Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

When I was a kid, there was this store out at the mall that sold cheese from all over the world. The place reeked. They must have had hundreds of different kinds of cheese. I like cheese as much as the next guy, but you wouldn’t think there would be any real need for so many different types of the stuff. I wouldn’t, anyway. I mean, why would anyone spend so much time dicking around with cheese? It seemed to me that there couldn’t have been much difference between some of the varieties, and a lot of them looked pretty much the same.

I never understood the place, to be honest with you, never understood how the hell it managed to stay open year after year. I guess maybe lots of people bought cheese for Christmas presents, although that doesn’t exactly make sense to me either.

Pretty much the only thing they sold was cheese. Well, pickles. They sold pickles as well, those great big pickles in giant jars, but I think those were mostly a point-of-sale novelty item to break up the monotony of all that fucking cheese. I don’t have any idea why anybody would go to a mall to buy a humongous pickle, unless, of course, they’re just completely bored out of their minds, which lots of people clearly are.

We used to drive around and get stoned and then go out to the mall to play Ski-Ball. We’d always walk down to the cheese shop because every day they gave away free samples of different kinds of cheese. They had a display out front with little cubes of cheese with toothpicks stuck in them, and they were never really dicks about it if you took more than you should or kept coming back.

The guy who ran the place always wore one of those big cheese hats made out of foam.

I once asked this guy if he could tell the difference between all the different kinds of cheese.

“Of course,” he said.

“Let’s see you prove it,” I said.

“Do the world a huge favor and don’t be such a smartass,” he said.

That pretty much became our favorite catch phrase all the way through high school, and in the right situation I still find it comes in handy now and again.

The day had been hot, and it was apparent that the night would bring little relief. There was no wind, nothing but the humidity and the stillness and the swelling sleigh bells of the cicadas from the trees. Up and down the block people were sitting out on the stoops of the apartment houses and duplexes, murmuring quietly and waiting for the darkness.

He was sweating profusely, and he was not a man who liked to sweat. It was a clammy sweat, sticky, persistent, difficult to make peace with. He knew he should find something to eat, but he had no appetite. He did not feel like eating.

It seemed to him that men had no business blasting themselves into space time and again when there was so much puzzling emptiness yet to be explored on the planet that was their home.

He lived with the regular intrusion of sirens, erupting at all hours. They mostly bored him, even as they served as a constant reminder of the seemingly limitless ways in which human behavior, and the human body, could be tragic and disappointing.

His wife now lived in the country.

His mother had come to look after his two daughters, who were spending a few days with him. He loved his daughters very much, he supposed, but they were better off in the country with their mother.

He was in the half-finished attic bedroom over the second-floor apartment that he had rented many years ago with his wife. It was hot up there, but his mother and the girls had taken over the bedrooms downstairs.

The attic room had a window that allowed him to stare out into the street while he listened to the radio. His mother had given him some money, and he was drinking a beer imported from Germany, a foolish indulgence. The beer would be warm before he could get halfway through a bottle, and he was trying to drink fast.

Outside the window he saw his youngest daughter struggling along the sidewalk with a strange cat dangling from her arms. She had the cat by the underarms (if cats can be said to have underarms) and it was hanging almost to the little girl’s feet.

Someplace out in the neighborhood an ice cream truck crawled tinkling through the dusk and the unmoving shadows of the condemned elms that were splayed in the streets. The sky to the west looked like it was bringing in some rain. That would be fine with him.

He was trying to think seriously about a photograph he had looked at many times in a book his wife had left behind. The photograph showed a Vietnamese monk seated calmly on a sidewalk, ablaze. There were other people in the photo as well, spectators, watching the monk burn. There were two men and a young girl. They all appeared to be leaning slightly away, as if they could feel the heat from the fire or were afraid the monk would explode.

The girl was holding a purse –or perhaps it was a book bag– and it was this girl he was trying to think about. He was wondering about the girl, as he had before from time to time, wondering what she was thinking and feeling there as she watched that man burn for some apparent principle she was likely too young to understand. He was wondering what had become of the girl, frozen there for all time, trapped in that image, and he was curious about what effect that moment had on her as she grew older and went out into the world on her own. He wondered what had happened in her life since that day.

He also, of course, wondered about his daughters.

And then he thought about the monk.

I read Nightwood again early this morning. There’s still nothing else like it.

Here’s something I wrote about that weird and beautiful little book the last time I picked it up and got literally lost in its pages:

Last night I sat down and blur-paddled my way through Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, a book I read –or try to read– every couple years, and which I love like few other books I’ve ever read or tried to read. I love this book differently than any other book I can think of, love its fuzzed weirdness and thickets of the barely explicable; I love the sense I have in every line of an eccentric and fascinating mind goading words across the page. I think it’s the only novel I’ve ever stumbled across that literally leaves me mind-boggled every time I pick it up.

It seems impossible that Nightwood could have been published in 1936, and I don’t know of another book that’s been published since that has accomplished its almost impossible combination of precise, vivid imagery and utter elusiveness, without ever quite abdicating its responsibility to tell a story.

I have been recommending Nightwood to friends for years, but few people seem to be able to finish the book, and I fully understand why. Djuna Barnes was likely crazy, and this is a crazy novel. The title couldn’t be more perfect –every time I finish it I feel exactly like I’ve been stumbling around in a dark, crowded place in the middle of the night, and my memories of the book inevitably begin to evaporate the moment the first murk of daylight begins to creep across the walls. I am, however, always left with scads of strange sentences and fragments that I’ve scrawled on index cards, and these words are the bread crumbs that keep leading me back to Nightwood time and again:

…but think of the stories that do not amount to much!

…I knew all at once that the tragedy of the beast can be two legs more awful than a man’s.

I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

Were she a soldier she would define defeat with the sentence: ‘The enemy took the war away.’

…down the grim path of ‘We know not’ to ‘We can’t guess why.’

One’s life is peculiarly one’s own when one has invented it.

We do not climb to heights, we are eaten away to them….

The excess of his sensibilities may preclude his mind. His sanity is an unknown room.

Only the scorned and the ridiculous make good stories….

I was sitting in this hotel bar in Sacramento one night a few months ago. It was early in the evening and the place was empty. Some friends of mine were out on a golf course somewhere and I was bored out of my mind and wished like hell I’d never agreed to come along on what was supposed to be a little weekend getaway for a bunch of old buddies who’d all gone to chiropractic school together. I never went to chiropractic school, and I don’t play golf, but a guy I knew from work had put this package trip together and had a late cancellation so he’d talked me into tagging along.

I thought I’d gotten a good deal, but it wasn’t looking like such a good deal after all. The night before we’d had tickets to see Abe Vigoda and Marion Ross in “Gin Game” at some cheesy dinner theater.

At any rate, I was sitting there in this bar and I haven’t had a drink in years, so I was just nursing an iced tea and watching college basketball on the TV. The bartender was this wired little character who was behaving almost like an imposter. He was pacing back and forth behind the bar and aggressively snapping a towel, and then he started lighting matches and flinging them in the air.

Finally he comes over to refill my iced tea and says, shaking his head, “I’ll tell you what, you hear some interesting stories in this line of work.”

“I’ll bet you do,” I said.

“Just this morning I had this guy come in here and sit right down at the bar and commence to telling me about an exerience he had recently in Thailand. You ever been there?”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Beautiful country,” he said. “Nice looking ladies. I’ve spent some time there myself. Anyway, it seems this fella was doing some hiking in Khao Wang, which is some sort of national park, and he stumbled across a bunch of workers who were castrating tranquilized monkeys on picnic tables. He said there were dozens of these poor insensate monkeys piled about, and these characters had them splayed right there on the picnic tables and they were sawing the little nuts right off the damn things, one right after the other. The guy said they had a big boombox and were blasting a Van Halen CD. Up to their elbows in blood and gore and monkey testicles, and there they were, he said, laughing and smoking and listening to Van Halen like they were having themselves a party.”

“I can’t imagine it,” I said, and I was telling the God’s honest truth.

The bartender claimed there was someplace on the Internet where a guy could see all the footage he wanted of monkeys being castrated.

I told him I didn’t doubt it for a minute.

“That’s where I get all my prescription drugs and fishing gear,” he said.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“The Internet,” he said, and slapped the surface of the bar with an almost frightening burst of enthusiasm. “Damn straight, mister. We’re living in an incredible age. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

He asked Emilie to leave the curtains by this window undrawn at night, in order that, when people were asleep, the fish might look at the moon.

—Isak Dinesen, “The Dreaming Child”

What is the theme? he shouted at me.

I’m sorry? I said.

Your point! he bellowed. What is your point?

Things are slippery? I offered.

Ah, yes, he said, nodding his head, calming down. Meaning is elusive. Meanings. Answers.

I mean things, literally, I said, stammering, starting to wave my arms around like I always did. I mean objects. I try to pick things up and they fall right through my hands. I lose my footing; all the surfaces seem so slick and shiny.

He sat nodding his head and stroking his beard. That might at least make a decent enough metaphoric entry to your theme, he said. Please go on.

But that’s all there is, I told him. It’s not a theme; it’s the way things are.

I left the inquisitor’s office and wandered the streets for hours. I was puzzled by the way the world looked, and had to admit that I sort of liked it that way. I liked losing my way, enjoyed the feeling of being wholly lost in a big city, stunned by an odd angle or a furtive, impressionistic detail in the ceaseless shadow tide of the peripheries, noticing the things that never moved absorbing the things that did. Also, big things, slowly, almost imperceptibly, absorbing the darkness, just as in the morning the light would rise in all of them again.

The faces of the people I passed were slack with preoccupation; they’d pulled down their shadows around themselves, and looked right through me in a sort of empirical blackout. I didn’t mind feeling invisible. It made it easier to stare into things.

I didn’t want anyone to give anything away, to show me the way into a single idea. Poets, writers, artists, musicians: I liked them best when they were at their most mysterious, when they drove me deep into the unexplored scrub country of my skull. The really great ones would kick all sorts of stuff loose in my head –images, luminous dust, sparks, bursts of static electricity, a fragment by which a story, a secret, even an entire lost civilization might be inferred. Words would suddenly explode from dark pockets in my head like startled birds fleeing a bush.

I’d ultimately fall down flight after flight of stairs, a bass line beating in my head like hail on a tin roof, or, a moment later, quieter, like rain at the windows.

Just open the door a crack, that’s all I ask, or allow me a brief glimpse of the whole howling universe in the sliver of moonlight where the curtains flutter momentarily free of the window frame.

Put it in my reach, not in my lap, as someone –I think Wendell Berry– once said.

Let me imagine my own world, my own poem, my own story, inside yours.

Just let me imagine.

That’s all I’m asking.

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.

How strange.

Do you see how much that poor creature has in its hands?

And yet you’ve never known anyone with emptier arms.

Look Closely: This Picture Is A Metaphor

Is anybody alive out there? Would you care to show yourselves or produce some general murmur to announce your presence?

This darkness is oppressive, and surely more blinding than light. I can’t see you, and I have no true way of knowing that you exist. Thankfully, however, my presumption apparently knows no bounds. I’m willing to presume all manner of foolish and seriously misguided things. This trait, I suppose, is a sort of protective delusion. I’m not sure, frankly, that I could live without it, or at least without some equally pathetic variant of it.

There are, I’ll admit, occasionally spells in which I like to imagine you –and first, of course, I have to imagine you, which is no small feat– huddled out there in a great, or even a rather modest, sea of bodies, pressed together in the darkness or even just scattered sort of randomly about, and holding aloft cigarette lighters in mass –or minor, or whatever the opposite of mass would be– tribute to my non-existent gifts.

I shout things like, “Hello, Minneapolis!” Or, “How’s everybody doing out there tonight?” Typical things, really, but I’ll also sometimes find myself yelling more atypical things along the lines of, “What am I doing, and why am I doing it?” Or, even more ridiculously, “How am I doing? Does my hair look okay?” Or: “Is there really any reason at all that I should carry on with this nonsense?”

And I can tell you emphatically that as blinding as the darkness can be, the silence is positively deafening. It’s unnerving, to be completely honest with you (as if, of course, such a thing were even remotely possible), and some nights it just flat out makes me keen myself red-faced and hoarse.

I wish I could say that this was somehow cathartic.

I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, done, and they stopped growing. At the very moment that one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult, in fact, they seemed content to swap the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes.

—Katherine Mansfield, from her journal

Come and get these memories.

—Martha and the Vandellas

There was a culvert down there that would take you right back into the mountain. In the spring, or whenever it rained, the thing would rush with run-off water that would fill the little creek and turn it for a time into a roaring, dirty river. During dry spells, however, you could walk ankle-deep in clear water way back into the cool darkness of the culvert, right into the belly of the mountain. A normal-sized man wouldn’t even have to stoop.

When everything started to go to hell and the men came across the fields in their black helmets and set fire to farm houses and barns, the people who lived in the little villages that were spread out across the countryside packed up their most essential possessions and took up residence in the mountain culvert.

Eventually the villagers established an elaborate community in the culvert, and started excavating further into the mountain on all sides. They set up partitions and built elaborate housing warrens for individual families and tribes. At one end the essential flow of water into the culvert was walled off with stones and diverted away from what were now the crowded apartments of refugees.

After a time the culvert community, strained by overpopulation, began to expand further and further, until there were a handful of anonymous villages strung out deep within the mountain. These subterranean hamlets eventually developed their own languages and cultures, and became in time bitter rivals. Malnourishment and an assortment of related dementias led to escalating violence that was every bit the equal of the hostilities that had driven the culvert dwellers underground in the first place. There were constant eruptions of new conflicts, and eventually full-scale war, which was a savage, bloody, and hand-to-hand affair in such close quarters.

They said when they finally went in there with the bulldozers they found the bodies stacked like cordwood, and there wasn’t one soul left breathing.

The darkness is only light

That has not yet reached us….

—Charles Wright, “Tattoos”

I knew if I waited long enough light would eventually come through that hole, and so I waited.

I waited a long time.