( I )
Sometimes it’s an accident. I looked the word up. It comes from the Latin accidere, which means to fall upon, to happen. And sometimes I’ll fall into her, just like that, without hardly being aware of what I’m doing.
Last night I found myself sleeping in her bed. Again. It was past two in the morning and I was dreaming we were comic books. Our heads were the dialogue boxes, our chests the colors, our midsections the ink, and everything below the waist was penciled half-sketches. It all needed to be put together, so I started to apply the ink and colors to the pencil. The next thing I knew my mouth was against her neck and I was pressing her into the futon, she pressing back into me in that way that can end up making a circuit out of things—
“You need to stop,” she said.
‘I know.’
I took myself out of her, cringing a bit because it felt like a ball of red and yellow was consuming me, making me hum against the bed beside her.
“I’m very fertile right now,” she explained, turning from me, toward the wall.
I apologized.
“Why?”
‘Ahhh… I need some water.’
“There’s some on my dresser.”
I reached for the cup on the windowsill, sat up, said ‘This’ll do,’ and drank, making the fluid go down smoothly, without sound. I swear I could hear everything for half a mile. It was 3am, and the city out the window was completely quiet, yet still I heard it, every drip in the gutters and click of the streetlights.
I plucked a hair from my lips, tasting her on my fingers.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked.
‘You’re salty.’
I stared into the night, said I was sorry again.
“Why?”
‘Because you told me you didn’t want to have sex, and I promised you we wouldn’t, and we did anyway. Well, sort of. Not all the way all the way, but….’
She told me I’m only going to get hurt if I try to be close to her, try to get close to her.
‘I know.’
My agreeing evidently caught her off-guard. She was quick to add “Well, not only hurt. Other things, too. Good things, too.”
I continued staring out the window, sitting cross-legged on the bed. I straightened my back, pulling at the tension knotted around my sacrum.
“I can still feel you in me,” she said. “Take yourself out.”
‘Okay.’
I closed my eyes and concentrated, taking everything in the room, in the house and surrounding streets, taking everything in the extent of my feeling and scrunching it down until my nostrils cleared and my inner ears were rumbling to yawn—until I didn’t want anything. Until all I wanted was a single, needle-pointed want.
‘Okay. I’m out. What’s left is just an echo. A negative one.’
I don’t know why I said negative one. I began to say other things—but didn’t say them, held them in, forced myself to be as quiet as I could. As tight as a stone, as tense as water.
I could feel her getting annoyed, realizing we had sex and that she didn’t want to have sex. (With me.) I felt her feeling these things and I began to absorb them, too—preferring she go back to sleep, to let me clear the tension out on my own.
People like to talk about lucid dreams, but if you’re in a certain state of mind, you can have a lucid reality, too. You have to fall into it, though. It sort of has to happen. A willful accident. I inhaled her annoyance until I felt her become quiet, then fall asleep.
She dreamed, and as she did I began to relax. Around 4 she turned over, opened her eyes and fixed them on me. She said something about rockets in the sky and a button to blow them all to pieces.
I got out of bed, put on my pants, put my books into my backpack. I was loud about it, but kept quiet on the inside, so she wouldn’t wake up. I went downstairs, dished myself some leftover spaghetti, and read the rest of the Secret Sharer. Then I rolled myself a cigarette and thought.
I thought about riddles. About how there are different kinds. Sometimes, they’re like a lock—mathematical and precise. And sometimes they’re more organic, like a knot, a string of connections that you have to wrestle with to make sense out of.
I wondered if I’d ever be able to figure her out. Not in a definitive sense, but a practical one: to separate what’s hers from what is mine.
I laid on the couch, two blankets over me. It was impossible to get myself to drift off. I could hear all the activity in the cushions. All the conversations, meals, dreams, thoughts. All the life reverberating in it. I could hear my ego saying “Me, me, me, me, me, me, me,” at a pitch approaching feedback. I tried to be cool about it, tried to let it disperse without having to force it to. I was too full to nod off, so I just lay there, feeling.
Eventually, it was mornIng.
( E )
She is wearing a pale pink nightgown beneath a see-through bathrobe that reminds him of a shower curtain. She is standing in the sunlight yellow and dust-drawn as it spans in columns through the living room. She comes to him.
“I thought you had disappeared into nothing,” her round face says, brown eyes childlike and playful, now. “I thought you had left for good. I was going to ask you to sleep on the couch but I thought that would’ve been rude.”
She slides into beside him. She chatters, laughs and moves her buttocks forward and back against his loins. He obliges but doesn’t make much of it. It is morning. People stretch in the morning.
Again, she falls asleep. He extricates himself from her warming zone, goes to the bathroom, hums until the piss comes out. He looks in the mirror. He feels sexy. He looks himself in the mirror and he feels absolutely beautiful, totally on. His eyes are like two swords, flashing and blue.
Why is this what I’m like with her? he wonders. I feel sexy, but vacant. Sexy ‘cause our charge is so volatile—and vacant ‘cause I have to be, to fit around her mass of momentary selves. It’s never constant in her company and I don’t know why that turns me into her risqué integer but god how I wish we could make love across the meridians, rapacious through the hours’ orbits, mating with faces multiple and contrary, one into the next—maybe what we need is one entire day of bedsport—maybe that would help us finish what we spark—
He dresses, goes up to her room for his coat. On the western wall are five drawings and they’re all of naked women, sort of like Tarot cards. One is drawn by him. It’s taped to the wall beneath the others. Its title is Canopy and it shows Mary staring at you with her eyes wide, mouth open, her breasts pendulous and exposed. Between them floats a yoni, a vulva composed of score and four ripples, overlapping. These ripples sprout from a penis that extends from the body below her, that she’s straddling. Between the phallus and the vulva is a curved horizon, stretching out across her torso. Along the horizon, from the foreground to the distance, is arranged a row of dancing figures.
It’s a simple, fluid sketch and he drew it at her desk last week while she was sleeping.
So much happens while she’s sleeping, he recognizes and takes note. Then he sees that with it placed where it is, at the base of all the women drawn, the phallus acts as pillar to the entire pantheon.
He says the word PANTHEON and walks downstairs.
“I fell asleep,” she confesses, stretching.
‘I know,’ he crouches next to her. ‘Are we still on for this evening?’
‘Five thirty at the Midway?’ The way she stretches the a in way is equidistant cute and sultry. He suppresses the urge to put a hand on her, to touch her face, her forehead, hairline. Breasts of abundant warmth. He glances at the finished novella on the stand beside her and guesses where he’s likely to be in seven hours.
‘Can’t we meet up somewhere else?’
They make plans for six at the Raindrop, in his part of town.
“Or,” she says, “we could go get coffee now.”
‘Sure.’
“Give me ten minutes.”
While she’s in the shower, he writes a note. Then he leaves. Two blocks away he realizes he forgot his watch, but does not go back. He needs these early hours. He has a notion that somewhere in them he’ll find a way to divest the stress beneath his surface, that’s brimming up to make him ache and walk a little funny.
After he’s seated at the Midway he orders eggs, toast, and hash. Tells the waitress to hold the coffee until halfway through his meal. The voices of the other customers are loud and make him feel on edge. He reaches into his backpack, pulls out his journal, and powers through the resistance against his own lettErs.
( U )
Your body feels like plastic, like something synthetic. You watch the water bead and fall down you, confirming your suspicions. You take the bar of soap between your hands and rub some suds from off it, pivoting back into the jet until it’s running too-hot across your face. You scrub yourself with your bare hands, pausing between your legs, remembering your dream.
A whale with a giant tongue.
That must be my spirit animal, you think. That must be what it takes to clean me out.
You wonder where the feeling clean begins. You wonder if there’s a place between the pure and dirty. You remember how your dad called you a whore once and you forget that you’ve already forgiven him for that.
The anger surges up into your palms, making them quicker, move roughly against your skin. You inhale the anger as if it were vapor, getting high and the opposite of sedated as familiar rants bubble in the back of your mouth, unvoiced.
You tell yourself to let it go. You’ve already talked to Dad about it, untied the knot it’s made in you. You know for certain it’s not even true, but a mish–mashing of several different events. It’s something fabricated, something made up for you to use. Something used to make you angry with the dirt you feel.
You scrub it off, rinse it down. There’s a hole in the tub beneath you, and that’s where you stuff your anger, that’s where you send it because down there it’s dark. Down there is where death turns back into life, so maybe that’s where the ugliness can turn into something clean. You remember Patience and step out of the shower, sponging up what your skin rejects with an extra soft white towel.
“Would you like some toast?” you call out, projecting your sweetness through the house. You step out of the bathroom. There is no answer. In the kitchen you say his name.
“Patience?”
You say it in the living room, say it on the stairs.
“Patience!”
In the hallway, walking to your room, you say it twice.
With your hand against the doorknob to your room, turning it the wrong way:
“Patience?”
Turning the knob the other way. The door creeks. You poke your head a little ways through:
“Patience?”
Maybe he decided to hide out in the basement. You sift through your clothes, choose jeans, choose the red sports bra, choose a black tee shirt and your blue sweater. You put your hair in pigtails, study your drawings on the wall.
You look over their forms and curves and they remind you of how soft you look, how soft you are, and you stand there, fully dressed, feeling your clothes and your skin, your muscles and bones. Your body. You begin to crack your joints.
“Ammmma,” you say, thinking: Goddess. Thinking: Goddesses. You breathe a few deep breaths and look over your list of things to do.
“Oh but Patience will buy me coffee and that’ll send me on my way.”
He doesn’t answer after you throw his name down the basement stairs. And the lights are off down there anyhow.
“Bastard,” but you smile. “Took off and didn’t even leave me a note.”
You make yourself toast and only after you’ve eaten it and go to wash your plate do you find the note on the bridge between the two sinks.
Happy Valentine’s
Let’s meet up tonight as planned
Yours nearly as much as mine,
P.
You walk up to your room, stand against the door, staring at the carpet. It’s clean, but cluttered. Clothes and books, cd’s, pens and papers are scattered across it, but beneath all these it’s clean. Your bed offers to obliterate the day, it’s blankets whispering: We will deliver you. You refuse them, turn away. Your word processor screen is on, its amber letters arranged in neat rows of ascii. You walk to it, sit down on the broken 70’s era speaker you use for a seat, reading over the paragraphs until you reach their abrupt end.
You feel at the thing inside you that wants to be written out. The something aching always for a fresh start. It prompts you to save this, clear the screen, and begin all over again. Your words creep steadily across the monitor’s not-exactly-darkness, like the segments of a caterpillar, led onward by the pulsing upright cUrsor:
( A: XX )
She falls asleep in whatever she’s wearing. She falls asleep not because she wants to, but because time is like a switch that is either on or off and the sound of it flipping up and down gives her a headache.
Amarita owns an ugly car that won’t break down on her even though she never gives it motor oil and when she does the gauge is dry. Amarita hates to drive it because the clutch makes an ugly sound when she shifts from first to second gear. The ugly sound reminds her of the feeling she gets when she needs to leave the house but doesn’t. She loves her ugly car but wishes it would break down so she wouldn’t have to worry about being stranded between here and there every time she makes a move.
On Monday morning Amarita wakes up naked and pulls her legs wide apart to crack her hips. There is only one man in the world who knows she does this and he’s lying right there next to her. She’s naked but she wants to be alone. If she had to be somewhere, everything would be fine but because the day is open she feels it taunting her. She feels it on the other side of the door, hungering. Hungering for her suffering or work. And because the man beside her makes her want to forget about work and suffering, she wants him gone.
She rubs her legs against him til he’s hard, then she pulls at his hardness with her hand til he’s awake. Then she tells him to leave but the words come out like: Let’s pretend that we’re still lovers, and he holds her and speaks nice things into her ear. She takes his hand off her breast and tells him to leave but again the words come out as something else. Amarita and the man laugh. She laughs so hard she gets angry. She needs to work. I mean suffer. No, no ——she needs to work.
He is already deep inside her and half of her wants to come but the other half wants to take control of him and she can’t make up her mind so she makes him leave. His penis is now beautifully exposed and she’s gets mad at how much she wants him to be the ladder foisting her up higher, and higher, away from the hungering day.
“I am so ugly why do you love me?”
He says “You aren’t ugly Amaretto.”
“My name is Amarita.”
“Nectar of the gods you’re perfect.”
She says “I stink how can you stand it?”
He tells her: she doesn’t stink. He says he likes her smell except sometimes when he puts his head upon her lap. He says it’s not her smell but the smell of her clothes that stinks just a bit but not really and when she hears this she can’t believe how much of an asshole he is.
She tells him to leave and the words say _exactly_ what she means. He just lies there. She is grateful in her anger because she doesn’t have to worry about coming or making him come or feeding the day with her work because she can finally suffer and she’s so relieved that her words come out just as ugly as she means them:
“Leave my room right now. Leave me leave me leave me.”
He sighs and stands and puts on his clothes. She wants him to leave but also wants him to stick around and empty her. Or fill her day with him. But he doesn’t look her way. When he shuts the door she makes the covers into a comfort coffin and pulls them all the way above her head, feeling fine with falling back to sleep. There is no day. Only suffering. I mean anything but suffering. She falls asleep and forgets the thousAnds things she has to do.
( A: XY )
@lex lies beside her and he wonders if she’s an ally or an axis. Is she someone with me or against, a consort or a nemisis? Where does our pivot lie? Is it a point of contention or connection? A bridge or a burning house?
She’s like a wheel to him, an unruly cosmos spinning, and he’s the white ball slipping round her rim to land on random and often imaginary numbers.
And every number’s sacred, sure, but how exactly, that’s what counts. She makes him dizzy. Even while she’s sleeping and especially when she’s awake.
He stares at the ceiling next to her warm body wherein she kneads her anguish and her gentle-kindness into the taffy that he’ll get stuck in once she’s awake and wants him here and gone with that “I love you hate you” scissor-hold that keys his every nerve to each her words and glances.
He puts a thumb against her hardened nipple, feeling at it through the fabric of her tee, thinking If only I could climb into her center without stumble, scaling up her heart-spokes undetected, and in her hidden stillness measure all her changes and surmise if they’re for me to navigate or not—
He tells her stories while they’re making love. Children’s stories while they’re merging. It’s a silly means of converting lust to laughter, distracting enough to extend their sex beyond that too-familiar race towards crux and climax.
Last week she came to his house and his roommates weren’t around and she wound up on his lap, the first woman in a while doing all she could to find his end. But he put it off, and upped the ante, and she became confused, atop him, shaking her head and then dismounting because where they were going kept expanding before them, around them, through them, in a knot a noose a nextness unending.
Alex lies beside her, thumb to nipple, his body coming to a head with his want for her and yet he knows that they don’t fit; that even if they could find a way to accept the discord or forge a dominant harmony——even then, their reactions will ever be experimental, something involving superconductors overseen by men in lead smocks and protective eyewear. Something more theoretical than actual, but all the same two fail-safes from total annihilation. For eventually their atoms will collide. And their collisions can’t ever not be vicious.
Vicissitude: ever changing, unpredictable.
I’m the air and she’s the fire and where we meet’s above the water but the problem is that neither of us wants to be the stone. And so of course it’s all unstable. All clouds and mercurial mists, without ever a steady where to land the fleeting feet.
Alex lies beside her, tumulting over their unlikelihood. She’s more beyond me than she’ll ever belong to me, he sings to no particular tune, hearing in her a future that invites and evades him in time with her evenly spaced breAths.
( Æ )
So I left you there again
staring at me through the
sharp side of my pen;
rescinding down these rows of space
justified like the words of ash
burning off the pages
that you feared’d become our home
& defenseless with the fact
you could never be alone—
You swore upon your grave
to land upright on your feet
after every wave
that picks you up to drag you down
but what happens when you’ve lost
the will to let yourself be found—
Among your fault and dirt
& yes I’ve heard all about the hurt you feel
the nature of your hope
and how it flees the room
but how late’s too late,
and how soon’s too soon to see—
That you answer to yourself alone
& what you call control
isn’t more than a chance to disown
all the things we’ve been given just to smash
(it’s only shameful if you understand
which I can’t
which I can’t
which I can’t—)
The future’s honest,
but not so much the past.
It takes a single match
to destroy a life of memory
but where’s the flame,
where’s the flame,
where’s the flÆme,
that will bring it back?
( O )
Days pass, turn to weeks. They write about each other, sing about each other, talk to each other in their heads. They try. It remains too much of a trial to connect.
One misunderstanding leads into the next, builds up into something that gravity keeps collapsing. They miss each other—dearly or completely, it’s anybody’s guess.
A night arrives when they are lying in her bed again. Lying there, talking. Skirting around the evidence of the soreness they both feel. She says I love you. He mirrors her. He tells her a story about two lovers lost. They’re looking for a monster with a thousand faces somewhere in the dark. All they have to guide them are a number of masks, and the masks end up becoming the monster in the end.
She tells him the same story, only inverted. There is a room at the center of the maze filled with a thousand masks. The only thing the two lost lover’s can talk about are the masks in the room. One mask shifts into another, never with any reason, meter or rhyme, and they get lost inside it all, never knowing who the other is because the other’s always jumbled.
“Do I make sense?” she asks.
His heart wants to touch her, his eyes want to watch her, his ears want to listen to her voice. All these things, all at once. But he hesitates. He asks
‘If the abyss has no bottom, how come you feel yourself falling?’
“What do you mean?”
‘If the abyss is really bottomless, what are you falling towards?’
“I think,” she says, and her whole body moves. He will never understand how she does this. “I think you feel you’re falling not because you’re falling down, but because instead you’re falling away. Away from up and down and right and left and all the sorts of places.”
‘You make sense,’ he says, lowering his eyes, his face.
She whispers. Lights dim.
“Which direction are we headed?”
‘I think we left direction behind a long time ago, and anyhow, there isn’t a map, so to hell with it…’
I don’t want you to touch me.
Two people hesitate in the dark, not touching, hardly moving, wanting so much but scared even more that the dam holding the moment together is about to burst.
‘I like pleasure and I dislike pain and that’s not so much a principle as the compass I glance at while walking through what’s uncharted.’
“But you said we left direction behind.”
‘That’s true, but isn’t there some certainty left over? Check your pockets…’
“No. Come here.”
‘You come here.’
Leave me. Let me go. Stay away. I feel you too much and never enough so never mind.
“Where are you?”
I am now.
Then I guess I am, too.
We don’t make any sense, do we…
‘Once upon a time two strangers met. They didn’t recognize each other, so they kept walking. They walked and they walked until they met up again. This time, they stopped and shook hands. I’ve seen you before. Yeah, I’ve seen you, too. Well, nice to meet you again! Yeah, nice to meet you, too. And they went along their separate ways.
‘Eventually they met up again. They sat down, shared some lunch. So, where are you headed? Oh, I’m going that way—and you? I’m headed this way. Well, thanks for the apple. Yeah, thanks for the cheese. Maybe we’ll meet up again. Yeah, maybe. Goodbye.
‘But the strangers didn’t see each other again. One of them made some enquiries and learned that the other had fallen off the face of the earth. What a lucky bastard! she thought. I’ve been looking for the end of the world for a very long time. I guess I was just headed in the wrong direction! So she turned back around, and eventually…’
“Eventually what?”
‘I don’t know…’
“I know, I know. Listen. Eventually, she found the end of the world, and you know what she did?”
‘What?’
“She looked down, into the abyss, and that’s where she sees the stranger, the one who shared some cheese with her one day—”
‘No, she’s the one with the cheese. He had the apples.’
“No. You’re wrong. But anyways, she sees him down there and she thinks: Wow, he must have been falling for a long time! But I wonder why he’s not so far away? So she jumps in after him. And that’s when something strange happens. When she jumps off the face of the earth, she meets up with the stranger right away. Only, they aren’t strangers anymore.”
‘What were they now?’
“They became a new language, something never spoken or heard before…”
‘Really.’
“Yeah. They became a new language and they couldn’t live without each other anymore—only there was one problem.”
‘I know what the problem was: they didn’t need each other anymore because they were eachother now. And because a person is always a stranger to himself, they ended up perfect strangers all over again.’
“Full circle.”
‘The end.’
That word hangs between them, sort of sour, sort of belonging more than they ever could. They reach out to snatch it, to crumple it up or burn it or somehow make it less than what it is—less evident, really, or more ignorable.
I am you. She says. They whisper something secret, fall asleep. He’s already begun to let her
gO