Z) in their names"

Z- in their names”

The Conclusion of a Series

Read Part 1

“A name is one of the most important things to consider in writing fiction,” Mr. Poot said. “If you name your characters right their name should reveal something about them like who they are or where they are coming from. A name should be memorable and unique.” In my new notebook for seminar notes I write in black ink with my new pen FUCK THIS.

New page:

SUPERNOVA SUTRA
a poem by DMM

No,

I took it

Yes I am sure

What was that? Oh. No.

Yes, it was taken from me.

No, I do not like this new shape.

Yes this was all pointed out for me.

No, I am not the same as who I was.

It is still too hot and too bright, give it time.

And look at me I’m huge! I’ve gone supernova,

burnt all the matter I was thriving on and bursting out

all over necessity to consume everything left, right and wrong

while innocent bodies wavered in my wake, and you told me so and pointed

reaching grasping groping pulling kicking burning screaming crying clawing weeping hating

and quavering boy it was hot too, that fire we still stoke, innocents in panic and desperation

because an ember of hate there, still there, breathe and it’ll reignite so I try to leave it alone,

and would do too, were it only mine, our only child a massive ejection sphere

which now you orbit angrily spinning lies like that you told me so

you told me so, you told me so, you told me so and all the

while I laid out asking why isn’t this working anymore.

Perhaps this was always my destiny to manifest

a distortion of the entire system, perhaps not.

I told you so, I told you I told you, I said.

Yes I have always been full of hot air.

No, I do not feel better about this.

Yes I see myself in the mirror.

No, what did you say? Oh.

Yes I can look at myself

in the eyes but

No, it burns.

My thoughts peripheral I try to make ends meet, conscious of the need for a narrative line. Continuity. A straight line leading to a point. Perfect lines never end in either direction said Mrs. Shepherd to me in the fourth grade. Circles however, make their ends meet. It has been a series of circles for me. We need to go back to geometry and invent a new shape: a line where the ends meet that is not a circle.

A straight line leading to a point. The line: a road from Austin. The point? A school I guess but what’s the point? To see a girl and make it work. Overhead the indelible Texas clouds, light rains. The road makes my mind wander. Borne away, I wonder. This the same road Zevon drove on and wrote:

A gentle rain
falls on me
and all life folds back
into the sea

Remembering a small quiet straight-haired grey-eyed girl I was privately and passionately in love with and destined to destroy. For a long time I’ve been in pieces. Watched constellations drift slowly apart. Now I was trying to make something work. I tried this once before. Circles, remember? Is redemption just a story?

I did my requisite danse-a-deux with time, finishing late, alone, long after the music had ended, and spun away to my own internal melody.

I had never been here before but it felt like I had. There should be a dark lake two blocks over there. It is a large school and I am a dark star, reeling my way each step towards remembering and becoming an emotional black hole.

I prefer the smaller campuses. The schools that afford a non-belonging student like myself the ability (though not the obligation) to shine. A dark star searching for a building just-off campus where she lives. The building’s name writ on a scrap of paper in my hand. The back of a receipt. A building where I will be met by one Lenore Bright, roommate, as the girl I have arrived to see will not be out of class until 6:30.

I enter an open rectangle where bare-armed and barefooted beauties walk astride swaggeringly eager parades of young handsome men. Oh college girls. All soft hair and liquid allure filing in quiet columns towards unimaginable appointments with disappointment, erect and blindly optimistic. Their supple necks and long chins pointing toward proud futures that only youth in a place like this can envision.

I met a girl like them once and took it upon myself to systematically educate her in the school of unfairness by telling her I loved her and making her repeat the words back to me as I gradually and methodically tore her from her hearts illusions.

Lithe bodies and shiny eyes strutting gratefully along the footpaths to fortune. Shiny eyes enwrapped in the delusion that they know how to handle themselves in the world. But the world is ugly. That is what I feel I represent here. Ugliness. The bastard. I feel dizzy. They are proud in their confidence that (although I could’ve never discerned this when I was their age nor would I fully come to understand it until the sweep of its ramifications had ushered up all of my friends and overtaken me,) their acquiescence in playing by the rules of this system wasn’t a cop-out and would invariably lead them into careers and professions that would place them at the forefront of the system itself: to control it as movers and shakers though, by the time many of them ascended to those ranks of moverdom and shakeracy, most will have lost any desire to exercise such power.

A blond girl in blue jeans stands eagerly outside the building.

“Are you Lenore?” She meets me with an unnervingly steady childlike gaze.

“Yessir honey, ’beenspectin’ you.”

Through two locked gates and a locked door she leads the way to their shared room. Up the stairs and down a hall. I am introduced to two others. Four girls in a “room” which is enormous and immaculately spare. The girls are distractedly lovely and tell me to make myself at home. They are sprawled out on pillows and pillows watching Mad Men on a laptop. I feel pitiful. I have a cursed capacity to sit with a beautiful band of young rich well-to-do females and remember that I once left rooms like this years ago in order to… what? Why did I leave this life? To wake up broke, ragged and ravaged on a beach in Southern California beside the rail-yards? With junkies and broken bottles scattered in the glimmering sand being the only islands of stability in the seaside sunup projections of my jaded dirty mind…

I survey the room and observe a spidery plant in the western window beginning to burn in the sunlight. Flushed with red at its extremities, it appears to be calling out for help the only way it knows how: draining plant blood from those leaves most distant from its plant heart. Furrowed spikes of red crowning a body of soft green in the Texas sunlight by the chair where the girls have thrown their backpacks and purses carelessly relieving their burdens at the end of what is for them, another day. I stare down and see a familiar face outside on the sidewalk.

She is walking with a large boy, veined biceps under a longhorn jersey, her smile like a lighthouse, and they stop before the outer gate and hug. The floor drops out from under me. I pivot and make for the door.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say rushing out.

Lenore starts “Hey, wait a minute honey there’sa bathroom in h—” but the door closes her in behind me as I run away.

Boys restocking dissipated grocery aisles with boxes of jars and cans. “So that’s the story.”

“The… story isn’t… is it finished,” asks Mr. Lowenstein on the phone.

“That’s the end.”

“Hm.”

Her face blazes before me and blackens, crinkles and corrugates like burnt paper. I wait for her to speak, not typing. I close the laptop and she is gone.