Ylide 'na Car Ride

 the snow falls

too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and

 snatched back
like a huge joke

-Dennis Johnson

 Wherever you are is a country. 

- Mikko Harvey

Ylide* 'na Car Ride
*Ylide- a compound with opposite charges 

But of course I was cursed by beauty.  Some writers are hideous.  These learn easily and quickly that just saying something doesn't make it true because no one wants to listen to you, feo, but some of us are cursed by beauty and so most everyone naturally believes us because to see us is to be in our trance and it's only as our beauty fades that we realize that we were deluding ourselves and must ever be wary of doing so again.  Some are seated at birth just inches closer to the column of truth, which is to say, hideous to behold, like my friend John.

Easy to ignore, with that execrable visage of his, the lazy eye, curlew nose, that turkey throat, his slump and uneven mosey. We've been friends since school, close at first, then not so much, then tenuously at best, and now moreso.  I appreciate John's perspective, and how, tied to our shared history, it means that we can argue without it being personal, it's refreshing.  Especially when compared with the ongoing battle that is my current living arrangment, which, despite a promising start has not been going well.  So when John asked me to drive him to Reno to visit his niece I agreed. 

A stiff south wind had kicked up Thursday morning, just enough to put people into their perpetual jackets, mine's green corduroy, John's is navy blue.  That's not important, just checking to ensure you're listening.  On Thursday afternoon, one of those mid-December early dusks, I seal up shop with my yucca plant and three tiny window cacti and head out to pick up John (he lives about an hour away) in my tiny two seater Ford Fiasco, a dark and rapid thwapping under the hood, feeling freaking cold. An acquired taste; the depression that is wintery weather, or winter, starved of color, that unmitigated cold embrasure of eigengrau, the night's air nothing but distant stars, promises of warmth too distant to realize. Although, some still reach for them.  John opened the passenger door and plopped down "This is my favorite time of year," he said.  I was worried he would smell the exhaustion in my breath after we were all nestled-in snug for the long haul with the heater on low, but he only said thanks and fiddled pointedly with the radio knob until he found the news, so we listened to that in silence.  

The realization comes slowly that this is the closest we've been in a long time— gazing outwards at the same listless road, giving nothing away, making our way up into the mountains, over the pass, watching in the sideview mirrors as the glow of the chilly western horizon presses firmly against our backs.  So long world!  I remembered the bond I'd long felt with John, the closeness, an epiphany both lovely and fleeting, and it has charged my observations of the trip looking back on it now.

"Have you read anything I've written lately," I ask.
"I read the one about the chicken," John proffers.
"Myrta?"
"Yeah, Myrta- the fortune-telling chicken. It was good.  You should publish."
"I should.  But yet..."
"But yet..." he echoes dreamily, "but yet what?"
I change the subject. "How're things going for you?"
"Same ole same ole.  I'm tired a lot. Late nights. Early mornings."
"Still at the plant?"
"Still. Always. It's what I was put here to do.  I'll be honest though, after most 10-hour third-shifts I lay my middle-aged white-collar body on the couch and extinguish what spark of life I'vein the Stream, then the Streaming takes over and leads me to a net where all the stupid fish are caught."
"You probably go through lotsa coffee."
"NO" he shoots me an ugly look that means how could you forget this important fact about me and I remember that he doesn't drink coffee.  The not-drinking-coffee I don't mind, of course, but what annoys me is this holier than thou rationale he affects every time it comes up —How he insists on explaining his caffeine intolerance in posh British accent with phrases like 'it ill-befits my health,' or 'this wretched bean! It does not become me.'  This annoys me.  John says, "Rememberest thou, I canst not bedrink of it."
  "Lest ye die," I retort, and the conversation wanes, idles down.

Into the foothills my thoughts drift off to my time in the Uttarakhand, how the mountains seemed to never end, and they filled up everything, even the sky, and filled me in the beholding.  Now there's sky to see, but when I look up I see nothing.  Clouds. Vaporous, perhaps but empty, as am I, everyone sees right through me. Cars pass me on the freeway, my life.

John clears his throat. "So tell me, friend, why are things going so poorly on the old love front?" 
"It must be her fault." This is what I say when I'm not thinking clearly. John, of course, believes me because I am cursed by beauty so when I say it's not my fault there's never any second guessing.  Why blame beauty?
"Who among you, or is it whom, first said 'I love you' first?"
"I think it's whomsoever."
"Fine. Whomsoever betwixt the two your first declareth love?"
"I don't know.  Probably me.  Must have been."
"But who truly meant it first?"

That's a stumper.  Last autumn I heard a voice telling me that God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone. This, I should have interpreted, in retrospect, as an admonition toward self-reliance but instead I went out to carouse. My buddy's band Bonerchai was playing at the gallery.  What are the words, post-mud-grunge, perhaps. Don't judge.  There she was, being introduced, the edges of the world disappear.  What are the words? Lithe and supple? Fair haired and wide-eyed?  Too good for me?  She assumed I was what she was looking for because, well look at me, and I assumed that she was what I was looking for because guys as a rule are paid the slightest bit of attention and go giddy as fawns.  What felt like thaumaturgy was actually astigmatism.

"Take a deep breath," says John, "and as your breast rises and falls, feel the blood course to your extremities.  Now feel it retreat, like the tide." He can see the anguish on my face and suggests "How about stopping at the Love's?" and my mind goes all sappy with the implications until I see the roadsign for the truckstop and pull over. He gets out to take a leak and grab some yummies.  I adjust my handsome mug in the rearview, but of course being cursed by beauty, there isn't much to do so I get out to fill up the tank and leave it filling while I pop into the truckstop as well. 

Inside the man in the tie tells the kid in the paper hat to go home, "service levels are down. "
    "Can I go home early boss?" another paper hat asks.
    "Me too?" chimes a another.
    "Me three?" chimes another.

"I probably meant it first," I say when we are flopping back into the car.  "What did I know? About what love means, I mean?"
"It means you're willing to put up with a lot of bullshit sure in the knowledge that it leads to great reward," explains John while munching on a pita wrap that smells like plastic.  "Life is better when shared with a partner. We know this.  The divine sparks within each of us, once rocked together, kindle a fire."
"But there's also divine truth to be meted out from isolation, and beauty too!  I could've pursued the eremetic tradition.  The desert fathers.  Written the next great American novel, a long great screed about individualism, Plymouth Rock, Walden Pond, yada yada."
"Who wants that?  It's as self-serving as masturbation."
"Readers want conformity and communal equilibrium."
"Sure they do.  Why not abdictate control of the narrative, of life, and become a unit in a grander scheme?  All ego-less and crayon-colored! That's what you did, hm?"  

 God wanted me to believe that I wasn't alone but that belief turned me just another dog in the kennel, happy you're home master, pleased to show you this old dirty bone.  I look at John. God he's ugly.  I love him, but gosh!  Taking off for Reno to visit his nieces, as gestures go it's as noble an endeavor as any, and it takes my mind off of the old chestnut, or, like Julian's disappearing hazelnut, the whole enchilada.  Would that I could go back to that night at the gallery and look like John in that moment, so she could see through the mask to what I am, what I was, what I will become.  We all become who we are.

"Last month we went to the planetarium.  And sitting there watching her text her ex as the laser lights shot every which way the blue light shone on her hair and I realized that it's transparent.  I could look through to her skull practically."
"What did you see?"
"I saw emptiness.  I saw our flotillas of time together and I couldn't place any of my standard narrative around any of it.  I saw scores of regrets and I saw the rotten core of all earthly efforts. I saw buildings burned and mountains laid waste and out in a space a fiery comet gone cold, caught up in the orbit of a sun that hadn't yet ignited, or a moon that only reflects the light of a distant star."
"So your girl's cheating on you and you're headed out with your old friend John to escape all that, eh? Off to the biggest little city in the world!  Swing out into the darkness dark comet, and leave her spinning behind in an indifferent blaze!"
"Something like that."
"I would offer you some corn nuts," says John, holding out the bag, "but I don't want to sound too corny."  Cars pass us on the freeway.  "Why didn't you reach out?"
"I — because it's hard.  Because — because everything seems to stand against the idea that — the enormity of the pain she has — that I felt like — I felt like it was mine to carry. Despite everything— and this is how art my remains possible, holding on to it."
"You and your idiotic attachment to sadness.  Loss is inevitable.  Change is inevitable.  Get over it. Stop living under it. Make art from sunshine."
"What if I can't?"
"Then you can't.  Do something else.  You've identified the problem, now change it up.  Take off the mask and take the stage again."
"I hope you're right."
"Hope is too passive.  I know I'm right."

John says he can't wait to see his niece, his sister.  I've seen them before.  Don't judge. But of course, I was blessed by beauty, so it's okay for me to point out that they hit every branch face first while falling out of the ugly tree.  Kidding, kidding.  

"It's good you've got them so close, relatively.  It's good to not be alone.  I've been  — I've been feeling pretty alone lately."
"To be less alone you need to be less alone!  Love someone back. Lots of people like you." Then he adds, "Not me of course.  I think you're a pompous ass.  A really fucking arrogant son-of-a-bitch."
"Thanks buddy."
"Fuck you, pal."
"John?"
"Hm?"
"How do you start? Being... less alone?"
"You just start."

  We stop for the night at our motel.  The wind had really picked up and we clutch our bags and waddle to reception.  I think about guarding my divine spark, somewhere deep in my chest.  Like candles lit in a hurricane, we can't be responsible for keeping our lights bright for long, nor blamed for letting the light go out completely. The world is brutal and invective.  

Later, John was asleep – it was late, probably about 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning — and I went over and just stood and looked out the window at this town.  It's sad western lights on into the middle distance.  Whence is one, cursed by the shallowness of beauty, such as I, encouraged to stew and ponder the depths? I could hear the trains mournfully passing through, that wholly winsome wail and my thoughts mixed with John's steady breathing I felt carried off by the throttle of his dreams, the man there still, and just inside he's the ignored little boy, abandoned to embrace some raw elemental vision or other, all while pursuing the boundless shelves of desire, hope, all just out of reach and yet reaching. That's hope.  It's in reaching. 

Xyla's Apartment

Inside her, we move as one, sparring toward the bright abandon. It flees and we follow, faster, find it! Further, we journey together, just there.  The strong fervent final upstrokes of release yielding to a quavering absence, like a high white room, then we are back in Xyla's apartment, uneasily present, inside our own flawed and knobbled bodies once again.

If the body is a temple then the sanctum sanctorum is the mind, unless you're Xyla, and then it's there in that hairy patch between her legs.  Her langorous eyes shining like hotel soup spoons.  We kiss deeply, warm together like the fertile earth beneath a gray blanket of sunlight.  There is no way to know everything about someone and so I don't try very hard. Imminent dawn is my curfew. "You can sleep now" I say.

"I won't" she refutes, closing her eyes, hugging the pillow.  The daylight dances on the meadows casting shadows off the spindly windbreaks as I drive home, the earth turning toward the sun in all it's fucking majesty as I pull down the sun visor and stop for drive-thru coffee, black in a quaint paper cup.  I pull around to a parking spot beside Commercial Real Estate Available sign and watch, the northern sky white with smoke, and momentary terror eclipses everything then passes.

Chipped a tooth on Thursday.  Took a big handful of popcorn and off popped the cap from the front of a left  molar.  What's left is sharp and my tongue has been fixating on rubbing it all week, as has my mind.  I yawp into visor mirror to try to see it, pulling my lips back at the corner with a hooked finger. It's in the back of my mouth, so even if I smile broadly the empty hole cannot be seen, but I'm very aware that its there, even if no one else is, and it makes me wonder about people, y'know? Like, what pain and sharp nagging chips are chirping around in some people's tortured minds behind their otherwise smiling faces? What secrets are the others are carrying?

"How was your trip" Cassia pips, her sly white slip a revelation against the dark gray of our kitchen backsplash tile. "I saw the fires coming in" I say, setting my suitcase rolling and running a finger across the spotless island.  The kitchen is immaculately clean, the dishes sorted in intricate yet coherent patterns, starched towels folded crisply and smelling faintly of coriander and ripened plum.  Obviously I haven't been home all week.  She pecks and swipes at her phone, pecks my cheek and skirts off to the bedroom to finish getting dressed. Work today.  The stereo plays Debussy.  So bright and fucking chipper. I turn it off. Toss my receipts towards the wastebin and miss.  She emerges fully dressed, her hair tied up like an extradiagetic halo and brushes to the door.  "Welcome home.  You should sleep now" she says.

 But rather than mope around and study the meticulous tidiness of the house I coif up my hair and drive in to work. The sky looks sullen, threatening, a wreath of smoke around the parking lot and corporate walkways so slyly designed to reinforce law-abiding behavior and discourage loiterousness and vagrancy. I swipe my badge a few times before the door opens and the foul wraith is there waiting.  Late sixties, purple spots, with a decaying cloud of hallitosis perpetually fumigated by eau de toilette.  "I thought it was going to be a bad day.  Now I know" she grins contentedly as I elbow past.  "What's the matter," she asks, "did you lose a tooth?" My inbox has seven hundred fifty unread emails, enough to read two daily for the next two years. Tuna sandwich for lunch gets stuck in my tooth hole for the rest of the afternoon. The clock seems unhurried, licking the grape juice off the fingers of the second hand as it steals my life away one tick tick tick at a time.

News said fire fifty percent contained. Then the wind kicked up.  Cassia texts that she is going to her sister's to help and I leave her on read.  So thoughtful, telling me where she is, where she is going.  Go over to Xyla's apartment again.  It's in a complex coherently labled A through H, all four stories, all slyly designed boxes with intricately overlaid modulations of color, a façade to fool the eye into assuming modulated variation exists within their pre-fabricated internal blandness.  Flat windows overlook a flawlessly manicured lawn with three walkways around the worlds most sterile playground and a gated quartz azure pool.  Numbered car ports.  "If he only asks you out on the same day he's just not that into you," she quotes, as I leer at her naked hips squeezing back into faded jeans.

    "I'm here aren't I?"  We pass the blunt until I can feel the color of blood squeezing in gushing beats into my cavernous heart. Her bathroom is disheveled, slightly funky smelling, but in a girlish way. The shower drain has a corona of her hair sopping up the suds as I scrub my skin so hard it bleeds.  When I emerge into the gentle light, I note that the air now smells smokey.  Like a campfire.  Outside the wind howls and moans, demanding payment.  My naked reflection in the mirror is mournable.  What natural disasters we hold within us.

I had watched couples in the airport, like an anthropologist, wondering what women see in men. Most men. No, all.   Building a lasting relationship is about the careful management of information, about making sure that someone knows exactly the right bits of information to think you someone still worth hanging out with.  Fraud, basically. Perpetrated by each of us with two Y chromosomes, each scheming pyramidic two balls and cock wrangling their wily ways into acceptance until the structure is too tall to crumble at the rotten revelation rocking the foundation.  I licked at my chipped tooth and my eye strays onto the women.  Women. What whigmaleeries make fraud look exciting.  

Imminent dusk is my curfew. The day fades on the drive home as earth turns from the sun's energy and I stop for drive through coffee, black in a quaint small cup.  I pull around to a parking spot beside a spindly tree to sip, and watch, the sky a nautical depth of blue. A deer in the still arable meadow across from the neon mini-mall.  The bank empty save the red tailights queing for the ATM.  It's money they have, peace they lack. 

    "I wish I lived by the sea" Xyla had said once.
    "Why?"
    "Water in that quantity brings purpose" she said.
    "It's a senseless world."
    "The sea speaks to me."
    I asked in an affected bard "what doth the seatide say unto thee?"  She smiled.  But her eyes were somber opals. 

Smoke. It fills the car and chokes it's way inside my head in the lessened visibility as I my lower window to talk to the officer blocking our street.  I tell him that I live here.  His demeanor bleeds with righteous ostentation.  "Get your things and get out.  We've got an evacuation order."  The street is empty, the house is locked. There's nothing that I need here so I grab the rolling suitcase I'd left packed that morning and two beers and head out.  The sky over the hill is bright and hot.

One reaches an age when one has met the limits of certain assumptions and no longer need entertain them.  They no longer hold sway. Cassia always just knew that things would get worse, with an unswervable certainty that I couldn't dislodge. I always suspected that things might get worse, but might not.  After three years together there was no need to discuss the merits of her belief, much less argue the logic of it against my vague and increasingly unlikely assumptions.  Her righteous firmament was foolproof, (somehow I always ended up playing the fool) her arguments were slyly designed, intricately patterned, joylessly lengthy, flawlessly coherent, and scathing.  My rejoinders were full of whiney"but-what-ifs."  So I call and am relieved she doesn't answer.  

I drive south, drink the two beers and drive, the wind at my back, the windows open, smoke wending out like steam from a coffee cup.  My tongue diddles at the vacant tooth. One little corner of the earth burns. There is so much more earth turning dumbly under the stars. I drive and I call again, and again, and drive, the highway spooling out before me until the last of the smoldering smoke smell has been long blown away.