Jorge: Dreams of pollution and chance

*

1. So Father Sam and I sat in analysis, or he in analysis and I in meltdown. Saturated, marinated, untranscended. My esteem for him deepened by the second, and so I had none left over for myself.  I hated myself. "You hate yourself but God does not seem to have that option, God loves you to the core. What does that do to your own petty perspective? Jorge, tell me."

2. My dreams were founded in injustice. They were truer than true. They were filled with knocking like a heart beating, not I think my own.  Was that someone knocking on my door? Did I even have a door in the porous corridors of dreamland? Maybe no.  The dream always grew assertive, it would demand to be heard. I tried not to listen, that was just another aspect of the dream.

3. The dream began when I stole someone's shell. So obviously we were animals here -- I suppose I mean "dumb" animals.  I climbed inside the shell and hunkered down, I would have closed it if only I could have.  Ah! The shell is a door that you can lock, so there's the door I dreamt about, anything to keep strangers out. And if the door weren't there then there wouldn't even be strangers -- one would be by definition exposed. I see (the priest said). This tender chitin-less abdomen would be exposed to everyone's forks and teeth. I would be delivered. I would be dead. And I know this because I have had time to reflect on it, and here is the most gruesome part: this reflection itself, couldn't have happened if I hadn't already had the space of reflection, which is what the shell is, the shell separates me from the sort of Darwinian chaos that I dream about, whether that chaos ultimately exists or not.  I mean that its nonexistence is as scary as its existence.  So it followed that I had to have the shell even to regret having it. So why must I feel so bad about something so inevitably necessary?  

The knocking (Sam said) is your conscience rattling around, and did you really think dreamland suspended such things? Oh (I said) but this too is a luxury and a gift, this having a conscience and feeling bad. This proves that I have won, whatever the game is that we're playing. The one whose shell I stole doesn't have guilt or anything because she is crushed and squished by the side of the road, like that poor indecisive squirrel.

4. I took what she had -- now that was disgusting.

5. I cannot live with myself -- but I do. So obviously I can.  I believe this dream guilt is largely cosmetic, something one must apply to the face as protection against the real thing.  Real guilt eats the soul raw, it is like a Darwinian predator, only I do not see how it benefits or has any fight to survive of its own to talk about.  It's as mindless as a shark.

6. In dreamland I am like one of those animals that nests inside another animal and eats it while it is still alive. The taste is better, is fresher that way, not that my victim is alive but that I am so appalled and horrified as I eat. The horror is like a spice.  God, how disgusting we humans are.  And yet they talk of innocence! And they talk of righteousness! Humans! They discuss the imitation of Christ, the ignorant fools -- we are so infinitely far from being able to imitate -- or even recognize -- those beings we pretend to be the images of -- and that we don't begin to understand.

7. So, Father Sam said, holiness would be like Groucho's country club that wouldn't be worth joining if they let such as you join. I don't think so. Now the 2 of them, Sam and the other one, the protagonist, walked through the hot mud puddles, ignoring the bar television that every dream has. The 2 men stepped into the whirlpool. It was impossibly hot -- J sank down -- looked over, accidentally saw his mentor's privacy, his groincurls, looked away quickly. And image as hot as an iron pressed against the brain.  Probably the amygdala was involved, that mass of "feelers".  I slid down into the bubbles to hide my -- what? to hide my feelings? Was my throat swollen? Heart throbbing? Was it just that I was so happy to be next to him? To have a friend and a ladder to God? It wasn't just that God had given me existence but that this existence was sometimes too happy to bear. An existence multiplied by itself, an abundance. Stolen from oblivion, not even mine really. Just handed to me (as opposed to someone else) by chance? What was chance? Did I even believe in chance?

8. When the atheist Dennett debunked design in favor of chance he thought he was closing a door that in fact he was opening. Chance! What was that? Something no human could ever manage -- or understand -- or even worship blindly -- because all our supposedly free acts ended up quite obviously reducing to old banal patterns recurring, not chance at all. Not worthy of being called chance. Because nobody could even say what it was. They say that human creatures are not deep enough or broad enough to use a word like chance, to mouth it like a known quantity, because it's really just a placeholder like zero, it means not even nothing at all, not even that, not even that much, not even nul, not to us. Because no one can define chance and then see what they define. They say the word it and call it awesome, that it that isn't even there. All right. I could go on. You know how every supposedly random number turns out to have factors, is caused, how sad. Jazzmakers improvisations follow rotes in the ground, have been sung a million times before, the artists' inspirations are all borrowed. So chance. So chance, what is that? It would be profound and transcendent if it existed and were not just this meltdown, this hallucination. Chance. If you don't call it design it only goes deeper -- like a tick you refuse to pluck. Dennett's chance is in fact entirely designed -- to stop discussion for one thing. But then his own silence begins to speak. The thing exorcised comes back doubled and trebled and ready to kill. Saying design exists or doesn't resolves to a single statement. "Nothing" is so scary because it is not, that is, not not scary, but not nothing, it is the "something" there that the atheist exploits and uses and that with him or without him we still fear. And we do. Of profound things there is no shading between discerning a pattern and discerning no pattern, which would be not discerning one at all because -- why? Because the light is too bright to pick it out. And the truth is that we don't even know what chance is. Nor do we acknowledge the implications of the fact that even chaos and utter disorganization have a design to be teased out. Don't even talk to me of chance. It probably exists but way beyond our reach -- there is only one powerful enough to wield chance and live. Not a journalist, to be sure.

9. So I was sitting next to Sam for a reason. Chance was not a factor.

10. And I only pretended when, just "by chance", I climbed out of the soapy spiralling mud and reached for my towel, oops, no towel at all! The waitresses circulated with their little napkins and cold-sweating glasses, little paper parosols floating, etc. I tried to think of my naked body as a kind of clothes.  Men's bodies stood around as if without the men inside and that was eloquent: this is not really you but your carapace.  The football team stood around the talking pizza box that I have never been able to shake from my dreamworld.  Coach's eyes, they flicked around the room like black flies, I tell you.  This is veristic, nothing has been added or taken away except, well, the basic laws of reason.  in this place whenever the world tilts I immediately recognize that we're on a ship, if only because my body --  my shell -- has filtered out the very concept of an earthquake, seeing them as intellectual constructions, not possible occurrences, but there it was again, as if immune to the simplifying power of a dream.

11.  And that was the nub: that discontinuity made the truest reality -- those fissures in the ground itself.  But the moment you accept them they become continuous.  Follows from this another essential that reality comes from outside my own tidy (?) being.  And yet they say a dream is all "inside the head" -- but not so -- au contraire.   The power of the dream is one's recognition of what in it is more than oneself, in other words most of it.  

12.  I sat disconsolate at the pool's side, or was it the ocean?  Then Estelle stopped to pick me up and drive me to the suburbs to see... to see Estelle, though even at the moment I knew this made no sense.  You can be multiple people conceptually but not in space, which only meant that this wasn't space, so what could it be instead?  The casting back of one's mind into one's memory, which was only the casting of itself into itself?  Wouldn't such a casting also create 2 people and not just one?

13.  She drove with utter confidence, she drove with liking, she liked to drive.  She came from a simpler and somewhat lovelier age when the other drivers never entertained the thought of killing you.  She was polite and competent -- later they took her licence away because she turned across a double yellow line and didn't remember her name when the officer asked -- that was just temporarily flustered about it.  And he was rude to her, she didn't like that.  she cried, never really recovered from the loss of her driving power.  Enough of that, the key to a memory is that the bad thing that happens later (in its inevitable and tragic fashion) has absolutely no effect on the goodness of the good thing that was previous, the good thing always remains intact.  So that you can immerse yourself in it without necessarily at every moment recalling what came later, what indeed at this very moment must have not yet come.  And you were glad.  She chatted while the 2 of you drove, she didn't care you were in that inevitable dream cliche wearing nothing but your shell.  Then you all arrived and greeted the little dog at the front door who peed on your foot and peed and peed.  And you were somehow wearing shoes again, and they were much too nice to be ruined like that, although at the same time you weren't wearing any shoes.  And you said to yourself: this is enough, wake up now please.

14.  There seemed to be a theme of water, Father, and if only I could be sure it was cleansing.  But I left wet footprints everywhere and climbed across Los Angeles, one wing to the other, on little stone steps as unstable as lily pads, a strange recurring dream I've had for years.  Sometimes I find myself bicycling on the freeway, through the very worst neighborhoods.  And I wold ask myself not "what do these dreams mean?" but simply "where does this amazing feel come from?"  Because waking life such as it was so often lacked all these feelings.  They where there but I didn't feel them -- not when I was awake.

15.  There was a drought of dreaming in my life, Father, and I knew I could see Estelle in no other way -- because death is a most importunate presence here, in waking as in sleeping.  It doesn't let us visit them, it tells us time's up before the time has even gotten under way.  I pressed the liquid doorbell and looked down.  The little dog had covered me in liquid waste from the shins on down -- and the little thing himself was covered, poor thing -- and no one would ever come to answer the door -- because this door was as if exorcised, de-haunted irreversibly -- no one was there or would ever be there.  And as I leaned, was it to take off my shoes or put on my shoes?  was it to put on or take off the pants?  And then I said to myself, this is enough -- I want to wake up.  Easily said, more easily done.  I lay panting on the bed.

16.  There was a streak of light on the wall, humble in the way it didn't go anywhere.  You could see it splitting the wall in two.   I felt a space around my heart, a feeling of God's being between -- as for instance, in begin between the light and what it rested on.  The essence of waking was to be able to hold onto this thought for some time.  Birds were singing in a dissheveled way on the trellis.  Suppressed activities could be heard beyond the shell of not having to act in which I lay but even less than that, a sort of virtual rocking.  I prayed in my clumsy way -- for some of the internal squabbling to get tired and desist so that the morning could come unblocked.  Between things lay spread not extension but presence.  I lay in a place of truths too deep to prove or almost even to share, even with oneself.  Did it exist?  Somet mes it was  a melancholy place, too thoughtful to impress itself on neighbors, on colleagues.

17.  The sun was not a sign.  The sun was not a blemish.  The sun was not a pointing hand.  The sun was not a clue or a puzzle.  The sun was not a person.  The sun was not a calibrated substance.  The sun was not a ploy.  The sun was neither this nor that.  But between the sun and the wall lay reality itself.

18.  I walked into the living room and the rug crackled.  Whenever I touched a doorknob I got a shock.  There was Estelle in that special hospital bed they'd set up so she could be in the swing of things -- but instead she lay as if below the mattress, sunk more deeply than a body ought to go.  Was I wanting her death?  No no, but only closure -- yet only one kind of closure seemed possible.  So every thought was pollution and time was fraught, literally freighted with equivocation.  I try to pray but everything seems to have left me, she said.  Oh Estelle. I answered.  It isn't that, it's just -- but I have to go, I'm late for work.  And she looked at me, dismissing me from her thoughts already, but not exactly.  The sun fell on her collection of little animals and circulated between them -- they splashed in it.   But I felt dirty getting into my car.  And somehow it was once again Estelle driving the car, with that calm competence that had always eluded me, was unavailable to a walking mess like myself.  She drove us into town -- through the dusk.  Dusk!  Well, it felt real if nothing else did.

19.  May you hear a sign tonight, she said as I closed the door.  I walked into the windowy building with a heavy bag in my hand -- books? gym clothes?  The dreamland abridged all the business of ID cards etc.  That left me time to wonder where I was.  A recovery center?  Well, I had just enough time to wonder, was able to wonder, while the men all moved like a slow fluid to the back room.  Since I was a man, I of course followed.  Father Sam was sitting in a battered cardtable chair, a battered Episcopal priest.  Being who he was, he didn't say to me: you're late, you missed the service.  No.  He said: I'm so happy to see you!

*

Jorge: Bricks

*

In this dream love was required. We all love here. The chaste kiss of peace.

The center of the Eucharist had become the moment of peace. This "moment" lasted for some minutes.

J began to panic. Did he love enough? Probably not. So would they notice?

Would they expel him from the sanctuary for the inadequate quantity of his love? Would everybody horribly try to repair him?

Was the love nothing but a disguised form of fear?

At the Thanksgiving dinner he'd attended a few weeks before, every single person in the act of expressing thanks had broken down into tears, except for himself. He had spoken but tears had not come.

A certain joy for him had been present but it had been dry.

I felt my mind wandering during the group prayers so I went into the parish hall bathroom. My absence so to speak wasn't alone -- there were lots of people in the hall. Preparing food. Acting out in the youth group. A few of the homeless lingering around the buffet and so they well might. I at least understood them. I understood a thing like need but love had me baffled. At least in dreamland it did.

Like a legalist trying to earn points I opened the closet to put out the necessary chairs for hospitality, but the closet had been bricked over by the new rector. The bricks wouldn't move. Then I heard the organ behind me and it seemed so far away, also somehow bricked off.

Yet I knew there was a way through those bricks if I could only figure it out. Most likely there was a breath of air reaching me through the impasse, like a winding clew. If I thus were to narrow my shoulder, and subsequently stand sideways, I might well squeeze myself through as if by a thought. And on the other side of the bricks, down a ramp of musty stairs, I did find a few of the chairs in a circle with men (only men) sitting in them. It was the other church, the secret church inside. These were 2 churches that did not so much share a building as in some arcane way hold a common interest in the space intervening between them, which I at least was finding irreversible -- that is, I could not back up. And the secret minister ordered me to sit down and so I did.

Who are you guys? I asked and they said: the men's group. J shifted with all the more discomfort in his chair for considering that he hadn't even sat there long enough to feel comfortable or not. The truth was that he detested and feared groups of men ("gangs!"). . And these guys were uglier than was possible, their ugliness was even multiplied by quantity and proximity. Not the sort to cry at a meal.

Oh give it up, J, give them a break. Soften your heart, it's the Eucharist. I needed to relax and soften. This was feeling like my dream of last night (? was it last night?) I think last night (?) when I found myself walking by the park on a windy night and watching the shadows of the walnut leaves -- just barely hanging on -- as they shook under the electric light -- and wherever a shadow touched the ground a bit of a pothole would open up -- so that walking became impossible, you had to dance and shimmy just to get down the street. And that was the way the women walked as they brought the bread in. Each one mincing like a waitress in the 50s or a reformed cabaret dancer. When they set the gifts down the men dug in. I held my own morsel like an idiot. Ever wanting to feel. To feel to feel. To be a part of reality, not a show. Then came the wine, maybe juice, and the girls danced right in, faces frozen in scowls. Oddly fetching or retching. I felt my stomach turn over and thought of the dancing walnuts. No that wasn't last night. I was mistaken, that was tonight -- had happened tonight. So this was the clew I had been craving: this very moment was constructed of dream, was not real. Oh, thank heaven.

Lord, you said that your gifts were given to "many" and you probably meant to "all" -- which is one reason we follow you, because in fact we feel compelled to be that "all" -- but the gifts must remain gifts, after all -- desired -- not just slabs of bread -- or no one will even take the trouble to receive them -- and it doesn't matter what people should do, since ultimately they will do what they will do, not what they should -- and the "many" will turn into "few" or "none" if no gift is there. But also what happens if it seems the gift has no one to receive? No one worthy?

So J stood up and walked into the kitchen where the women were working. Somehow it was steps taken down into the kitchen. He felt like a character in the Jules Verne novel, moving deeper and deeper, together with James Mason, Arlene Dahl, Diane Baker and Pat Boone. Since it was a dream, he didn't worry about this.

Behind him the minister was intoning the prayers of the people and his voice was made of "nose". It was a voice with a lot of nose. The spirit was buried in a fussiness like tissue. Then the room rocked like a boat and you could hear engines turn on. The women all looked up from their kitchen work and said: you can't be in here. The head of the kitchen crew pointed to a staircase leading down into daylight. Meanwhile J saw with astonishment the chairs. There were at least a million chairs, waiting for someone to come in and sit down. But no doubt people were too scared to enter this place where after all they were not allowed.

I had had enough of this dream. It seemed to me that I was dreaming a dream that had no place for me and that that would be the meaning of the dream when it eventually crystallized in the following day's fresh air. Because outside in the daylight I saw the people from my own church now leaving -- and they greeted me with love -- with that love that was so overwhelming for me -- but at the same time they hadn't noticed that I'd been absent. So the love was real but the object of the love -- myself -- had been placed off-station or misprinted with a smear or was not answering the phone. If this love had been thrown like a brick no one had been able to catch it even as a concussion. Did that matter? I felt the way I so often felt after "church" -- that I had nodded off and missed my exit. I hadn't been paying attention! I had just been dreaming!

But when I woke up it wasn't even Sunday. I was on a pier that was separated from its marshland train-tracks by some unexplained gap. The trick was to get my suitcase off the pier and onto the train without getting either it or myself wet. This would be enough to take my mind off the strange and unsatisfying topic of human worship. Behind me a woman's voice continually scolded me to hurry up. Her voice was notably bereft of love. She didn't care if I lived or died. So this was more like the sort of reality in which, for better or worse, our lives actually occur. At least within this indifference I would be able to spend a little time figuring out just what my dreaming offered in the way of prophecy -- just what it was it sensed was coming for me. Because I have noticed -- and hope that you too will ponder -- how insistently dreams present themselves not (as people once mistakenly thought) as interpretations of the past but as most entirely -- in every detail really -- about the things that are to come, which they play as great a part in being as in speaking. And this is the source of their insistence and their fear.

*

Jorge: The coalition

*

J began to dream of those who were dead -- in the last dream of the night -- and the people were quite alive in his dream -- and the dream itself was therefore quite alive in leaving him in his own perplexity and wakefulness. Well it was half wakefulness, like a heavy weight on the heart, slowing its forward movement. The weight was the dream itself and the dead people in it. There was his sister Una, carrying a book. Didn't she always have a book with her? She was soaked with the water that was said to have drowned her and carried her away. But the book itself was dry. And the club hostess shooed them forward, saying: Sit down. Sit down. We must move along. Everything is appearance. But (J said) I have to call my mom -- that is, my stepmom. Can't just sit down. So the staff brought a phone to the table, just as in some decadent German night club that one had not ever really heard of, it was so quaint and unimportant. Something in Isherwood maybe.

Are we in a boat? Una asked. Why does everything seem to be rocking? Oh, he said, that is the pyramidal neurons swaying and leaning forward -- they wish to form coalitions, they stretch their hands, trying to link. To link is to think, just as to rhyme is to climb. Ooo but this crowd makes it all sooooo hard -- I mean, just to think -- how hard it is just to think. This was not just anybody, this crowd of neurons was so select.

So these were the rich. (Psalm 74) Everyone here was middle aged but pretending not to be, and not at all liberal but pretending to be. The clothes were of the finest material and of the most gently sloping cut. Not Botoxed like faces. The folds fell sadly like children. This was fashion! Why fashion? Its purpose was to make you feel small and this was accomplished. You did. The nonbelievers smirked and the neurons fired and the dance music sort of slid across the speaker like beer-soaked boots. The floor did tilt like a deceptive boat. And look there was Estelle at last! My beloved stepmom. J's mere touch of the dial of the phone, just that alone, had awakened her or lifted her decal loose -- from the oblivion to which it was affixed -- as skin comes loose in a swimming pool. This is the loose the loss the pull of the moon. How it hurts.

Estelle of course was wearing the threadbare this-and-that clothes she always wore, her mind always on other more important things. The ladies looked at her with that certain look, the suavest of gotchas.

She moved forward, bumping into things, looking for someone. She bumped into a wall. She stood there looking at it, not moving. Unable to back up, just unable.

And I? I felt that urge one has around an old person, to help them, to right them, as if brusquely, with impatience and fretfulness, a state of emotion that helps no one, so I felt, yes I did, anger that she was there, that she was as if alive, disordering the laid down scheme of things in which she had passed away, we'd buried her and cried our eyes out. It was horrible but it happened, why is it unhappening??? And my sister Una looked at me in horror. This gift -- this rift -- this gift, why are you not accepting? Oh I needed you, Doctor Sam! No not Doctor but Father. Father Sam. I needed you to calm me down and point me once again to -- to the one you sort of represent or promote or feebly evoke -- the one, divine, the one, whom I must wake up to remember and I cannot wake.

*

A couple passed chatting: "It got so bad that babies couldn't share food."

Here is what I will say in conclusion. The neurons reach forward into what is eventually a black place, which they don't cross nor do they come out of it, not even mangled, on the other side. No, Father, the black place is simply there in my head and nothing crosses it. And no one explains it nor does it ask to be explained. And I am in the center of the blackness, sitting at a table by myself in a windowless room. And the rationalists never succeed in tidying this room. And I do feel closest to God when I am sitting there. But all alone, my love. Apparently it must be that way.

*

So Una walked over to the old woman and began gently pulling her, then she turned her 180 degrees, it was like resetting a dial. The woman looked over at me and was a total stranger, someone else's mom or stepmom. And Una herself, she looked so unfamiliar, a pretty girl, the kind that single guys open doors for. She was blinking and steadying herself as the floor rocked and I said to myself: Wait, Una's dead too. So who is that woman?

It was like a contagion. And I reached my hands to touch myself, to make sure I was really there, but that never works in a dream. The body seemed to be gently blowing against my hands, like a gentle puff of air that goes and comes. A garment that the dream itself was taking off. And the phone rang urgently but no one picked it up.

Lord, put me back together!

*

In the morning J woke up clinging to the ceiling -- or to the heating duct that abutted the ceiling. Sam stood on the floor where a human would normally be. He was tapping his foot.

Get on down now. No point.

There was no point in wasting breath saying don't know how. The frozen shoulders were an easy read.

Okay. Number one, Sam said. If you're going to fall just make it an act of grace. Fall gracefully, you might as well. Right?

Number two. Go into God. Just fold into that darkness that you dread so much. If God is everywhere God must be there, right? If God is there, maybe you'll find, well, at least the breath of your sister and your mom. So why be afraid, right?

I was afraid of my own longing to die but anyway, that was an old story, it was better to go somewhere new instead. I let go of the vent and stepped forward and then I was on the rug panting. This time I woke up for good. The priest was standing there. The room began to rock like a boat. Home!

*

Jorge: In the confessional

*

In the confessional J felt free and blind -- free because he was blind. Only God and Sam could see or feel his brain. (He himself could not.)

I think (he said) I have always felt a sort of sixth port of sensation -- a sixth opening for "impressions" and perceptions and anguish to come in. It was lodged in my back and from there poked a great gash in my stomach or somewhere a bit lower down -- one of those places over which one had no control.

And these "sixth sense" perceptions I could not describe, Father. And these perceptions I could not even share.

They could not be reproduced, codified or measured. Did they exist?

When everyone said they did not exist, what could I say to refute this? They (the sensations themselves) refuted this but publicly did not. Publicity seemed to kill them.

So they afflicted me but were silent.

I would be covered with sweat and my underwear would be damp with fear. I felt most duly out of control.

Tell me, Father Sam asked. Did you feel God speaking to you through this odd opening?

Oh yes, I said -- so much so -- so very much -- in part -- fully -- yes -- I don't know!

But also demons would sometimes grab the microphone.

But yes. Okay. God as well, God on top. So that even when my muscles became strong enough to close this down -- to close it off -- I knew I must not do so. Sam.

Sam? Are you there?

Si, escucho.

Je t'ecoute. Poor cripply little bean you are.

Sam, tell me. Have you ever felt something similar?

No I have not, Sam said.

But often my heart clamps down to the point that I can't breathe. And I wonder if there is a relation.

Was any of this feeling just repressed sexuality? No not even possile. In this epoch the only thing that isn't repressed is that. It always stands at the uppermost fringe, without shading, without mystery, oddly without fear.

So I don't think any of this is about sex per se, only one can't see the true subject matter through the thick fronds of sex but that is different. It hangs down and hides the true subject matter and the true fear.

Because now it seems the subject of God has all the intense forbiddenness that sex used to have. Dark and folded and furtively put away.

But how do I even know about it? I know about it from behind me. It is this electricity between my shoulder blades -- it rustles the little black hairs there and makes them rise.

It clarifies and illumines the network -- what network? -- the great big field of relations that lights up below the reason and then passes invisibly through the reason and then materializes like an impossibility before the eyes. Father, I am scared.

Don't be. This is important.

Well, there is this other way that things come to be, I mean it's not resemblance or contiguity or God knows cause/effect so Hume just plain missed out on the most important thing happening, which I can't even demonstrate or prove or put my finger on. A thing is there and it's part of the things of a larger expanse -- they don't resemble each other, they are neither "far" nor "near" in time and space and they don't even bother with cause and effect. Yet the meaning hangs as though it were pre-strewn and pre-threaded.

Everything is darkness. I wish you were my dad. I wish I had one.

Hey, Sam said. Name a single great educational experience that wasn't made out of darkness and pain.

With little points of light laid on it. Not knowledge but really something else.

As though knowledge were, well, sort of deathlike in its way.

*

Some orgy of sorrow.

*

Well, let it be that way then! Doesn't that just mean that you want the truth and not in some "bowing for my Academy Award" fashion but really want it, with your stomach and hips engaged?

*

Father I want to be free Father from the tyranny of justify justify. So much logic and no way to be any other person but the one who grounds things in reasons whether or not they apply Father. Because Father the only times I have ever felt suicidal Father were when logic like some fashion czar pushed me to it and said -- however you feel right now, reason itself has proved you to be a failure and a void so that logically it follows that you should do away with yourself. Like the inevitable acting out of a theorem. Then Father fortunately out of nowhere I see a loopity little dog trotting down the street or I hear a tune out of nowhere's organ (both hopelessly and hopefully out of tune and sinking) and then Father logic completely dissolves Father. It isn't even there, it isn't even not there. It was just this self-contained elitist little suburb I was in and now suddenly I'm not anymore. And so I can make a start.

There it is Father -- the tune coming from right behind my back. As beautiful as my mother's womb.

*

On the blackish street a white dog, a smudge of chalk, chewing a kibble with the same closed eye contentment that Carl used to show before his stroke and even afterwards -- another world, darkness. Each of Jorge's knees would show as white, a kind of phospherence, wherever he walked. When he pulled it back it would disappear.

The presence of the minister next to him, close to him, made J's own heart swing from side to side like a kettleball. So could a heart be good exercise for the heart?

Look up ahead. Mrs Scott was closing down her stall of hot cockles, a good sale day, the world is so hungry, 800 million people hungry tonight. Lord may I rest my bones after this day. But look he's crying she said and who's crying? I asked.

She pointed to the giant sitting on an upturned recycle bin. Oh what a heave -- the asphalt it surged like salty water, look at that, that was my heart. So hot, so very hot that heart. We were sitting in a sauna resting and the gentle giant took all the room. Not malice, that's just how big he was. Where the skin left off the hair took over and all of it was sad. They said he really was gentle but so impossibly ugly that no children would talk to him or shake his hand. They thought he was diseased. White as a ghost and covered with a Jewish brush, he did suck the air from the room and he cried and cried because all the other bears were dead now. Heart attacks or AIDS. Carl too. I would have consoled him Father but I too was afraid of him. Perhaps I was afraid of catching his grief and finding out that he was me. Then right on schedule the ship heaved, the good old Dancing Queen, and we all went on deck to touch the sky and recover. But zut alors I had forgotten my orange life vest! I wasn't wearing much at all, just my hesitation. Then as if ritualized came the familiar near miss as the land homed in for the ship till we swerved. Land! Who could have known that the land was sailing too! Land! the giant cried and jumped overboard and of course the rest of us followed, our quasi electroreceptors sensing the heat of our beds just a few feet ahead and yet a lifetime away.

This all was as weird as John Ashbery being an Episcopalian, which it turns out he is. Father, I need mediation -- quick like oxygen! I believe in God but feel the remoteness of God. I think it will have to be a human who semaphorically waves me closer to God. I can't, you know, just touch God on my own.

I am prepared to die if God is on the other side of what in that case would only pretend to be death. That isn't logical, doesn't make sense, but you know, I love senselessness, it has this homelike feel. It too is me. Reality is a place that you walk around, not this thing you argue about. Father, it is so refreshing to talk to you like this! Because you are there.

I can tell you everything but what you mean to me, which I cannot and must not say.

In the darkness all the people got separated and soon I walked alone. Or almost. You could say: alone like the hotel guest in the Nabokov poem. Everything was black with these lights punctuating it but not lighting anything, merely falling on the surface. Everywhere were warm African men that you could feel but not see. They all greeted Father Sam, everyone seemed to know him. So I was not alone. Nor was ever likely to be. We climbed the stairs to my apartment and he said goodnight with a blessing. He left me alone in the apartment but not alone. May I say that God was there like a tune you can't quite hum, a neglected hymn in the hymnal or a dance that has just one step that you never seem to master. When I practiced it the floor would roll under me. I saw the land approaching via diffusion through the porthole. My home was there. When I got home I would have time to pray again, to be again, to resume this existence that now I could only dream about, although the dream felt so solid that I could put it in my mouth and chew it until it completely dissolved. As indeed it just has.

*

Interlude: old dog, ice cream

*

Last night, a night deep in July, my dog got lost facing the corner, trying to leave a room that in fact he knew by heart. It was as though the room had turned. Since he was a dachshund and therefore unable by definition to back up and start again, he just faced the cul de sac and shivered. He had somehow wandered and gotten lost. When he saw me he sadly wagged his tail. I picked him up and pointed him the right way but it still didn't feel right, in fact still doesn't. Once you're in one of those turned around

places you can never really back out. This is death. We all know what death looks like when it approaches. This thing is never just approaching someone else. The approach approaches everyone. So much scary solidarity is too much to feel. And yet earlier I'd been so mad at him for wandering when there was clearly noplace to go. Wandering compulsively -- but I too am that. Compulsive. And getting mad at the old is about the ugliest and most futile of errors. Then it made me shudder to

think how mad I'd been at my mother (July 4th 2005) for refusing the chocolate ice cream she loved, when as one now sees, she knew that she was dying and I of course didn't or by nature of my role,

simply couldn't. Proving that I wasn't really mad but deeply scared. I mean, I was in a corner too, sharing the feeling that I was required to deny. And really only fools can imagine that sharing emotions like this one can have any connection with assuagement. These are not better for being shared. I swear, there he was, shivering in the corner. No emotional response to this would be

of any help. Something else would be needed. Not "I know how you feel." Please not that.

I'd say I can't evade the horrible grip that that corner had. or has and had and has. The sense it gave that death had a beauty and a meaning from which the living were not only excluded but had chosen to be excluded. But so rule-bound is the fact of living that in fact when we the living "choose" to see death as a great evil it is not a choice we have made but the role we are absolutely ethically obligated to play and so this fear involves no choice at all. Neither we nor the dead have really chosen.

And so I was ethically obligated to insist that my mother eat, while she was bound (from a much deeper and, I will insist, a truer place) to resist and say no.

*

Interlude: the ship dream

*

In July I was sitting in a suburban house waiting for my dead mother to come pick me up. The house was in both Palo Alto and Palos Verdes, the quiddity separating these 2 cities having been surgically removed with an ugly socioeconomic set of hot tongs. Everywhere the same. And as I waited in this land-locked house I looked out the window and saw "a" bay and in it a large blue and white ship heading straight for the house. At the last moment the house shifted to the left and the ship passed: to the ship's left and my own right, line-dancing. Jerky. And even my dreaming self could taste something distinctly non-Kosher. "It's an optical illusion," I was told. Okay. Time then to wake up. But I wasn't sure I could.

*

Jorge: The dream of freedom

*

So in my dream I was in a bar and hey I hate bars, haven't been in one for, no but there I was, I can't pretend otherwise. I was sober but the room swirled.

The caretaker's son was across the room, a hopeless person, but what do I mean? He was full of hope, he was smiling. It was other people who looked at him and felt no hope. That is, they felt sorry for him but not he for himself, he was free of that. So why feel sorry for someone who is not intrinsically a sorry sight? Well, because that was what people did.

In my dream he held a bottle of beer, wet and cold, better to touch than to drink. He peeled the label off the bottle, over and over. It was as though it continuously came off and never came off. Then he looked up and me and smiled. You're that kid I rescued from Satan. That kid. But I was forty years old.

X and Y were waltzing across Texas on the dance floor. The help was gathering the drinks the second a patron would put them down. Predators stood around the dance floor but no -- just would be predators, potential bad guys that were condemned to being good. The caretaker's son walked through them as though they weren't even there.

He walked out the front door and almost toppled into the ocean. He, or was it I, was it I who was he, I don't know, but one of us stood on the edge of the deck of the cruise ship, though a moment ago I had been in the middle of dry land, or was it he who had somehow gotten unmoored? The other ship came dead on and was ready to butt us but the street, bar and all, swerved at the last minute and averted a crash. And men in droopy t shirts walked unafraid up and down the dark.

I come in peace, said the alien or the person dressed as an alien. Mrs Scott had prepared her famous lasagne and it was not possible to pass the table without taking some, taking it in her sight so she would be pleased. And the array of foods was marvelous. We were all eating like crazy. Jorge looked across the room (was it the alley in front of the bar? was it the deck of a ship?) and saw the blonde who looked so much like his sister. But the lady looked away, now it's true she looked away but in the conversation between sexual beings looking away can be a form of looking at. The way she looked was to look away but everyone knew that -- well, what? Well, that scorn could really be something else.

The odd thing is that our bodies have lives that are different from our lives. They have already fused and separated before the idea even occurs to us. Do you think? Do you think that happens?

I think you're totally nuts, Jorge. Does it matter to me? No it doesn't.

Her dress was damp and no one seemed to notice her as she moved through the crowd. Dear Una always had this shimmer like those little curves in a soprano's voice.

When she moved down the alleyway he followed her into an old fashioned drugstore like a stage set, a place for starlets to sit and be discovered, and he did indeed sit down -- he ordered a hamburger, watching her movement in the mirror but there was none, she wasn't there, only this sort of uneven man who came into the frame of the rectangle unequally, one shoulder first, oh that's me, that freak is me. And the woman didn't register on the surface but when he looked behind him she was outside and the boats were all tilting in the water. I don't believe in that water! I believe I have made it up! Nixon's face was on the cover of the Newsweek by the door and the water sashayed, it moved like a human. Guys were jogging around the periphery not worrying about a dip suddenly throwing them into the water, hungry water! You go down into that you don't come back up at least not as yourself.

And when he looked into it his image changed and changed. Was this the way to shed your personality and become someone else?

The ships kept rushing in the face of the land but the land kept shifting its direction -- in order not to be hit, why was it afraid of being hit? What happens when we are hit?

Disaster disaster. On the other side of the water was the two towers, although we were many miles away from New York. Frightened he looked down, okay there was his image again. A Mexican, an immigrant without papers looked up and quickly looked away. But looking away is a way of looking in and looking back. The labels from the beerbottles floated semaphorically, and Mrs Scott grabbed my arm, pulled me back. Never get so close to something that wants you like that. But Mrs Scott, you have been dead for 20 years.

And the Mexican no Guatemaltecan, oh he came from Huehuetenango, he looked up at me maybe thinking I was immigration or else thinking I was himself, we are human and we just can't not look.

The water was dead, a great well of death and what could interest us more? No no no. I like gardens, not mountains and seas. But what I like is always different from what likes me. It is the second that really gets things going and flowing and sticking to the hands. There was a little box in the water that had been considerately labelled Logic so that you could know, if not what it was, then at least what someone wanted you to think it was but wait -- logic? logic??? Didn't that rule the world? Wasn't everything a mode of logic? If so, then how could it be -- how could it be... simply there?

The professor in his long black frock coat screamed and wrung his hands and jumped into the water to save the box as it receded into. Into the "into" really -- then the little man sank into the water and was gone.

And the box was gone. Were we better off without it? Or would we go back into our staterooms and find it sitting calmly on our pillow?

Jorge looked down. And down and down. That would be the next part.

The sea was like a mirror, was then wasn't then was -- a mirror of realism then, churning like the world around it. And he both couldn't look away and couldn't look out. Looking away was another form of looking in, yes? That was the logicians may they rest in peace, may they be okay but irrevocably elsewhere, that was what they hadn't understood about perception, how dirty it was, how contagious -- you looked and then you fused at what you looked at, no. You fused, and called the fusion merely looking. So the mirror moved when he turned his head.

He saw a face embossed in the water. What a sad face it was. It tried to radiate power and command but it was just a little boy's face, looking for inclusion. Always inclusion, do you accept me, monster as I am? The eyes -- they darted or they tried to dart but the web held them in awareness. Oh liquid it was inside there. It was like a sea churning. That meant that someone else could reach from behind and make that face what it was but what was it?

There was a giant triangular grid, Father -- Father Sam -- and the eyeballs were placed on it but unstably. They rolled around in it -- in perception, I guess? I chased them as though they were little balls rolling around on the deck -- of the ship? Other people too. We stepped through each other, hoping to find our own.

The caretaker's son held them in his palms, reached up, said here you go and put them back in my face. Why was he always so kind to me? What did he himself gain, Father? Father Sam.

Such was the power of the dream's undertow that invoking you brought you there. An overweight, Latino, 30ish man on the deck of the street. And if he was there, did that mean God was not too far away? Or were you more in the way of blocking him? I looked over to the table but Mrs Scott was busy putting away her utensils and wouldn't look at me, wouldn't speak. It wasn't her turn apparently. So the person whose face had gotten stuck in the mirror -- the "I" like a variable in a very complex equation -- that person shifted weight back to itself but not wanting to. The mirror turned when he turned his head so that he couldn't get out of looking. The surface was damaged, as if molten -- the objects in it bent in a liquid horrible way that made one sick.

You you you. You were stuck with you.

Then they turned their heads away from the window with the stormy rain, Father Sam and the young man, who seemed to be synchronizing his head with the other. Why does it feel so good to be standing next to him, to be synchronizing? The flesh warm and sunny and a little fat. Father Sam, not a priestly type at all. Do you bring me closer to God? Or do you block the way? The way. They walked along the strand -- in the alley some wild things were happening and Jorge tried rather timidly to block the other person's view. Don't bother, Sam said. I know all about that. Do you think I stepped out of a box? I've been a really bad man.

I was thrown out of my profession for drinking, did you know that? I have climbed back but not all the way, I mean, they don't let you get back all the way nor should they, not at all -- how can low creatures like us pretend we're Christ? What could be wronger than that? Wrong wrong wrong -- sounds like a bell. A bell? And the strand moved and made the percipient seasick. The image, the sense of self, it was not a sense but a perception from way outside. Father, father. That's something I never had, he said. The road like a snake, everything dark. Do you want to come home with me? Do you live on the street? Are these your congregation?

We are all brothers -- isn't that sad somehow? No it's okay.

When you turn your back to the window you're still on it, in it -- it's like a screen projecting you. Sometimes the film is so vivid it starts to burn.

There was an asylum on the corner. Once it was a warehouse of kissing and trade. Now there were beds for the sick and nurses to tend them. Father Sam slept here in a corner, you wouldn't really call it a home, would you? I mean it shifts every night. The deaths are appalling, good man. You go inside and you feel your skin crawl as though it were loose, shifting, ready to come off. Stomach and bowels just won't hold still. But as one dies, the sound of the sea, the murmur of the imaginary boats, and a priest to act perhaps as a mirror you can look into. No no, don't come in. But Father Sam, when will I see you again?

Dear, we are talking about transition. As it says in scripture, do not put a lot of your talk into the idea of tomorrow. Think. Where are you now, right now? But I don't know where I am. When will I see you again?

When you are missing someone have you ever tried to see their face in another person? Have you considered how one person might be as it were hiding inside another? Oh that's not good enough. Words words words. Need something tangible. Now later now. Don't know why always so needy but there it is.

In the morning J woke in such joy and desolation. The joy was desolate but the desolation a form of joy. Allthis was a dream!

Yes!

I am well and awake.

There was a giant moth resting on his tipped up toes. Moth or mouth? Through the belly of the... moth -- the belly a sort of fretted caterpillar mouth pulsing in the wind (with its little parts disintegrating), J watched the dream suck away into the waste place where all the untrue things go and have always gone. Freedom! Yes! Its dirty wings torn and hanging, the mouth flapped and looked away. The holes in the moth could be seen through. They were the soft guts of a man. It was there, not there then there. The not there was there.

Okay. You blinked and the dream was just motes of dust. They crinkled and collapsed without speaking. Only reality was left, this hard cold thing everyone "agrees about", with puckered holes in its sides. Breathing. The hesitations that everything has, even reality.

Then the longing J felt for Father Sam became -- infinite. It had no edge. Simply was. Be with me -- nothing more but just be.

You were the clew that led to God. But I, I was still my clumsy self tangled hopelessly in that same clew. I was idolatrous. But I hungered for God even then.

Did a moth have a mouth really? Did they really eat a man like that?

No. Wake up. You dismissed the thought and it broken into a billion motes (again?) and dissipated into reality, which was basically whatever was left. A bit depressing. Yet the dream remained, untrue but obscurely present, fuelling the wakefulness of day. So I got up and made my bed and myself most presentable. Walked to the stop. Sam of course was nowhere but the glory of God everywhere. The one thing that was sustained from "there" to "here" was that one thing. Humble faceless men were gathering up the red gold air to sell to museums. A giant billboard of a burnt dress hung in the sky. There was a lovely invigorating sea breeze but the sea was a hundred miles away. And the joy was desolate and the desolation a form of joy.

The glory of God was so everywhere that J had to look away. But the truth was that looking away was just a form of simply looking. It was the deepest version, the sunkest look, it was that form of looking that looked back. That looked at you. And what indeed did it see?

*

Poem: Uncle at Wednesday testimony

*

Uncle, when you said
your "words can't express"
the reach of God-
's goodness,

it was not only true
when you said what they couldn't
do but all the more true
the more they couldn't.

They were
more powerful somehow
the weaker
they were and so were you

as you spoke to me
and I listened distractedly.

*

Sir Twitch

(thanks to Karl Swedberg and englishrules.com)
*

WERE reincarnation
true, I would
have been a SPIDER
in a former life,
so deep and so negative is my affinity with them.

I've said before how the sight of one evokes in me a taste of flies -- and how nothing but scale seems to protect my life from their oversized hunger.

So... are they just Darwinism with all the atheist curlicues removed? Very blunt spoken creatures they are.

I have a rule that prevents me from either killing one or touching one -- except perhaps the former by an accident I may not always be sufficiently careful to prevent. This week there was an orange beauty -- carrying a tortoise shell tint like the one on the curved tines of a lady's comb -- blocking with its slanted web all access to the dog's hutch. This should have been prime real estate for such as him, given that it is home to hundreds of flies. But each day the monster looked more disconsolate -- and I didn't see any paralyzed bags hanging there either, though on the other hand, why would he have wanted to show them off to me especially? In any case, I began to wonder if he might be dead (in which case, I could enter and clean up).

Blowing on the web was oddly unproductive. Sleepy, are we? Finally, one hideous back leg twitched and swung. Was I happy to see signs of life? Good Lord, not at all really!

I kept on. No doubt what I wanted to see die was the affinity. Today the web has deflated. It is there but lacks buoyancy or sweep. And the flies continue to fly around and over and they seem to pierce and pass through.

And as for me I didn't like the life of it but I hate the death of it. I think I would revive it if I could, just as I am not a bit sorry that I can't.

We will
CALL you
sweet Sir TWITCH.

*

Jorge: Betrayal

*

Jorge's relation to his Lord was subtle and complicated, a thing to be described in many words, too many words, alas infinite words. But the main word was: betrayal. J proved himself to be a treacherous friend to have and this was his humanity.

His Lord was not the handsomest or best dressed man at a given party. He was not the one paid attention to. J generally felt him rather than noticed him. His presence in a given room might be called delicate, and almost intangible.

I knew you were next to me without looking up at you. I smelled you, I felt you, oh Lord.

But the other friends were louder and claimed more attention.

Have you ever had a friend like this? One that you could rely on and who for that very reason interested you less than the fashionable, attractive one, the "role model" that most advisedly ignored you -- or scorned you -- hardly needing you, after all, being one that drew attention without ever doing or needing to do much of anything. That aloof one you pursued as meanwhile the perhaps truer friend, the drab one, stood in the background, gathering as it were the dust of your disrespect.

And he put up with this because he was a true friend, after all.

He put up with it for a time perhaps. There was as it were a time of grace.

There was a time in which you were free, there was. The briefest time. You felt it like a point between two gears -- a locus where judgments floated suspended. Temporarily the still point held. But in your ignorance you thought of this suspension as freedom not as grace. A place you could choose to be. A door with a handle under your hand.

Joyful, virtual place! A roomful of college students inside it. When you danced your foot hardly touched the dance floor. The sweat on your body burst like little stars in formation. You were free to love anyone on the planet. There were no consequences. Life was virtual and your brow always came clean.

No no, there is no such place, the clocks all said. The clocks that "coughed when you would kiss". Your friend is very sick, Myra said. I don't think anyone knows what's wrong.

I don't care about him at all, she said. But I thought you might still care.

Well, of course I care, Jorge said. His heart was as if thudding from the room next door. His heart wasn't in his body but someplace distant. Next door. Where the air is heavy with obligation. Of course I care. I had better get over there.

But one thing happened, then another. It was several days before he found himself sufficiently organized to make the visit. The infirmary was so out of the way somehow. And the receptionist was like a dragon with long beautiful brown hair that crackled as she neatened it, staring through him. Through him.

It seemed that just by looking at him she could tell what a bad friend he was. And a bad friend was a bad everything.

So you want to see him -- does he want to see you? she asked. I don't know, the boy replied.

Maybe he just wants to sleep and be alone.

No, people here do like company. Certain kinds of company. Still you would be vastly surprised to know how many never receive visits at all -- as though it were only the old who were neglected -- the world is so upside down, we're only a short walk from the center of the campus as the crow flies but really no one comes by. I do all the visiting myself most days but clearly that's not what the patients really want.

What a place! All too much like an undesirable motel, one of those with a number in its name. The receptionist shook her hair. Even in fluorescent light it glistened and gave off nylon sparks and her smile was the opposite of welcoming. One fixated on her so as not to think of the illness behind her. But really she seemed to see herself as a kind of prison guard. Was she guarding the patients' health or their sickness?

A doctor slid by in the distant background like an upright white mollusc. I'll just go right in, the boy said, if you'll tell me the room number.

Well that's the thing, the woman said. Your friend checked out yesterday.

He's long gone. But we do have a bed open, which you could use. You look like you very much need it. Those deep engraved rings under the eyes. Why don't you come back here and get some rest?

*

J's search for his friend, his Lord -- what in metaphor was no ordinary person but the person whose presence made "person" itself possible -- this search so off track and not like a crow flying -- grew long and digressive, like one of those roads you follow on a hot day without being absolutely sure you are pointed the right direction. It's the right road but what about you? Are you going the way you should? (If not, how much further and further away with every step!). Is this road the right way? And the answer to that question is just what you are on the road to find. Unfortunately the you, the person finding, is itself lost now or in danger.

J seemed to sleep all day. In classes, at gatherings. He went to his friend's room but no one was there. The old haunts were empty now (and the creatures of fashion who did congregate there were now like those old angels on a weightless pin -- they took up so little space, they didn't seem to be where they were). The boy discovered how easy it is to disappear these days, even on a closed campus -- you just avoid all the places that you used to go. No one can guess where you might be going instead. There were wanted posters for Cupid posted all over campus but no one seemed to be searching for his friend. J felt lost and dissatisfied, a very deep and well-founded and intimate feeling. Now nothing seemed to matter but the friendship that he himself had abandoned.

In the chapel they talked about him and as it were groped for him without quite finding the words for what they were doing. The women were faithful but the faith made a circle. People like Myra went from cult to asylum to cult to asylum. Where was the actual path?

In the middle of the night J would wake up and, Thank God, I'm not in school anymore. That epoch is over. But then the shadows would move around slowly like dancers -- he would wake a little more -- and once again he remembered his loss and his sorrow. They were his road and he needed to continue walking down it. That is, down or up, as if searching for which direction to search. So the next day he would spend roving the library and the student center. He even checked the infirmary over and over and even made friends with -- but no, there was no feeling left over in him for that.

The campus parties became repetitions of parties. Machines, iterations -- they lost their flavor. There was no reason to go and little not to either. All the fashionable were stuck, their faces didn't move, their hips no longer cut the air with a slash.

But sitting alone in the library, that was no fun either. The sound a page made in turning would rasp like a branch against the window. The sky outside would hang slack under its clouds, sagging with age -- and "parfonds regrets" played over and over on the iPhone.

Finally -- at a Shakespeare play, it felt like decades later -- at one of those ceremonial hieratic performances that were so popular now, that seemed to fill an unspecified void -- J saw his friend or an older version of his friend. Of course he himself was older, too, although unchanged at the same time. The friend was on a balcony, surrounded by strangers. They all seemed rather sober, a bit flayed, filled to the brim with "life experience", which tended to be mostly pain these days. They would only reluctantly part to let Jorge get closer. In fact, they were a bit like guards.

"Absent thee from felicity awhile." Why have I spent so many unhappy years?

Why are so many of us so unhappy? The drug users are not chasing pleasure but fleeing pain. They are basically medicating themselves. So many of us are so stuck in our wrongness -- much too miserable to think of changing.

I would like to change, J thought. But moved with that dreamlike slowness through the milling crowd. Seemed to be moved backward against his will. And there of a sudden was his friend leaning against the wall, in the line to the restroom.

Do you remember me? Jorge asked. Do you remember me?

What I remember, the friend said, is that you didn't like me very much. Now tell me: are you different now?

Are you different now?

*

Poem: Parfonds regrets

*

We line-danced
to "Parfonds regrets"
and leaned against
the wall's own sway

then applied our hopes and blunders
to a second wall,
bougainvillea over the doors,
black cat on the sill,

strangers sudden friends,
our hips almost linked
but our hands
in shells and distinct,

with all of us looking
the same way saying nothing.

*

Jorge: The motel

*

The motel the motel. It was such a grand hotel, no it wasn't, just a plain motel. Lots of babies conceived there and alas a few sent home.

Cast my memory back now. The feel of the past is what matters to the living because that feel still grasps you today and is the bed in which your present still sleeps. Or turns and wakefully twists, in guilt and discomfort. When you dismiss these sorts of things they laugh at you and still cling anyway.

Jorge. He was calling himself Georg at that time -- like the Hungarian conductor -- "gay-org" it was pronounced but hardly anyone did, not even himself.

Cast my memory back now. Smoke trees in the patio. The mysterious dried faeces of creatures one hardly saw. Little, scared and vastly hurried things. The landscape pale and denuded but the colors, they entered you at last, and once that happened would never leave. They were pale but so deeply pale.

Get their money, the boss would always say. I don't care about anything else. But don't you not get that money. You're not the caretaker, you're the cashier, I would ask you to remember. This place is on the edge. On the edge. We may not make it to the fall.

Most people in America felt that money was the secret ingredient of all abundance. Georg himself had none. Abundance yes, money no.

The young blondes would come with older companions. They would linger at the desk and chat. Mmmm, the smell of their necks spoke a language of its own. Oh no no! the maid would say. That's a mujerzuela. Shouldn't let her talk to you.

She's not going to bite me, Georg said.

The blondes were so pretty and so was the maid. But Georg was sufficiently immune to them that he saw them as friends.

*

Mindy Sue, the most beautiful, Mindy Sue with the lofty lifted body so brown beneath her heavenly gold hair. So tasty, so lifted, such a high surrounded her, even when she smoked. Her perfume was suffused with the essence of her. Which was? She was? Because it was impossible to tell just what sort of being hid beneath that gorgeous body, like an apparition surrounding her. Her beauty felt like an absence of pain. She would hold her little putter at shoulder height as she circled the motel's putting green, followed by stout Mr Rolex and sinister Count Patek-Philippe. They were fighting over her. She was like the richest item in an auction. But I am not to be bought, she said. And she would cling to the hotel clerk, her "little Georgie", like a kitten. I just know you're so immune to me anyway. That predatory macho thing, I don't even feel it. So she clung to him. And that was when he sort of came to love her.

That woman's a wh*re, the maid said. No she's not a wh*re, Georg said, accenting the *.

Anyway the currency that buys such women is security -- a sense of security -- not money. For them the money comes and goes just like people in a motel.

And anyway. And anyway.

Anyway it is not a crime to give yourself as trade for security. Only maybe it's a crime to lean for security onto something so insecure as a man. Look, the beautiful God-filled heaven lies right over you, shining in the gender-neutral pallor of an open desert.

Abundance. Abundance. Prayer always feels better than sex.

Listen. Listen, beautiful one. I think the men who love you have very good taste, Georg said. I don't think they're wrong at all. I think they're on to something. At about that time she began to spend less time on her "torn and damaged" golf swing and Mr Rolex silently fell away. The other one had won her hand or won her heart or won her. Then they traded up and were no longer seen at a mere motel. They became 2 more examples of the people who came and then went. Cast your memory back, recall the way they looked when they walked together -- she a foot taller than he. The golf club twirling like a baton. The pale sun. Then one night Georg was going to the store in his old used-up Pinto and passed Mindy Sue walking alone on the desolate road when it was still much too hot to be out.

Her jewelry was replaced by bruises and tears. They all get tired of me eventually, she said. They come and they go. So Georg bundled her into his car and snuck her back to the motel, which is how he eventually got fired but that was later, another story on a tangent from this one.

*

She would cook for him, cut his hair, pray with him and even offer amatory advice, of little use to one without a lovelife but anyway. And that phrase "but anyway" contained a world. Listen, listen, she said. Just because I'm such a mess doesn't mean I don't know what other people should do. Advice is easier from a distance. A friendly distance. Then they would go out to the club,, maybe dance together, while all the straight guys envied him his fantastic luck -- she was so beautiful that it hurt your eyes to look at her. She didn't need jewels. She didn't need anything. You are just right as is, he said. But they never went to bed together, and each day they didn't, they became closer friends. Because sex is really overrated, she said. Most guys do it so they can find a way to forget about you. It's like putting out a fire so you can go on with your life. You must know that already from your side of things.

Meanwhile the boss got suspicious when he smelled perfume in Georg's cabin. If you're harboring someone, I will turn you in.

I run a clean place here, the boss said.

*

She came out of the bathroom when he left. She had a book in her hand. Well I got my reading done for once.

Look at this: "I have not sat with the worthless, * nor do I consort with the deceitful." Who was this person?? Did he spend his whole life in a coffin?

There are not any people who are not, you know, that. That way. You can't even avoid worthless people when alone because, after all, you yourself....

Nobody could say this authentically, not really.

Meanwhile there was a rhythmic low thump on the wall. Some bears were cutting up.

In the Old Testament they were always talking about their righteousness as giving them access to God -- almost as though there were cause and effect.

What Jorge -- this pseudo-Georg -- could not understand or even cope with was the feel of God, when it was so strong and binding, and yet you didn't feel even the slightest righteousness inside you to match. Righteousness was totally God's, in no way yours, there was a terrible disconnect. He knew he was immersed in wrongness, top to bottom, and it was just something he "processed" through. It was inside him and was him. He felt indeed abandoned. And yet this same being who felt so deeply wrong also could not shake the feel of God. And the 2 feelings were not so terribly distant.

There was a different and much humbler way of being a Christian.

And the on-again off-again so-called career girl, with her lofty cushy boobs, was now his deepest spiritual buddy, a sister of agape. And the wispy sound of those fabrics swishing between her legs had become an innocent sound. She was like Thais in the opera.

"I will wash my hands in innocence... I will not sit down with the wicked." These words just had to be some wry Jewish humor. They had to be tongue in cheek. Dry desert cheek.

*

The feel of God is the feel of the past but that doesn't mean it's dead. It has been millenia that the Bear has stalked our night sky. God has always had a leash on that naughty Bear.

*
Listen. Listen. Here's the thing. Outside in air so cold that it dissipates your warmth in a second. Stars bright but not seeming close. A lit cross on the hillside opposite, if you can call space "opposite", if anything is positional or conjoined in such a structured way to be called "opposite" or "near" or "far". Oh, this is scary! This is rockbottom fear. The smoke you smoke has no reality, it doesn't even linger before it goes. And you say to yourself, this is my life, I have only one. What am I doing? Why am I wasting it? Why am I letting it disperse right through my fingers? Que hago. Que hago. What do I do? What should I do?

It would be so great (so they thought then) if that cross over there had lips, if it told you -- in the clearest possible terms -- what is to be done next. Not just to believe, not just to pray, but to do. To act the behavior that the rightness in the world says is right. But exactly what act is that?

*

Don't think so much, Mindy Sue said.

You could let the way guide you the right way without piercing it with so many holes.

*

There is a mediation to the desert sky. The holiness of the heart's affections.

*

I love you, Mindy! Georg said.

Yes, she replied. But only in an abstract sort of way.

*

On the very next day Georg's boss found her underthings in Georg's room and fired him "without appeal". Sad because just before that she'd left for good, going back to -- was it Idaho? -- together with her daddy. (Was it really her daddy?) In the morning the man had suddenly appeared in the motel office. No, I don't want a room. I want my daughter.

I want her to sacrifice all her fleshy things and come home with me, lead a good moral life like before.

There are no perverts in our home town.

We are a very churchy town.

*

He had the sober look of a heavy father in a melodrama. Mindy Sue couldn't look him in the eye. Either one of them really. He asked her what she'd been doing in this crazy town and she wouldn't answer. Georg said: she hasn't been doing anything wrong. You probably haven't been doing anything, Mindy, her father said. You have probably just been wasting your life. People came into the office and floated out while he talked -- bears, gamblers, derelicts, prostitutes, ordinary people -- and they all seemed to underline his words. You have got to come back home, the altar girls have been going crazy without you.

This was the exact moment that Georg's boss stepped into his, Georg's, room, which he wasn't strictly authorized to do. Georg took his eyes off the woman and somehow never managed to get them back on target. She was crying. Her home town must have been a dreary place.

She turned to Georg and whispered: Marry me. Marry me. Right now.

Oh you know that makes no sense, he said. Nobody screws up a woman like a husband who just won't play the part.

All right, Daddy, I'm coming home, she said and Georg's boss, simultaneously, at the same millisecond, said: What is this stuff, Georg? I warned you explicitly.

When that conversation was over, Mindy was gone and George didn't have a job. The bear that kept him from starving was a businessman from Los Angeles named Carl.

He turned out to be a rich man by desert standards -- temporarily superrich as he described himself -- and that by no means rare type, the perpetual traveler. A restless fellow. One of those people with a "second" home in every town, yet he somehow didn't live in any of them, really, and didn't live anywhere. So he was a nomad more precisely. He had a good eye for spotting good-hearted fools and a very good eye for spotting out-and-out frauds. You would disagree with him but just wait, he tended to be right. So..... You know that so-called daddy of Mindy's? he asked. Well, he was no more her daddy then he was your daddy. Not by any means. That relation was not so pure. That daddy had some very bad ideas in his head. I can always tell.

*

Carl would clear his throat whenever he was about to dispense wisdom. Then the wisdom would come.

You know, Georg.... You should have saved that girl somehow.

*

Poem: Last chance

*

He wanted not to lose the fear
that came out of discrepancy -- the sense
of measure being trampled by God's step.
"No measure binds the 2 of us or could.
No good of mine is ultimately good."
There was no power of analogy
that made a stalk one climbed into the sky.

Instead there was a gap -- within
that gap a risk -- an entregar
that didn't close because one willed it to.
One's will was not the issue here.

"I am supposed to throw myself
into what is, for one thing, ignorance
but, wrapped in that, a last chance -- or not chance."

*

Jorge: The Bears

*

Part 1.

The bears would indeed sometimes pray but others thought this was a hilarious stunt -- you bears are just around the bend. You bears. You bears. Always cutting up. Never really serious.

They would splash in the swimming pool, not caring how fat they were. Caring but not caring. The blubber -- or whatever it was -- would bob like a trash bag full of water and there they were half-immersed in water to start with. Bears. Heavy hairy pink. Laughable to be sure. Nacho brooding by the side of the pool.

The bears would get into a line and waddle into town. Buy beer, waddle home. Barefoot, grotesque. They acted past caring. As if past caring. Bravura.

People think the male of any species is unable to care, as if bred to be absolutely hard -- indifferent to all other creatures. But in fact the scandal was that there were these bears who cared about each other, at least gave signs of doing so -- that was bad enough. As though they nurtured each other, it was hard to believe. Also hard to watch. But apparently once you put on your bear mask you could do this, sort of be tender, under the mask, or as part of the mask -- although the mask, if it was a mask, did not very easily come off -- it was a piece of flesh attached to flesh -- nor at some point was a bear any longer able to be anything but a bear.

The official word was how great it was to be a bear. And bears spent all their discretionary time, their "real" time, with other bears, as though the slim young folks that filled the spa looking like TV stars either didn't exist or didn't matter -- weren't big enough to make a blip on the radar. Boys or girls, it didn't seem to matter. Like fading wallpaper on the farthest wall. They were there but they didn't speak, their presence didn't speak. They didn't knock you out the way they were supposed to.

Bears -- how silly they were! They would smoke as though the surgeon general were only the figment of a dream. They pooled their money in restaurants. They were even almost courteous to the server!

You can't break my heart, darling.

So these silly creatures made a splash in that desert town. The word was that in real life (what was that???) some of them were cutthroat corporate honchos (???) -- or crochety reference librarians -- or car mechanics -- and definitely some construction there in the mix. All that "role playing" was carefully put away as the irrelevant detail that it was. We're just who we are.

Everybody's in the same army. Everybody dies.

Let's just stick together and love each other. Drive each other crazy the way a family does.

*

The motel clerk would line them up -- mentally -- and give them their names. Gluttony and Sloth were easy to spot: one was always at the buffet, the other never moved from his deck chair. Lust was easy to spot and Anger wasn't far away. Envy and Covetousness were names nobody wanted but this was America where "you can run not hide" and people judged themselves by the size of their car and you just wanted the other person's car sort of like protection. So you couldn't deny the 2 were there, even if more brooding than socializing. But where was Pride? You looked around and you couldn't find Pride anywhere. Bears were a bashful group, to be sure, and the truth was that they didn't think much of themselves. Pride was missing therefore. Pride had gone to some other party. Nobody here felt Pride or was Pride or could even summon the memory of what Pride exactly was. The bliss of feeling proud, that was for other beings to know. These had not been given their share.

Indeed bears thought very little of themselves and were right to do so.

*

Part 2.

Let's focus on Tony for a moment.

Do you love me? Tony would ask. Or do you only like and admire me?

Generally no one bothered to answer his silly questions. He was like the baby Mozart asking countesses m'aimez-vous? before playing.

In the changing room by the shower he leaned over and felt something leaning over him. It was a weight at least as considerable as his own. It squeezed down on his heart.

He should have called 911 at that moment. Instead he grabbed the motel clerk's shoulder and tried to speak.

Do you love me?

The clerk took one look at his face and went for the keys of his car. Alas, a dilapidated Pinto, one of the last on earth (let's hope). And Tony barely fit into the car. The seatbelt a frill to be swept away. The heat was just impossible.

Let's not forget Nacho, he groaned as the car pulled out. That was his friend on what they called suicide watch. The clerk said nothing but pulled into the road.

There was a brief swooshy sound and of a sudden green brake fluid covered his foot. A U-turn, the furious honking of cars going 90. He ignored them, the brakes still worked.

Awful. I feel awful. Spotted for the world's heaviest weight and then my spotter walked away and here I am. Pretty sure I'm dying.

Tony managed to say all of this in a single grunt.

On the bare part of the highway the wind was so strong that it would push the car halfway into the side lane. Passing a truck was ghastly but had to be done. Then the turnoff and the little pokey road to the hospital. The pickup in front of him was going 18 miles an hour but when he moved to the left to pass, it accelerated. So the clerk ended up continually feigning to pass just to keep the speed up. His foot was oozy and sticky.

Don't die on me, guy, the clerk said.

He parked illegally because walking through such heat would have killed a well person, not to mention an obese dying bear in a turquoise bathing suit and flip flops.

There was a man sitting bleeding from a knife wound. To the clerk's shock, they came up to Tony first. He looked that bad.

The nurse turned to the clerk for a moment and said, you may have killed him, you know. You're supposed to call 911.

In the hospital, all of one's sweat begins to "change its mind" and start to freeze precisely at the point where the t-shirt latches onto the iced-up air. Simple comfort becomes unimaginable.

The proof that bears have lives outside of being bears was that one of them came into the room and turned into a nurse. Gluttony was one of the worst and messiest of them all but now it turned out that he was a most competent nurse. Go home, he told the clerk. You saved his life. So: two conflicting judgments, both true.

When the clerk got back there was a woman fuming in the so-called lobby waiting for him. She had lots of luggage and was dressed up to look like Scarlett Johansson trying to look like Grace Kelly. And she did. She was even smoking correctly. And her foot made a little dent in the floor where she tapped.

I'm sorry, there was an emergency, he said. Then he got back to work. By the end of the week they had saved Tony. But they lost Nacho.

Do you love me? Really love me?

When you get asked that question, it's not enough to say "what's love got to do with it?" like Tina Turner. Because that's not an answer but the same question asked a second time.

*

Poem: Time as once nothing but twice alive

*

Time isn't when it happens - that goes by
too quickly to quite be --
but later later -- then the time becomes
assayable and felt -- its meaning comes
out of recurrence -- as though only once
were nothing and made little sense,
and only blossomed done again --
in duplication heard -- again -- again --
the first time understood the second time
and thus happening for the first time.

If not through repetition, time takes on
its meaning in pauses between
events that when they were were spurned until
they passed into the sacred perishable.

*

Poem: The myth of time as a rolled-up rug

*

Our time was an accumulated space
no longer housed in the old way,
as space that hung at a haunted remove
from consciousness -- no. Now it was rolled up
like an old rug and stored... somewhere...
in its stored form no longer navigable
"in the old way" -- it lacked inches or feet
to bar one's steps -- now was superimposed
as recollection -- nowhere -- everywhere.


Our time had its own rules. Its pieces felt
recurrent. But each time one fell it fell
more deeply, carved a deeper hold
of introspection and absurd
craving. Our time moved darkly and recurred.

*

Jorge: The Other World

*

So that other world people talk about -- it's not other -- it's right here -- I can kick it like a stone. It kicks right back. It's not a hypothesis or something you have to visualize. Here it is.

You know that guy who fell or was pushed off my ship? I saw him on the street just yesterday. But I don't care too much about him. I mean -- if transcendence is available -- then I'm going to focus on what is important. The one who has spread it between visible things --that One just has my heart. In awe -- speechless. So that's why I bump into things.

*

Jorge would wake from dreams and know he had just been there. In that "other" world that made the mesh of this one. And how he knew wasn't that the dreams gave him access -- no, not at all -- dreams were shallow tokens mostly -- but they just didn't have all the blocks and careful denials that waking life put up -- as if to prevent itself from feeling the closeness to heaven that simply was -- that pervaded this "closed" world of ours.

It wasn't "other", people just wished it to be.

*

Looking back at my childhood I'd thought of it as a Garden of Orthodoxy but that was wrong -- anyway thinking wasn't the mose of access to it -- although thinking took place there. It was more a matter of releasing breath -- thanksgiving and gratitude its open door. This was a door that had no frame.

People willed the door to be closed. A question of simplification. Easier to live and not to wonder.

*

Jorge stood at the door to the noisy gym. An odd kind of worship happened inside there, comparatively involute, very intense but somewhat futile. In the back corner -- where they stowed the free weights for die hards -- the Zen warrior lifted and lifted his million billion ziggity thousand kilograms of transcendent pain -- grunting with the sublimity of the effort -- and up the heavy structure went. Iron in the air, lifted with praise and joy. Nearby, the Nazi's wife on her treadmill sorrowing. . Everywhere half-naked models and ancient near-dead beings toggled past each other without touching. There were scenes of terrible blood on all the TVs. When J tried to move through the corridor a hand touched his shoulder -- the hand was "ice cold" like a Coke. He turned to face his dead godmom, his beloved stepmother -- Estelle.

Whispering.

You must believe me, boy, I am so sorry. I didn't have a clue what he was doing to you.

Not knowing something is the worst of the involuntary sins and those sins are the worst anyway, the worst of all, not knowing, with no way to repair -- there is nothing you can do. Except to have listened -- except to wait. To say: no matter how happy I am I must be missing something important to have. Then to look around.

Dying to rectify the injustice.

Jorge, I didn't look around. I didn't notice what was there.

And I can't seem to shake this off. The feeling of no way to fix this now.

*

A philosophical question: where does the "other" world touch this one? Surely they touch within this feeling of queasiness, of vertigo and unease. Wrongness swirling through the halls. Jorge felt the familiar bottomless clamp seize him and take him utterly. It reached from the bottom of the bowels up to the heart then the head. There was an elevator falling through space that had no floor. He fell in cartwheels or cornrows -- like poor Quasimodo -- yet he didn't move.

You must say something. You must try to speak.

Estelle, he said. You did nothing wrong. I loved you and still do. Estelle, he said.

I was just the way I was, Estelle. All he did, that man, was to bring it to the surface. It was there already. You were a perfect mom. I had no complaints.

Estelle.

Estelle, he said. Dry throat trying to speak. Air that wouldn't come into the lungs. Estelle, he said. He turned to say more but she wasn't there. She was dead of course, had been for many years. What remained hanging in the sterile air was perhaps nothing but unresolved guilt, first hers, now his.

He continued his trajectory now into the lockers. The college boys strutting -- their pubic furs held aloft like a flag -- shuffling behind them the old warriors aching inside every step, their balls clacking when they walked -- ancient memories condensed in the steam -- loose ugly hairs crawling on the floor -- history everywhere, clogging everything. The room almost unbearably concentrated -- and in the very near the ever so near distance, the sound of the water falling -- stroking the air like a giant guitar.

*

Poem frag: The faith of a donkey

*

My fear was without privilege --
my fear was simply fear, no longer was
the sign of my having been singled out
as special, spiritual -- fear was just fear --
a shiver in this matter beings were --
one more vibration that gray flesh
gave off -- a shiver -- nothing more.
But faith reduced grew stranger than before.

*

The preacher's reversal

*

In early times, when Paul tried to exercise behavior control, he did so in order to promote faith in God. At this moment, when a Southern Baptist preacher works to promote faith in God, he does so only in order to exercise behavior control. This for them is what faith is for.

The sin is huge. Preacher, if this is not true of you, then prove it by your deeds.

*

Fire prayer

*

The fire was to test and try him but didn't seek to kill him.

One day the Zen warrior walked into a centering prayer service in the middle of town. The people didn't know him but they didn't say anything. The leader struck a chime and the people closed their eyes all as one. Time passed silently.

One was alone but not alone. On the inhale the rich suburban air came into the belly. it was different from the air in the town next door. Safer, slightly less mixed. No taste of gunpowder.

In the warrior's belly it turned into fire.

Could the other people hear it crackling?

Was it burning only him?

Why did it make this noise? why so much noise?

Where the peace? the contemplative calm?

Could he even remain sitting in this chair?


Fire fire fire. A thing shaped like a word. Consuming the stomach, eating whatever it found there.

He exhaled it with a rough unruly noise.

Lord, find the way to make me more chaste. Just a little more chaste.

And the fire in its fiery manner said nothing in reply -- nothing clearly. It continued to burn. It and time passed simultaneously, one harrowing thing.

The warrior took another breath. Silence. Darkness.

What were the other people doing?

There was an Audenesque cough in the distance. A second one.

A car passed a million miles away, slipping through the charred space.

Darkness. Eyes closed and thus open.

What were the others doing?

Where was God in the fire -- the fire the fire?

God was the fire but was also not absent in the thing that was burning. He was patient as the warrior was not.

Another cough and then a very loud sigh. The warrior heard a sort of shifting as though somebody was moving.

Had the others climbed out of their chairs? Were they moving around?

There was motion in the inhale and then in the exhale. Something stirring.

If he opened his eyes would he find all the others crouched around his chair staring at him and wondering who let this queer into the room?

The inhale was tense and suspended and important. Insistent. The fire burned the fire.

The warrior opened his eyes. God stood in front of him watching him. There was no one else in the room. The stare was nothing but fire.

Who are you now? the vision asked. Are you indeed one of mine?

Speak to me now, instantly. Do you wish to be one of mine?

*

Jorge: Amor amor

*

You know, it's amazing (J's friend R said -- they were sitting in a wine bar with a crowd of acquaintances) but there's a whole community existing now that is cut loose from its homeland and completely fine with that fact. They come perhaps from Southeast Asia, they make their way into the west, they speak a language that would have been inaccessible to their parents' parents if not to their parents. Not just the nouns, not the verbs but even the basic thoughts (and whatever well they come out of) would have been "Greek" to their progenitors. And that's all fine with them. They have no problem with that. They smile about it.

They are comfortable here. Now. In this very strange and placeless place. Asians. Yes, J said in response, and that ease of theirs is beautiful. Nevertheless.

What about, let's say, the things very similar that the shrewd monde used to say about Jews in oh, let's say the 20s. The critics liked to say: international. Brows would rise. The critics liked to say: without a home. They would then say: comfortable. Trotting out the epithets. Then moustaches would be stroked and the hurtful word would finally come out: deracinated. Homeless. Then historically there was the whole thing that happened next. And after that: Israel.

So is being free from a place, or seeming to be free, something like passing through freefall? Is it like that neutral space between gears, the "dead" space of the French? Like a grand, expansive "awkward age"?

*

No one surely can survive long without place. Without a place, yes, but without place. No. that would be between gears. The car wouldn't move.

*

Not having a place is like being underwater. If you are a mammal, it is just a fact that you will eventually surface.

There was a boy at the university who had almost pure Venusian DNA. He walked like a man, talked like others. What then was the distinguishing sign? Perhaps only at first look the stubs on the shoulder blades. 2 wings covered with soft afterimages of feathers. They were like appendages snapped off -- he was winged.

All the others in his lineage had been put to the ban, immolated. Even Venus was said to be no more -- and looking around the world you felt this to be true. He was as the last survivor of a reprobate old tradition. The girls decided to call him Eros. Jorge would just call him E and leave it at that. Did he blush at the name? His skin blushed all the time so it was impossible to tell.

E's form of havoc lacked arrows or any form of release. His victims reported his claim to be unable either to achieve orgasm or cease trying. (Though something was transmitted all the same, as they said later.) He ached constantly with this painful craving for God knows what, something indefinable. Perhaps it was this aching to entregar, to give himself completely to another. Through the dorms he flew like wind, but one should not say "flew", no one saw him fly. Maybe despite the wings he was nothing but an unhappy human, after all.

But Jorge was sure that he was not human. One day he followed the stranger into the cemetery and watched him give an offering to his mother, was it his mother? -- fruits, wine, crushed flowers, the bodies of little bees -- it was not a dream, though surely felt like one. There was a Jewish grave by the trellis, upon which someone had marked a swastika with a black marker or evil spraycan, one of the kids from town -- or maybe, God protect us, another college student had done this, "one of us" -- and Jorge was suddenly too scared to move. Behind the grave was a garden of fussy statuary -- caryatids eroding back into their stone -- their shoulders and backs just a saddle shape in crude rock, and behind them hidden was the statue of the mother, Jorge felt sure that was who it was. The boy lay upon it. When J went back a few hours later, the demon was still there -- one could clearly see the humps under his t-shirt. And dogs were prowling on the gravel. This was not just a boy.

*

All study ceased in the dorm when he was there. After the half-year, when he left, in the first weeks -- before the illness -- an empty feeling churned inside his friends, something like a vacuum -- preoccupying, an involute shape with "can't live without you" carved out of its middle. Off the chart and with no notes for survivors, the suicides of 3 or 4 young ones, plunged from buildings or swept under trains, because life is not worth living without you. The mere pressures of studying couldn't have caused so many deaths. That was the act of a placeless one, to take away your place too, without even occupying it, just taking it. Around him, the solidest people seemed to lose their center.

Love deracinated.

Eros, can't you rest? Can't you settle down? Jorge asked. It was a terrible year, rationally unsupportable, insoportable, no soporto, no soporto. The itch to make love consumed the dorm.

Rumblings of wild behavior everywhere.

Remember we are not -- we cannot and will not act -- in loco parentis, the school said. The authorities backed away.

Everywhere sexual looseness took on the primness of a norm. We are treated as unclean, the virgins cried. Treated as unclean, outcast, something to be sprayed with room spray. We were the handful of girls who refused to play. The word shun wrapped us like a satin wrapping. The virgins were isolated, demonized. They were not to be touched in any way if not to be touched in that way. It was because they seemed so strange to everyone else. Their reserve was treated as a disease.

At midnight the football team captain would stand in the dorm hall screaming: Please have sex with me -- anyone! anyone!

The classrooms had a plaguey smell. Eros would huddle for hours in the maid's closet trembling. Then he would come out and prowl.

Jorge too had his history of love -- then suddenly none at all. Love unrequited, an ancient story. When amor went sour he retreated to his room -- a single with a soft and useless lock. He tried to nestle inside Psalm 139, prayed in the broken way that a person prays in the center of aporia:

You know Lord and I don't. You know me more intimately than I know myself. All the disgusting stuff inside me, you stand inside it somehow. You can bear it I can't. When I don't know why I do what I do, you know. So won't you at least give me a clue? Oh please oh please. Tell me why I always feel so sick.

Love music came from a distance out of somebody's speakers, an old Robert Bridges song updated: "Why is there nothing in your eyes?" Jorge fell asleep and dreamed of deity descending into the world -- a soft larval shape, white and vulnerable, deliberately exposed to trouble in utter tenderness, its openness a model for humans, a rule for behavior: do not spend all your time defending yourself and hurting others. You want to be like God? Be abundant and expose yourself to woe. Try it -- take off the carapace. That was what the music said to him. When he awoke Eros was lying at his side, having picked the rubbery lock.

With nothing in his eyes?

A pagan baby to scare us all? Just a ghoul with tight abs?

Jorge put his hands over his flaming genitals and said: Do not touch me. Don't. Don't.

And Cupid asked: Are you ashamed to be seen to be with me? or are you ashamed to be with me? Which is it?

Neither one but I am terrified of you.

Amor amor you have all the power. Everyone fears you and craves your blessing. Even though we all know you are a fake -- we know but play the game of not knowing and so do you. We are afraid to entregar -- to give ourselves up -- to the real God.

When we don't have you we feel worthless and despicable. But it is not your love I want but God's, the real God, I mean -- but I'm afraid he despises me for being queer -- even though I know he knows the why of my being and therefore understands and therefore forgives or even feels no need to.

In any case -- don't touch me because I might give into you if you do. And then I would kill you.

Love lay on its back with shoulder blades flattened and the wings compressed like coals. Its nipples stuck through the cheap t-shirt and provoked the heart they punctured. Jorge closed his eyes and felt the bed almost capsize. The other one was dry-heave sobbing, no sound, no water -- a sorrow with no issue or purpose.

I'm diseased, I'm infected, the god said. I have AIDS now -- my cells are damaged.

Please let me lie here and float through the night. The cost to you is nothing.

So they floated together without touching, chaste as two old-time Christians. And every time the pagan god shifted on the bed, everything seemed to turn upside down in the room, so that Jorge felt, "yet once more", the almost gymnastic weight of what was basically his own complete solitude. The feeling of another as dead weight.

*

Fantastically good-looking, astoundingly beautiful, don't look don't look. For the rest of his life J would wonder if he'd just been a fool not to turn, not to turn his face. Not just to give in.

One evening he woke from a lesser nightmare and felt an appendage crossing his legs, its tip on his groin. It was the stinger of a giant scorpion, resting outside attack mode, limp and hideous. The carapace scraped the sheet as the creature snored. If I don't move, nothing will happen. Jorge let his breathing take him into a distance from the one visiting, the pagan revenant, the ever recurring marea. He prayed as fervently as the legendary atheist in his foxhole. There was a divine release as he sank back into his own dreams.

In the morning the beautiful beast was gone, had even left town. That same day the reports from the student health center began. Everyone, almost everyone, was ill. Only the Asian students and a few Latinos had somehow -- mostly -- managed to avoid what the more hysterical students and administrators insisted on calling a "plague".

And we want to know who is responsible! Jorge stood in the center of the turmoil, feeling painfully well -- as though some menacing and (do not lie) bracing phenomenon had backed away from him suddenly. The sudden opening of the lion's jaw. Where is your friend? the administrators cried. We can't find even a forwarding address!

No no, Jorge said. You can't just demonize him. You have to fear and respect him and find out why he was here.

Look at all those young women in the hospital! they cried. That is Love's work!

But I don't think so, Jorge said.

*

When you offer up your entregar that's the whole point. You can't know if you'll get anything back or if so what it will be.

You have to give it to the right Person. That's how serious it is.

And if you give it you can't just ask for it back.

He was not the right one but that wasn't his fault.

*

The seasons passed irreversible. The missing person couldn't be found. A war started and young people were sent (or offered to go) overseas. You could say that life went on but in a sense it didn't. Not for everyone -- what a mystery! It moved in stops and starts and for some the stops lasted forever. Meanwhile the demon took on a legendary status on the campus but Jorge -- perverse to the end -- continued to defend him.

In a way Love had never touched anyone. His whole being had been abstract, a sort of myth-shaped hole. And there's no way he could have infected all those people they attributed to him. He had different DNA, remember?

He was Amor, he was really from Venus, not here. They are different and do things differently there.

*