[dropcap]“[/dropcap][dropcap]M[/dropcap]emorize scripture fast as you can, fast as you can type memorize it quickly and then write it down so that others can read it later, yourself included. It is important that you do this so dont forget that I am the one telling you now. “

Lame old beggars washed up on the sidewalks just picking at their toenails in the same way they look for edible trash in the trash bin, they are old and tired now but still they keep trucking, trucking alone looking for their scraps and dressing themselves in them. Why not suicide by means extraordinary or any means whatever just be sure to make it public, really public, ruin some childhoods, why not.

The watch sits on the book by the window, and outside the window rain falls and the steam from coffee coats the corner of the inside of the window. The rain falls on cobblestones patterned with gutters centrally placed to allow the rain not to puddle but to fall into drains where it is carried far far away and can’t bother anyone. Ivy greens are growing on the walls, regrettably some torn down and the sun shines through the ones that remain, which is nice but the walls sometimes ruin the scenery. It doesn’t smell much of anything except in the hallway leading to the door to the street, which always reeks of smoke. The watch still sits on the book, though, ticking away as usual, as it usually does, doing what watches usually do, which is tick. nothing new about that at all, and we really shouldn’t be surprised when we consider it, or when we consider the person sitting at the table drinking the coffee with an empty head and looking out the window. He collects his own rubbish.

Lame drawings adorned walls of green picture ivy that willowed down its side into puddles on the floor where it had built up and rotted. The floor became the proving ground of new species looking to eat their way into the world and out of the room, but till then they just continued to hatch and fest and crawl in the ivy. One would not want to walk in there without shoes as the bugs would crawl and eat the meat of one’s toes, under the toe’s nail they would squirm and eat. Beware that floor.

And so the shoed man collecting some empties looking out the window at the rain drinking his coffee, and outside the bums on the sidewalk, oozing colour into the puddles like chalk left out in the elements, oozing and losing its consistency as it oozes. Sometimes they would get up and sift, sift a bit more in the hopes of finding something, but sure enough there would be noth-

ing. They had already sifted those cans that day and there would be none left for tomorrow either but what else to do when one has no shoes and is stuck on the pavement. Do you know what it’s like to have to hide every time you want to take a shit? And then one needs to consider before hand, before the urge to shit approaches, what one is going to wipe away the shit with. Then one must get used to the worst of messes, and shit on one’s hand. Eating garbage does not lend itself to clean, smooth shits, but the runniest, wateriest shits that splash and make a big mess needing of unsure wiping with any disgusting scrap of cloth to be found. All while hiding. Then, ruined for the day, one retreats back to the sidewalk. It’s hard to look for food when one only wants to cry all the time.

“Again, memorize the scriptures and jot them down as I told you, you forgot some way along. It was a nice story but that’s it don’t fool yourself into thinking that I approve that somehow you gutted out something of any value. Don’t begin with me again this sad round of ecstatic outpour you know where it leads, the most miserable path to everything is trodden by nothings nothings that haven’t found anything that’s why they’re on the path to everything so have some fun with it at least on the way. Don’t take it so damn seriously because it’s really going nowhere at all for a long time still, until it finally goes somewhere and then you can stop typing.”

Beneath the gender apocalypse that was his home there squirmed some sort of rat, that like the bugs liked to eat, but it ate at the wires instead. The wires were old and worn as they were many, and really none of them led to anywhere at all. Who they were woven by I can’t be sure, but they were woven thick, and though they have all rusted and so lead to nowhere, were clearly laid with some great purpose or design, very purposely they were laid in the great thick bundles of all wonderful colours. Imagine into thinking that I’m here to stay because that isn’t the case. I’m just a purveyor of treaties, of land deeds and titles. blues and greens, pinks and purples all designating voltage or something. All carrying something, maybe electricity or the light beam signals from computers, the internet creeping its way along the inner rubber lining of the golden coloured pinks and blues of the wires. But while the rats eat away at the rusting metal and gnaw their teeth down to the gums at it, the rubber persists in its colourfulness, nothing drains that rubber of colour not even the rain water that sloughs off the bums on the sidewalk, pooling down into gutters and rushing beneath the streets to settle and sink down through the dirt, smoothing off rocks even down there below as its travels slowly down and collects again into underwater rivers that smash at the great tides of wires all around. They remain pink and green and blue and orange as the big rats crawl all over them and eat at the rusted metal.

Later:

Show me the dark elbows of your room, what collects in them? show them to me, allow me to draw my head close and lick at them so we can find out exactly what is there. I can’t tell just by looking, the corner of the corner is far too deep and dark for that, so let me introduce some moisture into the equation and balance out the variables. But that doesn’t mean that I have to belong to this place, just because I tasted the corner. Don’t trick yourself I come around every once in a while and evaluate the situation don’t you see? I’m really just a bureaucrat thats all – don’t get attached at the hip and don’t expect to see me before long. It will be a great while before I venture round again but be sure that you will have totally forgotten me by that time. That is definite and even written into the equation, there is nothing we haven’t thought of.

The man who had until then been drinking coffee at the window let the evaluator out the door and hurriedly mopped up the corner with old dishwater – it was all he had. Now the coffee had gone cold and the steam condensed into drops that dripped down the side of the window, over the shallow and short sill, and onto the desk, making a little puddle of their own, but no convenient drain, and so they just soaked into the wood, and to this very day if one runs a hand over the wood there is detectable a slight warp in the wood. It is raised ever so slightly, and has a hue just a bit darker than the rest of the wood – but its nothing that sand paper and good varnish can’t fix. If one could find any of it. It wouldn’t really be worth it any more though, as the bugs finally ate holes right through the floor and the walls and it’s been notified that there exists a risk of sinkholes throughout the entire city. The wires had in fact been laid so thick, that now since they have been nearly entirely digested by the hungry rats, there exists the very real threat of sinkholes, and therefore only walking is permitted and grocery trucks only manage to get to the peripheries of the city. Who cares about a desk?

Ever been to an auction—not the ritzy Sotheby’s kind—the local estate sales? Just remember two things: although beauty is in the eye of the beholder, everything under the hammer is always something somebody else didn’t want.

Hell, she’d been waiting for ages, so she lit a cigarette. Jayne moaned about that habit too. Money was tight, but Jayne’s bottled water, designer coffees, and personal fitness trainer — they were different. Harriett turned. Jayne had finally come. She wrenched the damaged passenger door open and climbed in. Jayne said nothing. Harriett thought, this is not a good week, nor had it been a good month. Jayne had been terminated for cause — for letting that bossy witch of a supervisor have it. She was too impulsive — you find something else first — then leave any saying until your last day. They needed two incomes. Then the collisions — who cares about fault? Still, for Jayne’s sports car, it was a five-hundred dollar deductible they simply didn’t have. Jayne hated the pickup truck and drove it that way — with battered hatred. Now it sported a cracked side window and dented passenger door. Best not to mention anything; explanations were pointless.

The drive home and the evening were endured with silence. Harriett had to travel up-island for a Friday dinner meeting, which meant staying overnight. Jayne wasn’t pleased about that either. She was using Harriett’s pickup because until they paid the deductible, her sports car was off-the-road. Couldn’t she use a rental? Harriett had argued, if she was careful and creative, she’d be able to make-up something toward that five-hundred on her expense claim as the per diem and mileage allowances were generous. Harriett took her pickup. Heading home on Saturday and enjoying an early lunch in Duncan, she noticed neighbourhood children taking down signs for a garage sale. Cruising past the address, she saw the usual sad remains littering the driveway. Usual, except for one item—a stuffed farm animal. She stopped and climbed out to have a better look. The magnificent black-faced ram, possibly an Old Norfolk, reminded her of a distant country and her grandfather’s hill farm. “How much?” she enquired casually.

“Oh — that goddamn thing — Hell — Nobody wanted it — Five bucks — But yer gotta take it right now!”

“Done!” replied Harriett, momentarily wondering about money for fuel, “Can you help me tie it down?”

“Sure — No problem.”

Arriving home, Harriett had barely turned into their driveway, when she was spotted from the kitchen. Flying outside, Jayne yelled, “Goddamn it, Harriett! Don’t you dare bring THAT into our house. Get rid of it!”

Now? There’s a problem, she thought. She telephoned an auctioneer from a pay phone near Starbucks. “Could they manage one special item? No — Not furniture. A conversation piece — No — Yes — Dead — Not just the head — the whole thing.”

“What? — You’re kidding! Well — OK. But if there’s no sale you’ll have to pick it up before 5:00 p.m. the day after the auction.”

“Done! — I’ll be right over.”

Harriett dropped by the day after the auction. She half-expected to see the ram forlornly stuffed into the back storage area. “Hi-yer, Harriett,” the auctioneer greeted her warmly. “Strange things happen, Eh? They went nuts over yer ram. It’s gone!”

“How much? — Twenny?”

“Hell — No! Six hundred and twenny.

I’ll get you your cheque.” The six-twenty less commission was enough to cover Jayne’s five-hundred dollar deductible. There wouldn’t be much left, but she might be able to find a complete passenger-side door at the wrecker’s and install that on the pickup herself. “What a miracle,” Harriett said to no one in particular. They would now scrape by without using plastic. She was still the only one with a job and she hoped, as they had agreed, no more credit card charges and no cash advances — period — until.

Next Saturday morning, she awoke to an empty house. Goodness, she thought, Jayne was up and out early — But why? Stumbling downstairs, she noticed that her truck was gone too. Then she saw a note on the refrigerator door.

Harriett — Gone to garage sales in Duncan — Kisses

PS — What’s that auctioneer’s phone number?

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] was in a city on a Sunday and all the passers-by seemed to have thin moustaches, wraparound sunglasses, and mossy army-surplus coats. Everybody wanted a cigarette. At this point I had very little to do; I had presented my paper at the symposium, received generous applause, and answered the questions in what I hoped were halfway-satisfactory ways. Professor Kobelski said I had a certain way of answering as though I had already anticipated every possible question, even when I hadn’t. I didn’t tell her why I suspected that this was the case, or what it said about me. They had introduced me as “by all accounts an exciting new voice in the study of Javanese art.” But I won’t breathe another word about what they said or how I felt about it. I’d rather tell you about the city that I still found myself in a day after the conference, foolishly having booked a late flight because I was foolishly trying to save money.

It was a mill town, sort of, but uncannily molting. Taking advantage of certain booms, building condos, changing the municipal font. The university had been around just long enough to have generated the good-will required for a fair-sized conference on world art history. I walked the January high street, looking into the windows of boutiques, mostly closed. Handicrafts, kitchenwear, knitware, vintage records, used clothing, bicycle design, graphic repair. Craft brewing even. But closed. It was me and the solitary smokers; I had no idea what other people did on a Sunday here but I suspected it involved a bigger city.

Eventually I found an outlet of that chain of art-supply stores that you have probably heard of. Known in bohemian districts but also provincial shopping centres with large parking lots. Still open inexplicably, and yes it’s true I sketch a little bit with pencil when I have the time. Electronic music, high synthesizer cascades in a key more “toying” than “playful.” I assembled the limbs of the little wooden man in a pose suggesting the Olympic high-dive. Then again the mother in the Pietá. Afterwards the son. Tried to remember The Dying Gaul but could only recall the wound. His marble blood, the least realistic part of the entire piece. They never did get the blood quite down. Wax of a used candle.

Somebody was watching me; I was the only customer in the store. Without looking up I said, “I think it was the ballistae. Archaeological or I suppose osteological evidence seems to confirm.”

A wooden voice: “In Spenser, Nature wears a veil.”

“What kind of fabric?”

“Polyurethane.”

“No, but I get it. A view of the present state.”

“I pay attention even though they don’t believe me. How many monographs?”

“One, and they love it. 356 pages. All on shadow puppets. This is true.”

“I believe it. Title?”

“Frames of Mastery: The Biopolitics of the Javanese Wayang Ku-lit. Working, you understand. Aphasia UP may push for a change.”

“J’avoue j’en ai bavé pas vous mon amour…”

“I would dance it.”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t? As a child I spent an unhealthy amount of time reading about the reproductive systems of non-mammals.”

“Did you envy them?”

“Some. The frog’s mouth, the seahorse barracks, the frequent manta ray. Something has a purse and I can’t remember if it is a shark. The purse shark? That seems wrong somehow.”

“Nature wears a veil but She is also a mile tall, not striding through the forest so much as knocking it over.”

“No, but I like the sentiment. Tapioca, manioc, maté, mescaline, peyote. Orange pekoe.”

“I’ll bring it to a boil.”

“Turn around.”

It was the full-sized, six-foot version of the miniature wooden man. Smooth, polished skull, absolutely no facial features, crudely carved pectorals, surprisingly realistic hands. Joints creaking like a rocking chair as he cocked his head a little. I had long aspired to meet a friend such as this.

“Shall we form a Covenant of Best Friendship?”

“Yes, I admire this proposition.”

“And now, immediately, let us part and be silent.”

“As the grave. But first you must buy those pencils. You were going to shoplift them but I saw you.”

“The first thing I shoplifted was The Nicomachean Ethics. The second thing was Augustine’s Confessions. I gave it to a pig.”

“Repent while you can.”

Outside again, the wind blew uncomfortably but failed to do anything exciting – like whip up little whirls of paper or whistle. It was one-thirty. I stuck to side-streets and let my mind wander to trapped places, double-binds. I vaguely remembered an Anabaptist whose pursuer fell through a frozen pond. True to his creed, he saved the drowning man – but was burned at the stake anyway. The soft, starving ice, so close in attitude to fire.

“Jesus coffee,” I said to myself. “I need a Christ.” When the ambulatory bog-body finally finds somewhere to sit with some coffee in an unknown city, it will not be a place with cracked formica tables, a sticky red racing stripe all along the wall, aluminum swivel-stools, and a lady behind the counter with a paper hat. Nor will it be somewhere where the undercutted baristas play weird, fuzzy No Wave while tables full of denim-jacketed ABD’s churn out tortuous theory-prose. Actually it will be an establishment that wipes away any trace of grease, puts in a fake stone floor, plays smooth jazz from a satellite radio station, and belongs to a sizeable regional chain. I warmed my hands at a gas fire with a fake log.

A painting on the wall: a woman with the very high forehead typical of European portraiture in the fifteenth century. Her exaggerated hands swirled around a coffee cup that produced effusive whorls of steam. The perspective caused her iron-latticed balcony and French windows to look flattened and far away. Something about it made me think of Nescafe jars or packages for hard cookies meant to resemble Danish pastries: lazy deep blue and pale grey pastels as a shorthand for Old World sophistication. Bastardly of a bridge and the Hudson never Lethed you, my Seine. What do you Le Havre in Stockholm? Oh, just a little something to München. I found a book in my bag, and read: Our investigations into the godhead have been conclusive. There is a tiny godhead by the sea. Auden spotted him and wrote a poem:

There is a tiny godhead by the sea:

He’s in the sand, and by the bloody sea.

A little statue gentleman, you know;

He’s madly there, but tiny, don’t you see.

I made a votive offering to him:

Just a few ciggies, boys, by the bloody sea.

The machine flange the machine flange the flare. Careful, the flare. The machine flange the machine flange the flare. Bandsaw bandsaw bandsaw bandsaw flare. And this – is a hand plane. Cut short early in life by unforeseen circumstances. This is a hand plane. This is a hand. 6X6 sheet aluminum 8X8 sheet plexiglass, plywood plywood plywood plywood stone. Ire of the neighbours. Ire of the taste. I have a mansion in my mouth.

I didn’t really know what the author was getting at, but I felt that it would be appropriate for me to feel unwell at this time.

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ust stop being a fucking PUSSY and TAKE IT, John says through a wet grin, and pushes a grass-covered ping pong ball in front of Nicole’s face. Nervous glances are exchanged throughout the party as we seek a way to cut the tension, the tightness around our eyes asking when our mandate of politeness is out the window. Nicole is too drunk to recognize the pedestal John constructs perpetually, and we all inwardly sigh with relief. It’s his backyard, after all.

John says babe, get me a drink and his fiancée tells him to get his own. See what I put up with? He says. It’s all a joke, just a joke that we agreed we wouldn’t put up with anymore. But considerate patrons don’t make waves. We avoid aggression like a dreaded figure that looms in the darkness beyond warm porch lights. We dodge and parry its heavy blows in the hopes that it will tire. We smile, say nothing, and hope it hollows out its own grave before someone innocent is buried. Of course, if someone is made a victim we will of course say something but no one has been hurt (and Nicole didn’t really notice) so it’s no big deal and we don’t need to say anything to John right now—It’s his backyard, after all.

If I think I saw John sneak into his sister-in-law’s bedroom at 2am a year ago and I never told anyone, when would have been the appropriate time to say something? I don’t want to make waves until I’m certain, I say. That’s appropriate. The only person who doesn’t care about appropriateness is John, yet we say nothing: we wait until we’re certain.

The game of beer pong eventually falls flat, and John decides we are not worth his time. He leaves the door open for us to hear him laugh at his fiancée and say I don’t give a fuck what they think. Then silence. Relief bounces contagiously through the party. We are deflating, but we stopper the guilt by apologizing for someone else and politely moving on.