The roof is the place to see parrots, an entire population of them descended from a single breeding pair that escaped twenty years ago from their cages at the zoological park. They congregate now in separate flocks of ten or twelve and multiply the same way the rest of us do. I like their colors against the drab concrete and the billboards, their chattering at all hours of the night, though I suspect I am in the minority there. Two kids with slingshots have at them but their aim is atrocious. If I had something heavy with me I’d drop it on their heads – something like the onyx globe, for instance, I stole from the Dean of Students’ office when I went there to visit and the Dean didn’t recognize me. He was immediately frightened, could sense that something was not right, and he tried to act as if he were perfectly capable of defending himself should matters get out of hand. Some people seem to think matters are always just a squint-eyed glance or awkward phrase away from getting out of hand. It was when he had excused himself, when he was going, he said, in search of some paperwork he was sure I was supposed to sign (though really I knew he was running for safety, looking about desperately in the hallway for someone with a badge and a gun to come and arrest me) that I stole the globe. I didn’t even bother trying to hide it under my coat, the coat I had brought with me for the express purpose of hiding stolen objects under. The kids who dislike the parrots so intensely listen to Thelonious Monk recordings all day when they are not trying to shoot the parrots with their slingshots. They are positively obsessed, which makes them miscreants in my book and deserving of something heavy dropped on their heads. If things keep going the way they have been going, soon every interior organ in my body will be damaged beyond repair, turned into a grotesque, spongy replica of itself unless I can find a way of reversing the procedure, of making the light that originates inside my body less anxious to make its escape. The only way I know of accomplishing this is to hold perfectly still for hours at a time, refusing to so much as blink until it is completely impossible not to. The sounds of Monk knocking about on the keyboard three stories below puts me off my game sometimes and I curse a little under my breath, shift about uncomfortably and then start again. You’d be surprised at how still the human body can be when the right mind has taken control of it. My record for not blinking must remain an unknown quantity because you can not do anything so deliberate as count and still expect to will your eyes into total immobility. Still, an educated guess might be in the neighborhood of three or four hours despite what the experts would undoubtedly have to say to the contrary. I know what I know, and the ocular experts in this neighborhood at any rate spend entirely too much time at McMullen’s Lounge, swilling gin and congratulating themselves on having married someone new or having published an article in a journal the rest of us know nothing about. If we were -- simply on a lark, simply so as to try to make a point that desperately needs making -- to try to subscribe to it, we’d be rebuffed as a matter of course. We’d be told in no uncertain terms to tackle something more appropriate to our abilities and our education level. Something with lush and sparsely populated tropical islands in it, say, and a story that isn’t true but seems as if it could be.       

I hone my skills at the impromptu marketplace they set up in the square downtown most Saturdays, pocketing handfuls of green beans and the occasional plum. I suspect some of the merchants, the farmers mostly come in from the outlying areas to peddle their miserable muddy produce, know what I’m up to. They all give me long, distrustful looks like those you might expect of religious icons when you don’t happen to be a believer of that particular religion. I don’t know, maybe statues can’t actually discern the things I think they can. Maybe they are face blind and without the requisite reasoning centers in their stony brains. If I had an hour or two to start chiseling away at a piece of marble, I’d make something that looked like a manta ray and try to sell it for a substantial amount of money at the gallery. I’d lug it around on my back in the middle of the afternoon, inviting all the little children I see to come and have a look at it, maybe even take a picture with it if someone had a camera. The last time the city flooded, I thought I saw something struggling in the water, something so enormous as to take up the better part of a city block. It came to the surface only rarely and made such a commotion, such a splashing and a stirring up of the sentiments washed down from the nearby hills, you couldn’t tell what it was exactly. When I try to explain it to people all these years later, the best I can come up with is a comparison with known creatures from mythology – griffins and centaurs and the like, though the comparison is, of necessity, loose and designed mostly to demonstrate a level of classical education on my part and not so much to communicate the actual truth about whatever was making its way up Baxter street in the waves outside my window. Odd, how we wish others to see us a certain way, as perhaps more urbane and less spiteful than we actually are, and we will go to such lengths to implant this image we begin to believe it ourselves. We throw it over our own shoulders like a shawl. If, that is, we are in the habit of wearing shawls. I have never, to my knowledge, owned one. Which is not to say I would object to owning something like a shawl or would refuse to wear one should someone give me a shawl as a gift. It’s just that I associate that particular accessory with a group of old women – ribald, skeletal things -- who gather in the sunshine in the courtyard of the senior center up the street, and whenever I pass by, they shout the most degrading things at me! Usually this consists of a litany of obscene actions they’d like to see me perform in the street. At first I would stand there for a moment, mortified, unable to comprehend the depravity these old women were apparently capable of, before hurrying along. Then, after it had happened a time or two and I had become used to it, I began to consider their requests. I mean, why not? What else did I have to do? And why not make someone’s final days on this earth that much more pleasurable if it is within your power to do so?                    

The light originates, I am positive now, inside my own body. I have studied the phenomenon closely for twenty minutes and there can be no doubt of the direction the light is taking – it starts in the lower back and seeks its escape presumably because it knows it will do the most good on the outside where it can join the substance just like itself streaming down from above. I would like to facilitate its escape by loosening my garments, maybe even tearing at the flesh that is blocking the way, but it’s cold, the sky is clear and I’m afraid of what people might say should they happen to be passing by on the street, look up and witness my frantic movements. I have been accused of all sorts of pathologies in the past by these people and I’m sure they wouldn’t hesitate to add to the list. There is something about congregating in great numbers that causes the many to have at the few with big sticks, or to construct pocket-sized effigies and stick them with pins. From my vantage point on the roof, the city spreads out like a rash, covering both sides of the river and spanning it in places as if to say “You can not defeat me.” Of course the river has the last laugh when it floods, which it does seriously about once every ten years, if my memory serves me correctly. But why start in the middle when it’s better not to start at all? Or to start and then to quit immediately because you recognize the futility of every endeavor that doesn’t involve making plants appear where before there had been simply a lot of dirt? I had imagined the light would redouble its efforts once I was outside, on the roof, closer, in effect to that which the light wishes to rejoin, but I was mistaken. It seems almost as if the light has resigned itself to staying inside, where it is dark but for the aftereffects of the light itself. I must try to coax it free so that it doesn’t roast my sensitive interior with its longing, with its energy naturally intensified by being contained within such a limited space. I can feel certain organs already beginning to give way – the spleen, for instance, if the spleen actually resides in the lower portion of the body cavity where I think it resides -- and the panic I feel would be outsized and uncontrollable if not for my training in relaxation techniques that had their origins, coincidentally enough, in the thought and practice of people who spent a great deal of time thinking about and writing about the sun. They seemed to believe the sun was some sort of deity, while at the same time recognizing that this belief was basically untenable, the sort of thing the least sophisticated of our forebears always gravitated toward because they had nothing else to replace it. They operated with a paucity of thought that nevertheless left them feeling perfectly contented in the morning when they rose from their beds of, I don’t know, fallen leaves? And began scrounging around in the dirt and the tree roots, looking for grubs to eat. Or patrolled the ocean’s edge, searching for shells and other naturally-forged trinkets to trade with their frequently treacherous and always unruly neighbors.

      

Some of the substances can not be classified as completely legal, but in that case I just simply refuse to use any sort of classification system at all. Or I complicate the classification hopelessly by adding elements that don’t belong. Ingredients, for instance, that come from overseas, testimonials that go on for pages and don’t really manage to say anything definite other than that someone has taken the time to compose the testimonial and he is now probably looking for a similar line of work so as to continue to influence the outcome of decisions being made on the other side of the globe by people he will never meet. Or if he does happen to meet them, it will be under entirely separate circumstances and no one, including the author of the testimonials himself, is liable to make the connection. I barter for my portion with whatever I happen to discover in the garage or the attic, and if I am lucky, something priceless comes my way because I have chosen to branch out beyond my own garage or attic and have made my way into those belonging to other people. I am not adverse to scaling trellises or jimmying windows in the middle of the night, though this can get hairy sometimes when whoever resides there is still awake and watching a film about a Korean serial killer or working on his memoirs. I try to explain myself at exactly the same time as I am turning on my heels to flee because this will confuse whoever it is I am facing and give me a moment or two’s advantage. Which, so far, at any rate, has made all the difference. I frequently wonder what would happen should I run up against someone utilizing the same technique after I have caught him slipping in through one of my own basement windows. Will I see it coming? Will I know instinctively how to react and manage to apprehend the intruder before he disappears again into the night? Sometimes, in these situations, the moon is a brilliant accomplice and you simply have to know how to use its light to your advantage by studying the moon’s movements and the different shapes it assumes at different times of the month. To this end, I spend hours each day pouring over charts and ancient atlases, information handed down by generations of amateur astronomers for the sole purpose, it seems, of making my life easier. But it rarely works. After all that, I no more recognize what I see in the heavens from one evening to the next than I do the facial features of the strangers who pass me in the street when I am headed in the general direction of my favorite diner by the river. A place where they serve veal on Wednesdays, and, believe it or not, it is very reasonably priced. 

Whenever I get the urge to start over, to eliminate at least one substance from the list of substances that is already a page and a half long, and replace it with one that doesn’t make the usual lists because it is bitter and no one has bothered yet to give it a name, I must stifle it just as I must stifle every urge that comes my way before I become a slave to each of them in turn. Before I morph into the sort of person you read about in pamphlets handed out at church. With black and white art work on the cover that looks at first as if it were depicting your everyday, run-of-the-mill demon, but in fact, on closer examination, turns out to be a close-up of a locust’s face or the underside of someone’s shoe. A couple weeks pass and nothing changes for the better. In fact, everything seems to intensify – the sound of tires rolling past on the pavement outside, the spot in the middle of my back where light originates and attempts to break free of the skin cells that impede it. The pain is such that I begin to wonder if I am really producing light with my body at all. I might instead be absorbing it in an unnatural way and turning it into fuel, but not the sort that makes you happier or stronger or more likely to find cash on the sidewalk when you are walking, not the sort others would then inevitably envy me for. The people I know have this way of turning everything around backwards and making it sound as if I have propositioned them. At the theatre when the lights have just gone down and the previews are coming on and everyone is still talking about all the remarkable things that have happened to them in the past month. Sometimes I want to turn around and hurl solid objects at anyone who happens to be sitting behind me, but I almost never have anything handy that would do the trick. And nine times out of ten, no one is sitting back there to begin with. If I had half an imagination, if I were to plan things better, I’d swing by the grocery store first and buy a couple of pineapples, assuming they are in season. I’d find a way to smuggle them in with me, which means I’d have to get a bigger coat and that will be difficult as I have very little money at the moment. There’s always stealing. I know that the so-called difference between right and wrong, the demarcation at the heart of any truly civilized human soul, is a popular topic among those who believe they will never have to paint one room the same color as the other. They won’t have to navigate entirely by sight because their hands have blisters on them and so have been bandaged up. They are wrapped entirely in gauze. But the topic bores me the same way lemonade bores me or kissing someone I have known for more than a couple of years. It feels as if it is too demanding, as if it expects the rest of us to take it as seriously as we take ourselves, and that is not something in its favor. In fact, I doubt it can be done.          

Clamming took up the entire day and he arrived home that evening covered in a mud that stunk of thirteen different types of protein, that came off in sheets under the hose. His mind shot off into the far corners of the county, cataloging, sorting and prioritizing when it should have been walking itself through whatever process was necessary to allow it to disengage from the outside world come evening. When the swallows found their way to the silos and the radio advertised something no one he knew would ever use. Something with pumice in it. And baring a Malaysian name. How frequently do we rob our own thoughts of their primary substance, turn those thoughts into bitter, empty shells before they even have a chance to break open of their own accord on the soils of the world? Inside you might have found diamonds and objects that looked just like diamonds but for the words engraved upon the surface, whole sentences sometimes with yet further sentences suggested and forbidden at precisely the same time. His barometer had fallen sometime during the day and it lay cracked and useless on the floor, the glass shards crunching underfoot as he stepped over the barometer and returned, uncertain of what he was supposed to do. People would be depending on him for information but he would no longer be able to provide it now. They would call to complain, to cancel their subscriptions, and he would, most likely, have moved to the shed by then, far from the ringing of the phone, re-soling his boots and talking to himself. Inventing riddles with answers that did not seem like answers, or questions either, or declarative sentences for that matter. They didn’t seem as if they had been invented at all, but were simply plucked out of the air fully-formed by someone who could see such things floating around above our heads while we were oblivious. We marched blindly ahead until the street turned to the right and the property facing the road was overrun with brambles. It was literally impossible to tell who owned it or why it had been allowed to go to seed like that without your doing a great deal of investigation. Without thumbing through records at the court house, for instance, and interviewing witnesses who, in all likelihood, weren’t even there. They were riding their bicycles instead, following the routes first laid out (so rumor has it) by the backwoodsmen -- the trappers and the primitive surveyors and the dirt farmers -- who first called this isthmus home. I suppose, though, knowing what I know of the troubled history of this region, that that last statement ought to be amended. To include mention of those who preceded the heroes of our tale. As well as those who just arrived a day or two ago, anxious to see for themselves what their own faces will look like when reflected in the peat-stained streams that wind their way between structures here like the opaque and implausible, if highly entertaining, syllogisms of a lunatic.            

The part about the fragments was good; you might almost be forgiven for keeping that around for a day or two, setting certain portions of it to music. If you know how to play the banjo, say. Or just how to arrange musical notes on a staff, which doesn’t look all that difficult to me. Of course, no one bothered to inform me the crate had arrived and that inside the crate something was desperate to get out. It had eyes you could see in the darkness between the slats, glowing red orbs that portended evil. Everything, it seems, portents evil these days. Everything is sick and tired of serving someone else’s purposes and so, in order to make its escape, in order to assert itself finally the way the Ibex asserts itself against others of its kind by ramming them with the massive, curly-cue horns on its head, all of creation has decided to cast some spells on you. It has decided to get in your mind and stir the conceptual circuitry about like so much cake batter. I recommended a different course, one involving the methodical mastering of foreign tongues and asking complete strangers to identify the single physical characteristic (widely-spaced eyes, lips that turn up at the corners) they possessed that made other people think they were trustworthy or competent. When this didn’t produce any meaningful results, I gave up entirely on meaningful results and concentrated instead on those that could be had for the asking. Whichever results just showed up because you stuck your hand out or you dropped a glass object from a great height and instructed everyone around you to be quiet and listen. I can’t imagine why the tarmac seemed suddenly so much shorter, why the approach was hampered by ginkgo trees with leaves the size and consistency of ceramic ashtrays. But it was and we would just have to deal with that. We had to recognize that the world is not manufactured according to anyone’s specifications, that it doesn’t have to fit together like a hose and the wet end of a spigot. I went back to the hangar after it had emptied out, and I examined the debris, the splinters, the place in the corner stained with blood. I was struck by how timid the memory is, how reluctant it is to serve its original purpose, which means, I suppose, vomiting up the information it has been asked to store. Perhaps this is due to its relatively late arrival on a scene that had been, if not humming, then stumbling along just fine without it for a million years. In fact, I imagine some very hard feelings once it decided to make its appearance. Name-calling, a campaign to have it removed from the premises just as if it had committed a violent crime, or worse. A desecration. This is why you can still make out today a faint outline in the dust, parallel lines where something like fingernails got dragged through the dirt. And why when you try to look away from the spot, you can’t. You can’t even whistle in time to the piano someone two houses down has started playing in what seems like accompaniment but is probably just coincidence. After all, who has the time to score your experience? To spend the morning commenting on everything you see in the medium of minor thirds instead of getting dressed like an ordinary person and going to work?