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?

          

Once she unbuckled the strap, gravity took over and the various pharmaceuticals plunged to the floor. That in vials escaped when the glass broke and you could have heard the weeping from two streets over. My arms felt as though they had been turned around backwards, against their normal rotation, and though I couldn’t remember how I had come to this point, I was glad that I was here. Otherwise, I should have been at home watching television with a family that clearly couldn’t stand me anymore. They had begun formulating names for the different parts of my body that offended them in some way, comparing notes and making sure each name sounded unique, that it didn’t resemble the one that preceded it in terms of number of syllables and types of vowel sound. I told her I thought we should rest a while in the back room where the lights didn’t work and where certain robust vines had infiltrated the walls. Sometimes, if you listened closely enough, you could hear ants and mantises and centipedes making their way inside along the pathway of these vines. Their movements sounded like someone whispering your name over and over again at a level too faint to hear precisely but still loud enough to be audible for all that. Her hair curled up at the ends and reminded me of cliffs I had visited once where people got paid to throw themselves over the side. No one could really see what was awaiting them, the abyss there just as total -- just as infinitely black -- as, I imagine, the abyss is anywhere, by definition. We listened for the sound of one object making violent contact with another, of a dull thud or water being displaced rapidly, but nothing ever made it to our ears. Pretty soon, the line of people waiting for their turn was so long, someone had to come there with a system of ropes and brass poles just to keep everyone in order, to keep them from swinging at each other’s torsos with whatever weapons they happened to have on hand. My time was running out so rapidly I requested a visual aid -- an hourglass, or someone pedaling furiously on a bicycle, getting further and further away until I couldn’t tell anymore where her legs were and where her arms. Pretty soon the bicyclist’s head was incorporated into the dark line of the horizon so completely as to fail even to increase its height by a millimeter. I too, I realized, was swallowed up at every instant by a line I could not see, one that ran right through my body on either side and continued forever in either direction, searching, no doubt, for someone who could make the whole process cease, who could turn the line back into what it was at its beginning. A single point in space, wholly self sufficient. Something with no need for companionship, no desire to increase itself lest that desire morph into a compulsion like that which makes most of us miserable when we find we must go to bed at night alone.               

Half dead from dehydration I traipsed to the end of the field and then turned around to see where I had come from, the hills and the villages between the hills and then the field itself full of desiccated weeds and plastic wrappers blown there in some instances years before. It was impossible to make out the lettering on such wrappers and when I tried later to make this fact suggestive of the weakness of language itself, tried to make it seem as if every word uttered is temporary and of no final consequence, the push back was immediate and all-consuming. The sort of thing that might be expected to send a lesser man into hiding on one of the islands in the middle of the river, but which simply had the effect of making me even more recalcitrant than I already was. I stood up as tall as I could, on my toes, and punctuated everything I said with an emphatic stab of my right forefinger. About this time, a woman I had met maybe once before called me out of the blue, said she was sitting at the deli about a mile away and wanted to know if I had any interest in meeting her there. She would, she explained, keep her hands clear of the silverware at all times and promised not to say my name out loud in case anyone in the vicinity might recognize it. I reassured her that the likelihood of that occurring was miniscule and that I had no plans for the moment but this could change if those at the dig site stumbled onto something and needed a second or third opinion as to what that something might be. Expertise is not always a boon for those who hold it. Sometimes it coaxes them down interminable rivers, and I don’t mean the figurative sort either, but real rivers with real carnivorous fish in them and poisonous vines hanging from the trees that line the bank. By the time I reached the destination in question, the woman was gone and I was forced to weigh the benefits of pursuit against the drawbacks of finally getting your hands on whatever it is you have been desiring. Sometimes desire is just another emotion in disguise – fear, for instance, with all its unruly facial hair, its habit of walking up and down the same street day after day with the assistance of a cane. If you were to get close enough to un-mask it, the others in the room might try to stop you. They might pull at your shirtsleeves, draw a finger across their own throats and open their eyes so wide you’d think something had gone wrong with the muscles in their face. But none of this should stop you. It is imperative you identify the masquerade and spell out once and for all, perhaps with a hand-lettered sign you nail to the trunk of a nearby tree, the very real penalties one can expect for engaging in such behavior. Friends turning their enormous, pimply backs on you, for instance. Lightning finding you (unerringly this time) from its inscrutable place of origin in the sky.  

Contact spurred further contact and led me to believe I knew the person I was speaking to intimately. It’s a mistake I make with such frequency those who know me refer to the mistake itself by my first name. Then they nearly succumb to ailments they picked up while traveling abroad. I fell in with a group of sungazers and thought that I too could get whatever energy I needed to sustain all physical activity simply by looking directly at the sun as it began to set. This went on for several weeks, during which time I limited my intake of food to that which I was able to find lying about on the ground. Discarded crusts of bread mostly and the occasional lizard numbed into immobility by the cooler temperatures. At some point the memories thinned out and I found myself spending more and more time shouting her name into the wind, but only when I was sure it was blowing in off the ocean and could not carry my voice down the street like a plastic bag. Who wants to be observed in that vulnerable state? But then again, who doesn’t wish for at least someone to take notice, to comment in such a way that the original state no longer seems so overwhelming if only because it has become an object of conjecture? Something you can look at from every angle and hold long, learned conversations about provided you are capable of distancing yourself from the original state sufficiently to see it as something that could have happened to someone else. Something that might even have been dreamed up in a laboratory where they are constantly dreaming up situations just to see how the average man or woman or child will react when faced with them. In the oculist’s office later, the full effect and benefit of hindsight falling on my shoulders like a predatory bird, I began to regret my decision and the outbreak of irrational anger that accompanied it, that caused her to run up the hill in a thunderstorm and disappear for several hours. We searched every crevice, every naturally-occurring cave for miles in either direction but could discover no hint of her whereabouts. And though we certainly weren’t about to give up, we didn’t like the idea of continuing forever either. I mean, what would we be losing in the meantime? How would know when our dedication had become a lunatic’s obsession and how would we be able to explain ourselves later to those we had abandoned? The children and the other bit players. The neighbors two and three doors down. The cousins we hadn’t grown up with and so didn’t know much about. Whether they were married, for instance. Whether they ever once questioned – deep in the night when no one was around to influence their decision, when the unruly kingdom of dreams hovered just out of reach -- if the world was, in fact, as conventional wisdom had it, round.       

Would you expect visual representation when all you have before you is random shapes and colors, a pattern that only a machine could extract? And that after seven months of trying. Her foot felt as if it had been crushed but there was no visible injury, no discoloration or record of the event. When they attempted to infiltrate her dreams they found their progress blocked at every turn by something very like concrete, which suggested they were starting at the climax and ought to reverse their course if they wished for results of the sort others might replicate. After that, no one would speak for fear of raising the specter of revenge, of fully grown human beings wandering about the hallways dressed like the invertebrates that call tide pools home. The starfish and the anemones. I would like to be able to tell you the hours begin to empty themselves of grappling hooks eventually, of every sharp thing that pulls at the flesh as the flesh is passing through, but to do so would be to commit the venal sin of saying things just because people wish to hear them or because they feel good in the throat. The ground grew more moist the further west she travelled and she was afraid people could read her mind. The combination, as all combinations will, ruined the ambiance she had worked so hard to create, ruined it in an instant, though this instant happened to extend itself well beyond what could legitimately be considered the boundary and influence of that word. Perhaps this is why her heart rate increased suddenly to a perilous level. It had nothing to do with the hand stroking the flesh of her neck rhythmically, had nothing to do with the fingers reaching for the place where her lips met the left corner of her mouth. Who knows? another ten minutes and you might have sensed something snaking its way between the shrubs at the base of the flag pole, an apparition every bit as mysterious as the ones that have the habit of showing up in old houses. Only this one was composed of flesh and blood and a little bit of cartilage, and when you tried to corner it, when you tried to run it down and capture it with a butterfly net or the lid of a garbage can, it vanished. It seemed almost to taunt you. It knew, for example, your weakness was centered in the eyes. It knew that the harder you tried to employ your eyes in the service of whatever it was you were trying to accomplish, the more likely it was that they would cross involuntarily. They would begin sending you snapshots of objects that weren’t actually there. Like a porcelain Minotaur. Or certain river fish rumored to increase a woman’s fertility if she slept with one secreted beneath her pillow.