XIII — You must listen intently to the sound in your ears. It’s a carrier signal.

XIII

You must listen intently to the sound in your ears. It’s a carrier signal. The message is layered into it. You have to separate the two. Turn the message into the signal. The message tells you. Follow what the message says. It’s easiest to separate the message when you are lying-down. Go and lie down.

So I do. I go and lie down, for a while, on the dust-red sofa, grip the grimed up arm. The dirty yellow lamp across the way, throwing out a feeble glow casts as some ante room to the timeless void. Who do you love? Just me. That’s all she says. I move onto my left elbow and look across at the woman. Who do you love? Just me. She says again. The yellow light frames her like a dark space. Listen. I say to her after a while: listen to that. What’s your point, she asks? I just want to know if you hear that. Yes I hear it. What do you want to know? I lay back on my back. There’s something wrong with me I think? Thick air pushes down the dust. And the red sofa is slowly fading away even as I lay on it. There is nothing wrong. This is the way it is. You mean in some kind of predestined type thing. No. No no not like that. Not at all. It isn’t like that, she says. I turn again to look at her as a dark space in the yellow. Do you have dark hair? She replies: maybe. Can’t you see it? Can’t you see the colour of the dress I’m wearing? I wait for the haze to clear for a moment, the haze that flows in and out and around us. I wait for a moment. A pause. A gap. A lucid gap into which I can make something. I feel a compulsion to get up and get into the light. Get a sense of her. But the compulsion isn’t strong enough. It doesn’t matter that much. The moment passes along with the rest. The yellow lamp becomes relatively brighter. So I lay back on my back and try to define what she looks like in my mind’s eye. The outline of her face swims and blurs and freezes and fades in, out, squares of overlapping colours transform in a way that resists bringing in the resolution. I stop it. This is the best way, I conclude. It’s the best way because it means I don’t care enough and that in itself is success. It’s the best way because I avoid imposing yet another fiction on the world. So I let her go completely and then, when I ask again if she can hear it, there comes no reply.

She never was of consequence, after all. Just part of the contingency of being. I lean back on my elbow and there is only space and the signal; that now I have to respond to. The telephone is ringing and I have to go and answer it. How does the telephone sound? It sounds like this:

[Space]. How does the telephone look? It looks like this: [space]. The yellow light is filling the room with an intensity pushing out all the shadows and lifts up the dust that covers the furniture; the sofa, the chair, the table. The dust converges into a dense point, absolutely in centre of this room. It converges to a point and then that point disappears into itself. A small space is left and the yellow light has to bend around it and I have to move my head just to one side as I pass to the telephone. I pick up the phone. Put the set to my ear and listen. As soon as I pick it up, the carrier signal gives way and I get ready for the message. Here it is: […]

XV — Yes. It was the Werewolf

Yes. It was the Werewolf, he said. I ask him what happened. Just appeared from the black. Ran at me. Round the back of the car. How did you get away? He looks at me. Stares straight in. Says nothing. Pushes his lips up with an ‘I don’t know what to make of it’ expression. Gives a slow and slight shake of his head. So how did you get away this time? That’s the third time? Fourth time? How you get away? The sky grows pale blue, and the breeze is already warm, despite the cold desert night. I guess it just changes its mind each time. Wants to slice me up but always stops short. It can’t. What is it? Some silver cross round your neck? He pulls down the neck of his brown checked shirt: you know that isn’t ever gonna be here; he gestures to his throat. So what stops it? You have to ask yourself that? He answers cryptically and pushes up his left eyebrow, left side of his mouth. You ask yourself that. I’ll drive. You ask yourself that. Give me a cigarette.

I drive. He flicks the butt out the window. We still have some way to wind down the road to the valley floor. The desert warms up quickly and the needle cold desert night feels like an impossibility. I wind down the window and can hear the dry suspension creaking and straining us down the mountain. I comment on this. I say: suspension is creaking on my side. The back. Hear it? What do you think? It’s fine. It’s the dust. Gets under the rubber boot. Dries up the oil. It’s fine. How long to the bottom? Twenty minutes. Fifteen if you put your foot down. I tell him the plan is to stay on the road, intact, in one piece. Check the map. Where does this track come out? He leans into the back and pulls out the bent up yellow road map. Folds it round. Turns it. Shakes it flat. According to this map, we’re not on a road. It’s an old map, I explain. This is a new track. It wasn’t here last year. Then how do you expect to know where this track comes out? It’s a reasonable question, which implies my failure to give him the full details. Which I can’t, at least, not yet. I will. I have to. Without the full details we can’t complete the job in hand. So for now I have to cover my tracks. Give me a cigarette. Will you light it up for me? He pulls two cigarettes from his pack, puts them side by side in his mouth, lights them up with a wind-proof lighter. Click. Just a-click. He passes me the left one and draws deeply on the right one. I sit back up and clamp the cigarette in my teeth; slightly off centre; slightly to the right; draw in whilst opening up the left side of my lips so that along with the smoke I get mixed in fresh air. It dilutes the smoke. Makes me feel better. I take another draw and then hold the cigarette in my right hand.

When I said: where do we come out, what I meant was: if you look at where the next town is and the highway, and you look at where we were last night, you can triangulate where we are going to hit the road. The main road. I can feel him looking at me and weighing it up. But I stay focussed on the track descending down to the valley below us. He turns to the map, I sense, and tells me we hit the floor about two miles from the highway, fifteen miles from town and another three hours from the drop off point.

There’s a dull thud from the trunk of the car. That’s the first time he’s made a sound. Yeh. I figured he would have said something by now. Shouted out. Seeing as he got shot. Maybe it’s shock through and through? I think about that and draw on the cigarette. Maybe it’s the shock. I agree with my previous idea. So traumatised he didn’t know what to fit it into. Couldn’t make sense of the narrative? Well that might work for anyone else. The driver is gonna lay out the alternative: he sees that every day. Blood. People getting their stories disrupted by someone like you. He must have a template for that. A narrative. So surely he can fit himself into his own story? Can imagine himself into it? That’s why he didn’t make a sound. Until now. He made sense of this years ago, knew it was part of his timeline. No trauma to be had if you got a box to put it in.

The cigarette gets to the mark where I flick it out into the desert and glance in the mirror as it lands next to a broken branch pointing back the way we came. Well. Just because he has a placeholder for it, doesn’t mean he’s not gonna shit himself when the time comes. Metaphorically or literally? Both, I answer.

We bump on down to the town below. Not much else happens. No more thuds. Until we get to the town. So we’re driving down into this valley but it’s not him and me. It’s her and me. The road is an edge-of-the seat of affair. Gripping on to the door handle as if it’s gonna stop the car tumbling off the mountain side. The road sweeps up and around. It drops out, tight corners with the horizon a long long way off. Distant hills. Shrivelled cacti come right up to the tarmac; big glazed dried out cacti withered ends. Thick spikes stuck out of the ribbed leaves. If that’s what they are. When it rains hard the cacti grab all the water they can and swell up fast, the rib expansion like some fat guy slipping his belt up a notch. I can’t tell if they’re dead. Looks like somebody beat them with a club. They occupy this strange space where they could be alive but could be departed. Endless numbered days out here on the mountain-sides.

The car struggles around and up a turn. Very steep but it’s a cut through so the walls are up either side of us. We get to the top. You can see blue sky the other side of the drop off as the car loses its momentum to almost a stop. Then we sit right on the tipping point and the view see-saws down opens out and away and because time has stopped I take in every grain of sand, every change of red hue in the rock walls falling away from us and the blades of grey green grass frozen in a timeless breeze. The valley opens up. In winter. In summer. I fly down the road taking it all in: narrow drainage gulley on either side, camouflaged trees with silver grey green yellow patched bark, scrub, small rocks, large rocks, the road speeds up, the car speeds up, mountain ridges up on my left and the wider expanse of the valley to the right past distant rock brown fields and rock walls.

You can forgive a body. Can’t forgive a face. But you can raise a can of beer on high, and seal your fate. What we need to think about is “having more woodlands, more diverse native species, and having those woods better connected”. On one hand this a judicious statement. But this rationalism belies its conflation with metaphoric content that works on an affective level. As always. This statement is empty rhetoric but, given its entanglement with the way that affect has been mobilised, it resonates in the same register. In this way, you kind of feel something. It kind of leaves you feeling that something useful has been said, that action will result; but not what. However, the entanglement with metaphor resonates and the metaphor obtains a significance that is both unwanted and extends far far beyond the intentions of the communicator. For sure: not the fuck what you meant. That seems to apply here at least in how you are the one sat in the chair and I am the one with a rope around your neck. A metaphoric rope. It’s literally a knife.

You see, I continue to the man in the chair, you see: I have this feeling your luck is none too good. This knife in my hand, keeps calling me ‘master’ and that implies that whatever it does is what I tell it to. I lean in to the man’s ear. But I swear that the damn thing just seems to do its own thing. I just happen to have it in my hand when it does what it does. It really isn’t me. The man gurgles something through the white cotton gag and he tries to rock out of his wheel chair. Grunting. Spinning. I’ve let the tires down, I tell him. Followed by a giggle. I’ve let the tires down. But I also shoved a bar through your spokes so you aren’t wheeling anywhere. I just let the tires down for fun. It’s this intangible feeling of something that indicates the problem. But it also suggests something of how these framings constellate at the social level and become shared means of understanding things. You follow me? You see how this is all framed? You worked the framings out yet? Possibly not. Like the fact you are in a wheel chair and when you wheel down the street that has an impact. It doesn’t go unnoticed. Really. It doesn’t. Are you doing that on purpose? Wheeling down the street in that way you do, I mean. The problem implies a rationalised account of how the media frames this kind of thing. You know: people in wheel chairs. People on crutches. Fat people. Thin people. Different people. How your person in the street, as it were, is constructed, with cues for public understanding and which they would have you think results in a change in public opinion on ambivalent and controversial issues, such as the fact.

The mundanity of it all. Every mundane thing gets elevated to the status of some fucking Saint. You got one arm? You got it made! You got one leg? You got it made! You got cancer? You got it made! No no no, you can’t have had cancer. You have to have cancer. That makes you a here and now hero. If you had it, you got nothing else to say and the people: they need new cancer. Now I think of it, there’s a fucking gold mine right there: somebody needs to invent a new cancer. A ‘cancer of the something’ that no one has ever had. That story would sell like fur coats in a fucking snowstorm.

I prod the man in the back, just to make sure he is listening. That fact I mentioned: you are in a wheel chair. That’s a symbol, you see. Your wheel chair. None of these symbols work in any kind of unitary manner. People love you in your fucking wheel chair. The Wheel chair guy is still rocking. In contrast, I argue that with stories such as the one in question, there are layers of conflict and ambiguity which result not only in a lack of convergence but also in an enhanced ambivalence about the topic in question. On the other hand I, me [I pat me on the chest, just so he is sure who I mean] argue that knowledge is differentially and unpredictably representative and that undermines any simple communication. No one cares about you in your wheel chair until the moment that things fall out that way. Then the fact they don’t care is replaced. But there are no facts to which we can appeal to decisively resolve these type of disputes. Do you follow?

More grunting and spinning.

And then I go on to suggest that the problem in-part stems from the belief in an objective material reality that exists apart from our affective relation to it and which can be represented in its objectivity by scientific practices. The same applies to you stuck in your wheel chair. Our work here, yours and mine, what we are attempting is predicated on being able to account for the problems associated with it from a rational perspective. Like I just said: that can’t happen. It’s just a wish. You got to accept that this is an ambivalent state of affairs and the only thing you can do is accept that ambivalence. Stay in touch with the fact it’s all a fantasy and that, in a very short while, even though most potential outcomes are going to collapse, that collapse is not going to converge on some real outcome where you get up and walk away from this. I laugh a little. That’s a funny thing I said there! What I meant to say was: you aren’t walking away from this. I’m surprised you didn’t stop walking years ago. With that bulging gut straining under your black shirt, doing its best not to spill out your regulation black synthetic trousers. No wonder you had that limp all those years ago. Progressed to this wheel chair, or at the very least gave you a hand. Didn’t it? Along with that gunshot. How did you feel about that?

I am genuinely interested in what he has to say, but whatever he has to say doesn’t make any sense. I can’t understand him. The gag makes his words sound like a car that won’t start. I step back a little. He’s really trying to shake himself free. So much so that the bar slips out from the left wheel and he starts to bump round in a left handed circle. After three full turns I detach from the absurdity and switch it back on. Holding the knife towards him, gesticulate that he best stop. Which he does. Clearly out of breath, the sweat runs down his great fat head down his fat neck, only to get lost in the folds there. Pooling, I imagine, until it is seeped and soaked all around. How many times are we going to do this and in how many different ways? Do you know? He shakes his head and some sweat falls on my left boot. The telephone was ringing in the back.

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XVII — How much further are we going?

XVII
How much further are we going? She isn’t really asking me. Just thinking aloud. The steering wheel sways gently side to side in time with the music. We pass along gravel roads skirted by pine woods. The rolling ground stacked over with brown dry needles, dry cracked branches fallen from the dark green canopy. We’re going up around this bend a while, then down a hill and that’s pretty much it. What is it? It’s a ten star hotel! That I doubt. You never even took us to a no-star hotel. The track starts down the shallow hill. The wood falls away to the left and reveals the scale of the wilderness around us. A clearing here and there. A patch of open grass maybe freed up by a lightning strike. A fire. Re-growth. The endless cycle that some might call nature. They have remote towers in places like this where some lone man or woman spends the summer months watching out for grey white plumes of smoke rising up, sometimes fifty miles away. She isn’t listening to me. Then they call in a plane to fly over the smoke to assess what’s going on. Sometimes they do that and sometimes they let a fire burn. The plane calls in another plane to drop a suppressant on the fire or, if it’s warranted and safe enough to do so, a team of fire-fighter parachutists complete with shovels, beaters, blankets. It’s a complicated situation.

Fires have been catching fire for millions of years before men were around to beat them out. Accepted logic is that it’s a good thing. Re-growth. New species. Released nutrients. Space and so on. But if there is no fire then that particular patch of forest maintains a quiet, shady existence. The deer creep past unseen. It doesn’t matter what happens. Either way works. Drop man in to the picture and sometimes that fire has to put out. It’s a reasonable thing. Maybe if the fire eats its way round and down and round down the mountain to the outskirts of town. Stands up on itself and waits for the weather and the wooden buildings to come together. Watches people sweating up ditches with tiny spades and barrows dragging away wooden food. But as with the patch of scorched forest: if the town burns, it re-grows. It re-seeds. So what’s the point of the fire towers? Why not just stand back and see what pans out?

It’s not man’s way, I tell her. But it could be about embracing the arrangement of things as they descend together. Something about throwing all the bones up and letting them fall and scatter and making sense of the shapes. There are watch towers stood on the hills. It’s jungle land. People don’t want their houses to burn. Take your feet off the dashboard. I don’t like it when she puts her feet on the dashboard. She says she doesn’t have any shoes on so it won’t do any harm. Maybe, but I don’t like it. She asks me why not. Don’t you like my feet? Your particular feet don’t have anything to do with it that I can tell. I just don’t want them on my dashboard. She looks out the window and wriggles her toes. But she doesn’t take her feet off the dashboard, which is walnut veneered and shiny as hell. I’m the one who shines it. She rubs her feet around laughing to herself. The wax shine is becoming blurred. The light breaks up in a million different directions. I tell her I wax the wood veneer all-round the car once every week and then I try not to touch it. I explain that inevitably I do touch it either by necessity or a chance passing of the hand as I reach for something or other. So I then I polish it again and so on. It doesn’t give me any pleasure polishing it and when I have polished it, I feel nothing. It’s just that it needs to be polished. I look at the deep shine. I look at the swirl of deep dark browns and streams of beige black. No irritation from having to polish it and no pleasure from having done so. Nothing.

As I reflect this to her, I realize that the polished wood and me have no relationship at all, other than being in the same proximity. And that proximity as far as I can tell rested on the chance purchase of a car that a neighbor, who had walked across to me one day from his garden; asked me if I wanted to make an offer.

The car is black, shiny, old and large. With a large trunk and so much leg room in the front that, if the passenger puts the seat back and stretched out their legs and feet as far as they could, there was still another foot of space between them and the bulkhead under the dashboard.

She remains cheerful. She wriggles her toes around some more. Small feet. The walnut veneer disappears under toe shaped smudges. Look. Do you want me to pull under those trees over there and kill you? Why would you want to do that? It’s just one of the options open to me. You have your feet on my dashboard. I don’t want them there. I could park under those trees and kill you and then your feet wouldn’t be on my dashboard. I could polish it. It’s an option amongst many. I’m trying hard to decide what part I play in that. She leans on to my shoulder and asks: have you any better alternatives? I suspect the innuendo and the way she looks up at me from under her eyelids. Coy, or an attempt at coy. I reply: not really. That’s the one I’m going to choose: the one I described. Why would you choose such a destructive course of action? She takes her feet off the dashboard. Tucks them under her seat. Sits back in the seat and folds her arms. It would be destructive for you. Or at least for your body. And your family and so on. But on other terms it may be beneficial. Universal terms, that is. Not that I believe the universe has any innate purpose beyond itself. Woah back up! Sorry. I should have said ‘beyond itself’. I didn’t mean to convey any character on it. The girl begins a low down moan of faux despair. She has heard this a million times, so she tells me; a million times. Well look at this way: sometimes there are areas of order and sometimes areas of disorder. The two go hand in hand but you can’t predict when one is gonna flip into the other. Well, not with the precision you believe in. The road tracks round to the right and up another slight incline. But seeing as your body even in a really really basic sense represents some kind of order, then killing you, breaking up the body, would flip this little part of the universe into disorder. The universe might like that! And don’t you think it’s odd that given the slightest nudge, anybody, any living thing slowly or rapidly depending on the conditions slips into some state of decayed disintegration. Disintegration, I emphasize. Bits seeping out. Molecules flying off with other molecules, turning green turning black, gases, flaking nails, changing shapes. It’s like the universe abhors a body. Slightest opportunity and it runs that body back into little bits. Too organised. All I would do is speed that up a little. Doesn’t take much to get it back to a less ordered state. You see, and I stop the car here to turn and look at the girl to emphasize what I am about to tell her and the car crunches to a halt on the gravel track; throws up the dust. This is what I tell her: your despair is a significant move in the right direction. There’s an uneasy look creeping onto her face and she says nothing. That feeling you starting to feel: that’s the beginning of a universal state of affairs and let’s face it: we all want to be at one with the universe, don’t we! This is your chance! You want to be at one with the universe. And your self? You don’t have one, by the way. But apart from that you just have to give up this thing you call life. You have to let go of the history of all your beliefs and all of history’s values that even at this precise moment are convincingly animating that lump of matter that you call your body which, let’s face it, just last week was a dozen cans of cheap hot dogs, a waffle, some donuts – I recall seeing you eat a donut – and a liter of fizzy shit. She squirms around a little. They’re not, of course. Animating your body, I mean. You may have that conviction and I won’t be able to shake you out of that. Just thought I’d mention it. This girl with dark hair, slim figure. Finely defined and contemporarily attractive face in a flowered dress and with bare feet is at a point in the universe that splits off in two or many directions. Up above the car, a single buzzard circles. He says to the universe with the piercing, melancholy cry that buzzards do: here I am. For now. The sky is blue. The sky is still and warm. The green forest is alive. There is a pause………………………………………. It’s about trying to bring order into disorder. After all the millennia, that’s the only thing that joins up all the dots. But it’s a struggle against the tide, against the hoard of clay giants running against you. The cut on the front of the philosophy book that d—— everything inside it. A girl sat on the edge of an old photograph. Looking inwards. Looking into the distance. Everyone else focused on the best man. The girl focused on a different version. A finite version that will not be realized. The girl looks out of her photo to the boy sat in his photo. The boy was still sat staring into the distance, with the cloth sack at his side; holding the top with his right hand; turned slightly towards it. His sister may have been dead beside him. A bag hiding her dark hair and fine features that were now caved in, blown out, falling apart. At one with the universe or moving that way, at least. She had been under the bag for ten years. Twelve years? Five years more than I reckoned with. Laying in a meadow. Laying in a forest clearing. When the boy removed the bag to look at his sister’s face he didn’t register the scene.

There is a difference between being next to the living and next to the dead. When humans come close together, infinite opportunities all split off to different outcomes and all of them feedback on themselves and then you can feel the life around you. Being close to another living human, you feel all those different possibilities just waiting to split off. Most often we just choose the easiest dimension to slip into and the moment we do, all the other dimensions may collapse. Or they may have been created there and then. They swirls and swell and fill you up and the human face registers one opportunity or one path over another. Even in a photograph. It’s no surprise that photographs follow us like trails. Or rather: we leave them as trails for history to make use of. However: look at a photograph of the dead and the trail stops there. The infinity of versions collapse to one outcome. No chance of life. No path leading onwards and that diminishes your potential to live. And that, of course, diminishes you. When I look at the boy, I wanted an outcome for him that was different. But his sister had prevented that. She determined his path, his becoming. A point in time just before all the versions split off in a billion directions. A billion different outcomes collapse onto themselves, to one. The final reckoning. I look across at the girl sat by me with the dark hair.

I rewind the scene so that she still has her feet on the dashboard. She squiggles round her toes and smudges the wax veneer and then she looks at me for a reaction, bursting out with mischief and life. Her legs and feet are stretched out towards the bulkhead under the dashboard. I try to bring the pieces back into order and force a different version upon the universe. And the universe yields. You’re not easy to live with, she says. Are you? The way you talk. The way you are. I’m not sure what you’re about. I tell her it’s about something like teasing this ball of twine out into all the little threads and a million colors. Or maybe it’s a Werewolf. She takes her feet off the dashboard. Tucks them under her seat.

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XVI — There was a boy once upon a time

XVI
There was a boy once upon a time who lived in a small village with his mother, his father and his sister. The village stood nestled in the foothills, beyond which was the longest mountain range in the country. Out of the mountains flowed the green river that wound past the village and away across the plain down to the sea, I start to say. Then a different thought takes hold and the boy fades into grey. Overtaken by the grey threads. Amnesia. The boy is insignificant. He has no value. The thought requires a thinker. To whom does the boy have no value? To the thing which lies beyond life and to which we all aspire. We don’t realize it. That is not death. Death does not lie beyond life. Death is not the opposite of life, I say to the man and sit forward in the chair: we are not trying to avoid death with our body enhancements, our injections and the sun treatment.

What would it all look like without death? We take up a position with a different relation. The human form isn’t our final evolution. Our final evolution is a dispersal of scale. It’s not a posthuman. It’s not a human with enlarged eyes and frontal cortex. That’s about cartoon posthuman. For some straightforward plagiarism: where humanists saw themselves as distinct beings/an antagonistic relationship with their surroundings, posthumans regarded their own being as embodied in an extended technological world. There was a repositioning of matter. What it really was, is a splash of flame against a blue background some 4000 miles way. Nothing to get worked up about, at that distance. Just a moment’s inconvenience and a micro in the spacetime. Our so called fundamental drive – to life or maybe death – has been misunderstood. We exist not as a thing but as a process that the matter of our bodies cannot escape. But of course, says the man.

I carry on: we are misled by the scale of things and the time it takes as matter accretes to us and away from us. You have to see beyond life. You have to hear what is beyond life. At any one moment: we are all capable of giving it up and nothing at all would be lost. A down-going where nothing is lost. I stop and look up at the old man, looking for a mirror of these last words. The old man sits back in his chair.

Is that your wish? His face is earnest. He doesn’t pre-empt an answer. How can I tell if it’s a wish? A wish: identical to reality? Man is to life what life is to death. An anomaly. For you, the man says. What about the others? I say that there are no regularities. There are only separate cases. The evolution of man moves towards mankind as part of a universal becoming. Billions of individual becomings becoming a becoming! The old man laughs! I see why, but I reframe it. The future of man lies in reaching a point where each individual is able to become themselves, but all of those becoming selves are always becoming in relation to every other becoming self. And there is no self or selves in the first place. So there never is a single no individual becoming. This is the hive mind. No. It is the post-hive mind. The Meta hive-mind? All are simultaneously one and myriad individuals. Actually no mind at all. That doesn’t fit either. No will-to-anything. All of that shit is about the individual. And all of that other shit is about the collective. This is neither. It’s both. It’s about a post-posthuman, I say. It’s about evolution into something. I start to sweat.

Well of course, says the old man. Evolution is always a move into something. Have you thought this through, he says, leaning forward and resting his chin in his hands and his elbows on his knees. Have you thought this, though? Are you certain of anything, any one part of it? So I say: we fight certain values. Certain moralities certain ways of being. Positioning, judgments, histories. What if we decouple from all of that? What if we resist all? Where you end up, I think, is psychosis, says the old man. That’s another value judgment. Do you want to risk that, asks the old man? The young boy and his father. Guns. War. Fragmentation. Dislocation. I adjust my position in the corner of this sofa. Wait for the man to say something. He says it’s time. Time is up.

I walk out into the sunlight of the street. The wide pavement and the lazy cars. It became too tiring. I had to walk away. It coincided with the old man telling me time was up. Is up. Some people leave life a hell of a lot quicker than they entered it. Some people never realize they’ve gone. They die so quickly, say by a gunshot to the back of the head or a tree falling on the car and crushing them flat. Smearing them down the road. They never have time to register it. In that sense, life appears to be an either/or situation.

But all deaths involves that same either/or situation. I glance in the windows of the cheap shops I pass. I see old ladies buying cheap soap and small girls and boys deliberating over the cheap sweets. The same momentary contingencies that lead to a choice irrespective of where the agency for the choice is rooted or diffused. A kind of reverse death. An inverted death. The ability for things to come together as an action. Death is the same thing: things come together and effect an action. But I still couldn’t work out what went on at that exact moment when what is called a life comes, or is called, to an end. And I have seen – I am sure I have said this: I have seen many ends. When my Father died I was with him. He got a chest pain one night at around 10:15pm. My Mother had called and said something like: your Dad’s got a chest pain and I called an ambulance. I was sober. Having decided to give myself four months on the wagon. So that was lucky break #1. I arrived to find my Dad sat on the sofa, head throwing back and forth in absolute agony, centered on the dead center of his chest. His sternum. No pain on in his left arm. No tight chest no blue lips nothing to point at a fucked up heart. So I took a lot of comfort from that, in a clichéd all of my friends are dying but not my Dad kind of way. Slightly surreal. Detached at this time. Anyway. Many years before I had a similar episode. Chest pain that came from nowhere and felt like the Devil was giving him the fingering of a lifetime. Never was. Wired me up, normal rhythm, careful stayed, careless didn’t die, inflamed gullet. Food pipe. Acid. So of course my Dad had the same. Death was not on the menu. Mum was keeping her shit together on the outside. Fuck knows what was in her head. Anyway. Paramedic appears, asks my Dad some banal shit to keep him focused and calm. How old? What did you work at? Said: let’s get your shirt off and wire you up. Which he did. Then I saw my Dad’s body for the first time in, what, 30 years? That was the first shock: Goddamn! Goddamn! This isn’t my Dad. This is an old old fucking man with an old fucking man’s body. Second shock: things may not pan out too well. I suddenly lost my faith that his body had some say in this. Muscle tone: gone. Blemishes, pallor, stains. Where was my Dad’s body? This was some old fuck I never saw coming. Because I had not seen his flesh for some thirty years, my Dad was just his face. The way he looked at me. And this was the time that my Dad said: “I think this is the end”. Straight up. Verbatim. And this is the funny thing: I still had indigestion in my head and had told him my story several times by now. So I genuinely believed that, and at the same time I had to reconcile the surprise of an old body with the melodrama insight of: I think this is the end. You know they say how one and one make two: this cliché didn’t add up. I was perfectly fucking aware of these different streams of affect/thought playing through my head. Each one led to a different outcome and it’s the best evidence I got so far for the existence of the multiverse. No. It isn’t. I’ve been really really fucking rational since then and kept my shit together like a Champion! It was a paradox I couldn’t resolve.

Maybe death was the necessary event that rendered life meaningful, froze it in place? There appears to be a definite before and after state of affairs, with death before life and death after life. Same thing. Nothing to worry about. But what makes the two things categorically different? On who or what terms are those categories? I’ve seen many endings and stared right into the eyes of the dying to try to pin down that precise moment. But it always escapes. You don’t see it and that in itself is significant. At the moment that life slides in to death you realize they can’t be separate categories. The conclusion I came to was that there is no moment. No event. Just a rearrangement of all the bits and pieces that had become implicated and whilst we are preoccupied with what the central actor in front of us is doing, the whole arrangement is gently stretching its legs and reaching around to grasp different things and different things are reaching out to it, getting in its way, laying on its tracks. The thing that makes the difference is perspective.

Taking a breath. Exhaling and relaxing and shifting the balance around a bit. One of the actors fades out the picture. Or leaves quickly. What we call life is diffused through the things that come together and that suggests that life is not a quality of an individual. It’s a quality of the collective. This is a most superficial insight. Where did the illusion that it is an individual quality start?

I walk the road. Children unwrap their one coin sweets. Old ladies drop soap bars to the bottom of their plastic shopping bags. I walk on down the pavement. At the end of this short section of sidewalk I stop and wait at a junction to cross. A few cars and a bus go past and then the sign changes and I cross. As I get to the other side I attend to the low down throbbing of a motorcycle engine to my left and turn to look at a blue chopper. I walk into someone stood still in front of me and the collision, no damage done, makes me jump back with a start. I have to seriously question my ability to see things coming.

The man looks at me. Dark matted long straggly hair, like tendrils. Dirty skin. Dirt worn right in and down to the bone. Dark and long tattered clothes. A shabby tattered long coat that might have been black or charcoal. Sorry I didn’t see you. You okay? The man stamps a foot and draws in a deep and meaningful breath which he cuts short and holds right at the apex. The world ended two weeks ago. On March Seventeenth. We don’t exist. And that’s all he says. The mid-summer heat beats down the dirt further into his skin and the breeze whips his hair into shapes. If we don’t exist. Who are we? The shapes change. A dust devil spins around this figure and throws up the torn coat fabric. Merges with him into a hazy series of charcoal sketches. I step back and away from the hair tendrils trying to whip across my face. Otherwise leave a stinging red line. I have a memory of this symbol and I tell him: what did you try to tell me? The dust devil vanishes and the tendrils fall still. The coat becomes a coat. It’s something about turning round a corner and coming face to face with the thing that would stop you in your tracks. The thing that goes with you wherever you go. You know what it is. You know what it is but every time you turn that corner you hold your breath you screw it all up and: it’s not there. And the next corner and the next and the next and the next and then one time when you relax because every other corner has nothing to hide: it comes right up into the picture and your heart stops. And it’s your turn to leave, so that all the parts can adjust themselves. Adopt a new pose. A new constellation. An absence connected to all these other things.

The chopper engine thumps away. Every now and then the guy screws back the throttle and the thumping ramps itself and breaks up mountains and boulders. A guy on a blue chopper motorcycle. Leaves dust drifting around the shiny pipes and shiny rims. Metallic blue tank and hard-tail frame. This guy on the chopper is looking over to me. Large bear [bare] arms and shoulders under a cut off denim big guy. A good layer of fat hiding the contours but strong as an ancient figure. Big grin on his face like something made him glad. He gives me a wave with a pale gloved right hand and shouts over that engine: what do you think about this? Do I know you, I shout back? He throws the engine up again a couple of times and the bike sits low down on the road. Long time ago, man! Long long time ago! Where have you been all that time? He grins even more at my question. I was right here. Always have been. Always will be. Grins some more and throws a laugh to himself. Lets out the clutch.

People walk up and down the pavement and young girls buy sweets in the cheap sweet shops. It’s a very clear, blue day with a slight warm breeze gently picking up fragments of paper and lifting them gently round the corners of the buildings. What is a life but fragments on the breeze? Shapes coming into the scene and shapes leaving the scene. A tune heard as a child that lingers and meanders in and out of the years. A tune that carries a million histories all clinging on to its tail. The war you read about but never saw. The soldiers’ bodies. The dead horses’ broken walls, streams of the dispossessed. Suitcases spilling out a million different historic water filled puddles, flowers pushing past the shattered stones. Rivers. Seas. Clouds. Clean washing blowing in the wind. Young children with expressionless faces. Young children laughing and rolling a glass bottle back and forth. Clean roads and new houses. Made up gardens. Time. Made up time. Blue clear days. Like this. A million histories all spilling around and clinging on. But the thing is: they’re not you’re histories. That is: they’re not something you created. They came to you by chance, were tangled up. You can try to leave it all behind but the figure with tendrils for hair, the scorched face, the torn coat: he lingers too as a truth you’ve always known. Nothing new about that. But his style shifts and evolves. He, or it, or she, or you, are a shape shifter. One day you get to embrace him. It always comes back to him. You get to spin round and round and the tendrils fly out and the black cape makes great sweeping arcs that cut space and time. Out of this world. As that end approaches you have an infinite number of opportunities to rearrange all the pieces and put them together as a better shape that you can happily end with. That moment in a bar: twenty years before when you should have done that and not this. That girl who smiled at you and you smiled at the glass in your hand. The right turn you took and you should have turned left. The moment when your Lover looks into your eyes for something you don’t have. And never had. It was just a story they confused. These things get spaced out to the ends of the universe right at the end for just a brief second and they hang there as balanced forces in perfect tension. You can make them hang there for an eternity that lasts a million millionth of a millisecond and then they come racing back in to take up this last, different, better form. It’s one end amongst many.

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XIV — This man lived once in a fairly clean house

XIV
So this man lived once in a fairly clean house, up along a good road. A good neighborhood. This was the man I told you about. He works in a store. He limps. He forgets how he got that limp. He had come to the area some years before, looking for a house to rent. The freshness struck him. The fresh painted boards. The cut grass. Really short and uniform cut like a barber. The house was a private rent and the sign in the window told him he could afford to live there. It was a small house but it fitted perfectly in this neighborhood. Children played in the wide wide dusty road and their parents assumed they were always somewhere close by. They usually were. None of them went missing. No one came looking to take away the children and no one living on the street had that particular interest. And it was a big neighborhood. Many blocks. Many types of skin. There was other crime. Burglaries. Beatings. A murder once in a blue moon but that was usually a husband hitting his wife too hard. A spill out from the bar ending in a knife fight. Premeditated? Hard to say. People think about those things in their private times and that may make it premeditation. It’s a thin line. Fact apart from that is despite what the media would have believe, life is not all abduction and worship. That’s reserved for certain places, times. Takes a great deal of effort for any neighborhood to go down that path and for enough people to get on board to keep it alive. Takes a powerful deal of effort and bribery and threats and elocutionary force and the paraphernalia and the right kind of weather.

On this street there was not that kind of weather. It rained and it shined. But it never just rained a grey smudged out monotone hue. There was no Sunday Confession. There was no need for religion. The denominations had come plying their trade, set up chapels. Churches. They stayed for a while. Eventually it fell on deaf ears. Or rather: it fell on ears that didn’t need to listen. Keep on moving. The city limits are that way. But the neighborhood was just like a piece of denim. Denim, as in the material. When you own a pair of jeans from new, they start off as blue. All blue of whatever description. You own them long enough and the blue begins to give way to white. The blue denim is always built on a matrix of white cotton. The blue wears away with the years and the white reveals itself in all the places where the hardest work has been done. In that neighborhood, wherever there was hard work, wherever there was distress and abrasion of the spirit and the potential for the grey amnesia, the white appeared. That was it. It was there all the time lying under everything else. No one wondered why. No need to. A stylistic choice, perhaps, but the white always came through. Some books have the author’s surname and Christian name. Some have just the surname. The latter is supposed to lend weight to the fact. What? You don’t know who this author is? You don’t know their Christian name? That’s your ignorance showing. But the denim still has white below it.

The man, still young, moved in to the clean house. He lived up to that house. There was no demand anywhere from any quarter to live it a certain way or to keep it a certain color. It just happened like that. He cut the grass like a barber. He lined up the trash cans. He wore the face of one man but it actually wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been. It must have been someone else completely mistaken for him. On the surface, it all fitted perfectly. It sounded like him. He played the tunes in the same way. They were authentic. But the picture on the surface must have been wrong, an ill fit. He was the different color in an otherwise white fabric. And people had come a long way in five thousand or so years. Five thousand years ago, man could interpret out what the stars were saying and drag a stone five hundred miles and perfectly align it with the rising yellow sun without even a compass and today there are lines and arrows to tell you which way to shit. But still the man kept his house freshly painted. For a while. Skip forwards some couple of years and the house is a mound of fly blown cartons and viscous black liquid appearing under the no longer lined up side by side bins.

The question: is this a before and after state of affairs? Is it a slow and insidious evolution? Is there an intervening event? What else came onto the scene? The whole neighborhood was creeping into the same viscous space. The borders became first unkempt and then tangled. The brier appeared. The cracks in the roads and pavements got wider and flaked off bits of cement for the children to kick around. Earlier, when a strong wind blew up and down the avenues and knocked over boxes and bins the people would chase the scraps of paper and milk cartons up and down the street. Now, the milk cartons stayed where the wind left them and they slowly blended in with the weeds. Fading down to meet the beige vegetation, which never quite made it to green. It came to a point where the symmetry between man and nature, what was taken for nature, got so blurred that the people couldn’t look any more. They’d just hurry along, trying to attend in their heads to anything other than the brambles reaching out to them across the pavements; their own trapped debris and rags beckoning as flags and way markers pointing back to a different space. The white paint developed a grey sheen over the boards, on the road signs. At some point the paint began to shrink and then it began to flake. The exposed wood soaked up the water and the paint curled around the edges, slipping away in the wind. But the people couldn’t tell. It was like some eternal recurrence. They’d look at the weathered boards and the roof-felt shrunk back from the eaves, flapping around, and they’d try hard to remember when that had happened. What was it like yesterday? It wasn’t like that! Chain link fences turned orange. The grass grew up and through the links and weighted down the fences and pulled them away from the steel posts. The people tried hard to remember who had cut the grass? Who had trimmed the trees? Was it them? Did they have a man come round once a month and do it for them? They couldn’t remember. They couldn’t remember when they had sat and smiled at the children, watched them play on the lawns. The girls playing with their dolls and setting up shops. Selling sweets. The boys. Chasing around, hiding behind the trees and laughing. They hurried along now past scrap heap gardens and accepted the drunken father throwing a can at a small boy crying in front of the broken go-cart. They accepted the snarling black dog. They accepted the black viscous ooze. Somewhere between then and now, between the clipped lawn and the Yellow of his fingers, nothing had happened and yet it was all different. No-one and no one thing were responsible.

But now the man threw his cartons on the floor. He stacked magazines on the edge of the bottom stair and when the stack was so high he stacked some on the next stair. And then the magazines got papers mixed in with them. Letters. Cuttings. Flattened out cigarette cartons and they stretched all up to the top of the landing and down the opposite stair edge and the man walked in between a path of artifacts. The paper caused him anxiety. He couldn’t throw it away because throwing it away meant he may by mistake throw away the one piece of information he needed. The key to it all. And it spread from room to room. There was never a plan. Like the neighborhood, it just was. He never ever noticed until those occasions when he’d find that a piece of paper had blown into the middle of the ever narrowing path to the bedrooms. And he’d stop and move it to one side and for a moment he almost remembered what it had been like before. But then he’d carry on up the stairs and the fly screen door would bend a little more. Outside, the children were no longer safe. There was a day when the man was just going in the front door of house. A sunny day and warm.

The car engine strained in the distance. The sound was far off, but close enough for the man to pick up on it. To attend to it at some unconscious level. It slowed him down. Made him fumble around for something. He had no idea what. The car engine got louder. Some sirens came into the scene. A soft wailing. Two or three. Arguing to see who took the lead. The man, now fully attentive, turned round to look up the road. He gripped the plastic food bag in his left hand and the tan car slewed to halt right there roaring tires smoking and burning in front of his house with the dust and pebbles taking up all kinds of directions. He didn’t know what to think about that. He didn’t have a reference for it.

Now see what you think about this: a man up along a road sat in a tan colored car. Down the road and further on up the road many police cars scream in clouds of dust. The man sees these police. Maybe there’s still a way out of this? Maybe I can find redemption. The man thinks it. Those police waving their twelve-gauges at me. I got me a twelve-gauge. I got me a small child on the back seat here. He winds down the window and fires off a lazy shot upwards. Makes those police all lie in the dirt and get down tight behind those doors. Those police start talkin’ at him through bull-horns but he can’t make sense of what they’re saying.

The small child is crying and the man turns round to look at his son but he can’t take it all in. It’s going too quick for him. It’s gone in a flash and he can’t remember how they got to that point. A police detective is calling out: it’s gonna be okay. We know what happened. The man in the car feels a wave of disappointment. Looks again at his small dark-haired boy on the backseat of the car. Points the twelve-gauge at him just to see what it feels like. Pulls back the hammer on that old gun. The child carries on crying so the man grits his teeth. Then he turns back to look through the side window and he looks up to see a man stood on the porch of wooden house looking back at him. The driver steps out of the car and looks over the tan roof and the man stood on the porch doesn’t move.

Over the cacophony of horns and engines and shouts and a million police ordering him, bargaining with him, threatening him; the driver calls out to the man stood on the porch. I’m a Salesman, he says. And as he speaks them, the words seem to take him by surprise. You don’t see it coming. You can’t. You’re too preoccupied with something else. It’s a myth that you reach this moment of peace and then just let go. You are, at best, distracted, and never one-hundred percent engaged with what is going on.

I’m a Salesman, the man had shouted. It isn’t my natural line of work. I just fell into it. The man on the porch had a plastic bag in his hand. He wore beige colored pants. A white shirt, but all of that got lost as he watched the Salesman. He ran on parallel tracks for a while and it was some time before the streams came together. But even then he had to fashion them and work them and smooth them and make them fit. What he saw couldn’t easily be captured, if at all. It wasn’t just that, though. The structures were already in place and so when the Salesman called out to him, it was all ready to go. He sat down on the rust red sofa and switched on the TV with its old thermo-set plastic dials that gave off that peculiar smell when they got too hot. The screen rounded off at the corners and so the picture never had any edges. The man knelt down. One track replayed what the Salesman did, on a loop. Round and round. It was always there. It interfered with the other channels. He knelt down and clicked the deep brown dial round and round. He came across an old film that may have been black and white but, given that the set was itself black and white, he couldn’t tell. A giant crab with human eyes and unarticulated mouth was speaking in a deep echoed voice to the lead hero. A woman/girl of indeterminate age with dark hair and an average face clung to the hero’s arm, and frantically unclipped and dropped the scuba gear she was wearing. The man knelt in front of the screen and tried to focus on the ribs and muscles of the hero as he too discarded his scuba gear. He opened up the connectors in his mind and viewed the scene some years before on that movie set. He squinted up his eyes to get a better view of the director shouting cut and the hero standing up and saying something to someone and the way that his ribs and skin and muscle carried on about their business. He penciled in the guy holding the microphone boom, wearing a green bomber jacket with a button missing off the left pocket flap, the lady holding some pages of script and a recently deceased brother foremost in her thoughts, the cars pulling up on the other side of the film lot, the busy road just the other side of the studio gates now rolling open on slightly rusting wheels, mountains running up from the desert beyond the city. People hiking in the mountains. But the man could not convince himself that there ever was an actor/hero some decades before on a movie set. He couldn’t stop it for long enough. He couldn’t freeze the scene and be there. He was unsure that anything had ever happened. He thought about stabbing himself in the heart just to find out if it would all stop or all carry on. If the films were just an illusion and he had no evidence that the people in them existed beyond that illusion, then what could be trusted?

In recent times, films and TV series always included a self-conscious comment from the actors, the crew. The explosion from a different angle with the shot including all the extras and safety guys and girls stood watching. But this wasn’t real either. The producers had cottoned on to the feeling of uneasiness and tried to compensate by bringing a reality back into the frame. It wasn’t. It was just another layer. The man watched the crab crawl up the beach on rails or hidden wheels. There was no fucking redeeming narrative that the man kneeling in front of the TV set and banging his fist on the floor could read. He rocked slightly. He was trying to make sense of this crab film and yet he was being hailed by the Salesman. See what you think about this! See what you fucking think about this.

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XVIII — Where did those men go?

XVIII

Where did those men go? What men? He says he didn’t notice; had his eyes closed listening to some music the barman had put on. Old couple are still in their beige cotton-mix windproof jackets; stay-pressed pants. They became one person split in two. They are not harmless. Sitting back into the chair I get a moment to contemplate what to do about this old couple. Hey! I’m going up when this beer is done. He says he’ll turn in too. That tomorrow he can drive and I can watch the grass.

The old couple have both turned to look at me with a shared expression. The expression tells me they are from another time and space. They’ve slipped between worlds just for me. The fabric of the old man’s beige stay-pressed pants resists all attempts at aging. Liquids run off it. The fabric resists looking any different from the day it was made. The old man came with his age pre-programmed. The wrinkles around his mouth, the thin white hair and the sunken cheek all pre-programmed and not the mark of a lifetime of experiences.

It came as a shock when someone realized old age could be commodified and sold as a lifestyle choice. This old couple could be any age from sixteen to six hundred. They may have made the choice themselves as aging adults or maybe they had been kids given the latest present. You just couldn’t tell because the process was just that good. But when the companies cottoned on to the fact, a completely new market opened up. And it did wonders for the social fabric, breaking down the divisions between the various groups that formed and reformed, some naturally some artificially, as everyone clamored after the latest thing. On the back of the old age option, surprising other options came online: the down and out, the terminally ill, the neurotic, psychotic, traumatized, banal, bland and the religious convert. The Housewife. You could opt for any one of these comprehensively valued personas for a minimum of time and pain. And very quickly and for a short period, no-one really knew who anyone else was. There was a sudden and brief collective gasp of realization and the differences melted away. No one was alienated by a less than pretty face. Skepticism about in-the-head illnesses became just a legitimate and expected response: Oh! That lifestyle choice. No one could tell. That old lady with cancer. May have been the real thing. Maybe not. Cancer had become a life choice; desirable; fashionable; virtuous. What it amounted to was this: the anxiety that normally faced people when faced with a compromised body, an uncontrollable mass, no longer had to be defended against in the same way. The anxiety didn’t have to be consigned to the ill as other. This was how it was for a short time. But eventually, when everything and everyone had become symmetrical and identity had become a global property, the marginalized others, that is the marginalized others that hadn’t made a lifestyle choice, vanished. It was a master stroke and it started as just another marketing strategy. They vanished and the official version was there never had been any homeless. No psychiatric patients. And no-one could remember. But eventually, out of the order, disorder crept back in.

The old man is looking at me. An unsettling smile. Something behind his eyes that I don’t know. Which way does the wind blow? You know, I say to the man as I stroll over to him. You know what! I reckon you are no more than thirty years old. Am I right? My processing vacillates between certainty and uncertainty. My fluidity is stretched and hardening into crystalline areas. The old woman now looks up at me and the old couple share that behind-the-eyes smile. I try to recall what happened last time. I remember that there were some birds talking to me and some kids, youths, ending up in an altercation. But what about this old couple? Or young couple trying to do an old couple? Well, the old woman had a bag with her. An imitation leather, beige, very beige, cross between a shopping bag and a handbag. I wonder if she had been a man at some point in her early life and had been arbitrarily predesignated as a woman. She/he may have even carried out a suicide in a slightly different time and place. Not here. What a mistake was made that day! XX? XY? XYZ? Dress it up in whatever framework you want. Dress it in a delicate pale gold floral dress. Put it in coarse hare-grey pants. As it stands, someone is making a less than arbitrary decision.

Nonetheless. I have this old/young couple before me and I need to do something about it. They grin at me. I sit down in the soft brown chair next to them and open up a dialogue in which they tell me where they’re from, how the dinner was, how proud they are of their daughter the violinist. They affirm each other’s stories with the fixed grin and excited nodding. Every now and then the old lady sits forward in her chair and clutches my left elbow. Or the old man slaps my knee. I notice a barely perceptible red stain on the edge of the low table. Why don’t you come with us, they ask in unison? Both of them look me straight in the eye and the grin doesn’t give an inch. The old man gives a barely perceptible nod, makes as though he’s gonna push himself up out of his seat but gives me the time to agree with the suggestion. I remain. The old woman tries her hand. You can ride in the front. I don’t mind. I like it in the back. We can show you round the waterfall. You can stay in the guest room. The old man hovers an inch out of his seat. His hands grasp the chair but show no sign of tiredness. No muscle fatigue induced trembling of true old age. That’s what gives him away and now I know how to play it out.

It feels like I’m stood on a record album sleeve. There is some yellow, some black or maybe dark green. Straight lines like a window at night like a scene trying to work itself out. A street scene in the west of the warm country. A club? A music club? Organizing all the actors in to a position where they make connections. People are present but they can’t be seen. The scene is a memory of a dream or a thought that someone had and so there were never real people there. Just the idea of people. And the music conveys this sense of an idea of a thought too. The scene creates a space that pulls in and positions against this repeated, tapping, clack clack clack clack sound with the electric piano undulant beneath. Over and over. A wind driven pipe plays a parallel tune. The music climbs a circular stair and then back to the bottom to climb again. Breaking out on top. Light. Space. Climb the stairs again. Goes on for miles.

I suddenly notice that none of the pages in the coffee table book that sits by the old man’s knee are the same. That is to say: as I look at the side of the book I notice that each page is a micrometre more or less wider or narrower than the next and this gives the book a sense of its own finitude. It restricts it. It’s not right. It’s not real. The ceiling light cascades horizontal laminar shadows down the book’s layered side. It’s not the endless smooth side of a book that has limitless possibilities because I can clearly see the limits of what is possible. The book is limited. It’s not an endless story. It has contours and texture. It is less than veridical. It has spaces of coherence and spaces where the coherence smears it around. The old man follows my eye down to the book and he reads my thought, grits his teeth and snarls in the back of his throat. Clenches his fists up. I look for other elements in this scene: low table; fake wood. Plasticized. I notice blank spaces under the chars and table which should otherwise show orange carpet. The red stain is growing. Making its way down the table leg and across the orange carpet. Plastic plant in the corner. Large leaves. No back to the pot. Two dimensional. The music hovers over a beat like a car in a jam. It pushes forward. Swells up! Goes round. The old man hobbles round toward me fumbling for something in his pocket and muttering with flecks of spittle irrupting from the corners of his tight smooth lips. The hobble smooths up and he gains a little height. I back off to give him time to change. His pace flows into sync with mine and the years fall away. By the time he’s in my face, we’re same age and an equal match. More or less. Well, more for me and less for him. He swoops at my throat with a small knife that came down his sleeve. But I have sharper teeth.

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XVII — The music fades out

XVII

Fade out. The music fades out. I say you’re a strange girl. She doesn’t reply immediately so I stay: switch channels. She switches channels. I watch the people swaying and stomping in front of me. Unselfconscious. They can’t escape the remorseless indefatigable rhythm. Neatly captured music that rumbled on for some ninety years now. The rhythm may get displaced every so often. Disguised as something else confused as something else. At some point it finds a way back and rumbles on. This music right now. The bass player pulls at the fat strings like shaking hands. The drummer pushes the drums back down. The drums come back up for air. The drummer pushes them down. The number going out now is……… the singer moans and his face contorts to the lyrics. I can’t separate the two. The girl spins off into the crowd, drawing people with her. I watch and try to keep rhythm at the same time. But I can’t stop me fragmenting into a million different frames. Each frame a possible alternative I can’t dismiss. They all come together to make a mess and I can barely hold on to her spinning off into the crowd. But this one girl has split herself into three. At least three. All dark hair. All petite. I can’t recall which is which and who is who. So I try to concentrate hard on the past. Try to latch on to a word or a smell. A look. Come on and try. Come on. Focus. I was responsible for something, but I can’t recall. I’m sorry baby. I’m sorry and I’m lonely for you. But it’s a fuck lot better than………………..something else I can’t recall. You have to be there, I guess. You want to play another? Well heck yes.

I slip back to some club in the 1970’s. Warm summer, late night. Maybe two or one a.m. I watch the scene I’m part of. I can hear the electric piano and feel the ambient warmth of the late night early morning. The electric piano drops out so smoothly I never notice the space it leaves behind. Then the rhythm changes, the music breaks and the electric piano is there with two perfect chords that freeze the moment. The affect entangled in those chords in that moment connect to different places across time and creates a new space. But it’s too small for all of us to enter. Outside the space we remain.

It’s an oblong building, low, not sure where the door is but the streets around it are wide and the occasional car cruises by. There are a million thousand people with me. But I don’t see them. A thing I can’t understand is why clothes get dirty. No. Not dirty, take on an odor. Clothes take on an odor. I put on a clean shirt and it smells clean and yet at some time later it smells different. But in between I didn’t notice a difference. You never notice yourself aging. The lines that had appeared in between. You’re doing the same thing you were doing ten, no nine fucking years ago. Nine fucking years. No. It was ten years. Ten fucking years. You’re working in an engine shop. I’m wearing this shirt. You’re pretending to be something. I wear the same shirt, or similar. There’s no point in pretending. What is different what is the same? On the left we have: difference! On the right we have: same! On your marks! Get set! Let’s just pause for a second to reminisce and let it all come back into focus. As it was or as it were? And go! Look in the mirror quick quickly now look in the mirror I’m holding up to you. Quick enough to hold on to it? Or did it slip away! Are you the wrinkled version of the young smooth unwrinkled version of you or is it as was. Metanomically speaking, that is?

I watch the people reflected in the plane glass window of this electrical shop. Lit up under a dim yellow light sign. The rows and columns of TV’s all contain my face. Staring back at me. I turn to the left. The faces turn to the left. I force a smile. They don’t smile. The people pass in between me and all those images of me looking out not smiling. These are big old TV’s. Really heavy big old TV’s. I’d be ashamed to own one of them. Even the ones at the top of the columns. Slightly bigger screen. More expensive. The air is still and the night is still. The people come and go but they don’t get on the TV’s. Just me. I turn round to look at the scene. No cars move along the road and the cars in the lots can’t move. They’re just flat images painted on the back drop. I step out to the edge of the road and squint up my eyes looking way down to where the street lights get closer and lower and dimmer. I can’t see past a point some two hundred feet away. The street seeps into the flat painted backdrop. The lights past that point are smudges of yellow matte on a matte painted backdrop. The figures that walk past me don’t say anything and they don’t look up from the ground or they don’t shift their fixed gaze from straight ahead. They’re just part of the backdrop pulled into a different shape and they pass from one end to the other. And back onto the backdrop. They don’t stop to look at the TV’s.

The door of the club is open and the music rolls out. One of the figures walks up that street and level with the door does a sharp ninety degree turn and goes through. Into the club. A figure, a woman, comes out of the door a few feet, does a sharp ninety degree turn and walks slowly off down the road. I can smell the cigarette smoke. I recognize the brand and look around, expecting her to appear. I watch me turning round and round on the TV sets. Where will I go if you’re not here? The woman turns round one hundred and eighty degrees sharp and walks back towards me and stops three feet away staring blankly at my face. I’ll see you later, baby. She says. No, I reply. No. I don’t think you will see me later. The woman doesn’t change her expression. She looks at me unmoved and then repeats herself: I’ll see you later, baby. She runs a monochrome flesh colored hand down the side of her yellow dress. Also monochrome. Dead flat. She has optical black hair and cartoon red lipstick. I’ll see you later, baby; she tries again. My lack of response isn’t part of the plan.

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XVI — Three black bags lay on the table

XVI
Three black bags lay on the table and the telephone was ringing in the back. That’s where it was. The fat waitress leans on the counter staring out the window too lazy to get the phone. The phone keeps ringing and ringing and she shows no sign of getting the call. Hey! Hey! Go and get the phone. Fat waitress can’t believe that a customer’s talking to her like that. Moreover, she can’t believe it’s a guy in a wheelchair doing the shouting. Get the phone it’s your job! You aren’t just here to serve out donuts and coffee. If the phone rings and no-one answers the phone then you answer the phone! And no-one else is answering the phone. You go and answer it now! NOW! You’re a little short tempered aren’t you?

The wheelchair-guy turns to glare at me but doesn’t reply. The waitress slinks off to get the phone that’s still ringing. Black & White Tie shouts after her to bring more coffee. Hey. Do you ever have trouble getting your wheelchair under restaurant tables, I ask. He sighs and relaxes back a bit. Yeh sometimes and you still get restaurants with no ramp. When I come across a restaurant with no ramp I make it my business to wait outside until someone goes in and I ask ‘em to send out the manager. When the manager comes out I give him, or her, sometimes it’s her, I give em’ a hard time and shake the chair around. Want to give the impression that with just a little more shaking I’ll shake right up and take a swing at ‘em. Then I ask the manager, or manageress if that’s what it is, to get a couple of the cooks or whoever to lift me in to the restaurant, which they usually do, and they usually throw in a free meal to keep me from shaking around anymore.

This shitty restaurant has a ramp running along the front and a wide turning area at the top. Really light door that swings both ways. I never been here before and I won’t be here again. It’s too far out the way. I nod. Outside the day gets hotter. People waiting for a bus at the stop just outside, lady walking with a pram, couple of suited men coming the other way. Blue sky. Wheelchair guy’s leant forward talking to Black & White Tie. Fat waitress is coming back out the kitchen. She’s straightened her blouse and apron out. Maybe she’s taken a piss? Did she wash her hands? Maybe she took a shit? She comes over to our table and looking a little nervous waits for my companions to acknowledge she’s there. Which they don’t. So I catch her eye and smile. Ummm there was a lady on the phone. She asked me if anyone was in the restaurant with a black bag. She waits for an approving look. She’s got wheelchair-guy’s attention now. We all got a black bag! Oh. I see. Well, the lady on the phone told me that if there was anyone with a black bag I should tell them this: meet me at the hotel. Midday. Bring the bag. Said she’d be in the lounge.

Which one of us are you talking to? Guy in the wheelchair gives her a like he means it look. Ummm. The lady just said anyone with a black bag. Well you must be talking to all three of us I guess! Can I have some more coffee? The waitress blushes a nervous blush and mumbles something about coffee. This hotel. They got a ramp at the front? Black & White glances up and past wheelchair guy and asks me the same thing: yeh. Do they? They have a ramp, I reply. But it’s round the side. Main door’s up a few steps. Revolving door. Must be the ramp comes up to the side of the lounge. Wheelchair guy shakes his head. So they expect anyone in a wheel chair to wait at this side entrance hoping someone who won’t be using the side entrance just happens past to open it? No. There’s a buzzer. You buzz when you want to go in. But it’s still not enough for the wheel chair guy. He goes on: so they’re too cheap to put in an automatic sensor and expect you to wait. Hoping someone heard the buzzer and can then be bothered to come and see who THE FUCK is buzzing! I take it that’s a rhetorical question? It’s a question. Well I tell you how it will go: I’ll wait by the front steps. You two go in and tell the manager one of my wheels has locked up and you need help carrying me up the steps. Don’t you think that’s a little lame? Manager comes out. He’s gonna look at me and him, I nod towards Black & White, he’s gonna think that we should be able to lift you up just us two. He’d be right. And he’s gonna think it’s a little strange when he sees what we each have. Well that’s the way it’s going to be! Or it won’t happen. She can wait all day with her thumb up her ass. There’s no point in debating this so I tell the two of them okay.

Waitress is bringing coffee and we have a cup each. Black with sugar, black with no sugar, white with sugar. Black & White. This is good coffee. Guy in the wheelchair tells him to have a donut. Black & White declines. Wheelchair eats a donut. Waitress has disappeared. Wheelchair to Black & White: Tell me something about yourself. Black & White declines that too. I can see Wheelchair getting hot under the collar; starts to fidget around and animates with the empty cup. It’s true. I had preconceptions. I had a picture in my head of this mysterious guy in a wheelchair with an ability to read your mind. In this version he was quiet, never spoke unless it was absolutely necessary and speaking is rarely necessary. When we make small talk what we’re really saying is: I’m safe. You’re safe. No threat here. Even between couples or friends most talk is a monologue. Each person trying to get their own version of the world out and listening as it comes back to them so they can check it and feel reassured they exist. Rarely interested in what the other person is saying and if you put them on the spot most of them couldn’t say what the other just said. They’re already preparing their next turn in the conversation; running through the delivery and the impact the delivery’s gonna have. Not interested in what you’re saying right now.

Wheelchair didn’t match-up to my mental image of him. He wasn’t restrained, he liked to talk and I doubted whether he could read minds. But it all might be a cover. If you were a mind reader the last thing you’d want to do is sit there looking like you were a mind reader. You’d cover it up. Who knows? I’m not a mind reader. My skills lie in a different direction. I break into Wheelchair’s cup-animation: how you gonna get there? I’m gonna wheel me; how else? It’s a long way. I wheel fast. Black & White asks if I want to ride with him. His car’s parked around the back. Nice sleek looking thing. Glossy black with black alloy’s, black glass. Even the lights are black. He explains how they manage to get the lights to look black and still work. Put your bag in the trunk with mine, he say’s as the lid pops up. Nothing hiding in there. No-one hiding on the back seat. The door shuts itself behind me with a gentle whoosh. If you got your hand in the door or if there’s a kid dangling their blanket out of it the door won’t close. That’s impressive I tell him. Door like that must be expensive. He grins to himself.

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