meteors

We spread the blanket on the wet grass and lie down.

The meteors shooting through the sky, through the branches

of the wet trees moving in the wind. He sang to me.

There were locusts. I closed my eyes.

"-tell me what it's like," I said. He put his hand over my eyes, he pulled me against him.

"its like a snow globe," he said. And I could feel him smile, his teeth against my neck.

Lying there. The stars fading into the dawn. Dew on our faces. The meteors, faint in the sky.
They were like lines traced into water, but I remembered where they were written.

--

Sorry I haven't been posting much--have been too happy, and also out of town :)

My brother got married, I went to Lollapalooza.

Lollaland! It was tremendous; I saw Tool and Neko Case and --Lou Reed--!

Ah la la,

and the most beautiful black-haired girl I've ever seen grabbed me out of a crowd,
she kissed me until the sky spun around us...

you perfect woman, out there somewhere, I wish I knew your name. Oh, my friends, dragging me away...!

But book is running very well--please send me zen discipline and good wishes, friends.

in my misdirected and all directioned love,

I Shadow the Psychiatrist

Placating lighting, paintings of lighthouses, a god's-eye view of the city out one side of the small office.

There was this young black girl sitting across from us, her tiny shoulders rounded like folded wings. Dug out eyes, glowing skin. She'd cut off her hair. It stood up all over, bird-like, in perky, indifferent tufts.

"And depression?" asks the doctor, pen hovering. "How is the depression?" he said, as if it was a pet she fed;

she raised her face slowly. Locked on me, and we just looked at each other, into the black center of each other's eyes.

After a long time--"It drowning me," she said.

She looked back down, silently rubbing her palms up and down her thighs.

"I can't ever get my head above the dirty water," she said, slowly.

"So--no better," said the doctor. He checks the box.

There was a military man looking at us from somewhere deep inside his head, from the other side of the world.

"I can't sleep, doctor. I can't;" he whispered, "they're waiting, all of them, waiting for me to. I know it. Their faces when I close my eyes; you tell me I don't."

"And depression?" said the doctor. He checked the box insomnia. "Are you having any depression?"

A manic blonde with a kitten's face and five kids out in the waiting room.

Her spanking new boyfriend shepherds her into the chair. The skin is still brightly tender, pale where his wedding band was. She watches me warily. Watches him warily. They are as faithless as snakes.

Depression for the them both, check check.

An old drunk, a young drunk, a beaten woman. A forgetful woman.

A boy with eyes like basement windows. He'd beaten his lover, throwing mangoes after her in the street.

"I'm a monster."

You aren't.

They came in and sat in the old chair, one after the other, and all of them wept. There was a box to check for each of them.

The boxes to check made it seem very simple, and maybe it was.

People like geometric objects, bobbing in and out of tetris.

The doctor says the right things kindly, writing out his scripts of mercy, and never looks at the clock.

Between the patients he shuts the door and turns full face to me, hands on his knees.
He'd been a surgeon for twenty years before he became a psychiatrist.
He loves people, he says. That was how he got into it.

Inside and out, I say. You love people inside and out, I say.

He grins at me, gregarious handsome Arabic man with his studious eyes.

"Who listens to you?" I say.

The receptionist came in when we'd talked too long.

"You have a crowd forming, doctor," she says gently, exactly the kind of receptionist you should have in an office where there are paintings of lighthouses;



the end of the day. Saying goodbye, and the doctor takes my hand.

(I don't think this happens to most people when they've finished shadowing. Sometimes I think there must be something distractingly wrong with me, that people paying attention can see so clearly through my skin; something very, very wrong in me.)

"You are going to do well," he said to me. "I wanted to tell you this. You are very sincere, and you have a good heart. Small things get to you too much, I think. -You don't mind?- You are going to be very much more than fine. Okay, sweetheart?"

Saying this last part carefully, the word sweetheart, a word that might break in his mouth like glass. A blessing with edges.

"Okay," he says.

My hands are cool where his held me.

The sound of silence in the long, carpeted hallway; the lights unblinking over me.
In the elevator a crooked old man, and I smile at him.

"I used to stand up straight," he says.

"Oh."

A drove of old ladies press through the doors gently, patiently, like cows. I almost expect them to low.
-The powdery smell, the old air smell, of very old people filling the elevator. Someone pushes the button, and we start to go down,

rows of little white boxes, outlined in black, on unlined paper

"You just stand up straight for the rest of us," says the man.
The women titter politely.

They can't see my crooked little Grinch heart inside its crooked little cage.

And so--I smile back. I can't see theirs either.

at first

february:

"I want you to belong to me," he says.

Pulling my hair to make me look at him. With my head twisted I press back, my ass into his ivory pale hips, and for a moment alive feels real.

"Hurt me," I say. "Tell me I'm your woman."

"You're my woman," he says, leaning over my body; fingers soft along my skin, the tips of my breasts, my ribs, and down.

"My breasts, my belly," he says, touching me,

"my lips," he says, kissing me, his tongue deep into mine, tongue fucking, clacking our teeth,
still pulling my hair. Fucking my body--the rooster crows, out in the yard, and brought back to outside myself I realize I am screaming.

"Make it be real," I say. By accident. Is this praying?

Lying there watching the light come slowly through the tapestries tacked to the windows.
Smoke trailing lazily along the ceiling. His face in my neck he says it--

"What?" I say. "Look at me."

"I don't even--I don't want anyone else to see you," he says, "even to know that you exist.I want you to exist just for me. Like...a city for no one else."

River laughs.

"I'm ridiculous," he says.

I prop myself up, watching him. He closes his eyes.

"Feeling this way...I haven't felt this way since years ago, it makes me feel crazy. I hate it. Imagining you when you're not with me, that the men who look at you--I know it's not true but I
think about it. It makes me crazy."

"Aren't you sure of me?"

"It's nothing to do with you. It's with how the world works. Men are disgusting, they're animals."

"But people are animals, goof."

"Women are different. You don't understand it. It's disgusting."

"Of course I understand. I do the same thing--I think about fucking everybody. All the time."

He glares at me. I'm irritated and want to make him angry.

"It's not disgusting. It's natural," I say.

I laugh and roll over. "It's awesome."

"The natural world is revolting. It's base."

"But what is revolting is beautiful, because without darkness there could be nothing light, don't
you see?"

"I see and I don't care, I'd be happier if everything ended and it would be clean and empty.-I want a cigarette."

He rolls over and pulls on his shirt. His keys jingling. "How did we start talking about this?"

"Do you always get dressed just for a cigarette?"

"It's a habit," he says.

"I love habits," I say. I don't want him to leave me alone in this strange dark country house--
"I don't have too many. Tea on the porch in the morning. Runs at night."

He's standing there dressed, looking at me.

I don't have many habits. I have some irregular compulsions but thats different--in a way it
would be kind of nice to pick up smoking, kind of bring you back to yourself throughout the day.
A kind of punctuation. Always would know about the weather. Maybe I should take up
smoking. I would smoke cloves like River does, like a pretentious art fag, although River is
neither pretentious or faggy. It's just he likes things to be sweet.

I guess I was grinning about something.

"You love to be alive," he says.

"I love the sound of my fucking voice."

He smiles. His teeth are yellow and sharp. I wonder how they would feel in my cunt.

"You think you hate fecundity," I say. "Lushness, too ripeness. Ripe into rot. But really you
don't, though, or you'd want to be with someone sick and dead looking. Not the way that I look."

He kneels down, cups my breasts in his hands.

"Obsessed with you," he says.

"Ah, you don't hate anything," I say.

I stand and press his face between my legs. "You're just afraid if you love anything too much
you'll lose it." He moans--his dry hands running up my thighs, under my ass.

"...you make me wet."

"I want you again."

He groans. I push him off.

"Look at that. You love some things," I say.

------

It is late. The sky is wet. People throwing their beer over the apartment ledge.
Someone crying in the bushes; end of a night.

"You know, people looking at-at any woman-they look at more than just sex. At the shape,
at the idea. And maybe that's what seduction is-the suggestion of something..symbolic, ideal..."

"I don't think that's it," he says. "Men want to fuck women. They want to come all over your
face and your tits. Release. That's it. Throw away. That's it. Like a fucking rag. Strangers
looking at girls-You want it to be this beautiful thing-but you're only fucking stoned, babe."

"You know, I don't care. I just wanted to make you feel better about it. This dumb goddamn
hangup which doesn't matter anyway."

A cruiser pulls up. I am high, and paranoid now, because I have noticed there are tiny buds of pot stuck to my dress-"I have to go," I say.

River grabs my hand.

I don't care. Why do I do this? It's like an unclean habit. It would be better just to hang out with a dog all the time, because dogs don't say anything. I wouldn't have to listen to anybody's idiot opinions anymore and I could just jerk myself off and read alone in my room.

My dog would sit in front of the door and just be there.

Which is what I want.

"I mean, the difference is, I love you," River says.

I slip my hand free.

"Wait," he says. "I want to say-it's jealousy, maybe. If I was a woman-"
the lines of his face, the streetlight violet behind him; his eyes black in the night and their nameless lack.

"If I was a woman," he says, "I would want to be you. That's all."


I sit in my room and look at the tree through the window. Its buds are white in the nighttime.

Was this what it would be?

Part of me has flown away, sometimes I think about years from now standing with River in
the country, our country of love and black cigarettes, chickens, dogs, wildflowers. Are there
strong men? Maybe it is the way that I love, accepting everything, wanting more, more
realness. Maybe it is my fault that they become boneless, needing.

Feeding me their secrets like love. I eat secrets like fish flakes.

"Sometimes I don't know if I love you," he'd said, "or if I just want to, so much."

"It's okay."

"But how do we know?"

"Love isn't---the more you try to touch it, baby, the less real it will be."

"I do love you," he said. "Because I'm afraid. When you leave--"

Too much talking. Between my thighs he makes a fist. Turning it, slowly, against me.

"I need you so much," he said.

My breasts are sore; I ache for him. I eat my candy. I think he has probably told lots of girls
that if he was a woman he would want to be them. It's a good line. Who wouldn't say it again? I
would say it again.

His voice on the phone; I can't remember it ringing or his calling me. It is all one unending
eternal string of sex and candy and talking, crying drunk kissing the clove sweetness of his lips
and neck,

"Were you sleeping?"

"Yes."

"Can I come over? --just to lie next to you. I can't sleep."

"Aren't you back out in the country?"

"I'm not going to do anything, I'll just lie next to you. I'll be quiet and you sleep."

He drives back to me through the dark, brightly awake and wishing he could cry, comes into my
room and lies down on the carpet beside me. There isn't enough blanket.

"It's okay," he says.

Pushes his face into my breast, his arms around me, lies there whispering until he falls asleep
and something clicks deeper inside me and I think I am in love with him, his smell like Christmas
and his hair in my fingers and the way we fit together, like missing pieces.

for you, benny

There had been a drag show and everybody was outside watching the queens leave. Benny was working. It was his job to keep out the kids looked like they wanted to fight with each other.

"People, why are we fighting?" he'd say. He was a huge guy, doing this Mick Jagger impersonation-"why are we fighting? We don't want to fight."

He was built like a wall, Benny was, an action figure--skin stretched so tight across the muscles it looked like it could split. He looked mean, and most people who didn't know him kept it pretty low. They stayed out of his way.

Except it had been one of those weeks that's sticky hot, hazy, sweat rolling itchy down your back all night and day and drinking only makes you mean. So these punks outside, they started fighting.

Benny goes up to them with his routine--"Brothers and sisters, brothers and sisters"--he was always watching those movies, those documentaries about rock stars. About everything he said was from the Rolling Stones or somebody.

One of the punks has a knife and stabs Benny. There were other bouncers--they pounce the guy.

Everybody yelling. Benny's standing back holding his arm, blood running out around his fingers onto the sidewalk.

"Baby," he says, like it's nothing, "go get the Bacardi from the bar."

I come out with it and they've got the punk facedown on the sidewalk. All of them standing there with their feet on his back dropping cigarettes on the kid. There's a game at the stadium a couple blocks away and the night is purple from the big stadium lights. Cigarette smoke twisting in the purple streetlit air. It's a painting, this moment, and I come out with the Bacardi and give it to Benny.

He pours it down his arm and lights it. The flame opens instantly, like a nightmare's sail, like salvation, this brilliant smoking flash. The bright cut on Benny's arm darkens to a sticky tar;

"What the fuck, man?" says somebody.

"Cauterizing the wound, motherfucker," says a guy, has his boot on the punk's head.

Benny, dripping with sweat, smiling. His sweaty buddha's face. He looks at the punk on the ground with benevolent eyes. He will do nothing to hurt the punk or to save him. In Benny mythology interference impedes another's growth, interference was a sin. Everybody was a different kind of plant to Benny.

"You grow uninterrupted," he says to me once, "you work yourself out. Eventually."

"Or you don't," I said.

"You know there's this one kind of plant that secretes poison out its roots to kill everything around it. That way it gets all the light, the water, everything," he said. We were standing there chewing sunflower seeds. He finished chewing and spat. "It takes all kinds."

A job where you let the people do what they want until they figure shit out for themselves; there must be a job like that somewhere and Benny should have had it.

"Let me up, man," says the punk. "I'm sorry."

"Sure you're sorry, says the guy. "You're a sorry skin-bag of blood and yellow ass guts; you stabbed Benny, man." He grinds the punk's face into the sidewalk. "I don't know about calling anybody, what do you think?" he says.

"Benny?"

Benny with his palms to the sky while his arm lit in flames--someone was sending down a message, the answer, and the rest of us could only watch.

His blood ran down, making a stain I believed I could see years later after everyone was gone and Benny was dead and I was alone. When I've forgotten the rest I will remember Benny.

Ceramic, poreless, my searing memories:

"People used to be so perfect," I said to him once. We weren't even really talking. Sometimes you want to say something to make it less true. But he answered me.

"Anybody ever said this to you, girl--what you don't have, you don't need it now," Benny said. "They could put that in the Bible." He put his arm around me. I touched his scar. I always felt safe with Benny.

We walked to the creek. He was in love with how clear the water was. We watched the sun go down and he told me about how when he was a kid he believed there was a slot in the earth where the sun went at night. The moon was down there, too. Sometimes they'd slide against each other like coins, he said. "I was always going to video arcades," he said.

"I liked petting zoos," I said.

"Healthy little animal."

"But now I prefer the aquarium."

"Cold fish."

"No, boo, a raccoon. I can't help but keep sticking my hands in."

He grabbed my fingers and put them into his mouth, laughing.

"It's all slots with you, isn't it?"--but he wouldn't let me leave, he pulled me closer and held me tight. And I let him, because it felt good to pretend to be held to something solid, unshifting.

The secret is that it is all smoke and ashes. It is only that some things blow away before the rest.

Fire and ashes--he died in a house fire. The fire was contained to his bed. Nothing else was touched. They could not explain it, but I can tell you.

In Benny's secret self he was burning alive, from fingers to neck to his unbound heart, how brilliant the message, and entire. He burned until there was not anything left.

.

Last night...she said...

The little coffee dive: slouching in the sticky seats, drinking sticky drinks, talking the big show and looking up all the time to see who's come in.

Tonight it's almost empty. People eating at the cereal bar, no one watching the TV. Lawrence's flaxy hair and his handsome wide angle face. We're talking about movies, about making movies, and the old grass-green excitement coming up in me.

Then Jack calls. We'd made plans to hang out after dinner.

"Do you like beer?" he says.

"Whiskey."

I close my phone--Lawrence has this funny look on his face.

"You're blushing", he says.

And I have this stupid grin-"I guess I just showed you my cards, huh?"

I can never hide anything.

"So you're going over there," he says.

"Yeah. Wish me luck," I say, without knowing why.

I kiss him on top of his curly, beautiful hair-

It is a cold, brilliant night. I stop at the gas station. The attendant is hugely fat, carnival fat, and scary people in there leaning on the counter. One has a fishing pole, for some reason, even though its January in Kansas at nine o clock at night.

My face reflected in the glass door: still with the stupid grin, because here I am on my big adventure, I wrote to this guy I had a crush on way back in high school, and talking to him on the phone he's just like me, probably too much like me, but fuck it, yeah? We'll make an exemption for the stone cold fox.

I think about Jack's forehead and the way his hair used to fall across it, when we would sit under that tree. Autumn, and leaves on the ground, everything smelling rich and living underneath us, and I felt that it would be impossible to ever die. I wonder if his hair is still as long as it used to be.

I bang my music and drive like a drunken loon through the country, passing the old barn where I used to shovel horse shit in high school, where I'd ride horses alone at midnight through fields full of snakes and flowers. I remember there used to be a farm with black and white cows across the road but I don't see it now.

Then I'm there. It's a nice house. A really nice house, and a big shed with stuff in it, and fences all over the place. He said that they have cats and I look around but don't see any.
My car ticking. Do I call him or just go over and ring the doorbell? What's the protocol for this, this fucking crazy, ass-random thing which I am doing?

The house is dark. It's fucking freezing. Suddenly I start thinking about In Cold Blood and terrify myself. There's this blue plastic dolphin swinging in the window--surely this is the wrong house, and someone scary is going to come to the door and yell at me.

Yeah, so I call him and he doesn't answer.
Wow, well here I am. How fucking stupid is this?
Then he calls back.

"That's my mom's house," he says. "I'll come and get you--"

"No, no," I say. "I see you. I'm coming."

Their houses are separated by maybe 500, 600 feet, these great nice country houses in the middle of all these land and these fences. Around me the night is silent. He flips on his porch light.

And there he is.

We stand apart from each other just looking.

He looks the same, but older, taller, blue shadows under his eyes, and crazy, tangled hair floating around his coat collar--still long.

"Hi," he says.

He picks us cups out of the drying rack and starts to mix me a whiskey and water-

"Better let you pour," he says.

I dump in the whiskey.

"You too?"

"I have to go slow," he says, smiling. "Or I'll start saying crazy things, and you'll run away."

I am going to get in trouble tonight.

So we're drinking, and he shows me his house. The lower half is spread out with music equipment, a big drumset and other stuff I don't know about. Back porch with a sofa and a computer.

We kind of have to mill around because there's not really anywhere to sit. It's cold on the porch.

"Bachelor pad," he says. "You want to see the upstairs?"

ha ha. sure. why not.
Steep carpeted white stairs.
He's got it draped with fabrics, and there's a sloping roof, a wall of CDs. Books all over one side of the bed, which is a massive futon, almost like a Japanese mat, and covered in a black down comforter.

N. and I had a white down comforter, our bed on the floor.

And of course, there's nowhere to sit but the bed.

"Let me show you this script," I say.

He goes down to get it from the table. I have decided to lie on the ground with just my head on the bed. That seems okay.

"Let me play you some of the songs I was thinking about for it," he says.

So he's a metal guy, right, and I know nothing about metal--very little about any music, really, but what I listen to when I want music is more like sixties psych rock, prog rock, turkish funk.

He's trying to read the script and he puts on this music which is loud and great and completely inaccessible to me.

"This is my baby," he says.

His handpicked band. They headline metal tours.

I can't help myself--I start laughing. I'm drinking too much, and the music is so crazy, and it's so random that I'm out here, and in his bedroom, this guy, who I never knew very well but always kind of wanted to fuck, and he looks up and gives me this sweet, earnest grin.

"I just--if I can't understand the lyrics, it's hard for me. And it's so-fast. I think I need to graduate into this."

What did he play for me--he kept putting things on--My Dying Bride, Type O Negative, Theatres des Vampires. I loved Theatres des Vampires. He put on things he'd done himself, sounding a lot like theatres des vampires, at least to me. We edge further onto the bed, talking--after a while he stops even trying to look at the script.

I go back downstairs for a mug of hot water. When it's cold, I drink a lot of hot water, lots of tea, hot toddies. Funny to be around someone I really don't know at all, to have them looking at you and be figuring you out. Hmm, she likes tea. And you are looking at them, doing the same thing. He has no laces in his shoes. That is interesting.

All the time weighing these things. Is this something which I like?

I sit on the counter top and listen to the microwave hum. Out his windows the country is beautiful, ice white and shining under the moon. Little glints like mica in the grass.

He comes downstairs and finds me. Stands there on the other side of the table which divides the kitchen.

"The fireflies out here in the summer must be amazing."

He steps closer. "They are."

"You aren't keeping up."

He slugs some whiskey.

"Let's get trashed," I say.

"You know," he says. "I rarely drink. So if I say some things tonight-"

"Oh, come on. This is a bender. That's what you do."

Then we went outside for some reason.
Whisky, vodka, cigarettes, cheese. There are no stars, just the moon like something ripe, and I keep catching him watching my face, watching me breathe. I run my cold finger down his face-"I like your profile," I say.

Actually we were in the bed.

But before that happened we went into town for a while.

"Let's take you out," he says.

Driving there he says suddenly, "I need to tell you I have a girlfriend. --But it's been over between us for a long time."

Which sounds familiar.

"We don't make each other happy anymore," he says. "I mean, she's really hurt me and I don't connect to her anymore. Thing is, she's a little suicidal. I've been kind of a coward about ending it."

We're driving down a long straight gravel road with trees bowed on either side, water standing silver in the ditches. His whole body inclined to me from his seat. Smoking his cigarette meditatively-

"Can I have some of that?"

Our fingers touch. "Shouldn't smoke," he says. "I don't want to be a bad influence."

It feels good, like all my nerves opening up and then easing, everything easing.

"I think I am a little drunk now," I say to him. Flick my ash out the window and wonder what happens to it. Probably bursts into a million particles on the wind. A firecracker. The grey, grey night in his headlights.

"I really like you," he says. He looks at me.

"Well. I am a mess." I say.

We go to the Replay. They had a serrated plastic sheet hung over the door because it was cold outside, but it is just as cold inside.

He buys drinks and we slide into a wooden booth, where it is fucking cold, and we keep leaning closer together across the table until I can't stand it and go across the room to stand up on a chair under a heat lamp.

There's this really tall guy there, who knows Jack, and I start talking to him, after a while saying things like 'isn't it crazy, everything we've seen, everything we've experienced-that it fits inside your skull?' With my hands on my head, feeling my skull, and saying, 'isn't it crazy?'

Thinking of Jodorowsky-crazy that we have a heart, that we have blood, that we have a cock-it's all so fucking crazy.

And this guy just grinning at me like I'm a loon, because I am a loon indeed, and yeah man, he's saying, it's crazy. Our breath shows white in the air between us.

With Jack standing next to me, his beautiful porcelain face and the hollows under his eyes and cheeks, I want to touch him.

Some people yelling my name, and its these two girls I met on New Years, these awesome girls, and I'm so happy to see them and exchange numbers, because I've got this idea it'd be fun to go into KC and see a boxing match together, get drunk and see some blood and knuckles. Tara and this girl whose name I can't remember, petite beauty with close cropped gray hair even though she's only 26.

"I wish it wasn't so cold--what I want to do is walk with you and talk with you," I say to Jack. He smiles and takes my arm.

We switch to Henry's Upstairs. Jammed with people. Standing in line at the bar these three drunk dudes saying something to us, screaming over the noise, this not-english gibberish, and we just smile and nod. He asks me if I want to go. I'd sort of like to see what happens.

We find a little table and I try to orient myself so we aren't touching, since after all now there is a girlfriend. He takes my drink and tries it, turning the glass first so that his lips will touch the place mine had met.

"You know, I had this thing for you all high school," he said. "But I was fucking scared."

I try his beer and don't like it.

"Did you write to me just because you want me for this part?" he says.

"Yes," I say.

I'm not lying, either. I've just been doing exactly what I feel like doing and letting the pieces fall--true to god I didn't think about it, I don't want to be with anybody. I just wanted my character to kiss a character she'd have chemistry with. No one will believe this but it is true.

"I don't believe you," he says.

"Oh well."

He puts his hands on his knees-"I have to go to the bathroom immediately."

I laugh and he leaves--and then this blonde kid slides into his chair.

"What are you looking at?" the kid asks me. I'd been looking at this painting on the wall.

"Uh, that."

"Have you seen this one?" He shows me one around the corner that's a bunch of painted squares. We go back and sit down.

"You know, that seat is taken."

"It wasn't when I came in."

"Hm."

A big guy walks past.

"Is that him? Nope, not your type."

"What do you want?" I ask.

He doesn't answer so I needle him-"how old are you?"

"Twenty-two," he says, with this smug frat asshole expression. I want to smack him.

"Twenty-two, and you don't know what you want. How does that happen?"

He reaches out to try to touch my hair and I jerk back. "Why do you dye your hair red?" he says.

"Go away."

He just looks at me.
Jack comes back from his piss and stands there. He's not sure if this is a guy I know.

The asshole looks up at Jack with this sullen expression, this spoiled rich asshole of a face, and he wants to fight. So I stand up, and Jack follows me, and we leave.

There are people who know him everywhere. It takes a long time to get out.

But then we're in the jeep, and after a while we're back in his room. It's a little cold.

"Can I get under the blanket?"

Drinking, smoking, music, talking forever and the night is endless. I want to press up against him so badly, I want to crawl on top of him and lick his face and his tongue-oh, to like a guy, to hop into his bed and just look at him, I love that. After seven years, to be so free, I love it, I feel like a child. Can we cuddle? Is that allowed?

But I stay on my side of the bed.

"God," he says-"I feel--elated. Do you have that?"

I start to say something but don't. He presses it.

"Ask me in a couple weeks, okay? Figure things out with your girl and ask me then."

"Oh, fuck, that's not fair. You have to tell me. I've said everything!"

My lips are sealed. Oh, but I want to kiss him. His smile. You beautiful boy. You've no idea.

It's five in the morning. His phone rings.

"That's her," he says. Resigned. I think about myself, my instincts, a couple months back. Calling.

He takes the phone downstairs. I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly he's there crouching behind me.

"She's coming over," he says, with a white face. "She wants to meet you."

"What?"

"I told her you were coming over tonight to talk about this part, and she wasn't happy. Then I didn't call. So she wants to meet you."

"No--Jack, you don't know what I've just been through. Fuck-this is exactly how it happened with N. and I."

"Look, we'll just go downstairs and we'll say we were drinking and you were too drunk to drive home, so you were gonna sleep on the couch. I don't want you to leave."

"Ah-" I am pretty drunk. Actually, I am well wasted. "Listen, would you get me my backpack from my car? I have something I need to take at six."

He goes and I sit up. The room isn't spinning exactly. More like swirling. I have to leave.

Downstairs all he has are tortillas and a sack of cheese cubes. My backpack slung over his shoulder, he walks me outside--I'm trying to down this dry tortilla.

It's still black outside. We stop and hug, and this huge black and white cat comes up to us. He looks just like the tomcat N. kept.

I sit in the wet grass and hold the cat in my lap. Jack looks down at us.

"That's Tom," he says. He sits--"I want you to stay."

Sitting in the grass with this cat like my Calvin, suddenly I'm not there and I don't give a fuck about anyone or anything, I'm that drunk, and bell-lucid. And there are stars, there are stars, there are stars.

"Stay with me," he says.

'Listen,' I wish I'd said. 'This is what you do. You hold her, you tell her the truth-you love her. You don't make her happy. You can't make her happy. And you're not happy. So it's over. And then don't talk for a couple months, so that she can build her own thing and feel okay by herself. Don't drag it out.'

This is what I wish I'd said but instead what we do is hold each other wordlessly, my hands inside his big black jacket like wings around us, and he tries to kiss me.

"Be good," is what I said. His lips along my temples.

Deer crossing the road, their eyes like lamps in my headlights. I hit a construction sign. It's okay. It's all okay and great.

He calls me--"I want to see you soon," he says. "I need to see you," he says, what N. must have said, and does say to her, and Jack will be my rebound, and I will be his, and isn't it silly, how all of it, it's just musical chairs.

"There she is," he says. "Here goes."

I miss my old cat. I miss the fireflies. I miss my landlord, and the Watkins, and the trees drooping softly over that place I used to live, with my N. in bed sleeping, his careworn face, face I loved like a father, a brother, my everything lover-you were everything to me and now it is nothing.

And this is right and it is okay. Because now there is nothing in the world from stopping me in becoming. But I do feel strange and disconnected. I am a kite without a string.

I make it home and pass out. Wake up and scribble for a while in bed with Topo curled up buzzing next to me. Intense desire for a fish filet from McDonalds, with yellow cheese.

Pizza

One time I had this job working at a pizza buffet. There were all these hot guys who worked there.

I was in junior high, and they were out getting wasted in fields on the weekends, singing songs with girls who stayed out all night. They seemed so free.

There was this one guy with curly blonde hair. He had a big smile and deep-set eyes. He liked to hug me before I went home, walking across the golf course alone at night, thinking about everything I would do when I was their age.

He would hold me a little too long, blonde, and I would breathe in his deodorant and his shampoo and the metallic stink of his sweat.

I love boys. I want to beat them and lick them all over like a mama cat.

These ones were protective of me like a kid sister, and sometimes when one of them would cross the line another one would step in and shake his head at his friend like, buddy, no. It was so fucking frustrating. I wanted them to take me out.

Anything, then, to be out of that house, my house of a closed up throat, with people I'd been looking at my whole life and they still didn't couldn't understand me.

I remember this girl who came in to see the blonde boy. She had these long and golden, deer-like legs. She walked like someone from California. Her ankles were heartbreakingly thin, erotically smooth and even.

I stared at her, and she gave me a meaningless smile because I was a kid and she was the kind of girl who smiled at everyone, everything, without meaning. Then she jumped up into the blonde guy.

It was like a photoshoot for Seventeen. The sun shot through the window between them, and I felt a stabbing pain in my chest because I would never be blonde and caramel like them.

I slunk into the kitchen, where Elliot was washing the dishes. He looked at me, and I mumbled something.

"Do you have an accent?" he says.

"No."

"I think you sound kind of Swedish. We think you sound kind of Swedish."

"Huh."

"Like, that Swedish lilt, you know."

"Do you think Josh's girlfriend is pretty?" I said. I shoved the tray of dishes into the machine for him.

"They all look like that, in high school. It's not special," he said.

"What do you mean?"

"Just that. She's not special." He turned away from me, concentrating on something, and I left, feeling unsatisfied. When I went home I stood in front of the mirror and lifted up my jeans. I looked at my legs. I'd never noticed my ankles before.

They were snow white, and startlingly beautiful.

A couple years later I saw Elliot working at my video store, and I pretended I didn't know him. I don't remember why.
Then, one day we pretended to recognize each other. "Oh! -it's you!" It was really stupid.

Love Without End Amen

The stone city below us through the windows blue at night, my white shoulders, my white face transposed across it by the glass like somebody dead; like bloody, bloody Mary in the mirror at midnight: patron saint of my scarlet life.

Behind me from the bed he reaches for me. I like the dark hair on his forearms, the white hair on his chest. The bones in his feet and his dimples. His hands, though, are too soft and floury--long palmed like a monkey, repulsive. Earlier, dancing, his hands around my shoulders, my belly, my neck like a constrictor. In my hair, and breathing me, this older man, saying the things everybody says.

My head is a bell.

Kiss me harder, I say. My hand behind his head I pull his hair. He can kiss harder but it isn't enough--I want to feel his bones, I want it to hurt, I want his skin to be rough, for him to hold me like a man. But he can't and it isn't. There is a solution. I always find the solution.

The bartender smiles, he pours like an angel.

You should be back here with me, he says. You look lonesome.

You don't look much better.

Which is why you should be back here with me, he says, tries to touch my hand.

I find this beautiful girl with Chinese eyes. Her hair is smooth, all of a piece, sliding around like something out of the ocean. Why men, I am thinking. We dance hips together, her soft thighs—the smell of lanolin, cinnamon, honey chapstick. Her shining two lips.

Then her man comes up and steals her away--and James comes from behind me--the men pulling us apart while we are still looking at each other, and now James wants to go. And why the fuck not--why not anything. Why not everything?

He's eating something and I take it out of his hands--anything you want, he tells me, I will give you anything you want.

There is nothing that I want, I tell him.

If somebody doesn't know what they want you can't trust them, he says. They could do anything.

We are back in the room and talking drunken all night. You know it's just as easy to love a rich man, he says.

Why did I come here? This is not what I want, I'm pretending, I'm proving something--what, that I don't hurt? That I can also kiss someone unimportant whom I do not love or know, that I'm fine without you? I cannot believe anything will ever be good again.

I fall asleep--wake up and he is loudly pretending to sleep. I hate him, the juvenile, the idiot, veils all fallen away and everything four o’clock naked. He pulls me back into bed, against him, his coarse forearms which I like, holds me & we close our eyes, he starts talking about all the things. A girl like me. What he'd like to do together. What it would be like to wake up and see my face, what it would be like to leave me and go to a meeting and then come back to me again, my face still there. With my eyes closed he could be anyone.

We could be anyone anywhere, eyes closed making promises without the intention of ever keeping. The game that we are two innocents, and not liars, that we are brave, rational, as happy as we pretend to be.

I want fire. I want to be burned alive, to be eaten alive, never to feel. I want a lover to grab me to hold me and hurt me, to split me open, make me feel, make me dead.

In the morning with our eyes open we get ready, walking around comfortable and indifferent. He orders green tea and juice, we read the paper, we walk outside together for him to show me the city, pleasure in talking about the history of things but something inside me dropping forever like a stone.

I am falling forever, there is nothing and no one to catch me and there never was.

We go to the top of another hotel for breakfast. Do you like the vista, he asks me.

Yes, I say. Paper bags and seagulls in the air, elevators sliding up and down outside the buildings, the red bridge unfolded, the prison entrenched upon the sea, the men in the street. A boy my age sitting behind us, tapping on his laptop, and I am ashamed.

What are you thinking, I ask him.

I'm thinking how I'd like to kiss you, he says. We finish breakfast and walking away he does: tilting my chin, feeling my ribs and my smallness the way that N. used to, finding me out. (memories of our smallness seven years ago in my first apartment, N.'s dear face saying I want you to have my babies, I never want you apart from me. Endlessness, I want to own you. I want you against me when we are old and the blood doesn't move anymore. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I believed. I ate his promises and hung them like a light between my ribs. They will extract the promises like the brains from a mummy--thread them out through my nose, place them delicate into a jar by my body for someday to find.)

I turn my face away--James kisses my neck. In the elevator my neck and my shoulders, his hands in my hair, and I push into him, wanting to be punished to be shamed. I deserve to feel this fucking way. This is what I wanted. This is what I wanted. I have done nothing wrong. These are not anything but kisses. I have responsibilities to no one. No one has responsibilities to me. We are all adults here.

He has a meeting. I'll meet you here at one for lunch, he says, and goes out. I print my boarding passes in the lobby, think about taking a cab and leaving without goodbye. Instead, because I'm there, I walk outside, I go to shops. The people pretend they do not see me and that I cannot see them. We are one million blind men.

And that was me crying in the streets of San Francisco, silent in the bright white sunshine of a white morning, white bricks and people relaxed in their jackets not seeing me. Seagulls and plastic bags, women selling plastic bangles, colored scarves. I am alive.

I am anesthetized I am lost I am alive. I am leaving just as I came in. My burning heart, my sacred body, this world my pyre, these words are smoke, there is nothing which exists.

Reading the Book of Serenity on the flight home, I fall asleep and dream in koans:

The teacher to his attendant: bring me me the rhinoceros fan.

The student, shamefaced: that fan is broken.

So the fan is broken. Bring me then the rhinoceros, says his teacher.

What can you say? There is nothing you can say.

The teacher draws a circle in the dirt. Inside the circle he writes with his finger: rhino

--so, friend, you are broken. Walk not forwards but backwards. Walk back to your original nature, to your natural self, to your face before you were born: the source of the fan.

N. hands me back my heart. He walks away and I am at the center of all things alone, the darkness alone, and this is where I came from, my love, my sweetest friend, the days before you pulled me out, and this is what I am made from: darkness and water and female softness. Yin lady, orange moon, temple's priestess.
I sing the song of myself.