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.

Y) ?

Y- ?

That room was cold as death, I wrote. A bad start. A freewrite is allowed to have a bad start. Who ever heard of combining a writers’ seminar with a meditation clinic? Stupid. It was stupid and a waste of time. Empty your head half the day into nothingness and the other half the day onto paper. I bit my lip and clamped my fist and continued, remembering the events of the previous day.

The room was cold as death. That is, it was air-conditioned to a fault. Seconds upon entering my teeth chattered. The crowd was light, each time the door opened a few more mournful people came in and went through the motions of cheerfulness and consolation. Then they talked in small circles about the weather, traffic, movies, books. Anything but the inevitable.

Tim’s half brother Johnny was tossing a football. Johnny was 12, I’d been told. Who told him it was okay to bring a football to a funeral? I guess it was his Dad. Why didn’t he have a right to hold a football if that’s what he wanted? Tim’s girlfriend Jamie was there, trying hard not to look seductive wasn’t working for her. The Bens were there too, dressed better than the rest. Ben Ease and Ben Manuel, both 23 years old were the founders and chief executives of Manuel Ease Co., a company out of Houston that handmade quality wood hand tools the way they’d been made a hundred years ago and sold them at exorbitant prices, as art really, to people who would never use them as they were intended to be used, people for whom labor wasn’t a verb but a noun, as in The Labor. The help.

Auger is one of my favorite words. I should find a way to use the word auger. Or misauger. Easy to misgauge the intrepitude of a word augered like misauger.

The director of the funeral home stood in the back of the room watching the little relatives chase each other in frantic circles across the deep green floral carpet, their tiny feet pounding. Laughing. Was it right that little children played at this, this-- what was it called? Open casket viewing? Their mothers turned away with tired resignation to talk to one another. Young, round and beautiful, rings on their pretty brown fingers. Tim’s mother sat looking exactly as I remembered her. Shouldn’t she be mournful? What does mournful look like?

The other writers crouched over their paper scribbling madly. They were so open to suggestion, this crowd. With their mechanical pencils and their plastic nametags reading

NAMESTE! MEERA NAM:

Jack

Tim's father, I realized, had inhumanly broad shoulders. Lying there in his casket he seemed to be built like a spade: no neck, but broadening from his shiny tipped toes all the way up to those two massive shoulders and then, plop, a tiny black head. I couldn't help but think football player but didn't say anything in case that might be racist. Hardly a time to be racist, at a funeral. Tim stood by his mother at the door. Having 'paid my respects' to the great man 'laying in state' I shuffled back over, past the appraising eyes of the flowers adorning the corner wall.

What does laying in state even mean? Did I use that term right? How exactly is one supposed to pay one's respect? Tim, solemn in a too-tight suit, was standing with his older sister and I suddenly became very sad. An intrusive nostalgia perhaps, or a cruel darkness coming over me. When I thought no one was looking I slipped out the door.

October in Houston. The massive sober clouds were doing something ominous. The sky was immense, terrifying, and probably full of aircraft bound for a trigonometry of projectiles. The air smelled damp and one could feel the pressure dropping with the onset of those dark clouds moving in across the flatness. Some gigantic coming.

I remembered the last funeral I’d been to, when it had been my brother and I standing against the wall, like Tim and his sister. A reel of memory set in motion.

When I first moved to Sante Fe I got a call from my father asking if I’d heard the good news. Seems my brother had written a novel, had I read it yet?

As filled with cliché as they get and still garnering rave reviews. Disenchanted left-wing mover-n-shaker leaves Washington on road trip to rediscover the real America, meets old girlfriend current socialista in Milwaukee, wind farm rodeo couple in too-much-love Wyoming, snake farmer in Tempe and beautiful film producer in San Francisco at a gay bar. In short, total shit. That fucker. There he was, smiling on the dust jacket photo like a child molester.

I know all this because I read it on the flight down here. Finishing the last fucking asswipe page as I looked to my left out the portal window to see tarmac blurred by clear gaseous exhaust from an engine draped to the underside of a wing. The airport was near empty. I could write shit better than that! Good shit too! So good and original it’d be almost unreadable and certainly unfit for public consumption! Ha!

Brainstorm: Story must have conflict and redemptive resolution: Man, afraid to talk to new people out of cowardice and a sense of misplaced guilty obligation to old abandoned college friends, spends 700 pages almost but not quite talking to people before deciding in a moment of hilarious clarity that it is okay to not ever say anything to anyone. Good, huh?

Probably been done.

The boys were discussing death and its attendant fear.

"Are you?"

"Little bit."

"Why?"

"Don’t know."

"Dead people are less frightening than live ones."

"Howdja figure?"

"If you had to be a snake would you be poisonous or of the non-poisonous variety?"

"I’d be a poisonous snake for sure, chimed in little Johnny."

"And why’s that."

"Oh," he thought about it for a shake, "safer I guess."

"There. Straight from the horse's mouth. Safer. You call that heaven? Safer?"

The boys thought about this. J laughed. Nothing makes people laugh better than uneasiness. I laughed too.

The funeral itself was short. Some people spoke. Tim was eloquently silent. The singing was magnanimous, a preacher read cryptically of bodies turned to dust and ash and I painfully yearned for a cigarette. He stressed the need to live purely and love each other. I thought of you. Afterward Tim approached as folks mingled outside the church.

"Come by the house later tonight, we’re havin’ dinner. Love ta have ya."

I stopped in town on the way. Walking in the tentative sun as anonymous as anyone. Looking at diamonds through the window of the jewelry store. Geese migrating stridently overhead. I held my hand up so my finger would reflect in the glass with a ring over it.

Stopped into a liquor store to secure the evening’s libations. A grocery list fell from my wallet in her handwriting, now overwhelmingly sad.

hair elastics, tube socks, panties, cream

Tim’s old neighborhood was quiet. Houses too close together in confusingly rounded lanes & roundabouts. I’d never driven here before, never before old enough to rent a car (Five days from Houston to Austin to College Station and back in a silver Acura Costs WHAT?). The last red rays of sun were ducking under clouds. Trees lacked conviction: as if they wanted not so much to keep shade on the lane as to curl up and go indoors and play Halo with the boys.

The boys laughed and cursed, all wrapped up in their own little virtual world. Basically neighing like horses. Jamie let me in and batted her thick long eyelashes at me. She wore a long black skirt and a lace top and my impulse was to corner her and ...

I scooched in around her and found Tim, pouring his mom a glass of juice and looking--- fine. Tim looked absolutely fine.

"Wan have a cigar?" Tim asked.

“Five minutes left.” Said Mr. Poot softly, clinically overseeing the freewriters, “Five minutes please.”

We stood out front in the gathering twilight of the quiet lane smoking medium-sized cigars and trying to make self-effacing jokes and ribaldries. Jamie skulked indoors around the glass patio door making vaguely menacing faces at us through the blinds.

"Ain’t many people can afford to act like you act," said Tim.

"Or to live like I live."

"Jamie, she’sa good woman. She understan’ me and I... well, I list’n to her."

"Hah!"

"Cigars excluded. I love her. And I tell her."

"Of course."

Tim inhaled a deep draw on the cigar and his shoulders rolled back as his chest swelled up. Then without a sound he let out a series of smoke rings until he was out of breath and blew the rest of the smoke out in a billowous gust. "My point being, without her, I’d jus fall apart right now. And you... well, you just gotta fin’ someone who’ll unnerstan’ you."

"And someone I’ll listen to."

"Right. And someone you love."

"All in one girl right?"

"H-hah." He coughed.

Later, cross-legged on a carpeted floor in a room wafted with incense and styled to be empty, I tried to make a sort of Kierkegardian half-leap, turn off the sour voice in my head while still listening to the effeminate Belgian man as he intoned:

"Our minds hold deep, unconscious layers of impurities and, breathe out, liberating ourselves from our own deep negative thoughts and habits cannot be achieved through relaxation," he said. I hated his voice. My head was like a radio. I felt sick. My spine hurt. What was the name of that— Dexter Gordon! Yes! I am an idiot who cannot even focus. Regret is not redemption.

"Clearing your mind takes work, and, breathe in, only by absolving your tendencies towards misery in silence and right thinking can one achieve the real inner peace and happiness that one craves..."

I wish he'd shut up. I shouldn’t be so hard on the guy, he's obviously a kind soul. Regret is not redemption. One must have faith as well as action. One has to. Did I have faith? Yes. I wouldn’t be able to write anything if I did not have faith. The young ones obviously had talent, yet I held to the idea that even though I had never been published I was good. Held to the idea. I was better than the rest in a way that was yet-to-be discovered. This was a faith I had gotten used to. This was belief contrary to observable evidence. This was holding on. This was the future.

"Let the constancy of your breathing dissolve the sensations which drive you to distraction. Breathe out memories, cravings, habits. All of these thoughts will pop into your head and you must remove them. Wave hello to them because they are your unique mind thoughts, then push them floating away and feel your mind expand in clarity as resistances sink into a tiny shadow of darkness, which we breathe out. And we breathe in a lightness which fills your body..."

Asshole cocksucker sonofabitch. Evil livid. Lion vile. Lucid lucky. Character name: Lucy Luck. Brainstorm: Lucy Luck wins the lottery and buys a lion, the lion eats her. Inside his belly Lucy finds a small boy named Levi who tells her the story of an African Prince who hunted the lion and Lucy finds the Prince’s magic dagger in the lion’s gut and cuts her way out and the Prince marries her and they raise Levi and save the lion and keep him as a pet in a cage of concrete… Concentrate! Concentrate! Concentrate on breathing. The ideal and delectable exhalation. Redemption breeds regret. It wasn’t fair that Tim’s father died and laid out in that room cold as death while we got to go back to Tim’s mother’s house and play Halo and drink astringent Corona and Tim lent me his computer where I sat long into the night typing instant messages rife with smiley faces:

SoHereIAmz: What will you be like in five years?

DMsqdMn17: A satellite.

SoHereIAmz: No. Seriously.

DMsqdMn17: Dunno. Like me. Only less. And more.

I am tired and in another day I will be tired and in five days time I will have centered myself and bought a tired $6 poster of a Tibetan Mandala which I will never hang on my tired wall. In five days I will finish a poem that is tired and almost finished now. The boys are playing Madden in my memory. Football is the dumbest sport. Tim has gone to bed and Sixty yards and six days to go. I type to the girl that I will see her then. She says good luck at the seminar and I feel doomed because I love her.

DMsqdMn17: There’s no one else like you in the world.

SoHereIAmz: I know.
DMsqdMn17: I’ll never meet anyone else like you.

SoHereIAmz: Nope. There aren’t many girls in the world who have both the letters Y and

X- Exitstageleft

X- Exitstageleft

Part 6

I know I said that I was leaving…but

-Sinatra

Do you ever wish that when you were younger you would’ve done things different? Done different things? Broken out of your shell and taken risks? If I could go back and be 17 again I would probably take fewer risks that before I couldn’t wait to take. I thought I couldn’t wait to take them. The years shove past quickly, running over each other. So many stories to tell, so few stories worth telling. Life isn't a silver platter and we aren't special. I feel like I have to make up for the time I spent being myself. I feel like I haven't seen enough of the world when I feel old, and then when I realize that I’m still young I know that I’ve seen more than a lot of other kids my age.

There is no story that we have that everyone wants to hear. There are long distances between people and love is genuine hard thing to find. Hard to sustain. Leaning towers of sand that yearn for collapse. Life is staying up late to keep in touch with friends. Life is those moments when we find each other. Getting up early, brushing your teeth, shaving ripened unwonted hairs and putting on matching clean clothes. Being presentable. If there was a way to narrate redemption contrary to this I would write it but it always comes across unsettling. Untrue. There are no pilgrims-of-one in the Happily Ever After. Perhaps redemption is the story. Our cultural mythos, brought to you by DisneyViacomAOLTimeWarner tells us that compassion trumps intellect in the end, but of course there is no end. So far as I know, there are no active writers from beyond the grave, not really anyway. Max Brooks may come the closest. When we die, we die.

“You're just bitter,” she said shaking her head.

“Bitter is good.” I lay on her bed trying to coax myself away from her laptop on which I have been subjecting her to Randy Newman videos like I Want You to Hurt Like I Do. Youtube replaces all-request radio. Absence replaces presence. Tonight is the night she is leaving.

Leaving!? Leaving?!? Leaving you ask?

Yes. Hanging over the story of our entire summer was the knowledge that after her month in Utah with her family she would be returning for a week and then going back to school in Texas. I stayed for a few days and returned to prep the story. Now I was bitter, apparently.

“Are we going to the show or not?” she asked.
“Sure. Yes. I don't care. We go, we don't go. The show goes on.”

“I thought you wanted to go.”

“I DO want to go! But I want to write something today. I don't want today to have been a waste.” Pause. “Not that spending time with you tonight is a waste.”

“Bitter.”

“What if I died tonight? On the way
to the concert? So what if my loved ones will want to feel loved and special when I'm gone. I want to create something brilliant. Create a character that looks and sounds and feels real and put enough semblances of myself in him so he’ll last forever.”

“Yes, yes. You could call him Ozymandias. We could call him Dr. Huck Finn, and after he goes to school and gets his doctorate he could intern with House.”

“Something that hasn't been done before!”

“All your other selves are only you. It's almost 8 o'clock.”

“GAH!”

“I love you.”

“I …love! I can love! Are you implying I don’t love!? I love people the way that I want to be loved; I
leave them alone so they can write. Do unto others, right? That's Jesus! Jesus said that.”

“Jesus was a Capricorn. Come on! I'm all dressed up. Put your clothes on.”

I got up and kissed her. “What’s the name of the town where you’ll be?”

“College Station.”

“What’s the name of the town?”

“I’ll be in College Station.”

“The name of the town is— ”

“Yes.”

“Can I come visit?”

She scrunched her face distractedly. “I expect I’ll be busy. It is school, not vacation. Some of us actually work. At it.”

Ignoring the jab. “I’ve been thinking about going to a writers’ seminar this fall,” I said.

“That’s nice.”

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Sure you can come visit. Get your clothes on. We’ll be late.” I closed the laptop and conversation stopped.

The show was a
long-haired band playing a venue packed with hipsters whom she strode in
amongst, confidently and began dancing with abandon. Her arms in the air. My instinct was to plaster myself to the
wall. But plastering myself to the wall
was exactly the kind of thing that I’d been doing wrong since I was 15 years
old. Why not yield to abandon? Why not
give in to openness? Why not connect?

Why not unmask, man?

I snaked my way in
amongst the stinky undulations: the bearded boys in flannel and Converse sneakers,
the miniskirt girls in work boots. She
had garnered a following, two guys denoting their territory with gyrated hips
and flailing arms in her general direction.
She danced oblivious. I had to work my way in. Bumping into the guy at her back like it was a
free form accident. Not shying away,
which caused him to angry eye me. Scowl
and pivot, ass for an ass, the other guy soon got the hint.

I was dancing with
my girl, and she was dancing with the music.
The music thrashed and roared until our ears were ringing and our eyes were
tearing and our throats were soar from screaming and our hands were red from
clapping and she jumped and cheered and I put my hands around her waist and I
was happy.

I drove her home in the moonless dark. Listening to a pop song on the radio about Romance I heard the soft and potent breathing of sleep from the passenger seat, little snores from a girl curling into herself. I turned down the volume on the stereo until there was only the sound of her and the purr of the road. A bluish glow illumining us both. How often I think that moments like that are great metaphors for life. The road in
the darkness, leading back home.

“Tell me story,” she said without moving.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I am asleep. Tell me a story.” She stretched her legs and redoubled them under her like a cat winding into a ball.

“You know— about that writers’ seminar this fall—”

“Waste of time.”

“It’s outside Austin. That’s close right? It’s also a meditation clinic. I think it
sounds perfect. October in Texas.”

“Austin’s two hours away. You don’t need a seminar. Or a clinic.”

“I know, but I’ve been thinking about all those stories I read at school. All those fresh sparkleface incomings trying to invent new ways to tell a story, and some of them even succeeding but
even the best of them the same old story. A high school relationship gone sour, or going sour, or worst of all: prevented from going sour.”

“Please.”....

“Its so cliché you know? Like writing about dreams. That drives me crazy! I don’t want to write about… dreams. Or love. Or change. I want a story that everyone wants to hear.”

“Don’t care.”

“No I— Okay.”

“A story.”

“A story.”

We were the third car to stop. I think it was a
Saturday but it might have been a Tuesday. The darkness was all around us. Jack
pulled over to take a look, “Maybe we can help,” she said, but I quickly saw
that we could not.

“It was an accident,” a man said.

“I bet they were drinking,” another man said. Of
course they were. What else was there to do but drink? The landscape was
desolate at best. Both vehicles were mangled, one half inside the twisted
other, upside down.

“He was going the wrong way,” another man said, my
legs were shaking because I had to pee.

Jack surveyed the scene, “see,” he said pointing,
“it was inevitable” and we crouched and sniffed.

There was nothing could be done. Police arrived
lights flashing. I snuck off to take a piss in the embankment. In the grass I
saw what appeared to be a hand reaching out and pointing limply. The moon was
dull. I stumbled back, feeling better, empty.

“Poor bastards,” she said and we all nodded, some
of us without nodding at all except with our eyes.

“I love you,” I said.

She was already asleep. I carried her inside and Dennis Rodman came up groggily to sniff at my pantleg. I set her in bed, tucked her in and drove home alone, not a little bit disappointed.

In the morning she would be gone. Alone, again I sat down to write the story of our summer together and realized that nothing really had happened. Time passes differently for different people. I was asleep. I woke up. The door opened. My grandfather returned from his summer hiking. He brought in the mail and left. I was alone. I got a letter from my college friend Tim, his father was dying. A month later, his father was dead. I was going to Texas.

W) The Western Lands

W- West

Part 5

Where seldom is heard

a discouraging word

Go west young man. These words echoed from our past, words carved in stones, in the wind tunnel of experience that led countless young men, myself included through many days and over many a lonesome mile. I had the window rolled down and the cold air fan turned up as the yellow line whooshed beneath the car passing through Los Alamos headed north remembering the significance of the place that birthed both the atomic bomb and Burroughs’ first boy love years before he would write of The Western Lands prompting me to discover it in an empty California Gold Country Library and begin writing the story which had gotten me published (or would soon) and into the troubled sojourn which I was now pounding on the accelerator in a desperate attempt to outright flee.

Go west young man. The words both encouragement and challenge. Had I been more sober when I’d made my way back home and packed a bag to go and see the girl I loved in Utah, I would have realized that the unideal route, the route I had in mind would actually bring me 7 hours primarily north, out of my way, but I didn’t care. West, after all, was a region, not a direction. A state of mind, not a coordinate course. I’d made my way home and a weary dog was patiently waiting with his head in his paws to be let in. When he saw me he jumped up and licked my face and I let him happily. It was nice to be seen. I wanted to be seen, not to run away. And to that end, I was running away.

Go west young man. Go west and become a man. The West as freedom and catharsis and solitude and redemption all wrapped in dusty uninhabited vistas of dirt, sage, and lonesome vastness. If anyone doesn’t like the grubby way I look or act or smell they can try and walk the 100 miles from anywhere of consequence to find me out there. The West! The dashboard covered in ash flakes like a mad internal snowstorm while the tape deck plays Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and I lean my right arm preternaturally across my chest to the open window in order to engineer a more even tan. We mustn't lose our vanity, oh western lands, we have girls to impress.

Two brown boys in sportsclothes standing idly in the brown median of the interstate highway system. I wonder what it is they are doing. Whatever it is altogether insignificant in the enormity of geologic time. I take a pill from my pocket and consume it. A woman drives by with absolutely no neck. Geometrically absent is any deviation in pitch from her chin to the protrusion of her chest. It takes all kinds. Big Country.

Go west and the land grows flat. My mind wanders like unto a dream. What was I doing? Another pill at the state border and a swirl of dust. A cloud enters my eyes. I become the dust of the west, sprawled out everywhere all at once, laying high and floating. I become myths of comfort and absence, present and all eddying. Edifying. Suppose she doesn’t really love me? Who is it she doesn’t really love? The Masked Man, my character? Why had he been masked for so long? What was it that he was hiding from--- that I was hiding from? Perhaps it wasn't me that was masked, but Time. I had expected time to enter my life suavely, to come in that way one day, smooth and cool and happy to see me, but the truth was that time was cunning and had come and gone, already, unnoticed, repeatedly. Like the help. Here I was, almost 30 and with what to show for it?

Stupid fucking Time. My adversary. My adversary who’s main objective had been to convince me that he wasn’t my adversary. I was going to see the girl. I was going against time. Tears of angel down my window. I pulled aside and turned off the car. Watching a rainbow precede the storm, which came and passed, happy I was not afraid of thunder anymore. I had spent storms like this cowering in gutters and dying thousands of deaths to become, who? What? Ancient? I felt old and young at the same time. Timeless. The rain stopped. I raced time by remaining still. Sat on the ground, leaned against a tire. Lit a cigarette, looked up at the stars. When it is dark there are stars.

So many stars. A shooting star too, two, no three. Such a misnomer. They aren’t really stars. To have some stars burn forever and shine whilst others extinguish in a momentary wishful flourish. Perhaps the name ‘shooting star’ was the result of a propaganda campaign by meteorites themselves, hoping to be categorized with their more talented cousins. Jealousy. I empathized. I felt crazy. The stars bent over me, burning, smothering me in their coldness. The only sounds were the squeeking chirrups of the crickets, a supple rustle of breeze, and a hollow train weeaah somewhere in the cloudy glowing distance. I huddled back into the car and drove on into the mad darkness.

Go west young man and become a vegetable driving a car. A vegetable with an erection unwavering away from all the bright lights of acceptance, fat throbbing phallic highway erection leading creosote lined and throbbingly aching for everything, hungry for anything mountained west. Drive away from any desire to be saved. Go deeper and deeper and deeper, deeper still.

Stopped at a sad neon diner for an extremely untimely breakfast where a big old man sat in the booth across from me as I fiddled with the sweeteners. I thought of talking with him. Hi, I would say. Or, Nice weather. And off we’d go. A man that size would surely have sizeable certainties to impart. He’d tell me something profound about existence like without repentance we’re all stuck pulling a life sentence in the prisons of our selves. But I said nothing, and he said “Git me mah use’ouhl fore I eat mah right arm” to sad eyed wolfish looking waitress. His double chin unshaven and fingernails greasy. Burnt scars on his knuckles, hair unruly beneath a faded cap which he removed when his food came. Perhaps we had ordered the same thing. No. He ate and left.

The orange sun came up slowly covered in mists that shined iridescent and slowly burned away, all the gray and purple darknesses of the world receding further west as the eastern sky got brighter, hotter. A beautiful slow heat that eventually saturates every blade of grass. As the sun rose the world rushed by my window. I was going to see the girl. My girl. The country lifted to the clouds and the clouds glided in to greet it. Brooding, overcast sky, low-lying marshmallows crowding a wide-open landscape ringing all things tighter together, manufacturing a momentary illusion of kinship between the car and me, the road, the land, and the sky. I drafted a letter to my ex in my head. The ex who I didn’t love but loved. This isn't meant to be a locus of indictment, it said. It's not your fault it's mine. I should have been happy and with you, not trying to be with you and trying to be happy.

I didn’t feel better, but I felt better. I felt exhausted and faraway. Wide awake I called an hour out to tell her I was soon coming. I could imagine the look on her face as the line lay silent. When I arrived she came up to the car and gave me a hug. A gorgeous house, far from everything. Her Dad walked toward me, I recognized him. I had forgotten in my haste that she would be surrounded by family. Jesus. Nervousness manifesting itself in meekness. I averted my eyes.

“Well now isn’t this a surprise. Hello son, we’ve heard a lot about you.” He stuck out his strong hand. “Come in, have a drink. Y’hungry?” The house was magnanimous, wide windows opening out onto a resplendent spread of mountains. She sat next to me on the sofa while the others busied themselves in the kitchen.

“Where’s Dennis Rodman,” she whispered.

“Left him with Bellamy. Where’s the rest of your family, I thought this was a reunion.”

“They headed out this morning. Reunion was only last week. The rest of the time it’s just us.”

Her father entered with a tray of iced tea. I thanked him, eyes lowered. He sat down looking relaxed and powerful. “I hear you’re going to school. What are you studying?”

I confessed that I didn’t know.

“Then what’s the point of school?”

“I was figuring I’d find something remunerative once I had a basic degree.”

He smiled and eyed his daughter. A reprove? The intricate silences of familial language.

“Well it’s a pleasure to meet you. A surprise pleasure.” Everyone smiled. Oh, her smile...

“We’ve sure got plenty of room,” her mother said, gliding in with a tall dark drink of unknown provenance. She sat demurely, ankles crossed exactingly, upright looking right at me and smiled the smile she’d given her daughter. “Do you ride horses?”

“Horses?”

An hour later we were horseback and gone on a dusty trail in the wilderness. Her mother, brother, niece, and I: feeling nervous and sick at first which gave way to the primeval rhythm of the thing and my mind began to chart off on its usual peregrinations. It’s not often anymore I sit astride a creature without breasts. Or this much hair… Good riddance. Horses, like most of the earth’s beasts do not lie. Save one, said Twain, or was that blush?

“His name is Tio,” said a little voice. The niece, but I did not hear. “Because he is the color of a tea.” I was daydreaming, the turn inward that only great western sights can bring about.

Such a nice red house. Such gorgeous country. Such a gorgeous girl, riding up ahead, her hair bouncing fluidly across her shoulders. She had given me a puzzling look but she didn’t ask me to leave. Although I had practically invited myself over. Perhaps it would have been rude to ask me to leave. Rude of me to show up like this. But I wanted to see her. Needed to see her. To tell her… what? Perhaps I was trying too hard. Perhaps this wasn’t right. I surveyed the hillside.

We rounded a switchback in the pass and the view beyond the heavenstretched branches of the cool fragrant trees reached towards the infinite west. High lonesome, they call it. Clear air and empty sky and I, staring into space in some private world of words. I could tell her about the story, my success...

When we returned to the house her brother and sister-in-law busied themselves banging pots and giggling in the wide kitchen, nominally preparing dinner. Her mother stole away muttering something about taking a nap. Liberation hits you when it hits you. Alone, together, down the narrow hall she pressed me to the wall with a soft thud and kissed me hard. I put my hand on her breast and she moaned in my mouth. We fall into a dark white room and she locks the door behind us and pushes me onto a yielding squishy bed. Imagine a smiling crowd waving happy happy goodbyes.

I slept better than I have ever slept. I dreamed clearer than I have ever dreamed. I was riding a horse with Burroughs and all the west was made of letters. We had written it. There I was, asleep young and beside the beautiful girl, and I was her father too, old and balanced, balancing, and I was the earth and the trees and the horse and Burroughs and he said “I’ll show them something to remember” and I woke with the morning sun filling the bedroom like a cathedral, and I remembered sad things far away from me, and went happily back to sleep.

Go west young man and see everything that you can see. See the clouds from above and the clouds from below and see the wonder of the end in sight and know that fear, it is the end. Don’t be afraid. Sometimes you know what will happen before it happens. You know?