P r o s e ........................ (ay-ick) ...................... Mardack

Treegreen

yep, i think one of my greatest creations was the afternoon in florida at the house of my grandmother's going-insane sister, josefa, when the adults turned their backs (i was maybe ten, then), and left me to seek adventure in the backyard. this was no "backyard" in the new york sense of the word, which is all i had had, which meant a backyard was the patch of stained asphalt behind your house, where you had (by the age of ten, for sure) learned to go stand when no one was looking, like a statue in the center of a private geometry. in other words, this was the place you went to wonder what you were for. so i had stood, and had encouraged all who would listen to me to come and stand with me, or even by themselves, if i was at school. why should someone be selfish with such a resource. but now i had been about-faced from the rum-pouring and cackles of familial re-acquaintance inside, and had before me a virtual jungle. sure, it was a yard, folks (current owners and past) had made a worn patch up close to the house, where spent charcoal being poured on the strugglin' grass had happened. and they were, to my eyes, hicks from the south, as well. which would give to their summer barbecues a "hoedown" sorta quality and a wildness and bigger flames, etc. the new york place for the same kinds of rituals would have to be (sissy!) prevented from being like the more daring forms of tribal nocturnal burning of slain animal meat, for the closeness of neighbors and detection. but here, there were swamps runnin' through things, different! places smelled inexplicably, and the water tasted like sulfur, which everyone else called farts. such were the artifices and coquetries i used at that age to achieve an aching and intellectual detachment. so anyway, the yard did not suffer fences either, or even the immediate idea that there was some sort of limit to the riotous fantasia of verdant ambition happening there, and everywhere around the house. i mean, there were other homes visible, but these did not come together with my aunt's house to create an impression of "town", or even of pioneer civilization. these homes seemed, instead, to have been surrendered to a conquering green army, whose soldiers were the creeping vines, whose tanks were the smashing bulks of tree trunks, and whose generals sat bunkered in some secret place of black soil deep, deep beneath the surface of the earth. no, these homes were losing ground. and i was mesmerized, of course. every true and awful thing in a boy of that age that golding said is there in the lord of the flies was there in me that day. there are some taboos inside you that you just live with, knowing that the day will come. like having a vision of doom. so, fuck it, let me just leap in to this... there were things alive EVERYWHERE, i mean crawling things with tiny wills and their own (maddening-to-consider) perspectives of the jungle, very different from my own. i wouldn't say it was an exercise of power. i remember using mostly adults for my subjects, in those very early experiments where i first discovered the relation between advantage and responsibility. still, i didn't like it that the connection was there, and pretended for a long time that it wasn't. i began to hunt frogs. they were alarmingly abundant. i became excited on several levels. there was the fantasy of actual wildness and danger, surrounded as i was (i really should capitalize that), SURROUNDED by teeming insect life. and, as we appreciate more subtly for living with roaches in new york, they will win in the end. but the insects were too elusive as individual animals, and too diverse to spark a "collecting desire" in me. it was the strange impulse to "collect" the frogs that all-in-a-whoosh just slid the moral question right outta there. and don't think i didn't know it when it happened, either. in the south there is also a very different attitude towards animals in general, but vermin in particular. where i come from, assaults on unwanted small visitors to our homes are waged with weapons which fizzle (weakly) from nozzles, or sit (with only the most fleeting specter of death hanging over them) with glue and cheese on 'em. but this (the south) is a place where men still live tensely near the boundary between order and chaos, where encounters with truly wild, uncontrollable, immediately-menacing nature happen all the time. as such, the idea of hunting frogs with sticks and pokers of various sizes, seemed not outside local traditions of boyhood misadventure at that moment. some of them i pounded across the back, and repeatedly, until they stopped moving. some were pinned by a swift stab, against the mud, and into which they sank, as i sustained/increased my pressure, again, until it was dead. time passed in the rhythm of the killing. i forgot where i was, i think. i can't remember anything but the coldness and the precision, and the nearness of terror. if killing things could be so easy, what prospects for a young man just finding his power. i killed many frogs that day. some were small enough to sit in the hollow of your eye. others, horribly large. these were the ones that made me kill them with a bit more emotion. they were near the line in my head, the one that separates the things that remain controllable even when their scale is monstrously exaggerated, and those which become nightmares even when just a little bigger than normal. i was killing black demons, small enough to be vulnerable under my uncertain and youthful predation, but big enough to fully challenge me. the spirit of collection, once there were a number of frog corpses, turned naturally in the direction of arranging my collection for display. this portion of the story may disturb some others who were not previously offended by the killing part. there were, i'd estimate, some twenty frogs. i lifted, each frog from the place in the yard where i had been massing them after the hunt, and brought it to a carefully selected spot on the road in front of the house. i arranged them, i considered them, i re-arranged them, and then i photographed them. oh, do not think to ask me for these photographs! they were lost in a fire, and pain me still. without them, the irrecoverable orange color of the light that streaked across the dead frogs (in that lowest, most devastating angle of the twilight) is gone to me. now i have only the ambiguous and muted palette of an unregulated intersection in my memory. i knew not whether i should go, only that i WOULD go, and would have to risk colliding with whatever unknown kind of traffic ran across. my pride, my vanity, my self-consciousness in the act of creation, all mark the genesis of a decided "piece". it was an installation, my most fleeting. for, i could not... remembering the adults inside... leave a grisly scrimmage line of beaten-to-death frogs for them to discover. southern beastliness or no. i had composed for posterity, but had prepared to destroy my work as soon as i was done. the surface of the road was a span of uniform color, and therefore a canvas. it was an especially exciting moment to be in the path of rusty cars from the south, whose fenders shepherd southern boys and girls, together, against precipices, and have a dead frog in my hand, guilty! the clock was running. i would later remember this part and understand precisely why serial killers become addicted. you can conceive, even pre-savor, the perfected ritual. like the string of "you's" you see when you stand between two mirrors, i could see the sequence that could connect itself to this, that could derive from what i'd done. i knew that i had struck, and worse, i then wished to make evidence where i had made the wound. so i took pictures of them. there were maybe four arrangements. i never touched them, i should say. i used the very sticks i'd used to kill them, and moved them around. there was still a need to keep them away from myself, though they were no longer prey (repudiated, vile), but objects to be guided by my will, given meaning by my touch, made into art. it didn't work out that way, quite, but i think that i took pictures so that i could shed the burden of remembering.

November, 2002

On September 20th, 1978, at 4:33 AM, a radio transmission of "extremely high energy" was intercepted by an ultra-sensitive antenna located on a US Army base in Northern Arizona. Among the few details released in the public report was the fact that the transmission had originated at a point about 40,000 feet in the skies over Flagstaff, where no identifiable aircraft could have been at that time. In May of 1989, after a worldwide manhunt, a high-ranking official of the National Security Administration, reported missing some 6 weeks prior, was found murdered in a seedy hotel room in Tijuana, Mexico. For eleven days after the body was discovered, what can only be described as a "swarm" of NSA agents descended on the hive-like border city, apparently engaged in some sort of search. Nearly two years later, a desperate woman entered a copy shop in Mexico City, where she sent a 3-page document to a fax number in Paris. She spent the equivalent of 1 month's pay to send the fax, and was herself later found strangled in the tiny studio apartment where she had lived and plied her trade. The following text is believed to be an excerpt from that fax, which person's speaking on condition of anonymity have connected to a stolen valise belonging to the murdered American NSA official. The cover page and first page of the fax were unfortunately destroyed. But those who claim to have read the original fax in its entirety declared the message was a "transliteration" of a radio transmission intercepted over Arizona in 1978. This is the last page of that fax:

"...short while later it became apparent to me that the blind man's cane was not merely an instrument of detection, a tactile substitute for the human eye in this case. But also a transmitter for a kind of force which has the power to displace other persons from his path before he encounters them, and which operates in such a way that the blind man is unaware of its working. We believe that the eyes of sighted persons, likewise, exert a (transformative?) influence over everything humans see. We also believe that the objects tree, moon, (etc.?), like the semi-conscious shuffling to one side of a person standing in the blind man's path, register the (covetous?) approach of an eye, and transform themselves, instantaneously, into the form of the perceived object, a form very different from the form of the pre-perceived object. We are forced, therefore, to consider the question of our own occasional appearances, in a system of human vision which is considerably more complicated than the simple (one-way?) perception of patterns of reflected light by light-sensitive organs located on the anterior plane of the head. We have evidence that human vision is more correctly described as an interplay (negotiated dialogue??) between surfaces properly equipped for conversations in light. We also believe that this complexity is unknown to them.... (?) the discomfort of looking directly into each other's eyes, we can observe a rapid succession of adjustments, paralyses ... (?) a mirror of themselves and ultimately the illusion of aliveness which stems from there being a direct link between the sight organs and the conscious mind. We believe they cling to the idea that only eyes can see, because it is only in eyes that they recognize their own (clumsy fumbling?) in the presence of visual (riches?). We believe that the electromagnetic spectrum is the medium for a complex web of interactions between all living things (on this planet?), explaining, for example, why flowers dress themselves in ultraviolet finery, to attract bees, and win the reproductive benefits of their alightings. We have evidence to suggest, however, that human ignorance of these facts may be coming to an end, or at least that there are some among them who are aware..." [END TRANSMISSION]

...some sort of pole vault, Doc, a scrambling kinda madly, then a birthing out of sorts into a whiteness without limit. "Go on, go on. don't stop now." A clean end breaking white into white of cinematic nothingness, credits rolled and all, ha ha. Then a second flick comes on, a house, unknown of course, but somehow Dad's and he's inside there with a pair of twins, two boys are jailin' him in there. "Jailing him in there?" Yeah, dunno why, but he's afraid, and I'm their brother now and welcomed from a long and empowering absence. (... jot, jot, scribble-scrabble). Creepy buggers, too, eleven or twelve -- Eddie Munster look-a-likes on crack, death-pale over bowties, hidin' something under nervous joy. (Harrumph, squeal of leather, teensy fart) Lots of touchin', lots of touchin' me and then they gave me a gift, and a room for it, all paints and canvases... (Eyebrow arch) Yeah, made me a real master they, brilliant, no style I could've recognized. A work in progress on the floor, shapes and shit and colors all round and achin' full. I picked up a tube of Titanium White, to sunny up the highlights a bit. I was amazing! Then the palpy fingers on me touchin', cold anemone fingers. "And that's when things turned?" Yep, I realized that my talent was gone as soon as I walked out the door. But what the heck, I am just visitin', and tired now from all the self-awe. So they persuaded me to let 'em into bed with me, and that was a big mistake. "Oh?" Soon as sheets closed round us, like an orchid down for the night, little fuckers swarm on me like snakes -- black mass writhin', pullin' downward into flower's center dark. (Tap, tap, furious new pencil) And I know there's no comin' outta that one, so I leap up and things speed up -- a nightmare now, full-blown. And Dad's been cryin' in his corner, feeble whimpers the whole time. Why you livin' here like this Old Man? Then the danger makes a power in me. I dream-flex some new dream-muscle, turn them twins into three raw pork chops on the floor. Slice 'em real quick into fleshy ribbons, squirmin' alive, reconstitutin', but I still got some time -- to grab the Old Man by a wrist, down a dizzy staircase wide. Stunned, c'mon let's get outta here. A black milkman, all smiles and yessir, I got this form for you to fill out sir -- twin's conjury, for sure, gatherin' strength. I push us out into the street, too late, light's changed and the traffic's speedin' before us in a river of vehicular light, blockin' the way, and real good too, makes me think then as now: Am I ever, ever gonna write again, Doc? (suppressed belch, swallow, wide-eyed silence).

So I'm walking down the long corridor, right. And this is the looooong corridor that leads up to the Big Door, on the other side of which is Benny Blanco, the fattest, baddest mutherfucker that ever sold a gram of coke in Brooklyn. Problem is that tonight I'm the errand boy, and the particular errand is the delivery of 4 keys and $18,000, of which I have neither. Empty hands. But the corridor is short now, right, and what I have are maybe 15 seconds before I gotta start producing words of explanation for Mr. Blanco. But let me back up a bit. Rewind to yesterday, around two in the afternoon. I'm driving down Flatbush Avenue, sportin' my new MSW rims, just chillin'. White Debbie comes running out of this building all of a sudden, in her bra and panties. Me and Debbie's kicked it around, so you know, I open the door and Debbie gets in. Bitch is trippin', going off about somebody's after her with a gun and shit. I'm still sitting there, blocking traffic. Folks know my ride, so they're chill with a little disturbance being put down in a quiet and caste-honoring manner. But Debbie's like: "Go, go, he's gonna fucking kill me! Drive!" So, of course I pull out into traffic and go, but easy with the pressure on the pedal. Don't want anybody thinking I'm spooked. I check the mirrors as I drive away, just in case Debbie's right. But no shots were heard to ring out that day on Flatbush Ave. Debbie hasn't shut up yet since getting into the car. And we're slipping stealthily into the well-greased lanes of the Belt Parkway, southbound toward Coney Island. Back in full control of my situation, I give an ear to the shit Debbie's poppin'. The name Chiqui keeps coming up, like a sour note in the Debbie-bullshit-song. "Chiqui said he's gonna kill me because I talked to the police..." And then it trailed off again into the unintelligible. "Chiqui what...?" I said. Then she gives me that "...let me hide in the shadow of your cock for a while..." look on her face. So, what the fuck, I take the bitch back to my crib for a session. She remembers all my favorite positions, and the way I like to have her drag her lower teeth under the rim of the helmet. Bitch is the best fuck in Brooklyn. I'm balls-deep, when there's a knock at the door. Fuck, I had forgotten Ruben from Queens was gonna bring me the buy-money for 4 keys of pure from the Chibcha Club guys, and some cut shit we we're turning around fast with the brothers from Lennox Avenue. The sight of Ruben and all the quick doorway niceties took their toll on my hard-on. So I put the $40,000 and 120 8-ball baggies on the bed, right next to the wet spot. "So tell me what happened with Chiqui..." I told her. Just sayin' the name put that vomit taste back in my mouth. Chiqui is just one of those crazy mutherfuckers always gonna be in this business, because they do shit that's 50 times crazier than anybody else for half the money, you know, a head case. Like this one time he cut the baby out of this pregnant bitch in an elevator while her husband was watching, between the 4th and 17th floors of the Holiday Inn by JFK. Lots of stories like that. But I remember Chiqui back from 99th Street in Corona, when we were kids. He used to ride his bike up and down the block, in a popped wheelie, back and forth all fucking afternoon. Everybody thought one day we'd hear the screech of brakes and a dull thud, and we'd walk over and see that Chiqui had been bounced free of the unnatural forces that kept him alive. But it never happened. Mutherfuckers got shot every week, and houses burned down and you heard about kids who drowned in Rockaway every Summer. But Chiqui just kept his front wheel up in the air all the time, and was never seen to relax from that difficult posture of absolute dereliction. Oh, but I'm forgetting myself. I tend to slip into the eloquent tones of a fan whenever I'm pressed to speak on the subject of Chiqui "El Maniatico" Alarcon. I suppose I preserve him in a bubble of mythology because it makes this business a little bit more magical, and that's important. I wish I could say, twenty-two mutherfuckers kicked that door down, fucked Debbie into a coma, beat me to the front door of death and stole my shit. But that's not what happened. Truth is, Debbie kept talkin', kept telling her story. And I just listened, like a fucking cobra listening to the charmer's flute. I bobbed my head, and she explained how Chiqui had been fucking her with an encouraging regularity, and had even begun to permit her to remain in his bed when it became his office during the day. It was well known that Chiqui almost never left his bed, for any reason. Me, I don't think I'd like to screw and do business in the same place. I never could joyfully mingle those odors. But hearing this shit was like hearing about dragons and sorcerers and shit. The story predisposed me to the sort of sleep I longed for as a kid, full of fantastic dreams, because I had shoved off into the waters of my slumber from such a strange pier. So Debbie saw a lot of faces and a lot of blow come and go while lying naked in Chiqui's bed. Chiqui must have gotten scared by the intimacy, I mean, Debbie knows how to give a mutherfucker a God complex. She'll just stare up at you, down from under the saggy weight of your spent balls, those trailer park blue eyes of hers just sparkly in the light she reflects from the object of her adoration. It gets old, and creepy, real fast. Five minutes before the knock at the door, Debbie was telling me about this Nicaraguan slag Chiqui had offed last week right in front of her, and she's got the whole memory just all fucked up and distorted in her head. Gotta be, because in her version of events, Chiqui is using a light saber on the Nicaraguan guy, and his head comes off "so gently", and the blood floats away in these little globules, because there's no gravity in Chiqui's bedroom, where all of this is happening. On any other Monday afternoon, I would have just taken care of business, and put the bitch out naked right then. Pretty much exactly where I came into this movie. But, I had had the uncertain fortune of running into Father Pesaresi on the steps of St. Philip's the day before, and he really fucked my head up. He baptized me way back in the beginning, and now he knows I'm a dealer, same as everybody else. But he pays me the intelligence-respect of delivering his moral instruction in the form of densely coded allegories. "Walk with me a few steps, my son." Oh shit, I thought to myself, he must have heard about that Italian punk half of Brooklyn thinks I threw off a building in the Bronx. Wasn't me, but I hadn't quite yet finished riding out the usefulness of the possibility. So, I let Father run out his strings on Cain and Abel and brothers killing brothers and all that shit. But I'm staying above it. Number one, because I know I really didn't do it, and number two, because if I had, I would have all the moral justification I could buy with the $288,0000 I heard they lifted from this Italian guy's dead body. But Father's in a rare form, he's waving his arms all up in the air, and screaming shit in Latin. I remember enough from high school to piece together some vague story he's tellin' about a bad man and his treacherous woman getting their heads cut off by this avenging angel type mutherfucker, as they were screwing and sluicing in the spoils of their evil. Then Debbie goes into this slo-mo simulation of Chiqui killing the Nicaraguan guy. She's got her lips all puckered up hard, like a tied-off balloon end, and she's making a sound effect, too, by blowing all the air she just sucked out of my cock through her ass-tight lips. Sounded like a helicopter getting ready to crash. She's standing on the bed, naked, and somehow she's got me convinced this must have really happened. She's doing this Jedi performance thing on the bed and making all these weird noises, and I'm all freaked out, because she looks just like Father Pesaresi from the day before. And she just won't stop, either. That's when Chiqui came through the door, he just passed through it, didn't make a sound or exert himself in the least. He's just suddenly standing right there in front of me, panting like he just chased somebody and caught them and slit their throat. Looking sort of like a newborn too, 'cause he's naked and covered in this brown gooey shit. There aren't a lot of ways for a drug dealer to go down with dignity, but taking Chiqui Alarcon's Jedi light saber in the neck is definitely one of them. I'm naked too and weak and slow from fucking all day, and loopy from Debbie's creepshow. And there's all the Latin shit still bouncing around inside my head from Father Pesaresi, so I close my eyes and brace for death. I swear I could hear the hum from the light saber, and even with my eyes closed could see the movie of Chiqui slashing away at Debbie and the sounds of big chunks of her hitting the ground. It was kind of exhilarating waiting there in the Lotus position, stretching my neck out, feeling the wind of furious movement against my naked skin. Problem is, I guess I don't get killed. I wake up and the sun must have done its thing already, going down and embarking all over again. Because it's the next fucking day, and Debbie's gone of course. No coke, no cash, just my sorry brown naked ass wadded up in the sweaty sheets. Now twenty-four hours after I picked the bitch up, I'm walking down this corridor on my way to death number two, still wondering why death number one is all wrapped up in amnesia, and why all I have to show for the experience are these empty hands and a sore cock. I think White Debbie does a lot of acid.

"Where does light come from, Daddy?" In the stark shadow of a towering McDonald's road-side sign, I held the child in my arms longer than was usual. It seemed to me, as I was holding her, that logic and science and the reassurances of my academic formation were serving her less and less as she grew older. I was serving her less. The lapses had grown longer, when I could do little more than stare into her eyes. She was only seven. And It had begun to feel as if security and knowledge were gifts flowing from her to me, rather than the reverse. Anna was my child, forever and always. But somehow I had missed the moment of switchover when all the someday-things I wished to see in her had become the today-things she was. Physics is a strange place to seek sanctuary when the person you love falls flaming from the sky into the ocean. Anna was only two weeks old, and already her mother had felt too long the calling of remoteness. She'd been "recruited into the business of motherhood", as she'd always say while Anna was growing inside her. And there were important things to do in Macchu Picchu, things that could wait no longer. Anna's birth, after the interminable pregnancy, released her from us finally. So she went, and farther than husband or infant daughter could have dreamed possible. When Tara became pregnant, for me it was as if all the spinning and illuminated beauty of the universe had been drawn out of the mathematical ether, where I'd always sought it, and into the impossibly small space of her tenanted womb. I should have realized it then, how powerless my understanding would be when really tested. But for Tara, I could only guess, it must have been a rather unnatural state, like breath-holding. Something which had drawn her in, like a game, and around which it was possible to create a sort of artificial excitement. There were moments of terrifying intimacy between us, with my hand placed tentatively on her belly, when I realized just how much despair there was for her in that state. When her talents of convincing were in good order, she could make me believe that marriage and motherhood were surprisingly agreeable dishes that had emerged from the mysterious kitchen of her life, and been placed before her though she'd ordered something very different. The worst I permitted myself to believe was that Anna and I had only briefly interrupted her, while on her undeterrable way to wherever she was going. I'm afraid now, it may have been much worse than that. "Las Vegas 208 miles" Now Anna was becoming fidgety in the passenger seat. It meant I had been too long in my reverie while driving. It had been her idea to rent a convertible for our drive to Vegas, rather than something "less optimistic", as she said winkily to the Hertz guy. We were upon one of those great and strange stretches of American motoring ambition. Interstate 5, if the long-ago marker was still true. The miles, all strung together end-to-end in such homogeneous lengths of distance, forced the mind into a sort of linearity. I felt as if all my concerns had ceased clamoring to come through the door of my attention at once, and had formed instead a cordial single-file, that I might have them in one at a time. It was nice. I'm sure I would not have felt so capable before these demons if we'd been driving in a car with a roof on it. The blue of the sky, passing in a slow cloudless crawl over our heads, was scrubbing my mind free of something. "Well, what kind of light do you mean, angel?" Of course I knew what she meant. She had that way of lifting her eyebrows into two perfect little brown arches when she wanted to lead me somewhere I might not go comfortably. She just stared at me, her pink little knees held like two cherished things to her chin. "I don't mean like sunlight. I mean, isn't there a kind of light that isn't waves or particles, that just is?" Much as I'd like to pretend I don't know where she gets this brand of persistence, she is Daddy's little girl, in so many inescapable ways. We'd gone down this road before. When Tara died, I tried to balloon myself into some sort of protective bubble for Anna to come and live safely within, while she mourned her mother's death in her own secret-little-girl ways. But the larger I tried to become for her, the more it seemed it was she who was embracing me. I had spent the four years of my life graced by Tara's presence trying to collapse her beliefs into something I could express in terms a physicist might sleep on. Never worked. It came to be an early sign of true love for me that I lost the ability to sleep restfully when I met her. We each had our point of breaking. For me, it was the tears, and the big wide eyes of the ineffable all welled up inside her head, all of it just screaming at me, or wanting to be screaming, in a language I just couldn't hear. Tara was on her way somewhere, no question about it, streaking like a derelict satellite in the sky where I first saw her. At night, she was most visibly herself. She gave up the harder drugs while Anna was growing inside her. But the marijuana was a "natural path", and so whether I had consented or not, at sunset, she was often to be found smoking a joint, cross-legged in the forest just beyond our property, with her big Anna-swollen belly hanging over her waist. "Just is...? How do you mean, honey?" The mustang's legs were long, and she loved it when Daddy drove fast. I think she knew it meant I was feeling alive, in some way that made the risk an exhilaration for me. The press of a bare foot to the accelerator of a rented car in the Nevada desert at dusk. It was in such moments that Tara might have shrieked with joy all of a sudden and for no clear reason. She knew when I had transcended, even for a moment, the burdens of my deconstructed universe. "Come into chaos with me..." she would cry when we made love. I never exactly knew what thing in me might have won her for my wife. But I was grateful for it. And though I never confessed it to her while she was alive, whatever in me was worthy of her had to be the best thing I was. "Well, I mean a sort of light that isn't coming from something that's burning, or resisting electricity or some kind of chemical reaction. A sort of light that just sits there, in the middle of space, just being there, you know..." Most of the time, I feel compelled to honor the balance Tara and I achieved in this child. Whatever sanity or certainty before the madness I might have offered Tara, must now persist, and serve our child too. But there are moments when I swear I feel as if I am the child, and that the strange coils of illogic and pregnant circumstance that governed Tara's life want to take me inside for a period of wombing and re-education. It's what makes being Anna's dad so hard. Most of the time, I just pray she can't see how little I really know. I have no words now for my daughter. None at all. No answer, and only the frailty of my love to offer. So all I can do for her, really, is make the effort to un-tense the muscles of my shoulders and ease myself a bit more into the white leather bucket seat. Our timing is perfect. The mustang seems to have reached the summit of a long, slow-growing scend in the road. Anna has fixed her eyes on the horizon, where the black and permanent silhouettes of the desert are meeting the emptiness of the cobalt sky. She's let me off the hook for a little while, and she knows I know it. She's got that same way of radiating contentment from every part of her body that her mom did. My God, so little is beyond her reaching. "Faster, Daddy!" she bids into the infinity of my compliance. She stands up and lifts her head over the edge of the windshield, where the wind can caress her head as violently as the thoughts raging within. "I love you, Daddy!" she screams over the 100mph roar, just as the glowing spires and fantasies of Las Vegas dawn at the horizon before us.

Some of us have to deny ourselves any possible consummation, flirting only to bleed out a bit of the pressure that boils within. But the material expelled is flammable and sticky, like Napalm. Inevitably, things get set afire, then burn hopelessly. A safe one is the older man. This guy's like 62 and still very pointed in his posture from what must've been decades of diligent lifting. Think Anthony Quinn from about fifteen years ago, or Sydney Pollack's engirding aura of affluence in "Eyes Wide Shut". You'll see one or two of the type on the BART platform on a Tuesday night, right around eleven, when the less-expensive, mid-week performance of the Opera has just let out. Wasn't the cheaper ticket that brought out this rare fish, though. But the inevitably more variegated texture of the crowd that thinks to make an Opera Night from a pedestrian Tuesday evening. Strange lot. The city would seem of an entirely different face if such an audience were taken representative. So the BART platform is alive with them at around 11:30, clusters of carnival activity and the odd chatter of a foreign language. He'll almost certainly be standing, rather than sitting. It is a part of his appeal and raw physical charm that he resists such capitulations to age as sitting down when one is fit to stand. This man is erect, and for the wrinkles on his gayness, absolutely poignant. It is difficult for most men to realize it when they are being regarded with interest by him. There is usually the day's edition (or The Economist) tucked crisply under one arm, at the highest part of the arm, which requires so much more muscular tension, and a finger may be draped thoughtfully against the mouth. And there is always a wristwatch of exceptional craftsmanship and absurd cost. If you are a really young man, with the bloom of skateboarding and last weekend's rave still glowing on your skin, you will never detect his desire. If you notice his eyes passing over you at all, it will all seem strangely avuncular, if even that menacing. You'll think it envy of an oddly fangless sort. But it is for a certain, specific breed of heroically distraught homme armee that our old fish most avidly hunts. This much younger man, of about 33, will be the perfected reflection of his youth, the picture of himself he will wish to see in his memories, before the sell-out, before the poetic fire of idealism was extinguished in him. Having sighted such a one, he will be at his most vulnerable when he is dancing about for the first meeting of the eyes, he will be more listless than he wants to be, less stoically composed and more concerned about the BART than he normally appears. Excessive glancing at the watch. The fish will show clearly what bait has tethered him. But when he finally achieves your attention, you too will be startled to see yourself mirrored in him. Your first moment together is made intimate for both being afraid of what you see. There is also that weird kind of tautness, like between a father and son, when the younger has reached age and size enough to really threaten the older in a fight. But here, of course, it is without any incestuous taboo. The impulse to wrestle, to feel resistance and testing, and the irrational ache for physical mastery are all free of the usual blood fetters. When the dialogue of eyes begins, he will seem shaken and agitated. He will try to make the pain of self-recognition seem like tiredness, or still more absurdly, like nervousness before your beauty. And you will melt against this extraordinary flattery, never seeing his moment of great frailty. You will loiter long minutes in his gaze, and will enjoy how completely he sees you and how much of what he sees is admired. The BART doors open, close, the distraction of other bodies slides between you. And then there is the need to bring the relation into a more self-acknowledged light. You can only crane and peer around the obstructions so much before a conversation must erupt from the sheer embarrassment, from the nakedness of the chemistry. He will no doubt be some sort of architect, and have a dog-eared Atlas Shrugged near the intimacy of his bed. The unwritten, suppressed, lines of poetry will be there in his speech. He grows more lyrical, and queenier, when he sees just how well you hear his music. Now you wish that you had not lured him to this place of loss. And already you are slipping out the disappointing information. His mouth is drying, you imagine, for all the fluid in him having sunken to his feet. With sex precluded, the exchange recedes, sadly, to the province of intellect. And there, what are you but two echoes of the same sound, cancelled to muteness by each other.

One last Cosmo at the bar springs open the trap door. Mickey makes 'em just right, saccharine, to belie the hidden narcotic underneath. My skirt's all wadded up, time to go. The cigarette in my hand is burdensome, unwieldy. I put it out with extra force, hold the glowing tip against the bar until it fades to dark. Orange is a fearsome color. Fuck, another wobbly night. My legs go, slug-slow out the door. I'm convinced there is a trail of slime left behind my passing, through the alleys of the city, through the tunnels which hold some stillness of the night even at the noon. I am utterly transfixed by the darkness, the pools of shadow that lick at me. "Click clack", the sound of my stilletoes against the shadowed street. And the night awakens to me. Gargoyle-hoboes wink and leer. Where is my car? I am not afraid of rape. Been there, done that. Long ago I learned to be the baker's marble slab, veined with green beneath the floured dough's oppression. Learned how to breathe under the doughy, smothering press of a man. Now the sky goes all brittle, and the tiles which pass for darkness show their bright edges, the incompleteness of the night. There's a God up there somewhere, who works that caulk gun to exhaustion. And I appreciate his efforts, even when his work is poor. All those tiles, with stars on 'em, are hanging loose, and the sun, or whatever other light is behind 'em, is showing through. Just my way to mark the nearness of the dawn, I guess. But there's still time, time to court some sly seduction from these dark places. Where are those eyes who know me so well? I don't care for the consummated flirtation, no need for the certainty of a dialogue. I am all invitation, open and willing. So I walk, and my hips are the abandoned drum, wanting for the rhythmic touch of a master percussionist. What a night it is! Tuesday, or some similar absurdity. In a pinch, all kinds of attention passes for a fuck. I should just pass out, go deep into some coma sort of place. Then I'll wake to a handsome paramedic's face, some uniformed authority. And the ambulance wail will herald the parting of my legs. I like the name David, so let's call him David the Paramedic. And there is some cardiac urgency all of a sudden, I am arrested in his desire. Must've been the X, that third hit, or was it four. And the meth, and the coke. Bumpety bump makes "lub" chase "dub" too fast, too fast. The tiles shatter, and rain shards of black glass down on me. Like a bullet to the chest. The hidden daylight that creeps behind the black drape explodes overhead, finds me crawling sordid, ugly, revealed. "Hello, David..." Like a regent lifted by the power of her bearer slaves, I am raised from the pools of shadow and the vomit smells of the alley. The door of my chariot says "LANCE" on it, or is that half a word. David's paddle-hands come cold upon my skin. My nipples are turgid and ambitious, but know their place, still as the Alps, while the work of resuscitation happens in the shadowed valley. "Clear!" Heartbeat rises out of my chest and seeks its rhythm in the siren. Bad place to look for music, when one is cold and lifeless, too near death. "Clear!" Now we're getting somewhere. Give that petulant nipple a pinch, David. Pass your hand, so professionally, over this imminent corpse. If this is truly your calling, and you are indeed a healer of fallen women, then put your mouth to mine. Let me expand, like a balloon, under the force of your speaking. Are we not bound together, David, you and I, by these mortal moments? Clouds of ether part, and I hear him ask me: "Have you taken any recreational drugs tonight, ma'am...?" Only you, sweet David, only the breath escaped from your lips. See how I rise, like a flaming Hindenberg, from the nowhere of the stretcher, into the somewhere of your attention. There are explosions of light before my rapt vision, swimming in the delerium of my emptiness. Fill me, David. I won't tell. The driver is too busy with the business of his driving. Don't let me die, unfucked, like this. Is there no part of you so deeply shamed into hiding, no part of you so secretly erect, that you cannot find a way to enter me? Paddle pounds electric, its lightning semen. "CLEAR!" I am only a dislodged tile, David, a fragment of the night, out of place, but for the corrective gesture of your diligent triage. Death is an orgasm. Let me cum, then. Tack me, bright, against the night. "Clear..." No avail. I go, I go, like a spill before the mop, like a winking spark, I am doused by too much gasoline.

Used to be I had to work at my fantasies, shut my eyes and find some quiet place, like inside momma's closet. I'd spend at least five minutes just setting the stage. I'd have my timid little thighs all shut tight, bracing in my need. I'd lean way back into the depths of momma's fake fur coats. It was black as pitch in that closet, but I knew those colors of artificial mink and fox and the other one. I knew them good, and they were a sumptuous glory into which I pressed my little girl's body. In the dark, thinking about the colors was the best part. One of momma's silk slips pressed to my cheek made it all sexy. I'd breathe into it and make it hot and humid from my breath, almost felt like skin after a while. I made my kissing movements into it, which only made it wetter still. My fingers, inspired by some magic, formed those lips I wanted so bad. My fist, with just a little effort, became a cherished skull, and the silk slip was a skin and the complexity of the knotted part was like his hair mounding powerfully downward to where I was imagining the rest of him. I could feel his press, the insistence of his need, and the fur coats prickled my most delicate skin. The hardened knot of him, the bunched silk slip into which I had breathed its nightly life, passed over my entire body, and took its leisure where I knew he would. That was back in the day, before what I call the "Renaissance of Darcy Davis", before he kissed me. Every day after that one was different, and for good. I'd be at Von's with momma, right there in the chilly aisle, feeling cold in all the best of ways. He'd come to kiss on me, without me asking for it. Didn't even have to close my eyes. He'd just come, and it'd be less cold. If I wasn't careful, he'd have me, right there in Von's with momma looking on me and wondering what was wrong. It worked out well to get kissed when I thought I wouldn't, and then to have Mr. Carrier tell me he thought I was so good in math, all on the same day. I guess it made it clear how loving Sam was just like math, and how my future was bound up inside his, like some geometry. It was nice to have those things so close. Seems like all that life from before is already part of a closed chapter. I mean, where do you know that you've been changed? It must come at some moment before the actual event. When I knew, I suppose, that Sam would have me, that must have been when everything really changed. 'Cause here I am, riding like a bullet, like some derailed train in Sam's Impala. And it may as well be a convertible, the sky's so big under my wide eyes. He's got this tape he made special playing, and all the songs are right. We're going on the highway too, we looked at each other in complicity when Sam took the on-ramp. There's so much possibility in the Eastward direction. We could be going anywhere, but somewhere along the journey, we're gonna stop, and Sam's gonna make me a woman. I am so surrendered to our speed. Mr. Carrier has this way of wrinkling up his nose, when he thinks you're not gonna get it. It's like he's apologizing ahead of time for making you feel less smart than you should believe you are. I'll bet he hates that part of his job, handing out F's and D's, when he'd really love it most of all if his students just fell into natural love with Calculus. It makes me sad. I wonder if Sam is good in math. We'll have kids, and they'll sit around on the floor just staring at the ceiling, while neon numbers dance above their little heads. Sam's got the car fixed up special for the occasion. The smell inside is just like in Mr. Carrier's car. He's got that amber jar sitting on the dashboard too, looks like a little genie's bottle, kinda magic. Never saw one at night before, the way the liquid is thick and moves around in little waves. I hope we'll kiss a lot before we do it. I think I like the kissing best. I knew Sam was gonna be the one when I saw the beautiful mathematics in his mind. It was about a week before Sam kissed me for the first time, and Mr. Carrier had been talking about complex numbers, and making me feel a little woozy but every bit as smart as I knew I was. There just seems to be all this space opening up all the time, and it's just like driving really fast at night. Mr. Carrier, he just goes on and on, and I get the scary feeling there's some crazy sort of infinity that's gotten into his mind. I want to go there, and he makes me feel I could follow. Mr. Carrier just gave my nose a little squeeze, right where any other man would've done something else. And I was ready for any assignment. Then Sam told me how much he loves me. And there was all this clockwork in his head, as if he were reckoning the ratios of his passion, and wanting to steady us, because the numbers were too powerful. I almost fainted, there was so much restraint in him. But Mr. Carrier is the champion of restraint. I'm sure he's holding himself in line all the time, wanting to laugh out loud for all the symmetries inside him. It's so dark down here up close to the upholstery in the back seat, and warm. Sam is busy with his calculations, preparing his descent on top of me. The windows have begun to fog, and the lights in the sky are all a milky glow. As a vice to be conquered, most of all I want to concern myself with inexactitude. I want to be clear and certain, like Sam, making no assertion before the moment is right. For all his capacity for precision, Mr. Carrier rusticates in theory most of the time. He's all invitation and no consummation. To succeed, I'll need a lesson he can't give me. Sam gave me a new pet name, when he picked me up at home tonight, said it was gonna be the name I'd hear myself called in my dreams. He said there was math in it too. Wrote it on my hand with a Sharpie pen: "0+". "What's that mean?", I said. Sam was light as the air inside the Impala, on top of me. He made himself into a point, and the darkness swallowed him up, and I looked out through the fogged rear window up at the foggy stars. So much space out there, Sam! "It means 'Zero Positive', Darcy. It means you're still nothing, but you got ambition." Sam was displacing great volumes of nothingness inside me, without filling me, only defining a space. Outside the car, inside the cradle of the road-side dark, my neon numbers were tumbling end over end. I clung to Sam as he drew his lines and slashes over me, and loved him even more terribly than before, for the cruelty of his math.

I am not the rudder of my will. And tiresome, for that reason, are the throngs which gather in my wake. They draw me backward, they drown me in awful contemplations. I am afraid to be the thing they say I am. And today, what? For such lofty pronouncements, before the promise of so great a trip, what place today in which to do this work! A wedding, a gathering of Israel in small. My people are drinkers of wine, oh yes. They are wanting for a demonstration, for a gesture to bind them in a waxy ball around my presence. And they shall melt against me soon enough. But how pedestrian, how quaintly human. Water into wine. There was no premeditation of this on my part, of course. Only a foreknowledge of the miraculous essence, and of natural tendencies. My Father is no magician, only an accelerator of natural process. Never did he make an ass from a man. Men fare well enough alone, in that capacity. He showed me these things, when I felt compelled to make pigeons from wet clay. I was a boy, and oh that these days were as those days have been. My boyhood fond, the moments when my life was as a stream. Days flowed forth from the fountain of days, sweetly successive, one after the next, and were conducted into His golden daylight. So were the moments of my waking. Darkness did not exist. There was only the passage, in the evenings, when my mother lay me down to sleep, from the most bright glow of conversation with my Father, into the slightly lesser brilliance of the night time, when He spoke to me inside my dreams. There is nothing in a living pigeon which the clay does not contain. I had only to inspire in the clay some faster movement, some hurried and excited action in the direction of its natural destiny. It wanted to be more, was, even as I compressed it with the ball of my foot, so much more than clay. The picture of a pigeon in my mind as I molded the clay was already figuring into the organization of the matter in my hands. I did not know this then, but later He showed me the function of my own thoughts against the impulses of His earth. And I learned to control them. Don't worry, mother. I see that everyone is here, and there's no reason to make a dragon from a pile of earth. Soon enough we shall wrestle with plagues and see death itself reversed. Let us temper ambition, today, with a subtle act. We, my faithful five and I, have come late to the wedding. There are more unconscious guests than awake. But the servants are fresh and alert. They will speak of this great miracle, my vaunted first, well enough for the effect. Let us to the jars of stone, then, and to the water. There is a voice of design, some small and hidden will, within those jars. They whisper, and are glowing with a light imparted to them by the shoulders of many slaves. How potent is the nectar from a bonded vein! It can smear a thousand years of longing upon a casual surface. And so have these six been smeared, these fine and weathered jars. Now they are to be carried, once more by servants, to their fated marriage. The water is drawn from a pool outside the house. The pool steals from a small stream, which itself has stolen down the precious essence of rich and fertile mountain soils. I could have bidden forth entire orchards from these waters! The many fervid hands, the many searching drops, have touched all manner of successful crop. Enough alimentary diversity to satisfy the palate of a king, which, of course, was precisely the idea. And wherever it has briefly pooled, wherever some thirsty life has put its tongue to it, there too samples were taken. Animals, flocks, beasts of every pursuit swim in Her as lonely cells. The water, She, for His waters are always female, was now in this little pool a fertile womb, filled with swimming life. The servants poured Her into the jars, and with Her went enough of nature to make His Kingdom afresh. But wine was the order. And what a wine it shall be! Some forty years aforetime, on an isolated vineyard in the North, one year a grape came forth from vines thought barren. So magnificent a wine ensued from this Holy grape, that the aged vintner forsook his profits in that year, rather than part with the special product. And where the vintner's family might have felt the absence of some accustomed pleasure, a lamb or two in the Spring, their lives instead were filled with joy from this extraordinary wine. They did not miss the money. The wine healed them, it made their ring of blood a tighter ravel, impervious to the suctions of the sand. They thrived, and later a son was born to them whom now travels in my band. Let us heal a people, then! In a gesture, I shall marry the seed knowledge of this grape with the will of Israel. Pregnant water and blood commingle in these jars of stone. I feel the intercession of My Lord, and how his measurement, his careful breath, has blown over the mouths of stone. Spoken, as a Word, into the patient ears of grape. A will flashed within, so brief, as to slip from the human mind entirely. Even I did not see the flash of light, though I felt the pulse of terror to the deepest of my flesh. Oh, Mother, what see you in your son? Your astonishment is more cruel than my name. You have heard the Baptist's cry. And what believe you of these things? Speak to me, without the burden of your shame, of that awful night. How came my Father to your bed? Were you drunk then? Can you not see now His stealth and power in my ways? But I drain, as the blood from the throat of a ram. I spill and fountain toward loss. Oh mother, why bid you such simple tricks from this tired wretch? The life in me is already doomed, too brief. I am not a lamp, but a place of burning. I am consuming souls, all who stare too long into the surface I present. Go from me, Mother, to the solace of my wine. A road beckons mortally. And it is mine.

Never does the mortal experience so crave its wings as in those moments before death. Press "PLAY." So, I heave my tired bones from some gothic summit, surmounted by the fierceness of a purple sky, where millions of bats are making their dark festivities in the air. Very nice. Already I can take my cue from this. What an ironical God has been mine. He touches me even in my play. Fuck the new technologies, they only give the bastard more ways into my head. So this is my new sim deck, hot and Japanese. A true totem of my success. I can live anything I want, be any person I want. Total sensory immersion. It is my birthday, so I've given myself some time for this. I have 37 minutes of Nero's life. The right 37. And then there's the gender reversal thing, where I can play any one of an assortment of roles within the orgy scene. But right now there's this cheesy intro to watch. Manufacturer's chip: travel ads and all kinds of "thanks for choosing Sony" crap. Whatever. It gets better. This is some sort of death sim. A cool freebie. I'm still falling, surrounded by bats. They're creepier than I thought at first. In their terrible squawks, the airborne demons do make a music fit for dying. There's even a Hebraic theme, weaving the bat cries into a melody. Oh, this is priceless. It's pegged me for a Jew. Now the merchant's cry is to escort me from this world, oh my. Avarice has certainly been the engine of my life. Even as I woke into childhood, from the numbness of my infancy, I saw the two ways in which a Jew's life can be lived. I had my choice before me, and as any man who sees a choice would do, I chose the smoother road. I fattened. I became the impassable camel, and my sense of heaven became an excluding doorway through which I could never slip. So wedged into that needle's eye, it seemed, I was now being conducted to heaven by a swarm of bats. Their faces came large before me, became human and more horrible. I, no longer falling, and they, no longer flying, now filled a room with a grey interior. Shabbily dressed, the bats, now men, were all in a row in front of me. It was an office, oh, a very functiontal place. Whatever words were spoken, had that physical effect, and put a gel of tautness in the room, some three or four feet deep. I have known places such as this, even in my fattened life. Inevitably, there are those enterprises which are leech-like in their essential nature. They exist only to parasitize the legitimate businessman. What license now, commissioner? What permit? I wrote my checks, of course. But the waiting room is another matter. Then the Ubergruppenfuhrer comes through the door, and I become aware of my scandalous attire. What sort of ratty schmatta is this? Oh, the whole concentration camp theme is in effect. Now this is a little foolhardy. Fiddler on the Roof is one thing, but this. C'mon Sony. Nobody gets away with more antisemitism than the Japanese. These dark trips have all the subtlety of the illustrations in Jehovah's Witness literature. Even the beards are stylized. No naked rabbi ever looked so petulant. And there's just too much luster on those Nazi epaulets and wings. Of course, they want me. "Come out to the yard with us a moment, Mr. Cohen..." Sure, whatever, Heinrich. I definitely register a drop in temperature when we go from the dim incandesacent indoors of the field office into the silver twilight outside. Northeast German dusk in Winter, circa 1939. Very convincing. The big stormtrooper has an excruciating grip. I can almost feel my famine-withered humerus crunching under the pressure. His gait is perfect, all the precision you'd want to believe was actually there, not a man, a machine. Evil. Heinrich does not look at me, though I am staring openly at him. Smiling, even. In my head, I'm wearing an Armani and lying on my couch, and this guy is nothing but a few million pixels. But in the main yard at Dachau, Heinrich is the shit. Don't fuck with Heinrich. I suddenly understand the naturalness of the Schwarzenegger/Republican connection. There is something reassuring to them in that accent. Heinrich speaks: "You will work here!" he says, and points behind me. But I can't look over yet, must be programming on the fly. The German words are deciphered gutteral and harsh. There's some extra emotional coloration in there, too. I guess the program thinks I should be more scared of Heinrich. This is going somewhere now. Big Hank's resolution suddenly sharpens up a bit, as if to set him apart from the drab historical context for a moment. He's more colorful, more real, than the foetid barracks behind him, more than the column of smoke rising from the oven. Suddenly the full miracle of this new technology becomes apparent, as Heinrich steps out of a recorded 3D video and into my head. Holy Shit! Heinrich is flawed and beautiful. His uniform has signs of wear, and he's looking at me now. He knows he's just a man, and there is that fear in him. Fear especially torments the cruel, as I remember. We are walking, Heinrich and I, and there is a way in which the programmed terror of that moment for the encamped Jew knows how to draw some fluid of life from the enormous Nazi. How those poor wretches must have clung to life, and wrung it from wherever it lay in any abundance. We are in the place I am to work, a pen of sorts, rectangle of mud and barbed wire. Heinrich is a man I may have chatted with briefly on the subway in Munich. A boy really, but I can't be sure. He is imperfectly shaven, and there are those peculiarities in his throat as he speaks. I can imagine his nervousness before some fearsome Gertrude, on a beery Thursday. What a dimensional creature he is! Morality is a drama playing inside his eyes, when he places the gun into my hands. There is the sensation of the metal, the contact. It's colder than the German winter, textured, grainy, too pregnant with tactile detail. It is insufferable. Then there's the mechanical Germanness of it, some ancient solidity in manufacture, a faithful dedication to function. It is an executioner's side-arm. I took it into my hand. Heinrich makes the most solemn expression in his repertoire, then smiles, then looks mortified and forlorn. There is a queue of wobbly old Jews. Rabbis all, teetering and leaning, mouths silent but in some scriptural movement. They have borrowed faces from my childhood in New York. There, a pickle seller. There, the man who drove a van. This is extraordinary. Heinrich has kept a Luger for himself. "Pop", into the first Jewish skull. "Pop", Mr. Pfefferberg, the kindly butcher. All are kind, in my memory, below a certain age. Kind even as I am moved to kill them. Heinrich watches me approvingly. Hate and detestation come so near to admiration. Alone, in a rectangle of mud, in Dachau, a Jew may briefly inflect his bile into a prayer. The deities of abstract custom have fled, leaving in their wake only gleaming German angels. I am, inside my most private mind, feeling all the exhilaration of a suicide jumper. From my moral heights, I plummet into Heinrich's arms. Expended as a revolver, I am limp in his tenderness. The bodies to my credit are already welcomed into the mud. There is a strange tendency to dissolution, to erasure. Heinrich draws his oarsman's thumb across my brow, and I am sadly estranged from him. His theme of color intensity has been adopted across the yard. There is a convergence, a bleeding zone of reds and pinks, in the middle of a sepia wall, a barrack wall. Inside, the moaners dream their sepia dreams, while outside, the colors of my American perspective run gaudy from the sky. Oh! My father is configured symbolically behind his counter. Above his head, etched in neon pink, are the words which proclaim his commerce, so strident, more glaring than the blood which would be red if the place permitted any color. The Nazis and the gassers and the rapists and the injectors are all lined up to buy his fragrant product. There is chit-chat on the line, amiability. With a coffee and a ring of deep-fried Jewish flesh, they go forth from "Dachau Donuts", and back to their rounds. Fucking Sony.

Right around midnight, there's a dinner-bell sort of sound. It comes from inside the hospital's perpetual machine. There must be, I imagine, complicated systems of organization, gases and liquids and valves, and such, that synchronize the longings of the heart with machinations of a more cosmogonic sort. And somewhere, ticking deep inside the walls, inside the cybernetic nexus of intelligence, there is a clock, ticking. It ticks throughout the day, below the line of audibility. But, by midnight, when I am alone with my cadavers, the tick tock is awful loud and full of joy. I am bidden from my desk-bound reverie, called forth. I am surely one of Pavlov's least restrained of all his carefully lessoned dogs. Adrool, I heed the sound and descend into depravity. There are too few publicly defensible reasons to embrace pathology as a career. Too few, I should think, to hold a gifted and incorrigible practicioner, like me, so well above suspicion. Yet miraculously, the world sees a heroism in us, you sculpt with death -- one of art's most resistant raw matertialk.ho must have.... oh, let's call them "eccentric appetites." I got the bug one Summer on the Cape. I must have been all of fourteen, and all boners and pimples, when it happened. She had already been singled out, had been made the starlet of my most exotic animations. I had made her get fucked by African savages on some sort of marble slab, festooned with vestiges of animal gore and ceremonial light. I would set her all aglow, make her the one the fat chieftain would just have to have ASAP. They would lead us back, after our humiliating capture, all strung together like hapless fish flopping about on the deck of a boat. We were dragged into the camp, and the white men, me among them, would know to hold our heads low. We were beaten, and knew our women would be screwed and enjoyed while we watched. The fear, in such dreams, came less from the menace to ourselves, and more from becoming aware that we wanted to watch our women get fucked. We had the excuse, the luxury of our bound wrists. Van Damme or Stallone would surely muster some special dose of adrenaline to prevent such a desecration. It was easy to imagine the close-up of the chieftain's leering mouth, Serena's thighs tensing briefly, to show resistance, then they would part, and the camera would show the surrender on her face. And just like in those cliffhanger's from the '50's, she would bite her lip, as if from the pleasure/horror of entry. Then Jean Claude or Sylvester would drag a slow and dull blade across the chieftain's throat, and it would seem he was suddenly too far away to have been inside her. You felt cheated, in the audience. "Hey, that car had already rolled off the cliff and burst into flames! When, oh, when, did our hero overmaster the jimmied door, and spring away to safety?" We knew there had been, at least, some cock-head pressure at that golden door, some reason for the bitten lip. But in our camp, in my frequent dream, the hero never came, and Serena got fucked. So this Serena, the real one, had been sighted in the center of those aquatic demonstrations which can only inspire awe in a pimply teen. She tore a gouge on the surface of the blue, and made herself into a light-filled fairy sort of thing. The boat seemed to accelerate her into some super-mortal plane. Her legs made impossible angles against the sky, and you could see her smile broaden and transmute when she felt the sun and the eyes on the smoothness of her crotch. She was flying above the water just that way, one afternoon in July of 1976, when a bird cried or a cloud opaqued her source of power, and she slipped away. If there were any other eyes on her, they did not react. I alone gasped my sound into the air, the sort of sound that set's a wilderness of animals to stampede. She tumbled back and down. The boat did not proceed into the sky as I expected, proving that it was she who lifted and exalted her chariot, and not that the two bronzed gods piloting the speedboat would reach heaven but for her burdening weight. All the light and the life flashed once and burst from her when she struck the wooden ramp. Some sound was made, I love and meticulously catalaogue all the important thuds from my life. The shirtless boys inside the boat went on for some absurd length, and did not even veer from their trajectory to greatness until it was clear Serena had been stricken where she flew. By then, oh eager body of mine, I had made a furious line in the water to her blood. There was no one around, no one at all, and only the merest of signs were appearing to suggest aid was coming. I had long minutes alone with her. She was so very dead, I knew it at a glance. I pulled her heroically from the water onto the ramp, and I had my moment of hero's clarity. I looked all around, and saw my universe transformed. I reigned and had drawn the princess from the dragon's maws. Then I stooped, quick and thoughtless, as if for a fallen coin. I put three fingers in her cunt, all in a move. It was professional and necessary. I must be looking for a pulse or some sign of living warmth, or something. I was good in science. She was warm as the sea inside. Now there was a big fin of water flying behind several boats. Minutes ticking loudly. I moved her bottoms aside, not off. Forethought to reconstruction of the crime scene. I put my shadowed dick in her. No, I moved it into sunlight first. I reversed the shame of ejaculating under my bed, or at the radiator in my room. I was erect and worthy. I came instantly. Even had a moment to catch the sun on my cock, where her slime made it glisten, as I stood over her. Less than 48 hours later, so intense was my celebrity, I had my first live girl. She did not compare favorably.

Come into the emergency room. Feet first, if you can. I especially enjoy the surprising ways in which the color red makes its cunning leap from the spiraling ambulance light into the fluorescent world of the inside hospital. Cunning and subtle. The smell, only the smell of blood, which is of course brilliant red in the mind's eye. I am like him around the eyes, the demon standing over by the television in the waiting room. I left a piece of myself out there with him. Much more than my eyes, I think. I am on my back now, in some impossible orientation, such that a river is coursing where the ceiling of the corridor should be. So swift is the advance in these treacherous waters. But I have been a guest here before. My body is still wet from the last immersion. And that demon, he's laughing at me now, openly. What sort of familiarity could breed such contempt? Am I not a brother, after all. Perhaps it was that one occasion, so long ago. Yes, that must have been the moment of offense. The orderlies are running me faster down the corridor. We blow past doors, and they spring apart, I hear them explode against the pressure of my gurney. A missile, we are. But the demon still troubles me. If we begat children of the same woman, are we not brothers first? That was my understanding. Oh, the orderlies are excited now. They're shouting commands of some sort. Battle field urgency. There's that pesky red again. Now a tide, an awful wash. The river of the ceiling is running red, and even faster than our advance. There are swept and tumbled things, rolling miserably in the foamy red. A head, a bludgeoned face, specters from my past, the restless phantoms of my every misdeed. What service now, Elijah? What can I repent from this proximity? I am too close to your final gate, too far carried in this crimson flow, to give any flexion of remorse. Yes, I have killed, and the red which conducts me to my death is their spilled blood. But what can I achieve against the holes I've made? "Operating Room" .. bloody letters at the final threshold. We slow, the orderlies and me, we enter solemn and unhurried into our presence there, into that place of slaughter. And the air, so thick with tortured spirits, chokes hot as gauze into our throats. Forgive me, Tom and Blah, or whatever the fuck your name is under that white and red-spattered orderly's uniform. Forgive me for being such a poor fare, oh my energetic, young taxi drivers. When I gave you these intstructions tonight, as I nightly do, there was no expectation of arrival in me. I was self deceived. As much as you. But here we are, arrived. Do not press against my chest, for the life you would save is not resident in me. Spare my throat the indignity of your perforation. I have already, and long ago, placed my oar inside the boat. This is only the final rapid, the part of the ride which earns its fame. And thank you, thank you for your testimony. Now come, stand with me a moment, Tom and Whatthefuck. Do you see that inconsistency over there, in that wall which separates us from the other place? Undo these silly IV drips, will you please. I can stand now. I can stand and walk, if feebly and with great humiliation. Come and give me a good wish for my departure. Even my friend, the demon, has deigned to give his attention to these proceedings. But hold fast to my hand, I am old beneath this guise. My flesh is tarred and ruined by my many sins. And so there is a slope, a grade of sufficient angle to play against that instinctive mortal fear of plummeting. Watch me as i go, as I slide into the flames. I will sing your names, and a thousand others, Tom and Whatthefuck, when my feet touch against the molten stone. I will scream your unanswered prayers directly into his mouth. I will kick and fist against his throat, and catch and tear. It is my right. I am no anonymous arrival. I am a brother, deposed, returning to take his place in the sulfurous throne room. Dead and rotting minions have announced this day. I am home.

Watching the weather is a habit of the forlorn. I stood and watched another grey anvil slide across the horizon, and that familiar portent of apocalypse welled up in me. Not that I mind crying in public, or flamboyance of any sort... In fact, I am an addict. It may be that my penchant for weather watching is itself a byproduct of my addiction. I find myself skulking like a criminal on the trolley cars, in the middle of the night. And they come like apparitions, seeming to materialize only to satisfy my thirst. There was a couple only last night. It was about 2:30, and the street had that quality of aftermath, as if every visible human movement were some activity of recovery or reconstruction. But these two, they were alive. They were locked in a fearsome clutch, face consuming face. They were, together, manufacturing a potently narcotic private reality for themselves, right there on the trolley in front of me. So, I stared, openly. I began to sup at them, making little flicks of my tongue at the air, which I hoped held some fragrance of them. She began to slide two fingers along his hard-on, where it lay beneath his taut trouser leg. It was my cue to introduce myself. So I made some comment on the weather. They agreed it was indeed a restless and stifling night, unusually hot and humid for the city. He offered her to me at the end of his outstretched arm. My first desire was to confirm that she would have an exceptionally wet pussy. She was some sort of Asian mix, but enough of that Oriental tendency for vaginal deluge was in her to make my supposition right. And the taste of her was sweet as the moisture on a mound of pickled ginger. The trolley lurched upward to take a hill of significance. We were keenly aware suddenly that we were, we three, riding inside a machine. Somewhere, under our feet, under the road, inside an alien depth of machine-privacy, a sprocket wheel was turning a greased chain, and the machine was humping itself up the hill with us inside. And with every slip and catch of that knobby chain, I ground my cock into her mouth. He produced a rolled newspaper from the place outside my sight where he had been working something. It was a tight roll, but still had the cruel edges of a recent edition. He wet an end of it in my mouth and began to fuck her with it. She bit me once to the point of discomfort, but instantly corrected for a new degree of tension in her jaw, which was itself a correction for the new pain of the newspaper's tearing entry. Cries began to puff out from her throat around my shaft. It gave her sucking a delightful pneumatic quality, for the gusts of air were being pumped from her by the thrusted newspaper. All of this conjured in my mind a picture of what was being done to her pussy. Would there be blood yet, I wondered. The cries certainly had sufficient pain in them. I looked for the cruelty at its origin. I met his gaze, and we exchanged a moment of forbidden arousal. His hand, which held the rolled newspaper, was connected to a place in his mind that now wanted to impale not only her, but me. And his eyes received my thrust, in turn. I delivered it physically, too, with the sudden forceful push of my cock to the gagging depths of her throat. The tautness of the gag made her clench around the newspaper. He took the squeeze into his own body and to that place which wanted to feel me squeeze him. And I reciprocated, by pounding her mouth so hard that the intensity of having her head fucked eclipsed, for a moment, the pain of having her cunt ripped apart by a rolled newspaper. Her brain must be all white sparks and noise by now. And she relaxed like dead flesh. Her ass even lifted and spread against the destructive assault. Pleasure finally seized her face and transformed it. Her tongue remembered itself and, began to circle my head inside her mouth. I melted into the sensation and stood now more languidly, to make him know that my pleasure was increasing. And for him, finally, there had been too much restraint. The trolley crested the hill, and increased its speed downward. Coit Tower flashed, all strange and lit, in my vision for a moment, but was replaced in my attention by the white and concrete-hard erection emerging from his pants. He spoke a word, his first to my ears. "Ass..." he said, and disappeared himself into her from behind. There was Coit again, and necessary now, to stand as a visual surrogate for his hiden cock. I imagined the cobalt sky opening a darker maw above the tower, and descending itself unto it. And we were racing each other suddenly, he and I. There would be a prize, we agreed by making gestures with our mouths and hips, a prize to be awarded at some later hour, perhaps at a bar, to the first ejaculator. She surprised me and became my ally, not his. The flash of her treachery almost made me come immediately, but she bit down to stave that. I would win, if it was all up to her, and it was all up to her, but only when she wanted me to. But I was wrong, this was no race at all, but something else. He and I were not in competition, but joined in plight, and tight in her control. It had all been, clearly now, her design and brilliant execution, not a passivity against our selfish pleasure. She was now not a woman, but an intelligence choreographing a form of sex between two men. His need, she passed to me by increasing the urgency of her sucking. And he was permitted to feel the nearness of my orgasm by the rate at which her ass contracted around his cock. She played us together, in that way, one against the other, making herself an organ of our intercourse, until we had drawn the attention of the driver. He was all white temple hair tufting from under the press of his dutiful cap. He looked back at us once, made no expression, and returned to the place where we did not exist.

Man # 1: "As incarnated souls enter the latter part of their terrestrial tenure, and cut the ribbons on the last few lifetimes before carrying on to the Next Plateau, they begin to seek, here on earth among their situational equals, the sort of lofty relations described with such ether and light in brother Plato's rhetoric."

Man # 2: "Yes, quite true. Souls of a certain age, while still chained to this ball, begin to crave, very intensely, the company of their fellows, and, to have with them, an ecstatic form of mental 'touching', which delights the very core of selfhood. Or so I have heard. This desire, once fully awakened by a first 'touching' experience (a loss of virginity), surpasses the rapacity of even the most notorious pharmacological addictions."

Man # 3: "The 'touching' experience is nothing less than a taste of Heaven. A secret handshake, as excitedly stolen from the realm of the divine, as tongue-kissing by ten year-olds from the realm of adult sexuality."

Man # 2: "Yes, but more than that. It is a true fore-glimpse of a divine activity, of the way the angels converse in Heaven. Implicitly forbidden by the Reducing Valve!

Man # 4: "As much as flight or genius! No accident that drugs, especially potent hallucinogens and stimulants, often have a role in these 'touchings'. We made and consecrated them for their tendency to wander consciousness in 'dis-incorporating', valve-dilating directions."

Man # 5: "Hmm, yes, we have all heard this talk of uncleansed 'doors' and constricted 'valves' before, from the likes of Blake, Broad and Huxley. And remember, it was Huxley who built the handy bridge for us from the medicine cabinet to Mind-at-Large... He had a sense of it, that one. God in the hedge, wasn't it?"

Man # 6: "Pah! And plenty of Windex for the French Doors of our Perceptions have we found among the new acquaintances LSD, mescaline, Ecstasy and cocaine. But, my friends, do we now dare the hubris of declaring ourselves Shamen? Is it not we who dance around fires naked in the night? Alone, or with those strange few whom fate has linked to us in this feral rendezvous. We wave our torches madly in the night, aching to see another soul seeing us back. Oh, and what a mirror is that, gentlemen!"

Man # 1: (Laughing) "How else would I know what a naked savage dancing round a fire in the forest at night looks like...?"

Man # 6: "Let us make haste then, my brothers. The symbols of this place, the moon, the stone, the tree, the hedge, and we ourselves, are on the brink of an apocalypse of symbolism. Lift your apples to the sky! Bite once and end this dalliance with Adam. Bite again and end our long exile. This time, the garden we leave behind is of our own making. Bite and eat my brothers. Adieu, adieu, until again we see each other in the mirrors of our father's palace."

The evident mechanism of her thinking did not evoke pictures of an anatomically normal brain. Instead of the usual materia gris (with all its lobes and hemispheres, corpuses and meatuses), her smallish and pretty skull seemed rather to house a creature of altogether inscrutable alienness. I have no picture of my own brain. That is an impossible perspective. But the thoughts of others usually appear to me as flashes of light, as tiny "pops" happening all over the surface and interior of their brains. The greater or lesser intelligence of a brain is visible in the overall "liveliness" of the activity (the frequency and extensiveness of the flashing), and by the presence of eccentric and interesting sequences of flashing, which mark the unlikely paths of truly exotic thoughts. Like none other in my experience, this subject's brain was of an order which seemed to refute and refuse any anatomically deconstructive scrutiny, and, more startlingly, suggested even the obsolescence of such an approach. The only "symbolic picture" of her mind I could see was both beautiful and terrifying, strange and emminently seductive. Instead of a normal brain's pulpy grey mass, the inside of Ms. Blair's skull was, in my mind's eye, home to a strange plant-like florification, which extended from the top-most end of the spinal stalk. "Plant-like" is merely a gross approximation of its physical appearance. For this was no inanimate palm frond, though it was branched and articulated to resemble one. The frond inside her skull was in perpetual, oscillating movement. And after appreciating this phenomenon for only a short while, I realized any comparisons to plant-life had become descriptively useless. Alive, it rather seemed a creature from unfathomable oceanic depths, an unknown Echinoderm from pre-history (genus Gorgonocephalus), or a fabulous fore-glimpse of Evolution's future. In the creature's movements, there was a way to divine something of the workings of her mind. For it was very much like a basket starfish, "blooming" events of contraction and expansion all over its body, which would then die-out in ever-smaller circles, within the clutchings of ever-smaller tentacles. Stimulation came into her brain just as plankton comes to a hungry basket starfish, seeming to drift or shoot in from all directions, to be ferociously embraced and devoured. My words would fall into that writhing mass. And I could see them being so captured and consumed. At times, a fragment I had given would be taken hungrily within, only to be liltingly caressed for days by the smallest and most dexterous of her fibers. At times, my offering was rather like a fine dust I had blown over her, occasioning a blissful shudder which passed in waves over her entire body. At times, I simply sat and watched how this fantastic creature digested its food and distributed nourishment throughout its secret systems. There seemed to be an ever-inward progression to this process of "consumptive knowing". It was fantastically busy, but in-fed by the cosmos' own musical pulses -- quite a marvel to behold! A machine enclosing a perpetual cataclysm of data. I could see captured fragments of information being worn smaller and smaller by the worrying of the primary tentacles, only to be passed as smaller and smaller bits to ever-finer sub-tentacles. Grains of sand so became atoms, which in turn became sub-atomic particles, to be handed over to the next smaller size of tentacle, and disappear! All of this seemed to have the capacity to go on forever. As if the fruits of her analysis and contemplation could never be exhausted. The more closely I inspected her, the more intricate she became. Every increase in the magnification of my lens exposed a deeper, more hidden, more indecipherable level of activity, along with the terrifying knowledge that I could go deeper still. There is a way to see, even the simplest of things, very deeply. There is a way to apprehend phenomena, given to an almost apocalyptic tendency to destroy one surface, only to reveal yet another surface, and another... It was this apparently limitless capacity to give attention, and to ceaselessly reap the benefit of that attention, which led me to describe the most salient quality of Stacie Blair's intellect thusly: She has "... infinite fractal curlicues of understanding."

Subject: Blair, Stacie Lain
Subject Gender: Female	Estimated IQ: 165-180
Subject Age During Experience: 34	Category: Romantic