Night-time screams out in yellow in my ears. "There is somethin' out here! You want to breathe this cold air!" A lot of nights I used to spend just walking around, with really nothing to do. All was right with the world, in a way that I fear I can never get back. I would trek around the byways of cities in which I lived, overground route-finding, zigging from zag to zag, looking for things going on. As a kid I always wondered what happened to the world after dark, where everything went, what went on in the places I recognized during the daytime. As an adult I have grown to learn that nothing happens anywhere, not even during the daytime. But especially not at night.

You learn the most about a city at night. During the day you can learn about what a city once was or wants to be, but all the cultural exhibits, streetside plaques, and brand-new buildings tell you nothing about what it means to be in the city from day to day. All I have ever known about any city I have known because of the streets at night. During the day you go to an art museum, you walk around and see everything plainly: here is the dock, there is the bridge, over there is something else entirely. What is it? Oh: only another bridge. Geography is garish and renders itself unnecessary when the sun is out. There is no need to worry. If you get lost, you can look a little harder, you can find a way to get to where you are going, even if you have to ask someone on the street. Look over there. There's the bridge we just crossed. It's pretty much the same as this bridge over here. Let's cross this one now, we can still see the bridge we just crossed anyway.

But at night, cities have a different feel. Liquid blackness fills the spaces that used to render themselves so clearly, so vividly. Now the bridge is a tunnel, a horizontal abyss dripping with oily darkness. These bridges all look the same: this isn't right. Was I just at this bridge? There's no one around to ask, and the streetside plaques are all tarnished and smeared with food and food grease. I just want to get home now. The art museum is lit up like a French whore, but it's not even open. There is no good art now, except the art of getting my ass home. You walk around and look into windows here and there, trying to discern what it is that people are doing with themselves. Trying to join them, if only for a moment. The whoosh of buses on wet pavement form the structure of the soundscape and yells, sharp metallic clicks and tire squeals, fill the framework with wordless terror. The night is constructing a cage for you, made of your own fear and loathing. You are here, you are separate from those people who live among the willing, the indoors are for them. You have somewhere to be, but where could it be?

What you learn about cities at night that you cannot learn during the day is what the city does with its leisure time. The city doesn't like work much. No one does. The city works because it has to pay rent, commutes and recoils in frustration at the amount of pollution in the air. The city has to do what the city has to do. All cities do this, and no one city's work is really substantially different from another's work. Some work in factories and some in offices, some have to smile when they sell you back your soul, and some only really need to be there to make sure you aren't going to steal anything, but every city shows up and suits up because it has to. But what cities do during their leisure time is different: it is everything.

Does the city have a penchant for strip clubs, prostitution, gambling, drinking, drugs? Does the city simply fall asleep in front of the latest Must See TV shows, only to wake up hours later to reruns of previous Must See TV shows, with a terrible taste of dead skin and bacteria in the mouth, to drag its sorry ass into bed with its clothing on? Does the city ever sleep?

Some cities are quiet, in the outskirts and suburbs almost all are. Some cities are so lively they practically punch you in the gut when you walk into the night air, dressed to kill. There is a time and place for all of this.

A Home In The Shadow

Invocation:

I am evaporated, listing slightly, listening to the sleeve. Side one: twofold and none more. Side B: all whinging and bubble-wrap. Someone was looking at the night, piercing with eyes cormorant-like, penetrating and discursive.

You want me to tell a story, something like the old stories, when things we knew were simple and you could simply tell a story. A nothing. A something to be totally detached from the damning light of day. Now everything means something. The magic of light and lying has gone. Even lies are functional - there is no more play, no more silliness for us, only the meaningful and the dead. The dead are lucky, but they are not here to hold it over our heads at least.

Exposition:

Sometime down there in Mexico, a certain man looked at a cactus and told himself, "I will build a home in the shade of this cactus." It was a large and impressive cactus. It had arms that spread themselves in the sun, further out than any cactus of any variety within a good square kilometer. In the distance, mountains and the clouds they wore as hair and beards pondered these things. They thought it would be better for the man to live among them, but that is another story.

The man began with a plan. He was sure it could be done. The shadows of this cactus changed daily, as they did for every other cactus. They were elegant, long things in the mornings and at night, yawning over several meters at their longest, but by midday they would disappear almost entirely. He sat chewing on the end of a pencil, thinking about where he would make his start. On his knee sat a piece of paper, unmarked except for his monogram and a little doodle of a cactus that looked nothing like his cactus.

He sat and he thought. He looked over the cactus for hours, getting up now and then to get a different angle on it. He poked himself intentionally with the cactus needles, the barbs that protect the cactus, to keep himself awake and alert, because thinking about the cactus was boring and monotonous. "If it will not show itself to me," he thought to himself, "I will simply begin, and let the home build itself." He had read a book about sculpting once that said great sculptors do not chisel a form from stone. They start with a good piece of stone and, using the chisel, allow the shape in the stone to illuminate itself, so that when they are finished, the stone is exactly what it was meant to be instead of some arrogant bastard's idea of what it ought to look like. The man thought about this a while, and laid down to rest when the sun fell behind the mountains.

The mountains, for their part, let the man be even though they thought it would be better for him to live among them.

The next day, the man woke up and went back to his piece of paper. He looked down at it, perplexed, and tried to think of what he had been thinking of the whole of the day before. He could barely remember it. He noted this on the paper, and thought some more about what shape the house would take. The note said, "Try to remember."

The man thought all day, in much the same way as he had done the day before, and he went to sleep again when the sun fell behind the mountains.

The mountains decided it might be better if they helped him a little. They made a rumbling and a rustling with their beards and hair. The man woke up in the middle of the night and saw a lightning storm off in the distance. He heard the deep voices of the mountains rolling over the desert, and he watched as the mountains tried to get his attention to no avail. He rolled over and went back to sleep.

He woke up again the next morning, and looked at his paper. "Try to remember." So he remembered that the previous day he had decided to go to the mountains to get building materials.

As he walked through the desert toward the mountains, the man thought it would have been smarter to travel at night. The sun beat down on him, and there was no water at all, anywhere. He trudged on, promising to drink some water as soon as he had an opportunity. He didn't care if it was a stagnant pond, or a stream of piss from a camel; he would drink it. Night fell, eventually, and the man found that he was at the foothills of the mountains. He slept in a hollow log using moss for a pillow. He slept until midday the next day, dreaming of velvet, which he had never seen or felt, and barley, which he had never tasted. He woke up thirsty.

There was a stream nearby that he hadn't been able to find at night, when it was dark. He went and took a long drink from the stream, and splashed water all over his face, until it dripped from his hair. He laughed a little bit at this, thinking how silly he must look, and tried to determine what building materials he might use.

After some internal debating and a few blind alleys - live animals are not good for structural supports, he had deduced - he began collecting branches of trees, bundling them up with strands of moss and ropy tendrils of some of the smaller trees. When he surmised he had gathered enough bundles, he took another drink from the stream. The water was cool and cold. It occurred to him that he might simply stay here, at the foot of the mountains, where there was plenty of water, and he could laugh at himself. But the desert was his home; he had never lived anywhere else. So when night fell with the sun and their shadows stretched for kilometers over him and everything he knew, the man hefted all of his bundles and began to walk.

Traveling with the bundles of sticks made for considerably slower going than when he had been unladen. He stopped lots of times, and sat on his bundles. He was only halfway back to his cactus when day came again, so he stopped, watched the sun rise over the horizon and shed light on everything he knew. He laid down to rest and, because he was so tired, fell asleep immediately.

The mountains wondered if they hadn't frightened him off.

He woke up in the late afternoon, rubbed his face, and looked at his bundles: there they were, just as he'd left them.

The man began his trek once more, and arrived at his cactus once again in the dead of night. He had a hard time sleeping, so he meditated on his predicament, how to start building his home. There was shadow everywhere, he thought, even with the moon and stars out. It would be difficult to design a home in a place of unlimited space.

Once again, the man began to look over his prospective home, and wondered how he might make a start. He decided that as soon as the sun came up he would simply begin working, and that the house would present itself, like in the books about sculptors.

The morning came and the man set to work. He put his hand into the shadow of the cactus, and scooped some out to test its consistency: a little stretchy, but perfectly useable. He kneaded it, and added some to the ball, working it around to get it properly apportioned. The ball grew larger and more stable. He set about smoothing the edges where the shadow connected to the ground and the cactus. Using the branches he'd collected, he stretched the shadow out to let it dry in the sun. By midday, he had one room almost completely finished, the walls stretched out like canvas. He would be able to sleep inside tonight. He cut a window out of one wall to let a little light in, to let him know when the day had come again.

In the distance, the mountains were happy for the man, but confused.

Dia De Los Muertos

I took the bus out to Discovery Park one night. The problem with Magnolia, the part of town where Discovery Park lies, along with a smattering of smallish, modest houses and apartment buildings, is that it's too insular, too far away from everything. Only a mile away as the crow flies from downtown, Magnolia is at least fifteen minutes from everywhere. There are only three bridges to get there, though the place isn't even an island. It's a perfect place to hide from anyone or anything, a perfect place for ugliness to slip through.

In my pocket I held a letter to my ex-girlfriend. We had never even gone to Discovery Park together, although we had visited several parks in the area. We liked to walk around; it was sort of our thing. Come to think of it, almost every relationship I've been in has included lots of long walks.

It was a late-summer, early-autumn night, one of the first nights at the end of the summer (and there are always a few) where I wished I had worn jeans instead of shorts. Someone had told me that Discovery Park was haunted, but I don't remember who, or why. It was strange to have heard this, and I wondered what they could mean. I have seen and heard things that could make your skin crawl, but I have never really had a paranormal experience that wasn't attributable to drugs. Premonitory dreams and voices are one thing, but I've never had one of those "oh, shit" experiences that has totally wrenched apart my deeply-held, scientific understanding of physical matter and its properties. The unaccountability of extra-sensory perception can be accounted for: energy fields, waves, and particles are a lot more fluid according to physical law than matter in its various states.

As I walked into the park entrance, the darkness closed around me. Barely visible were the outlines of the trees against the moonless sky, and through an arbor tunnel I walked on a gravel path. In this weather, the color of the path matched the black sky, flecked just barely with smudges. Creaks and gasps from the surrounding foliage bled into my mind, amplifying and swirling into a muddle of voices and laughter. The trees began to speak to me in tongues, of their lost branches and the death of every winter's coming. My breathing became labored and I looked into the dark for any sign of life, but the static salt-and-pepper that lives in the corners of my perception, coming to the foreground only to fill in the blanks when there isn't enough information to process, had swept in and injected rivers and eddies of formless stars shot through my vision. I remember feeling frightened, putting my best sneering smile on, and continuing on through the jittering darkness. I hoped to scare the demons away with my own pride.

A streetlight appeared in the distance, and shined its matchstick light into my field of view. The sickly tangerine of fluorescent reflections pervaded the edges of objects now, throbbing and devouring everything in a fit of blissful recognition. I crossed a bridge and found myself looking over a field, dotted with officers' housing, remnants of the army base that was the original intention for preserving so much land from development. To one side was forest, the other a broad field followed by a long drop and the ocean, and dead ahead was a mutilated industrialistic framework of chain fences and cylindrical metallic structures. It was as if aliens had landed in a ghost town.

The ever-present wind here on this precipice over the ocean chattered through sibilant grasses, spreading like wildfire. I pulled the letter from my pocket after a short walk to the middle of a field.

Reading and re-reading it in the half-light, I was aware that it sounded fatuous and insipid, that anyone who read it would probably feel the same; so I decided to skip professing my love for a woman I hardly knew any more. This was a letter to a ghost. The woman I had fallen in love with no longer existed, replaced by a more responsible, more mature version, but I was still hopelessly, madly in love with her. It was a stupid and irresponsible thing to do, to fall in love with someone who couldn't love me, so I set it alight.

It took forever.

The paper, heavy with ink and the sweat from my pocket, hardly even smoldered. I wasn't sure that this wasn't some sort of test, but lo! eventually the flame took ahold and the paper began to belch gray, dark-gray smoke. Nothing happened.

There was no great voice, no weight lifted from my chest, no feeling of elation or relief, simply a heat that grew to burning as it approached my hand. I waited until the fire was completely burnt out before I stomped the paper to make sure: I didn't want my personal information, even in fragments, floating around, ready to be decoded and analyzed by the next schmuck to happen by.

Screams and calls, cries of horror and helplessness emanated from the energy around the houses where officers and their servants and slaves used to live. They sailed over my head and through the spaces between my bones. At once I started, jolted awake from a deep sleep of tears and regret, and was free of the misery and depression I had felt prior to that point.

And then the werewolves got me.

Quarters

I want to talk about war.

You heard me. This thing must stop. Where we all fall to circling, scattered discs; wobbling on our flat sides in concentric waves. We like the way a quarter falls to the ground when it ceases to spin fast enough to stay on its edge, but have the hardest time describing it without the use of metaphor.

It will always begin again.

Someone will pick it up and use their delicate, ashy fingers. Someone will place one finger firmly on the top of the quarter at the twelve-o'-clock position, pressing down and leaving a little skid-mark row of lines in the soft flesh of the fingertip. Someone will steady this quarter with one hand and use the other, pulling the index or middle finger back behind the thumb to tighten the tendons that hold the fingers together and release the thumb to send the finger it was holding nail-side first into the side of the quarter. The quarter will spin. Knuckles will become bloody if we play this game long enough.

I want to show you something.

Put your hand here, baby. Right there, and hold your four fingers spread apart with the thumb on top of a quarter. Now slide the quarter with your thumb along the table, through the arch created by your middle and ring fingers. Now do it faster. Harder. At my knuckles. See? That's how it works.

If it were easier, you'd already have been doing it.

Now let me do you. No, you have to. That's the way it works. I know, it looks like it hurts. It does. It does hurt. But I won this time. It does hurt, but that is the rules. Hold your knuckles steady, dear. Hold them steady against the table. Because you didn't flick the quarter fast enough. It spun off the table. You have to finesse it. I'll show you how later. This only stings for a minute.

I know, I know, the bone hurts; it's supposed to.

I didn't make up the rules, honey, I just do what I have to do. To win. Well, the winner is whoever doesn't quit first. So you can quit if you want, but then you lose. Don't come crying to me, though, after you've lost and all you've got to show for it is some bloody knuckles. It's a penalty for being the loser. But you have to pay the penalty before you quit; that's just the way it is. Hold still.

There, that wasn't so bad.

See, you got me. If it was all bad no one would do it. Now you get to do me. Go ahead. Go ahead. I deserve it, I lost. I wouldn't pull any punches for you; remember how the last one felt? Go ahead and give it a good plug. Ow. Wow, you really did it. Damn. Damn, girl.

If this is the way we talk about war we will never overcome it.

If we haven't the vocabulary to sleep under bridges then we avoid that scenario. You need to know things. You need to know people. You have to have seen something. You can learn. What can't you learn? Will there be a test? This is the test, and you are living it.

I don't want to talk about it.

The war can never stop. We rage on and on against the promulgation of this unholy terror, we collect our quarters and you walk in one direction. I walk in another. We will not greet each other on the way home. We will never wonder why our paths only cross when we stammer out machine-gun fire, why our eyes search for bright lights in the darkness, our quarters glinting as we flip them over and over like little beacons waiting to bring us to some home of our reckoning.

We arrived a bit late. There was a galaxy of punks on the grass outside the hall, all over the grass like garbage strewn about, with same consistency: striped, rumpled, shiny with advertisement but covered in grime. They all looked happy enough, and I wished I could feel like I was one of them. To be a part of something: this is the key to happiness.

The air was chilly and for the first time this year, I could see my breath in front of me, faintly. The water vapor from my snug lungs didn't hang around long. You disappeared right away, off to some other planet probably, as it were. I think there are a few things to discuss here.

1) I love punk rock music. I love it like I love to howl and stomp like a child with a sugar-buzz. I love it like I love all rock and roll music, but in a way that is unique. I love it like I love my id, big and dumb. Come with me to see a show, you said. It'll be fun. Oh, woman, you know I love a spectacle.

2) You look so beautiful in that dress. Every time. It's like a nightmare, the recurring kind that teethes in so many layers down your flesh, and you want to rid yourself of it, you want it to be different, but it gets you every time, the same as it ever did. It's like that but in a good way. It's like that but in the best way. Every fucking time. You really like it? you asked. I know you like it, but it's just an old dress.

3) Where did you go? Off to go get something. Someone. To the bathroom? There aren't any restrooms here, outside. There's a cemetery across the street: tombstone carving? Do you know someone who is dead? I feel like a person without a limb, something ghostly about me, the absence a physical presence. I am dressed up too, you know. For you. I don't wear fingernail polish ever. But you said you liked black fingernail polish; I've blown it already, haven't I? Overboard. Throw a life preserver.

At the door stood two giants with their arms folded, in black. One had a haircut that suggested military training and an attitude of gentle madness; the other had a shaved head and sunglasses at night that only ever suggest one thing: I have never been sure what that is. Clad in black, they stood that watch and stood it firm: giants. The both of them, slabs of gristle and hide, motionless. I wondered if they coordinate breathing so they aren't out of sync.

In little fairy rings the punks sprawled on the grass, passing around cigarettes between nicotine and tar-stained fingers covered over in painted-on fingerless gloves and Sharpie marker tattoos, temporary Xes and permanent phone numbers that will bleed into the shower drain come tomorrow. Some of these kids steal from parents; most steal from their own. How can you not, at this age, take everything you get your grubby hands on? They've given it all free thus far, it's just a matter of time before you get the rest. My arms were full of shivering and I brought my head up to touch my neck against the column on which my back leaned.

Spotlights across the street lit the grass up greenish blue, an eerie tint like an aquarium at a strip club. These dark-circled eyes of youngsters bobbing, shifting in listerine blue, with tongues pierced and grown back in and pierced again and surgically split down the center holding little glowing squares and cylinders on them, geometric shapes to bring down doors and houses and stave off sheep and downy goodnights. Corrugated rooves of metal-filled mouths would praxis later on in the night - something wiry and wry might get inside you if you're not careful, oh, your stars are in alignment and your moons are dragging brightly. I thought to myself, please don't make me take one of these, please someone save me from this.

Music, or someone's approximation of a performance art resembling music, rumbled out of the front doors of the ballroom, an old VFW hall with a square lawn and even a flagstone set out front, narrow path leading up to a peaked doorway and the omnipresent ogres in the way of all the fun. Inside, elliptical arcs traced by the few who paid or came with the bands, the insiders, the door guys' cousins and girlfriends, and one lonely-looking couple almost slow-dancing - probably the only people who bought the album and knew all the words - made the modest hall look vault-like, capacious.

From the outside, inside appeared to be a whirl of darkness, a couple of misguided but certainly sincere people with glow sticks and heads thrown back, eyes rolled back further, spun in circles ten feet around. That's pure joy, said one boy, but he was putting something on some young girl's tongue. Is this emo or what? asked some crusty strolling by with illegible patches on a dirty leather jacket and shorts that have probably never seen the light of day or the smelled the scent of ALL. He laughed and stumbled further down the street, off to make out the words to some band you have never heard of and cannot possibly understand, so far underground that the whole scene is just that band.

The electricity of the music pushed out through the doors with a rush, and everyone on the grass simply rose in one swift movement. The band was getting off in a major way: you could feel it, the ticker rising like the sun, slow but sure as tomorrow. I wanted to see you, looking at me to let me know it was okay, but you were still far away somewhere in someone else's arms maybe, or perhaps just noticing the way the trees froze in time against the white backdrop of a masonry mausoleum wall. The music flushed from the hall and everyone on the grass wanted in: immediately.

My post, against one of the non-load-bearing support columns on the fascia of the outside of the building, afforded me prime opportunity to be sucked into the vortex. A black hole occurs when space-time momentarily becomes overlapped; the product of a point-moment(sub 0) and another point-moment(sub 1), when extrapolated out from specially relative space-time coordinates (i.e. point-moments in space-time) into generally relative space-time (i.e. these point-moments and all other point-moments as each relates to every other and the whole fabric of space-time as it relates to these points and to itself) occludes space-time in an observable, fundamentally non-dimensional fashion. The punks gathered quickly round me; I had no time to escape, and I found myself hard up against the armpit, my right shoulder dug into the ribs of a very massive man with twenty punks pressing the back of me: immediately.

From outside of this situation I saw my body floating in three-dimensional space. So this is what it's like to have your chest cavity crushed by a mob, I thought. One moment my body was filled with light against the darkness surrounding, the next moment it was in a different position. Absolute jerk, with no smooth transition from one point to the next. I had been tessered by these punks. It felt like a good hard shove: I was on my knees struggling for breath, but for no reason. I was breathing normally and all my molecules had survived intact. The security guards had held fast, but given up after all the non-paying customers had miraculously filled the building. They had some beers at the bar down the street later on and forgot the whole thing had even happened, which served them well: theoretical and particle physics anomalies were about as helpful to their jobs as were subtle distinctions of jurisprudence such as prior restraint versus right to refuse service.

I didn't forget it. I could never forget a night with you, you said once, and that was a long time ago. That was a long time ago. How had you gotten inside, and when you knelt down to hold my face in your hands, to cock your head and smile, to give me that broken-but-not-dead-and-please-forgive-me-again-this-once gaze, how did you even know it was me? I didn't even know it was me.

Minutes later, the show was done. All parties had disappeared. The house lights were up, and the streamers hung from the ceiling, blue and silver decorations from someone's 50th year of continuous sobriety, according to the faded, fringed sign someone had slightly altered with a rattle-can: "Happy Goth Year, S.o.B." I opened the door to the dressing room, left you standing in the middle of the room with your sleeves hanging off of your shoulders and far past your hands like a sorceress, and the band were smoking clove cigarettes and congratulating each other, the stink and heat of sweat and gear roiling out of the doorway. You were gone again, and you wouldn't be back.

The Spark - Excerpt from a novel I stopped working on.

The Spark slouched on a bus stop bench under a burning sun. She half-slept under a black umbrella with electric pink and green polka dots. The Spark was black, clad in dark clothing, with a half-sleepy look on her face. She didn’t move. She hadn’t moved, in fact, for several hours. She might have been dead during that time. It would be hard to prove either way, unless you took her pulse, and there was no one around who could be bothered. Even if there was, they would be less inclined to touch her than they might be to touch anyone else, given that she might be presumed dead and thus susceptible to zombism. Even before the zombies’ recent overthrow of the Rules of Life, starting with the rule outlawing cannibalism, she would be a person most human beings would hesitate to touch. They might have to tangle with her somehow. And she was a big woman. Two-fifty if she was an ounce. Furthermore, she was sort of mean-looking, in that way that a sleepy-eyed lioness looks mean; that is, uninterested in you unless you are prey. And she was old. Or young. Depending on how you looked at her. Her skin wasn’t creased so much, although it was healthily pitted; no wrinkles, it just looked worn, like a church-house bible, smoothed but almost calloused by careful use. She sometimes looked as if she had been around since the dawn of time, but at the same time couldn’t possibly be a day over thirty-five.

The Spark sat under the umbrella under the bus shelter and smiled. She had been smiling for days, weeks, perhaps, white teeth glinting out from under the shadows and curves of her lips. It is possible that the zombies had simply considered her dead already, ruled out as fodder. It was more likely that the zombies did less considering than all that, and simply ate anything that looked like a meal and happened to be moving. The Spark may have looked like a meal, but wasn’t moving.

In happier times she had been of the Afrikaa Bambaataa Zulu Nation, a wayward youth drawn in by the electric hum of Something Different, punk rock fed through a synthesizer, disco programmed by sandpaper itself, overseen by space aliens of boogie, a tremulous droning sneer that you could dance to. There was always a message to electro, always a meaning, even if it was just Dance Today, Be Free Today. Usually it was more complex, the inter-marriage of Black Pride and Social Conscience, the will to civil rights and social justice. Usually it was about Unity and Identity somehow at the same time. Usually there was no cause for a fight, because we can use all the help we can get. Usually it was unusual. The Spark loved the Unusual. She might have been called the Unusual if she had not been called Spark.

“Would you believe I once had bright red hair, like an orange flame?”

“I guess so.”

“I did, honey.”

The Spark had been the name she wrote on trains, the name she would have tattooed into her shoulder if she had ever wanted a tattoo, the name by which she would be known when her given name was of no use to anyone. Now, for instance, a couple of zombies, swaggering and staggering with tongues lolling out of their useless heads, dead tongues like fish, jerked and revolted down the street past a barber shop. The price was ten dollars for a buzz cut and several more for a style. The front window was shattered and the chairs inside were slightly spattered with blood and that blue solution combs are kept in. Apparently someone had, just prior to having a very close, zombie-tooth-administered haircut, thrown a jar of combs at the offending monster. A trail of combs and blue drips led to the rear of the store and undoubtedly into the alley out back.

The Spark was hallucinating, she was sure. She had begun hallucinating days ago. Someone had told her once in an AA meeting the court sent her to that the day would come when she’d just start to see things that weren’t there. This was the day she had better quit drinking, because those hallucinations were DTs and DTs could lead to death. The Spark had asked what she should do, was there any way to fix it? There was not, they said, don’t move around too much, and don’t lay on your back. Yeah, said another guy, you don’t want to choke on your own vomit. This started a conversation about Jimi Hendrix and some other rock stars that had unintentionally done that very thing, but the Spark was busy then, thinking about how she was going to get out of that room with all those fucking crazy people. Nobody drinks that much, not nobody I know, she had thought to herself.

The Spark was hallucinating badly now, because there were all sorts of evil things treading around and causing a scene. She wondered if maybe it was riots like she’d seen before, and the DTs were just making it look like a horror movie. This was the worst withdrawal she had ever experienced. She was so sick and weak she didn’t want to move, so that part was easy, but sometimes she felt so full of fear that she thought she would just burst open. And there was that little part of her that told her that this was all real, that everything she was seeing was non-fiction, that this would go from 398 in the Dewey Decimal System (Folklore) to 909 (World History). She told that part to shut up from time to time, to go run and hide from this evil. She watched the zombies drag their cluttered forms past the barber shop and the car wash and keep heading down the street toward greener pastures.

The Spark simply sat, stock-still, waiting for the hour when the fever would break, when she would sleep and wake up in a cold sweat, feeling like she’d pissed herself and smelling like she had sweated out evil incarnate. The Spark sat, and she smiled, and thought about a Leonard Cohen song. “I smile when I’m angry.” The sun beat down on the world, merciless and crude, but a bus shelter and a parasol shielded the Spark.

You fell and the world fell with you. Look at all you have accomplished, dust. Look at all your great fire raging at the emptiness of space, ash. A flicker, a walking shadow, a desolation wind. See you on the shady side of the wall.

Into another time we passed and made our marks on the backs of your fathers, your brothers and sisters, mothers, and all kin. Sold, enslaved, we marched you and yours back and forth, from hearth to heath, field to farm, and bled a nation dry. Bled a people dry. We are truly humbled by our own participation, but how can we say we are sorry?

Our mouths now grind the grist of our brothers' labor. You were we and we were ours, our own, our owned. We were slain and brutally raped, murdered and tortured, but we were not you then, and that was the condition. Our eyes now feast on the fruit of our sisters' labor. She was her and they were them and us and we have been too fortunate. Some have been more fortunate than any heretofore, and some have seen the glinting end of the knife in the dark. You have wept more bitter tears than any and we have not exhorted you to bring your struggle to light. We have held back more cries of mercy than befit a civilized people, we have held back more howls of adjudicant rage than should be ever wanted. Our ears have gone deaf, says the man, "to the screams in the South." WE were US and all encompassed. Your lives, he says, "and my life will never settle."

In my time I have never held a man in captivity, never bound a man to another, never held the single key to manacles by which I could free a man. No whip brandished, no assaultive words to replace a tired beating. Instead I have blended in, ignored conscience. Remained silent when by all rights I had reason to shout, "Injustice! Oppression!" God help me but I am young to regret so much. For what reason could I have ever stopped a bus, set a fire, drowned or hung a man? We have seen so much in your years, and our years have never done right by you, as if we traded. In my time I have been a coward, in my way I have been despised. We were bred for luxury and pacific mutability, sponges. We multiply and can hardly be killed, but are most useful in our deaths. In my time I have never felt more than shifts in temperature and salinity. I am divided, multitude, sepulchrous.

How can I be sorry for being born? Shall I lament, uncreate myself? Do I tear at my clothing in a display of shock and horror, a lacerated beast at last? To whom do I owe this pleasure, you who have seen little of your ancestry? Are we all now bound? For where?

And in the hour of dying we are all our own lives. In the day of our deaths, nothing seems to be wrong, worn-out, or sharp as it could be. In the season of your last breath, may your cold winds blow as cold as they may ever blow, and your warm winds temper you rather than keep you weak.

Your color was the color of diamonds: gray and white and whatever else. I am beginning to think that this isn't such a good idea. Like when? Like when you said things would be good again and you looked into my eyes, your forehead clear and white like china, and you said the reason we cannot love is to be found in our eyes. I stared at your eyes for so long then.





Topiary gardening isn't as easy as it looks. I should know: I do it for a living. I know you think, "Well, all they have to do is just cut the bushes and trees into the shapes they want." This is partially true, but think about it from my perspective. Have you ever tried to cut a hedge? Have you ever tried to cut a straight line out of a hedge, much less shape an elephant or a giraffe? It is infuriating.


When I started, all I could do was the hedge maze, for hours and hours, trying to get the hedges just trimmed back to where they had started. A snip here with the nippers, a grunting reach up to the arboreal heights with the loppers, and of course moving the ladder around in the wee hours of the morning so that it doesn't affect the daily rounds of children with ice cream cones and mouths full of screaming and laughter and ice cream, hands tearing and jostling my beautiful hedge maze.




Mr. Warstone, he was my boss for this period of time. "Head Gardener" read the brass nameplate over his locker in the cabana. "Ours is a simple task," he would begin to the rounds of new recruits - turnover was like you wouldn't believe - "to keep the hedges and topiary sculpture trimmed, groomed, and in decent foliage year-round at Winter World/Summer Land theme park. We are Winter World in the winter, when all the topiary will be covered in snow. Mostly it's just a matter of raking leaves and protecting the plants from any damage incurred by youths armed with candy canes and sleds. I guess you can figure out when we operate as Summer Land.




"Spring and fall, however, are really our peak seasons, as they are for all gardeners, farmers, and people who live off the land. In summer it is too hot to plant anything, and since we don't grow fruit, there's nothing falling off the vine to collect. In winter it is too cold to plant anything, and very few plants bear anything worth collecting in the winter. In spring, however, plants are in full growth, and the topiary sculptures beging to sprout all manner of unsightly ingrown shoots." At this point he would point to his nose. "Do you trim your nostril hair?" The unbearded grounds crew, mostly high school and college students, would usually laugh and imagine what it would be like to have copious amounts of nostril hair, or a nose like Mr. Warstone's, as big as a pluot, in which to cultivate it all. "Well, one day you will. Until that day," and at this point he would gesture out to the grounds, "you can practice on our sculptures."




"Fall is a different matter altogether. We must replant and regroup." Mr. Warstone would point at the seemingly disrepaired and unused shovels huddling in the corner of the cabana next to the folded mackintoshes and galoshes in an array of cubbies with pieces of tape over each square cubicle marked with names like "Graney" and "Shep." "Those shovels will be of some use to us then. Your backs should be strong enough to shift some earth. We will braid the new plants into the existing foliage, always thicker." Mr. Warstone's eyes would begin to stare off at some far-off Platonic ideal of topiary foliage, through which no light nor child's arm would ever pass, a hedge that would cleave like butter, at right angles. Then he'd take us outside, to the mammoth.




The mammoth was his pride and joy. It was a woolly mammoth topiary sculpture, about life-size, roughly the size of a two-story cottage. He would ask us if anyone thought they could sufficiently trim the mammoth, with a base hedge of juniper and ivy draped over it for the woolly part. He reserved the trimming of this sculpture into late June - most of the trimming took place in May - in order to prove a point. Invariably, some young lad who had been on last year and thought he had mastered the shears would raise his hand. Mr. Warstone would set the young man up on the side facing the cabana, away from the side facing the entrance, and let him at it.




In less than five minutes, Mr. Warstone would be tearing into a screaming fit. "You're ruining my mammoth! What is the matter with you?" Without fail he would with tears in his eyes run at the mammoth with clippers in hand and in a few short minutes would stand back, look forlornly at the mammoth, to all eyes but his exactly the same as it had looked ten minutes earlier, and sigh, "Well, I think I may have saved it." Then he would turn toward the crew and give us a disappointed scowl. "But I think I had rather die than let any of you near my mammoth again." He would assign us to more menial tasks - trimming, raking up excess clippings, mowing the lawns, watering, and so forth - and go to work perfecting his mammoth. He could spend hours on the juniper tusks jutting toward the sunlight, and one wondered how a man with so much patience at his craft could fly into a rage at his staff of high school students.



Summer wore on and some boys would quit, unable or unwilling to bear the spate of verbal abuse that was sure to accompany any run-in with Mr. Warstone. Any task, no matter what stage of completion or how well or poorly it was done, went without some comment. "Don't cut so much. No wonder Bambi's mother was shot; you amputated her," he would sneer at a boy trimming the leg of a deer. "Do I have to drown you before you understand how much to water the ficas fox?" It went on and on. Warstone was not an especially happy man.



I remember the day Robbie Childs ran up to the cabana to awaken Mr. Warstone from his daily siesta. Robbie was the smallest among us, probably only about 139 pounds, a junior in high school, barely able to lug a shovel around, much less do any good with it. He knocked on the door. From beyond the portal came a groan, "What?"



"It's two-thirty, sir, like you said." Robbie listened at the door and looked at the windows to check for any signs of life. Mr. Warstone was known for throwing a shoe at the door to frighten the offending party off with the loud noise, but the other shoe did not drop today. "Wake up, sir."

Like a light pours from an open window into the street, unguarded and unbarred. A womb, art, this garden where I lay unfulred looking across the abyss of flowers and sky. Each stem is a tiny world where light and the fuzzy glare of afternoon plays on the ends of petals. There is a perfection in these weak moments, a satisfied grunt of grass smells and the sticky tangibility of grass touching my arms' skin.

Cough, cough. Something about this album grabbed me right from the start. The Black Eyes and their harsh, counter-melodic rhythmic carpet-bombing made me crave memories and concrete. Outspoken, bizarre, Christian, and on Dischord: what was not to like? It was noise and art and intentional and smart. Who's to say?

Guess what I wrote in my black notebook today? I padded back in from the bathroom determined to make conversation.

I don't want to hear about it right now, she snapped. Why don't you get out of here before something happens again?

The red and yellow streamers she'd hung flickered on the ceiling. The room was on fire. It was so hot. I watched them ripple and wave in the fan's extension-cord powered wind. Silence, except for the white noise from the fan and the street, pervaded the conversation. It was like a separate party, arguing incessantly for breathing loudly. The cars rolled by downstairs. The fan huffed.

I said get out of here. You better. Her eyes narrowed and there was a little jump in my heart. I was happy to have her attention, but I couldn't understand what was the matter.

Are you having a nervous breakdown or something? I asked, hoping that she would answer yes. I have had a nervous breakdown. It's not fun. I did not tell her this.

Do I look like I'm having a nervous breakdown? I just want you to leave. A light rain joined the conversation, though the sun was still shining outside. Do you understand me?

It's raining, babe. I don't want to go. I want to figure out what I can do to help. I started putting on my backpack and my shoes anyway. She wasn't going to budge, not now. I was going to have to leave. My shoes squeaked on the wood floor as I double-knotted the laces. No socks. Great, I thought, my feet are going to be soaked when I get home. Have to put the shoes in front of the heat register.

You can leave. She was on the verge of tears now.

Are you, uhh....is it that time of the month? I pulled my backpack straps down, momentarily tightening my backpack before letting go and allowing the bag to drop a few inches and settle with a satisfying 'whuff.' So there, rain.

She shot a dark look to let me know that her menstrual cycle was not up for discussion now.

I just wish I could be of service to you somehow, I whined as I turned to walk out of the room.

Well, you can't. I could hear her lower lip shaking through the words, an oscillation that could have been interference from the fan, but wasn't. You can't help me with this.

I knew well enough not to ask if there were anyone else involved. It could only make matters worse. Besides, I didn't really want to know if there were. What was I going to do, hit them with a baseball bat? My feet plodded out the door and into the hall. Well, bye. I guess I'll call you.

She didn't answer. A lot of things went sprinting through my mind. Should I wait outside and see if anyone slips out the door? Where would I hide? It was raining. This was ridiculous. If she wanted to have her problems to herself, whatever they were, then let her. I opened the front door and looked up the unlit stairwell into the corner where the stairs bent into the upstairs hallway. I love you, I said. Please let this be okay.

Outside the ground had the fresh smell of rain and dirt, street grit kicking up into the graying skies. Summer was coming to an end. I felt each individual splash of rain on my legs and bare arms. Usually we don't have real rain, just sprinkling drizzle for days. This felt good almost. It was real.

Down the street a woman walking her dog cinched her sweatshirt's drawstring so that the hood wrapped tight around her face, framing it like a coccoon. Her hands were pulled up into the cuffs, too, the leash shooting out and waggling here and there following a great big German Shepherd. She looked like one of those 'invisible dog' leashes with the wire stuck in the leash and collar, except backwards, like her clothes had the wires in them and the dog was the real part of the trick. It wasn't cool enough for what she was wearing.

When we passed, I asked, Aren't you hot?

I know it, she said, with her almost invisible face. I chuckled and kept walking.

This gray atomie looks to me like a shower of gray atomies. Nothing is the same as it ever has been and nothing will ever be the same again. I can't stand thinking about the past in this way. I can't stand looking at all the nauseous people, there on the subway, with their books and their photographs in their wallets, holding onto scraps of paper.

Living on a pitchfork with whip in my tail, there were only two things I needed to say: I am not here and I haven't got time for this. It was only a matter of time before the right-handed part of me looked back at the left-handed and laughed.

This came out of me in my white notebook. These notebooks are fictional. The notebooks don't exist. They are real, but in a strictly physical sense of my owning them, possessing them, or even planning to possess them they are a figment of my imagination.

There are notebooks.

There are notebooks in stacks, and I have green ones emblazoned with the University of Washington logo, purple ones, blue ones, maybe even a white one, certainly some red and some black ones, their spiral-bound cardboard covers dulled from their original glossy sheen, scribbled all over with Sharpie pen ink bled and smeared, Bic pen ink gouged into the colorful veneer with all manner of slogans, sayings, and scratched-out words. Abandon hope, all ye who enter was one of my favorites.

At one time I believed I was living in hell, that this world was a literal punishment for something I had done at some time in the past that I could not remember, or a punishment perhaps, if the Lord were especially vindictive, for something I might do in a predetermined future. These notebooks contain the sum total of my soul's desire to prove itself worthy of existence, and should they never see the light of publication, I will be much blessed for the fact. There is very little a soul can say to justify, in the Valley of the Shadow or the Garden of Eden alike, its existence. The absolute glory of creation is enough, isn't it?

There are notebooks. The notebooks I have kept since I was old enough to want to express myself in the written word and young enough to believe that this would make a difference. Now it is something I simply live, day in and day out. If I were to stop writing for any considerable period of time, I would lose something in myself, something intangible but central to the fiber of my being. The core of what I am would melt and I would be adrift again in the Arctic Sea of my own conscience. I write. My dreams and hopes and desires and fears, stories I have made up and haven't made up yet, poems to soothe the burning infamy of consciousness; all these things flow from me.

But the notebooks to which I refer in italicized bookends in my short blog entries, these are simply fanciful mechanisms. For water to flow from a sink, one must turn the faucet, and to turn the faucet off to stop the flow again. The notebooks are valves, with multi-colored handles, listless and impatient.

Promises kept and days ended, the wordless widow kept her watch. The cottage smelled like fresh flowers, and few visitors ever made it this far down the path to her little villa in the sun. The path, overgrown with brambles and sunk in marsh-water, was not easy to tread, after all. With her sewing and cooking, she had enough to do, but was always more than gracious with any visitor.

Labors erased by a fretful, wandering hand. We were a movable feast. I am on the edge of the canyon looking out over the gorge. It yawns before me as if it could never be any closer than I am now. There is a blue sky looking down at me, and the river snaking through the flat belly of the canyon. Where are the desert flowers? Is it too hot and dry even for the seekers of the dead heat?

This I wrote in my brown notebook. It was etched in a weird script, something other than what I usually write in. Anya commented on it, said it was "felicitous" that my own script is so forlornly ravaged that I have trained myself to read virtually anything that can be called handwriting. "That's why you should be a teacher."

I smiled and muttered something under my breath.

"Excuse me?" She fixed on me the gaze, a storied and studious look. What can I say to a question posed with such mischief?

I cleared my throat. "I said, 'I know, I'm working on it.'" What I had actually said under my breath is of no consequence to this tale and unfit for print in any decent publication.

"It's always a comedy of manners with you." She rolled her eyes a little and went back to her work. She returned the paintbrush to her mouth, like a bit, using her eyes to incise the fragment of pottery she held. Perched in her left hand, balanced with the right was some thousand-year-old piece of antiquity, the better part of an ewer gangrened with the crud of time and lack of care.

I turned to look at one of the books on her shelf: Gray's Anatomy. "Why do you have Gray's Anatomy?" I hefted the volume. It was solid, and when I flipped through the first introductory pages, I got a whiff of that old book smell, the glue and dust mixed with paper in a slow rot.

"One never knows the reference volumes one might need." She was back into the pot, looking at one spot for seconds at a time, trying to determine, sitting cross-legged now hunched over a piece of brown parchment paper with caked pieces of dirt strewn over it, whether the spot she was looking at was a piece of the original work or another piece of detritus to be hewn away.

Flipping throught the musculature of the adult male and adult female, I hurried past the red strings of muscle and blue lightning arcs of neurons with their bulging eyes and approximations of the human form rendered in what I have always thought of as the least attractive and most engaging light. "This is for doctors, though." Aah, yes. Here we are: sex organs.

She had a tiny chisel with a fine edge on it and was digging the long end under an imperceptible cracked layer in the ewer's coat of dried muck. Her slender fingers gripped the handle and end of the chisel, while the crescent of one reversed thumb edged into the opposite side of the chisel, the vessel itself cradled in between the heels of her boots. "If I were to find medical implements or something...maybe a speculum, say..." Little beads of sweat began to formulate on her forehead under the loose strands of blonde hair.

"I'll say." My eyes widened at the labia majora and minora in all their illustrated glory. "You'd want to know the ulnar nerve from the anus, right?"

"Exactly." She looked up at me and narrowed her eyes. "Though I think you might need more help than I do in that department."

"If I don't own the equipment, I should not be expected to have the manual memorized."

"It wasn't manually that you had a problem, as I recall." She went back to her work, and I resumed my study of the epididymus.

"I didn't hear you complaining."

"You didn't hear me snoring, either."

"Harsh."

"I'm trying to work." She shifted her weight from one buttock to the other and back again, squirming and sighing in exasperation, "and you're making me all hot and bothered. Why don't you go make yourself useful and get me some vinegar?"

There are advantages to being a kept man. One is that fetching is considered being useful, whereas with a dog it is considered playful. Another is that sloth is at times tolerated to the point where simply leaving the room for a few minutes brightens someone's day. "I'm not sure if we have any. Is it for cleaning the ewer?"

"Sure is."

"Okay, not malt vinegar, then." I put the Gray's back on the shelf, silently resolving to find and put a name to the part of me that died when I agreed to live with Anya. "I may have to run to the store to get the distilled, industrial stuff."

"Fine, sweetie."

And we laughed at our circumscription when our chains looked like rose petals, but our abyss was just as bottomless and just as meaningless as the one you held in you. For a time it was only the worst in us that fated us to worn-out husks of our former selves, and then the best began to turn, until all we had had blown away into the wind.

Snippet about Snow

Today is a good day to get a primeval word out of the dictionary and bash people over the head with it. Maybe something like, I don't know, "connubial" or perhaps "perspicuous." Any way to keep the heads rolling, really. Because what is life except empty words and the way you affect others?

This was what I wrote in my green notebook on the fourth day of the year. There were cherry blossom trees with arthritic branch systems, frozen under. I saw a formalism of frost that I hadn't ever seen before, or had never noticed before: total immersion under ice of one cherry tree. The whole tree had been soaked with melting snow and then dried and frozen and then melted again, and frozen again, so that each branch, all the way out to each terminal twig, was completely enveloped in a transparent layer of ice about a quarter inch thick. If I had had a mind to I could have snapped a twig off like an icicle, and the whole tree might have shuddered with the amputation. The whole tree might have glistened and become still for the part of it that it had lost.

Instead I imagined a whole world covered in a thin veneer of ice, every surface slick with ever-perspiring glass. Walking would be an entirely different animal. Maybe even a different form of life, or not a life-form at all. Minor, precisely calibrated movement, highly tensile and attuned to the distortion and degradation of the third-degree lever, would be at a premium. Or very, very sharp claws.

I wanted everything there in the snow, in the ice, wrapped in a cellophane and delivered to my doorstep. And there it was, I had only to run out into it and hazard my knees and ankles. Blue jeans are always so much less predictably awful when it comes to freezing wetness than they ought to be. Everyone who has worn blue jeans in the snow knows exactly what they are getting when they wet the jeans at all: a future of red-chapped legs, denim that is starch-stiff with cold and impossible to peel off with extremities [read: fingers] frozen dumb as a coffee can full of pens, and a natural melting and drying process that takes hours and leaves your jeans warped and fitting tight in the ass and blown out in the cuffs. And yet, there you go again, there I went, out into the snow with blue jeans on, thinking less of my clothes than my sheer bejanglement at the marvel of a snow-covered day.

You can really make a lot more money trading in souls and futures than you can ever dream of making in the lottery. The lotter pays more, but come on, everyone has a soul.