The conversation centers for days and weeks afterward on the dart in my chin. Those who didn’t witness the event directly ask for detailed descriptions, then elaborate and expand on those descriptions for their own listeners until the tale becomes so outsized as to challenge those still circulating about the trappers that opened up whole sections of wilderness just west of here two hundred years and more ago and whose visages would now grace our coinage if not for the unlucky fact that no one can agree on just what each of them looked like. Of course there were no cameras then, and no camera obscuras, and very few people around who were handy with a paint brush. They had all been lured to some other continent (frequently the very one their own parents and grandparents had fled scant years before) by promises of wealth and notoriety and physical comfort such as we are, to this day, lacking. We bend the line of sight our mind takes when it is trying to gaze into the past because if we don’t, if we stare straight ahead like someone suffering mental illness or someone trying to act as if he hasn’t heard the insult aimed brazenly at him, we will see only what has managed to stand upright and undamaged through the years. We will glimpse only that, for example, which the wind has failed to topple, only that which has ossified to such an extent you can’t scratch it with your fingernail. My investigation is thorough, starting at the end of the street and taking into account each doorway and the amount of time it takes to move from one doorway to the next and who might have had reason to do so on the evening in question. Still, the task is daunting and I like the idea of giving up on everything, of abandoning all pursuits as soon as you have begun them. That way, there is never any danger of feeling as if you have more to accomplish than can reasonably be accomplished in the time you have been allotted. It’s like Eulalie always says (when she is in the mood to say anything at all, that is, which is rare enough and, here lately, only when you have managed to get a modicum of gin into her system by offering her the bottle as you might offer her a bouquet of roses or your hand in marriage): It’s necessary to get even with yourself. That way the rest of the miserable world is spared your vengeance -- which is almost always white hot and beyond anything they can possibly imagine -- and you are free to exercise it again and again with little in the way of consequence. Just a cold sore now and then. A trembling of the fingers that you can explain away easily enough as the aftereffects of a mild case of mercury poisoning. A misunderstanding, really. Something to take no more note of normally than one takes of the azimuth of the sun.

Empty envelopes spill out of the back of a truck making its way east. When I attempt to recreate the scene later with pastel chalk on cardboard, I can’t remember what the driver of the truck looked like or what the people in the street did when they saw the envelopes fluttering about like ailing sparrows. Perhaps they stood around in stunned silence or perhaps they took the opportunity to discuss the concept of happenstance in depth and then departed for the nearest pastry shop. Ever since I got rid of the phone, I hear a faint ringing in my ears, especially when someone, strangely enough, is getting ready to knock on my front door. This is the only avenue left to them and some, like Xarlemagne, take to it almost gleefully, seeming to recognize that rules are only as powerful as the language used to communicate them. When you scramble that language, the rules stop telling you how to behave. They become witnesses instead, standing on the sidelines. They are afraid to share their opinions. Xarlemagne raises donkeys the next town over and makes a great deal of money when the weather has turned soggy and cold and the roads going elsewhere are mostly impassable. He stays up three and four days at a time cooking powders in beakers and trying to explain to anyone who will listen why the planet is neither spherical in shape nor flat, but raised like the flesh on your arm when someone comes at you with a butcher knife. His theory is the result of thirty plus years of haphazard observation and a carful working out of formulas in the night when the moon is his only illumination. And the bees are humming contentedly in his walls. It was Xarlemagne first suggested the manufacture of chess boards as a means of communicating with those forces in the universe that respect the game despite never having played it because they have no hands with which to manipulate the pieces. I remind him of this every time I go to visit and my tone is none-too-conciliatory because my life has been affected adversely by his every suggestion, but especially this one. It slows and twists around on itself as if there were a hook in its mouth or a rider on its back and it wishes to remove it. My life behaves as though it can concentrate on only a single object or desire at a time and that object or desire usually happens to rhyme with words that have no obvious rhyme.  Like “delicatessen.” Or that for a place where one level of soil gives way to another, older level and your only hope of being able to tell the difference between the two is to study the pigments and the pollen grains in them closely, under a microscope. If that doesn’t work, you can always ask someone who lacks training in geology, who just happens to be passing by, in fact, and so has no vested interest in the outcome.         

After the sun disappears I find myself on Pangolin street, under one of the cameras, pulling faces and practicing sign language. It has been years, I realize, since I took any lessons, and those were from someone I could never be sure actually knew what he was doing. Perhaps he was simply making the gestures up as he went along and I was paying him twelve dollars an hour! The prospect, the first of its kind to visit since those rarified days, fascinates me so much I drop my hands so as to better concentrate on all its implications -- so as not to distract the weak and minimal movements inside my mind with those naturally more rigorous conducted by my body. Just then someone tosses a dart in my direction. I am completely vulnerable, zoned out like an aye-aye on its vine, my hands slow to come to my face’s protection and so the dart sticks a little in my chin. It wobbles and doesn’t hurt and what blood emerges does so only reluctantly and in trace amounts, as if the blood knows that it is unwelcome here, that its prospects upon emerging are basically nil. I hear some hushed whispers from the shadows, the first trace of someone’s mirth, a sound no doubt belonging to the culprit and one I attempt to commit to memory so as to match it up later with whoever happens to emit that sound in my presence. Thus, I suppose, giving his identity away and opening himself up to the retribution I am almost positive would be forthcoming. I like to think I am a patient man, but the truth is I have no patience, and my memory is brittle like a sponge out of water. Only guilt sticks around for any extended period of time, a hazily-defined mass that hovers at shoulder-height and follows me now down Pangolin street with the dart still sticking in my chin. The first and lasting thought is, of course, that I somehow deserve this, that it is in cosmic alignment with some deed I have committed in the past or something I am going to do in the near or even distant future. Perhaps, then, it’s best to leave this emblem of my transgression where it is, let it hang there for all the world to see as testimonial of some sort. Or, better yet, talisman. Against whatever else might be in the works. The vengeance coming down on me in sheets and rivers of lightning, in letters filled with vitriol and published in the editorial section of the local newspaper. But then, no one reads the newspaper anymore and they never really look beyond the mirror. I’m not talking about the actual mirror they keep on the wall in the bathrooms of their houses, but the mental one they carry around inside them wherever they go, the image of themselves they have generated over the decades by plucking attributes from those they meet on the street – an eye here, a protruding nose hair there – and re-arranging them according to a pattern they have worked out based on the tales they tell about themselves in their heads. You know what these tales are like! Truly remarkable things happen in them. The whole world is brought to heel. Even Love is there. It makes its appearance. Love plays a musical instrument. It is a virtuoso, in fact, on something very like the Hammond organ.

No one recognizes the songs from my childhood when I try to whistle them now, try to unravel the tune from the knot my memory has made of it. They look at me on the street as if they can see the blood vessels throbbing inside my body and they wish they didn’t have to see this because it reminds them of the vulnerable structures inside their own, the bones made brittle by whatever process turns bone into a mere shell of itself, the retinas of the eyes filling slowly with leftover images until there is no room anymore for what passes outside before the eyes. I give in to a sudden, unexplained urge and jump up on the counter and make wide sweeping motions with my arms and my upper body almost as if I am conducting an invisible orchestra. The late afternoon sun shines in through the bay window opposite and for a moment I am carried away by the power I seem to wield over the entire scene, by the realization that no one else on the face of the planet is witness to precisely this set of circumstances at precisely this moment in time. I know this fact should actually make me feel a little lonely, should remind me that I got rid of the phone that used to hang from the wall because it was always in the habit of ringing at inopportune moments, and I have yet to replace it and I miss that sound now sometimes, though rarely. Sometimes, for instance, in the middle of the night when I am playing a game of chess against myself, which is easy enough to do given that I don’t really know the proper rules of the game. I know the piece that looks like a horse must move two spaces one direction followed by a single space in another perpendicular to the first. I know the little ones go wherever they please. Because I don’t know, though, or because I knew at one time and have since forgotten, the other rules that govern the remaining pieces, or even precisely what the object of the game is, I like to make up new rules each night based on whatever snippets of conversation I may have overheard on the street during the day. Translating what was said by people I do not know into what shall be done on the board sitting before me is no easy task and I deliberate for hours sometimes about this process before I ever make a single move. Sometimes I get impatient and wing it, assigning each piece the role of a part of speech and watching what happens when it does what that part of speech is supposed to do in the sentence I overheard earlier. Follow the others around in a predetermined sequence, for instance. Say one thing and mean another. But I usually regret this the next morning. I have been too careless in my approach, I have let the contingencies of the language infect the outcome of the contest. And I always promise myself to be more deliberate in the future, to ensure reason and technique predominate if they can’t eliminate contingency altogether. And then the next night it is the same old story all over again – a willy-nilly mishmash of event and speech. Of what happened and what was uttered and why the one doesn’t always have to precede the other. It’s enough to make you want to quit playing chess altogether if it weren’t for the fact that I love chess. I love the idea of it anyway. I love the way it makes me think of the past, as well as the faulty image of the past we, of necessity, carry around with us when we think we are carrying around the real thing.           

Rumors swirl around B ----------, Stepanovich’s wife, like insects drawn to the carbon dioxide that oozes from our skin. These rumors, though, are rarely salacious. I happen to know a thing or two on the subject, but I’ll never tell. I could, however, be persuaded to drop some hints. It doesn’t take much to get me wagging my tongue – a bottle of cheap gin, say, even just a partial bottle. Tickets to see the minor league baseball team. They play in an area of town no one really feels comfortable visiting anymore, at least not since they put cameras on the light poles and they put decoy cameras on some other light poles and you can’t tell which ones are actually taking snapshots of you and which are just there to get you to behave yourself even when you don’t have to. Once, B -------- and I were sitting by ourselves in an abandoned horse cab – the old throwback buggies that ply certain parts of downtown in hopes the tourists will give their operators more money than they deserve to take them once or twice around the block. She was fiddling with the snaps on the front of my clothes as if she had never seen snaps before and wanted to figure out for herself how they worked. The moon was barely discernible in the sky and the traffic was making its peculiar noise on the ramp overhead, but we were unobserved and unobservable in the horse cab abandoned at the end of an otherwise deserted street. I liked the way B--------‘s breasts moved around visibly inside her black shirt and when she would catch me glancing at them she would let out a laugh that sounded very like a piece of machinery grinding its gears or, later, after we loosed all parts of our bodies onto one another like debris – fence posts and ripped tarpaulins and blocks of Styrofoam -- riding the swell of simultaneous floods, her laugh simmered for a while and dissipated on the breeze while I was trying to imagine why I might have done such a thing to Stepanovich. I felt guilty, even though he and I really weren’t all that close to begin with. I mean, I wasn’t entirely sure what his first name was or if he had a first name. I had never heard anyone refer to him as anything other than Stepanovich, and there were some people that never referred to him by name at all but just held a closed fist up in front of their faces in order, I suppose, to imitate his nose which was misshapen, to be sure, but not overly large or imposing and certainly not the sort of thing one could expect to be known for when there are so many other things one could be known for. Like generosity. Or a tendency to reduce absolutely everything that happens -- and many things that don’t -- to an axiom originally gleaned from college trigonometry class.                

For several weeks explosions intermittently rock the neighborhood where I live, and no one seems to be able to identify where the explosions are coming from or what exactly is causing them, let alone figure out what to do about them. At four o’clock one morning around this time, I am tossed from my bed by the power of one of these explosions and I think for a moment, while still half asleep, that the earth has opened up down the middle and everything is funneling in. The entire surface of the planet and everything resting on that surface is sliding into oblivion. I search for a camera with which to document this singular event, but my hands just get stuck in the pockets of the robe I have worn to bed and inside there are bandage wrappers and half-eaten pieces of candy gathering lint. Afterward, I can’t sleep, as is usually the case anyway, and so I do what I must do to keep myself occupied as the stars rotate slowly above my head. Frequently, when I can’t sleep I have visions of the walls sliding slowly outward, revealing a place between where the room ends and where the outside world begins, a place without color or substance, about three feet wide from top to bottom, where, if I could figure out exactly how to accomplish it, I could spend my nights more profitably than I do now. Reading books that take place on a lane far away where someone who is rumored to know the names of the different plants and flowers she passes while walking on that lane spends the entirety of the book calling out the names of those plants and flowers just to demonstrate that the rumors concerning her are true. Wouldn’t it be something to find we enjoy again the things we enjoyed in our youth? The local delicacies made with watercress and cognac? The songs about the train depot where the trains were always late, where the people who were waiting for the trains kept looking at their watches and mumbling threats under their breath? These threats, like most threats, were not serious. They didn’t hold the weight and import of, say, a diplomatic wire from overseas. Just the same, it’s hard to imagine ignoring them completely if you were the target. If you felt as if you were being given an ultimatum, say, and the only way you could respond was to do what your father and your father’s father before him (and perhaps even two or three generations beyond that) had done – namely, to address the threat directly by making a threat of your own. One as serious in tone as a canvas by Michelangelo but having at its center a soft, white spongy material that could be pressed and formed to hold any image whatsoever. A bird, maybe. Someone with a bird perched on his arm. He is holding the arm with the bird on it up and out -- toward the sky, as it were -- and you can tell he wishes the bird would fly away and that he is a little bit disappointed that the bird is showing no inclination to fly. It keeps its wings stubbornly tucked up next to its body.                    

Stories like those my cousins and I liked to tell one another, those that center on the workings of machines that haven’t yet been invented, must, of necessity, catch the listener’s attention by using facts and details you do not find in the real world, that arise from the imagination as effortlessly as bubbles from the murky waters of a swamp. To insist otherwise is to take the perceptual equivalent of the back pages of a catalog and transfer them to the front where they will be misunderstood by all but the most discerning of patrons. They will cause a disconcerted rumbling among those who rose early just to be wherever the auction the catalog belongs to is going to take place. The Pakistani man turns out to be native born and explains what I took to be his accent as the result of a stroke that nearly felled him when he was very young, that deadened a patch of tissue in his head about the size, his doctors said, of a postage stamp. He is working hard to reinvigorate this patch of gray matter by doing crossword puzzles obsessively and drinking enormous quantities of pomegranate juice. He invites me into the bowels of the boat he works on, lays out the different conch shells, the different pairs of tin earrings on a place mat depicting road maps of various states other than that we occupy at present. I can tell this by the numbers assigned to each of the roads depicted, numbers in the high-forties mostly and corresponding to none of the highways that bisect or meet at the center of town. He tells me he is not that interested in bartering, in accepting even so much as a dime in trade for the conch shells, the earrings. He just wants them out of his sight as quickly as possible. This makes me suspicious, of course, and I begin a line of questioning I observed once when my friend Stepanovich was trying to determine where exactly his wife had been and what she had been doing when she returned home one evening after having disappeared for a week and a half. Her hair was a different color than what it had been before she left, or so Stepanovich insisted despite his wife’s adamant refusal that this could be true. She claimed she hadn’t even been gone and had woken up beside him in the bed that very morning. But he would have none of it. He knew when he was being played for a dupe and so he asked her a series of questions that seemed at first to have nothing to do with the situation at hand, very technical questions concerning how much water volume might be displaced when different objects were lowered into a bucket that had been filled up beforehand with water. If I remember correctly these objects included wind chimes and industrial strength cleaning products still in their original packaging. Soon the brilliance of the strategy became apparent when Stepanovich’s wife slipped up while responding. She admitted to things she obviously didn’t wish to admit to all because of the rapid-fire manner in which Stepanovich asked the questions. She hardly had time to think, to formulate a studied response, and when she did think, she inevitably thought about where she had been when she disappeared and what she had been doing and with whom, and it was these details that snaked their way to the surface and eventually shown through.