The Climb

We eventually dug our way out of the tunnel. It was bound to happen sooner or later. If we worked hard enough, we were bound to be successful. We had talked about it long enough. We had dreamt about it for so many nights that were like days, and we had sung about quietly during the days that were dark.
One night we clawed through all the muddled dreams, through the bright geometric nightmares, through unspeakably complex puzzles all made of dirt and branches and dust. And we did it with our own hands and we did it with our own voices and with our newfound language which easily disturbed and broke apart the thick walls of our established identities that had turned into heavy pieces of rock.

I could feel the heavy force of gravity the entire time – pulling us down, down, down. I saw old symbols carved into the walls as we passed by and kept on moving and many times I slipped on the outstretched forms of a few equations and algorithms for which I had no understanding or explanation.

Something may have helped us along the way, something that sometimes pulled us up, something leading us along through barely visible silver threads. But it had no name and it had no voice so we would never speak of it and we couldn’t have said anything about it even if we wanted to speak. We would never acknowledge its presence even among ourselves.

Our improvised songs travelled out ahead of us like guides, then came back as echoes and told us of the future. We wouldn’t let any force stop us. Not fear, not hunger, not exhaustion. Nothing would pull us back, we wouldn’t let anything pull us back down. Sometimes when I looked ahead I saw the same nothing staring back at me, nothing behind, nothing ahead, nothing below us, nothing above. But I kept on digging, and I kept on singing and I kept on speaking.

I awoke on the other side, naked and red with blood and bruises, encircled by cold and darkness. Bubbles clung to my skin, and the past dissolved behind us in a black puddle.

We all walked away in different directions then and I never saw any of them again. I never even tried to search for them. When I think of them now, they have no faces and they have no names. I am not even sure that they ever existed at all.

Rise of the Old King

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. Slumbering peacefully, the lightest touch would rouse him, incurring the violence we feared and longed for. In our shinning world of straight edges, mirrored glass, blue screens and open source, it was easy to lose track of the other thing, that which lurked in the places we had avoided for so long, the real animal brutality of our own deepest subconsciousness. Emerging from the depths, and not from the skies where we raised our dream machines towards the stars, the old King returned to us from the realms of myth and shadow.

He came from the caves, from the hollow center of our world, a kingdom we had forgotten in our infancy as a race. Somewhere through the ages, in our race for distant suns, we ceased to look down at our own root. The memory of the inner Kingdom faded as the last pages of the world’s most ancient books turned to dust and blew into the cracked walls of crumbling libraries. When the first star was born in a magnetic bottle and its power was harnessed to make the world a fantasy of unending light, we shed that old skin of memory, of dream, shadow, and terror and began the expansion beyond the terrestrial.

In our quest to drink in the light of all the stars our universe could offer, in our dance with infinite space, and a newfound command of movement and time, we found worlds like our own. One in every thousand had the potential to raise life from its mineral rich soil, and on some we found the evidence of civilizations that had flourished and fallen before we had ever even mastered the use of fire. Thus, we learned that there had been life in the universe, but death had won over it.

Among the ruins of tumbled citadels sunk in grey sand dunes beneath the faint glow of a red star we wept. There would be no meeting with the alien other, no exchange of ideas or culture. Our archeological work began. Countless dead worlds came under our scrutiny as the expansion continued. For our biologists there came a few worlds where life was present as rudimentary single celled organisms. We would have to wait and see if our cosmic brethren might someday grow from one of these worlds.

Eventually, the expansion lost its appeal. Our songs had grown cool and calculated, our dreams had flown back to us empty handed. The age of our enlightenment was coming to a close. Our own star was near death for the second time. We had mastered the art of reviving it, yet it was upon this reoccurrence of imminent stellar collapse that we ceased to resist and plunged into darkness. The door to the inner world had been re-discovered in our arctic desert. Perhaps we had forgotten and remembered it many times during our evolution. Now we remembered it again. As our star shone small and white, its planetary nebulae dancing red and blue in the vacuum, the ancient seal was broken.

There would be no brotherhood among the stars, nor any great conquest there. No friends to keep nor enemies to vanquish, until the seal was broken, and the Old King rose from our hollow core with a fearsome bellow. His legions were loosed, his appetites awakened. In the moment of our most supreme boredom, we were catapulted into reckless, euphoric terror. Our Council was crushed, our infrastructure demolished, our stranglehold on light loosened.  The shadows grew longer, music roiled, wild and discordant, as the Old King showed us what it meant, that old word: vanquished.  He walked amongst us once more, drew us into the inner world and gave us gifts both beautiful and terrible. Upon the surface he ruled as he hadn’t for an eternity.

When the new sun was born the impulse to kiss his remorseless, deathless face had to be held at bay. The old King grew weary as it grew strong and we returned him to his sanctuary, singing our farewell. We were naked as we bore him back, our skins stained with the fruits of the vines, the soil from which they grew, the blood and sweat that had been spilled in our orgiastic remembrance. His legions followed and folded peacefully around him like fallen leaves upon a forest floor.  

Missing Words

How many times will I dig through the mud to find those missing words?  Hands cupped, probing the thick dark folds of silken sludge, I move with the instincts of an animal, all seeing in the darkness. Through the buried remains of world and beast I move, finding remnants which in them contain entire galaxies, though I see them as tiny bits of stone and meadow grasses.

Those words, I released them in an undulating pattern of body convulsions, clicking, and rocking spasms. I sent them up into the air with warm breath and panting and so much fire.
There is still more in me. Deep in the caves guarded by secret mistresses in black hooded robes and pierced pink nipples, hidden in such dark places it might take years or lifetimes to find. There the sound swirls, a deep well of red hot amber, swelling and irrepressible.
Palpitating and prepared for all the fingers of every god who can make the journey. Every beast. Every mountain man covered in fur and curls, white powder on his heels. 
If they walk the thousand steps, slay the thousand dragons, enchant the guardians, they will find it there, swimming through the thick pools of combined water and earth, stone and plant.

Those missing words released in a momentary fluttering, they are tucked into small ponds with tiny golden fish, red and yellow stripes along their bellies. Bubbles and little waves sometimes push them to the surface where I can scoop them up and swallow them whole. There are none left for the wild dogs on the days I wade into the waters, naked and just slightly stiff in the cold air.
Always a bitter wind will sweep down off the mountains, rushing towards me, an avalanche of sound and roaring desperation.  How can it tell?  Finding my body as it moves, coming towards me gracefully as a large-winged bird. It covers me in a frozen embrace and races towards the great ice caps of the north.

I dropped my clothes long ago in the meadow. I walk with red painted toes and black stripes marking my breasts and ribs, barely breaking a blade of grass with my weight. My breathing, smooth and shallow, just enough to keep me alive as I search the waters. There are bees darting and iridescent songbirds and cicadas drowning out the noise of other living creatures, creating an undulating drone which corresponds to the water ripples slapping against my white skin.
Do they react to my rushing heat or do we move together? Desire and bubbles and fish and lost words pushing against each other, naked and sweat covered and moving without language.

Thin purple petals are covered in dew, they sparkle in the brilliant light. The wind keeps racing over and past me and my heart runs after it, a high pitched scream following our decent into the caverns below the sea of time. The ache inside bursts out, swelling outwards towards the sea. 

Gripping the wind for comfort, deep and voluminous snakes emerge from the holes in the ground, from my ears, out my mouth. Overcome by scales and hissing, I finally sink to my knees. They suck on the tiny beads of sweat below my breasts and coil around me, bringing me back into time. Where things happen, where words are formed.

Dancing Inside

Julie and Isa walked up to the glass and metal door at the far end of the lobby.  Visiting hours were over at the Santa Cruz county jail and the rows of chairs in the waiting area were empty. The large female officer behind a Plexiglas window at the receptionist counter had directed them to the metal doors in the far corner just past the metal detector. Isa reached out and pressed the cold silver button on the right side of the door.
“Yes?’ asked a deep and husky voice that rode the edge between displeasure and curiosity.
“Hi!”  Julie said with exaggerated enthusiasm that seemed to drip with false friendliness, “we’re here to teach the ‘exercising your power’ class. It starts at six." 
There was a momentary pause as they waited for his response and Isa imagined him shuffling through papers and looking at the list of scheduled visitors.
“We’ll send a guard to escort you in. It’ll be a little while.”
“OK! Thanks!” Julie said into the metal speaker embedded in the wall.
Isa turned to Julie, “Why are you so friendly with them? I hate the people working here, I hate cops.”
Julie shrugged, “They’ll do what we want if we’re nice to them.”
Somewhere inside Isa understood that to be true, but she was too angry to let it resonate and inform her behavior. She held the people there responsible for her own unhappiness, thinking each one of them had somehow contributed to Ray’s felony conviction, sentence and continuing drug and legal problems.
They waited in front of the thick reinforced doors for a while, it was one of the few portals to the cells behind the cinderblock walls where the humans in orange jumpsuits were kept locked away from sunlight.
Isa felt a loathing for every one of the people in dark blue uniforms. She thought they personally benefited from the containment and detention of people and could not contain her dislike when confronted by one of them. 
When a large male guard showed up and opened the door for them Julie once again used her most enthusiastic voice, it was high pitched and seemed to clash with the cold metal and whitish-gray walls of the interior.
“Hi!  How are you?”  she asked.
“Fine,” the man responded quickly, “follow me.”
To Isa, it seemed like he had been sent from a casting agency, fitting every cop stereotype she had ever seen on tv: round stomach, pale face, cropped hair, cold manner. Isa responded in kind, she stood there with a straight face as well, not a glimmer of warmth or friendliness towards the man. 
They followed him through the sterile hallway, the architecture screaming, “INSTITUTION.”  The space was all hard edges, angles, Plexiglas, metal, cold walls, thick doors, light paint that felt devoid of human emotion and compassion. It was the opposite of home, the opposite of love and warmth and rehabilitation.
The halls were well-lit with overheard florescent bulbs, the floors were shiny. On each side of the hallway were rooms with Plexiglas windows. They were unused at the moment and the lights were off, looking to Isa like dark portals.
They passed an inmate in an orange jumpsuit. He was holding a mop, a large trashcan on wheels was close beside him. He stared at them as they passed. Isa smiled faintly.
Julie spoke, “This is our first time here, we’ll need to tell the women what the class is about.”
“OK, I’ll bring you to the women’s dorm first.” 
They turned a corner and entered a darker space which was a very large central room. There were no lights on. Along the edges of the room were the various ‘dorms’ divided by sex. It was like looking into many fishbowls, they could look in and see the inmates. 
In the center of the main room was an unmanned desk. On the left was the room where the men were kept.  It was crowded with triple bunk beds. The room was teeming, men sat on bunks on the floor, men were walking and standing close to the window.
Some men took notice of Isa and Julie as they were led past the room to the women’s cell. Just a few more feet down, past the view of the men’s window was the women’s dorms.  They wore the same style of jumpsuit only in a dark maroon color.
The guard led them into the room and yelled out, “Listen up!  These girls want to tell you about a new class.”
The dorm housed one hundred women and all eyes turned to Isa and Julie. It was the first time Isa had smiled since entering the doors from the parking lot. She smiled, somewhat embarrassed to be the focus of such attention. 
“Hi,” she said a little shyly, “I’m Isa and this is Julie and we’re starting a class tonight called ‘exercising your power.’ It will be a combination of dance, exercise, journaling, writing and music.  If you want to check it out, we’ll be starting in about 10 minutes.”
Isa and Julie left and were escorted to the recreation room.  Isa plugged in the boom box she had brought and Julie lay out the journals and old magazines and glue sticks. The guards had confiscated the scissors. 
Then the women arrived. Isa watched them enter through the door, all of them shuffling in their county issued white socks and plastic sandals.
The single file group of women continued and seem to never end. Isa looked at Julie with amazement. When the last one had entered the room was crowded, there were at least forty women in front of her, almost all of them older than her. They looked to Isa and Julie, waiting for instruction.
Julie started, “So this is going to be a really loosely structured class. We brought music for the women that want to dance, we brought journals and art supplies for those of you who want to write. We want for this to be a creative space, so tell us what you’re into and what we can do more of.” 
Isa turned on the music, a cassette of disco/techno music she had gotten in Italy years before. She and Julie led the women in a free dance, exercise session. Many of the women suggested different moves and Isa looked around at one point and saw that everyone was smiling. 
Together, she thought, they could make it seem like home for a moment, maybe an hour.

Worlds

The body is alive.
How many moons have I in this skin?
Looking out, the night sky is littered with light.
Other stars, other worlds. 
The celestial is within, flowing through each limb. 

The body is alive.
The dark pattern of galaxies, the rings of Saturn illuminated by the sun.

The body is alive. 
A young girl in a bed, naked and reading. 
For the moment of one inhalation she can feel the enormity of the cosmos. 
Space stretching further than the mind could touch.
Endless endlessness
dark and speckled with light and solar flares. 

She looks out the window and sees a palette of greens and shifting leaves. 
Blue skies and the faint wisps of clouds.
Beyond the atmosphere, it is all there, as ephemeral as her own body. 
We shift together.  The body on earth, the earth around the sun, the sun around the galaxy. 
Shifting together as one massive entity.

How blind!
Caught up in shopping trips and career plans and the dinner menu. 
The furthest stars shine, exposing themselves as worlds unto themselves. 

I know them. 
The wormhole is here taking me from one state to the other. 
The mind opens with many doors,
I step through the threshold over and over,
finding myself a little ahead,
sometimes many steps behind.

The body is alive. 
The leaves shine, letting in speckles of light and creating layers of shade and shape. 
I am a universe unto myself, a uterus of creation eating the blood that lines me. 
The stars are fed, they cannibalize the glory.

A Walk Through Eternity

“Eternity is here and now. Right now. As you read these words. It cannot be otherwise.
Eternity is not a very long time, longer than all your memories, longer than you could ever imagine. Eternity is not very slow, something much slower than what we could conceivably endure.
Eternity is not loving or unloving, not hateful or compassionate. Eternity is not reward or punishment.
Eternity is not and cannot be something that will happen someday, something that has happened already.
Eternity cannot happen for to happen something must have a past and a future and eternity can have neither.
Eternity is what is left when past and future are gone.
Eternity can hold no sequences and no trails of cause and effect.
Eternity is complete because it cannot be otherwise.
There is no time to be lost or gained, no time to fulfill lacks or to form wishes. Eternity is simply no time at all.”

I thought of the words on the old book as I stood on the border, looking in. This was not the first time I thought of them. It probably wouldn’t be the last. The words caressed me in ways I didn’t find fully pleasant, something about their implied meaning disturbed me, hurt me somehow, something rose up within me to defend my inherent right to events, my right to chains of causality, my right to the forward motion of time. The something that rose then stayed in my chest, having nowhere to go. And there it lingered and it could only grow as I replayed the words in my mind once again.
There was a great circular labyrinth in front of me and I stood on the edge, right where the narrow path of white stones began. Should I go in? I wondered. Is this the time? The right time? I asked myself in silence. Will there be another opportunity if I were to wait? Will this moment return or will there be another similar enough that it will make no difference?
My mind was clouded with thoughts, tinged with self conscious doubt and human concerns. As I whirled in the middle of pros and cons and other random waves of kinetic brain activity, I felt the moment closing. I felt it moving past me, rushing like a slow inexorable current, slow but definitely moving…drifting through my finger tips as I stood there debating inside my head. The moment was about to move past me like a cold little stream past a heavy rock, unafraid to leave me in its wake on its way to an unknowable destiny, some place where I would never be.
I could feel the three women behind me squirming slightly, their bodies preparing for departure, ready to move up the hill and begin our lunch. Something we had all been waiting for with impatient eagerness. This was not the time for distractions. This was not the time. It shouldn’t be. I felt it passing, all of it. A thread of nothingness on the black current of emptiness, drifting away from me while I stood still, trying to decide. I knew it was leaving now, maybe forever. Soon, even the decision would be gone.

“We may experience Eternity. But this experience won’t be in the past, it wasn’t in the future, it wouldn’t be in our memories of that perfect psychedelic trip into the infinite maelstrom, or that amazing moment of meditation when the walls disappeared and all the people turned transparent like new plastic bags, or that one instant when you and I fell in love and we both knew it as clearly as we knew where we were sitting, as clearly as we knew each other’s names. It won’t, it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the sudden burst of direct Knowledge that came over you that one day, that one day that we can all vaguely remember. Yes, all of us. It has happened, will happen, would happen to all of us. Every single one of us.
It wouldn’t have been in the future, in that bright final day when I finally accomplished the Great Work and I fused with the True Self that I found standing behind the illusion. It didn’t come when I was finally Awake, fully and beyond mistake, or when I completed my spiritual progress through a thousand lifetimes of abnegation on my way to glorious liberation which came and went before I knew it was happening. It didn’t even come the days before my death, when I finally surrendered, fully and completely, when I finally started to Work. It couldn’t have. It didn’t. It won’t. It can’t.
Our experience of Eternity can only be Now. Now as you read this. Now as you hear this. Now as you think this. As you think it in the words that are here written.”

A small bird chirped at me from a nearby tree. A soft breeze blew wisps of hair across my forehead. Without another thought, without a clear sense of purpose, without a final bout with the constant plague of imagined consequences, my foot suddenly took a step forward. My first step into the labyrinth, my first step onto the path. And as my foot took that step, my mind was completely taken by surprise. It had been left out of the decision. It was being taken for a walk, like a small dog that suddenly realizes what is happening as the door closes behind him and the cold air hits its pudgy hairy face. "Oh, I guess I’m doing this.After all that thinking, I guess I’m just going to do it." I said it to myself where nobody could listen, inside the place where nobody could reach.
My mind was shocked, but willing to go. I looked down at the path directly in front of me, at the narrow bit of dirt outlined in gray stones. I remembered myself. I remembered what to do. My right foot touched lightly upon the path, I felt the soft dry earth beneath me, I felt the heel as it made contact with the ground. Each step slow, each movement deliberate and carefully noted.

“The experience will not be soon,
The experience will not come a moment from now,
Just as it didn’t happen a moment ago.
Just as it didn’t happen before you can remember.
NOW.”

Nearly thirty steps in, my mind started to dart around once again, a reinvigorated ping pong ball bouncing on a fully enclosed spherical table inside my skull. "Was this a good time for this? Will they be mad? Did I mess up the space? This is probably taking too much time! They are all waiting to eat. They are all so hungry. I’m hungry myself. This is the last thing they want just now. To be waiting for me while I slowly move through this little maze of rocks. And now I can’t even see them. I can’t even turn around to try to read the thoughts behind their faces."
And then, a calmer voice, another player in my secret private game of bouncing phrases and flying single words: "You’re doing it now, you can’t turn back, you’re in the middle, you made the decision, something made it, something inside of you…so do it as best as you can.And keep on going. There is no stopping now. There is no stopping."
My hands were swinging, the air drifted through my curled fingers like soft kisses in the momentary resting point of a long uncertain journey, deep in the middle of the night when it seems that such a journey can never end (but it always does.) My left knee bent as my whole body prepared for the next step that was surely about to come. I turned the corners carefully, slowly, watching the ground as the outlined path turned back upon itself, watching it curl back to what I had already left behind, to the path of pale which seemed already so distant.
"This just keeps going!" I thought. I put my attention back on my feet. I felt my arcs stretch with the forward movement of heel to toe. The breeze touched me again and tousled my hair. The path was still there. Curving away ahead of me. Ahead and behind and both at once, blurring into a confusing knot where the future and the past twisted themselves around each other.

“Our language, our imagination, our projections, our world of symbols… they have all conspired to give us an image of Eternity as a really long time, a time so long that it might as well be forever, a time where actions stretch forward into an insistent periodic repetition without friction or decay… Eternity as the white washed heaven of the Christians, the gardens and virgins of the Muslims, the complex Bardo chambers of the Tibetans, the rising cosmic steps of the Gnostics, the monstrous and heroic houses of the witches, the many colored visions of the shamans, the fiery dungeons of the ancient and secret God Pan. All of these may in fact be real (or real enough that we may have the pleasure and pain of experiencing them for a very long time) but they are not the experience of Eternity. If something is happening, then it will stop happening eventually. If something some day stops happening, it will eventually come back. As surely as these words will one day disappear. As surely as these words were always written, long before I seemingly made them appear from nothingness onto a blank white page.”

When I first started on my journey, I had heard the voices of the three women on the outside. I was able to imagine how they saw me, how they might see me, how I may have looked from the distant places that were outside. I imagined their thoughts even if they were only my own projections. They kept talking among themselves and I felt safe in their neglect.
But when I was focusing on my feet, somewhere along the way, their voices had dropped away into a kind of strange silence, their voices which were known and unknown, their voices which were real and imaginary. The space was now profoundly quiet, except for the rustling of nearby leaves and the occasional car tires swishing on the asphalt of the road below. It was me and the labyrinth. Me and the elements. Me and my effort. Me and the path.

“But Eternity cannot begin and cannot end. It is not an extension of time. It is itself outside of time. Time cannot reach out to swallow it. It overcomes time and envelops it like an infinite snake that has transcended all restrictions. We are, you and me, right now, in the midst of Eternity, projecting images of illusory lifetimes onto a never changing Clear Void. And the void itself remains the same, no matter how much the illusion changes.
The longing for the experience of Eternity is a struggle that can never be completed. As long as there is a struggle, the goal has not been reached. But if the goal has not been reached, the struggle cannot end. And so, like Achilles, our work will always be just a hair short of the Eternal Turtle that moves just slightly out of our grasp. Ever so close. Ever so far.”

The rings were getting smaller. I turned corners more and more often until I suddenly reached the center which was both more than and less than I had imagined. In the small round heart was a mosaic stepping stone that had small stones and beads upon it. Signs that others had been here, signs that they wished to be remembered even if I would never know their names or their secret agendas.
I closed my eyes. I saw small sparks of electricity playing on the canvas of my eyelids. I raised my hands out to the sides, opening them wide.I then lifted them high above my head and finally brought both hands together in front of my chest. As if prayer. As if there was something there that would listen.

“In the deepest void within you, behind you eyes, behind your thoughts, behind your emotions, behind your secret wishes and desires, behind your bright nightmares and dark dreams, behind the twisting and gyrating thing that you think of as you without ever thinking about it, behind it all you have Eternity. Right now. Your experience of it relies on your ability to maintain your attention steady, to look inside and not be instantly repelled by the frightfulness of pure untouched Nothingness.”

Oooooommmmmm, the sound was not as pure as it has been, not as pure as it could be. I noticed that fact objectively and I held my attention on the sound and my diaphragm, even as the sound cracked slightly. I pulled my stomach in as my rounded mouth continued with the elongated vibration. I stood in the center, feeling the soft breeze, feeling the sun, hearing the sound of birds, feeling quiet, yet electrified and alive. My ego had fallen and I was overcome with a sense of lightness.

“There is a reason why we are here, why we move through time, why we play our parts in this infinitely complex labyrinth of time and space. There is a reason why things happen, why "we" happen as we are happening right now.
The reason is entrenched in that elusive experience of Eternity. When you enter into the heart of the Labyrinth, the inner circle that never changes, the secret chamber that never started and never can end, where there is no past and no future and no semblance of either… there you will understand the reason. It will be as clear as it ever was, as clear as it ever will be.”

My body turned back. I took a step, I raised my leg firmly like a soldier, placing it firmly on the ground. I took another step, a very short one on the tips of my toes. I slowly walked back through the rings, sometimes emphasizing the movement of my hips like a supermodel, other times walking erect and with a sense of formality. Other steps, I glided loosely as if I was about to grow wings from my back. I alternated between movements, improvising each like a chaotic dance with my attention as the thread of consistency. And the more I played, the more alive I felt. My smile increased the more I played and I shed more of myself upon the soil.

“This has happened a million times before.
To you.
This will happen a million times again.
To you.
You have experienced Eternity. Directly. And now you are here, in time. And the part of you that recoiled, the part of you that fell, the part of you that opened that door but only slightly, that part that saw the primordial union that cannot be seen, felt or heard, and ran away, afraid that it might have seen too much, afraid that the precious object of desire would never give it the compassionate pleasure of coming to an eventual stop...”

There was nothing else. My past was a distant part of my imagination, the future was never coming. There was only each single step and the thousands of movements which seamlessly created it . The labyrinth and I were playing. We were lovers in union. Dancers intertwined. Actors upon a stage. Beings in a living void.

“…that part of you knows why we perceive Time and why we imagine that there is a past and there is a future.
At the heart, right now, within you and without you, everything is still, quiet and outside of Time, beyond Time, around Time. Here in the innermost chamber we can truly say without any hesitation:
Nothing ever has happened
Nothing ever will happen.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.”

The Boys And The Path

The sound of twenty small plastic wheels on pavement shook the narrow park path. Like a deep, elongated rumble, the sound traveled like a steady thunder that hid in the cloudless sky. They traveled in a herd this early Sunday afternoon, these five young men, all thin and lean and wearing baggy pants. They moved as they did almost every other day, together, in a pack that shook the earth with their sound. Five skateboards moved in near-unison along a tight curve in the cement path, a bend in the meandering walkway that cut through the city park for miles in each direction, going past small lakes and barely-blooming cherry blossoms and a circular equestrian field. Though the path was mostly dotted with pedestrians, the boys rode it with ferocity, unyielding in their speed. It was their highway, a lane between the bright fields of green grass and low shrubs.
On either side of the path and all around them were couples on picnic blankets and young kids chasing after plastic balls and groups of people in their early twenties lounging beneath the open sky. It was a warm sunny day, an unusual day for a city famous for its fog. And though the people they passed basked in the sunshine, the boys paid no attention to weather. It was jeans, a T-shirt, a hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap off to the side in the sun or fog. Their lives were not ruled by the sun like the girls in their neighborhood, the girls that lay out in small bikinis when the sun made an appearance and hid when it didn’t. And they would look at the girls as they rode by, but they had no patience to sit and talk.
Like soldiers they combed the city. Skating alleyways and metal rails and stairs they came across. The people out strolling were merely obstacles. If someone could not hear the roar of their cumulative wheels, then they would shout, and soon the person would feel the impending doom of five skateboards at their back and jump off the path at the last second. Sometimes they would hear a yell fade into the distance as they skated on, someone who had not been quite fast enough, someone had not understood their urgent need for speed.
On this stretch of path, there were no obstacles, no couples holding hands or young teenage girls laughing in a tight cluster. As far as they could see, a long stretch of concrete lay before them, open and inviting. A warm wind rattled the tree tops in the distance, long, tall pines that had grown for years. Twenty wheels rolled on, carrying with them the eagerness of escape, the ecstatic impulses of five young men to explode outwards, moving ever-forward. There was no time for the girls in bikinis and the little daisies they offered. No time to admire the colors of the rainbow they had vaguely heard about. No time to be still.

Closing The Door

The house was always bathed in a yellowish hue, but this couldn’t be blamed on the light bulbs. It was the inhabitants of the chamber, the vermin clothed as humans, the sticky sludge that resembled normalcy, the fluttering shadows that projected life, they were the ones that gave the house its distinctive yellow shade.
The two inhabitants looked like a couple. One acted like a pretty girl with school books and thin tank tops. The other one seemed like a skinny guy wearing an oversized suit. That is what they were but they were also something else.
She tried to conceal it in the corners of her heart, in the caves where secrets hid and rested, where they spinned their wool and catched blood-filled mosquitoes with eyes that had long ago been sewn shut. She tried to hide it all away, but blood always found its way out under the door.
The gray cloud above her head darkened her perspective. The steel ball shackled to her ankle ate away at her voice and jingled with each step that she took on the pavement. The pain was written on her face.
The disease dressed itself up in purple spots and lay quietly on his skin. The house smelled of vinegar and burnt tin foil and the books absorbed the smoke like the thick leaves of a jungle.
It was just a thin string that kept her from going insane, an invisible thread that tied her to the world she once thought of as unique, as solid and real. She could only escape from her secret knowledge when sleep overcame her and sent her off into lands unknown. Then she could forget about her present troubles.
But at the moment, she was wide awake.
She could not describe the nature of the impulse that pulled at her will like invisible strings raising a wooden puppet. She couldn’t speak about it clearly, but she knew that she smoked from the hands of red demons. Disguised as the glass vase for plastic roses, hidden in the product of water and fire and metal and coca leaves that combined into a surge of power, there was a brief full body orgasm that could instantly color her green and leave her wailing without tears, hungry with no need for food.
She smoked from the bumpy skin. She heard the bells of their choir and sat still while the earth spun and her stomach took a ride on the roller coaster that always ended twenty seconds later. Then she stood in line once again. She called for the conductor, she looked for the tubes and the white rocks and the dirty spoons. And again she took the ride.
And when it was over, when she was on her knees and drooling and looking for the foil, she took it again. The same rusty car, the same plastic seat, the same eternal loops that held her with hard plastic handcuffs.
Now there was concrete and tar and little else. She wished to move in the warm contours of soil and sand that now only lived in brief dreams of nearly forgotten chambers. She dreamed of woolen rugs and tapered yellow candles, crushed slivery leaves and stone bowls of water. But this was concrete, hard and unmoving. And there was no easy way to escape.
She followed her body into the yellow room and found the spoons and the powder and the carton of baking soda. She wanted to make rocks from powder and hear the choir and shake with the bells. She tried ‘til 4am until the small bag was empty and every ill-cooked rock had traveled in wisps of smoke into her lungs.
She called for more in the shower and spun as the water drenched her naked body. Later, she sat on the patio, surrounded by dying plants and a created world that made no sense anymore, under the night sky that felt more ugly and brown than she had ever seen it.
She sat and heard the bells. That’s when she decided to go out.

Now she stood at the corner, indecisive about the direction she should go in: south, north, east…Did they all lead to the same place?
The streets ahead were gray slate and drab and littered with old sandwich wrappers and discarded paper cups. The printed slogans drifted away on the wind, forgotten like the half eaten French fries. The gutters were a collage, a temporary museum to the unwitting Mexican artist that had unknowingly constructed it. The dark roads were long, each one of them marked by sign postings and shiny buildings that reached to the heavens in false praise.
Clouds dispersed in the wake of their unmoving weight. The clouds moved slowly. It seemed to her that they moved without care, without emotion. Their form merely shifted and scattered by the merciless force of the wind.
A sharp edge played with the tension in her back. It applied to her inner radio the mute song of a 90 degree angle. It talked in the only way it could.
She still gazed in the four directions. A bus bearing a hundred Asian immigrants passed by her, rustling her hair. Taxi cabs passed by as well, one after the other. They were only blurred colors and shapes. She saw them as unsentimental players in a hidden drama that was just a few steps beyond her. They came and went on command, the drivers, their cars, the lights. She wished she could swim with them, a sparkling fish in their school. But she felt distant from it all, she felt like she didn’t belong where she had once been and she didn’t belong where she was. She simply didn’t belong anywhere.
She reacted with a grimace when a tall woman in a nice dress passed by talking on a cell phone. She smiled at a short Mexican worker selling strawberries in the corner. Acting on pure impulse, she drifted like a kite caught in the clutches of a silent hurricane.
She knew that she was walking right to the edge between pure realization and final death. Then came an elongated honking horn, the stretched out music of a car in flight. It flew towards her, found itself caught up in the coils of her intensities, pulsing with the cold movement of her secret mechanical life.
You are here, she heard in the distance. The cries of bats and ocean waves crept in, the screech of old brakes and country songs curled together like strands of DNA. Distortion like nothing she had ever heard before. Teetering, she allowed the weight of the building to hold her.
A large metal door was half open. There was noise coming from inside. Inside was outside, and there was no safety anywhere, so she followed herself into the open doorway, squinting at the darkness that enveloped her.

A college-aged boy in a white T-shirt and jeans stood in front of a crowded room. His round Asian face looked towards the white pull-down screen in the center of the warehouse wall. An unused microphone rested in his left hand. The room was dim, the only light source came from the projection itself, which was a picture of the same boy, in another place, another time.
She leaned against the wall looking up, looking at him looking at himself. In his flat calm face, she could also see the contours of her own. She wanted to see it and it was there.
The boy in the photo was in a light filled greenhouse. His hard city mask had fallen and he beamed into the camera, holding a red ripe tomato in each hand. In the dark room the boy looked at a boy that was lost in the past. He could not recognize himself. The face that appeared to be his own was that of a stranger.
The boy in the room had been overtaken by death. He stared with eyes blinking. He looked, searching, searching for the self he now knew.
The projected photograph was a sudden flash…something used to be different. For a moment, maybe as quick as the snap of the shutter, he was different, he had been different. He smiled because of tomatoes. His fingers were dirty and his car was useless and all his friends and family were miles away. He was no one to the soil, no one to the trees. But he coaxed life from a seed. And life was given. Birth happened, and the tomatoes were proof.
The photo which he stared at now with strange curiosity, was a reminder of another life, one that faded the moment he left the greenhouse.
A tarot card drifted to the floor. She saw it but the boy didn’t see it, he didn’t feel its subtle wind. It lay face up. A skeleton in armor trampled everything underneath him with the strength of his horse. The flag of death waved in the red sky. A fallen king was lying next to his forgotten gold crown, two children wept at the feet of the white stallion.
The boy with the microphone did not see the fluttering death flag beside his own head. The boy could not recognize himself. But she recognized herself in his projected picture.
The stench of her physical death would take years, but this was just as foreign. It was like looking at her own corpse, the remains of what once was. She had been like the boy in the picture. She could still remember.
Her wide open eyes looked at the being that was left behind. The being had been forgotten, flowering just for a moment. Open and light-filled and caught forever. Caught for a moment that would always exist.
Death came uninvited.
Death came when she began to think, when she began to be “herself.”
Death happened.
A moment of sudden life had exploded out of the rotting experience of a machine, and that moment lived on in the photo. It lived in this dim room, lived in the one moment when she allowed herself to watch. It was the reminder that flowers can bloom in the mud, that a burst of lighting can cause a fire.
There were no words for her sudden realization. No words that could describe the bliss of creativity and birth. Nothing could explain the smile and the love of two tomatoes and the energy of a being spilling forth.
She recognized herself where the boy did not.

It was almost dawn when she looked in the mirror and saw a strange woman from a bleak distant land. A woman in the clutches of a force she had no language for. A stranger from a parallel world, a whore, a student, a woman…all could be possible, all were placed before her for the choosing, like doors leading in very different directions. There was some of each resulting character in her eyes.
The bumpy hands were tight around her ankles, the choir sang without rest. That is when she decided that this would not be her path. She would not surrender to the demons that tried to pull her down. She closed the door and sealed it shut.
She felt them call for many days. The invisible creatures kissed her ears and played in the corners of her mind. She buried herself in books, she buried herself in the open sunlight, she buried herself in a burrowed memory of a boy she would never meet. Working this way, she washed herself clean of the powder. And the call of the demons dimmed so much as to resemble silence. And the silence was just the sound of cars and of old friends who would forever forget to call.

The Chariot And The Wheel Of Fortune

The desert landscape stretched out on either side of the black tongue of road in expanses of flat tan earth and distant purple peaks interrupted by the occasional sequoia. The old Dodge Dart rumbled along that line, a streak of pale banana yellow with chrome fenders and black wheels and white letters spinning so that they were a white line racing around and around on the surface of dark rubber.
Inside it was difficult to hear the radio over the roar of the air outside engulfing and rattling the old vehicle as it sped along. It was now picking up mostly static anyway. With one hand on the wheel, Daniel reached for the silver knob of the radio tuner, a burning cigarette poised between his index and middle finger so that he manipulated the dial between his thumb and ring finger. More static rose, some talk, then he tried the AM and at last clicked it off.
The wind roared in through the open window and he put the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled and switched hands so that he could let one arm rest on the open window and the other could cling to the wheel. His black hair rose in a wave at the crown of his head, rippling in the chaotic current of air. A green rectangle appeared on the right shoulder and grew in size as he approached it. It informed him in neat white letters that Phoenix was 250 miles away.
The sun was beginning to descend behind those distant peaks leaving a purple and orange band in the sky. He estimated that in another three or four hours he would arrive. And then what? Well he would get a room, of course, and then dial the most precious number in the little black book residing in the back pocket of his blue jeans. Or maybe he’d just find his way straight to the address that was written in wavering blue ink under the phone number, all of which was scrawled under the name “Sue” on the first page marked by the tab labeled “Q, R, S”. He would park against the curb in front of a house with a lawn of white quartz rock glittering under the moonlight and make his way up the Astroturf carpeted front walk. With the hand that was now on the steering wheel, he would then rap on the door and there would be shuffling inside and the sound of muffled voices as her grandparents wondered who it could be. Then the door would open a crack and blue eyes would peer out and widen in disbelief and the door would be opened wider and Sue would cry,
“Daniel!” and then she would at last know that he loved her because he had crossed the Mojave to find her.
As the desert air cooled he took a last drag off the cigarette and dropped the glowing butt out the window so that it hit the asphalt and showered tiny red sparks into the darkness.
The sun finally disappeared entirely and purple night wrapped itself around the lone vehicle cruising over the endless road. Now he turned on the headlights and they illuminated only the small patch of highway ahead of him. Chilled by the impending desert night, Daniel rolled the window up, and it was then, just as it closed, that there was a tremendous POP! And a thunka, thunka, thunka, and he had to grab the wheel with both hands to maintain control of the Dart and pull it over onto the dusty shoulder of the road.
He sat quietly with both hands on the steering wheel after the engine had been turned off. The silence cloaked him under the emergent twinkling of stars and deepening of night. The full knowledge that the spare tire wasn’t there crept over him and he continued to sit still feeling the vision of Susan fade away to be replaced by a small nagging creature; a little thing that was formless and faceless and caused goose bumps to form on his forearms. A thing called dread. Dread, bathed in isolation and the splendor of an awakening black night.

Trouble With Machines

“Hello?”
“Hey Lyd, it’s Yos, how you doin’?”
“Okay, how are you?”
“All right, all right. You at home?”
“I’m driving, I’m almost home.”
“Listen, call me when you get home, I need help to email a picture…I need to send a customer a photo of a machine.”
“I’m pulling up to the house now, are you in front of the computer?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, let me just turn the computer on, give me a second. I’ll call you back in a minute.”
“Okay”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”

She turned off the car and opened the truck’s door. The residential road was quiet and dark, she had parked at the slight curve in the road beneath a large pine tree, her usual spot. On her right was the large barren hillside that led to a row of houses a couple hundred feet above her, to the left of the parked car was a row of houses that were mostly dark. Though they were far apart, a couple street lamps illuminated the road with their yellow light. She crossed the empty street and walked along the side of the house. Her eyes adjusted to the dark space in between her house and the neighbor’s on the right. As she approached, she kept her eyes fixed on the space beneath her neighbor’s stairs, looking for movement. It was only a couple steps from her path and in the dark, she always felt a couple seconds of vulnerability while she waited for the motion sensor to flip on the side light. Always slightly paranoid, she looked into the shadows, looking for lurkers with knives…men who had studied her daily habits and determined the best place to hide and wait. As usual, no one jumped from the shadows and she pushed the latch of the wooden gate. It opened to a backyard of concrete. Here too, it took a couple steps for the motion detector to register her movements and here too, she looked to the corners along the left side of the fence, near the towering eucalyptus trees just beyond the fence to the farthest point of the yard from where she stood. A couple seconds later, as she walked towards the door, light above it flooded the yard and there was no one hiding; the shed was undisturbed, the trash cans stood as they always did. She walked to the door and she fumbled with her keys for a moment, looking through a dozen to find the correct one for the top lock. She turned the key to the right and then put the same key into the bottom lock, turning this time to the left. She pushed on the door with her foot, a habit she had recently developed, and the door opened. She found a different key with help from the light, she pushed it in and turned it to the right. The door opened and she was assaulted by the usual smell of an indefinable source. It was a smell she had noticed her first night in the small studio, not entirely unpleasant, but slightly perfumed and foreign and definitely not coming from anything she had brought. After months of cleaning and incense, its source was still a mystery, perhaps coming from some of the building supplies, but maybe a smell filtering in from the garage that shared her wall. She flipped on the light, closed and locked the door and turned on her computer. As she waited for the computer to light up, she lit a match and ignited a gas burner on the stove. She filled her small orange pot with some water and set it upon the circle of flames.
The computer was ready. She picked up her small red cell phone and she dialed the numbers.

“Hello?”
“Hey Yos, it’s me.”
“Hey Lyd.”
“You use yahoo right? To send email?”
“Yeah”
“Okay, are you looking at the page right now.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you see where it says ‘compose mail?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, click on that.”
“Okay”
“Do you see where it says, ‘attach files’?”
“Yeah”
“Click on that.”
“Okay”
“See those five lines and it says ‘browse’ on the right?”
“Yeah”
“That’s where you need to go look for the pictures. Where are the pictures?”
“I put them in a memory stick.”
“Is that still attached to the computer.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, go to ‘my computer,’ do you see the little icon for the memory stick?”
“No”
“Are you sure it’s attached? Because you need to copy the pictures from the memory stick to the computer. They’re not in the computer automatically, you need to put them in.”
“Ahh, I see. I saw them in here yesterday. I don’t know where they are now. Let me see.”
The line was quiet while he pressed buttons.
“What are you doing now?” she asked.
“I’m just looking.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know…ah…no…maybe…no…
“Are you sure they’re not in a section called ‘my pictures’? Did you look in there?”
“Yeah, give me a minute. Ahh, let’s see….maybe…no….ahhh….
Silence again.
“I saw them in here yesterday.”
“Did you see them in the camera or in the computer?”
“I saw them in the computer.”
“How did you get the pictures from the camera to the computer?”
“I put them in a memory stick.”
“You put the memory stick into the camera?”
“The memory stick is the camera.”
“What?”
“This particular camera is a memory stick, it has memory.”
“I know cameras have memory, but…”
“This particular camera is a memory stick.”
“I don’t see how you could get the pictures from the camera to the computer without a cord.”
“It’s a memory stick.”
“What do you mean? Where is the memory stick?”
“Forget the memory stick! I saw them in here yesterday!” He stopped talking and started clicking tabs in the computer.
“Do you understand that just because you hook up a camera into the computer, with a memory stick or with a cord, you still need to copy the pictures into the computer itself. When it’s hooked up to the camera, it’s just like borrowed information, it’s not inside the computer yet”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it. Let me see…..”
“Do you really get it?”
“Yeah. It get it” he said in a dismissive tone. “Okay…maybe….”
She held the phone partially away from her ear, trying to let the energy of frustration roll through her.
“Hey, hold on a minute” he said.
She heard him on the other line… “hey Mike, how are you?” He sounded a little far away. “Hey look Lyd, I’ll have to call you back.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah, bye.”

She closed the phone and suddenly remembered the water she put on earlier. The water was boiling rapidly and she turned off the flames and dunk a tea bag into the pot directly.
She felt a bit like a prisoner. She needed to do some other things in the house, but didn’t want to be interrupted with his phone call, so she waited. Cleaning some dishes that were piled in her sink, picking up a couple clothes she had left on the floor. Fifteen minutes went by. She picked up the cell phone again and called him.

“Hello”
“Are you still on the phone?”
“Yeah, listen, don’t worry, I think I can figure it out myself.”
“Okay”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”

She felt a bit frustrated, suspended in the air when she was ready to jump. So that was what it felt like. She recognized the part her father was playing. She had played it many times before. Not clear, not listening, unable to take advice instead of doing her own thing. Stubborn and proud. She sipped her tea. A part of her felt like she had just wasted her time. Another part felt that she had just been held up to a mirror, her exact actions illuminated for her in sharp relief. A photo of a machine. She could see it clearly and study it. If she chose to pause long enough. If she chose to look. If she chose to work with what she saw. So simple and yet so hard to grasp. Step by step, no matter how simple, no matter how small. She sipped again from her tea and wondered how long it would take for her to forget.