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.