My Lunch With The Poet Bryzynsky: A One Act

Characters:

Bryzynsky
The Man
Giuseppe the Wine Merchant
Young Man
Young Man's Girlfriend
Pizza Maker 1
Pizza Maker 2

(Wide angle shot of a New York City neighborhood from the air. It is day. A Gershwin clarinet initiates, somewhat ironically abates. Camera, awkwardly, rapidly pans in on a single window, travels through the window, zeros in on a man in his underwear laying on a fetid mattress leaning up against the wall drinking from a bottle of wine. The room is chaos, a sea of bottles and clothes. The walls are bare.)

Man (thinking): I was living in a fleabag C street apartment, driving a yellow cab and drinking during my days off. They had this wine for sale down the street at Giuseppe's. IL Primitivo. Giuseppe had a limitless supply he kept in crates in the back. He showed them to me. "IL Primitivo, look!" he said. It had an almost too sweet start that suddenly dried up like a conversation with a woman you meet somewhere. Then once you think the interaction is over, there's this light bluecheese aftertaste, like an unexpected touch to chase away the long, dead years.

(The man takes a drink from the bottle. Camera pans in on the bottles label. IL Primitivo. The man wipes his mouth with his sleeve, stands, puts on a his pants which are lying on the floor the belt still attached, puts on a jacket over the incredibly filthy, wine stained undershirt and walks out into the steamy New York late morning.)

Man (narrating): I was going to meet my old NYU dorm mate Byrzynsky. Over the last 12 years, Bryzynsky has become something of a celebrity, very much as I have become an undiscovered country unto myself. It's funny what life hands you. I used to think I was more or less in control, but not anymore. You aren't in control of any of this shit.

(Man walks down the street, enters the subway, sits waiting on one of the wooden seats below. The woman sitting next to him gets up and moves severals seats down. The train comes...)

Man (on the train, thinking): We haven't seen each other in five years. I wonder if it will be awkward. I wonder if I look horrible.

(Man exits the train at Avenue J, passes out onto the street, joins Bryzynsky in line at De Farra's Pizza.)

Man: Is this the line?

Byrzynzky: Did I ever tell you about lines during the Soviet Period?

(Byrzynsky is tall, with long dark hair and a beard. Hip. Designer jeans with, a mid length coat, a gray scarf. An Eastern European intellectual dandy, with that macho Eastern European edge.)

Man: Maybe. It's been a while.

Byrzynsky: The idea wasn't so much as to produce a sense of order as it was to see how long the line could get. It was like the game Snake Xenia. Do you have Snake Xenia on your phone?

(Man digs out his old phone)

Man: Yeah. Snake.

Byrzynsky: The Snake Xenia: she is a female snake: that is her name: gets longer and longer until the only way she can continue to survive is to make a spiral starting at the outskirts and spiral in on the last morsel she will eat just before she eat's her own tail, and at that point the game will presumably end.

Man: What happens at that point? Do you win?

Byrzynsky: I've never gotten that far. It's all theoretical, like the end of time, or alchemy, or maybe communism. It's like communism. It's as if the game itself -- the totalitarian structure which is the programming -- ironically mimics in the architecture of the snake's journey the phone's ultimate fate: the fate of the obsolete technology circling down the historical whirlpool toward Fresh Kills. Have you been to Fresh Kills?

Man: The dump out on Staten Island? No.

Bryzynsky: After I published my first book of poems, caused the sensation and did the Larry King interview and all that, I started going out there. You take the train out there for as long as you can ride and then you get off and walk down this long road through the forest. There is no sense whatsoever that you are approaching the world's largest garbage pile. And then you start seeing seagulls everywhere swooping in, ane the forest is littered with stray plastic bags and broken television sets presumably people discard as if they can't tell where is the dump and where is nature.

Man: Why did you start going out there?

Bryzynsky: I don't know, man. To get away. I think at that stage I needed a journey from the familiar to the totally unknown, and there is nothing like this place. It's like: the end of the world. Like our own collective destiny. Piles and piles of trash. Of course they don't let you into the main garbage city, but they allow you to prowl the outskirts with the rest of the garbage lovers.

Man: Garbage lovers?

Bryzynsky: Or scavengers or whatever. Fresh kills attracts all types. You'd be surprised. Lots of Swedish tourists for some reason.

Man: Swedish?

Bryzynsky: Yes, Swedish. The Swedes are for some reason fascinated by Fresh Kills. Just find a Swede, say Fresh Kills and you'll start a whole conversation, they'll be like 'oh, that place! I love that place! It is the most American place!'. And then there are the scavengers, the metal detector crowd. Don't talk to those guys! They don't like it when they are interrupted because they are always just on the cusp of finding diamonds in the trash, gold, I don't know what. And then there are the people like me who go there to think.

Man: Are there lots of people who go there to think?

Bryzynsky: Eliot Spitzer

Man: Really?

Bryzynsky: I once met Eliot Spitzer out there, but he ran away when I recognized him.

(They enter the perfumed and sonorous atmosphere of De Farra's where those two guys, their eyes clouded by staring at pizzas too long, take their order.)

Man: what would you like Byrzynsky? A square pie or circular pie?

Byrzynsky: Pizza should be circular, don't you think? The dough naturally wants to take the shape of the circle. But why don't we go against the grain today and experiment with the square? Break the routine, eh? Shoot for shocking geometries. Let's have him make us a Octagon.

Man: I don't think they do that.

Bryzynsky: How do you know?

Man (to Byrzynsky): I wonder if they have any wine. (to the pizza man) Do you have any Il Primitivo wine?

Pizza man: Il Primitivo???

Man: never mind.

Byrzynsky: It's OK. You could use a release from alcohol. It's a cage, you know.

Man: I've never thought of it that way. More of a crutch. At times a pillow.

(They sit down at one of the little tables. They are surrounded by people eating pizza.)

Byrzynsky: Most things in life are like that. Liminal holding cells between one state and the next. I write about this in Flozinksy.

Man: I haven't read that.

Bryzynsky: You haven't read Flozinsky? He is this kind of Blakean God, except that he is a post-modern and lives his life inside a blue jelly bean.

Man: Liminal.

Byrzynsky: Lets extend the metaphor, shall we? You have made love to a beautiful woman and you are exhausted. Spent. It hasn't just been good: it's been great, OK? You've found your zone where control and lack of control meet and time stops like out at Fresh Kills dump, OK? Then, you lay there smoking your cigarette or joint or whatever you like to smoke during that time as you wait for your desire to rejuvenate. Recently, I have begun to smoke a pipe.

Man: what?

Byrzynsky: A pipe. (he takes a pipe out of his inside jacket pocket) I take out my pipe and have a smoke.

Man: In bed?

Byrzynsky: Yes!

Pizza man: Sicilian Square.

Man: I'll get it. (Gets the pizza, brings it back)

Bryzynsky: Did I ever tell you the story of my first poem?

Man: No. Not that I can recall.

Bryzynsky: Well, I was seven years old, living in, this pizza's really good! living in Poland. You know, that is where I am from. Poland. I am Polish.

Man: yes, I do know that. It's on the back of all your books. From Poland. Polish.

Bryzynsky: Yes, and so it is, and so it is. Well, we were quite poor in those days. My father was an engineer, and in those days being an engineer meant nothing, and my mother worked in a thimble factory. All the thimbles in the eastern block came from this factory. That was the decadent thing about the planned economy. They planned to have all the thimbles in the world produced in one factory. All the cameras or watches or whatever were produced somewhere else.

Man: Like Willy Wonka.

Bryzynsky: Yes! The Soviets would have approved of Willy Wonka's world wide schemes.

Man: All the candy comes from one place, the socks from someplace else. It is excessive. Clearly the workings of an addictive personality.

Bryzynsky: When I was a little kid I would go and I would look at the thimbles tumblling down these fantastic, science fiction like tubes and shoots, and it was like an amusement park for me. Going to the thimble factory was my favorite thing in the world. And we aren't talking about a little tiny factory here: some micro brewery. This was totally macro: like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory -- almost a metaphore, but not, stretching on and on forever and ever like Snake Xenia at the moment of her death or rebirth: the hypothetical end state, the dream, the veil.

Man: Bizarre

Bryzynsky: Imagine the difference of a Soviet and American childhood! On the one hand you've got thimbles: these little things women put over their fingers when they are sewing, and then on the other hand you've got these video games or whatever, the guts spilling out, the Japaneseness. Meanwhile, I was growing up in these extremely spare surroundings which were nevertheless somehow connected with infinity. Everything was stripped back, bare revealing the cosmic forces. We of course lived on the outskirts in one of those old Krushchev era complexes that were once sparkling white epitomes but became gray and sooty. The paneling attracts the soot turning them into these blackened depressing monoliths. But for a kid, I remember being quite happy, playing in the little courtyard with the other kids, although we did not play on the spider but around it, hunting cats with slingshots and setting traps for drunks whose routines we had memorized.

Well, and so I think it was at this time, around 7 years old.

See, this is when I became a poet: this is when I new I was a poet. It was all connected with the falling out of my parents -- my father was having an affair with a Lithuanian prostitute named Milda -- I learned her name when my mother shouted it, shouted this strange name again and again, Milda! Milda! It's Milda! Is it Milda?! Milda!

Man: Is it Milda?

Bryzynsky: So, anyway, I don't know what it was, but all of a sudden the idea of death as void, as nothing which it certainly is, hit me. I just couldn't wrap my mind around it, here today, gone tomorrow, and not just gone but forever wiped off the face of existence! The concept terrified me. It was all I could think about. I stopped playing with the other children and spent all my time in the dirty stairwell contemplating the void. My world was shaken. This pizza is delicious. Oily.

Man: Fresh basil.

Bryzynsky: Yes, the basil! I think we all must eat more basil. Basil on everything. And it was as if all of nature could sense my thoughts, my powerful awareness of oblivion, and at school the other children one by one began to forsake me. It was as if they wanted no part of the stark realities I was grappling with.

So, coming home after school, the apartment full of my parents screaming, the only place left for me was the stairwell. And the only other living creatures in the stairwell were the ravens that would fly through the broken window on the top floor and scavenge in the garbage bags people left out by the clogged garbage shoot. Have you observed ravens?

Man: just crows and pigeons.

Bryzynsky: If you haven't observed Ravens before, you don't know how intelligent these creatures are. They are feeling creatures. They think. They observe. Watching the ravens, I felt soothed by their presence. There lives were as fleeting as mine, and once more, I was practically sure they knew what I was going through. In fact, I got the sense that that was why they were ravens! As if their intimate knowledge of destruction had led them to incarnate themselves as little black bird men, little philosophers thoughtfully pacing around the eternal winter of communist Poland. The ravens knew! I knew they knew because they would actually come right up to me and gently peck like this at my raggedy old sweater produced in Bratislava because that is where all the sweaters came from. For some reason the pecking of the ravens soothed me, and so I took out my bit of chalk and wrote a poem on the wall, next to the scrawled phone numbers of prostitutes. Perhaps Milda's number was among them.

Man: What was the poem about?

Bryzynsky: well, it was actually a dirty limerick.

Man: Interesting. So your own first poetic impulse was lewd.

Bryzynsky: It was a protest. I wrote it as if controlling my own actions from a distance. The idea of writing a poem, much less a dirty one, had not been on my childish agenda, never. I never considered the idea of writing a poem, of even writing anything unforced, for pleasure, for myself. Up until that point I had never really considered anything except the void which I had only lately begun to obsess over. And now I was writing a poem and I had this massive erection, or at least whatever it was in those days. And now ever since, I know that I am writing a good poem when I get a...

Man: I see.

Bryzynsky: An erection, a stiffy, a boner. What do you call it?

Man: I see. So, what have you been doing with yourself? You've attained such notoriety. I'm really impressed.

Bryzynsky: This last week, me and my girlfriend, my girlfriend and I, you know Serena...

Man: How could I not. Serena James. English super model. She's absolutely beautiful.

Bryzynsky: Yes, she's gorgeous, isn't she? Serena and I visited Omaha for a fashion show. We found the domestic flight so odd. Even in first class, it felt like one of those long bus journeys you take when you are 13 and have absolutely no money and are being shifted to spend the summer with some relative in Massachusetts or somewhere, and so you ride through the great American no where, and the detritus of fast food wrappers and water bottles begins to build up around you. Well, United Airlines was very much the same thing; like the re initiation of some uncomfortable American journey you thought you had escaped long ago but never did because you were always on the journey, down around the rim of the theoretical gravity well. Like Snake Xenia. It was so odd. We felt odd. We looked odd. I mean, look at me. I'm not exactly normal looking. I'm 6 foot 7 and most days I wear Armani, and Serena, well, as you know she is quite stunning, and she was wearing these Louis Vuitton shoes, very catty, very sexy. Did you know she is only 45 kilos.

Man: 45?

Bryzynsky: Yes, 45! She is like a leaf. And so I am with this mantis-like woman riding a flying, accumulating garbage pile, and we felt like we were slumming it, really, and all of a sudden, mutually, we wanted to make love.

Man: how did you know?

Bryzynsky: We have this thing. This radar for each other. It's really weird. We know.

Man: Love radar.

Byrzynsky: Yes, love radar. The question wasn't, did we want to make love? But, where were we going to do it? Were we going to join the mile high club? I never thought of this sort of thing. I've never had the passion that makes you want to make love in unusual locations, although some people feel that way like they want to make love in the movies or on the bus and that's OK! I don't judge them, but I myself have never felt that way and so casually, as a joke I made reference to it -- reference to the mile high club -- and the flight attendant, someone named Courtney or Cody or Casey: one of those names that can go either way depending on which state you are from, actually motioned with her head, did a little head jerk toward the bathroom.

Man: No way.

Bryzynsky: It was absolutely scandalous! That's what it felt like: like we had discovered the hidden scandal of the United Airlines. We made love standing up in the United Airlines airplane toilet, Serena's legs with those sexy shoes up by my ears, and then after I covered the smoke detector with my Fedora with one hand and smoked my pipe with the other.

Man: Are you serious?

Bryzynsky: Yes! And then after, when we were leaving, the flight attendants invited us to some thing, an orgy they were planning in their hotel room in Omaha. But after we left the airport and were driving to the city, it was like all of a sudden the weight of the universe descended, and we just broke down in each other's arms in the back of the limo crying. And then, after checking into the Hilton, We broke down again. Guess where?

Man: I don't know.

Bryzynsky: The Hilton stairwell!

Man: what? Oh, the stairwell. Were there birds?

(Young man approaches with his girlfriend.)

Young man: Excuse me, but are you Stanislaus Bryzynsky?

Bryzynsky: Yes, yes I am in fact.

Young man: No way. Could you autograph our pizza box?

Bryzynsky: Sure, why not, I'd be happy to. (takes the pen and signs their pizza box.

Young man: I love Flozinsky.

Bryzynsky: Flozinsky.

Young man: Flozinsky (Byrzynsky and the young man stare at each other as if they have just uttered a password).

Bryzynsky: People love Flozinsky. You know what the secret is? It's the name! The word flow coupled with a Slavic ending zinsky.

Man: Is it all that superficial?

Byrzysnky (shrugs): You know what my favorite part of the female anatomy is? The back. I think it's because the back has the biggest surface area, and a nude back reveals so much by revealing so little, and it is also like a man's back: let's be frank, a back is more or less a back, except for the subtle refinements which make it dramatically different: the slight tapering, and then the soft quality of female skin as opposed to male skin. The delicacy of the shoulder blades, the spine. Nothing captures the absence of maleness so totally and so suddenly.

Man:I kind of feel like I've slipped through.

Bryzynsky: That's a very poetic conceit.

Man: You think so?

Bryzynsky: What happened to your poetry?

Man: what poetry?

Bryzynsky: Didn't you write poetry? I always thought you wrote poetry, or intended to write poetry.

Man: I was an economics major.

Bryzynsky: Really?

Man: Yeah.

Bryzynsky: Shall I get the check? Let me pay!

Man: We could split it.

Bryzynsky: Ok, let's split it.

(Wide angled shot of Bryzynsky and the man standing out in front of De Farra's Pizza. We can't hear what they stay but they exchange parting words. The next moment we see the man leaning his head up against the window of the train. The camera focuses in on the man's glasses reflecting the setting sun from out the windows of the train. You see him exit the train in Manhattan, walk to the wine shop and buy two bottles of Il Primitovo from Guiseppi and then walk home. On the way home through the dusky city, the man recites in his thoughts the last few lines of the Dylan Thomas poem "And Death Shall Have No Dominion". He speaks slowly, sadly, as if he is deeply familiar with the lines, caressing their every cadence...

No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down...)

The End

The Aspergers Spectrum Through The Ages

As things advance, we realize that ever more people who we otherwise did not expect as being so, are actually idiot savants. This becomes clear upon a cursory historical investigation.

Cave Men

It could be said that Aspergers syndrome was an ordinary part of being a cave man. As everyone knows, cave men lacked empathy and were highly intolerant to most everything. Not only were these spear wielding barbarians emotional imbeciles: they had an obsession for shadow puppetry which went far beyond anything any sane person would consider normal.

The Greeks

The Greeks were obsessed with reasoning and logic. Take some of their more annoying philosophers: Socrates for example, who by every indication was your classic Aspergers sufferer. Socrates annoyed the shit out of anyone within range with his iron clad logical systems. Then, when some jerks told him to eat hemlock and die, Socrates took them seriously. Other Greeks who probably had a syndrome include Demosthenes who pestered everyone with his rants up in the big white building. See Tourettes Syndrome.

Monks

After the collapse of classical civilization, a new breed of obsessive compulsives emerged in the form of Monks, masking their own compulsive terror for grooming and dinner conversation behind a thin veneer of religiosity.

Dustin Pedroia

This sorry freak takes being a scrappy second baseman to a whole other level in what must be some kind of sick Aspergers redirection of the blinding chaos of fundamental human emotion into the only damn thing that makes any sense for Dustin Pedroia.

Spaniards

Me thinks the lady doth protest a bit too much?

Subway Mariachi Bands

Blissfully unaware of how annoying they are to non Asperger's sufferers, Mariachi Bands continue to get on and off the New York subway all day long, working for about enough money to buy a sandwich. What uncontrollable urges drive these Mexico obsessed savants?

Richard Dawkins

Explaining away all religious, poetic impulse using a flying Spaghetti Monster, Richard Dawkins appeals to other Aspergers sufferers though his own atrophied sense of humor and air tight, tautological nerd reasoning.

The Food and Drug Administration

Here we see a good example of organizational Aspergers syndrome. Can't eat this cheese because it looks old and moldy in comparison to the square slice of dissected and genetically reconstituted yellow matter (smooth, yellow) wrapped in a piece of plastic? School lunch programs masking a childlike obsession, a need -- a need to see others consume tater tots in as much as the tot must be ubiquitous and daily, an hourly incantation at the alter of an artfully masked tick? As if food in its diversity of colors, textures, flavors and effects overwhelmes: the pyramid itself less catalogues and more monumentalizes a transcendent urge to order total internal chaos with platonically calming geometries. Little is yet known about how departments, branches, governments and other organizational dork cones come into being rooted upon a steady supply of vexacious, monomaniacal intellects worshipping at the alter of macrocosmic governmental systems in service of unmentionable totalitarian desires.

George Lucas

George Lucas represents the mainstreaming of the symptomatic Vulcan-type personality originally devised by the hep cats who invented Star Trek and Buck Rogers in the 25th century. Little did those mustashiod, emotionally complex swingers suspect that the entire genre would one day be commandeered by the emotionless robots, androids and science officers originally scripted for comic relief purposes. See Scott Bakula.

Is that you Max?

Professor Solomon liked to think that in a small way he had been a part of it -- the 20th century. Of course he was aware of the impossibility of measuring his own impact, in the peace movement and in the break up of the Soviet block. But still, it seemed that for a while the world and he fed each other's momentum, making the aging process, his own, the world's, deeply gratifying.

After a certain line had been crossed, however, he stopped getting it. He lost track of what was going on as the world he knew birthed an equivalent world based on no principle of parity and fear, but on the simulation of these things, like a darkened equivication which perceived from the outside must look like an electronic cube with splayed wires, sparking in a vacuum.

He was 82, although his youth and the impulses of his youth still chided the stodgy impulses of his old age. Leaving NYU, he decided to contradict the wishes of his sister, currently living in Nebraska, and move East again as he had while young, as he had as a professor and cold war political tactician. This time, however, he embarked as a tourist.

He flew from New York to Frankfurt. As he had done many times in his 50s, 60s and 70s, he took the U bahn to the Frankfurt Hopfbahnhopf. At the central train station, he noticed that that old marquee whose clickety clack used to comfort him and remind him of the secret heart of travel, had gone digital therebye draining the spirit of the place, making arrivals and departures seem overly monitored and absolute, bloodless embarkations and disappearances.

He wandered the red light district immediately neighboring the train station. The red light district was a guilty pleasure. It offered him a glimpse of the realities others more courageous drank to the dregs. It withered his soul and excited him. He saw a junkie shoot heroine. The sight of the man's spiritual and physical decay gave him the shudders. Although the rational thinking part of himself saw the utility in keeping such things in the open rather than pushing them underground within a colossus of post modern developments, shopping malls, obese children, the despair that comes from having nothing really to despair about, sociological theories concocted by under read zeros driving the world to a universal state of zilch.

***

Finally, he was on the road again. The trains of the east were as they had been. Some things don't change, and the little freedoms a culture is inborn into die hard. He stuck his head out the window and breathed in the night air. The Germans and Poles were as engaging as ever without quite making contact. They looked at you, curious, fearless, remote. They seemed interested even in the lives of old men, whereas Americans had become inverted long ago, denizens of the arachnoid space.

Dozing in and out of sleep aboard the dream train, as he thought of it, he kept asking the young man sitting across form him, "Is this Gdansk? Is this Gdansk?"

He had never been to Gdansk and always wanted to go to the city of reformation architecture, revolt and kielbasa. The city on the Baltic coast, as austere as his soul perhaps. As warm.

***

"But you must come out with us!" said Stefan.

And so later he found himself at a table full of boozing Poles and Germans, a token, although young Stefan did his best. Professor Solomon made apologies and took his beer out onto the street. To the left, he could see the reflection of the setting sun on the Gdansk canal. Several tourists walked by led by a Polish guide. He found the guide's face architectural, like the face of long dead Gretchen, and as he had loved Gretchen totally, so he felt he could love the guide.

Max Von Sydow walked passed, paused as if considering something, turned, stood before Professor Solomon a pillar of gray and blond, sleet and snowy sea, the echo of voyages, of exploration and northern religion, elk, sex and death.

"Professor Solomon," said Max Von Sydow.

"How do you know who I am."

"I just know, I know certain things, come invested with a kind of knowledge, a sort of arcana, an eczema of information if you will."

Max Von Sydow was dressed in a black turtleneck with a handsome brown blazer. Something inside Professor Solomon revolted.

"What's it like to be you, so pretty?" he asked.

"Pretty?" Max Von Sydow smiled. "No one has ever mentioned. Me pretty? I know I have daisies inside but physically I have always felt like a log, like a piece of driftwood."

"You've never really known loneliness, have you? True loneliness? The task of planning your days, weeks, years totally alone." Huge tears slizzled down the professor's cheeks like raindrops on a window.

"Is that me? The sort of man who doesn't comprehend the basics?"

"So that you secretly suspect everyone else to be insane."

"You think I am this psychoanalytic type?"

"I suspect you are."

Professor Solomon sank into his beer which he gulped rapidly. "Who put you up to this?"

"Professor Solomon. You may think you know me, but you don't. See, a part of your mind thinks it knows, but you have to admit that I am external, a nothing,a figment, as is everything, these people, these cobbles, this accursedly quaint place."

"Are you even familiar with Max Von Sydow's work? Thou simulacrum?"

"Well, yes, more or less. Wild Strawberries. Old Bergman films."

"But that's just the start of it!" said Professor Solomon. "He did so much, with Bergman and with others. He seemed immortal. I'm not even sure he's dead. Is he? He may really be immortal for all we know."

"Well," said the 50ish Max Von Sydow. "I'm not sure myself, but I don't think it matters now, does it. Alive, dead. It's all on tape."

"If he's still alive, isn't this a form of plagiarism?" asked Professor Solomon.

"Now look, just stop it. Are you going to stay here sitting on this cold stoop with all the young people inside talking about the quaint old man they met, or are you going to come along?"

"Come along?"

"With me, I mean. Come with me, elsewhere, to a place other than here."

"Where will we go?"

"To a place other than here. I already said it."

He took Max Von Sydow's hand much larger than his own.

***

"I like your films."

"Thanks," said Max Von Sydow. "I myself find them indescribably miserable, like the ultimate cessation of existence. Like ritual suicide, but that's just me."

***

"Where are we?"

"Where do you think we are?"

"In a Bergman film."

"No, thank god."

"It looks like a Bergman film. Like one of his 19th century visions. Look at that clock," Professor Solomon pointed at the grandfather clock counting the seconds. It had one of those starry night sky dials with the blue background. "You're even dressed...like a 19th century banker, a petite bourgeois."

"Am I?"

"Is that a watch fob?"

Max Von Sydow grasped the golden chain, bringing out an equivalently golden watch.

"I guess so," he said. "It's my fob."

"Where is this?

"My home, I think."

Solomon looked around himself, at the antique furniture. Looking into the adjoining room, he saw a video game machine, of the stand alone variety like they used to have. Arkanoid. The pinging sounds of the game seemed to be the legitimate markers of time, the game real, the grandfather clock a prop.

"This is your place?"

"Welcome to my pad, or so to speak."

"This is kind of like your Bergman themed bachelor pad, except for that thing in there. You aren't married?"

"Well, yes and no. After so many years, the institution of marriage evolves toward friendship. The evolution is the main thing, a kind of narrative of acceptance and loathing. Sex becomes this kind of historical echo, like something from the bible, an overtone, a sense of something."

"Really? I wouldn't know."

"Or, no. It's like one of those books full of big glossy pictures of lizards."

***

Professor Solomon wanted to investigate the other room where the arcade game stood. He made to rise. As he felt himself leave the chair, his stomach heaved. The room spun and he thought he would pass out or vomit or both. He sat back down. The feelling immediately went away.

"You can't get up."

"Why not?"

"You have to stay seated there. Anchored to your chair."

"Why?"

"We're moving too fast."

"What are you talking about?"

"Help yourself to the brandy."

There was a tray of brandy, cheese and crackers before him. Beyond the big bay windows, it began to snow. Professor Solomon felt tired of the game.

"Where are we?"

"It's hard to describe."

"Are we in Stockholm?"

"Might as well be. Then again, we are far from these stupid places you think about from time to time. Very far. That's why you have to remain seated. We're actually traveling quite fast. Fractionally faster than the speed of light."

Professor Solomon looked at Max Von Sydow.

"Stockholm's a shit city," said Max Von Sydow. "I have always preferred Latin places. Spain. Central America. I feel like the women in these places are more accommodating."

***

"In case you are wondering, we are in a cave, formed by certain geological processes, approximately 300 meters beneath the surface."

"Now that you mention it, I was wondering."

"Then you are probably wondering about the oxygen, about how we are still breathing in and out," standing before him in the phosphorescent luminescence, Max Von Sydow pantomimed breathing in and out. "It's because the air, see, it comes down from a fissure in the southern wall which leads to a kind of crevasse on the planet's surface."

"What am I doing here? Is this a part of dying?" said Solomon, looking out over the cave, lit by a natural chemical process."

"Well, you could say so," said Max Von Sydow. "But then again, at this point we have to rethink certain new fangled concepts and reaffirm the old traditional intuitions. Here," he said, handing the professor a flashlight. "First there was absolute shit and then came the light."

Professor Solomon had never seen anything quite like it. The cave was remarkable. All sorts of crystals grew there. There were purple crystals, blue crystals, clear crystals, dark crimson crystals, pink crystals. Meanwhile, a babbling brook ran through it all.

"This is really beautiful," he said. "The sound of water echoing around this beautiful, indescribable Xanadu."

"I know. I knew you would like it, professor Solomon. I knew you would like it very much, and that you would feel like this is a return to something, from childhood perhaps."

"This isn't like anything from childhood."

"Not like a return? A return to something familiar? Like rediscovering a lost bag of marbles in an old wooden box, or something else American like that?"

"No."

"If you are feeling sleepy, you can lie down."

"Where can I lie down?" asked professor Solomon, all of a sudden overcome with exhaustion.

"There. In the crystal chamber," said Max Von Sydow. "Don't you remember the crystal chamber? At one point, we had a hard time getting you to come out of there. You were fascinated by the crystals and we were very worried in the beginning."

"About what?"

"About you; about the whole project."

"Where is the chamber?"

"Over there. Through that archway."

Professor Solomon went through the archway, propped his head with his jacket, lay down on the bed of crystals and closed his eyes.

German Trench Coat Lady

In the evening, they gathered in the crater. It must have been one of those craters from the bombs they had just begun to build before the very end when bomb artistry had reached its peak and the bombs they began to drop were less dropped for strategic purposes and more in a celebration of mastery.

It felt like only like yesterday, thought Sgt. Frank Starling, when they leaped out of the hatch into the night and fell into the deep green forest, their speed broken by huge white sheets sewn presumably by all sorts of women. They lost Moreno on the fall, broken on the branches or else evaporated upon the night, snagged and caught upon a flock of northward migrating storks. Because when they hit the earth they had already gone from 20 to 19 American soldiers playing hide and seek with ghosts. Over the course of their guerrilla sabotage campaign, 19 became 10 men navigating a sheer billy goat trail into Bavaria their vision distelled into flashes of water, hands on loose earth, teeth unstopping corks, releasing straps, excess baggage plummeting hundreds of meters.

McCoy lost his leg to the land mine, perhaps the only one planted in that beautiful green field on the edge of the rundown estate at the foot of the mountains. When they heard the blast, the men instinctively dove for cover and watched shifty eyed from behind the huge animal topiary neighboring the field as a man in a white tuxedo decorated with dalmatian spots dashed down a long drive toward the wounded soldier. The eccentric Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff raised the alarm, summoning some local nuns who took McCoy away.

It was in Hasselhoff's orchards that Starling's men spent a two week stretch gorging themselves on peaches washed down with cognac. Hasselhoff himself always dressed in that weird dalmatian suit brought out new bottles of wine and brandy every evening as an incentive for the men to listen to him lecture on the science of insects, the art of the cobbler, upholstery and other random things. It was in fact in the middle of an interminable lecture on the tragic demise of Italian astronomer Giovanni Bruno that Stevens decided to walk out of the war, which meant he merely started trudging south west, a bag of peaches and cognac slug over his shoulder.

Revived by two weeks of orchard living, the men fought on, setting fire to a checkpoint house on the outskirts of Munich and removing the rivets from a large segment of railway before joining with the regiment in Dresden.

By that time however, the war was mostly over.

***

Dresden was a desolate recall of rubble and pain. The city taken as a whole reminded Starling of the fine burning cooking coals on which as a boy he cooked the oysters he caught in the cove with the other boys who grew up in the area and ran wild during the summer eating all manner of sea things, muscles, clams, the rock crabs whose shells you sucked for their sweet, salty juices.

Perhaps the true looting began when they strode the ruins of Dresden on the lookout for gleaming things. "Get down from there!" he shouted at Corporal Biggs who, after finding a diamond broach in a rock pile, climbed the bombed out steeple steps to raise his prize to the light. In a fit of ecstasy, he bounded higher and higher until he reached the top, exposed like a stylite, immediately brained by a sniper's bullet. "I can see the Elbe from here!" Biggs shouted holding the jewels aloft, his goofy voice the only sound within miles before the thinly echoing shot. He went down like a defenestrated duke, a splash of blood momentarily adorning the cloud cover.

Leonard succumbed on the road north. He had faked a semblance of arches upon enlistment out of Newark and had suffered ever since, propping his recalcitrant feet with various doomed methods. Now he could go no further and merely sat down on the roadside. He said he would wait for the medical unit to come, but no one knew what really happened to Leonard as later it was discovered that he had not returned home .

***

"Bring it out!" Barked Lt. Gracey. "Bring out your shit!"

And mechanically everyone came forward one by one dumping random items into the center of the crater. Someone shepherded in two beautiful white billy goats like soul cleansing autumnal snow. Someone emptied out a bag of German guns clanking onto the hard yellow ground. Corporal Clemens, known as 'shrimp' emerged from the crowd with a gigantic painting of an aristocratic mounted upon a rearing horse.

"That's gold!" said Corporal Clemens, tapping on the gilt frame with his rifle.

"Bring it out!" barked Gracey. "Withholding is a capital offense! Bring out your shit!"

Someone came forward with a large mounted globe containing disproved geographies from a grandfatherly era; another offered a white stone bust of an old composer or philosopher or somebody.

Then, as the mist rolled in over the crater, Lt. Gracey urinated on the head of the philosopher or the composer or the somebody. The urine's steam rose up into the night like the vapors of some primeval libation from a time when blasphemy and worship were one and the same act. Then after that solemn piss the men lit a bonfire, broke out the casks of wine and whiskey and tilted toward oblivion.

***

In the morning, Starling awoke. The men sleeping around him caked in mud and soot looked dead. There was something about embracing that look in war, about embracing the dead look. It was hard to describe. An act of camouflage. An act. He blindly grasped about his immediate vicinity for drink, and then once fortified he marched to the center of the circle, armed himself with three German lugers -- one in the belt, another in the holster, and one in the inside pocket of his jacket. Starling strode off into the forest bottle in hand.

He walked for a long time, perhaps two hours, building up a sweat, bringing himself back to life with drinking and song by recounting the things he knew.

"Bridegroom was the horse that won the Kentucky Derby in 1926," Starling said.

The site of the man in the black and white pajamas reminded him of a film he had seen about Alcatraz. The inmates of Alcatraz have hobbies. One makes chess pieces out of soap stone. Another feeds a pet mouse or a sparrow or something. After he saw two or three more of the wandering jailbirds, he began to notice how slender they were. Emaciated was the word. These jailbirds were starving. He approached one. The wandering jailbird stared him in the face. The starvation had made him all eyes, nose and mouth. The cheek skin draped against his jaw like leather tenting. Starling offered him his bottle. The jailbird declined, muttered something incomprehensible and then walked off into the mist.

Jailbird Sing, Jailbird Cry
But we all know that a jailbird can't fly

The lines came to him, something he had read as a child in a baseball dugout.

Jailbirds. Jail. Starling's uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for armed robbery. He robbed the bathtub factory where he worked.

"Bathtub factory," Starling said.

Luger in hand, he scrambled to the top of the hill at which he came out onto a pine cone littered road.

"Pine cone road," he muttered, surveying the clearing.

Starling peered to the left and then to the right. To the north smoke trailed up from somewhere, a house or an enemy camp. Southwest, a pine branch hung low over the road carrying at its very tip a cone. He leveled the muzzle of his pistol. Heavy, like a real pistol and powerful, he had seen these things penetrate steel, but with that wacko kraut design that made no sense. His shot rang out. He missed. "Shoeless Joe Jackson played center field for the Chicago." said Starling, taking another drink, heading south away from the ominous smoke trail.

***

They had been out on the clam flats all day when Jimmy got his legs stuck. He had been digging too long in one place and had forgot to move. "Go get help!" Jimmy said. By the time help arrived, he was already up to his knees in water.

"We'll get ya out of there," said Fireman Perry himself up to his waste in freezing sea water digging frantically.

Boy Starling watched from the shore as all efforts failed. The mud could not be beat, had an army of mud backing it up ready to fill the fireman's breach. Hank from the auto body came out with a hacksaw and Doctor Bender, the strands of his comb-over flailing like rat tails, sawed Jimmy's legs off right above the knees. When they hauled him to shore, Billy was fighting the pain real well, not even crying even though now he only had two bloody stumps which trailed through the cove's little breakers leaving a scent for the sharks that later that night came thrashing.

"Guess no more clamming," Jimmy said looking up at Frank Starling age 12.

"That clay is like a vice," said Fireman Perry. "If you stay still long enough, it bonds like cement."

"It's the suction," said Doctor Bender, drenched, sitting on a drift wood log trying to get his right hand to stop shaking. "Does that sometimes," he said of his hand. Next to him lay Jimmy's legs in a paper grocery bag.

The moments of his childhood were eternally gray like the gray sky, gray sea, gray mud with splashes of red, the red of Billy's blood on the gray stones which reminded him of the red of Biggs's brain matter momentarily suspended against the Dresden sky. It was as if all that was a preamble to this; like the past was constantly giving birth to the one gray moment interspersed with flashes of memory.

Walking down pine cone road, Starling wondered if he would ever reach the front of it, when gray gave way to gold, when that thing called sex came along and cracked him open on the inside so that the golden blood of love flowed in torrents.

***

"You shall refer to me no longer as Lieutenant., but as King. I'm the King of this place, this mud, this filth. Bring out your shit! Bring it all out!"

The soldiers stood around Lt. Gracey who stood on an old carton in the center of the crater ringed round by fragrant pine. There were mutters of approval. It was as if this was the logical next step to what came before. That evening, Private Polanco brought in a large sow which they cast alive like an Indian widow onto the pyre. Then they plunged their pikes into the boiling flesh solemnly, none speaking out of turn, stubbly mouths swallowing boiling fat, gulping alcohol which had the earthy, water flavor river stones hold.

Even after the soldiers had forced themselves to forget everything associated with that rogue age, a part of each of them always disobediently remembered that meal and found all other meals lacking.

***

In the morning, Starling found his way back to the road. This time, the walk took a lot out of him. He was exhausted by the time he made it, yet he felt driven by something, some mystery unfolding within himself that found its mirror in external things. Before him stood a man on a horse. A Russian. He could tell by the hat. He looked like a Russian from another century.

Amerikanitz, said the Russian.

They walked some ways together down pine cone road passing the bottle.

Amerikanitz. That's all the Russian said.

Instead of winding to the left, they walked down a side trail to the right coming out on the edges of a huge compound. Presumably, from the look of it, a crumbling jail.

"Bathtub Factory," said Starling. "My uncle Dave did a stretch in Sing Sing."

The Russian, bottle in hand, pointed at the emaciated jailbirds milling about the yard, let out a gleeful whoop and then driving his boots into the ribs of the horse, proceeded to charge one of the poor fellows, shouting the incomprehensible words, Bizhi Yivre bizhi! The frail man, young, old, it was impossible to tell, preemptively collapsed before the onslaught of horse and man hurtling through the beleagured atmosphere. When Starling came upon him, he was clutching his stick-like calf. Starling took out his gun, leveled it at the Russian's horse, and fired. The horse collapsed. The Russian stood in the mud, wrangling with his rifle strap, struggling with the mud clogged mechanism. Starling fired again. The Russian collapsed.

Starling rummaged through the dead Russian's pockets. A gold Star of David. Leonard's. No. Someone else's. Who could say whose it was. He dropped the religious artifact on the Russian's chest.

"God save the queen," Starling said.

***

At the top of pine cone road, instead of cutting back into the forest, on a whim he decided to investigate the smoke. The trail dipped down a hill, crossed a shallow creek and then wound up again into the pine woods. He followed it north for a ways, winding up and down, until he arrived at a log cabin with a Mercedes Benz parked out front.

He pounded on the door. The door opened. The first thing he thought was Marlene Dietrich. The blond, middle aged woman was wearing a weird trench coat. The trench coat reminded him of his German pistol, of Baron Hansel Wolfgang Hasselhoff, of Germans in general. There was no use making sense of it.

"Is that your car lady?" he asked.

"Vas?"

"Is that your car!"

"Mercedes," she said.

"Gimme the keys."

"You wait."

Starling watched her walk into the inner recesses of the house. He devoured the woman with his eyes as the darkness took her. He wished he was the darkness.

She returned with a Note.

"I...will return the Mercedes of Fraulein Schmidt undamaged and in tact on the date of..."

"You gotta be kidding."

"Sign please."

"This is wartime, lady."

The lady, Fraulein Schmidt, produced a pen.

"Ok, I'll sign. Gimme the pen. Damned bureaucrats, Germans. Are you a bureaucrat?"

***

The regiment came upon the town of Wik. At least the map referred to it as Wik: a low lying zone of thatchery and pig styes on the German Polish border.

"We aren't leaving this god forsaken place until every last one of you has left his seed behind in a Kraut woman!" shouted Lt. Gracey from atop the tank.

The men standing around Lt. Gracey's jeep muttered their approval.

They had passed the point of no return shortly beyond Dresden. Perhaps Leonard had used his feet as a pretext for escape. Perhaps he had intuited savagery's onset.

The village of Wik was mostly made up of a bunch of huts with those thatched roofs. Starling did his best to save some of the horses as the barns burnt. He let the white horses flee, and the sight of them running reminded him of winter waves breaking on the dunes the day after a hurricane made landfall far to the south. Finally, he found a darkened hut. Someone had put out all the lights. He tried the door. Locked. He put his weight against it ever so slightly. The door opened. Sitting in the corner, a stray moonbeam filtering through the window, a beautiful girl in loose man's clothes huddled. She couldn't have been more than 16. It was if the encounter was scripted. So. This was Starling's time.

Starling approached her. He put his gun on the table. He began unbuttoning his jacket.

The girl cowered. Starling looked at the girl. Starling sat on the table. He lay down on the table. He unfastened his helmet and struggled out of his backpack and lay flat on his back.

"Oh, I don't know what to do! What am I supposed to do God damn it!" he said to the darkness. "I'm not good at with sort of thing, raping. God damn it!" he shouted to the rafters beyond which lay endless thatching. It was the kind of roofing Europeans burnt with torches in mad political fits.

The girl eventually rose and brought him a half empty bottle of liquor and a plate of cold stew. Starling at the stew, rapidly drank the liquor after which he started to sing Danny Boy. He was not Irish, but Jimmy had been Irish and sang it all the time out on the clam flats.

Suddenly Lt. Gracey burst into the room.

"What's going on in here, Sergeant!"

'I've raped this girl here!' slurred Starling. "And now I'm drinken up all her liquor."

"Good job soldier!"

Starling stood up and shut the door in the lieutenant's face. Then he returned to the table where he fell asleep. In the morning, the girl was gone.

Starling would think about the girl everyday for the rest of his life.

***

Sergeant Frank Starling revved the motor. Soon, he was careening joyously down pin cone road, across the creek, up to the smoky summit. He had an idea. At the bottom he turned southwest, arriving at the gates of the prison, bursting into the courtyard, slicing through the gravely mud. He stopped.

"Get in!" he said to the jailbird with the hurt leg who lay on his back in the mud half frozen staring at the sky. Starling motioned. The man slowly rose and got in.

"Where you from?" he asked the man. "Watcha do? Petty theft? Robbery? These krauts are merciless. I bet they didn't even feed you in there. Here, take a drink. I haven't done no time myself, but my uncle did a stretch in Sing Sing for robbing a bathtub factory, same factory he worked at. Smar, right? Kind of like biting the hand that feeds you, wouldn't you say? Well, whatever you did, whatever they think you did, it's over now. Now, you're going to be OK. Everything's going to be OK. You're busted out and free. The both of us. Everything is jim dandy."

They drove east past an encampment of Russians sitting by a fire. The Russians were dressed in some motley: a combination of medieval and mongol fashions. They watched the car as it passed, watched it all the way over the hump in the road.

"These people remind me of vikings. You know the vikings? They used to rape and pillage the coasts of Europe. Had these ships carved like dragons. Horned helmets. The Vikings. I liked history. History was always my favorite subject. Mr. Winkelblech's history class. Do you know Shoeless Joe Jackson batted 408 in 1911?"

The jailbird looked terrified, braced his hands on the door his feet in front of him. When Starling slowed down, the jailbird opened the door and leaped out. Starling saw him in the rear view mirror limping back down the road. "Crazy fucker," he said. "Suit yourself."

He drove down into a misty valley in the center of which was the ruin of a barn and a house both burnt to a skeletal char. His wheels got stuck in the mud and he spent some time getting loose by putting hay underneath the tires. Sometimes, pausing in his labor, he looked around. Total, utter silence. The snowy mountains in the distance sang of silence and the silence was terror, and so he sang Mac the Knife at the top of his lungs although he had an imperfect recall of the song's lyrics and so ended up repeating "It's Mac the Knife!" again and again.

"It's Mac the Knife!" sang Starling.

When he return along the road, the Russians left their campfire to throw rocks. They cracked one of the side windows. "Freulein Schmidt ain't gonna like this," said Starling as he motored along the prison's barbed wire.

***

Still, the jailbirds milled around in the courtyard. They had built a bonfire in the center. Starling stopped the car, opened the door, shouted. "Get on outta here! What are you all waiting for!?"

Suddenly, he felt full of anger. What were they waiting for? He got out of the car, trudged across the mud, seized a jailbird by the shoulders. "Don't you get it? You're free! The war is over. They can't touch you now, don't you see? All the records have been destroyed! You've got a clean slate!"

Looking around himself, he noticed that someone had removed the dead Russian. Then he noticed the smell. Flesh. They were eating the Russian's old nag, roasting it in a pit and feeding off it in increments as the outer flesh cooked. An inmate offered him some boiled red muscle which Starling took gratefully (he had missed lunch) and hunkered down. He sat by the burning horse for a long time until the stars came out. He was exhausted all of a sudden, sick of the sound of his own voice shouting "It's Mac the Knife!

"Where are you from?" after an eternity, the jailbird next to him spoke. He was a husk of a man, as if he had been inflated to bursting point and then gradually deflated so that his structure still held the suggestion of a former size. His big featured face was gray. His hands were gray. The grayness gave him an ageless feel so that Starling couldn't be sure if he was 40 or 70.

"Cape Cod."

"Ah, Cape Cod! I know it well. My brother lives in Albany."

"What's he do there?"

"He owns a paint store."

"Like house paint?"

"Sure! House paint, acrylic paint, oil paint. Any paint you want. You like paint?"

"Sure, so how long you've been here?"

"Since 2 years."

"What did you do?"

"What did I do?"

"Yeah, what did you do?"

"That's a good question."

Starling smiled. Jailbirds. Innocent to the last man, like his uncle. Uncle Dave. What a piece of work. "Well, I guess it doesn't matter much anymore," he said.

"I guess not," said the man with a brother in Albany.

"The thing I don't get is, why are you all hanging around here?"

"What are we supposed to do?"

"Go home?"

"Home?"

"Yeah, home, you know, with the wife and kids and the little doggy..."

"Why don't you go home?"

It was a question Starling didn't care to consider. "Listen," he said. "Let's get out of here."

"Where will we go?"

"I know of a place. German lady. German trench coat lady."

Starling felt full of this lonely childhood feeling like love's unmet invitation.

***

They drove through the night up the pine cone road. For some reason, Starling wanted to talk. He was a man of few words, but in the presence of the jailbird, he felt like overflowing. It was like a secret mechanism had been released. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was the prelude to the symphony.

"When I was a kid, we used to go clamming on the mud flats..." Starling began to tell the story of Jimmy who got stuck in the mud and had his legs sawed off.

***

"Who are those people?" asked Starling.

"Just animals," said the jailbird.

The powerful Mercedes headlights picked up everything along Old Pine Cone Road, including the a pack of Russians crouched like wolves around some kind of carcass.

"What are they doing here? What are you doing here?"

"Riding in this car with you."

***

Fraulein Schmidt, dressed in her trench coat opened the door and ushered them into a dimly lit parlor. The parlor was lit by two gas lamps, one by the window and the other by the entryway to the neighboring room. Framed photographs covered the walls. A clock somewhere chimed seven. A grandfather clock, somewhere in the recesses. Why did they call them grandfather clocks?

"Please sit. Schnapps?" asked Frau Schmidt, retreating to the kitchen.

The men watched her go, her golden calves.

"Some broad," said Starling.

"You think so?"

"What's the matter? Don't like dames?"

The man didn't respond, just smiled faintly and hunkered down into the arm chair.

Fraulein Schmidt brought out a bottle of schnapps and poured three large glasses full to the brim. She sat in the chair next to the fireplace and took several long swallows. Starling noticed that the prisoner couldn't take his eyes off her.

"What?" asked Fraulein Schmidt in her strong German accent. "Is something so interesting?"

The prisoner laughed. "Nothing. It's just that I never thought I would find myself in this situation. In fact I have dreamed of being in this situation, but now I do not know how to behave."

"What? You two know each other?"

"You could say that," said Fraulein Schmidt.

"You the warden's wife or something?

"Hah. That is well put," said the prisoner. "You could say she is the warden's wife. Yes."

Fraulein Schmidt choked on her schnapps, coughed, stooped over in her chair, breathing heavily.

"Why do you always wear that trench coat? Are you naked underneath or something?" asked Starling.

Then, the jailbird spoke, his voice level and commanding: "So let us drink a toast to the dead. All the dead, right Frau Schmidt? Let us toast the dead this evening."

Now Fraulein Schmidt's boggly eyes were overflowing with tears. Fraulein, Starling thought. She's a little old to be a Fraulein, but still I'd like to see what's going on underneath that trench coat.

"Schnapps and wurst," said the jailbird. "This reminds me of Saturday afternoons, just an ordinary Saturday afternoon."

By the lamplight, Starling noticed the jailbird was also crying silently.

"You got a radio or something?" asked Starling.

"Yes, I do," said Fraulein Schmidt who stood up, retreated to the other room and returned with an old timey phonograph like thing. She put on a record. The record started to play. Some kind of symphony music. German music, echoing and brassy.

Starling removed his jacket and rose to meet Fraulein Schmidt in the middle of the room. When they began to dance, softness pressing on softness, the drawstrings of her trench coat came undone. Slowly the garment relaxed its grip before pooling around her elegant red slippers creating the halo in which they moved. Starling found himself sheltering her nakedness from the hard pressing night, the ex con's gaze. He wondered if this was the beginning of the future proper, the past having run its course, the gray half-birth present worn through like old wall paper. He held her, caressed her, kissed the tears from the eyes of the naked, dancing kraut.

Billy Was Billy

They were spacious studios for rent, suitable for a young man who had just passed the bar exam and had begun work for the state. In fact, he noticed another Tulane graduate across the street occupying what he assumed was a studio apartment identical to his own. His name was Mark, something or other, and he was seeing a beautiful woman.

Chris commuted to the downtown office where he had just begun working on the case of the death row inmate Jack Stowe. He returned home in the evening and sat out on the balcony and watched Mark, he couldn't remember his last name, sit out on the opposing balcony across the street with the beautiful blond woman, perhaps actually a red head or brunette who had taken measures. He had the suspicion that Mark did something in patent law, although he wasn't sure.

One night, laying in bed, he thought of what it might be like to be laying with the beautiful blonded woman. What a luxury it seemed to lay next to this woman nightly.

The following day, a Saturday, he passed her up close in the grocery store which lay at the ground floor of the studios. They passed each other. Up close, he noticed how angular she was, as if she was all elbows and knees. Her face was angular. Yet, there was nothing objectionable about the angularity. The angularity made her all the more appealing, was like a promise that she would always be pronounced and present. That and her beautiful skin and this trace of an idea that she was concealing something, a need, a sorrow.

That evening, he saw them sitting on their balcony across the way. They were drinking something red out of a pitcher. Sangria? Through Mark's curtains, music wafted into the night. Latin music.

That night while drifting off, Chris closed his eyes and imagined laying next to her. It seemed like such a luxury to count on being able to come home to Mark's girlfriend every night.

***

Chris drove out through the marshland to the state penitentiary. The land seemed haunted by the ghosts of dead Indians. The marsh Indians had lived in a perpetual damp Utopia marred by occasional bloody warfare with the Indians of the north. He had read up on the region. Where the Indians of the north were farmers, the marsh Indians remained hunter gatherers until the bitter end. They ate cat fish, wild boar and grandfather moss.

Chris had studied anthropology in college and had read up on the Marsh Indians before moving down south, and as he drove to the penitentiary, in his mind he populated the landscape with the ghosts of the Marsh Indians.

After passing through an endless green corridor of impenetrable forest, the pen loomed in front of him with its towers and turrets. He was ushered into its darkest depths where he met with Jack Stowe, who had been sentenced to death for the double homicide of his wife and his wife's lover Billy Le Blank.

"I hated that Billy Le Blank from the start. He seemed, I don't know how to put this, blank."

"Like his name."

"Yeah, like his name. Billy Le Blank, pulling up in that pick up truck."

Jack Stowe had a grisly quality Chris associated with being in the Pen for 10 years. He had no hair and seemed excessively gaunt. He kind of looked like Ben Kingsley, the English actor, although his face was pale. Suddenly, and with a knife-like intensity, he thought of Mark's girlfriend's skin.

"And so you're telling me that he would come and actually sleep with your wife while you were in the house."

"Hells yeah, he did. That no good Billy Le Blank made me a cuckold in my own home."

"What did you do?"

"What do you think I did? I cursed them out. I told him to get out of there, but he wouldn't leave. They just laughed at me. Once I came home and found em there..."

"Having sex?"

"Yeah, having sex right on the living room couch with the TV on."

"That's fucked up, man."

"Damn right that's fucked up."

"How long did this go on for?"

"2 years."

"2 years? That's fucked up. Why didn't you leave?"

"Had no where else to go. Besides, it was half my house."

"Why didn't you get a divorce?"

"I was afraid Stacey would take the house and that was all I had to my name."

He had a point there. There was something overly fragile about Jack Stowe. He could imagine Jack's wife Stacey getting the house and getting everything, leaving him out on the street.

Back at work he asked his boss Hank if he had heard Jack Stowe's story.

"It's real fucked up," said Hank.

Jack Stowe was slated to fry in the autumn. He had exhausted all his appeals. The rest of the legal process was mere of a formality.

Driving home in the evening from the pen, Chris stopped at the liquor store and got a small pint of Bim Black. He didn't buy full fifths because he knew that if he did he would drink half the first night and then half the second night and would be at half mast for the entire work week.

He stood in his spacious kitchenette and emptied the contents of the whiskey into a glass, and then went out on the balcony to watch Mark and the beautiful blond woman drink sangria and dance to salsa music. After the day of listening to Jack Stowe discuss his fucked up relationship, he felt happy to be alone. But at night, he couldn't help but imagine what it would be like to come home to Mark's girlfriend, to crawl into bed with her, to know that she was there. The thought helped him drift off to sleep.

***

In the morning, he drove out to the state pen with the turrets and the towers like a panopticon presiding over the marsh, the evil spirit of the marshland itself embodied: the soul sentient eye. The guard ushered him into the inner sanctums and depths, the areas of little rooms of solitary confinement in which the lights were always on day and night, where television sets were still black and white and drinking fountains were attached to the backs of toilets.

Finally, they allowed him inspect the Chair itself.

The Chair had always been a significant part of his life. Ever since a child, ever since discovering the evil men do to their fellow man in a thinking, rational fashion which poses as goodness, he had been both fascinated and terrified by the idea of the Chair. A firing squad seemed more humane. Even a hanging seemed like preferential treatment to the Chair electrified, a thing of both comfort, for sitting, and for dying. It was an absurd parody of justice, with the viewing window, the switch, the executioners abnegation of culpability. Any child could see.

And there it was, the destiny of Jack Stowe, the contemporary crucifix.

He rain his fingers along the smooth, wooden arm. Oak?

"You should have left, Jack."

"But I couldn't leave."

"You could have, Jack. You could have left."

"Where could I have gone?"

"Anywhere, Jack. You could have gone someplace else, started over."

"With what? I don't have any skills or abilities. I don't have any talents. That house was all I had. Allison was all I had, and I loved her," he began to cry.

***

"So, when did you first get the idea?"

"They idea of what?"

"To, you know, to kill them..."

"That's what I've been trying to say! It wasn't premeditated. At least it wasn't premeditated for a long time. I just came home one night and found them in bed and it occurred to me that I could do it and suddenly I found myself doing it! It was like my mind was being controled by some evil force! It was like I had no control over my actions, and so I just went to the kitchen, got a knife..."

"That's horrible, Jack."

"I know! I know it's horrible."

"Once I came home, and they were having a barbecue. Billy Le Blank and his friends and some friends of Allison who had originally been our friends. I saw them through the window in the kitchen. They were hanging out in my yard grilling burgers..."

Jack Stowe had a kind of high pitched plaintive country boy way of talking.

"I went out there and everyone said hi to me and I realize that, hell, these people who I thought were my friends think I'm a piece of shit! You know when you're in a situation that's so fascinatingly horrible, you don't want to leave because you are fascinated at how horrible it is? I cracked a beer, sat down and just watched everything. And it was like everything going on was for my benefit. Everyone was looking at me when they spoke, like they were all shitting on me. I couldn't take any more and started to cry. Then I stood up and said, 'why do you people hate me so much? Allison's best friend Sarah said, 'we don't hate you. We just think you're kind of a bummer is all, Jack!"

"A bummer?"

"Yeah, they thought I was a bummer!"

"That's fucked up."

"Hell, yes, it was fucked up! And there's Billy Le Blank grilling burgers using my barbecue. He's got these sunglasses on. He looks like fucking Alec Baldwin standing there, smoking a cigarette grilling burgers."

"A bummer."

"Yeah, a big bummer!"

"Weird."

***

"Have you ever heard Jack Stowe's story?" Chris asked Warden Jones.

"Yes, I have," said Warden Jones.

Warden Jone's office seemed like a Warden's office from the movies. Lots of books. A picture of Jesus. It was like the theosophical center at the heart of the panopticon.

"What do you think of it?"

"That's a fucked up story," said Warden Jones.

"Yeah."

"But it's no reason to kill someone."

"That's true. But it definitely supplies a comprehensible motive."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying that I don't think Jack Stowe deserves to die."

"That may be the case, but what are you going to do about it?"

"At this point, I'm not sure what I can do."

"Would you like a peppermint?"

"Ok."

Warden Jones handed Chris a peppermint. They sat there, sucking on peppermints looking out over the marshland.

***

It was the regularity of the event that seemed the most momentous thing. As far as he could tell, she was always there every single evening when Mark came home. She had committed to being there in the evening. At the end of the day, they had committed to coming home and sleeping with each other every single night.

He had long since received the impression that he probably wouldn't get along with his neighbors across the street: with the woman or with Mark himself for that matter. He read this notion in the things of their lives, the hybrid car Mark drove, the Sangria, the salsa music, and the Avocados he saw piling up in the woman's grocery cart. Always Avocados. The things of their life seemed to appose his things, which consisted primarily of a 1992 Grand Am, Johnny Cash and ingredients for spaghetti sauce.

But he still thought about what it meant to come home to her in the evening. The coming home and the falling asleep seemed infinitely preferable and more important to the kind of sex life you were supposed to have. He wondered if they reallized that.

As he drifted off at night, he began to think that imagining sleeping with her was in fact even a greater luxury than actually sleeping with her. It was perfectly safe, for one thing. There was no chance of Billy Le Blank entering the picture. There was no chance of her realizing his metaphysical condition dangling on a rocky outcropping above the Sea of Japan. There was no chance of him becoming Jack Stowe.

***

Billy Le Blank had been married to Sandra Le Blank and had two little daughters. At the trial, apparently Sandra Le Blank and the daughters had all testified to the fact that they wanted Jack Stowe to fry. The two little daughters said they wanted Jack Stowe to die.

So, for Billy Le Blank's two little daughters, the Chair was the instrument of revenge. They possessed a totally different vantage that he had had onto the Chair as a child.

He pulled up in front of Sandra Le Blank's house one Tuesday morning to try to broach the subject of clemency.

"Well, as long as you're here, you'd might as well take a seat. Billy always approved of hospitality and you're just doing your job."

"Thank you Sandra, that's awfully cordial of you."

"You're welcome."

Sandra Le Blank busied herself in the kitchen with coffee. She had even fastened a little apron about her slender waste. She was a pretty woman in her mid 40s with a hairstyle he associated with people living in the country who appeared on talk shows.

"What's a nice young man like you mixing with trash like Jack Stowe for?"

"If there is going to be prosecution, there has to be defense."

"Well, I guess that's true."

"How are your daughters?"

"They're staying with my mom. You know how it is. They've got lots of space and are getting ready for college and I stil haven't gotten over my husband's death, after all these years."

She broke down weeping. She rested her head on his shoulder. Suddenly, they were kissing. Chris fell into the act of kissing Sandra Le Blanc with a passion he never knew he possessed. It was like the years of toil and isolation, like sentries, finally stood aside revealing Sandra Le Blank's body. It was not angular, but was rather full and firm. It reminded him of the foothills in the countryside somewhere. She was clean and sweet smelling. The couch was scratchy. He wanted her totally in every aspect without reservations.

After, laying in each other's arms, he didn't broach the subject of clemency.

***

"So, how did it go?" Jack Stowe asked him.

"She wasn't home."

"Wasn't home? Well, where was she?"

"I don't know. I'm going to try on Friday."

"You do try! You go and try! We're talking about my life here! My life. Shit."

***

"Care for a peppermint?" asked Warden Jones.

"Sure."

"You know, I never planned on becoming a warden."

"It doesn't seem like the kind of job you plan on," Chris said.

"I wanted to become a baptist minister."

"What happened?"

"Fear of public speaking."

"Do you ever feel guilty?"

"About what?"

"About executing people?"

"If I didn't, then someone else would."

"Why don't you just let someone else do it?"

"Do you mind if I get a bit personal?" asked Warden Jones.

"Ok."

"You're a young man. Young men think they can change the world. But once you get a little older you realize the world is just an evil festering thing. It festers. Do you know about the Indians that used to live around here?

"A little."

"They ate babies."

"They ate babies?"

"The baby eating tribes. Fry them up and gulp them down."

"That can't be true."

"Don't believe me, look it up."

That evening, Chris looked it up. Sure enough, it wasn't true. It was a popular myth concocted by Christian missionaries to justify the murder of Indians.

***

On Friday after making love, Chris and Sandra went driving around the town.

"I hate this old place," said Sandra. "I've always hated it."

"Where would you rather live?"

"I don't know. I've never been anywhere." Everything she said came out in the form of mild protest, as if she were protesting her lot in life. In an eerie way, her way of talking reminded her of Jack Stowe's. Everything couched in the form of mild protest. He tried to put the similarity out of his mind.

"Billy always said that anywhere was as good as anywhere else."

"Was Billy good to you, Sandra?"

"Billy, oh. Well, I suppose so. I mean, he wasn't bad. Billy was wild! Billy always had this thing about him. He wasn't the most popular, the strongest, the smartest, but he was Billy Le Blanc and we all wanted him."

"Who is all?"

"All of us. We went to school together. Everyone wanted Billy Le Blank. Everyone."

They drove down a gravelly trail and in view of the swamp, made love in the front seat of his Grand Am.

***

Dropping Sandra off, stopping off at the liquor store for a pint of Bim Black, sitting on on his balcony, he realized that he despised his neighbors across the way. He hated them intensily. There they were, spending another evening with that mindless Salsa music playing, that jug of ridiculous fruit-doctored wine. But he still couldn't fully wrap his mind around their commitment to each other just as he couldn't understand Sandra's commitment to the scoundrel Billy Le Blank. Jack Stowe's position on the other hand seemed infinitely comprehensible.

As he visited Jack Stowe weekly, he kept on putting off the question of asking Sandra about clemency. It was the best sex he had ever had. He realized that he was just factoring into Jack Stowe's life as another scoundrel, but it was as if he couldn't stop, as if he had lost control.

"What do you mean, she isn't giving you an answer."

"She says she can't make up her mind."

"What do you mean she can't make up her mind? It's either clemency or not? What's the big decision?"

"I don't know, Jack."

"Who are these people?"

"I don't know, Jack."

"It's either life or death, clemency or revenge. What's the big problem?"

"I don't know Jack." He felt mildly annoyed and then ashamed by his annoyance.

In the evening, Chris the state appointed attorney of convicted murderer Jack Stowe, went to visit Sandra Le Blank. He sneaked up to her house in the evening and lay with her in the darkness. At 29, he felt as if he had entered into his first mature adult relationship. It was a relationship with no set boundaries of commitment, revolving around the bed and spending aimless afternoons watching the rain pass over.

When he returned to his place, he did not think about what Sandra Le Blank was doing. He did not ask her if she was seeing someone else or if she wanted to go steady. He didn't care. He observed himself not caring. Not caring was something new.

***

"You've changed," said Warden Jones.

"You think?"

They were staring out over the marshlands. Chris did not hate Warden Jones as he hated his neighbors the salsa dancers. He knew that he should hate him, but for some reason he didn't.

"You know, I met my wife Jerry when I worked as a garbage man. I used to take out her garbage."

"Really."

"Then, one day she asked me out. We were married the following Tuesday."

"What?"

"We drove to Las Vegas, got married, and got busy real quick."

The marshlands were endless. The only sound was that of their mouths working the peppermints which Warden Jones kept in a carved, wooden box on his desk.

***

Sandra Le Blank's body unfolded before him this insatiable landscape daily tuning itself with his own landscape of desire. Being with her required absolutely no effor, the opposite of effort, whatever that was. Being with her, he felt transformed, alive.

"You've changed," said his boss Hank. "I don't know what it is."

"What do you think of me?" he asked Sandra one evening as they lay in bed. "I mean, in comparison with other men you know, have..."

"Have been with?"

"Well, yeah."

"Well, for one thing you're not really what I'm used to."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, for one thing, I usually prefer, you know, big men, and you're more, just, well average."

"Oh thanks."

"And for another thing, you're not like Billy."

"In what sense."

"Well, Billy. Who was like Billy? We all wanted him, you know, oh, don't take offense when I say that! Please don't take offense. You're real. You're the first real thing I've ever had I think, and you're smart, but Billy was Billy and we all wanted him."

"Do you ever think of clemency?" he asked.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, clemency. I mean forgiving him. You know Billy wasn't exactly a saint."

"What are you saying?"

"I mean, perhaps he doesn't deserve to die."

"You're talking about Jack Stowe? You think he doesn't deserve to die? You're saying that the killer of the father of my children doesn't deserve to die? He deserved to die before he was ever born!"

"How is that possible?"

"How is that possible? It's possible because sometimes demons are born into this world that should have never been born and deserve to die before they ever see the light."

"I'm sorry."

"What do you mean, you're sorry!"

"I'm sorry," Chris said.

Drifting off to sleep, he imagined laying next to the angular woman. The angular woman! He had missed her fragrant non-presence, her permanent angularity, the sense that she was hiding something, a secret state that she didn't show anyone, even Mark who over the course of the last 4 months, had suddenly gotten fat but who had improved as a salsa dancer.

***

Finally, the day of the execution came. Jack Stowe was handling it as could be expected: with a great deal of tears, rage and repentance. Although, Chris felt distant from Jack Stowe now, distant from Sandra Le Blank sitting next to him in the gallery who he had stopped seeing casually. He felt distant from Warden Jones who stood in the execution chamber and threw the switch, causing a certain amount of volts or watts to flow through Jack Stowe, putting him out of his misery. But when Jack Stowe died, Chris felt something inside himself die. That night, laying in bed, he felt blank.

The Prismatic Cathedral

There were so many different kinds of churches, first of all. There were the really old ones he had seen in movies, and then the not so old ones, and then the brand-new ones, like the First Church of God he went to Sundays now in Westwood next to Fleetland Park. Then there was the Prismatic Cathedral, a Cathedral like no other, made of pure glass, where Pastors Roy Hillenborn and Jeremiah Youngblood preached the gospel Sunday mornings broadcast on channel 14. Christoph tuned in to their services every Sunday morning.

Now, he was riding the bus, recounting to himself what he knew about churches. There were what you'd call old churches, then there were churches that really weren't churches - were more like stadiums. He readjusted his coke bottle glasses and scratched his chronically sweating scalp, exercising his taste and knowledge of churches with relish. First of all, a stadium isn't a church. It's just a place where people play football. And there were so many people in the audience that it made the ceremony seem like a kind of sport. The Prismatic Cathedral on the other hand was just the right size. Christoph wanted to ravish Jeremiah Youngblood and to be treated kindly by him and be his disciple.

Certain churches suited him, like others didn't. And church was his favorite subject when we spoke with the grocery store checkout clerks and Stan Swank, the kindly hardware store owner. He told the clerks and nice old Mr. Swank all about the guest pastor at the First Church of God, Andrew Wield. The regular pastor, Gate Hagen, had gone on a mission to South America and was off the map somewhere out in the jungle with the vines and the apes. Christoph remembered how everyone gasped for breath when they found out that Gate was going to South America. He had told them that God was calling him to go and preach the gospel in a place called the Amazon River Basin. He said that even the deepest jungle couldn't keep Jesus out, and everyone nodded in agreement. It was very impressive.

Before Christoph fell asleep at night, he had fantasies about joining Gate in the jungle, rescuing him from some natives who had held him hostage and escaping down the river in a canoe made from a hollowed-out tree trunk. Lying in bed, he adjusted his coke bottle glasses. Then he thought about Jeremiah Youngblood.

The Hatches win and make plans

The Hatches won the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, and what no community expected would happen to it, happened to the community of the First Church of God: one of their own finally won the big money. Gate Hagan used the occasion to remind everyone of the power of prayer and the necessity of charity. The Hatches were very good at praying and were some of the most vocal prayer artists in church. Christoph would pray in his silent way, couched behind his coke bottle glasses, asking God for little things like a chance to go to the Prismatic Cathedral in the southern dessert, or for the reintroduction of an old variety of cereal onto the grocery shelves, but the Hatches were very vocal with their amens and their rocking back and forth, making the whole pew sway. They were a very large couple, and it only seemed natural to Christoph that they prayed about large things, like peace, love, and the President of the United States. It was no wonder that God chose them.

When Gate Hagan asked them what they were going to do with their money, Mr. Hatch, who had been a carpenter before he went on disability, said he would remodel the kitchen for Mrs. Hatch. Gate Hagan said amen to that and that he knew that Mr. Hatch had been a carpenter and that Jesus was also a carpenter - so there was this kind of parallel being drawn there. While the end effect of what Gate said was lost on Christoph, it had the rest of the congregation murmuring on the steps of the church in the springtime.

But secretly, the Hatches had devised other plans. They planned to relax and to do exactly what they always wanted to do. They wanted to see how large they could get. It was some sort of infernal, satanic need that they couldn't deny. Sitting on the couch, looking into each other's eyes, they mutually knew that this was what they both wanted, and they made love to each other quickly, quietly in the missionary position on the stained, living room carpet with the television blasting the Religious Friends Network.

The fatter they became, the more aroused they became and the more their bodies enmeshed, creating a perfect, erotic circuit. As if embroiled in a satanic paradox, their libido increased in proportion to their weight. As they grew larger, they mutually felt to be the embodiment some kind of glorious, arousing perversion that neither of them could resist and that preyed on them endlessly. When the Publisher's Clearinghouse money came, they went to Cosco and bought a whole bunch of bulk food. "Alls I's saying is that God gave us this money for a purpose, and when the rapture comes we'll be ready," the glowing Mrs. Hatch told Gate Hagan apropos of her burgeoning foodstuffs.

"Well, I hope you leave some room for me!" said Hagan, at a loss for words.

That night, Gate Hagan tossed and turned, dreaming that he was hiding from God inside Mrs. Hatch's stomach. As much as he never fully realized it himself, this is when his relationship with the divine began to change.

* * *

While Mrs. Hatch occasionally fantasized about other men, Mitt Romney, television wrestlers, she really only had eyes for her husband, Denderman. Dend was from northern Utah, an apostate from the church of Joseph Smith. He breezed into her life 21 years ago at a Fourth of July Picnic in Beaverton, a booming New Haverford suburb, the projected site of the outlet mall and the latest Sequoya Technical College franchise. They had been relatively thin back then. It was all a haze. The first church they joined had been the Church of God in Christ's Love, but for some reason after they were saved they moved on to other churches and other people.

They had originally been saved by Pastor Erik LeBaron Brian Washington who had left the Church of God in Christ's Love to take over the reins of a youth reform center called Jonas Asylum. When Erik LeBaron Brian Washington dunked them beneath the frothing waters of the plastic baptismal tank, it had been like a weight had lifted. One negative side effect, however, was that the lessening of spiritual weight translated into an increase of mundane, real-world weight. Being saved initiated a slippery slope of eating, sex and forgetfulness, so that occasionally when they tried to talk about it, they would immediately forget what it was they had wanted to say. "Remember the time when, the time when..." and Mrs. Hatch could see the tears in her husband's eyes as he struggled to articulate. Then, she felt something inside her, something very old and irrevocably previous, desperately reaching out, trying to touch the thing that was reaching out of Dend. Like hands reaching across outer space. But then she forgot what she had wanted to say and felt hungry.

They had come to the First Church of God by way of a brief interlude at the Church of the Immaculate Conception. Christoph, that retard with the coke bottle glasses had been there. The Church of the Immaculate Conception in general wasn't for them. It just wasn't – godly enough - and was too old, and the people there had attitudes and other sorts of names.

So then, weighing a collective 450 pounds, they had settled at the First Church of God and had taken Christoph along in tow, even as they couldn't understand a word he said. Whenever he would speak in torrents of drooling blather, they would just nod their heads. The post-salvation forgetfulness had already begun to set in, and sometimes they felt like they were wandering around in a mist.

Advertisements for toothpaste mesmerized them and were their favorite. Once, when they were watching an infomercial about a special anti-bacterial toothpaste hosted by a wild, dentally obsessed Texan, "Cavities don't come from eatin'! Cavities come from bacteria!" Mrs. Hatch actually directly commented on their situation, "It's like a mist!" she said.

"I know!" Mr. Hatch replied, but then they rightly didn't understand what they were talking about, and even though it was a clear, warm night, they both mutually thought that it was raining and chilly out.

"It's raining outside," said Mrs. Hatch.

"I know," replied her husband.

But it wasn't raining. Mrs. Hatch shut the windows and turned on the heat.

Sometimes the Hatches combined eating and sex in sprawling, raucous, messy binges, and sometimes they went at it for weeks, so that the sun made them squint when they came out of the house. Once they hired a prostitute who said, "I have never done anything quite like this." They both felt wonderfully monstrous and their sense of being monstrous was never more delicious than when they went to the First Church of God and listened to Gate Hagan's sermons. They found Gate Hagan delicious – almost as tasty as that Jeremiah Youngblood who was the pastor at the Prismatic Cathedral which was somewhere down south.


Gate Hagan questions his faith

Deep within the rainforests, Hagan traced his memory back to the initial events of his apostasy. It had all really come to a head while making love to his wife Barbara. "Look at me!" she kept on saying. "Look at me Gate! I love you! I love you!" They stared into each other's eyes. "I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! I love you! Yes! Don't stop looking!"

He had abruptly stood and walked outside. Naked, out on the deck, his erection subsided in the cool night air. The stars were out. Something was horribly wrong, and the universe was fractured. He didn't like the feeling of the wooden banister beneath his hands. He didn't like the feeling of the wood on the deck, nor had he enjoyed the sensation of the carpet beneath his feet as he had traversed the living room toward the sliding doors. He didn't want to touch anything because everything was contaminated, and he felt unbearably small beneath the impossibly large sky. It was as if the sky was pressing down on him and he had the strength of a blade of grass. Then he knew what he had to do.

He went to the refrigerator and took out the celery and began eating stalk after stalk, fresh lettuce, apples, bringing the fresh fruits and vegetables up to his face, breathing them in. He went to the bookshelf and picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment which he read until he couldn't hold his eyes open any longer.

"What are you reading?" Barbara, sensing something wrong, had emerged.

"Crime and Punishment."

More than the fact that he had inexplicably gotten up in the middle of love making to stand naked on the deck, the words "Crime and Punishment" scared Barbara.

"I love you!" she said.

Gate didn't reply. Barbara retreated in tears to the bedroom, reeling from the title of her husband's book.

That night, Hagan didn't praise God even when he had turned the lights off and lay there in the night on the candy striped couch. He didn't praise God because what was the use? God knew what went on inside of Gate, but you couldn't use words to describe what God did or did not know, and you couldn't really use words to communicate with God.

Instead as he drifted off he thought of Willy Nelson.

***

At the Hagan household, Friday was intercourse night and Saturday was the evening for guests. Barbara had invited the newly rich Hatches over for dinner. The Hatches sat at the living room table. The feeling Gate had the night before had not evaporated with the dawn.

His children, who bore the weight of first names that were last names – Mason and Dixon - were at Lee Norwick's house playing with Norwick's children who were blond, had bowl cuts, and were named Kobe and Kai. Sitting directly across from him, Dend Hatch was saying something about his time in the Church of Latter-day Saints and the polygamists he met. "You're telling me you have 27 wives? How do you afford that?"

Barbara laughed and played footsy with Gate. "I knew I was going to marry him the first time I saw him," Barbara said, or was it Mrs. Hatch that spoke.

"Now we have this money and we aren't sure what to do with it."

"The secret is not to change. We'll never change." "No, we'll never change." "We were thinking of moving somewhere nice." "Maybe Beverley Hills, but then we thought LA probably isn't for us." "She's just a country girl." Gate didn't lose track of who was talking: he truly couldn't tell. Mouths. Mouths moving. "So we decided to build a house here. Why move? We'll just tear down the old one and put up a new one. And it's right near to church. Why should we move?"

Gate became absorbed in the original Misuzake hanging on the living room wall. He had never seriously considered it as anything other than one of Barbara's overpriced obsessions. It was an oil painting of a soulful Jesus with a brown beard and vaguely Semitic features: just enough of a Jew to seem modern but just Nordic enough to hang on one's wall. Perhaps that was what Barbara meant by 'soulful.' It had cost 25 thousand dollars, not including shipping and handling. It was an investment, painted by the famous, Japanese child prodigy, Misuzake, who had sprung up in the heartland and painted like a litany delivered by the collective American unconscious.

He sat, looking at the Jesus looking back out at him, and the Jesus was in total agreement with everything the fantastically obese Dend Hatch was saying. "Why move? We'll build it here. Near to church. Denderman wants to by a Hummer. He deserves it. Last Tuesday we met another clearinghouse couple and they said it changes you. But we don't change, do we Dend? The original Misuzaki Jesus was following the things the Hatches said. No, don't change Mr. and Mrs. Hatch. Live near to church. That's right. Don't move away. You deserve it.

***

Gate Hagan's Jesus looked like one of those strange bachelor habitual churchgoers who let their beards grow out – one of those guys that tries to physically emulate Jesus's appearance even as though no one really knows what Jesus looked like. The Jesus emulators wore tight blue jeans with flowing, white linen shirts unbuttoned at the top. They usually had beautiful wives or if they were single only brought trouble and were venerated during their time, but never stayed for long, moving on to be venerated elsewhere. The single Jesus men always eventually migrated out to the dessert of New Mexico, or to the Colorado Rockies, or at least they told everyone they were going someplace like that: Clear Water Gorge, or Crazy Horse, – Indian places where, Gate speculated, they lived in their own communities, forming worship groups of their own before seducing younger disciples, remarrying, and moving back home to start construction companies.

Everything was surface for the Jesus emulators, and while they never said anything of note, they managed to project auras of spiritual authority by virtue of their appearance coupled with crypto-religious smugness. They had names like him, like Gate or Dend or Gob, which was a couple of letters away from God - a bizarre homage to the Lord. These were the names given by people who didn't know what a name was. Names like Treek. Gate remembered that he had once had a congregant by the name of Treek – a commercial painter who looked just like Jesus and had to leave the church after two beautiful married women fought over him, ripping each other's billowing, ensconcing floral dresses in the warm sunlight on Easter Sunday.

Gate calmly arose. They paid no notice to him as he went to the kitchen for the lighter fluid. He cracked the Misuzake over his knee, and Barbara screamed when she saw the ritualistic-seeming indoor flames leap up.

The following morning he shaved his mustache and bought a plane ticket for Sao Palo before heading over to the church. He had the suspicion that the Hatches had already told everyone about last night. Several prominent members of the local gossip community blushed and turned away. Wendell Rove went as far as patting him on the belly and telling him about his brother's barbecue.

The incident with the Russian

The Hatches' palatial mansion went up over night. What they lacked in horizontal space, they made up in vertical. The most distinct feature of the house was its antennae. After noticing the antennae sprouting on the roof, it was in fact impossible to focus on the rest of the house, which was built of old growth redwood and had two huge marble antebellum columns in the front. Looking at the antennae, one got the impression that the house was reaching out to communicate with people across the oceans, perhaps listening for sounds from outer space. The people walking to church would look up at the Hatch's roof, and the men would wonder what kind of electronic equipment Denderman Hatch had in there. In reality, Denderman had nothing in there. He had merely purchased the array for its looks. He had always liked the look of an array, but with the Internet, there was really little reason to have a ham radio setup.

At this point, neither of the Hatches could remember where they had met Christoph. They knew they knew him somehow and at church they always said hi to him for some reason, but they didn't remember where they had met him. They also knew they could never understand a word he said. Gradually they came to believe that he was a foreigner – a Russian immigrant. There were lots of Russians in church. They were old and wore old clothing with little cabby hats and were grateful for their freedom. The Hatches thought that Christoph was one of those Russians.
They found out more about him when they emerged from their dungeon one Sunday morning to find him materialized in the living room, masturbating to one of the sermons of Jeremiah Youngblood broadcast from the Prismatic Cathedral. They both blushed because they too had often masturbated to the sermons of Jeremiah Youngblood and had done other things in his televised presence with what they took for the vile abandon of those certain of eternal damnation.

Christoph mumbled something totally garbled and the Hatches felt their own sense of overpowering perversion so strongly that they immediately cast aside their rubber moomoos and formed their circuit on the living room carpet. Mrs. Hatch tilted her head back to look at Christoph. A bead of sweat ran down Christoph's temple. Mrs. Hatch said, "Russian. Russian. Russian. Russian - oh you fucking Russian!" Christoph said something lost within a confluence of saliva. After the frenzy had passed, the Hatches got dressed, called the police, and had Christoph carted off.

Gate Hagen had gone to South America. The Hatches discretely told Andrew Wield, the interim pastor, what had happened. They felt in no danger of recrimination because the boy with the coke bottle glasses was Russian and couldn't speak English and who would believe him if he told everyone that the Hatches were, in fact, servants of Satan? Andrew Wield nodded his head. "Poor Boy. He has Manheim's, syndrome you know."

The following Sunday, Andrew Wield delivered a sermon about sexual desire and how it was an expression of love between a man and a woman and that this love was impossible without first having a relationship with Jesus and then meeting a man or woman who also had a relationship with Jesus. Everyone somehow knew that he was talking about Christoph because at that point Andrew Wield had told everyone. Trouble in the parish was a boon for an up-and-coming pastor, and Andrew Wield started a fund to send Christoph to the Jonas Asylum, run by Erik LeBaron Brian Washington, in the peaceful community of Fork. With the Hatches' generous donation, the First Church of God had no problem raising the money.

Christoph and Erick LeBaron Brian Washington at Jonas Asylum

Christoph had no idea what the people at Jonas Asylum were saying half the time. He remembered Erik LeBaron Brian Washington from his days at the Church of God in Christ's Love, but somehow the Erik of the present and the Erik of his memories were different. This man looked different. His clothing was casual now and he hadn't the same scent. Brian Washington checked up on Christoph now and then and said things that Christoph didn't understand, like, "How do you feel?" What did this mean? Christoph could never make it out. He told him how he felt. "Kind of sick. My underwear is too tight."

"We're just tying to help you, son," said Erik LeBaron Brian Washington.

But help him do what?

They had given him this too-tight underwear that he had to put back on after the timed bathroom breaks. After five minutes, whether he was done or not, the bathroom door popped open. He slept in the underwear. It cut off his circulation and made it feel like he was walking on pins and needles. One evening while checking him in for the night, Nurse Paula exclaimed "Oh my God!" and sent for another nurse who looked at Christoph's blue thighs and said "Oh my God!" Since then, they gave him slightly looser underwear, but after a while it felt just as tight as the old pair.

He couldn't understand what he was doing at Jonas Asylum or what anyone else was doing there. He had a vague intuition that it had something to do with pastor Jeremiah Youngblood and the Prismatic Cathedral, so that suddenly, with a rush of blood, it dawned on him that they were preparing him to go to the Prismatic Cathedral: to take the long journey out into the dessert where the cathedral had forced its way out of the ground, an angular, divine eruption amidst the cacti and the lizards sitting on rocks. But he still wasn't sure, so that once he asked Erik LeBaron Brian Washington, "Am I going to the Prismatic Cathedral?" Smiling kindly, Brian Washington responded. "Absolutely. If you're a good boy and you do everything we say."

Since then, Christoph happily anticipated the day they would drive out to the Prismatic Cathedral and meet Jeremiah Youngblood. Jeremiah Youngblood would take him on a tour of the Cathedral. They would walk around with their hands clasped behind them, and Jeremiah would say things like, "I know what you're thinking. It's funny how the Prismatic Cathedral is out in the dessert." Or, "The Prismatic Cathedral is made of one hundred percent solid glass." Christoph would nod his head, then after pausing in front of a lifelike painting of Pastor Roy Hillenborn, who was getting on in years, Jeremiah Youngblood would invite Christoph to live with him in the Prismatic Cathedral in the southern desert as his disciple. "You will be my disciple until someday you will have disciples of your own."

After Christoph took his meds in the morning, he had breakfast with the other residents of Jonas Asylum. Most of them were a good deal younger than him – mostly teenage boys.

"Do you wear the tight underwear?" Christoph asked a boy named Mike who sat across from him in the morning.

Mike started laughing hysterically. "We all do!"

"Why are there no girls here?"

"They live in compound two," said Mike.

"Do they wear the tight underwear?"

"I imagine so!" Mike laughed hysterically.

After Erick LeBaron Brian Washington's breakfast sermon, they would all go out to the quad to do jumping jacks and pushups with Sergeant Bob. Sergeant Bob had been a sergeant in the army before Erick LeBaron Brian Washington had told him that he had important work to do at the Jonas Asylum. Sergeant Bob had come to get their bodies in shape so their spirits could follow.

This is how Christoph's day went. After lunch, he had a man-to-man with Erick Le Baron Brian Washington, who kept on asking him if he still thought about Jeremiah Youngblood and what his little guy felt about Jeremiah Youngblood. Christoph felt like he was receiving mixed messages. He felt like Erik LeBaron Brian Washington wanted him to think about Jeremiah Youngblood in as much as he was being prepared to go and live with him out in the desert. At the same time, he wasn't supposed to admit thinking about Jeremiah Youngblood and that somehow his future life in the Prismatic Cathedral was related to his response to a trick question.

He had no idea what Erik LeBaron Brian Washington meant by "little guy," so that he began to conceive of an actual little fairy creature – a little guy - who was present in his life as a reoccurring theme of conversation, but also as a concrete possibility in as much as there may have been a little person somewhere on the premises that Christoph would eventually meet or perhaps spot out of his peripheral vision, scurrying down the hallway.

They would look at magazines together, and Erik would ask him how his little guy felt. At this juncture, it was important that Christoph would say "Randy," or, "Horny as a horn dog," when it was a woman. When it was a man, it was important that he say, "A little weird," or simply "Gross." The response that Brian Washington seemed to like the most was "I have one of those too!"

Christoph would say these things even as he had a hard time focusing on the glossy pictures in the magazines through his coke bottle glasses, and he actually felt nothing distinct. At breakfast, he asked Mike if he also had an illusive little guy. Mike, hysterically laughing, said, "Of course! Everyone does!" This confused Christoph. How many little men could there be at the Jonas Asylum, and where did they sleep at night?

The array, the reinforced sex swing, the good life


Denderman Hatch continued to add to his array until his house looked like it had sprouted black, stringy hair. He purchased the wire from the sporting goods store and occasionally stopped off at the junkyard to scavenge for iron rods. After a while, it got hard for him to climb up onto the roof, and so his project came to a halt.

The Hatches sprawled poolside, drinking daiquiris out of aluminum cans and eating microwavable chicken potpies. Their house had fallen into utter disrepair. They had a hard time getting around and cleaning up after themselves, but they didn't want to hire a maid because it was important that no one found out that they were 'of the devil's party.' Each relished what they interpreted to be the evil of the other, and the prospect of internal damnation spiced their world and helped them plan their days.

They purchased Mexican prostitutes and had ungodly ménages on the living room rug with the Religious Friends Network blasting in the background. They bought a reinforced sex swing that Mrs. Hatch sat on as Denderman, clad in oversized leather bondage gear, penetrated her roiling, lubricated flesh. They soaked in the hot tub together and took turns pretending to drown the other before dissolving into each other's arms. They ate the most expensive of microwaveable meat pies and gourmet roasters they had delivered now from a chicken farm two towns over. They had a strange life together, and eventually that sense of forgetfulness – of perceiving life through a fine haze - was subsumed by crystalline awareness of their possessions.

As their lives congealed, they built a pool in the shape of a cross in their backyard, and after hiding their pornography, they hired a Mexican maid from two towns over to come and clean up. Then, they invited the entire parish over to a pool party that lasted all day, which Andrew Wield called unprecedented, where some of the Russians got drunk and started doing silly little dances with each other. They never once thought of what happened to Christoph.

Yet even if their life had finally crystallized around them, and they were at last happy, the array that Denderman had prized began to fall into disrepair, its spikes sorrowfully wilting, casting ominous, spiky shadows on the gables and the Doric columns, giving the house an odious air that the neighbors secretly remarked on.

An escape south, Flora, regrets, Jeremiah Youngblood's disgrace

Gate Hagan went to live in Sao Paulo. Sao Paulo was apparently crime ridden, but it somehow felt much safer than life in the United States. He rented a little room in the center and started giving English lessons. When people asked him what his job was in the States, he told them that he had recently had a spiritual experience and was searching for himself. They nodded their heads and told him they understood in a way that made him feel as if they actually did understand. They were the most present people he had met in his entire life. "Well, I hope you find what you are looking for in Brazil," they said.

One of the strange things about coming to Brazil was how the change of country affected his self-esteem. He bought some new clothes. The clothes here fit his gangly frame. It was the first time in his life when his clothes fit. He looked in the mirror at his stubbly, tan face, and that constant feeling of innate, physical ugliness evaporated. Sometimes women smiled at him in the street. He had never experienced this before. Romantic contact with women before his marriage had been limited to the lascivious come-ons of congregants and a feverish, confused dream life. But here he sensed a new possibility that felt at once natural and wholesome.

In Sao Paulo, he had absolutely no contact with the news and had no idea how the war was going. Sometimes he saw the most unflattering images of American politicians plastered on newspapers, and he recoiled, laughing, disgusted, feeling vaguely soiled yet free.

He didn't find his way into an English language newspaper until he saw Jeremiah Youngblood's picture on the front page of one of the regional English publications. He felt ashamed of how he had once behaved around Jeremiah Youngblood on his visit to the Prismatic Cathedral around ten years ago.

He had been personally invited out to one of the televised sermons. Like Arab sheiks, they had taken a limo caravan out through the desert. He had sat in the backseat with Jeremiah Youngblood, feeling carsick, pandering to the young megalomaniac. "You're doing a great thing for the Lord," Hagan had said. In Sao Paulo he read with glee of Youngblood's twin entanglements with a male prostitute and meth in Las Vegas. He kicked up his feet on his sweaty little mattress and laughed hysterically.

Eventually the teacher-student relationship with his Portuguese instructor dissolved into a romance. She was the smartest, most present woman he had ever met. She said the most amazing things about life, God, contemporary politics, and when he had divulged to her the awful nuances of his life as a pastor, she had said, "Organized religion is shit." He had never heard his own burgeoning beliefs put so bluntly.

Flora talked a lot about books. In particular, the writings of Sartre and Camus. At an English language bookstore, Hagan purchased a Dover Thrift Edition of the Plague, but he couldn't get past the first chapter. It was like he just wasn't smart enough. He began to suspect that his problem was that he simply wasn't as intelligent as he had always considered himself to be, and that his entire life had been geared in a way to keep him from thinking deeply: to teach him to accept shallow platitudes as a fundamental reality.

Like the Jesus men with their billowing shirts and beards who eventually migrated south and said things like, "God is in the details," or "God helps those who help themselves," so his former life seemed to be the sum of these ancient, stupid axioms. It was as if he had always adopted the form and scaffolding of knowledge, but without the content. For a moment, Hagan became afraid that he was just following a pattern in Brazil - tracing the lines of another superficial thought structure - but then he reminded himself where he was, in Sao Paulo, in Brazil and not in an Arizonian Baptist church or kneeling by the banks of the Crazy Horse River or having dinner beneath Dendermen Hatch's array.

***

Flora was not beautiful like Barbara, but parts of her were amazing. Barbara had been brittle yet pliant and totally, intellectually opaque; but Flora was rounded, active, willful and communicative. While she was not the traditional beauty, Gate began to see her through the window of her beautiful parts, her maturity, confidence, rapacious intellect, and random, unexplained moodiness.

His love of Barbara had from the start been protective and slightly pitying, but with Flora his feelings were beseeching, confused, insecure, grasping and alive. He wanted Flora to love him and didn't understand why he wasn't certain she did. She never told him in words that she loved him. These were new experiences for Hagan.

Sex with Flora was also different than it had been with Barbara. There was no mandatory staring into each other's eyes and no constant declarations. In fact, in the beginning, Flora had expressed distaste for the things that Barbara had always wanted, and she seemed to like Hagan the best when he was slightly remote, bent over his writing desk or sitting out on the balcony, pouring over the first chapter of The Plague.

They went on walks through the city and in the evening went out dancing. Gate Hagan felt those exciting new feelings of insecurity – like he had absolutely no idea what would happen next. Finally, Flora told him that they could no longer meet because she couldn't handle all of his psychological baggage and that she hoped that with the help of a good therapist, eventually life in Brazil would cure him of the experiences he had accrued in the United States. But it may take several years, and in the meantime she had to get on with her life. He felt grateful for the time he had spent with her, and gratefully, but with no small regret, agreed to whatever she said.

After a year, the initial effects of his life in Brazil wore off and he began to see the place as any other place and began to feel an old sense of stress at the core of his being creep back up inside him and paint his world with the hues of fear. He tried to exorcise the stress by drinking red wine and sleeping with women. It worked. He struck a balance within a hedonist, bookish existence. He felt better and better, until finally he decided to take a tour of the villages around the Amazon.

They were little mud-caked villages. There was such poverty there, but the people were happy. It was only when he encountered the missionaries – swarming, carrying bibles, with vaguely ominous names like Pastor Franklin French, the man from Boise Idaho that he had met on a night bus, did he hear rumors of a vast, spiritual despair pervading the sunny little villages of the Amazon.

When the missionaries asked him what he did for a living, he told them he was a coffee scout. He didn't accept any of their invitations, and gradually his consciousness became welded to the Amazon itself as a living, geographic formation that snaked back into the green depths as he himself snaked back through the terrifying layers of the past. He lay in little rooms, struggling through the pages of the Stranger, dreaming about the canoe trip he would take into the inner rain forest, through the living, breathing jungle.