Year: 2005

So ain’t we all inanimate, George?

—Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

I saw you spinning that greeting card rack at the truck stop. I saw the look in your eyes. You eventually moved to the next rack and bought a cheap pair of sunglasses instead. You’re tempted, aren’t you, always tempted to add some helpless contribution –more plea than invitation– to the scarred metal in the bathroom stall? Remember the pawn shop, the old woman who said, “I’m not here to listen to stories, son. They don’t pay me enough.”

Your old man was William Burroughs if William Burroughs had to stand on his feet boning hogs all day for a living. You’d watch him stir Metamucil into a glass of tonic water, chase a shot of whiskey with a long pull on a jug of Mylanta. His philosophy boiled down to little but this: Always throw the first punch. And: This world ain’t in the business of making sense.

The first time you walked out that door all those years ago there wasn’t a doubt in your heart that you were going absolutely nowhere. No problem, you thought. Where else was there to go?

Somehow, though, you got saved, and now Albert Ayler takes you across catwalks, down fire escapes, and right out into the night, into the mewling city; through empty streets, past other half-dreaming houses lit by insomnia, the blue wobble of TV screens in dark windows; along the lapping harbor humming with idling industry and the great under-throb of the city at three a.m., sprawling shadows, litter and moonlight and longing and the great hold-out behind and beneath every heartbreak, the always losing silence and compromised darkness; the way light sneaks around even while a city sleeps, all the creeping, sleepless things, that saxophone a prayer rising somewhere in the night, a wish at least, a promise, an apology, a stirring monologue, a beautiful loose thing traveling like a breathing kite from a small puddle of light cradling a park bench.

Am I to blame if hallucinations and visions are alive and have names and permanent residences?

—Karl Kraus, from Half-Truths and One-and-a-Half Truths

There is another kind of sleep,

We are talking in it now.

As children we walked in it, a mile to school,

And dreamed we dreamed we dreamed.

—James Galvin, “Hematite Lake”

My heart of silk

is filled with lights,

with lost bells,

with lilies and bees.

I will go very far,

farther than those hills,

farther than the seas,

to beg Christ the Lord

to give me back the soul I had

when I was a child,

ripened with legends,

with a feathered cap

and a wooden sword.

—Frederico Garcia Lorca, from “Ballad of the Little Square.” Translated by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili

The ranting of the old crone had been assaulting the King’s ears for weeks. By now, he figured, the madwoman’s words were drilling in his brain like an army of moist and destructive organisms, the kind of things he’d seen writhing under a microscope on the Discovery channel.

A sneeze carried to him from a distant chamber; the Queen had a cold. A moment later he heard clapping, and then a snippet of a cheerful tune from some insipid third-rate musical. The odd bird he had married would dance and shake her pom-poms (improvised from shredded newspapers) and sing alone to her heart’s content. Bodies stacked like cordwood outside the walls, and his daft Queen remained the picture of happy oblivion.

The woman never seemed to sleep. The King heard her solitary revels long into the night. She was getting wine from somewhere, he was sure of that.

He had a headache. The smoke from the pyres had fouled his lungs. There was nothing to do around the damned place but walk the dark, endless, piss-reeking halls. He’d had it with horses. All of his old chess partners were either dead or in exile. What a dreadful life, he thought. So boring, even with all the commotion and the dying. His lunatic son served no one but God, and had burned every book in the castle. Not that any of them had been worth a damn.

God Almighty, how the King hated writers.

If he could keep any of his enemies straight, if he could just pinpoint which of the scoundrels had planted so many crazy ideas in his wife’s head, he’d have the guilty party flayed and strung up from a dying tree. At the risk of offending God he had already banished his lunatic son. He’d been hearing stories for weeks that the wrong-headed fool was wandering in a sackcloth and living in the surrounding woods.

By God, the King felt pinched and set upon from all sides. He was thirsty as the devil himself for a can of Coca-Cola, and there wasn’t a damn thing left to eat in the place but rancid roast meat, stale bread, and Frito chips.

His only daughter had run off to Brussels with a rock and roll musician who favored impossibly snug trousers.

The King didn’t have a single hobby that could sustain him. He’d been an obsessive counter for years, but he was even tired of counting. He’d saddle a horse and ride right out from under his miserable life if he wasn’t such a poor horseman and so damnably overweight; what a mess he was. He wouldn’t doubt he was carrying 20 stone on his tortured frame.

Listen to that: now the foolish woman was laughing herself sick. He went to the door of his chamber and listened. Oh, something was entertaining enough, by God, in this baleful world. Not another sound beyond the lunatic raving of his wife, her ruckus cruelly amplified by all that emptiness and stone. If he could find anyone left to do the job he intended to have the Queen’s head cut off first thing in the morning and her body dragged deep into the dark woods by oxen. He would have her buried; it was the one concession he would make: he would not have her body flung upon the reeking piles of the common dead.

The King made his way to the North tower and gazed out at the wreckage time had made of his kingdom. He could see the bobbing torches borne by the roving bands of marauders, the lot of them tearing around on those destructive motor buggies he’d seen all over the television. A stinking, sickening cloud hung low over the wretched scene. The loud guitars and absurdly booming bass of loosed anarchy blasted from the portable stereos in the impromptu trailer encampments that were now scattered throughout the dark woods, each of them, it seemed, more squalid and libertine than the next.

The King was weary beyond words. There was no end to his misery. His campaigns of freedom and righteous vengeance had bequeathed him a kingdom of resentful refugees and imbeciles. He needed a new line of work.

There was no one left to talk to, no one he could trust. Even the ghosts had stopped talking to him; they now avoided the area around his chambers altogether, having apparently grown tired of his labored breathing, his ceaseless monologues, and the sorry spectacle of his naked rambles in the wee hours.

He wished like hell he had joined his old friend Ruckert, who had bought himself a Winnebago and was now armed to the teeth and living in the high desert somewhere. While the King sat there in his dark and drafty castle, surrounded by death and lawless disorder on all sides, Ruckert was probably drinking a cold Budweiser and watching his beloved Wolfhounds gambol in the sand. Oh, you could always be certain of that: Ruckert was indisputably the brainy one of the bunch. The rest of the old gang had either hung or gone to the chopping block.

The King lit a candle and took a piss from the small window next to his bed. He could hear his feeble offering rattling in the leaves far below. The fires were still blazing in the woods, and the music was raging louder than ever. The fleeing servants, he imagined, had already stripped the place of everything of value, and he imagined that the marauders would come for him soon enough, their murderous rage now driven by little but habitual stupor, inebriation, and boredom.

They were welcome to what was left of him. He would content himself with the knowledge that he had been King, and that for damn sure still counted for something in this world.

Whoever, so as to simplify problems, denies the existence of certain obligations has, in his heart, made a compact with crime.

—Simone Weil, The Need For Roots

How could I have expected that after a long life I would understand no more than to wake up at night and to repeat: strange, strange, strange, o how strange. O how funny and strange.

—Czeslaw Milosz, Unattainable Earth

The town I found myself in had a surprisingly nice public library where I could spend a couple hours checking my email, reading the newspaper, and browsing through books on local history.

At the back of this library there was a spacious and sunny enclosed porch that jutted out over what might have been either a lake or a swollen river. I could have probably found the answer to that question in one of the local history books, I suppose, but I wasn’t that curious.

Through the big glass windows of this porch I stood and watched as they dragged a body out of the lake or river almost directly beneath me.

I couldn’t tell you where I was if you pasted my mugshot on a wall map that had all of the place names printed in big, black letters. I saw them drag that body out of the water, though. It was hard to miss that. I saw them heave the body from the water and drag it through the tall grass along the bank. You couldn’t really tell what it was other than, unmistakably, a body. The guys who did the dragging were wearing plastic gloves, and there were a lot of guys wearing plastic gloves; it seemed like everybody that was standing around wanted to have a hand in pulling that body from the water.

I watched as they wheeled the shiny black bag away and tucked it inside an ambulance.

It was a small town, that much I know, and every cop, firefighter, and news reporter in town was down there, as well as the usual mob of kids on bikes and old folks out walking dogs.

Later, on the local TV station, I heard the body had been some eighty-eight-year-old woman. I was on the bed in a motel room when I learned this news. They said it appeared the woman had been in the water for quite a long time. They knew her name, and showed a photo of her on the screen, a shot that looked like it might have been from a church directory.

A little fucking town like that and nobody had even reported her missing.

Let me tell you something: if you fall off this planet you can fall for a long time, and much of that time you won’t even feel like you’re falling.

So this is the advice I can offer you today: Hold on.

Gravity is sometimes brutal, but it’s at the very least a sort of connection and binding, and as such is mostly a beautiful thing, and beautiful things are blessings.

That much, at least, I believe.

For fifteen years I’d been waiting for the news that this poor, skinny fucker had turned up dead in a place just like this, but here he was, (barely) living proof that it didn’t require much in the way of cooperation and commitment to simply keep on breathing.

It had probably been at least seven years since I’d last seen him, and he’d lost even more weight, pounds you wouldn’t think he could afford to lose. He seemed to have a permanent case of pneumonia.

He claimed he was installing countertops, this wrecked moron who was probably the most brilliant person I’d ever known. Once upon a time he had been, anyway.

For several weeks I’d harbored the nagging idea that I wanted to see him. At the moment, I felt surprisingly fine –pretty good, really, if not quite like the old days– but looking at him nodding off on the floor of that motel room I knew that I had nonetheless been mistaken. It would be just my luck if the fucker finally kicked in a room registered under my name.

He was sitting maybe three feet from the television, propped up against the foot of one of the beds, making a sort of instinctive, animal effort to watch Sports Center through fluttering eyes. Earlier I’d tried to rouse him to get him to clean his blood off the bathroom sink.

Twenty years he’d been playing with needles and he still made a mess. He was so fucked up he’d either missed the vein or popped it.

I wasn’t nearly as fearless as I’d once been, and was flat on the bed when the first wave rolled over me. I threw up in a plastic garbage pail.

“I’ll bet you never thought you’d feel that way again,” he said.

“This isn’t going to be my life,” I said. “It never was.”

“Of course,” he said. “You were always just an adventurer.” I knew this was him trying to be nasty, the best effort he had in him.

“Who buys this shit and pays for your motel rooms when I’m not around?” I asked.

“There’s always money,” he said. “Or there’s always people with money. I have a place, you know. The motel was your idea.”

I knew he had a place. I also knew I didn’t want to see it.

He had a weird and mysterious knack; no matter where he was –and he had been lots of places– he always seemed to know how to find drugs. Even in a dinky, jerkwater town like this he had his connections.

“Do you remember if there were Tecatos around back when you walked away?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “What are they?”

“Mexican junkies,” he said. “I work with a couple of them. They’re always plugged into something, although a lot of what they come up with is actually Fentanyl, and I’m not sure they know the difference.”

This was a guy who’d changed the direction of my life, and there were a lot of good, enduring things that I’d learned from him, along, of course, with the things that weren’t so good. There was a time when he’d had a real gift for discovering interesting things, in a place where that wasn’t so easy to do, and I’d once admired him more than anyone I knew.

I don’t know what happened to him, beyond the obvious things that had happened to him. I’d long since lost interest in trying to figure it out.

I think the last thing he said to me before he nodded off was, “Remember what you said to me that one time?”

“I don’t suppose I do,” I said.

I slept, which had been what I was really after, and when I woke up he was gone. I honestly can’t recall the last time I felt such a huge sense of relief.