The Motel Room

I stood beneath a white four-legged canopy, content that a bit of canvas was blocking the full force of the summer sun. In front of me was Kevin, the customer who always wore politically slanted marijuana related T-shirts.
“Do you work for an advocacy group? I always see you wearing those political marijuana shirts.”
He looked down a bit startled, unsure of what he wore.
“Oh yeah, I used to when I lived in DC.”
“Cool.” I said nodding, “do you know Craig Reinarman, from Santa Cruz?”
He looked into my eyes deeply for several seconds then I saw something flash.
“Yeah, I do. He does some good work, has written some good books.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding again, “His sociology class really altered the course of my life.”
There was silence between us and we looked at each other. Then another customer walked up to the table laden with breads. I turned my attention on the new person, smiling help. I smiled at Kevin while I packed up pretzels for the other woman at the table and he walked away towards the chocolate seller.

Next week was the same. Another sunny Saturday shielded by the white canopy. Kevin came up to the small booth and bought a loaf of bread. I asked him a question, something so simple it slipped through the grasp of memory. When I was waited for his response, he started to nod, his head bobbed up and down, almost like a tick. It looked like the words where getting caught somewhere between his brain and mouth. I looked at him with a soft smile, his eyes were looking down, then to the left, then the right. I was not sure what was happening to him, but I felt amused and wanted to watch, like a puppet was trying to come to life.

He looked up.
“You know,” he said by way of explanation, standing a little on his toes when he finally got the words out. “I’m self conscious almost to the point of it being crippling. I’m working on it though.”
“Oh really, I never would have known if you didn’t say anything.” My face was covered with the expression of shock, my eyebrows raised slightly by the information. “But I know what you mean. I’m self conscious too.” He looked up, a bit surprised. “I wouldn’t say its almost crippling, but I do know what you mean.”
He nodded. “You are easy to talk to.”
“Good.”
Then another customer walked up and asked questions about the pastries. Kevin waved a silent goodbye, tucked his loaf into his yellow bicycle bag and walked towards the small hill behind the line of booths. I turned and watched him take a seat on the grass next to a slender black woman who I assumed was his girlfriend. I had seen them sitting in the same spot every Saturday, sometimes they would lay in the sun, letting the sun bathe their skin in warm light.

Kevin and I were in a motel room together. There were two full beds in the room separated by a small end table and wall-mounted lamp. The room was filled with the same yellow light that always exists in all motel room chambers. He had offered to help me with my German lessons and there were several hardcover course books on one of the beds. I sat on the floor and flipped through the numerous workbooks I had. I knew there was a particular assignment I was supposed to do, but after I flipped through three different workbooks, I couldn’t find it. I wondered if the pages had gotten torn out somehow.
It was very late and I gave up one finishing the assignment. I started packing my bag. I looked over at Kevin, he was topless and in one of the beds under the covers, his left arm holding onto a pillow.
“Are you sleeping here tonight?” I asked.
While I waited for his answer, I looked around the room. It was full of my things. Clothes, my artwork and photo albums, the pieces of fabric I had been collecting for a decade, some scrapes from Kauai I hadn’t seen in years. My red guitar was on the other bed, sitting right on top of the nicely made bedspread.
“…is it because we haven’t made love?” Kevin asked.
I was sitting on the floor by the door putting my jewelry into a box.
“I have a boyfriend, so that never would have happened.” I said it looking down, keeping most of my attention on the jewelry, yet feeling the air between us change.
I felt his body stiffen with my words. He grew more quiet, though he had not been talking anyway. I stood up, putting another box of my things by the door. I felt fine now to say anything since the delicate balance between us had already been broken. I didn’t look at him as I surveyed the room.
“People are only nice when they think they can fuck you.”
The words came out harsh and I was startled by the accentuated way I said “fuck.” It sounded so cold, like steel that could never grow a heart. “You know, you never asked me out.” Even as I said it I wondered if it was true.
I knew he was mad and I knew I needed to leave, but my things were everywhere. In every drawer I opened where more albums and CDs and artwork. I knew I needed to take everything I cared about because he was angry and I thought he might start to destroy my things. I put the stuff I wanted by the door, opening it slightly and positioning one of my jewelry boxes to hold it open.
When I opened the door, I saw a blue plastic shopping cart in the hallway and thought I would be able to put a lot of my things in there. I stepped further into the hallway and onto the maroon carpet. My sleeping bag was all spread out on the ground, I wondered how it had gotten that way since I didn’t remember doing it. I looked up and saw a man in the doorway of his room.
I turned and went back inside to gather my things. Everything was a mess, completely disorganized. I didn’t want to leave anything, but I needed to prioritize what I would take since I couldn’t bring everything. I thought that even if he didn’t destroy my things, I had no idea how I would be able to get the rest of it in the morning after checkout since I didn’t have a key.
I stepped into the hallway once again and turned to the camera.
“See, this is the reason we fought over the joint earlier. Whoever got it would be in power.”
Ultimately it had all been about power, it was laying right under our feet all along, precisely where we weren’t looking.
Without looking back, I started to walk away.

In The Theater of Red Twilight

We walked down a narrow alleyway, an inconsequential little street I knew from another time full of gentle repetitions and harmless routines. Now, even though we were still in the world as we knew it, even though the cars still honked at each other in the broad main street we had just left behind us, even though there was still the sound of drum machines and glasses clinking against each other coming from the bar that stood in front of the spot where we left our car, even though people still turned away to avoid our eyes and there was still a general sense that there was a world and that it moved in its usual ways, the ways we had come to expect from years of recurrent reassurance, even through the world was still normal, whatever it is that we really mean by that, even though all this was true, there was already a sense that something was different, something was not as it should be, something was already in the process of changing.
We turned into an open black doorway, a gateway that led into red and black shadows. We stepped into this other world and by then, by the time our feet had crossed the edge between two lights, it was already too late, the change had happened and all that had been vaguely prognosticated by the tiny hints outside came into full manifestation before our eyes, under our eyes, all around our eyes. The world then ceased to be a rough mixture of faded colors splattered over gray concrete and blue asphalt. Instead it became a thick sepia that invaded our senses like smoke, a dark twilight that covered our faces with a sense of a long awaited goodbye, a final embrace before the looming journey. The long walk up the stairs finished formalizing the change that had already been evident as soon as we stepped into the twilight. The stairs were dark red and the banisters were covered in gold or in something that looked like gold in the shadows, and we quickly surrendered to this new state of things, to this new world where the rules had changed and consequences flowed in all directions.
Mother moved slowly and I was painfully aware of how slowly she truly moved, slower than I had realized, slower than ever. I slowed down my own movements so that I would stay by her side and it was clear that the walk up the long staircase was a very painful journey for her increasingly fragile body. She exhaled loudly every few steps, took a moment to rest and then made an effort once again, holding on tightly to the golden banister with wrinkled weak white hand. I helped her when I could, and I talked to her so as to distract her from her discomfort. I talked of anything and everything that came to mind, as all words had changed meaning as soon as we crossed the doorway and I was still in the process of discovering what there was for me to say in this new chamber we had only begun exploring. Soon we would be up where we needed to be, soon we would find our seats and begin the process of waiting. After a space of uncertainty that had lasted weeks, now everything was clear and certain, everything rolled like a mechanical train on perfect tracks across a red landscape frozen in time.
It had been harder than expected to be here. It had been easier than expected to be here. Both sentences were equally true and neither would surrender its truthfulness to the other. Neither could be resolved by pushing down on the other one, neither could be broken by the cutting sharp edge of the other one’s knives. Nor were they neutralized by each other’s presence. They were both true in a way that was resonant, a way that staked its claim to reality in a radiant pulsation that could not be denied.
My heart was hurting in a way that I had learn to accept, it was no longer truly painful, it was more a kind of intense pleasure that was difficult to sustain, something that would be delightful for an instant but which became like torture when it went on for minutes, hours, days. Here, in this world of twilight, the pain increased with each step up the staircase. Up, up, up we had to go. Further than it seemed necessary. All the way up, as high as it was possible to climb. And Mother was moving slowly and breathing heavily and I was making an effort to keep on talking, even when the air itself seemed so thick that I could only barely manage to take it in and then use my still open eyes to explore this newly discovered land of murky brilliant shadows. There was pain in the air itself, a pain that mirrored and resonated with the pain that I felt within me, but it was not being talked about, not by me, not by anyone else. It only floated on the surface of the twilight like a shallow coating of transparent milk, only barely visible if one looked at it sideways.


When we found our seats, the place was still mostly empty. There were small groups of fellow attendees that talked incessantly, maybe doing what I had been doing as I walked up the stairs with Mother who couldn’t speak. It was then, when the seats were mostly vacant and there were only a few people here and there looking to find their place in the red and black world, it was then that I began to realize it, it was then that I began to notice that I knew everybody, every single person there, everybody. I noticed that I knew them all or that I should, or that I would, or that I could. Everybody. Every single one. All faces jumped out at me with a burden of stories that I could only barely begin to disentangle before another face stood in the way, also carrying a new offering of memories that I couldn’t place, dreams I could not remember, unknown places that I couldn’t shake away, false histories that I tried in vain to disentangle from others that were true, others that I believed to be true and yet here they had become undistinguishable from the others.
There, that old woman, did I not spend years working with her, in weekly meetings in a basement off of 16th street, surrounded by smoke and the smell of old printers and photocopying machines, did we not share a hundred hardships travelling over land to Central America, trying to learn to haggle with merchants of the road, trying to deal with soldiers who looked at us as intruders and possible victims, as vulnerable strangers who had clearly overstepped their bounds without a clear sense of consequences. No, that never happened. Not to me. Not to the me that could still remember walking in here with Mother, walking up a red stairway and moving through the red twilight. Not to that me. There, that young girl in a black dress that revealed her slim brown shoulders shining in the twilight, did we not love each other desperately in a house in the Sunset district, just a few blocks away from the ocean, thick brown curtains and empty cartons of Chinese take out spread all over the floor, a stereo playing old rock songs in the room below us, the sound of waves in the distance, always seeming to come closer, closer and closer, as if the salty water was about to burst through the windows, splashing us with its taste of cold freedom, did we not become drunk with each other’s ecstatic exclamations for nights and days and more nights of sexual abandon, long hours when her body became mine so completely that I could no longer distinguish where her flesh began and mine ended, moments when her eyes rolled back towards the top of her head and I recognized an instantaneous and eternal Nirvana in her momentary silence before breaking into thick exhalations of physical recovery, did we not stay like that, together in her private darkness, until it all became too much and we had to say goodbye, if only to save our lives, our individual sanity, our sense of place and time and memory? No, that never happened. Not to this particular man who now sat next to Mother, waiting for something to happen, waiting while everything was happening all around us already, waiting for another event in a sequence, just as events themselves seemed to have slipped out of sequence altogether and were now fumbling about in all directions, without a clear sense of cause or effect. There, the overweight man with the little black beret, did we not play protest songs for years, did we not learn to know each other’s musical habits so well that we no longer needed to plan ahead for a performance, did we not learn to perfectly harmonize each other’s improvised melodies, did we not smoke marijuana for days on end until we no longer needed to speak out loud to hold a long and rambling conversation, until the distinction between music and silence became irrelevant and the sounds of the city itself became our endless lullaby, did we not together find a kind of silent love that was only possible though acoustic guitars and the gentleness that came with the sound of nylon strings vibrating? No, that never happened. Not to the one who now writes these things that you are reading. Not to the one I have come to know as me.
“She is bound to be here,” Mother said and I agreed. She is bound. To be here. She is bound.
And there, that girl in a thick white shirt and long dress pants, did we not meet in a faraway place of thick sweat and long green leaves and the recurring calls of endured hardship cutting through the thick heavy air full of black smoke? Did we not turn each other’s lives around in a whirlwind of passionate love and obsessive desire that changed what could have happened and what never did? Did we not discover that all things that are so pleasurable are also paid for at a very high price and the price is never stated clearly at the outset? Did we not learn to forget what we had known and ultimately stare at each for only seconds at a time while cold entities of the world decided our fate and dictated our divided future? No, that never happened. It couldn’t have. Not to her. Not to me. Not to the one who looked down at her as she walked up the steep steps between the red seats that were quickly filling up.
“There she is,” Mother said and then she was silent. Unsure as to how to proceed. Did the moment call for silence or for an outburst of speech? Did it call for roughness or kindness? Did it call for empty gestures or subtle sincerity? And if we took one route, would we ever find out what waited at the end of the other one?
I smiled and waved at her and she approached us, smiling tentatively, as if embarrassed to show her underlying happiness, as if swallowing into herself years of decisions that had turned her past into a soft gooey mulch and her present into a many colored vortex made of living questions.
I reached over the metal barrier that separated us and I placed my arms around her shoulders. I kissed her on the cheek and she smiled when I did, she smiled hesitantly but truly, she smiled from deep inside and her face had just a bit of trouble catching to her inner impulse. Then she greeted Mother as well and Mother responded with a smile and a warm greeting. That was all. No true silence, no true explosion, and yet a silence of sorts, an explosion of a certain kind. All in that one passing smile, all in the kiss, all in her eyes. She left, to join all the others that were here, all the others that I knew, all the others that were here that I didn’t know, all the others that I couldn’t know and yet I did.


We had come one last time together, here in this twilight world, to pay homage to a dream that had been slowly dying, a dream that it was finally time to release into the great open void so that it could be finally broken apart, ready to be reconstituted into new dreams that none of us yet suspected. I knew it. Mother knew it. We all knew it, even if some would have been very reticent to express it, even if some still vainly struggled to keep it alive. But it was no use. It was time for a dream to die.
Some souls did cling to their dreams more tightly than others. Some still screamed for armed revolution, for a free Cuba, for an insurrected freedom that would slide through the sweat of cracked brown hands and reinvigorate the earth itself so that it would become fresh and new again, all in a cloud of burning gunpowder and young men in improvised sweaty red masks. Some still believed, some still wished to believe, even here, in the theater where all such things had to finally come to an end.


“Sueña lo que hago y no digo
Sueña en plena libertad
Sueña que hay días en que vivo
Sueña lo que hay que callar “

“Dream what I do and don’t say
dream in full freedom
Dream that there are days in which I live
Dream what must be kept quiet…”

It was to dream that we were here, and it was his job to lead us in our collective dream through the shapeless shadows of emptiness, it was his job to lead us back to when the colors of the old stories were full and strong and they hadn’t yet faded into barely recognizable hues, to bring us back to a place of collective hope that sparkled with the incandescent shape of infinite possibility. He appeared so suddenly that there was no time for wonderment, it was simply him and he was there, in full physical form in front of us, something that couldn’t happen and yet it was happening, now and not later, now and not before. And once he was present, there could be no further questions.
When I felt that I knew him, that he was clear and evident before me, and that I shared the life of his dreams and that I shared their death as well, their long agonizing decline, then it was clear that I truly did know everyone here, as much as they knew me as well, as much as they knew me so well that they would search in vain within the valise of their memories for a clear signal, a solid reply, something that would finally tell them who I was in their life and why I was here, why we were all here to listen to this man tell us our own dreams that had slowly escaped from our grasp.
His voice was soft and pure as always, crackling with age and experience that wasn’t quite there in the recordings I remembered, and yet a young boy still peered through the gaps between the syllables, letting us know that nothing ever truly ends, it only goes into temporary hiding. And yet, in those times when it is hidden, it is as if it had gone forever, it feels that way, it feels like the colors won’t ever return, like life had been banished and it won’t ever come back. When he sang, everyone responded, people screamed with exclamations that came from deep within them, deep in their bodies and deep in their shadow minds, spontaneous invocations that proclaimed the ideals of a time that had already passed, a time that was already a double exposure on the old black and white photo of history, a wish that had turned its eyes from the future into the past but we just didn’t quite know it yet.
I could only wonder if this theater of dark colors, this theater of gold and red and sepia that was itself revived from a time that nobody truly remembered, I wondered if this theater had never really been opened at all, if in fact this theater was still closed and forgotten even as we all sat within it, and we were all just wandering ghosts that had been called forth by a master magician that had sneaked his way into an empty stage, in the hope of reviving voices that had long been kept silent.


“Hoy llevo el doble dando coordenadas
pero nadie contesta mi llamada.
Que puede haber pasado a mi senal?
Sera que me he quedado sin hogar?”

“Now I do my job and send my coordinates
but nobody answers my call
what could have happened to my signal
could I have been left without a home?”

Each of them that I had loved, each of them that I had lived a long life with, a life that was as much mine as it was theirs, each of them was a lost segment of time that I could vainly hope to recover, an old photograph slowly dissolving into nothingness under an unforgiving rain. And so it was with her, the one that sat behind us, only a few feet away, so close and yet so far away, so familiar and yet so strange, so present and yet so absent But maybe it was only that the memory of her was freshest within me, maybe it was only that I could still smell her sweat and taste her lips, maybe it was that her one memory had jumped out among the others and projected itself into the past so intensely that it had blurred away all the others, made them less tactile, less firm.
Each one of them gave me their memories, and to each of them I gave mine, and to each of them I silently called, even if it was only by looking and looking and looking again, into their clothes, into their bodies, into their faces, into their shapes cloaked in twilight. There had been no clear response, no clear reaction that would let me know that there was someone on the other side. But I knew that they were there.
It was difficult to know when to call and when to wait. Here was a moment when an outside force had been necessary, something greater than any one of us, something greater than all of us combined, and this great outside force had turned into a guitar and a small man, a man so tiny I could only barely see him, down there in the bottom of the great theater where he was almost lost in the enduring twilight of red and black and gold. This tiny figure with a voice so sweet, so tender, so forgiving, he was the one who now called and we all responded, in a way that obliterated all differences, it was a call that we couldn’t help but answer, it was a call that emerged fully formed from deep within us, deep within the us that was not a plural but a singular, the us where we could no longer be distinguished into me and you and them. It was only much later that we could then say that it was a man, that what we had seen and heard had been a man, only a man, a man playing a guitar on a stage, so many feet down below us, so far away that he was almost lost.
There was a call, a signal, and an answer, and in this place of darkness and ghosts, we all found a home and in this place we were also to finally understand that all homes are temporary, that everything truly changes, changes as much as we could have ever imagined and even more so, that everything must end sooner than we expect and that what is left is always, will always be, as beautiful and perfect as what was there to begin with; that it will then, as now, be our duty to find once again the beauty that we thought was gone, the beauty that was only hiding. The tender call of the tiny man with a sweet voice, the call told us all of this, and we responded by becoming one, by becoming one as we always been one but had forgotten, we responded by remembering and forming the lost home that once we had so yearned for, the lost garden that we had dreamed of, for so many years, for so many eons, for so many lives.


“Hoy viene a ser como la cuarta vez que espero
desde que se que no vendras mas nunca.
He vuelto a ser aquel cantar del aguacero
que hizo casi legal su abrazo en tu cintura.
Y tu apareces en mi ventana,
suave y pequeña, con alas blancas.
Yo ni respiro para que duermas
y no te vayas.
Que maneras mas curiosas
de recordar tiene uno,
que maneras mas curiosas”

“Today would be about the fourth time I wait
since I know that you won’t ever come back.
I have once again become that song of the tempest
That made hugging your waist almost legal.
And you appear in my window,
Soft and small, with white wings.
I don’t even breathe so that you can sleep
And you don’t leave.
What strange ways
We have of remembering
What strange ways…”

And it was the fourth or the fifth or the hundredth time since I had known that you would never return. It became clear one day but, like all such days of intense clarity, it is now lost in the subtlety of its own absolute knowledge. Big empty things are easy to remember, true knowledge is easy to forget, all it takes is a moment of distraction, a moment of looking elsewhere, a moment of falling in for an old habit, a moment of saying those sequences of words that you know so well, saying them quietly to yourself while nobody is listening, saying them in the most silent voice that exists, the loudest voice that rules our dreams, your dreams, my dreams, and then it is over. We have once again forgotten and it is time to start again from scratch.
And it was that one day I knew that you were gone and you would never come back, maybe it was a windy afternoon with a gentle sun that refused to fully show itself and refused to fully die, or maybe it was very early in the morning and the birds were just starting to sing outside my window and maybe one of them was click clacking with its beak against the glass and I thought of you and knew all I would ever need to know, or maybe it was a dream where you sat by a rolling cliff, with your long white dress rolled up to your knees and your eyes down turned as you told me “I understand what happened but she won’t ever understand, and so I won’t ever come back, even if I want to, even if I really want to…” Maybe it was none of those and it was some other time, some other dream, some other afternoon that was as lost as she was. But one thing was clear. It was too late, definitely too late, much too late to try anything, even if I still would keep on trying, anything, everything, much like an actor that continues in their role minutes and even hours after they have left the stage, maybe even hours after every single last member of the audience has gone home. So I would continue to try, I would continue to call and explain, and come up with new ways of saying what I had already said, and I would run my eyes over a white wall marked by graffiti while I heard your voice through my cell phone, saying “yes” and saying “no” but always saying the same thing, the thing that would not break apart, the thing that somehow withstood all my attempts at contact. I would continue to try even if I knew it was hopeless, even if everyone around me knew it. I would continue to try only to fulfill the temporal shape that was my duty, the duty of my role in this drama of which I form only the tiniest part.
But I knew, ever since that moment of clarity, that the result was already written, maybe I knew it even back then, when that other woman of wisdom said “she will do what she will do, you can’t stop that from happening, just be as kind as you can be and let things go where they will..” and I listened and knew that she spoke the truth and that it would be just as she said that it would be but I still had to try, I still had to make an effort, I still had to sing the main theme as softly as I could manage, even when it became too soft for anyone to hear.
And now, when it was so late that it seemed that the bridge that once connected us had altogether disappeared (even though I still felt it, I could only resign myself to knowing that you had bombed your side of the construction, destroying it permanently and making sure that it would never be built again) then a window opened, and you came through, a ghost being called by another ghost for the sake of a third.
Did I call her or did she call me? Such questions become pointless when you sit in an enormous old theater full of ghosts, an abandoned husk where only wraiths can congregate. We all called each other through the voice that we manifested from nothingness, the voice of our purest dreams, our most hidden fantasies, our most perfect heavens, our most desired hells. And there she was, soft and small, and I couldn’t bring myself to breathe much, so that she wouldn’t leave, even though she had to, sooner than later. It was all such a delicate maneuver, holding onto a single instant of time long enough that it would become eternal, and then it would make no difference if she left or if she didn’t, then it would be too late, for we would once again be together, forever, like before, like later, like always.
Where we then remembering the lost dreams of a generation or the private dreams of two people that swam in each other’s waters so deeply that we nearly drowned and only barely managed to come back to find the light? It was both, there was no distinction here in the world of the twilight. A voice had seduced us into believing in revolution, a voice that I once only knew as an old fragile cassette tape that had to be hidden under layers of wood and clothing, so that soldiers would never hear it, so that soldiers would ever find it. It was the same voice that had seduced us, me, us into believing in eternal romantic love, one single voice, here manifested as a small man with a guitar, almost lost in the shadows.
To believe that all things could change and become as they should be and stay that way was as illusory as believing that two people would be joined once and for all time, and nothing would ever come between them, that all it took was that single moment of recognition in a narrow living room of books, small paintings and diplomas and that single moment had enough fuel to last a lifetime. Two illusions, two symbolic beliefs. In both there was a true eternal effort that was occluded, in both the effort was hidden by stylized drawings made in chalk, in both there was hope without work, there was belief without knowledge, there was wishing without sweat.
But the voice itself was made of effort, it was made of work and of knowledge, it was made of all that we had hidden from ourselves, its fundamental materials were in the shapes that our minds could not decipher, it was in the curves in the air that we had come to call sound, it was in the mathematical symmetries that we have come to call form, it was in the repeated patterns that we have come to call beats, it was in the nothingness that curled up around itself to become something, even if it was only briefly, even if it would eventually return to the void.
We took the voice in, but we only took part of it. And we came here now to listen again, maybe this time the message would at last be completely received, maybe at last it would finally come through with all its truly shining colors. Maybe some of us, maybe one, maybe later, maybe now.
But before and after, there would be that you that smiled for a single moment, there would be that you that offered her cheek and took my kiss as if we had always been together, as if nothing had happened in between that first kiss in the living room and that new kiss in the theater of ghosts, there was that you that was shining through trembling eyes, the you that looked downwards with an innocent embarrassment that once seemed to have died under layers of acquired sophistication and anger. And you were an old thin woman that I used to know, a “gringa” that helped me when I was sad even if it wasn’t your job and we had much more important things to do with our time, what with the war and the violence, and you were a young girl that I used to know, a girl that kissed me with tenderness in the darkness of an afternoon touched by sunlight and reminded me that days can last forever, that days can last too long, and you were a fat man that I used to know, a man that, after too many songs would lean back with a hand made joint in your hand and would point out my mistakes with such sweetness that I couldn’t help but laugh and accept and try to fix them, and you were a brown girl that I used to know, a girl that stood by a black window in the middle of the night and offered all that you had to give, offered it all to me, even if you didn’t know who I was, even if you didn’t know who you were, even if you didn’t know what you were giving. You were all and none. There was only you and there was no other. Nothing, no one, nobody other than you. And I could only hold my breathing, hoping to hold you for just that instant of recognition, and that instant was all I needed, that instant was all I could ever have. You that came and went, as you had to, as you would have, as you always would, as you always will.


“…esta la escribi porque cuando era chico en mi cuarto habia un grabado de dos angeles que llevaban a un chico atravez de un puente…”

“I wrote this song because of a portrait I used to have in my room when I was young. It showed two angels who were guiding a young boy to safety across a bridge…”

I leaned back and gave myself to the red darkness and allowed him to sing purely into me, I allowed the theater to fade and all the others who were my true companions to fade away as well, I allowed the shadows at the edges to grow and grow until they swallowed all and everything that was around me. When I was done, he came fully into me, in a way I didn’t know was possible not too long ago, in a way that was easy to forget. I saw across the gap that divided us, for he was only a man, a man with a guitar, a man so small and so far away that he nearly faded into the same shadows that had already swallowed everyone else in the theater. I saw light all around him, bright clear light, and I saw the same light around the beings that were around him, the ones who were his companions, the ones who were his help. I saw that here, in this chamber that was truly eternal, completely separate and away from the flowing current of time, as eternal as all true chambers are, I saw that here they were the guides and it was my job to let them guide me, to let them take me where they wanted me to go and to simply follow. I focused as much of my attention as I could manage, trying to release all that had previously distracted me. There was no further reason to think of you, I had swallowed you in that moment when I kissed you and you now lived within me, as strongly as you ever had, and there was no further reason to think of the old woman, or the thin young woman, or the middle aged musician with the beret, there was no further reason to think of Mother who believed, who still wanted to believe even though I could see the belief sliding out of her skin like tears flowing from every pore in her body. There was no reason to think of anything or anyone at all.
And as I let them into me, as I let it into me, for in that moment they were no longer several but one, one that was several, and as I saw the bright light that was there all around them, all around it, I suddenly knew them for what they truly were, I could see then what had been hiding. I knew then that belief ended tonight, there was no more use for it. There had been a time when belief was necessary, there had been a time when without it the entire world would have turned to a strange nothingness without a beginning or an end, a hot soup ready to explode to form the universe of twilight in which I now breathed. There had been a time for belief, but that time was over. What was left was only clear light and a voice, the real sound of waves moving through the air, waves that were the gift of the Absolute that is nothingness, a gift that I received and tried to transform in my own way. That was all I could do, that was all I could ever do and I was finally truly knowing it, now and not later, now and not then, now and not forever.
As belief faded away, what was left was not a vacuum, it was not sadness, it was not disillusion, it was not hopelessness. What was left was five figures in the distance surrounded by bright clear light, and the sound of ghosts responding, grunting and screaming and singing and calling, and it was Mother sitting quietly, with wide open eyes and shifting hands, and it was all the ones that were here and all the ones that were not here for this one night (for there were so many that were heavy and present in their absence), all that I had ever known, and all that I could ever know, for they were one and the same, they had always been so, only now it was evident. What was left was all stories and all legends and all myths, all breathing and living here in this place that had gone past the boundary of belief into the gaping mouth of the twilight.
And just as I had swallowed you, it swallowed me. I surrendered, and in surrendering, I allowed myself to be guided and I went where they took me with no wish to return.


“Si no creyera en la balanza
en la razon del equilibrio
si no creyera en el delirio
si no creyera en la esperanza.
Si no creyera en lo que agencio
si no creyera en mi camino
si no creyera en mi sonido
si no creyera en mi silencio.
Que cosa fuera”

“If I didn’t believe in balance
in the order of equilibrium
if I did not believe in delirium
if I did not believe in hope.
If I did not believe in what I work at
If I did not believe in my path
If I did not believe in my sound
If I did not believe in my silence
What would it be?”

In the end, some would release and some would hold on, and that was the way it was, and that was the way it should be. Some would call for the words that they knew, screaming their requests over and over, demanding that the guide should speak in the precise way that they desired, in the phrases that they were accustomed to hearing. “Sing the song about Chile! Sing the song about Nicaragua! Sing the one about the Bay of Pigs!” Some would simply proclaim their love in a thin trembling complaint that would echo in the halls of the old theater and then be lost without reply. “I love you! Thank you!” But all of them, screamers and silent mouths alike, they would all know that they had gone somewhere, somewhere that was not so easy to reach, a place that they very rarely went to, a place they might not find again in a very long time.
For me, for there was still a me even if it had been blurred into near complete dissolution, even if it had been rendered completely out of focus, and yet there was still something within my breathing body that clung to a presence, to an identity, something that could set out the limits of what was possible and what was not, something that could plan and worry and lay out entire worlds in great detail, for me I could sense that as belief vanished, only clear and intense work remained. Even as knowledge came over me, it immediately tried to escape, it tried to fly out of my ears, it tried to find a secret door out of the pupils of my eyes, it didn’t want to be here, in the here that was me, the here that I still imagined was me, this me didn’t want knowledge to reside here.
Soon it would be gone, there was no way to hold on to it for too long. But the passing of knowledge would leave behind a trace, and I had now learned that a trace was enough, a trace was all that was necessary. I would use that trace as a map, a map to that place where an eternal question could be answered: what would it be if I had none of what had made me, if I had lost what I had been? And the answer would not be a word but an action, and the trace spoke of the action in just enough detail that I could begin to act. That was all that I needed, that was all anyone could ever truly need.


“la era esta pariendo un corazon,
no puede mas se muere de dolor,
y hay que acudir corriendo pues se cae,
el porvenir…
por cualquier hombre del mundo,
por cualquier casa,
por cualquier casa…”

“The time is giving birth to a heart,
it can’t handle it any longer
it’s about to die of pain,
and we must go to help it
we must go running
for destiny is about to fall.
We must do it,
For any man in the world,
For any house,
For any home.”

Here, in the final words, was encapsulated all that I had seen and all that I had been unable to describe, all that I am still unable to describe even if I persist in trying, all that escaped from between these sentences that I now try to put in some semblance of order, something that might approximate a clear communication. It must undoubtedly fail in this task, even if it will dissipate into incomprehensibility the moment it is touched by alien eyes, even by my own eyes after some days have passed.
It was that time, the time when we all dreamt of a change that would be unchangeable, a change that was not touched by the dirt, by the shadows, by the night, a change that we would all bring about together and that would save all of us at once, it was a time of flowers and guns and strong unified calls and lonely horrified screams of ultimate loyalty, it was a time far enough away to be forgotten but not so far that it couldn’t once again be remembered, here in this final theater of twilight. Everyone here, Mother, me, you, her, him, them, we had all tasted of that same dream and we had all lived long enough to see that it, like all other things, was bound by change and by the law of falling. It was drawn in blood and blood must eventually turn to dirt and rain and ocean water, and all things that were united once must some day be spilled apart, and all things that break apart hold within themselves the possibility of uniting once again, one of many, many of one.
And so we all had dreamt, we dreamt wide and far and in all the imaginable colors. And here, in this theater, the Real, hidden within the illusion, had come back to pull us back up, to pull us through the narrow gap between Mother’s legs, to pull us beyond the words we had known, the words we would always remember, it had come back to tell us, yes, the time, this time, this age, is birthing a heart, exhaling a heart. It is happening. It is happening now. We, you and me and all the others, we were that heart, we are that heart, now, not so many years ago, not in the past, and not in some future that is yet to be determined. It was here once again that the time breathed and was ready to give birth and it was us that were born from it. We had come as ghosts and we had returned to life, even if only for an instant, a brief instant that was more than enough for eternity to hold, frozen and perfectly alive. We would leave as ghosts once again, but that instant would remain, like all the others and maybe even more so.
As we left, some of us stayed behind, trying to hold on to that moment a little longer, trying to grasp at the wet remains of a wave that had washed over all of us and was now returning to the unknown place from which it came. I saw a woman staring at the closed curtains with a sense of loss, her eyes lost in a sadness that couldn’t be placed because it was not borne of matter. I heard a man trying to put into words what had been spoken to us from a land where words don’t matter. I felt the crowd wishing that it could always be so, that the grayness didn’t have to return, that the colors could remain.
We walked out together as we had come, Mother and I. It was clear that we had always been together, for this night held Always within itself, it held Always in the palm of its sepia colored hands. We were back on the street but the theater still lived within us, and the voice was still singing behind our ears, still whispering in phrases of delicate perfection. It was only temporary, this separation. It was only temporary that we drove away, that we began to talk as we were bound to, that we began to worry once again about the future and the past. She would look for money to pay the bridge, I would worry about my schedule for the next day, wondering how to best arrange the various units of time.
It was only temporary. Sooner or later we had to return. We had to return to the theater of twilight, we had to return to the encounter with the ancient voice, we had to return to the songs that flowed like mathematical flowers swimming over oceans of infinite fractal complexity and simple rainbow perfection. We had to return.
And when we did, we would find ourselves once again in the presence of the one true voice, the one voice that had so many shapes, so many names, so many bodies, so many songs. When we returned, we would realize, once again, as we always did, as we always had, that we had never left, that we could never truly leave. And even then, we would realize, that soon we would forget again and an old song would start all over again.

The Forbidden

Bright yellow sun shone down on the grass covered knoll, its heat sending out the subtle smell of earth and fresh green sprouts. The first day of spring brought with it a rare sunny day, and the little mound in the park was filled with all types of people, all of them with their heads facing the heavens, basking in the rays of sunshine that found them equally. A small group of hip young lesbians lounged on a Mexican colored blanket while their small children squirmed over them. A young couple with bronze skin lay contentedly together, lazily stroking each other’s skin. A man sat next to his bicycle eating a dark croissant slowly. Three children played with the dropped fronds of a nearby palm tree.
“Ahhh!!” came the delighted scream of a young Asian woman. She sat on top of her boyfriend, a young white man. She moved her arms close to his body, trying over and over to tickle him, but he was doing the same, lunging his hands towards her torso and ribs. He grabbed her and threw her to the ground playfully. She wiggled under his weight, laughing, trying to find his ribs with her hands. She screamed softly with delight. It was an intimate display of friendship and trust, and they played, rolling and mounting each other, laughing and lunging. Their bodies were not just covered in cloth, but also with wide smiles.
Next to them, a young black girl, no older than four, watched the couple with curiosity. The girl’s hair was braided with rainbow colored beads at the tips. Her eyes were wide open, and a faint smile rested on her lips. Next to her was an older white woman, the girl’s mother, a woman well past middle age and wearing only white. The woman looked at the couple with quick shots of disgust, then gently pushed the little girl’s head back towards her and away from the couple. As soon as the woman took her hand away from the girl’s head, she would turn to look once again. This time, her smile brighter, for now she knew this was something she was not supposed to see.
“Ahhhh!!” the Asian girl laughed. The white woman turned to them, a look of disgust etched across her face. She held her hand in front of the little girl’s eyes, blocking her view, but the girl squirmed and moved her head and looked at the couple again, captivated, knowing that what they did was forbidden and wrong, and the more her mother sighed and cleared her throat, the harder the girl tried to look, her own delight growing with the conflict.
The older woman’s look cried, “There are children here for goodness sake! Children!” In her purity and chastity, she forgot that it was scenes like this that made children, the very child in front of her that she now tried to protect from the urge that kept the planet spinning with cats and flowers and honey. In another moment of ecstatic union, perhaps alone on a bed, the couple might one day create a new being. But now, there were no thoughts of the future. There was only play. There was tickling mixed with kisses and tiny screams. There was grass and sun and the sense that there was no one else around them, though there was. Their shared delight rose into the warm afternoon, creating waves of pleasure for those that could watch without fear, sadness, jealousy or disgust.
The woman looked at them with hard eyes. How long had it been since she had been like that? Alive, laughing uncontrollably, her body thrown every so often to the ground by firmer hands. The child kept finding openings to watch, the annoyance of her mother making the scene so much better. Her eyes fought through the hand that tried to protect her, realizing there was something she should not see, that somehow, for some reason, her mother didn’t like it. She watched, bringing into her two of the many different strains that would one day be a fundamental part of her. Curious fascination with sex and the memory that it should not be happening, her mother told her so, her mother had clearly expressed it without a single word.

In Flight

As a passenger, I get to sit back and enjoy the trip. At least that’s usually my intention when I first board the airplane. At least it has been. I can’t really say what my intention is anymore. Things have changed.
When on a plane like this, I can wallow in intentional ignorance. I don’t have to know what is happening in the cockpit, I don’t have to know what is happening in the communications tower. I am entirely unaware of the five other hunks of flying metal that are lifting off the ground in the same second that my own is rattling out of gravity’s finger tips. I have no idea that another plane has just been redirected so that it won’t collide with the one I find myself in.
I only know that the charming woman up ahead is going to bring me peanuts, and a fizzy beverage after the captain turns off the “fasten seatbelt” lights. My mouth is watering and I’m trying to decide whether I would like a Coke or a Clamata and I’m wondering if I might persuade her to part with two bags of peanuts on my behalf… all of it while death is soaring all around me, talons neatly spread, wondering if it can make off with two jet planes full of people, including myself.
But I don’t have to think about that, not about that, not unless I really want to. Sometimes I do want to. Maybe more often than not. Isn’t that known as morbidness? I like the sound of that word. I don’t mind it being applied to me.
While I fret over the discovery that this airline no longer serves the honey roasted peanuts I had so perfectly envisioned and instead has switched to serving pretzels, some prematurely balding man in a button up white shirt is determining my fate. Let him determine, it is only a clear manifestation of something that has been true all along. “Fate is in your hands” is only an old joke to tell kids on the day of their graduation after all. My hands are not large enough for fate, they can barely hold the bag of pretzels and a soda.

I turn to the man sitting next to me. He is a middle aged executive who can’t stop fumbling with his briefcase as soon as the fasten seat belts light goes away. I begin to speak to him, without the need of any prompting, without checking to see if my speech is welcomed or even tolerated. It probably isn’t. It usually isn’t. Who wants their fellow passengers to talk to them? Very few people do.
I have learned to set aside such considerations. I simply feel it is the time for me to speak and I feel that it is time for him to listen. I am sure I will soon find out if he disagrees. However he reacts, it won’t matter. Eventually I will do what I can do, and he will do what he is bound to do, and the result of the equation will be determined by time. No need to stop at the doorway of possibility when the numbers are always ready to be computed and served back in an easy to open container of rainbow light.

“Can I tell you how I came to be here? How I came to be here at this time and this place, this point of convergence between dimensions that I imagine or experience or dream, this moment that I may not understand at all? If I tell you, swear to me that you will accept every word I say as true and not press me on matters which seem questionable, for I fear that it will break my delicate grip with this reality if you prod it unnecessarily.”

My questions are of course rhetorical. I don’t intent to wait for an answer. The man turns to me and it is clear by the look in his eyes that he is starting to believe that I am insane. Who’s to say that he is wrong? I may be about to prove him right. I often have my doubts but I only have so many things I can worry about at one time.

“These things are like fine webs made of spun sugar mounted one upon one another to form pink cloudy softness, webs that once touched with sweaty hands or a curious tongue merely melt into sticky sweetness, no more constant or fixed than human promises. I will tell you because you seem sincere and because you are here, a captive ear for my untrained voice. So listen up, place all your attention on me, give me all of it just for a moment. I will tell you the story of the black man and the little bird.”

I have to admit I don’t really think he seems at all sincere in his attention, his eyes are glazed over, as if he already knows anything I could possibly have to say. He would rather not have to listen to a stranger, but he will probably like the story I have to tell, maybe it will make him just a bit more sympathetic to my speech. That’s what I tell myself. In the end, like I have said, it doesn’t really matter how he responds, whether he likes it or not. Or it hardly matters. Maybe just a bit.

All I would have to do is sit back, relax and enjoy the trip. There would be no need to be telling stories to strangers that probably would rather have the loud silence that comes with a large mechanical plane in full glorious metallic movement. I could simply relax and take in all that is happening and all that is not happening.
It just happens to be that that is not what I do. Maybe I will do that eventually, maybe I used to do that before things happened. Since then, I can’t resist the urge to talk.

“First I will tell you about the black man.”

I say it clearly and loudly and the man’s eyes are wide open even as he tries to look steadily ahead. Maybe he thinks I will go away if he consistently ignores me. Kids think that sometimes when they close their eyes to avoid being found during a game of hide and seek. It doesn’t really work. Not there, not here.

“It does not matter which of these things I tell you about first as the events surrounding these two nouns; man and bird, occurred simultaneously, if they occurred at all. That is to say that sequence has everything to do with language in that the word is like a narrow doorway through which only one topic may pass at a time, like little drops of dewy spittle from my lip to your ear, a tiny packet of data about things which have been occurring in a world too vast to squeeze into a dew drops or words or feathers that have been made into writing quills instead of the wings of flying birds. One comes before the other only because that is all that the doorway permits, all that the ungracious lord, THE WORD, will allow, one at a time to visit the well of communion between souls.”

I stop briefly to make sure that he is still listening. I decide that he is in fact listening reluctantly, or at least as much as he ever was, as much as I can ever expect him to listen to this strange creature who won’t stop talking in a space where silence would be ideal. This strange creature who appears to be me at the moment. Eventually I won’t even care if they listen. I am not there yet. Soon, pretty soon.

“So first the black man. Let me tell you this about him.. he is the cohort of countless witches condemned to burn as well as those that fly round secret fires in a whirlwind of ecstasy before they are discovered by the mob and punished for their incomprehensible crimes. The black man, he is not what you expect. He, as I have known him anyway, is always mild mannered, self composed and unassuming. He that knows so much will ask you what he well knows as though he never knew it, not to play a game with you, but just that the two of you shall partake of knowledge together in the renewed asking of a question, in the fresh discovery of an answer. His hair flecked with gray, his posture stooped, he keeps trees that bear fruit, unusual trees, and he will peel back the leathery skins of those fruits to reveal the strange delights held within and offer it to you as water to a parched man.”

Maybe he turns slightly towards me, maybe it is just an attempt to make himself more comfortable, but what real comfort can there be when I won’t stop talking. And I truly mean it: I can’t stop talking. I simply can’t. It is an unfortunate side effect of the things that happened. Maybe not so unfortunate, maybe not so much on the side, maybe not an effect at all. As for him, maybe he really is about to start listening. Good. Just in time.

“He would withhold nothing, least of all that which grows from seed to meat. Should you wish to partake, he shares without reserve. What is his is yours while you are with him and again later if you choose. He is also a fisherman who draws great shy beasts from the deep with lures unlike any used by ordinary men. He will draw up the arcatuthus for you and then you will see your greed for the catch dissolve into sympathy for the beast and you will see its children born and hope that it survives captivity and may return to the deep, but if not, then there are still the offspring in whom to invest this new found tenderness. He is a stranger, a lover, a father all in one, your oldest friend, a friend that you have forgotten. Never did he forget you. Never did he hold it against you that you would forget or swear that you are unacquainted with him. He has all the tenderness of an old grandfather, the wisdom of a priest of one of those true orders of mystic stewardship. That is the black man. That is as much as a I can now say about him.”

When the plane changes course to avoid a lightning storm, I am oblivious to the maneuver, we both are. I say “we”, for now we have formed a we, even if unstable and tentative, even if easily untangled. I turn away briefly to ogle the flight attendant as she comes around again for the passenger’s garbage. I am not past such pleasures, I hope I never will be. I enjoy the view of her rear as she works her way up the aisle past my seat. There is something in its implied roundness that makes me sit a bit straighter, and it makes me want to talk. But of course, I have never stopped talking, not even while I looked away.

“And then there is the bird. I met the bird in a parking lot looking for a crumb to nab. I was putting groceries into the back of the truck and I heard him say that he was hungry, so I broke off some bread and tossed it gently his way as I had been taught by the black man. The bird turned his head slightly to look me in the eye and thanked me very much for taking notice of him. I told him that it was my pleasure and I hoped he would enjoy the fare and, as he went heartily to it, I got into the truck and drove away.”

Now I have to say he definitely has turned towards me. There is no doubt now that he has turned. Something in my story has interested him. Good. I knew that this wasn’t a complete mistake. They are never mistakes, these strange impulses I have, even if I sometimes worry that they might be. It’s the mention of the bird which has got to him, that is what usually does it. It certainly did it for me when I first saw it.

“How did he look? Well he was small and sort of grayish brown, a sort of sparrow maybe. It is his little voice which was clearest to me both then and now. I heard his voice again this morning while I walked to the airport. He was singing gaily. You will tell me that sparrows don’t sing, but I must tell you that by today he was no longer a sparrow. His voice was very clear and bright and I listened to it as I walked, touched by its merriment.”

A hint of a smile, something he wishes to hide but he can’t hide it from me. I have turned completely towards him and it would now be very obvious if he turned away. So he stays in place, frozen, with just that hint of a smile, that hint that tells me everything.

“I noticed that he sang the song that cars sing when they are rubbed the wrong way by someone who cannot turn off the alarm. Diabolus in Musica and so forth, at least that’s where it starts. You know what I mean? It was the song of that alarm which goes off in low class neighborhoods and runs through a series of different obnoxious tones and rhythms so that the offending car robber will be dismayed by the shrill and clownish noises and depart in all due haste. Now my friend the bird repeated this same song in his lovely trill.”

I try to sing and imitate the bird song I remember. I do a fairly decent imitation, at least based on the second hand echoes I hear inside my own head. The hint that I noticed earlier has now turned into a broad smile and I smile at him as well. He has found his place in silently listening and I have found my place in talking, as I must continue to talk, for my story is not over. Not that it ever is truly over. But, as usual, I’m getting ahead of myself. I sing and I talk, then I sing and I talk some more.

“I stopped beneath the tree laden with pink blossoms and listened to his heart bursting with joy through his rendering of this popular new song. The outward form mattered not at all. The lyric to the song, the tones, the rhythms, all were quite unimportant. What mattered so was the heart. That is what he administered liberally to that tired old alarm call. He made it into a masterpiece.”

If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that for a moment he wanted to sing himself, he wanted to break out in song, in the song that he imagined the bird singing. He wanted to sing with me. Maybe it was just a twitch of the lips. Maybe it’s just something that passes, like a fluttering of the eyes or a bird that flies by a window as you drive out of an old town.

“ ‘You should try it.’ The black man said to me, tasting a succulent gem from one of his trees. ‘That’s what we do. We take what they made and we remake it, we remake it with ourselves in it. We put ourselves into that which is not ours, that which is not us. It doesn’t matter at all what they meant for it to be in the first place. We make it alive, we make it live once again. Life is its own meaning. All other meaning is superfluous.’ He said this with a little fluttering hand gesture that reminded me of the bird. I can’t even say for sure if he was actually speaking. I can only report what I remember. I hope you don’t mind. His beard was short and sparse then, composed of short curled salt and pepper bristles. His skin looked like milk chocolate, soft and weathered with age. He was perfect in his own imperfect way.“

The man nods slowly. I can see it clearly now. Something has resonated deep within the folds of his pulsing flesh and he just nods, there’s no need for any further comment. I stop briefly because I am overcome by the pain of memory. Is there something in memory other than pain? Maybe pain itself is the basic building block of all visions of the past, of living time that has coagulated into frozen images. Maybe it is only when we forget that pain goes away. But as I talk there is no memory, there is only the story, and that is not the same.

“I say, sing on little bird, sing on and I will listen to you and to the black man too. I will listen and I will try to sing as well, when I can. That’s what I said as I walked here this morning, as I walked into the airport, right before boarding this plane, right before coming here to sit with you.”

And I whistle briefly, softly enough that only he will hear me, for he is my one and only audience. All other passengers have become the noise that surrounds us, a vibrant sphere of activity that only serves as a frame for our one sided interaction. Now he could react in some way if he wanted to, there is space for him to do so. But his reaction doesn’t matter, it never really did.

“What about you friend? Are you listening to me now, telling you this story with gaps wide enough for us both to fall through? If you haven’t heard, then no matter and never mind, so long as you spare me your criticisms. I don’t need them and they won’t change anything. I tell it to you the best way I can with this clumsy stuff, trying to wedge a leviathan through a hole made for a mouse. That’s what I do now. And so my story ends here, with me sitting with you, talking to you as I am doing.“

I turn on the seat completely, bending my left leg up and twisting my right leg sideways, pushing my foot under the seat in front. I stare right into him. He is too caught up now, he can’t avoid my eyes, and, of course, I have my way of forcing my own gaze upon him. It is rude and it feels so good to do it.

“I could have just told you the story of Iron Hans, painting the forest in greens so deep they were almost black like the rotted underside of forgotten chard. I could have told you any story at all, an old, old story, one that you have heard a dozen times before, and, if I had, I would have done as much if not more than I did here. It just so happens that I told you this story and that you are now a character within it.”

He nods again, his eyes wide open, looking straight at me. I can see the clouds passing behind him through the small oval window of the plane. We are flying together, in more ways than one.

“It is not what I told you really that will profit you at all, but what I poured into every senseless syllable. It comes from the fount at the heart swelling over after the rains of winter, ready to feed all the spring grasses and from them, little lambs, and from them, hungry lions.”

He smiles broadly and I smile broadly back at him. People are moving around us, returning to their seats. Soon it will be time for our time together to be over. So things come to an end, so cleanly, so abruptly. All unions end this way, with a flashing sign. Sometimes the sign is not so obvious.

“That is the story of how I came to be here, how we crossed here like roads running unknown courses, my voice and your ear, joined for a moment and now soon to part, for now I take my leave of you. I will never mind if you forget me. I will never mind if you claim that we never met.”

Soon the plane is engaged in a whole new ballet of high speed hunks of metal guided by fallible human directors who may or may not be distracted just now because this high stress job has taken a toll on their sex life and their significant other stormed out this morning with packed bags. Death perks up again, hopeful, but we land safely (we have definitely turned into a we now, even if the we will soon go away and we will once again be I and you, or him and me, or them and nothing.) I get to see the fasten seat belts light turn off and I lean back on the seat, closing my eyes. Quiet at last. Not for long.

As a passenger, all you have to do is sit back, enjoy the trip, and say thank you when it is over. Sometimes other things happen as well. Sometimes things change and they never return to their original position.

Going To Irak

The sun rose just a few hours before, but I have already done my breathing and written my dreams and sang a few songs. It is early and the light streaming in through the airport’s wide windows is pale blue and I stand, feeling young and protected from the world by my black hood, making me look like a lost forest creature in modern clothing. I am standing in a line that moves geometrically through a wide tiled space that echoes with machinery and groggy voices. It is the boundary of the airport, the place that divides the travelers from the stagnant. Beyond the artificial boundary is the place of arrival and departure, the doors where we step into the sky and hope to return, intact and breathing. I say my mantra and grasp my heart, holding onto the thin contact that wavers like a long silvery telephone line in the morning wind.
Hello? Are you there?

The line is seventy people deep and we are corralled through the space by metal bars, leaving us like cows waiting for the truck, only we think we know what lays ahead. Around me, people are still weary with sleep. Business men in their gray and black suits. A foursome of Norwegians, two blond guys and two girls. I stare at the pointed nose of the shorter girl that ends in a singular dot, I have never seen a nose that looks more sketched. She laughs and touches the arm of her female friend and they both begin laughing while their men remain solemn, looking at the line and x-ray machines waiting dutifully fifty feet ahead. The line moves slowly, winding like an angular snake, bending at 90 degree angles every dozen feet.

Two men in matching navy blue pants and white collared t-shirts are at the front of the line. One on each side. The man on the right is Asian, just crossing the threshold into middle age. His black hair is streaked with white, his face is etched with lines. He looks weary and sad, it will be a day of names and numbers, impatient travelers and fussy old women inconvenienced by the bureaucracy of it all, remembering a time when it was different. On the left is a young Latin man. He is a few heads taller than his coworker, seemingly fresh and unfazed by the repetitive nature of his job. Each man holds a pen in his right hand and a small flashlight in the other. They are TSA men, looking to match correct names to their matching tickets, looking for the things that don’t match too, foreign sounding names and distant, obscure destinations.

The young man is tall and slender. His long silky black hair is bound in a small bun at the base of his neck, shining in the early morning light wafting through the skylights. He has two paper tickets in his left hand and two plastic ID cards, his right is beaming the focused light of the flashlight into them. He looks over the information. An older couple, fifty people ahead of me stand in front of him, waiting quietly for their ticket and ID cards back, both are much shorter than him, coming just to his chest.

The woman is portly and wide, having expanded with time. Her cropped hair is styled into a wavy helmet that hovers around her head like a halo. She is dressed as I have seen many Asian grandmothers, in dark polyester pants and a thinly quilted jacket. The man is facing another direction, though I notice his head of white hair.

The young TSA agent looks at their tickets, then back at the two of them.
“You’re going to Iraq?!” He pauses, taking a breath, “I guess you want to go there.”
Incredulously, he looks back at the tickets and their ID cards. His mind seems to be spinning, unable to process the destination or the possible reason for going to such a god-forsaken country.

Neither of them say anything in response. The older man is turned away slightly, his attention already focused on the next thing, the x-ray machines and scanners that lay just a few feet ahead. The woman, holding her purse strap with one hand, merely looks up at the young man, saying nothing, nodding almost imperceptibly with a polite smile on her face, as though she has learned how to deal with young men that think they already know the secrets of the world.

Looking at the information on their paper tickets, looking again at their ID cards with his slender flashlight and finding no irregularities, he looks up with a smile on his face. Handing the items back, he says:
“I guess you want to go there.”
The woman nods again and opens her mouth slightly, though no sounds comes out. She reaches out for her items and then steps away, looking at the next stage, the next hurdle to cross. The young man turns to the next person in line, reaching for a ticket and identification with his right hand.

Creatures

“What are they?” the men crooned in unison. Their syllables bounced off each of the four walls multiple times, jumped off the empty marble floor before fading into the darkness of the windowless chamber.

He heard their words and let the silence hold, thick as anything he had felt before. He knew what they wanted: answers- the same reason they had come to him years ago, seeking comfort and guidance in a world of gray. Seeking a warm wing in which to bury their doubts. He knew them, for he had done the same thing decades before. And though they held out their deepest fears for him to calm, he hesitated, he didn’t have the answer.

He looked down at them from his red velvet covered throne. Their brown eyes were open wide with glinting terror, their bald heads glimmered with sweat and the shadows of flickering candles. He knew they needed him, just as he had needed his elders, they had no idea how to think, how to solve problems and create solutions. They were minions, followers, sheep. They played an essential role, the church needed sheep. The trouble was that he, their leader, was also in the dark, grasping at answers, searching for comfort in a world of gray.

He had watched the things for several days, crawling up the sides of the temple wall. He had watched, at first afraid, then only aware of them as flickering shadows, like the candle light he was so used to. He wished he could give them a name. They were black and almost two dimensional, but they moved. They clung to the area surrounding the doorway that led to the courtyard beyond. They were long, with skinny black limbs at least twice the length of his own. A few had appendages that looked like heads and four limbs, others were headless and merely twisted along the walls like ribbons, gripping, feeling with their long antenna-like arms.

He wondered what they were, why they had come, what they were seeking. Upon first sight, he imagined they needed to be let out, that they were the manifested spirits of his many prayers searching for the courtyard. It seemed like a reasonable explanation, only, he had opened the door, and like he had imagined, one escaped into the courtyard, but the rest stayed, and then they multiplied. The day he opened the door he had counted three distinct shapes, but the day after, he had counted six. Then there were eight.. And now, others were noticing them too. It was not just his eyes, but the eyes of his followers. They were scared. It would not be long until the whole community vibrated with rumors. The people needed answers, something in which to believe. Right or wrong, they needed an explanation.

“They are creatures sent by the Lord, they are here to help.”

The men nodded, satisfied with the answer. It was what they wanted, and it was what he told them. As for him, he sat with the full weight of the problem heavy on his aging shoulders. There were creatures on the wall, and he did not know why.

Toni And The Police

I awoke in a haze of sleep, my dreams evaporating instantly. The room was still dark, nearly pitch black to my half closed eyes. I pulled the thick covers away mechanically and stepped onto the carpet. Holding my hands in front like a blind man, I sought the hard realness of the desk against the wall and the glass doorknob I would find to the left of it. Holding the knob, I slipped my feet into the slippers I had thoughtfully left by the door. There was a sea of cold tiles that stretched from my bedroom to the bathroom, and I tried to avoid the frigid shock. I pulled the French-style door open, and a cool air hit my face. Without central heating- a cold darkness lay just beyond the bedroom walls.
It took me a second to realize it, while my brain computed and bumped along, but there was an unmistakable flashing red light coming from the garage. My door was open just a crack, and I pulled on the knob. The garage pulsed with flashing red and blue lights, like an empty nightclub. I urged my feet forward, carefully stepping over the guitar and microphone cords that criss-crossed the floor. The light source came from outside, just beyond the wood panels and high frosted glass windows that made our garage door. I stood on my toes and looked through the diamond shaped window, an architectural necessity for any house constructed in the 50s.
Two police cars were double parked in the street, one just in front of our house, the other in front of the first car, almost out of sight. Both had their lights on- blinking red and blue that seemed to scream silently in the night. There were the cars and the houses on the other side of the street, illuminated in the blazing lights. I immediately thought of our next door neighbors, the ones who had just moved in and brought with them loud voices and almost a dozen children. I listened hard for voices, but heard none. No sobbing women, no shrieking children. I pulled a green and cracked vinyl chair towards me and quietly stepped up, looking through the diamond window once again.
Partially shadowed by the night, then brightened by the lights, was Toni, our neighbor, with her hands behind her back, surrounded by four large police officers. Three of the men were white and large, one of them wearing a black beanie on his seemingly bald head. The fourth officer was a stocky Asian man. Toni looked so small and thin next to them, her chocolate skin illuminated and somehow looking pale.
“They don’t take care of my mom, I do!” she shouted. The men mumbled their responses.
They walked together towards the car closest to our house. One cop in front with the black beanie leading, one next to Toni, the two others following. The man in front was shaking his head, and from where I stood, he seemed to be looking right at me. I wondered if he was. Was it a warning? I felt myself grow cautious, wondering if they could see my curious white face through the small window. I felt a fear creep inside. The men felt dangerous. Men armed and willing, ready to take a life. They closed the backseat door behind Toni, then huddled by the trunk, looking at something the one with the beanie held. Toni shouted from inside the car, but her words were muffled, just the anger escaped through the closed metal door.
“Shut UP!” yelled the man wearing the hat. He turned instantly to the Asian man on his left, smiling. His smile filled me with fear. Bullies from high school, men with a license to shout and abuse, kill if need be. He thought it was funny. He did not have the insight to see that his actions altered the course of lives. What was a job, a routine night perhaps, something he would write a report about and then forget as he put the pen down, it was different on the other end, between the metal cuffs, waiting in the backseat of a car. A river flowing one way was instantly diverted with his presence. Arrest wasn’t a minor thing, though he might have gotten used to being the figure with power. And when he laughed, like he didn’t care, like she was just another piece of trash he had to deal with before his next coffee break, it etched a dread in me I had not felt in a long time.
The men conferred behind the car, looking at something. The Asian man broke away and walked to the police car. He opened the driver’s door and spoke through the metal grate to Toni.
“What’s your name?” he said quietly, but distinctly. I thought I heard her say Jessica, but I probably misheard.
I thought of Toni confessing months ago that she used to do crack, that her grown children were still mad at her for how she had been when she was raising them. What had she done tonight? I imagined her in a yellow lit house, wandering from room to room. Which one of her family members had called the police? Who would take care of her mother with dementia? I thought of the old woman who sat in the easy chair in front of the window, what would happen to her? What would they do with Toni? I imagined her heart shattered, crumbling in on itself as she thought about the helpless mother she was being dragged away from. What had she done?
I left the window and walked back quietly through the garage, careful to step over all the cords. I used the bathroom, never turning on a single light. I stood by the doorway to the garage, wondering if I should go back to bed. But then I heard my friend’s voice, asking me questions. I thought about Toni and thought someone should keep witness. Moving gently to the window again, I stood on my tiptoes. I looked into the windows of the other houses across the street, looking for other faces. If they were there, they were hidden. And if it was just me, watching as Toni was taken by the four men. Then I should watch it through to the end, whatever would be the end at this hour.
As I stood, the word boredom crossed my mind, and I felt guilty that the events had lost my interest. The scene was a bit more quiet, Toni had stopped cursing. Two cops now stood by the hood of the police car closest to me. The steps leading to Toni’s front door was illuminated by the porch light. I could see the purple exterior paint and the metal gate at the landing that was slightly ajar. I watched the quiet scene for a little while, then the light above her garage door came on. I wondered if it was a motion sensor, maybe a cat had walked by. Maybe someone had turned it on. A few minutes passed, then the sound of jingling, perhaps keys, though it sounded more like glass.
One cop came down the front steps, taking each step quickly, with a sort of bounce. His large black Maglight was beaming and down-turned. At the sidewalk by the steps, he began to search the driveway, carefully looking around the red car that was parked there. Toni started cursing again and another cop turned on his flashlight, joining the search. They didn’t find anything and within a few minutes two cops walked towards the car parked just beyond our house. I heard the ignition start.
The cop with the black beanie walked to the other car and took his place behind the wheel, his partner sat beside him. He turned on the engine and then turned his face to the left, in my direction. The shadow of the car’s roof hid his eyes, but I felt like he was watching me, perhaps daring me to do something. A deeper sense of fear moved through me, the man was dangerous, more ugly than many I had met. He stayed like that for several seconds and neither of us moved. Then he looked straight ahead and drove away.
I stood in the garage for several minutes, the space now black again without the police car lights. I moved back towards my room, but lingered in the doorway to the garage, wondering if I should lock my door. The space seemed less safe, not because of whatever Toni had done, but because of those men. The police and what they stood for.
Men without any hero’s code of honor, but simply men that had passed a few tests, a few obstacle courses…men that had been given a gun and the power to enforce laws, the power to hurt, the power to change destinies. They were nothing special, but they were backed by cells and judges and an entire system of repression that would bite down on the prettiest of flowers without a thought.
I was cold. I got under the blankets again and stared at the blackness of my wall until the sky turned blue.