Singing With Babies

Pale sunlight streamed in through the glass windows on either side of the narrow room. It was almost 7pm and soon she would have to put the babies to bed. She would somehow convince their little bodies that it was time for sleep even though it was still light outside. But before she tucked them away for dream time she sat each one on the padded dinning room chairs that surrounded the oversized antique wooden table and turned on her black laptop. Jonas sat closest to her and Noah on the chair beside him. She pushed the computer to a center point on the table between them.
Noah started to clap his chubby hands as he saw the LCD screen come to life. Jonas, looking so small in the straight-backed chair, waited patiently, watching curiously and quietly as the Windows sound and screen prompts popped up one by one. Noah let out a small excited wail as she plugged in the computer’s mouse and then found the right folder and file and pressed play.
“Meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow meow!” It was part of her daily vocal training and she sang the syllables loudly going up the musical scale. The wooden floor and furnishings bounced her voice right back and the sound was crisp and resonant.
Jonas seemed stunned and looked at her excitedly with a big bright toothless smile that puffed out his fatty cheeks, a smile that showed he was not quite sure what he was hearing, but he liked it. For him, it was all new. His experience was fresh and his eyes widened when she sang. He laughed too, with every meow meow phrase he erupted into tiny giggles of delight.
“Meow meow meow meow meow meaow meow meow meow!”
She sang along with the prompts of the recording. Jonas looked back and forth from the psychedelic screen saver that accompanied the music to her, mesmerized by the combination of what he saw and heard. She wondered if music and those transforming colors of never ending possibilities would always be linked in his mind, she hoped so.
Jonas started clapping his tiny hands, bobbing his head up and down rhythmically to his own beat. Noah sang a little under his breath, a sound that seemed sort of like speech, but was flavored by melody. She looked at them as she sang, opening her eyes wide, raising her eyebrows, sending her energy towards them in pure unabashed delight.

There Was A Song About Them

There was a song about the houses, the little boxes made of ticky tacky… you know the song perhaps? Maybe you heard it first sung by an Indian gentleman on a short plane trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles or in endless variations on a late-night television program or on an old recorder long ago dumped in the trash. Perhaps you know the song about the houses.
If you have never seen them, the houses of blue, green, red and yellow, you might think that it was only a song, a silly song, a symbolic song highlighting the rote and under-whelming achievements of modern man. You might think that they were not literally boxes if you had not seen them as I, Earl Winters, have seen them.
They line up as neatly as boxcars on rails of track along the faces of those low, verdant, mist shrouded hills, traversing from the fringes of San Francisco into the deep dank moors of fog-covered Daly City. If you know anything about moors then you know that they conceal mystery and hide their phantoms. You know that hidden in that ever-present gray are the deadly secrets of the transmutation of matter and their link to moon cycles. To see these little boxes, however, dispels any fear of the unknown, blots out any possibility for variance, and suggests infinite uniformity, for though there’ s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one, they’re all just the same.
See the all-American family seated together in the dining room, hands clasped, heads bowed in prayer, meatloaf garnished with a sprightly sprig of parsley grown in the victory garden out back. After dinner father reads the paper, mother washes the dishes, little Sally and Tom play with the silky terrier, and the baby plays on the rug in the living room.
If you wish to enter this century, well then, mother throws out the designer paper plates before heading for the bath and father examines the world news on his iPad while Sally texts her boyfriend while baby snuggles in her lap and Tom plays a graphic and gory first-person shooter game designed by the US Army recruiting agency on the Xbox.
Pick a year, 1956 or 2011, if you peek into the little boxes and peel away the curtains, if you can somehow manage a glimpse into their tightly sealed world, you’ll find the inhabitants doing the same things at approximately the same time from one box to the next. You can depend on it. Most of the time.

I have suggested that this century is the 21st and that I, Earl Winters, am familiar with the box houses and what goes on inside of them. I know what goes on in much of the world in fact. It is my job to know. If you have ever listened to Half Moon Bay Radio KWMA, my name may have seemed familiar to you. I am radio journalist, Earl Winters, former host of Important Points, your daily investigative news journal. There is nothing about the workings of the world that I haven’t learned either as a kid on the streets of New York or in some press conference or news room or even on a battlefield or two. That is to say that I knew quite a bit before I ever visited 119 Santa Clara Avenue in San Francisco, right on the cusp of the moors.
I have told you that I am a journalist, but have I mentioned that it was terrible soul bruising work that turned my eyes into bleeding wounds and the only balm I found to sooth them was poetry? To smooth the broken glass and barbed wire of guerilla warfare from my voice I went twice a week to a café on Shattuck Ave. near the radio station where I worked, Café Nouveau Paris. I went to read things I had scribbled down in tiny notebooks to a room full of self-proclaimed poets and orange walls and glazed croissants.
That is where I first saw Theodora, smiling at a tiny round table, golden strands of hair falling over her gray-blue eyes, nervously shuffling sheets of paper with long bent fingers. I came in from the streets and noticed her immediately. The rest of the night I tried to be near enough to speak to her. I looked for an open seat or table, I thought of trite scenes I had seen in movies, dropping my napkin or spilling my tea, whatever I could do to prick her effervescent bubble.
I stood mostly paralyzed by the wall until the opportunity came. She was standing under a lamp and reading a small hand-written sign that asked for donations in a roundabout way. Poetry is all about the roundabout. Here, even a sign was indirect, diffuse in meaning, forsaking meaning for ambiguity.
I told her I liked her poems even though I could not remember them. I said that I had felt something kindred in them even though they were entirely incomprehensible, possibly only gibberish as far as I could tell. The poetry of her was in her smile, her posture, her tousled hair.
I suggested getting together to share more poetry. I gave her my card and as she read it, waited several long seconds for her to recognize my name. The recognition never came. In fact, studying the card she had to ask:
“Important Points, that’s… a radio show, or internet based thing?”
She liked that it was radio, I could see it in her smile. And that smile filled me up with a mint-scented air that I could sense cleansing the deepest part of me, moving through me as incense drifts though a room. She told me eagerly, as if this now assured me that we were friends, that she created music with a group that called themselves Pleroma. I said I’d love to hear their music, and she eagerly gave me a card which contained the internet addresses in which to find their sounds.
That night I went home and found the place in space-time where Theodora’s voice existed, her screams and deep guttural tones came through my speakers and filled me with a light I had not seen before.
Four months passed in which I sat at that round table next to Theodora reading her my poems, listening to hers, telling the stories of my life to her round blue eyes and trying desperately to wring some from hers. I endeavored to create other meetings with her, suggested a visit to the rose garden, expounded upon my desire to collaborate, prayed for a rainstorm so that I could offer her a ride home.
For all my effort, I saw her once a week in the same place at the same time, in the Café Nouveau Paris for the open mic session on Thursdays. Each week I asked for something and got a basket of smiles and an invitation to come improvise and record something with Pleroma in the house at 119 Santa Clara Avenue in San Francisco, right on the cusp of the moor.
Four months passed and I thought she must love me. Four months passed and I knew that I loved her. Four months passed and she gave me so little, but it was something. At last when she stopped coming to the Café Nouveau Paris I felt it was time to be bold.

There was a song, about the houses, the little boxes made of ticky tacky… you know the song perhaps. The house at 119 Santa Clara was one of these little boxes on the hillside, an orange one with a sage bush out front and a white car in the driveway. It was into one of these boxes that I, Earl Winters, set foot on a summer evening in the 21st century.
Yes, Theodora was there to hug me at the door and invite me inside, to offer me tea and introduce me to Leigha and Ferdinand and the others that had come to call that evening. Leigha was petite with dark curly hair and heavily shadowed eyes. I thought she was quite lovely, the complete inverse of Theodora, brooding where the other woman was flippant, unhurried where the other was fleet, dark where the other was light.
Unlike Theodora, Leigha was aware of my radio show and comfortable with bringing up politics and the things of the world to which I was accustomed. Ferdinand joined in our chatter. We stood in the bright living room and yes, I smelled the faded sweetness of amber incense, saw the chalice on the mantle, the flickering candles and a bowl full of silvery leaves, but I thought little of it.

They took me downstairs to the studio that Theodora had often times referred to as the underworld in her invitations. Poetry is all about the roundabout. Every sign is indirect, diffuse in meaning, forsaking meaning for ambiguity. The underworld was filled with electronic gear, guitar and microphone cables were spread over the floor like the thick dark chords of an enormous spider’s web. Lines from Theodora to Ferdinand, from Ferdinand to Leigha, Leigha to the Russian fellow that had arranged some of their live shows (Theadora had introduced him as their priest)…electronic lines to a guitarist, lines to me, to a microphone placed inches from my mouth.
I turned on my small laptop to find the poems within. In the walls of this unfamiliar lair, surrounded by large pieces of artwork and installations within the confines of open cabinets, I grasped at the known, the familiar. I held onto my computer and tried to smile though I was aware that the tiny, scared boy of fifty years ago was slipping through my eyes.
After Leigha lit small white candles and turned off the lights Ferdinand took a seat at the twelve o’clock position of the circle. It was then that I noticed the shadow cast on the wall behind him, the silhouette of Ferdinand with horns rising from his temples.

In the other boxes on the hillside there were cars and washing machines and children’s bicycles in the same spot where we sat entangled. All-American families were seated together in their dining rooms above their garages, hands clasped, heads bowed in prayer, meatloaf garnished with a sprightly sprig of parsley. Where there should have been a garage at 119 Santa Clara there was instead an underworld in which I had unwittingly descended pursuing a poem.
A poem composed of more than words and letters. A poem of soft white flesh and laughter that could lift me from the sadness of my afternoons. Poems that multiplied, mirroring each other in their glory, just as the sun is more beautiful followed by the cool light of the moon. I basked in both lights at once, amazed that such a thing was possible.
Whatever else I saw that night, whatever transformations occurred, I wrote them off the following day as tricks of the night, as the side-effects of medication from my minor eye surgery.

In the light of day I thought of the slow, moon-shrouded poetry of Leigha, who I felt was more receptive to my attention than Theodora had ever been. Her eyes were ink pools waiting for entrance. Poetry is about the roundabout. Every sign is indirect, diffuse in meaning, forsaking meaning for ambiguity. She had looked into me, found me waiting there, had welled up with emotion as we created music together.
Leigha, petite with dark curly hair and heavily shadowed eyes, I sent her an email and told her how I loved her, just as much as I loved Theodora. In my carefully thought out verse I confessed my desire to know her, to be with her alone just as I had been alone for many months with Theodora. I suggested a picnic and drive to Bolinas. I described watching the colors of the sunset and sharing dreams. I imagined sitting beside the soft poetry of her body, touching the warmth of her hands.
The response I received turned my chest immediately into stone, leaving me more than cold, as I read the words the poems in me crumbled into nothingness. It read as follows:
"Thank you for your email and working with us today. We read your email carefully. We understand what you are perceiving and feeling, but there are just some things that cannot happen. We are trying to do something unusual. This means there are some things we do not do. We would like you to be part of our creative projects, but the kind of thing you described in your email would be outside of the possibilities. We hope you understand. We like you very much and would like to keep doing creative projects with you. We know that the kind of contact we have had is rare, and we would like to maintain that kind of rare contact with you. It will just have to stay within certain limits. Love, Theodora, Ferdinand and Leigha."

It was the impossibility that the three of them had read my email together and responded in concert that led me to uncomfortable conclusions. Whatever I had seen, whatever had happened, it was the email that guided my regard of the happenings at 119 Santa Clara.
I responded to the email saying that I was hurt with Leigha’s disclosure of my message to the others. She responded that it had not been their intention to hurt me, it had simply been their intention to tell the truth. A week later I wrote Thedora;

“It is not possible that I was understood by the collective mentality of your exalted group, as exalted as you may be. I poured my heart out to you, and then you and your intensely felt colleague and house mate. So now, the three of you know the heart of my heart of my heart, based on a trusted and risky effort at sharing, and I know almost zero about one of you, and a little more about the others. When I asked to get to know one of your better, I got a group speak response, that felt very cultish in style. May this life, Theodora, bring you endless joy and creativity along with the suffering and struggle...EW”

Her response was an obscure:
“No problem EW, farewell.” Concluded with a smiley face.
I looked up from the short message, unable to focus on any shape around me. The familiar colors and furnishings of my living room were dirty and old in the bright afternoon light. With those final words I felt the last bit of mint drift out of me. The poem had faded, taking my stories with it.

Perhaps you know the song about the houses. If you have never seen them, the houses of blue, green, red and yellow, you might think that it was only a song, a silly song, a symbolic song highlighting the rote and under-whelming achievements of modern man. You might think that they were not literally boxes if you had not seen them as I, Earl Winters, have seen them.
Poetry is about the roundabout. Every sign is indirect, diffuse in meaning, forsaking meaning for ambiguity. And yet all these houses, all these familiar little boxes, they are all the same, they must all remain the same.

Soulless Things

Later, much later, Andrina was caught in the net of a fisher of men. She was a soulless thing like all of her sisters, except for the youngest who had earned hers through sacrifice. But when that priest looked into her eyes she felt a pang in her chest.
What eyes they were, round and silver like moons with amber striations radiating from the darkness of his pupils. His hair too was silver streaked with black, like lightening flashing in a tempest, it hung long around his face, undulating as the sea in the brisk gale that blew over them, rocking the tiny boat.
Helpless in his net, Andrina gazed back through long black lashes and the pale hair that hung limp and heavy around her face. She had never seen a priest before, and so his long black habit revealed nothing to her of his occupation, but it impressed her nonetheless. She had never seen a fisherman wear such a garment.
He did not speak to her at all before he cast her back into the sea, and after following him and singing her most alluring song to no avail, she at last swam reluctantly back to the depths.

As the tides ebbed and flowed the pang in her chest grew into an unbearable torment. Creatures such as herself do not sleep, but they dream with eyes wide open, concealed in kelp forests whose swaying lulls them like a silent song. But her dreams were only of those eyes and the way he flung her into the sea and never looked back. She could not bear to dream, and soon could neither eat nor sleep. She found no pleasure in the arms of the sailors that she dragged into the watery abyss and sucked their last breath from them with deadly apathy.

Desperately, she followed her younger siblings' example. After arduous searching, she found the sea witch in her caverns, gumming the bones of dolphins and drowned children.
The witch drew herself up out of the silt, stirring the water momentarily to muck. Then her one remaining golden eye locked onto the pale face of Andrina and she commenced to indulge in a laughter which began modestly but soon rumbled through the caverns, disturbing other dark things that once lay sleeping.
“Another little mermaid tormented by love.” the witch gloated, “And with a priest, no less. This should profit me well.”
“Love?” Andrina felt insulted. “I cannot love. I’m sick, witch, and I’ve come for a remedy.”
“Silly thing.” the witch said rearranging some bones to form her magic circle. “You are sick with love. You were contaminated by that priest. You’re only hope is to make him love you back. You must seduce him if you wish to be released from your torment. I will do for you what I did for your sister. I‘ll give you legs. Now hurry and leave before you transform. I love to eat things that have legs. You have one year, and if he hasn‘t made love to you by then, I get to eat you anyway.”
The witch quivered as she spoke this last line. Then her laughter swelled again, shaking slimy things from hidden crevices in the deep.

Andrina arrived with the storm, tossed onto the earth by titanic swells of white capped water. She hated the legs from the moment she stood on them and each step brought pain as though a dagger had been thrust into the arches of those horrible feet. Andrina dragged herself away from the angry mouth of the sea and staggered up the first path that presented itself, up to the church on the cliff. Above her the stained glass sparkled in the darkness, red and blue and gold, candle light flickering from behind so that the colors blinked like stars. The priest's boat was torn from the dock behind her and smashed in the waves while the wind howled and the icy rain pricked her flesh like needles falling from heaven. Naked and shivering, she burst into the chapel where her priest kneeled at the feet of the virgin. He turned as the doors were flung open and she limped, wild eyed and chest heaving, across the threshold to collapse in a pale heap.
With the same somber attitude with which he had cast her out of his net, the fisherman priest rose and shut the chapel doors against the storm. When he lifted her from the floor, Andrina wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her lips against his, but the priest held still as though a snake were at his feet, his lips unyielding. Then very slowly and gently he pulled his head away from hers as she lost consciousness again.

Having never slept before, Andrina lost a week to slumber in the priest's bed. When at last she awoke he fed her broth and bread, things she had never tasted, things that made her stomach sour. He tried to speak to her, but though her eyes remained fastened to his, she could not understand a word that spilled from his tongue. She tried to kiss him again, but he pushed her sternly, though gently, away.

He converted a store room into quarters for her and showed her how to stuff her own mattress with straw and scented flowers. He made her wear a scratchy gray dress and showed her how to draw water from the well. She was made to kneel before the altar with him several times a day. He attempted to teach her to speak his language though she could scarcely manage to feign interest in the coarse sounds that he uttered.
He taught her to tend the garden, but things of the earth withered in her care.
He built a new fishing boat and took her out with him, and here she excelled. She would cast the net and sing in her own tongue until it was heavy with fish. After discovering this talent he sent her to fish alone and tried to teach her to sing his own music. She would not look at anything written on paper, but he taught her to repeat after him and was amazed by the perfection of her memory. She could perform complex melodies if he sang them or played them for her on the organ but once.

Thus routines were established and Andrina fell into step with her priest, each footfall filling her body with searing pain. Every Sunday he rang the bell and one old woman would trek up the path and take a seat in the pews to listen to the mass and take the sacrament and hear the priest play the organ as Andrina sang. Andrina grew weaker with each passing day. The priest was immune to her physical charm. His eyes were more hypnotizing than her own, his passion distilled into religious fervor. Only her voice could reach him and this he bent into his songs of worship, his will stronger than her heart.
Andrina’s pale hair grew brittle and her eyes lost their sparkle. There were days when she could not move about without the assistance of a cane, and yet worse days dawned when she could not rise from bed at all. Her priest ministered to her then and she followed his eyes with her own, as entranced as if she were in the kelp forests of her home.

The seasons passed, 1, 2, 3, 4 and the old woman from town died. Her casket was carried up the cliff by two men with coarse faces and tight fitting suits. They lowered her into the ground and left the way they had come, walking stiffly down the dusty road. Andrina, supported on her cane, watched them go and thought of how she would like to draw them down into the darkness and suck their last breath from them. The priest prayed for the old woman and buried her and made Andrina come into the chapel and sing.
His language was beginning to make sense to her.
“Ashes to ashes.” she heard, “dust to dust.” It terrified her that she could understand this, she who had once been immortal, she who was now running out of time.

That night, she slipped into her priest's bed and he flung her out, just as he had flung her from his net eleven moons ago. He made her kneel with him and prayed for her forgiveness and salvation the rest of the night. As the dawn broke over the sea outside and peeked through his small window he clasped her face in his hands and said:
“My child, god's love is infinite. Seek his love, not mine. The flesh will die, your immortal soul will go on at his side if you abide by his commandments and do his work.”

Andrina formed her mouth awkwardly over the words leaving large gaps between each utterance:
“My flesh was im-mortal…I lost that to be at your side. I have no soul. Your love is my on-ly salvation, since you caught me in your net. Save me, please, save me, my love.” she wept and the priest, taken aback by her first words since her arrival, turned pale and released her warm cheeks. He clambered to his feet and left her alone on the cold stone floor.

Andrina went out in the boat and sat upon the sea weeping. The wound in her chest had only grown in the months that had passed. She whispered farewell to the sea and the long life which now seemed like a distant dream. She wondered if it had been real at all, or if she had always been a mortal creature, the crippled daughter of a fisherman perhaps, weak minded and fanciful. She wondered if she might escape the witch’s appetite by running from the sea and settling inland, she wondered if she would die somewhere surrounded by stone and root and if some priest would lower her stoically into the earth mumbling about ash.

At that moment the sea hissed and bubbled near the small boat and a black dagger broke the surface of the water, a pale hand wrapped around its barnacle encrusted hilt. As the knife rose into the cool air the sea quieted beneath it and Andrina could see the face of her sister, Arista, just under the shimmering surface, black hair radiating from around the pale oval like the rays of a dark sun. Andrina recognized the dagger that had been cast away by their strange youngest sister long, long, ago in the moment of her sacrifice. Andrina herself had been the one to place it in her hand. Now it was Arista who offered it up. Trembling, Andrina seized the dagger, her finger tips brushing against the cool slick flesh of her sister’s hand before Arista sunk back into the depths. Andrina concealed the dagger under her dress and turned the boat back to shore.

The priest was gone for most of that day. Andrina waited for him in the chapel, but would not kneel at the feet of the virgin. She paced and felt the bite of the earth sting her feet. As dusk approached she nearly gave up hope that he would return, but then he came into the chapel looking pale and weary. She limped to him and shaking he pulled her against his chest. For a moment the pain in her heart was eased, almost transformed to euphoria, but then he spoke into her hair, the heat of his breath touching her scalp:
“My child, my vow is to God. I can do nothing to break my covenant with him.”
She tried to turn her face up to kiss him.
“Save me, please.“ she begged, but he held her until she stopped struggling,
“No!” he cried fiercely though softly, “What you ask for is not saving, you would damn us both!”
The sun was slipping away behind the stained glass, leaving them wrapped in gloom. The moon would rise soon. She fell limp in his arms and wept for a moment longer. Her hand was wrapped around the dagger's hilt as she spoke into his chest:
“I will not die for your God.” She plunged the knife into his belly and he gave a little startled cry as he crumpled heavily around her. “Now you can feel my love, as I have felt yours.” she whispered.
The chapel doors blew open, a sudden gust coming up from the sea. Andrina pushed her priest off of her onto the stone floor where he lay bleeding and gasping like a fish. She took hold of the hem of his habit, and wincing from the pain in her feet, she dragged him out of the chapel and onto the dirt path.

Storm clouds were gathering over the sea and the lightning flashed over the water. Silver against black, like his hair. She pulled him through the dust, ashes to ashes, down the path cut in the cliff, the dagger lodged in his belly, his blood spilling into the earth as they went. The moon was rising, silver over the water, like his eyes, as she stumbled and fell and crawled still dragging him behind her. Her knees were torn by the rocks so that she too bled and her blood mixed with his and with the earth.
On the beach she struggled to her feet and dragged him into the surf, then collapsed with him where the sea met the land. She wrapped her arms around him and sang her most alluring song to him, waiting for the waves to pull them free. The mouth of the sea opened hungrily around them and swallowed them up, pulling them into the deep.
Now Andrina gave him her kiss, drawing him down, down, down with her into the inky depths, far beyond the place that nets can reach, mortal dreams peeling away from them in their descent. She was a soulless thing like all of her sisters, except for the youngest who had earned hers through sacrifice, but when that fisher of men looked into her eyes it left a wound in her heart that not even eternity could heal.

Belief

Belief was a golden-haired child born in the state of desire within the realm of the word.
The word: right, gleaming, sometimes dark and full of clouds.
All was true.
None was true- just like dreams during bouts of thunder.
He had never been in the realm of the Real, cushioned as he was by the pillowy softness of DESIRE and THE WORD; he only caught short glimpses of the Real, tiny fragments of light he could never remember. It was as if they had never happened. The golden-haired child, born on the white bed during the time of blue, little did it know that nothing born of the word could walk in the realm of the Real.

Belief was born in a place where the urge to fulfil needs is transferred into abstract longings whose ends can never be met, a place where yearning goes on and on because there can be no end to yearning. Belief was a necessity, a logical conclusion to such yearning. It worked like a bottle with a cork, how tight it kept all those things locked down. Blue and brown bottles all lined up and evenly spaced on the shelf, tidy and ordered and gleaming like church windows in noonday sun.

Belief was a natural product of desire. Oh, that dress. That kiss, more, more, please.
Whereas a need could be met, a desire knew no fulfillment and so it naturally blossomed into Belief.
Oh, that touch, more, more please.
It is the notion which makes us believe that what one longs for does exist, will happen, is coming eventually to those who are good, to those who believe. The houses they promised, the dream they spoke of, the heaven that awaits after toil and suffering, the approval of the father after a lifetime of whipped dog-like subservience, the love of one and only one other human.
All of it- belief.

Once, not too long ago, Belief knew he was a man of god. He was a street preacher with long blond hair pulled tight behind his head. Many people regarded him as a semi-delusional zealot who imagined he could hear God in his head. He stood by the courthouse steps and told them the evil of their ways. He was a man in an old brown suit that was one inch too short for his pale limbs.
Many people prayed to god. Hands clasped tightly, desires leaking from their mouths. They talked to him, some even thought they heard answers or saw signs in response. But when a man did nothing but stand on the street and preach and shout and lecture to the passers-by about the word of God, the majority, even the church-going people, thought that his mind had slipped into the cave of fantasy. From his own perspective, he was the only one who believed in the lord enough to give up all other things. He saw himself as truly devotional, the messenger, a solider in God’s army.

It all happened for Belief within the realm of the symbolic order. All of this happened because a symbol was not the thing itself. A car was not a car, love was not love. Words, words, symbols. It was like a shadow, it took a shape that couldn't be grasped, a shape that could take on a life of its own and birth new shapes with no correspondences to the Real. These shapes, these shadows with no correspondences, were the makers of DESIRE, the grandparents of Belief. They were dark storms that clouded the Real.

Belief constructed a world around himself, as we all do, to explain his existence. It was elaborate and full of detail, rich in explanations which he liked to share often with whomever would listen. In his world, God spoke to him, God commanded him. There was one word that mattered, one sound that trumped all others. In his world, men could do what they wanted with their women as long as they were married. It was what God commanded, what he actually wanted for the men of earth. He knew that people must be humbled, for now their pride eclipsed their accomplishments, and their ego would not let in the glory of the lord. They needed to experience the low human-state so they could one day experience a higher one.
It was the only way. He knew it. As God’s solider, it was his mission to teach THE WORD. God told him the way to humble these humans who coveted their fine clothes, their hot meals, their whims and merriment.

Belief was a prince in the house of DESIRE. He ran to and fro calling for some action or other in his name. People gladly indulged this spoiled child because it gave them Hope, his lovely sister and wife. She was only another word. Hope lacked anything that could keep it from floating away during the night. Hope was the golden-haired sister of Belief. Sticky, sweet and empty. Always encouraging one to embrace Belief, for if you stuck with him, you would get to taste her sweetness, like dime-store candy.

Once, not too long ago, there was a family that trusted Belief. This family hired him to help repair their roof which had been leaking for many years. He worked at their house for five hours one day.
On the 5th night, as had been his plan for several days, he cut a hole in their screen door, which was partially open to let in the wonderful summer-scented night air. He let himself in while the moon was still high. As everyone slept, he kidnapped Hope from her bed.
He had recognized her as his long lost sister and lover. He took her to the woods where he had told his wife to wait for him under the trees. His wife gave Hope a robe and told her to change into it.

Hope and Belief, together once again, offered justification to the house of desire. Like the children of a couple that has become disenchanted with one another, they were the fantasies that made all other fantasies survive.

A small ceremony was performed and Belief proclaimed Hope as his wife. He become one with her, as he would many times afterwards, many times each day. Hope was found nearly a year later walking on the street of a town she once had seen through very different eyes. The colors she remembered had taken on a fractured quality, as though she had merged with some other creature while chained in the woods. The blue authorities wrote down her words:
"Anything I showed resistance or hesitation to, he would turn to me and say, 'The Lord has commanded you to do this. You have to experience the lowest form of humanity to experience the highest.’ I watched him from the ground, talking as he did with emphatic movements. Then he would get on top of me and humble me once again.”

Belief and his first wife were taken into police custody. They were both declared mentally unfit to stand trial. It was Belief's explanation that the court saw as unstable. His preaching on the courthouse steps, his very thoughts on God.

If we could only have Belief we would join God in Heaven and bring Truth back to life. With Belief’s hand in mine, it was okay to kill and take another’s land. His presence supported actions borne from desire, his company justified all actions. Human thoughts became God’s thoughts.

With Belief at your side, you will do any number of absurd things; set out cookies for an immortal in a red suit, or eat crackers and wine and call it the flesh and blood of your God, or burn a person at the stake, or drive your neighbors from their homes and push them into the sea, or destroy all of the natural resources available to you and the rest of your race. With belief, it is what God desires, what God has asked for in an inaudible voice that shook the walls with its power.

The writer of a particular text about Hope used words like “horrific and sick” to describe Belief. This is the conflict. One man believes he is doing what God wants him to do. He is humbling a young woman so that one day she can reach a higher state, so they can both become what they were meant to be. This is Belief.
One deed is thought of as righteous, the same deed is seen by others as evil. Both are words used to describe an action.

There is nothing that “can’t” or “shouldn’t” be done when you can say that Belief is with you. No door can be closed to you when you come from the house of Desire, frothing at the mouth with want of a satisfaction that can’t be had, golden Belief and fair Hope marching at your side demanding that you take, take, take. Take what you want and say it was for Belief. Your basket is full, Belief is there at your side, a parrot on your shoulder.

Even in custody, Belief continuously sang hymns to himself until he was removed from the courtroom. The world around him was crazy, full of evil men who had no contact with God. He sang to remind himself that he was the one with the truth. He was the one with God on his side. He had to sing to protect his world. He sang to protect his symbolic order, the world he had built for himself, the only world that still had a place for him.

He ran amok under the shadowy banners of the house of Desire within the Realm of the symbolic. There it was glorious, there it was beautiful. In the realm of the Real, Belief and Hope vanished like evil spirits.
In the realm of the Real, you stand alone with blood on your hands, raw animal death under your fingernails, spattered on your face, shivering through your bones.

The Real is void of Gods, void of hope, void of salvation or damnation, void of any branch to which you might cling and profess “It is so!” In the state of the real you would not search for your lost sister, because there is no sister to lose, no “other” to humble or cling to, to subordinate or raise higher. There is an endless sea of “something” which defies explanation, which eludes capture in the realm of the symbolic. Whenever you dip your hand into the well of the Real and try to bring it into the realm of the Word, what you retrieve is transformed from life into death, from unity into separation, categorization and humiliation.

The Real cannot be perceived through the word, not through the damaged eyes of Belief or Hope, made of words as they are.
Nothing that can be said is true.
All those who speak lie, from dawn till dusk they lie and only in the darkness is the truth revealed to them, in their nightly visits to the well of the Real. Something voyages between these two realms, the land of THE WORD and the kingdom of the REAL.
When it is in one state it is one thing and when it is in the other it is another. This something is a voyager, sometimes captured by the gravitational pull of the WORD. To be free of the word and of desire you must sacrifice Belief and Hope, stop expending vital energy in supplication to these false deities. They are closest to you, and therefore easiest to reach.
Then you must tell Mother desire that you know she is a lie forged of the illusory substance of Father word and then your tongue will be tied by the white hot heat that leaves you howling and wriggling as you abandon the WORD, achieving lift off.

The Meeting

She pulled up to the café and saw that the lights inside were on still. It was past nine and all the other small cafes along the street were dark. The corner café was spilling its yellowness onto the sidewalk and into the dark night. Even though the lights were on, she could tell it was closed. It had that feeling, something that was finished, but still lingering. She pulled her car alongside the plate glass windows that acted as a wall. She shut the engine off and looked inside. There were two people inside behind the counter, both of them almost blocked from view by the large industrial coffee grinders and stacks of cups.
She put her purse in the trunk, put her cell phone and car keys in her pocket and then got out of the car. She shoved three twenties into her corduroy jacket pocket. She looked again through the café windows and saw Ronnie inside. The barista, now she could tell it was a young woman with long dark hair, was handing him two white paper cups of coffee over the cappuccino maker.
Suza walked away from the front glass door and strolled the length of the café, the entire front wall was made of plate glass windows. With her hands in her jacket pockets, she looked into the empty seating area at the far end of the narrow building. There were wooden tables and chairs and wooden bench seating built into the walls. On the wall above the bench seating were framed pieces of art arranged in a single row.
She turned to the left, towards the registers and the coffee grinders and equipment and saw Ronni standing in front of a narrow table against the window by the front door, fixing his coffee with cream and sugar. He looked up and they made eye contact. He smiled at her in recognition. She looked again towards the paintings on the wall, semi- abstract mountain scenes painted in a neutral orange and red palette. There was a small cork bulletin board just a few feet from her on the wall. It was crowded with so many paper signs, ads and posters that it seemed more like an interactive collage layered with old announcements and flyers.
She heard the sound of the glass door fifteen feet away and she looked towards it, towards Ronnie coming out of the door with two coffee cups in his hands. She walked towards him and he handed her a cup. “They’re closed but they still had some decaf,” he said.
“That was sweet of you,” she brought the cup to her chest, a source of warmth in the cold misty night. “I can’t even drink decaf, I still feel jittery when I drink it, but that was nice of you.”
She felt a mixture of sadness and harshness inside as she rejected his offering, his thoughtful token of affection.
He walked slightly ahead of her, walking towards a row of tables along the wall of the café perpendicular to the front and the street she had parked along. They sat for less than a minute. A wild gust of wind picked up and she felt the wind go inside her jacket, torturing her chest with an icy touch.
“It’s cold,” she said, grimacing slightly. “Maybe there’s somewhere else we can go.”
She looked around at the darkened neighborhood.
“We can go to my car.”
He led her back around the block to the front of the café. His car was parked about ten feet behind hers, leaving a space between them just big enough for another car to fit in. As they were walking he turned around towards her.
“You look really good,” he said with a smile.
She smiled, “You look skinnier.”
“Yeah, I’ve lost a lot of weight.”
It had been a year since they last met at the same café. He was the same, but different.
He opened the passenger door to his tan Volvo and she slipped inside. Inside was the dog she remembered from the time before, a pug with slightly glazed eyes and stinky fur. She avoided touching it. The last time she pet the dog, over a year ago, the smell had not come off her hands for hours. She had washed her hand with soap, poured Listerine and rubbing alcohol on it, nothing worked immediately. This time she avoided touching him, though he leaned his head towards her, practically begging for affection.
The dog kept his skinny hind legs on the back seat and reached towards the front seats by putting his two front legs on the console between the driver and passenger seat.
Ronnie walked around to the driver’s side and got in. Once inside he handed her a small, folded-up piece of aluminum foil.
“There are two five-strips in there, you’ll need to cut them yourself.”
“Oh, they’re not all cut up?”
“No, it looks like this.”
He opened the glove compartment, pulled out a ziplock bag and procured another small folded-up piece of aluminum. He opened the folds of foil and then moved it towards her. There were three strips of paper inside, each about an inch long and an eighth of an inch thick. Ronnie and Suza both peered in, as though they were looking into a doorway or a flashing tv set.
“Shit,” Ronnie muttered as he lost his grip on the feather-light foil and a little strip fell into the nether-region by the car’s gear shift. She let out a little chuckle, wondering to herself how many illicit substances were lost in the caves of his car. Ronnie pulled up the fake walnut veneer that housed the gear shift and found the white little strip (it looked like cardstock or paper used for watercolors) and put it back into the foil.
“Don’t do what I just did,” he said with a smile, “when you’re cutting them, put on some gloves, you’d be surprised how fast it gets absorbed into your skin.”
She nodded. She was a little surprised by how small the strips were. How could such a small thing produce such profound changes in the person that puts it in their mouth?
“So, cut those into five equal strips…”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“How many do you usually take?”
“I take one.”
He said it with such finality and seriousness, looking into her eyes directly with a slightly tilted head, as though he had to make the point and underline it. She was surprised. He had told her stories of taking 5-10 hits of whatever substance he could find, it made her a little nervous that he limited himself to one tab, how strong were they?
“I haven’t tried these ones, but I took some that looked like this a few weeks ago and within an hour, an hour and a half, I was on the floor. I was glad I only took one because I wouldn’t have been able to handle any more."
They’re strong, she thought. She felt a little nervous, her stomach started to turn, her body finding something to worry about.
“I met someone that is interested in DMT, can I give him your number?” she asked.
“I don’t really want to deal with people I don’t know. I would probably deal with him through you, but I’ve never seen DMT commercially available. I’ve made it, synthesizing it from plants, but I’ve never seen it out there in big quantities.”
He leaned over her and reached into the glove compartment again, it was still open. He got a small bit of folded foil and opened it. He turned on the overhead light, which illuminated the substance in his hand, a small crystal, it was smaller than a grain of rice.
“You do speed?” he asked.
She laughed, “No, do you?”
“Yeah," he said.
Now she understood why he was so skinny. She thought she heard him say something about smoking.
“If you are going to smoke that, I should probably go,” she said looking at the door handle by her left knee.
“No, I’m not going to smoke it now,” he said laughing.
She started to feel a slight sense of nausa.
“Speed is something, I mean, if you can’t just do it once or twice a month, you really shouldn’t do it. It can really mess with you.”
She looked at him moving around all jittery. He kept on looking in his rear view mirror and then looking at her and then looking ahead out through the car’s windshield. There was a stoplight twenty feet away, green light beamed towards them. She started to feel paranoid, like at any moment, a car could pull up next to them and turn on its sirens. They were just sitting there talking, but the glove compartment was full of different baggies and any cop would have been following his right instincts to stop and search them.
Avoiding the dog, she sat slightly tilted in her seat.
“Right now,” he said, “the doors are open. We can get coke, heroin, crack, which is just a few blocks from here. There’s molly. Whatever you want. But not DMT. I’m looking to get a big mimosa tree, the bark has DMT in it. Then I can synthesize my own.”
“I’m sure they have one at the nursery on Water Street.”
“Yeah, I’m sure they do, I just don’t want to attract too much attention, you know? I’ve got a garden full of psychedelic plants already. Did you know that the moment you die, your body releases dmt?”
Through an unlit cigarette in his mouth he said, “I think that’s very interesting.”
He pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket and lit his cigarette.
“I think I am going to step outside,” she said.
“Oh. Does this bother you? I can put it out.”
“Really, you sure?”
“Yeah, I can wait.”
"I think Valaris has DMT in it. I’ve been looking to find that plant.”
“We have valaris. The variegated kind.”
“Which kind is it, there are lots of varieties.”
“You know,” she said, “I’m not sure, it’s variegated. It’s in my friend’s yard, he planted it, not me.”
“The other day I found some really pure molly. See, me and my girl took some hits, they were ok, but they didn’t quite take us there, and once you start, you really want to get there, so we went down to the Falcon Bar and I started asking different people if they had seen my friend mollie. Some girl said, ‘yeah, I know mollie.’ It was this candy raver girl. You know the Falcon Bar? It’s a raver bar. It was such a clean roll. It was exactly what I’d been looking for. I found her later and asked if she could get some more, she had major quantity. We had a big old-fashioned ecstasy orgy at my house a few days later.”
She started to feel something in her stomach. A general sense of ill ease, like something bad would be drawn towards them. Maybe it was the memories of an old life in Santa Barbara, but sitting with Ronnie in the car, his glove compartment full of enough evidence to warrant years of jail time, it just reminded her of a particular level of existence where you were always scared of the cops, or at least looking for them at every moment.
She wondered if it was just her that was paranoid. He had not been paranoid several weeks before when he was comfortable arranging the substance and payment for it over the phone. No code words, no disguise. ‘It’s white on white, 5 bucks a hit.’
She was the one that was worried about the cops, she who remembered so viscerally her life ten years before. As she sat there, her body tilted avoiding not just the dog, but the situation, she realized she was pulling in, not pushing out. She tried to imitate him a little. She realized she was getting fearful. She reminded herself not to pull in or else she would absorb his atmosphere into herself.
She pushed out. She tried to imitate him a little, but she forgot her intent soon after.
He said “You know, I’m not a drug dealer, I’m not trying to make money off this, I just want people to get high and have a good time. When I do LSD, I do it spiritually. I go into the woods and take it. I don’t fuck around."
“Ronnie, I need to go now, I need to go pick up my goddaughters.”
He looked at her very sweetly, he stared at her like he liked looking at her face. She smiled at him and got out of the car. She checked her pocket to make sure the foil was there, then drove her car around the darkened lake, back to her house.

The Bird

Light comes in, bursting through the colored landscape with speckled dots of brightness. Moves in like the unwanted visitors who stalk restful sleep. Soon she will remember where she is. The little white room, the single bed with a tri-colored crocheted quilt over her naked body. The little stars of light break through the story of her dark dream. Images of hillsides and trees and a rusted red car leak from her memory, fading fast, spilling, spilling as the light gets stronger. She cannot fight it, it is day and with day comes a bright reality. Four white walls, a single sized bed, a narrow window that looks out into the long, narrow garden. As the colors of her dream drip back into the unconscious, as she fights the tide of consciousness that rushes in, she finds herself too tired to reach for her pen and notebook just inches from her bed on the wooden nightstand. She cannot will her arm to move. It is all right there, but she lets the dreams slip, just like so many other things that have washed back into the dark unruly waves of her nighttime voyages.

Minutes pass, maybe more. Her eyes are open widely surveying the room. The sky outside is cloudy, a thick blanket of white, the same as most mornings here by the sea. Maybe soon, as all things are temporal, the fog will come in full gusts, will water the plants in her backyard with its fine stingy spray. She pushes the quilt off her body with a shove of impatience, the move, though coming from her own limbs, startles her. The impatience seems foreign, though it is all her own. Suddenly, her skin, all warm from a night of thermal incubation meets the cooler air of the small white walled-room. The meeting of two worlds are like tiny alarm clocks on her skin, a thousand little electric needles to her fleshy whiteness. She tosses her legs off the bed and reaches for the sweatpants and oversized white t-shirt on the carpet, the small pile of clothes she wiggled out of more than eight hours before. The t-shirt is thin and white and soft from bleach and time and washings. The tiny alarm clocks begin to fade as the clothes wrap around the contours of her body, all full of curves and roundness, each one calling out in its own voice for touch.

She stands up and looks at herself in the long mirror nailed to the back of her bedroom door. An image familiar, an image that looks like a vision from a dream. Wild shoulder length hair of dark waves that have taken on a medusa madness in the night. Her brown eyeliner is smudged below her eyes and she looks like she should be on her way to some hole in the wall industrial show in the depths of San Francisco, not waking up in her small white walled room, a ceiling of clouds speaking to her through the window. She is different. A different animal than the one who closed her eyes and fell asleep on a flattened pillow. She searches for what has changed, something beyond the mess of hair and piercing eyes, eyes that saw other worlds during the long dark hours. She looks deeper, but realizes suddenly it is not just her, it has all changed. A new layer of dust added to the bookshelf, the slowly dying geranium outside her window, it was all new and different, as altered as she had become by the dream of a rusty red car that would come for her on the street where she lived.

She walks to her bedroom window. The window is narrow, entry or exit from it barred by a crosshatch of decorative iron bars coated in a whitish oxidation along certain edges. The garden outside is lush. Bright bushes of blue hydrangeas are in full bloom which compete with overgrown weeds competing for the same sun. Along all edges of the wooden fence are bushes of deep red geraniums she planted a few months before and a tiny morning glory in a little plastic container that she hopes will one day cover the yard in its curious creeping vines and purplish blue flowers, though right now, the plant is just a few inches tall. Along the back fence, more than a hundred feet away from her window is a massive black walnut tree whose canopy is so wide it covers much of her yard and much of her neighbor’s too. She stares out into the garden many times a day, her patience sometimes rewarded and surprised by the iridescent green shimmer of hummingbirds as they dart quickly among the azaleas, poking their long beaks into the heart of each flower face. More often though, she watches the tiny song birds, more frequent visitors to the garden. Their little brown bodies and fat breasts make her smile with their constant play.

She’s looking out the window and sees a slight movement along the back fence, just a vibration really against the wooden planks but then two pale hands reach up from the neighbor’s yard and grab onto the fence, within seconds a man easily draws himself over the boundary between the two yards. She is startled and still, her mind actively remembering each lock in the house she secured in the night before she slipped out of her clothes and into her soft bed. She does not make any move, her breathing slows. He looks up into the wide canopy of the black walnut tree, his hands on his hips. He is a white man, thin but not frail, though nowhere close to fit. He’s wearing brown slacks and a short sleeved white button up shirt, his clothes reminding her of a mid-level bureaucrat from the fifties or perhaps a director of a small funeral home in the middle of the country where time and fashion is still decades behind. She has never seen him before, is startled and alarmed at first by his presence, but her fear turns into curiosity when he does not walk towards the house but instead, climbs the black walnut tree along the back fence. He perches on one of the lower branches, squatting slightly. She notices his feet are bare and very white.

Her attention is diverted from the man as a fat songbird flies close to her window, circling in front of a small geranium bush with deep red flowers and then makes a straight line to the man in the tree. The man watches as the bird approaches and he opens up his hands as it flies nearer. The bird lands in his cupped hands and stays for a few moments. Both the man and bird are still, looking at each other until suddenly the bird takes off and flies up, landing on a near vertical branch at the top of the tree.

The man closes his eyes. He stays like that for a while, though she cannot see his slightly creased forehead, she can sense his intense concentration, his stillness, he seems to both expand and contract, yet is still, getting lighter, lifting as though the wind were picking him up in a gentle embrace. Wind full of summer jasmine and the threat of seaweed-scented fog. She watches him through changed eyes, sight altered by dreams and time. She notices his white shirt, the way his chest begins to protrude just a bit more, pushing against the plastic buttons along the front, the same sort of movement she has seen the little brown songbirds doing in the puddles of her concrete patio after a rainstorm. As she watches, his pale white skin turns a pale shade of blue while thin, long blue and brown speckled feathers sprout on his thin arms. His bare feet turn darker, then become black and claw-like. A weak breeze moves through the leaves of the tree, the tiny song bird at the top takes flight. In a moment the man is covered in feathers. He opens his arms wide, ducks below the lowest hanging branch of the black walnut tree and flies away in the direction of the ocean, his blue and brown feathers becoming a dot, then vanishing completely against the white overcast sky.

Dinner For Alice

The hunger was undeniable. Alice would awaken in the dead of the night, stomach growling, feeling stretched as though it might break into pieces. At first, always at first, she would try to be quiet, she would try not to wake up Ben, then she would remember that Ben was gone. She was alone.
It was the cold hard fact of this singularity that drove Alice into the yard, into the victory garden that had fallen into fecund disrepair since his departure. After a day spent in tears and rotating cycles of hair tearing and screaming, she would fall, utterly spent upon the bed and almost forget his absence in the dark desperation of sleep. Until her stomach called her awake, gurgling, forgotten and denied during the regularly scheduled emotional storms of the daylight hours.
In the endless torrent of wishes for her own death, for the death of Ben’s new flaxen haired lover, for Ben’s death, there was no time or motive to take sustenance. But in the darkness, after the exhausted blackouts, her appetite would take control and lead her barefoot into the yard. Under the pale white face of the moon Alice would kneel in the dark soil between the bug eaten chard and rhubarb. With one trembling hand she would scoop up a hand full of dirt and greedily thrust it into her mouth, wriggling worms and all. Turning over rocks she would lick at the scurrying surface, swallowing things that were still moving.
She fed with urgency and abandon, alternating between unturned bricks or stone and fistfuls of cool moist dirt. And when she was satiated she would return to the house, crawl with dirty fingernails back into bed and sleep until dawn, whence the appetites of the night would give way to the convulsive grieving of the day.
The nighttime excursions came to be extended. Rather than returning to bed Alice spent the rest of the night walking through the neighbors' yards, skirting around the edges of houses and tool sheds and compost bins, sometimes stopping to feed in a freshly tilled flower bed. In the early hours of morning before sunrise she would creep home, entering through the side gate, back into the yard, through the back door.
Pleasantly tired, she could sleep away the hours of the day. She tacked cardboard over the windows to keep the light out. As long as the sun was barred from the house, grieving could be suspended. Alice rested peacefully in her dirty bed, a layer of soil accumulating between the sheets. Waking after dark, her stomach crying with pain, she came to rise instantly with the knowledge that she was alone, that there was no one who could see her, no one who could stop her from doing what she wanted to do, no one to stop her from eating what she most craved. And what she craved for a time was the earth itself and the things that hid within it.
The change was gradual. Her skin first developed a certain sheen. It darkened. Then it began to harden. Her legs and arms had grown just a little longer. Her movements during her nightly excursions were quicker. There was a sound that her altered feet made over the concrete and asphalt, a soft skittering as she moved fleetly into the shadows along the walls.
Alice herself, resigned weeks ago to dying, accepted the changes unquestioningly. With a goal as simple as death, anything that happened in between was superfluous. As the changes came, however, as Alice pursued her appetites without regret, the death wish diminished, even vanished. Alice no longer thought of herself at all. She simply followed her instincts.
Her new form demanded greater sustenance. Neighborhood cats began to disappear. Soon the power lines bore pitiful photocopied announcements of reward for the safe return of a handful of different family dogs. One night Alice went out into the garden and spread her new pair of shiny black wings. In the city she kept to the alleys, terrifying the homeless drunks hidden beneath papers and soiled sleeping bags.
They had nothing to fear however, Alice had a hankering for something particular. She found it around the corner from a popular new nightclub; a young man laughing and wobbly with intoxication tugging a pretty young woman into the alley with him.
“What was that?” the young woman asked sharply peering into the darkness ahead of them.
“Nothing, nothing baby.” he cooed. Alice shuffled closer.
“Uh uh, no way, I’m out of here.” The woman broke free and hurried out of the alley, back to the street and its lights.
“Mary hold on.”
He called after her, but only managed to lean against the wall catching his breath. He laughed a little as he started towards the street and lost his footing. Alice scurried forward and took hold of him, mandibles sinking into his soft pink flesh as he screamed. The sound was drowned out by the beat from the club next door. Soon it ceased entirely, transformed into the gurgling of his own crimson internal fluids as they spilled from his lips.
Alice thought that he reminded her of something called Ben, although she could no longer quite recall what Ben was. Nonetheless, she felt sure that Ben was what she wanted, and this was almost it. She found it deeply satisfying.