dining room and laughed triumphantly.
“Ha, ha,” he shouted, “talk about timing. Now I’ll show you how a promotional contest winner ought to handle himself.” He turned back to the phone and fairly yelled at the woman on the other end.
“So, tell me, what do I have to subscribe to – what did I win?”
“Well, sir, AOD Services is the Angel of Death’s customer benefits provider, and since our records show that you are already a subscribing member to the Angel of Death’s basic services, and your number has been drawn at random by our computer, you’re eligible to receive, absolutely free, passes for you and four friends or family members into paradise after death.” Phil was silent for a moment, then he bellowed raucously,
“Alright, but what do I have to sign up for – what’s the scam?”
The woman hesitated – obviously not used to being so easily and quickly received – and then said indignantly: “There’s no scam, sir. This is an international corporation that has been operating in the United States since nineteen ten. We serve millions of customers a day. Scam, oh.”
“Ha, ha,” Phil forced, “just kidding. I’m in telemarketing myself, and I was just explaining to my family the way people are about these calls – morons, in my opinion. Now, you say you guys have been in business since nineteen ten? I would have thought the Angel of Death had been going a lot longer than that.”
“Of course, you’re right,” she replied pleasantly, “but this branch of the company was only incorporated in the US in nineteen ten. But, yes, we have a history much longer than that.” Phil was cleaning his teeth with his fingernail as she went on, “So, you said you have a family? I’m sure they’ll be excited. All you have to do to redeem your four, totally free passes into heaven is join one of our monthly payment plans based on a yearly contract. If you’d like, I can quote you the prices for just the family plans.”
“You see,” he boomed, slapping his knee, “I know about these things – it’s no surprise to me. Shoot.” Then aside to the dining room: “I’m handling this, kids, just wait till you hear what your dad’s won for this sorry crew.”
“Alright, you ready?” she chirped boredly. “Our Family Choices Plan starts at nineteen ninety-five a month for the basic and twenty-nine ninety-five for the deluxe plan and ensures that you and your family will have comfortable or exciting deaths. Our Family Life Plan is twenty-nine ninety-five for the basic and forty-nine ninety-five for the deluxe and it guarantees that you and your family will all live to ripe old ages and die comfortably. We also have a Parents and Kids Plan which allows family members to decide their death orders amongst themselves and that’s a special rate of nineteen ninety-five. Finally, in case you’re interested, all plans come with a free Euthanasia service, which provides painless, instant death at the time of request.” She took a deep breath and then plunged back into the quick monotony of her schpiel. “I just need to get the number for a major credit card, assuming you have one, and your plan preference and those four passes as well as free equipment and installation are yours.”
“Hoo, whee,” said Phil scratching his underarm, “So, even the ol’ Grim Reaper’s turned into a Capitalist. Can’t say that I blame him. Now, before I go and give you the keys to my bank account over here, you’re going to have to sell me a little better on this prize I’ve won – I’m a faithful Baptist church-goer, you know. And I provide an all-important warm body for our weekly street evangelism team – helps draw the crowds. I look every bit as secular as the best of ‘em, too. Sometimes I even hand out a few tracts. So why should I want these passes to paradise of yours?”
“Well, a telemarketer and a witnesser,” she said, sounding impressed. “Look, between you and me, with all the different religions and stuff floating around these days, it’s really hard to be confident about any specific one. Besides, with these passes, you and your family won’t have to worry about going to church and street evangelism and so on or keeping the commandments or saying sutras or any of that, ever again. And on top of that, you’ll have the peace and confidence our family plans offer at incredibly low prices. You have to admit, you’ll be hard put to find these kinds of supernatural services at these kinds of rates.”
“Hmm,” he said breathing in with enormous gusto and puffing his chest paternally. “You’ve got a good point about that church thing. That’s a hell of a prize you’re giving away. You give one of those every month?”
“Not always this one, but our prizes are formidable.”
“Well, I think that family life thingamy sounds pretty good.”
“Basic or deluxe?”
“Basic should do ‘er.”
“Alright, I’ll just need information from a major credit card and then you’re address and we can have a serviceman over there to complete your free installation and drop off your prize as soon as tonight.” He gave her the numbers, tossed a goodnight and sauntered into the dining room to proclaim the omni-benevolence of the father while Christopher blew bubbles in his glass and sprayed meatloafy water onto Sara – and Sara made mortified, princess faces in return.
The doorbell rang a little before eight and Cynthia opened it to find a turnip-faced, youth with an AOD baseball cap and a box full of packing beans. He trundled his load into the living room, as sparkly and fresh as morning dew, and began unpacking the box. The family bunched around him domestically – like cows – and he handed them each a shiny, chrome loop and a little plastic bag of fitting accessories. Then he poised himself in front of them – his teeth a perfect octave of polished ivories aching to be tickled.
“All we’re gonna do tonight is get each of you fitted with one of these patented, AOD neck rings and make sure it’s all snug and comfortable and then we’ll do a couple of tests. Once you’re satisfied, I’ll give you your free passes – congratulations on winning those, by the way. What a great prize, eh? This shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.”
“What are these things for?” Phil squinted, eyeing his ring impotently.
“These are guaranteed to protect you all from the Angel of Death’s scythe or sickle or whatever you wanna call it, for at least another fifty years – in the case of Mom and Dad – and maybe, what? Seventy or eighty for the kids?”
“I thought the Angel of Death provided this service,” Cynthia piped with sudden anxiety and a sharp, doubtful glance at her husband.
“He is, he is,” cooed the installationist, reassuringly, “but it’s not easy for him, with his work load, to distinguish special service subscribers from regular, non-paying customers. So he designed these to stop himself making a mistake – they’re a unique alloy, the only thing his sickle can’t cut through.”
“Couldn’t he just cut off half our bodies or slice our brains, or something,” said Christopher wickedly. And his sister exclaimed, “Ooh, you’re so gross,” with what seemed a lapse in her usual witty form.
“Nope,” said the lad, “it’s pretty tried and true the neck is the only reaping spot – someone did die after a swipe to the head, but that’s only happened once. I think you’ll find, as you go along with our service that he’ll occasionally get you elsewhere – in which case you might experience some temporary tingling or numbness in a limb or muscle group – but don’t worry about it. It’s just reassurance that the collars are working properly.” Everyone watched him raptly as he spoke, eyes as narrow as portable lavatories and just as vacant.
“The rings can be removed easily, like so,” he demonstrated with one of them, “for bathing and so on – just don’t forget to put it back on.” He chuckled and winked at Sara like an old uncle.
“Let’s start with you, Dad,” he said after a long pause had reassured him there were no further questions and proceeded to tinker with Phil’s ring in a vastly un-gentle manner – to the detriment of both Phil’s neck and his temperament. It took him a little over an hour to get everyone properly fitted, either because “Dad” couldn’t keep his head still long enough to get the size adjusted or because Sara’s chin kept getting in the way as she attempted to catch a glimpse of herself in the new accessory. When he finally stepped back and said, “there we go,” with drawn out syllables, the family looked like a lined-up traveling gospel group of upper spinal injury victims.
“These aren’t very comfortable,” Christopher complained, but Sara was of a different opinion: “I think they look pretty,” she peeped happily, continuing to strain her head for the impossible peak at her own neck.
“Don’t worry,” said the installer, “You’ll get used to them in a few days. Now for the main event.” And he produced the four free passes to paradise which had been inscribed with the names of each person in the family – Phil noted that he had provided no such information – and were every bit as impressive as anyone could have hoped. They were shimmering gold and had very realistic holograms of the heavenly city on one side and the Grim Reaper himself on the other. Phil hallooed victoriously.
“Ha! You see? Old Dad’s pulled through this time, eh kids? No more Sunday School for you two, no way. Tomorrow we’re going to church just to wave those pompous stiffs a goodbye and good-riddance.” And he began dancing around the room, drunk with how impressed he was at himself, and grabbed his wife and spun her around. For her part, she wasn’t exactly “sitting loose in the saddle” and kept grimacing and adjusting her head in its new stirrup. The two kids were first paralyzed with disbelief and then, as it dawned on them that their dad meant what he said about Sunday School, became gleefully animated. There was even a sort of Hearndt abomination when Christopher grabbed his sister’s hand and they danced together, whooping and clapping with their Davidic father – who, thankfully, did not develop that patriarch’s state of undress.
The delivery and installation boy yelled that he would leave the company contact number on the table in case they had any questions and left without so much as a have-a-nice-life. The celebrations continued for some time after he was gone and only melted away when they all realized how sweaty they were getting “under the collar”.

They arrived at church the next day early enough to get in a full ration of gloating without actually having to attend the service. Sara’s Sunday School teacher had her stand up in front of the class and show everyone her golden pass as well as explain what her pretty chrome ring was for – which, of course, she was totally incapable of doing. After show-and-tell she sat back down on the floor out of sheer habit and was happily listening to the story of the rich man and Lazarus – who “didn’t get to heaven just by being poor, kids” – when her brother came in to remind her they didn’t like Sunday School and wouldn’t be attending.
In his class, Christopher was teased obtusely for wearing a “girly” ring around his neck but his classmates quickly changed their tune when he told them the neck guard assured him a free pass to heaven and, more importantly, a ticket out of Sunday School.
Phil, for his part, whirled directly into the sanctuary to flaunt his golden pass under the broad Baptist nose of the pastor and some deacons, all of whom examined it sanctimoniously. In fact, the Pastor breathed in so authoritatively when he had it between his digits that one diminutive deacon was almost nasally raptured. He was duly impressed – “this depiction of the eschatological city is very true to life” – but, in the final analysis, advised Phil not to take his family out of church. One of the deacons even reminded him of a faith pledge for a thousand dollars he had apparently made at the beginning of the year.
“Gentlemen,” Phil said to them expansively as he walked towards the lobby, “faith pledges are strictly for non promotional-competition winners.” And he yelled to his kids and floated piously to the car where his wife had been waiting proverbially, nervous mouth taut. They spent the rest of the day celebrating at a restaurant and being ogled by everyone that saw them.
Christopher tried jumping off the roof of the house, that evening – something he had only avoided until now because no one had been able to assure him a deathless landing – and found that, while the collar worked well at keeping him alive, it did nothing to assuage his searing rump pain. Nevertheless, they all went to bed in high spirits.

The next morning, however, those same high spirits seemed to have been dunked in old coffee and dropped between the cracks in the couch cushions. No one had slept a wink all night and everyone had the most horrible cramps in their necks. They oozed viscously to school and work, spoke to each other in grumbles and grunts when they got home and crawled grouchily into bed at some unprecedented early hour. From there, the week only got worse.
Sara woke up two or three times every night and ran weeping to her parent’s bedroom to sobbingly complain that her foot or hand or fingernails had gone to sleep. “The reaper is after me,” she cried, “he never stops swiping at me!”
Christopher refused to remove his collar, even for showering. He claimed he was too frightened the Angel of Death was waiting anxiously to get him the moment he was off his guard, after that leap from the roof. Around the house, however, the suspicious point was made – by more than one person – that he had never liked showers in the first place and was just taking advantage of a convenient excuse. Whatever the case, his pubescent body became so rancid by the middle of the week that his mother stopped letting him eat dinner with the family. Naturally, when he was cut off from a nightly opportunity to gastronomically disgust his sister, the boy showed signs of depression.
His parents had problems of their own, however. Cynthia was not able to look down enough, thanks to the restrictive collar, to cut vegetables, do the dishes or mend anyone’s trousers. On Thursday they realized they had run out of forks, were all wearing sweat pants and were developing vitamin A deficiencies. She also refused to go out wearing “this hideous metal band” and Phil didn’t allow her to take it off for more than a few minutes at a time. Two children were left standing outside their school in the rain more than once – sweating profusely under the collars.
Work became an impossibility for Phil. The discomfort of the neck-band combined with his lack of sleep rendered concentration moot. His talents for customer service turned sour and lumpy. He told one potential that she was as likely to die now as in ten years, apologized for being so thoughtless and then shared with her that he was developing a horribly itchy rash on his neck. She, of course, received this well, having been overjoyed at the call from a telemarketer to begin with.
At home he was a nervous wreck. On Friday night he chipped a golf ball into the refrigerator along with a pitching wedge. On Saturday night he stood up at the table, called Christopher into the room, and made the following announcement:
“Dammit, I’m canceling this blasted service. I don’t care what the damn cancellation fee is. I’ve never seen a family so worried about dying in all my life. And if they don’t have some magic pills to make this rash on my neck go away, so help me, I’ll set a fire under ‘em!” And with that, he stormed into the kitchen, slammed the refrigerator door, which now only pretended to close, and violently snatched the phone off the hook.
“Hello, AOD Services,” said a monotonous voice on the other end.
“Dammit, I’m canceling this blasted service,” shouted Phil, quoting himself. “I don’t care what the damn cancellation fee – Oh yes, I know there is one, yes, yes, yes – and I better get some magic pills for this rash, overnight the damn things to me, understand?”
“Excuse me, sir,” the voice said patronizingly. “If you want to cancel your service you’ll have to speak to Debbie in the claims department. Please hold.”
The usual hold music ensued. Its mind-numbing, bass-less tones stole the air right out of Phil’s sails and he stood there slump-shouldered and becalmed while Christopher took the opportunity to make up for lost time with his food and his sister – both of which had not obviously missed him.
After a moment, a new, slightly more inflected voice came on the line, “This is claims.”
“Look,” said Phil as meekly as if the Fur Elise had given him rickets, “My name’s Phil Hearndt – this Family Life Bit isn’t working out too well for us and we’d like to cancel.”
“What’s the trouble with the service, sir? Maybe we can help you out,” she said as if she had found cancel under chat in the thesaurus. Phil grunted a knowing, porcine grunt.
“Well,” he said, hesitant to play her game, “these ring things aren’t too comfortable, my daughter’s having trouble sleeping.”
“Of course,” she said, without missing a beat. “If the rings are worn for too long at a stretch they can get uncomfortable.”
“Too long at a stretch?” Phil burst out, as if he had sat on a pin. “Too long at a stretch, she says!”
“Yes sir. Our deluxe package is specifically designed to eliminate any such discomfort – there is no protective apparel of any kind involved. We could switch you to that plan as soon as…tomorrow, I think. All I need is your authorization.”
“Now hold on,” said Phil with irritation – his dander was beginning to get up again. “I said I wanted to cancel. Cancel means no more to pay, no more service and some treatment for this rash on my neck – overnighted to me.”
“Are you certain you want to do that, Mr. – uh – Hearndt? We have an early cancellation fee of three hundred dollars. Besides, the peace of mind our plans provide is the best you’re going to find on the market right now – all of our products and services are designed by Mr. Reaper, himself.”
“I realize that.” Phil ran his hand through his hair vengefully and watched more strands than he cared to count fall morosely to the floor. “But, you know, it just occurred to me that I probably don’t need your stupid guarantees of long life anyway. Who said I’m not gonna live to be ninety-seven on my own, huh? Tell me that.”
This seemingly strong point did nothing to discourage Debbie from the claims department – in fact, her voice perked up.
“If you’d like,” she almost squeaked, “I can check on that for you.”
“You mean, check on how long I’m supposed to live?” he gasped. She had wrong-footed him.
“Sure, the Angel of Death has his personal appointment planner loaded into our database so that we can better know how to serve our customers. Give me just a minute, here.” There was a clerical clicking and clacking of keyboard keys and a number of concentrated mumbles. Phil’s heart thumped and yearned like a Psalmists.
“Ooh,” she said, with a tone that brought his dinner into his throat. “You’re scheduled for the thirteenth of May – sometime in the evening.”
“The thirteenth of May?” Phil screamed, “that’s less than a month from now.”
“I’m very sorry,” she said, obviously working hard to muster what pitiful resources of empathy she possessed. Then she was quiet. And Phil was quiet – except for his heavy panting into the mouthpiece.
“Alright,” he sighed finally. “Upgrade me to the damned Deluxe – but it better be good. I’m warning you right now. I know how these things work, believe me, I know ‘em inside and out. I’ll hang you out to dry if there’s anymore foul play with this.”

And so, the next day, the pale installation boy was back to beaming cheerily in the doorway, this time with a teetering stack of boxes he could barely keep afloat on the scrawny puddle of his body, and a wizened smile.
“Firstly,” he said when he had herded the family into the living room again. “We’ll get those neck guards off of you all. Uncomfortable, huh?” He said uncomfortable as if he had warned them against such impractical fashion accessories all along. There was weary jubilation. A tiny peep of joy even slipped from Sara’s worry-worn little mouth before her face suddenly tightened with concern.
“What if he comes to kill us?” she said with innocent terror – her family were all thinking the same thing, though their terror, for the most part, was not quite so innocent.
“Not to worry,” chuckled the installation kid condescendingly, “I’ve got a new solution for that problem – the Deluxe solution.” And he whipped a long length of bright orange tape from one of the boxes with the elegant grace of a rhythmic gymnast.
“Wow,” gasped the family together – it was one of those seemingly scheduled gasps.
“With three hundred feet of this stuff, you guys can kiss itchy, stiff necks goodbye,” the pale-faced one said. “While I’m helping you remove your neck guards be thinking of the places you visit or spend the most time at. When you’ve got your list we’ll surround each location with a barrier of this electromagnetic warning tape and then Mr. Angel of Death will know where not to go so he doesn’t send his service subscribers – you guys – to you-know-where.”
He set about removing neck guards to general relief – Christopher excluded, of course. He refused to let the delivery boy lay so much as a turnipy finger on his neck, insisting there was still the incident with the roof to think of. His father could be heard making an aside to the effect that there was still his excuse not to shower to think of.
The installationist, however, wasn’t the least bit phased by this objection and produced a bottle of skin-tone lacquer, which he vivaciously applied to Christopher’s guarded neck.
“No one will even know the difference,” the artist beamed, “the deluxe package comes with a few little surprises like that.” And he winked at Sara again who responded by pointing out that Christopher’s neck looked a little greenish – not to mention “puffed up like a hotdog bun”.
“It’s fine,” Phil grunted irritably. “How about these barriers? Let’s get moving – I’ve had enough of this bologna to last me ‘till next leap year.” But his voice was a tremolo – he hadn’t forgotten about the thirteenth of May.

After a long discussion, the decision was to put the tape around the house, the car, the school, Phil and Cynthia’s offices and the supermarket. At the supermarket, however, Phil remembered that he had been intending to make Zanies Bar a new frequented haunt, now that Church was out of the picture, and he reduced the taped supermarket area to just the produce section – on account of their recent vitamin problem – and the ethnic foods, which was next to the produce. As it turned out, the tape, once laid, stuck permanently and had wires running through it that had to be connected at the end to a large electronic box. Christopher and Sara had both asked to be taped themselves but the box for the car consumed the entire trunk and they soon realized the impracticability of this plan.
When everything had been secured the pale lad gave them some final instructions:
“Stay within the taped areas and you won’t have any problems with Mr. Reaper until well into your nineties – got it? Good. Now, you may find that the color fades on the tape – don’t panic. The signal will still be just as strong – the Angel of Death has a detector that goes off when he comes near the perimeter and tells him not to reap anyone in that area. Have fun guys. Hope there’s no more problems.” And with that he was gone in a swirl of packing peanuts and piano-key teeth.
They all watched him go with secret despair. Phil stared at the bright orange stripe around his Explorer and murmured, “damn”, puckering his lips with oafish resignation.
Throughout the following month, Hearndt family life deteriorated predictably. The kids were quickly tired of being able to go only to school and back. At first, there were family car rides to look at their friends’ houses or McDonalds. But this was soon abandoned as more depressing than staying home and watching TV. Christopher continually bragged that his decision to keep the neck guard gave him the freedom to go anywhere he wanted, drove his sister and parents mad with it, and never actually made good on a single word – that leap from the roof kept him perpetually quaking in his boots, even twice protected.
Fruit and vegetables were the standard fare for breakfast lunch and dinner until “brother” and “sister” began seizing and foaming in epileptic rebellion and “Dad” began taking his meals at Zanies. Of course, discipline had been tossed the moment everyone realized they had no incentive for either behaving themselves or bothering to force anyone else to and the parental path of least resistance was embarked upon. This meant that everyone’s diet soon consisted of Ramen noodles or tortillas for breakfast and lard-laden Zanies for dinner. Pounds were gained, cholesterol soared, breath deteriorated.
Phil became as brittle as a communion wafer in the weeks leading up to the thirteenth. On the day itself he refused to get out of bed at all and spent the hours rolling around like a greasy, twitching melon, long overripe.
Once the day came and went leaving him relatively unscathed, however, his whole attitude changed and he quickly transformed himself into a thankless bigot – drinking as much as he wanted and washing it down with burgers and curse words and pie. What friends he had quickly fled – he could never go anywhere with them anyway – and his social graces with them.
Christopher’s decision to retain both his neck guard and daily layers of bacteria continued to produce fascinating outcomes. Everywhere he went – school – people asked him if he wasn’t feeling alright, he certainly had swollen glands, they said, “and doesn’t he look a little green around the gills.” It wasn’t long before he realized the sympathy value of green gills, started coming home early every day and spent his time sitting, un-showered, in front of the TV, learning absolutely nothing and grinning like an unreformed pope. His mother got so tired of picking him up from school and following him around the house with pot pourie that she snuck into his room one night and removed the festering neck guard herself. The next day, after a great deal of moaning and rolling around in bed, it was discovered that the boy was no longer capable of supporting the weight of his own head and the ring had to be reinstalled – to everyone’s dismay. As it turned out, however, his long abandonment of sanitation eventually paid off by thoroughly pickling him and transforming his reek into a savory, bitter-sweet aroma
About six weeks after the changeover to the deluxe package, the school officials decided the orange tape around their campus was unsightly and had a janitor scrub it until it was white. Sara was an emotional Sodom and Gomorrah – post-brimstone.
“How do I know if I go outside the lines?” she wailed. “What if he swoops down and cuts off my head? I want my neck ring back. I don’t want to die.” Once again, there was little sleep to be had at night by anyone within earshot – except, perhaps Christopher, whose ears were blocked with dirt and who had nothing to worry about anyway since he no longer left the house.
Cynthia quit her job so she could dedicate herself to fulltime nocturnal comforting and pot pourie burning during the day – the latter having become an addiction. Phil – who had already turned somewhat belligerent – fell off the deep-end, so to speak, broke a co-worker’s nose with a hurled keyboard and quickly lost his job as well.
Suddenly, there was a crisis. The Hearndts would only be able to afford the deluxe package, to say nothing of their house, school, car and nightly Zanies, for a month or two at most. Phil, hung over from the previous night’s one-too-many, dug up the customer service number in an apoplectic frenzy.
“We’ve got to cancel,” he screamed before the operator could even say hello. “We’ve all gone mad. We can’t survive another day of this. We’re going to keep these free passes to heaven – understand? – cut our losses and let that be that. I don’t care if I die as tender as a veal! I’m the size of a barn, I haven’t slept in a week and I don’t think I’ve been sober in two.”
“Well, sir, our cancellation fee for the deluxe package is seven hundred and fifty dollars. We – ” but he cut her off, his voice finding a fevered, sermonic register.
“Why don’t you just go ahead and kill me now!” He paused to let his bitter rhetoric sink in. But the woman on the other end had apparently heard this a thousand times.
“Alright, sir, if you’re sure. I’ll go ahead and page Mr. Reaper right now. This may take a few moments,” and her voice gave way to the trebly Fur Elise.
The Euthanasia service! He had forgotten it. He screamed into the phone for her to stop, to call it off, to perform a slew of obscene acts. But there was just the empty, impersonal clunk of that hold music. He let the phone drop. He had come to it at last.

Several minutes passed. He pulled his now only remotely impressive free pass out of his pocket and clutched it childishly, praying long neglected bedtime prayers. There was a brightness and he was no longer in his kitchen – he was standing before the pearly gates themselves – every bit as glorious as any Sunday morning flannel-graf had promised – waiting in an only-too-familiar-style line to speak with the all-too-cliché gate-keeper. Frantically he looked at his hands – they were still clutching that pass, and on it, his name was still legible.
It took an hour of celestial inefficiency to finally bring him under personal scrutiny by an emaciated, scowling St. Peter behind a dizzyingly lofty podium. The skin on that apostle’s face was as loose and wrinkly as a deflated football bladder and his voice reminded Phil of the sound a roach makes when it is stepped on.
“Name,” he croaked.
“Philip Hearndt.”
“Let me see, Phil – F, F, G – H. Ah ha. So – a telemarketer and a witnesser, eh? Impressive.” The old man looked up over the predictable bifocals. “Make your claim,” he went on slowly. “Why should we let you in?”
Phil had to hold the gold pass all the way above his head just to put it in the keeper’s outstretched hand.
“Hm. A free pass, eh? Don’t tell me – you won this in a promotional competition?” Phil nodded.
“Hoo Hoo,” the old man cackled, putting a finger to his nose. “I know about these things. Know ‘em up and down and backwards and forwards. Yessir.” And he began to scrutinize the pass minutely, chuckling to himself abstrusely as he did so.
After a moment he murmured, “no, nope, I’m sorry, this pass is expired. See.” And he held it out pointing to some miniscule words on the back. “Mm hm, this was only valid for the thirteenth of May – probably your originally scheduled appointment – you can’t use it now. Unless there’s anything else, it looks like your headed…outta here, fella.”
Phil gaped at him in shock. He should have known.
“Isn’t there anything you can do?” he pleaded raspily. “I’ve clearly been victimized here.”
“Sorry. You did come in here a little on the tipsy side, after all, not to mention thirty pounds overweight.”
Phil fell to his knees in devastation. He ran his hands desperately through his hair. Not a strand fell out.
“Oh, if only I’d kept on going to church,” he sobbed to himself, “if only I’d just kept going to church.”
“You went to a Baptist church?” the old man inquired, leaning in nosily. Phil nodded.
“Ha. You kiddin’ me,” the crackling voice bawled. “AOD bought out the Baptist church years ago. Heck they bought out half of Protestantism and most of the Catholics. Only those Pentecostals stayed independent – but even with them you’re basically gettin’ the same sorta bait-n-switch deal.”
“What are you saying?” Phil whimpered, looking up out of his prostration.
“Well,” the old man replied, “old Grim knew some people just preferred other brands over his – you know, tithes and abstinence from this, that and the other over monthly fees, or Our Fathers or whatever – so he bought the others out and made them part of his parent corporation but kept the names and product packaging and all that. You have to hand it to him – guy’s got most of ‘is disciples in the old upper room.” The gate-keeper tapped his cranium, clearly impressed, then shouted, “Next”.
Phil was still staring at him blankly when there was a sudden resumption of the tinny Fur Elise, an overwhelming darkness and the growing sensation of heat under his feet.

2004-11-21T09:15:00.000+11:00

Riverden

2004-11-20T10:10:00.000+11:00

The First Conversation About Myself
()

“Where are we?” he said and leaned against the table.
“My dining room,” was my smug reply. “You’re leaning on my dining room table.”
“I know this is your dining room. How did we get here?” He seemed agitated – genuinely confused.
“Don’t you know?” I said. “This is one of my short stories – it begins in this room.”
He stood up and rubbed his hand through his hair. He took in the room with a wide-eyed puff of his cheeks.
“So,” he said, after a moment. “This is your story and I’m one of its characters. I don’t believe it.” Clearly, he was forcing himself to be doubtful.
“It’s true,” I said with a shake of my head – he knew it was. “Look: in a second you’re going to say…” and I told him.
He stared at me, trying to look incredulous. He blinked too many times.
Then he said it.
“There you see,” I cut in. “How could I have known you were going to say that?”
“I don’t remember saying anything,” he shot back, raising his voice a little.
I blew an exasperated sigh.
“Ok, I narrated it instead of giving you a direct quote.” He folded his arms, a little relieved.
“Hold on,” I said. “In a few seconds my wife is gonna come unexpectedly through the back door and give me a kiss on the cheek and then run to the bathroom.” He half-smiled.
“Unexpectedly, huh?”
The back door opened and my wife and a little gust of tangy wind rushed through the kitchen and into the dining room.
“Hi” she said breathlessly, and gave me a quick, cold peck on my cheek. She started to hurry on but apparently saw something in my expression.
“What’s wrong?” she breathed, screwing up her face. I didn’t know.
He said:
“You’re so red – do you have a fever or something?” but she couldn’t hear him. Her face was red. For some reason, I found it fascinating.
“Good observation,” I said, turning toward him, “I should write that in.”
“Who are you talking to?” my wife said. Her eyes were suddenly wide.
“Um – ” I wasn’t sure what to say. “You’ll find out later, babe.” She turned her eyes sideways at me and started again for the bathroom.
As soon as she had shut the door, he looked up at me doubtfully.
“You see,” I said. He shoved his hands into his back pockets and turned to the wall – pretended to look at some of my photography.
“You’re omniscient then. Maybe you can tell me what I’m thinking,” he said sarcastically to the wall.
“You don’t have thoughts,” I returned. “the things you say or do are all you are.” I sauntered towards the fridge.
“Hold on,” he suddenly burst out, spinning toward me. “How could you not have known about her red face if you had me saying that? If this is your story you can’t discover something you want to put in the story during the story.” I opened the fridge door uninterestedly.
“Don’t ask me,” I said behind a wall of condiments – “I’m a character in the story too, you know.” He was quiet. The apartment was quiet. I poured myself a drink and leaned against the sink to sip at it. After a moment like that, he said:
“So what am I – what am I going to ‘say and do’? We won’t be in this little apartment the whole time will we?”
I clicked my tongue.
“Yep,” I said, “It’s one of those short, clever, philosophical pieces in the Borgesian tradition.”
“Are people even reading that kind of stuff anymore?” His voice jumped. I raised my eyebrows. He was clearly upset. He walked past me and out onto the balcony.
“If you want,” he started again, almost angrily, “I can spice it up a bit for you – jump off the balcony or something.”
“Actually,” I said, “it’s sort of a suspense-thriller, too” – I hesitated – “You die at the end.” He didn’t say anything but I thought I could hear him breathing a few puffs of sardonic laughter.
“Come on,” I said, moving to join him, “It’s not such a bad story to be in – to be in, I mean.”
“And to die in. I’m assuming this is a first-person, past-tense narration – so you shouldn’t have to worry.” He looked out over the rooftops of our city block. We were quiet again for a moment. Then he popped his lips and tugged on his belt.
“So, what’s going on with your wife?” The sound of her moving around in the back of the apartment had noticeably vanished.
“I don’t think she comes into it anymore.” Quiet. Then:
“Just like that, huh?”
“Just like that,” I said.
He sighed deeply and leaned his head against the wall.
“I guess those chimneys are symbolic or whatever,” he breathed with resignation.
“Whatd’ya mean?” I asked, looking out.
The rooftops were scattered with old, unused brick chimneys. Most of them had TV antennas or satellite dishes sloppily strapped to their mummified sides. The one nearest me teetered, tall, thin and ludicrous from the top of the next building, ready at any moment to fall and shatter like a dry lump of dirt on the concrete below. It was strangely frightening.
Far behind it, a huge brick smoke-stack rose up formidably. It seemed somehow timeless – sound, whole, unencumbered – and the others were childish and redundant in its shadow.
“The little ones all look like they’re trying so hard to be that big one,” he said. I gave him a puzzled look.
“I don’t know, I wouldn’t be saying anything about them unless they had some thematic significance for the story. Right?”
I forced a chuckle.
“Good point,” I said.
He sat down thoughtfully on the first step and clasped his hands to his knees.
“So who am I?” his voice was thin and uncertain – “do I get a back-story, with details, like, say, a name?”
“Sorry,” I said, “no such luck.” He shook his head broadly at that.
“How do I die, then?” his voice raised, “you can at least tell me that.”
I shrugged my shoulders. Maybe I hadn’t thought of it yet. He made a frustrated groan. Then he suddenly held his breath.
“What good is a name to me?” he said. A dark change was sweeping his face.
“You know, I can’t really be anybody, anyway. I exist purely to discuss my own existence in this story – all I can say is what you’ve written.”
“Come on,” I said placatingly again. His sudden tone alarmed me.
I shifted uncomfortably back toward the kitchen.
“Ha,” he puffed and stood up from the step energetically. He turned towards me.
“I’m not a character at all, in this story – I’m just an extension of you.”
“What?” I said more harshly than I meant to then quickly turned my back and stepped all the way into the kitchen. He followed threateningly. Shut the door behind him.
“You know what I’m talking about. I’m only made up of bits out of your head. No doubt only the bits that will put you in just the right light – justify you.”
My breathing was getting heavier. I put my hands onto the kitchen bench and lowered my head anxiously.
“This isn’t about me,” I said, “I write stories.” My voice was really thin now.
“Oh my god!” he burst out, his expression large. “I guess you had to say that. Yeah, you’re just a character too.”
He had moved really close to me. I could feel his hot breath on the back of my neck. I hated him being that close to me. He raved on:
“I know what you’re doing with this.” He paused, nearly panting.
“It makes me so crazy – every word I’m saying right now – you’ve carefully calculated each one. This sentence has probably been revised ten times – ah! That’s so maddening. That’s so maddening.” He grabbed onto the curtain in front of our pantry and wrung it in his hands.
I raised my head slightly. Fumbled with one of the drawer handles. He groaned again. Seemed to deflate a little. Between us several breaths were breathed.
Then something occurred to him:
“Why would you have me here saying this – just criticizing the egocentrism of your art – of creativity in general? – You are trying to justify yourself.”
I looked down again. I was sweating.
“I have to be honest,” I said very quietly. I half hoped he wouldn’t hear me.
“Exactly,” he said more loudly than necessary. “You have to be honest if you want to be great.” He let go of the curtain. The swell had gone out of the moment.
I didn’t say anything. The drawer handle seemed to twitch in my hand. There was another pause.
“In which case –” he flopped wearily against the pantry door frame, it seemed his eyes were welling with despair, “I’m the most dishonest thing you’ve ever dreamed up.”
I started. I looked up at him. He was running his hand tragically through his hair. Our eyes met.
“And this makes for a nice little touch of pathos,” he said wearily. Then he looked away and began sliding to the floor – but I already had a hand in the drawer.
He started to say, “So, tell me, how do I –” and then I reached up and cut his throat.
I backed away quickly and threw the knife down. I breathed deeply, unsteadily. Then I turned, switched off the light and walked out of the room. It was quiet. It was as if he had not even existed.
I told myself it didn’t matter. I had made him up to begin with. And I had no say in the matter, anyway – I’m a character in this story, too.
But I still felt guilty.

2004-11-19T10:09:00.000+11:00

The Supremacist’s Greed

A photographer and a scientist stood on top of a mountain marveling at the tiny, radiant world sprawling below.
“It’s incredible.” sighed the photographer. “I bet nothing in your little world of laws and certainties and controls helps you to enjoy this any better.”
“On the contrary,” replied the scientist sharply, “my understanding of the geological processes that pushed this mountain to such distorted height, refraction of sunlight – which is eight minutes old as we see it in the valley here – to create these exact varieties of what we call color, and the functions of perspective which make things far away seem smaller to our eyes thereby allowing us even to see such a view at all make this experience far more full of wonder than if I’d been an ignorant child.”
This statement threw the photographer into an unaccountably sudden fury:
“Science is greed! You only look at things so closely and carefully and with such devotion to your rigid definitions of meaning so that, by understanding everything about the world you can somehow possess it. It’s the last frontier left to the supremacist cravings of the Western explorer. In art we let things loose into the world instead of caging them up behind suppositional bars.”
The scientist raised an eyebrow and turned to his companion coolly.
“Each time you take a photograph, my friend, aren’t you capturing for yourself a little slice of the universe, spinning it just so to suit your mood or the mandates of your ‘inner demons’, and then proudly vaunting to the world your reality, the world as you have made it – the piece of time you have caught in your butterfly net and pinned to a bit of paper? That is supremacist greed.”
The photographer grimaced at the other and unfolded his arms angrily but said nothing. So they both turned back to the beautiful shrunken world laid out at their feet – that was beautiful just because it was so small – because it could be lapped up into their eyes like a warm soup. And when they were far from that mountain, and it, in its turn had withered into a little snow-capped triangle on the horizon, they looked back and slipped it with delight into the drawers of their memories.

2004-11-18T10:04:00.000+11:00

The Second Conversation About Myself
(Recollections of Tomorrow)

I just sat on the steps with my arms crossed against that surprisingly cold whisk that inevitably stirs Chicago at this time of year. I wondered how I could know so much and do so nothing about it. There are, I'm certain, few people as self-obsessed through self-criticism of their own self-obsession as I am. Pride is the great evil I always say – to myself, to the page, to God, to everyone – self-concern eats me like a cancer, I long to overcome it. I say that – now, again, again – but I don't, I don't overcome it. I sit on the steps in the bristling wind and obsess.
I was remembering – my memory piqued by these thoughts – a man I spoke with on the Brown line platform at Chicago about three years before. (I recount the story here with Hemingway expletives).

He smelled like vomit, or sewage – I could taste that smell the moment he threw himself onto the bench next to me – and the exposed skin on his body was covered in burn-scars and cuts, dozens of them, at various stages of recovery. When he sat down he turned his head robotically toward me and exhaled a cloud of vodka and coffee, vodka and coffee, vodka and coffee – I’ve never seen, felt, smelled human breath with such obvious layers – as he said, "want me to give you something? I ain't askin' you fo a thing, not a thing." He shook his head violently and the faded rainbow fabric he had tied across his forehead filled my vision.
"Other people'll ask you fo this or that. Not me, no sir, obscene-filther. Pow! I'm gonna give you something – the power to know your own destuny. You'll be able to see it! Dis-is what humanity has always been lookin' fo! The power to know they fue-chas. (his face was all pontifical gravity) Now why would I give it to you? I like you. Das-right. You understand me. You know what kinda man I am. We understand each other, obscener." He finished with an intrusive pat of my chest and another wave of dense, humid breathing.
I was still a freshman in college, new to Chicago, new to that stench and that brand of spontaneous intimacy – to those sorts of words (though, in all my time here I haven't heard the things this man was saying to me. The forms, yes, but not the content) – and so I took the empty flattery a little to heart and let my conceited goodwill out of its velvet box where I kept it for the "really needy". I asked him what he meant, how he could possibly give me such a gift. And when I said that, his eyes burst wide and he jumped off the bench like a terrified nocturnal animal.
"Gift!" he shrieked, "A curse, mo like it. A curse, you obscene obscenity! Filth!" Then he caught himself and became suddenly calm again, slid down next to me and started patting my chest.
"You don't believe me, but that's aw-right, that's aw-right. 'He that believes will be a believa!' (this quote came, no-doubt, from the recesses of some imaginary holy book) Now you just listen, little obscener, just sit there an listen. In a-bout thirty secuns this blasphemous right fist is gonna hit Eva-wood over here (he waved at a billboard behind the bench)." I made a face at him. "Shut-up an’ listen!" He fairly jumped on me. "I know what you thinkin' obscener, 'just stop yo-self Jeffrey if you know the fue-cha – just stop yo-self' but that ain't destuny. No sir! That is not destuny" and as he said that he spun around and hit the sign much harder than I could've imagined. I stood up and reached towards him but he held me back with a triumphant fist, swished erratically in front of my face.
"See! That... is not...destuny! The fue-cha is just as said and done as the past, white boy, just as said and done – but ol' Jeffrey here, he just happens to know his own fue-cha just like he knows his own past, das right. You understand me, das right. Filth!"
He stopped waving his fist and forcefully ushered me back onto the bench. He went on confidentially, "This is what I'm tellin' you, I'm 'bout ta give you the powa to know everything that's gonna happen to you, good and bad, the sins of the children's children! You know what I'm sayin', obscener – but you won't be able to do a thing to change it, no m'aam nigga!" And he clapped his hands with a gleeful malevolence. It suddenly seemed he was becoming less inclined to be my friend and more inclined to be something in the order of my deranged murderer.
I stood up to see if the train was coming. Miraculously, mercifully, it was. I had decided that Jeffrey was not one of the "really needy" and that my good-heartedness would be better spent on someone else. He stayed seated on the bench and talked after me as if I wasn't rudely avoiding him:
"I ain't gonna be on this train, so I'll just sit tight, you already got the gift, you already got the gift. You'll know when you got it – tomorrow I'm a dead man, hear me, a dead man – and then you'll get it. BAM! Das right, but that don't bother ol' Jeffrey. Filth, it's you that's gotta worry now. Yes sir! Mmmm! You better find Jesus, filther."
The train began to slow down as it neared the platform. I felt a twinge of guilt at missing the opportunity to tell him that I had found Jesus and that he had changed my life (and so on) but then it occurred to me that trying to “witness” to Jeffrey would be like casting my “pearls to swine” and I felt piously renewed.
Then, just as the last car came up alongside me, I felt that leathery hand over my shoulder – I felt that reek.
"Mmm Hmmm" he said happily, "I ain't even gonna ask you for a dime. I already knows you ain't gonna give me a penny – not a penny. 'Sides I'm a dead man tomorrow anyway and ain't nothin' I can do about it. Right?" And he laughed hysterically.
Almost instinctively I dove my hand into my pocket, much more to prove him wrong than because I wanted to help support a reeking homeless man's drug habit – maybe it would do him some good, be the smelling salts that woke him up from his schizophrenic stupor (only since have I realized what a great beggar's strategy he was on to). But there wasn't even a gum wrapper in my pocket and I had left my wallet in my room. I wanted to curse. Instead, I left my hand stuffed deep into my pocket and pretended I had only put it there to keep warm – I hopped, disinterestedly, onto the Brown line.
I watched him – fairly dancing on the platform, waving his rainbow headband like an Olympic gymnast as the train pulled away – tried to forget about that smell and him altogether. But the guilt kept nagging at the back of my mind; and, more than the guilt, the horrible thought that he had been right – I couldn't have given him a penny.
Two days later my roommate pointed out a story in the Tribune that claimed an apparently homeless man had shot himself in the head in the last car of a Brown line train. Two passengers unwillingly watched the gruesome act early in the morning on the day after I had spoken with Jeffrey. I might have subconsciously appended the article later, but I am haunted by the words “multi-colored headband” in the dead man's brief description.

Sitting on those steps in that inevitable season-changing breeze, I kept turning that memory over in my head and wondering if Jeffrey had been telling the truth. Perhaps the future is like the past. Perhaps the future can be known the way the past is known – inevitable, unchangeable. It is a terrifying thought that a person might know the decisions he would make – blessed or utterly disastrous – ahead of time and be able to do nothing to alter or prevent them. But, at that moment, in the introspective gloom of the dusk and my memories, it occurred to me that it might be more than a mere thought. After all, don’t I know The Mistake and know, just as surely, that I will make it again tomorrow? I feel, more every day, that I am turning into Jeffrey – that the knowledge most of us would give anything to possess is driving me slowly mad.
Perhaps Jeffrey gave me his ‘curse’. Perhaps I already had it. I don’t know. It and he and that day on the steps, my cyclical failure, are a fog like the rest of my mind. A slowly lifting fog.
Perhaps what I have written here hasn’t even happened yet.

2004-11-17T10:07:00.000+11:00

In the Cards

Ashley fumed over her cards – unabashed like any beginner – while Adam, the teacher, reclined behind his perfectly-fanned hand, nodding and don’t-you-hate-that-ing presciently. The final trick played – to Adam and Ashley’s detriment – and the hand fell to the other pair who smiled at the score in spite of themselves. But Adam took it laughingly in his all-knowing stride. “Man,” he condescended happily, “I’ve never seen that before, a team losing all the points in one hand! I just hate it…” but he couldn’t finish. His face was suddenly turned, for the first time all evening to an un-prophetic, very human face – because Ashley stood up quietly, switched seats with Kevin and joined the winning team.

2004-11-16T10:06:00.000+11:00

The Third Conversation About Myself
(A Soul Hole)

In a coffee shop near my apartment I was, very gradually and without inspiration, chipping away at the first bits of this piece. During one of my frequent pauses to stare out the window and imagine what sort of praise and eventual broad exposure my pseudo-work would bring me, I heard my name from an unfamiliar voice. My full name, first, middle and last. My head twisted itself toward the sound. My neck cracked loudly.
I saw a clump of people in their late twenties, two couples, leaning in and staring at each other intently through faces alight with amazement. None of them looked up. Clearly they weren’t trying to find me or get my attention. None of them were familiar. I loosened my neck and strained to hear what they were saying. Music in the room – turned up much too loud, I suddenly thought – obscured all but snatches of their conversation. I heard the phrases: just graduated; going out; told his wife; new wife.
I leaned towards them indiscreetly. I tried to stop breathing. Then I heard: Colorado; all night; TV hasn’t even been turned on. There was a murmur from one of the women and I clearly heard the response – he said: he lives in Chicago; then my name again. I stood up, apparently not as loudly or obviously as I had intended – none of them noticed. I strode quickly to their table. The usual lump rocketed into my esophagus. I tapped the speaker’s shoulder.
A clearing of my throat – the lump had reached its destination and stuck firmly. Then I was asking them in a dry voice what they were talking about – I was thinking I shouldn’t have got up so quickly, should have stayed in my seat and eavesdropped. The speaker turned around to look at me. An addled expression on his face. It lingered for a moment as he opened his mouth to say something; and then it froze rigid and began to melt. His eyes burrowed into mine. A moment passed.
Then he popped. Exclaimed that I was him. He looked frantically to one of the women who was staring at me with wide eyes – wide face. He asked her if he wasn’t right. She confirmed that he was. My cheeks burned. The other couple was looking at their friends. I glanced over and saw two faces twisted obliviously into questions – embarrassed questions.
The first woman suddenly stood up and stretched out her hand. Her name was Sophie – but friends called her Pudge – not that I would want to know. I brokenly told her my name – she knew. The man grabbed my hand almost before she had let it go – Mark, and these were their friends, Chris and Rochelle. I nodded awkwardly. I apologized – I asked them how they knew me.
The first couple looked at each other, breathed in, and told me they had seen my…the thing I’d put in the ground.
There was an extended, expectant silence. I just looked at them. I was utterly bewildered. Hesitantly, I told them so.
The thing I buried, they repeated, out in Joliet – they lived in that cul de sac. I asked them what cul de sac. I had only been to Joliet once I told them – didn’t think I’d visited any special cul de sac – and I had never buried anything anywhere.
There was an extended, blink-less silence. Every second of it awkward. Chris kept looking around underneath the table and scratching the back of his neck.
Then the woman told me that they had found something in a pothole in the tarmac on their street. The road was built on an old building foundation, or something, and it was all moving and cracking and everything and little potholes were sinking all over the place, a nightmare for their suspension, she could tell me. Mark – she nervously grabbed her husband’s hand when she mentioned him – had been filling them all in, just as a kind of service to the community, I know? And that’s when he saw, um, me, sort of, in the hole. She bit her lip. Mark broke in. Explained that I was the hole – sort of – not that I’m a hole or anything, of course.
They all looked at me – a circle of screwed up expressions, holding their breath.
Pudge timidly whispered she knew it sounded weird – and then her eyes and her voice trailed off. Everyone sighed tensely and at once.
I told them it actually didn’t sound that weird, that I’d heard of something like this before – never expected it would happen to me – I wasn’t upset or anything – a little surprised.
A gale of relieved puffing. Some little explosions of awkward laughter.
I bit my lip.
Mark and Pudge began jabbering over one another – gushing with a garrulous, red-faced relief. They had kind of expected me to say that, they said, since the hole and everything was kind of like something I’d been thinking about for a story lately. I scratched the back of my neck uncomfortably. They didn’t pause, only assured me I was a big hit on their street: no one was watching TV anymore even. I forced a smile. They told me the fight with my wife last Thursday had been really popular, everyone was still talking about it. Apparently, Sandy Thullen had cried like a baby.
Here I stopped them with alarm, my tone accusatory: What about my privacy? Had they seen anything…?
Two sets of eyes jumped out at me. Chris and Rochelle had already crawled under the table by the time I finished the sentence.
No, no, they were both shouting together and fairly jumping up and down. Pudge told me it wasn’t like that, and then Mark stumbled over her that it wasn’t like watching me, or watching through my eyes or anything, it was like – and then Pudge said, my feelings, it sort of showed them my feelings – my understanding of the world. Her eyes pleaded with me to understand.
I looked at them both skeptically. Then we all turned as Chris said he and Rochelle needed to get going. I nodded distractedly, turned back suspiciously for a better answer. The other two seemed to have suddenly remembered their friends and were visibly melting with anxiety in front of me. They knew I still wasn’t convinced – they realized their friends were on the brink of never speaking to them again. They hovered in painful indecision for a moment and then gingerly trotted after Chris and Rochelle who had already made it as far as the door. Their stretched lips apologized to me over and over – with worried glances thrown in my direction every few seconds – until the door beeped shrilly and closed behind them. There was much to explain outside. I felt a little sorry for them.
But the door beeped again. Burst open. A seemingly enlightened Pudge exploded through it and scuttled towards me with her head buried in her purse. She rummaged until she found a pen and a torn movie ticket – wrote their phone number on the ticket and gingerly handed it to me.
She said I ought to let them know what to do – they could give me directions if I wanted to…you know. She added awkwardly that I was much “nicer” in person. And then she scampered out.
I hate being told I’m nice.
I stuffed the ticket in my back pocket. Then I remembered I had left my computer unwatched – my half-finished story visible and beckoning, I thought, to the unscrupulous public for general viewing – and I rushed to close it.

Three days passed. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely eat. I couldn’t write. Work was torment.
I had almost thrown away the phone number. But it dawned on me that I might not want a hole-in-the-ground to go on broadcasting my deepest, darkest self to the suburban world in general. So I held on to the ticket self-surreptitiously and agonized over whether or not to use it.
At first it was all fear and self-consciousness – I lived in my head, I thrived on my emotions, on what was mine alone. Now, it seemed, what was mine alone had become property of the public domain – the indiscriminate, gabby public. Sandy Thullen – who sounded unemployed, thoroughly hair-sprayed and sweat-pant-clad with a string of ex-husbands all over the country – knew more about me than my own wife. And besides, I had always, on principle, despised emotional voyeurs.
But then there came, incongruously, a gradual, guilty pleasure at the idea of my sudden popularity – that my thoughts proved better entertainment than TV for a whole neighborhood of middle class Americans.
Of course, this idea gave way to a gnawing suspicion that cheap entertainment was never what I had had in mind for my sacred, secret, inner life. What if I had always planned to have my demons taken seriously? An artist is not an entertainer – surely. An artist is certainly not entertainment.
Then I realized they were watching – or hearing or tasting or whatever they did at that unholy cosmic anomaly – the whole infernal conflict with myself.
I dug out the ticket. I called the number.
I would put a stop to this. Even if my intentions were already known to the whole voyeuristic world before I arrived – even if they came with knives and machine guns to stop me – I would cover up that hole with my mangled, lifeless body if I had to.
It wasn’t until I was half-way to Joliet that it occurred to me to look into the thing myself.
It was, I suddenly thought, for all practical purposes, my soul hovering beneath that tarmac. My soul made somehow sensible – tangible. Providing hours of riveting drama for a shameless street-load of suburbanites. I almost veered off the road.
All my life had been one long pursuit of insight into that soul. I had wrestled with it and caressed it. I had sweated blood over it. What was it? Who was I? Why did I fail? What was good in me? Did I truly know God – did God know me?
And now, at the end of a Joliet street, only an hour from the prosaic hum-drum of my daily haunts, was my chance to peer, as an objective, outside observer, into the depths of what had always eluded me.
I noticed the back of my shirt was wet with my sweating. The exit loomed suddenly close.
What would I see? A fearless man, brilliant, loving, satisfied? Would I see godliness? God himself? My stomach tightened. I knew I would see dishonesty and pettiness and conceit. But, oh how I prayed that I wouldn’t. That I would ecstatically, resoundingly surprise myself. I willed my very being to surprise itself.

Then I was turning into the street – my car wading gradually through the thick suburban thoughtlessness. It seemed everyone was out. Dressed like garnished fish for the warm weather – smiling expectantly. Most were schooling around one spot at the right-hand edge of the cul de sac. A small tumult erupted when my car came into view. Some kids ran alongside me. Great – children had been looking into my hole.
I climbed out slowly from behind the steering wheel and slipped into a sea of good will. Handshakes all around. One little boy wanted my autograph. Did I know how much I had done to help someone’s grandmother? Why couldn’t I have been single? A father pressed me for that autograph for his son. I seemed much nicer in person – didn’t I seem much nicer in person? My name was flying around like a wiffle ball.
I spotted my friends from the café and made a bee-line toward them. The edges of their mouths curled up happily, fashionably it seemed – but their eyes were apprehensive. Mark pointed to a little stack of black-top patch bags, a shovel and a tamper, lying in the street. I eyed them conspicuously. Then I saw the hole.
It was about the size of a dessert plate on the surface but was, clearly, sub-terrainially larger – the edges sagged a little as though they were waiting wearily for their turn to fall in. I wondered how everyone on the street had enjoyed me so universally in such a tiny lacuna. I ignored the obvious stares – the encompassing, welling expectation as I eyed the opening and that bag of patch – and then began walking methodically towards it.
Each step lasted forever. It seemed the hole, itself, was moving away from me – taunting me to catch it. I quickened my step.
Then it suddenly, cheekily stopped moving and slipped itself under my toes so that I tottered foolishly on its edge. An involuntary, nervous cough racked my throat.
I dropped slowly to my knees and stretched my head over it. I had to open my eyes because I had shut them. I sensed nothing at all around me.

What I saw was like what someone must see when two mirrors are positioned to face each other – and the someone is one of the mirrors: an endless series of reflections of reflections. A nothing that only gets smaller. What I heard was like muffled feedback, endless ringing. What I felt was bitter, vacuous futility. A soul peering into itself.
I must have sat in the same position for some time. My thighs, my knees and the arches of my feet were cramping. My eyes hurt with their frantic search for a focal point – any point.
Gradually, I became aware again of murmuring and giggling and moving and breathing all around me. Apparently, the suspense was too much for one thirteen year-old because she came up behind me and peered intrusively over my shoulder.
Oh, was her casual exclamation, it goes all blank like that sometimes – it’s really annoying.
I looked up and everyone was blinking back at me. I was reflected in a hundred glistening eyeballs.
And that’s when I decided not to use the patch. I made a mental note never to finish this piece.
When I got into my car again and had my hands firmly on the wheel, everyone cheered. I admit, it felt pretty good.

2004-11-13T10:04:00.000+11:00

Nixus and the Surges

2004-11-10T10:02:00.000+11:00

The Last Conversation About Myself
(A Prophecy)

Why should I always continue to do this? It accomplishes nothing.
I have thought long about it, thought endlessly and painfully about it, and this is what I am convinced will happen when I am called. This is why I must continue:

The room will be shattering with his brilliance. I will bow to him and he will say:
“Have you brought anything as a gift to me from the life I gave you?” like the indistinguishable creaking of the mountains.
“My life and my work has touched many people,” I will probably say. But it will be a formality – without conviction – because I know he will respond:
“No. I have touched them,” he will say “you have brought me something else.”
And of course he will be right. I will smile childishly and pull my hands out from behind my back. And then, as if I expected his mouth to gape for the first time in awe, I will exultantly hold up to him my creation – all the things I have fashioned out of my head, my life’s work. Spinning and leaping with music, rich and light and altogether full of color and sadness and depth. I will hold up for him the little cosmos of people and places and feelings and melodies and things that I have spent so many long hours – days, months – poring over and perfecting and loving. Things I clumsily molded in my imagination before I could speak and things my imagination can’t even fathom as I write these words.
Then I’ll say:
“Lord, I want to give you the things I have spent my whole life making,” and bow humbly.
I suspect, then, there’ll be silence as he takes it from me and sees it all completely and lucidly in less than a moment and still examines it carefully just to please me.
“It’s beautiful,” he’ll probably say, “but it isn’t perfect. I can’t accept something that isn’t perfect.” And he’ll hand it gently back to me.
I’ll look at it then, and I’ll see the precious pieces of my soul that I carefully, painfully breathed into that little incongruous cosmos. I’ll hear the echoes of joy and longing and tears that reverberate through its colorful halls and I will think, “how good it is,” or, “how I love it”. But I will know what I am expected to do.
I will kneel before him and hold it again above my head and say:
“I know that it is flawed, Lord. Redeem it for me and make it perfect so that I can give it to you – because, for you, all of it was made.”
“Ah,” he will say as he turns the raging storms of his eyes lovingly, knowingly, sadly toward me. “I can’t, son. Every creator must redeem his own creation.”
I’ll look up at him, then, in surprise. I’ll say:
“But, Lord, how can I? I’m already dead.”
“You don’t need to die for what you have made,” he’ll reply patiently. “The creator must partake in his creation – in every last bit of his creation.”
I’ll look at the vibrating, living thing in my hands and shake my head uncertainly. Look back to him. He’ll say:
“Eat your gift to me – that’s how you must redeem it.”
I am writing this prophecy now, I am writing what I think he will say; and what I’m writing will be there with me, squirming in my hands, along with all the rest. But still, I know those words will shake me. Their certain finality, their strangeness and truth. They will shake my whole being with despair. I’m sure I’ll look at him and crawl toward his feet and plead with him in my face. Perhaps with my voice. But I will know, the moment I see his eyes, that there is no other way.
Then, slowly and weakly – completely without heart – I’ll bite into my precious little worlds. Again and again. Chew each mouthful delicately and reluctantly. And swallow. Until there is nothing left in my hands – until my gift is gone. My life’s work decimated.
In my mouth I’m certain the things I make – that I have bent over like some crazed, obsessive Frankenstein – will taste sweet and rich and full in my mouth. I’ll delight in the flavors I have poured into them. The myriad feelings and styles and inspirations.
But in my throat it will turn to glass. Breaking and grinding and slicing my insides until I am bleeding unstoppably from my mouth, until I am gagging with the pain. Can barely cough with my choking.
And when it reaches my stomach it will become bitter. Wormwood. My insides will churn. “What has become of my good creation?” I’ll cry within myself. “The core of it is rotten, its whole exterior is just a brittle shell!”
I’ll wonder if everyone who has ever eaten from my hands hasn’t tasted what I am tasting.
Then I will feel the vacuum of its empty meaninglessness in the core of my body. My stomach and my lungs, and my bowels squeezed upon themselves unbearably – imploding gradually within me. The agony of what I had exhaled – broken off from myself – becoming one with me again.
I know I will scream out. Fall on my face. Squirm in my own bleeding. Become an animal in front of him. Filthying his radiating perfection. I know I will gargle agonized words:
“Lord,” I’ll choke, “I can’t”

And then he will stand from his seat and everything will shake – all the foundations of the universe – and he will fill it with unbearable light. With the voice of the seas – irresistible and trembling with his love – he’ll cry:
“Now I can redeem you.”
Then his scarred hands will reach for me and he will embrace my bleeding, shuddering form until I am swallowed in his arms and his breast. His body will be the unquenchable fire that burns away every impurity.
And the pain I have felt from the meal I will have eaten will be like a prick in the arm by comparison to the pain of his presence surrounding me.
We will cry out in agony together – creator and creation, creator and creation.
But slowly, the affliction in my body – all the absurdity I will have imbibed – will burn up until it is gone. No longer a thing of being.
And I think, then, I will feel – I will be – for the first time, whole. Blissfully incapable, for the rest of eternity, of breaking myself; of looking at myself and having to split my own spirit to do it. I will be able to look at him. He and I will finally be one again.
“Now,” he’ll say, “you are your gift to me.”
This is why I mustn’t stop.

2004-11-03T09:33:00.000+11:00

Into the White Sunlight

I doff my sandals, unwrap the towel from around my waist and spread it over the sand – stretch myself onto its warm, soft ringlets. My body, which is beginning to sag limply around me, heaves with the deep sigh of a woman breaking the surface of the water after a long dive. I have escaped. I know I have. Because I can feel my cell shedding from off of me:
The sky is faintly smeared here and there with translucent, insubstantial clouds as though a child has taken a paint-tipped brush to its gradual, blue surface. White sunlight is blasting off the sand. Everywhere people lay flattened under its warm, blindingly disarming weight. Voices can only lilt through the mesmerizing, rhythmical rush of the water on and off of the beach. The roar of jet engines overhead dissolves into that noise like salt into the lake that makes it and everything seems gently muted – soft and malleable. There is no sense that time is pushing through me with its usual, glacial indifference.
Now is a warm, soft pool of gentle currents. The water will drift softly this way and that – the sand will move palpably under the hand – the air will slide around the body, muss the hair and caress the skin, which melts into the vague, sun-blasted colors of this lithe world and is no longer clear. Everything is sensually one. The curved bodies – tan and creamy and undulating through the watery air – the curved sand – rising and falling under the sun with the same subtle tones like a supple, milky echo. Like an alto’s notes, voiced into a pillow.
Only the broken-timbred exclamations of three drunkards at the water’s foot stands apart, discomfiting and shredded – but even it is somehow gradually swallowed by the smooth, mucous atmosphere of the lake and the sun and the sand.
Inwardly, the rolls of a despising laughter massage my stomach and I swish my hand through the palpable light as if to smear the offenders into the colors of the sky – so impotent and ethereal are their forms. But there are consciousnesses behind those body-shapes and wills will not so easily smudge. One of them has seen my hand – assumed I meant to wave. One of them is un-melting into clarity in front of me – holding a cigarette. I sense a frictious, disseminated sound – perhaps a voice – asking for a light. I shake my head at the two-dimensional, undulate blur here in my vision and feel immediately the shocks of an alcoholic laugh, distant and irrelevant, as the shape re-melts – is gone. I fall backwards, merge with the sand.
But something is different. I open my mouth to inhale just two or three final draughts of the free air, my lips envelope the atmosphere desperately until I force them shut dully and the sand all around me breaks apart before the toes of six feet.
Because there were three of them, the drinkers. And now there are three – surrounding me, filling the horizon it seems – remotely talking to me, guffawing, raucous and distant, shamelessly looking at my chest. I curse myself for wearing a bikini because I know it is my undoing: that they have come for me.
Too late to run of course, but I have a little dignity – no kicking or screaming. I came quietly – so will I go.
I wrap my towel around me and wordlessly get up to leave. A cloud from somewhere has covered the sun – the beach darkens, the cloud itself becomes a sudden black as if it had given up its spirit. I can hear them laughing at me, clearly now – crystalline and cutting. A jet screams over the city, the beach shudders. The breeze whips off the lake, a mess of unhealthy odors on its back. I look at my feet – there had been sand, now only countless, miniscule stones tumbling frantically off of my dorsals – clinging wickedly to the pores in my shins.
Everything is a brittle, disparate grey. All I can see are broken pieces – jagged shards of a billion incongruous slices of the world. Nothing belongs to anything – as though every atom is stuffed alone into some corner of the universe – as if the universe is made of corners in which to stuff them. Ah, this is the city that traps me – alone and trembling and baring its teeth.
And I am baring my teeth.
I stop at the concrete edge of the beach and turn to scowl at the rats who have given me away. I do it because I hate them. I do it because I am cornered – like they are – and I want them to stay just as cornered. I do it because this is the way cities work: we prisoners are each other’s jailers.
My inebriated captors break into a new wave of nauseous, dizzy laughter as I twist truculently and stomp away. At least I know they won’t be rewarded for my capture – who would bother?
My heart is racing again, my movements robotic again – I am ice again. I barrel through the curveless passages of grey stone and acrid tar that make up the streets of my neighborhood. I see nothing.
At the door to my tiny apartment, as I turn the key rustily in its lock, I glance through the claustrophobia of edges of buildings and steel phalluses to a tiny wedge of the lake from which I have come. The sun is shining again there now and the water is brilliantly, blindingly golden – a far off heaven twinkling through the drudgery of the world. Like an image glowing on one of the summer-time movie screens in our shoe-trampled parks. And I can only look.

2004-05-11T10:12:00.000+10:00

2003-09-23T00:27:00.001+10:00

Fin: Don't push me. I have plenty of time to get where I'm going, you know.
Gun: Ha! If I had that sort of attitude we'd have turned to stone days ago. As it is, I can barely stand up with going fast enough for both of us. I'd be better off just leaving you here to die.
Fin: What's keeping you then? But, oh, I have to tell you that if you "leave me here to die" that's just what I won't do - since it's only to die that we're marching ahead so relentlessly.
Gun: What? This isn't the road to clarity?
Fin: No, it is.