Next to the barrier you may occasionally see something that looks like an enormous hawthorn flower, but this is, in fact, a man-made object frequently associated with a group of artisans who meet together in town once a week and share gossip and tips of a technical nature. None of them admits to forging the hawthorn shape but each in turn will explain to you how it was created and what the materials are that went into its composition in such minute detail you might begin to suspect they were all in on the project together. The problem is that once you begin to examine the shape for yourself, you realize that everything you have been told about it is false – not a lie, exactly, but simple misinformation of the sort that you can pick up when discussing the animal kingdom with people who have viewed a great many wildlife documentaries on tv and so consider themselves experts. As a result, time and again, confusion rides up in its (to keep somewhat with the trope) birch bark canoe and makes hand gestures in our direction and we respond in kind but nothing ever really gets said. I tend to hang out in the back, where the shadows take care of whatever concealment is necessary and where I can work out for myself who in the room is an enemy and who is merely someone with the potential to become an enemy, someone with very particular ideas concerning the direction the continent should take, and by this I mean the actual continent, the landmass itself and where exactly it should wind up as it goes drifting about on its tectonic plate. My reasons for scouting others out in this manner, people who are probably, in all actuality, no more hazardous than are the motes in the sunbeams that find their way in through my windows, are myriad and I would list them out loud without provocation, as a kind of therapy, a kind of mildly necessary catharsis, if I thought anyone would pay the slightest bit of attention. But given I have situated myself both here and in my domestic relations in such a way as to suggest I want very little company, that I probably don’t even speak the same language as anyone else I might happen upon while moving about in the world, I have nothing, really, to complain about. Everything is of my own doing and my own volition; I am, it seems, ultimately responsible for the existence of everything, both visible and potential, and it can only stay that way -- in fact, intensify -- the more closely I set out to examine everything. The stone stairs leading up through a tangle of honeysuckle and garbage. The nebulae -- when you locate them in the viewfinder, or more accurately when someone else locates them, someone who knows where to look, who has been trained to properly operate the sorts of mammoth instruments capable of locating distant objects in the sky, and who then takes a photograph of the nebulae and publishes those photos in a place where the rest of us will have access to them – the nebulae looking strangely like children’s sloppy, hand-drawn art in the remote corners of space.   

Lists appear before my eyes as if they were tangible, as if they were actual three-dimensional entities engaged in defying the laws of gravity. I can’t make out the items themselves, the language they are written in, but instinct tells me the lists are important the same way nerve twinges and muscle aches arising in the body are important and should not be ignored. That I am mistaken, that none of it matters in the least, becomes obvious just twenty minutes later when the girl with the pigtails and a blue poncho shows up again, her eyes no longer as dull and malformed as they seemed before in the shadows of her front door, but vibrant now with something like fear, though I suspect almost immediately the name of this emotion is not precise, it is not what I am looking for. She has had a change of heart, explains that the book is indeed hers, or at least is something that has belonged to her family for more than a couple of generations. And she needs it because how else will she construct the programs meant to accompany her marionette theatricals? How else will her mother know the background and importance of what she witnesses most nights on a stage the girl has constructed with two old end tables and a beach blanket thrown over them, a blanket with orange and white stripes and what appears to be condiment stains cleansed and subdued by time. Sinister associations accompany the least sinister of situations like a pack of dogs. We look for the bridge that sways unstable above the river, the weeds grown chest high in the field across the street, and we tell ourselves they mean exactly what they say, which is, of course, nothing. When you get right down to it, all of creation is mute. The song Uncle Toby Belch sings serves (for the audience, at any rate) as initial unmasking of everyone’s favorite, or second favorite, bête noir, Malvolio, but the song itself is artificial in at least seven different ways and it’s only when we elaborate on them, when we deliver our exegesis that any real sound gets made at all. The girl in the poncho knows this, clearly, despite her reluctance to explain what she is doing, despite her insistence that she has brought us back to the apartment she shares with an, as yet, merely theoretical mother, not to demonstrate but plead. Who else could possibly get to the bottom of the tangle of abominations and falsehoods? Who else could possibly understand what even a little bit of sunlight is capable of doing to the skin? If we attempt to turn all of it on its head, to reverse the order, to unwind what amounts to a physical syllogism, an argument in matter and dust and thread, we are guilty of the same crime we set out originally to prevent. We can’t remember what it is. No one remembers what that crime is, what it’s called, but it has a name, you can be sure, and it will stay on the tip of the tongue like bacteria until such time as someone commits it again and everyone blurts the name of it out at the same time, a whole chorus thunderous and overwhelming and terrifying, its members pointing their vicious long fingers and bellowing and wiping the foam and spittle from the corners of their lips, and only afterwards, when they are at home, in private, just themselves and maybe a reproduction watching sheepishly from the far side of the mirror, allowing themselves a measure of shame.     

The pores and the pits on my forehead could give me away; they have the potential to explain to the casual onlooker what exactly is in my mind and how long it’s been there. Fortunately very few of them know how to interpret these signals, and even fewer have the desire. I am safe for the time being but who knows who is getting ready to bound down the stairs, to come around the corner in a turban? I’ve always felt as if the crust of the Earth was just a few millimeters thick and lying in wait beneath it another world, an alternative it is our object and duty while occupying this one to try to discover, to try to penetrate by stomping around in boots, say, by digging everywhere with spades. The woman who lived in the apartment beside mine at one time (this was when I still lived in apartments, when I still resided in something man-made rather than spending my time in an ever-expanding series of caves) would drop whatever she was doing when she glimpsed me out the window having at the grass and the soil beside our building with my bare hands. Her teeth were straight and flat as cardboard, her smile like something that hadn’t convinced itself yet it was an actual entity, something that has been named and described by those whose job it is to catalog objects and those states of mind associated with objects because they seem to be required to be associated with something. She didn’t share this particular metaphysical conviction of mine, but she liked the feel of the dirt between her fingers and the sounds she made when she came out to join me became so distracting, I was forced to wear ear muffs in the heat of summer or stuff bits of newspaper into my ears when I couldn’t locate the ear muffs. I admit my behavior borders on the insulting sometimes and when I try to remedy it, I am nearly always successful, but then, immediately, an odd, obstinate feeling comes over me and I stop trying again. What’s the use? Whoever I happen to be standing beside, whoever I happen to be engaged in conversation with at any particular moment, will soon find himself so far away from me both physically and emotionally speaking, it will be like he had never really shared space with me at all. Perhaps I invent each person I meet for purposes that blur, that disappear just as rapidly and as completely as those who I have invented. Then, I must start all over again, I must pull the shape of the face and the color of the eyes of someone new down out of the firmament and conjure up a backstory inevitably making use of little bits of my own. There will be the part in it with the shell necklace on a bare neck and my desire burning hot as embers. And a light rain later, making its way in through broken windows.

       

Someone has left his Bible on a radiator in the hallway and a quick flip through reveals missing pages, half of entire books clipped away neatly with a knife or a pair of scissors. We knock on door after door, attempting to reunite it with its owner, discover a motive for this disfigurement if one is necessary, but the closest we come to accomplishing our task is when a little girl in pigtails and blue poncho looks at us for long seconds with bloodshot eyes before closing the door unceremoniously in our faces. A little while later, we stumble down the back stairs again and outside where the sun reflects off the building’s aluminum siding in a concentrated, murderous beam that seems to follow us down the street for a block and more and I think for a moment I might succumb, my head swimming, the sound of strangers’ voices drifting in and out of my ears in varying degrees of panic and foreboding. Fortunately, there is a plastic tree positioned at the end of the street that blocks all direct and indirect sources of sunlight if you sit under it a certain way (with, at the time of day I made use of it at any rate, your knees pulled up and your head turned sharply to the right and tilted up) and so saves my life. Eulalie disappears and returns again half an hour later with a bottle of something in her hand. Drink this, she says, and I resist at first because I think perhaps she is trying to poison me. I am slowing her down, and ever since that time in the canyon when she filled both our canteens with stagnant, larva-filled water and began absently to hum snippets of the aria from Gianni Schicchi, I haven’t really felt as if I could trust her. But I notice the bottle has a professionally printed label and Eulalie promises me that if I comply with her wishes this afternoon, she will comply with mine later. When the stars are out and we will be able to group them, as is our habit, into constellations of our own devising. Part of the problem is that, even in the shade, even indoors where the air conditioning is running, nothing anyone says to me anymore makes complete and total sense, the way it used to when I was younger and words seemed tangible and sharp and angular as a first basemen’s mitt. You could group them together in simple patterns and trust that those patterns would stay put, would represent something obvious to everyone in the room, even if some of those people present had arrived late with mud on their pants and excuses on their lips that no one, least of all their spouses, actually believed. Now, these entities hurry from one place to another like dragonflies on the wing, frequently breaking apart in mid-flight and recombining to form new conglomerations that don’t seem to serve any purpose whatsoever. Some of them fall to the floor when they become too heavy and you can pick them up and turn them over in your hand to get a closer look, but the end result is always the same – your hand begins to sting as if it has grasped something impure. And your eyes become strained and your mind fills up with a kind of unremitting darkness that threatens to solidify, to become the permanent mould and record of the thing within which it got its unremarkable start. 

If our lives consist of thought, in the strictest sense of that term, then very few of us are alive. Fortunately, we have the senses to distract us, to wave us on past the fencerow and toward the entrance that looks as if it were transplanted from a region where stone is plentiful and cheap, but where the residents are sick and tired of being told what to do by the rich owners of the quarries. Everywhere I turn a sickly sweet scent like lavender, only without the unpleasant associations loaded on lavender’s back by its historical place in both literature and film, assaults my nostrils, makes me wish I hadn’t strayed into this part of the country thinking I was straying into another. Getting lost is something we do when we don’t know how to read maps or determine for ourselves what is floating about in the night sky above our heads, which is no easy task, believe me, even after you have been trained. Perhaps this is why I try to keep my eyes pointed straight ahead and a little to the left so as not to run the risk of glimpsing something that calls out to be deciphered. It’s not that I resent landmarks and souvenirs, not that I am looking to establish strict philosophical principles in a landscape where even the standing cactus plants refuse to take on human shape in the moonlight. It’s just that our time is so limited and the distances to be covered so great! If, upon arrival, you stand directly in front of the gate, a series of electronic beeps and noises greets you but nothing happens. You could stand there all day. Fortunately I have some rope and an idea how to use it, an idea derived no doubt from reading too many Zane Grey westerns when I worked at a desk in a cubicle on one floor of a building where, as near as I could tell,  everyone else was doing the same thing. I thought, after a mere month or so, that I would be forced to pull my own fingernails out if someone didn’t come along and do it for me. I didn’t really know what their motivation might be, but I certainly knew mine, and at that time I rarely separated the two. On the other side of the gate, as you might have expected, a garden, a carefully cultivated oasis stretches away to the left and the right and when I bend to take a drink from the spring in the middle that seems to make the whole thing possible, someone shoves a gun in my face. Mistaken identity says the woman dressed almost entirely in black once I have put my hands in the air and she laughs as if I have just repeated my most clever memory (or joke or story or all of the above) from the past involving someone sitting on a rocking chair on the deck of an ocean liner in the middle of the ocean and moving her hands as the deck itself pitches and rolls, moves her hands in such a way that you can’t tell if she is trying to keep her balance, or if perhaps she is blind or simply requesting something from you each time you pass. Chopsticks. A watch with a leather band. If you stop to clarify, to ask her directly what it is she is up to, she waves you away with a barely audible grunt, as if your very existence disturbs her. As if she wished you would be so kind as to vanish immediately down the same ladder or peach-colored hallway from which you originally emerged.

The flesh, highly susceptible to pinches and rending, serves as a questionable barrier, at best. A gauzy afterthought that belongs really in glass cases at the museum rather than out here among the brambles and the strangers carrying sharpened sticks. The question becomes not so much what is the flesh a barrier against -- that much is obvious if you have eyes and an imagination dulled but not extinguished, still capable of visualizing fractions and fractions of fractions and invertebrates going about their usual business in the leaf litter and the eaves of old houses. Rather, one should be wondering about what’s inside, what exactly needs to be protected, whether it is something kin to the flesh that protects it or something altogether separate, which is the opinion of most everyone since Malebranche, and even before if we are being honest with ourselves. Certainly you can, after separating the one from the other, try to fuse them back together again, but it won’t stick. Habit serves something more fundamental than itself. It is that which anchors us in place, keeps us from floating away on a river of incomprehensible objects, two hundred million million of them bunched up in places like fallen trees trunks in a gorge and torrent, and isolated in others, so far removed from the others of their kind as to seem mere decoration or hallucination, something dropped into the void so as to rob the void of its haughty demeanor. I thank the heavens for their interference in these matters, for their stubborn insistence that you can’t take the soil you stand on too seriously or else you will be swallowed up, both literally and in contemplation, which is a terrible fate, believe me. It is like borrowing fifty dollars from someone you have to see everyday or every other day from that point forward and there is no escaping the humiliation, the need to lower one’s eyes to the floor whenever this other person happens by. Whenever she comes up the stairs, say, at the same time you have chosen to go down. Sometimes, that stairway is too narrow for the both of you to fit. You know you will have to step aside, to make way or else bump into her with your shoulder, and that option is suddenly out of the question simply because of the debt, because of this strange artificial way we have of placing inordinate value on certain minerals in the ground, or even just digital figures bouncing around in space. All future physical contact between the two of you must now be relegated to that same indefinable space, that same theoretical other world where nothing gets done, where nothing happens except for very real zeroes piling up (in your name) like tires in the brush beside a stagnating lake.   

After a week or two surviving on nothing but the diminutive grasshoppers that alight at my feet on occasion when the sun is high and the air feels and even smells a little as if it had been exhaled from the interior of some beast said to be long extinct, it becomes apparent that acquiring food will be my number one priority for a while, or at least among the top five, something that depresses me and so effectively neutralizes most of the hunger for a bit and allows me to put off the inevitable for a few more days. Reflected lightning plays its odd visual serenade on the walls of the cave behind me and I speculate for many hours at a time on what the nature of the infinite would be if it weren’t entirely infinite. If, for instance, it allowed itself to be erased as a kind of experiment, the way we sometimes pretend we are someone else, someone of the opposite gender, or holding convictions we ourselves, in our natural state, would never consider if only because they would make us appear heartless or weak or likely to jump headfirst into a river without knowing really how to swim, all in an attempt to determine something important about who we are and what we desire without, of course, knowing ahead of time what the results will be. This instinct is one of fifteen or so that have the potential to lead us around by the nose, to take over completely and refuse to let go, until we find some means of neutralizing their power. You can accomplish this, I’m told, by hand drawing and coloring in maps of locations that don’t actually exist or studying the footprints left behind in the snow outside your window just so long as you recognize that the footprints probably belong to someone you know or at least someone you have seen before in the neighborhood, most likely at a distance. For her part, Eulalie has never seemed overly interested in consuming flesh and when I see her with a glass of wine in her hand, I wait patiently, I avoid conversation as much as possible, so as not to distract myself, so as not to miss that moment when she brings the glass finally to her lips and parts them slightly. It is one of those moments you think you will remember forever, something sublime and deeply moving without your ever really being able to determine why. And yet, even so, an hour or two later, it has inevitably escaped my memory in all but the barest outline -- a grotesque, half-completed sketch on a sketch pad itself damaged by wind and time and rainwater, folding up at the edges and turning an insipid yellow.