The Book of Instructions

 

I.

They came quietly, the way ghosts or debts come—by mail. Cream-colored envelopes, sometimes pale blue, often typed, sometimes handwritten in a strange elegant cursive that curled like a vine around my name. They came every few weeks, regular but never predictable. Each one with a task. Not a demand, not

a favor. A suggestion that arrived like a soft imperative.

    "Take 12 photographs of birds—any kind, any place."
    "Write 6 poems about someone you love."
    "Make 10 notes about old memories, even if they're false."

The return address was always the same—an artist in another city, a name I’d once seen footnoted in some underground catalog of collective performance pieces. We had met once briefly, I think, in a train station or at an opening for someone else’s work, her hair coiled like wire, her smile something quick and

technical. But now, we spoke only through these one-sided correspondences, and I did as I was told. Not because I had to. Because I wanted to. Because something in the ritual thrilled me.

I took the photos of birds—crows outside the hospital, a heron knee-deep in garbage water, pigeons under a freeway underpass glowing in dawnlight. I wrote the poems, some real, some fabricated to fill the quota. I peeled the scabs of memory open and scribbled whatever I found inside. I did it all, every absurd,

holy, useless instruction. I placed them in my trapper keeper, labeled with my name and the number she had assigned me: PARTICIPANT #74.

And then, nothing.

II.

Weeks passed. Then months. Silence.

At first I thought I’d simply missed the final instruction. That maybe I was supposed to wait in stillness, a test of patience or trust. But more time passed, and the silence stopped feeling profound and began to rot inside me like old bread.

So I went looking for her.

Her address was a crumbling apartment building at the edge of an industrial district—now half-razed, soon to be developed into offices for green tech startups. The buzzer didn’t work, so I went around back, climbed the rusted fire escape, and found the door unlocked. Inside, the apartment was abandoned, but

not empty. It had been left like a shrine.

III.

The walls were covered with charts, diagrams, piles of folders. Index cards with names. Dozens of binders, colored and labeled like grade-school relics. It smelled of glue, dust, and burnt coffee. Her mail had stacked in slow sediment near the door. Her mattress was rolled up and tied with string. But what struck

me most—what dropped my heart into my feet—was that my trapper keeper was there, placed neatly among the others.

I recognized it instantly. Purple with neon lightning bolts. I opened it and flipped through my photographs of birds, the poems I had written (some of them still made me blush), the ten memories written on yellow lined paper in my unsure hand. It was all there, unchanged. But it wasn’t mine anymore. Or perhaps it

had never been.

IV.

That’s when she arrived—the other woman. She barged in with angry eyes, a nervous energy in her jaw.

"You too?" she said.

I nodded.

"She told me I was part of a grand piece. She told me I was helping her construct a web of meaning. I did everything she said. I sent my binder. Never heard from her again."

She looked at me, trembling. Not with rage, not exactly. More like betrayal shaped as fury.

I went to the wall. Her binder was there. I took it down, handed it to her like a ceremony.

"Here," I said. "Don’t be afraid. I found yours. And mine. And many others. And now I understand something."

She watched me. Her rage was cooling, morphing into something else—reluctant wonder, maybe.

"These pieces—we made them, yes. But we didn’t author them. She did. She’s the artist. The true creator. We were her hands, her instruments. Vessels."

She blinked.

"And that’s not a betrayal. That’s a gift. We were invited to participate in something larger than ourselves. Something without edges. And I can’t imagine a better kind of grace."

V.

We sat in the quiet hum of the abandoned apartment, flipping through pages. Notes, drawings, artifacts of invisible rituals. How many others had received her instructions? How many had obeyed? How vast was this project? Hundreds? Thousands?

There were folders labeled in Polish, Arabic, Nahuatl. Some had been mailed from jungle villages, some from Manhattan lofts. One was bound in goatskin. One was nothing but a USB stick taped to a piece of cardboard.

The deeper we looked, the more impossible it became to grasp the scope. She had built a world inside this modest apartment. A museum of participatory obedience. A cathedral of small gestures. A silent archive of human willingness.

I stood by the window and watched the sky turning orange with industrial dusk.

"This is art," I said. "Not because it is beautiful or even complete. But because it changed me. It turned my life into a sequence of rituals. It made me pay attention."

She nodded, quietly now.

And somewhere behind that orange sky, I imagined the artist herself—maybe sitting in a new apartment in another city, watching someone else obey. Watching the net grow larger.

I left the binder on the floor like an offering. Then I walked out. I didn’t lock the door.

Where We Had Come From

We lost track of ourselves in the desert
slowly becoming invisible
under the warm light
of the sun and the stars.

For years, we had traveled the blue roads
creating new dreams each day and each night
pulling poems from red arching rocks,
from steep peaks of purple and forgotten giants.

We came to realize
that it would all disappear
all that we knew,
even our bones
even our dreams.

The many unanswered questions multiplied,
piling on top of each other like leaves
like dust on old memories
photos stored in tiny boxes.

We tried to imagine the stories
which would emerge from the chaos,
tried to hold on to the signal
that seemed eager to float away
to leave with the fading light.

We were whole for one moment
one brief instant caught and held in a passing blink.
For a flash we saw
and we sent out what we saw
out on the night breeze
hoping it would become a song,
a dream, a painting, a map;
far away from the big desert,
under the warm light
of the sun and the stars.

Our project unraveled,
and brought us back where we had come from,
back to the very start
where there was only black chaos
and blinking sparks that came from the darkness
and went nowhere.

Then I stripped naked and danced.
That was all that was left
for me to do.
To dance freely
one last time,
under the warm light
of the sun and the stars.

The Whole and the Chaos

The Whole eventually emerged from the Chaos

And it came out naked and bright

And slippery.

It was built on poems and manifestos

a blend of colorful paint

and crumbled balls of newspaper.

 

I stood far away

And I watched it moving

somewhere in my mind.

I felt the breeze of its movement

And I heard the sound

of rustling leaves overhead

and I felt my heart beating

more and more slowly.

 

Chaos slipped back into the shadows

like a wave that slides back into the ocean.

I could sense its low hum,

I could feel the crackling of its low song.

 

And the Whole grew bigger

brighter as it moved,

pulling in more and more words

lines of poems danced around it

forming rings so large they sprouted hurricanes

and all the cities were drenched,

pounded by drops of thought

and walls of words

and they were all made new again

and slippery

almost naked again as they once were

in their gray color.

Waves

when she stopped making art,

she became angry,

anxious, irritable, resentful.

she would watch him draw horned beasts,

using only red and black pen on a white canvas.

she would watch him outside a window

swirling acrylics on metal surfaces.

she would browse through her old drawings,

or find a stray red pencil in a drawer.

what had once moved through her?

and where did it go?

early on, when she had felt the first wave  

she got derailed

trapped by her own need for affection

for acceptance, for love.

she abandoned everything to move in with a stranger

she left for the ocean.

every warning was ridiculed,

she surrounded her thoughts with an iron fence.

her body was burdened,

her lungs were tight and closed,

and the thing that once moved through her

became so small as to be invisible.

she thought about it for years.

sometimes she attempted a small drawing,

but she had lost trust in her own hands.

she judged the lines before they were complete,

saw herself as another would see her,

as another might see her.

later she fled,

or was cast aside.

she escaped the narrow path

of needles and crime,

lies and delusion,

denial and fear.

she salvaged what lay just inside the dumpster

and left the rest

to become a vague memory.

and she found herself in a room,

staring out a window.

how long had it been since she drew?

he said to her:
'if you want to make art, make art.'

and she stared at him

with tears in her eyes.

she thought she had to wait

for something to happen,

for a burst,

for an explosion,

for shapes to break open the gates

and explode onto the page.

she watched him standing in the sun

just outside the window.

he never noticed her there,

just a few feet away.

the canvas was on the ground on a blue tarp.

he let the colors mingle,

then would occasionally move

one side of the canvas or another.

After a while

she went back to her room.

Hidden Patterns

on the floor was the poet
young women at his side
kissing his fingers
without rest
and the stars above
flooded the night

he kept his mind on the words
with great discipline
creating and re-creating
the hidden patterns
and putting them into
larger constructions,
organizing their strange gifts

the women lay flowers at his toes
and sent their sweet breath towards him
with messages and secrets

he inhaled the chaotic structures
that came from them
and began to cry
transforming the stars,
the kisses
onto pages
in his never ending book
full of questions
and vast pregnant gaps

Impulse

Mood is my body

manifesting itself

through subtle levels

too light to touch

too faint to hold.

The remains of my lost thoughts

fall without making a sound

without leaving a trace.

How do I speak

of harmony

of light

and the process of the rose?

I have come through

twisted from the labyrinth

emerging fully formed

from the tunnels of time.

It is all a colorful pattern

yet fearsome and dark,

a strange loop

where words are arranged

in spiraling currents

a sequence discarding logic

a structure without

a stable frame.

No need here

for a physical body

just a seed

containing the process

and the freedom

that brings it life.

I remain

an unknown mass

a life impulse

a lustful fountain

a fading thought.

Starlife

There was still some life left in the central star, a pulsing red heart close to extinction. The flame soon to be extinguished, the warmth soon to bleed out into the cold expanse, and yet there was still some life left. Enough to nourish a dragon and send it out with a message.

"Tell them that I was here. That I lived, that I gave life freely for billions upon billions of years. That my children grew up around me and became other than they were until at last they needed me no more and moved on. Tell them that I too changed and changed again until I was turned inside out with change. Tell them that I am not gone, but that I have gone on. Or tell them nothing and simply fly, my last creation before I am the absence. Now go swiftly, or I will not be able to help taking you with me as I collapse."

The dragon shot out like a spark into the great beyond. When it was a safe distance away it stopped to watch the heart from which it was issued turning black.

Flowers

It started as a game, a simple game that they played on Sundays between cups of coffee and blueberry muffins. The endless stream of faces, familiar and new, would ebb and flow and they would take their fun as they could, here and there, in seconds, in minutes, in half hours of down time, moving chess pieces on a board that sat on top of the case displaying crumb cake, cookies, and croissants. Some of the regulars took an interest.
“Whose winning?” they would nod to the board before placing their order.
“He is.”
Or
“She is.”
They would say, never revealing that it was impossible to tell. They each cheated frequently, re-arranging pieces when the other's back was turned, or moving knights like bishops and bishops like queens as though it were natural, sometimes trading color mid game. If a customer paid using a two dollar bill the entire board would have to be reset. If someone asked to break a hundred both players could reclaim a lost piece. The game never ended.
Sun filtered through the dusty windows, crowds of friends gathered at the mismatched tables and chairs. Lonely souls sank into the worn cushions of a maroon couch turning the pages of paperback novels whose covers had been torn off. Men and women dressed in filthy sweatpants, tattered sweaters and knitted gloves with the finger tips cut off, came in to beg or buy with change obtained through begging.

*   *   *

She liked the timbre of his voice, the unruly curls atop his head, the way he gracefully navigated the crowded space behind the counter, never missing a beat. He liked her crazy laugh, the flowers she wore pushed behind one ear, the way she looked deeply into the eyes of whoever was speaking, as though they were the entire world. Sometimes that was  him.
He opened and she came in an hour later. He left after noon and she left an hour later. Once he thought of staying until she clocked out, but the only excuse he could think of was to continue the game. Then it might actually end, so he left.

*   *   *

Sundays came and Sundays went. Crushed leaves littered the sidewalk and were carried in by the scuffling of shoes like jagged orange and yellow confetti. Leaves gave way to rain thumping on the windows, leaving streaks in the dust. Umbrellas lingered in the stand by the door, sometimes forgotten, red, black, yellow, gray.
Eventually the windows were washed clean by the rain and the sun grew meekly brighter, polished by a crisp wind that begged buds out of the naked arms of the tiny trees outside. And still the game went on, hundreds broken, two dollar bills accepted.
One afternoon he was close to winning. He began to evade the game, too busy with foaming milk and shots of espresso, restocking cups, lids, wooden swizzle sticks, and napkins. Tables long neglected suddenly received his orange scented devotion as he carefully polished their scratched wooden surfaces.
Every old lady who passed through the door filled his heart with hope. Surely, in that oversized handbag within the folds of  an overly somber pocket book his salvation had arrived. At last a blue haired woman saved the day and the board was reset.

*   *   *

There were excuses for touching, Brushed fingers as a cup was passed, hands on shoulders as one slipped by the other in the narrow space, a hug to say hello or goodbye. Buds turned to blooms of pink and an idea developed in his mind, a perfect reason to see one another outside of work.
He would take her to see the forest of cherry blossoms in the park, invite her to meet him outside the tea garden. They could walk, get caught in a spring shower, huddle together under a pavilion where he could slip his hand around her waist.
And then one, day, before he could utter those words, rehearsed to ensure perfectly casual delivery, calculated to be an enticing command rather than a question,  “Meet me in the park in the morning.”, the schedule was changed.

*   *   *

He was fated to come in as she was leaving. Though their paths crossed, there was no time, no in for those words, just a wave then absence. The game continued slowly, one move each every Sunday. But it was more than a game now, it was a token of affection that was growing colder, more distant as the words died unspoken and the petals drifted from the blossoms to the earth and blew away into gutters. Green leaves sprang up in their place.
One week she was out sick. The board sat untouched, collecting a fine layer of dust. Someone, midweek, sensing the abandonment, put the board and pieces away. The following Sunday she returned to find that the game was over.

*   *   *

She was strangely distant as they crossed paths at the door. It was the fist truly hot day, and she murmured something about Baker Beach and slipped away down the sidewalk after he asked her,
“What’s up doc?”
It felt so cold, the way she barely answered, like a ghost, the way her body moved, shrinking in to avoid accidental touching, as though they were strangers. His mind fumbled with numb confusion as he watched her depart.
When he found the display case neatly polished and the chess board and pieces gone, a hollow feeling seized him. Had she done it? Had she given up? If not, did she think that he had? Did she think hat he would quit their game?
He was in agony between cups of coffee, blueberry muffins, and feigned smiles. He broke hundreds and accepted two dollar bills, the endless stream of faces familiar and new trailing off into an empty Sunday night. He closed the store alone and walked home, his heart feeling as though it were being wrung like a rag by a washer woman in a depressing black and white film.
It was Allegro Non Troppo without music, cartoons, or jokes. It had started as a game, a simple game they played on Sundays. But when the game died, what was underneath it was lost too.

*   *   *

That night he dreamed. As the two dollar bill was passed to him over the register he thought of resetting the board and looked at the empty display top. In that desperate sad moment, instead of shutting the register drawer doling out change and smiling vacuously at the next in line, he doled out the change, took off his apron and announced:
“I’m sorry everybody. I have to close up right now, I’m very sorry.”
He jumped over the counter and ushered them out into the late afternoon sun. He locked the door, ran home, found his car on the street collecting club advertisements and got in. He drove to Baker Beach and found her sitting there alone on the sand in a striped bikini, flower tucked behind her ear. He sat beside her, looked her in the eyes and said,
 “Bishop to King 4.”
She smiled. The panoramic golden gate stretched out behind her, breeze softly ruffling her hair, sun sinking into the golden pacific.