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.

Noah's Time Theory

Like other people who experience life as a constant struggle for enlightenment, Noah Goldstein thought he hit upon the answer. It came as he was walking down Broadway toward Times Square. God is time. We make our peace with time and we make our peace with the universe. If we can only let instant after instant wash over us without protest, we will align with our true selves and begin to flow in the general direction of things, rather than swimming like fish upstream.

"God is time," said Noah Goldstein draining into Soho like a fig leaf charting its course toward the sea.

When he returned to his Midwood Brooklyn room, he began furiously writing down his thoughts.

Noah Goldstein was indisputably handsome, tall, dark skin, with brown curly hair cropped close around the sides exploding out of the top of his head. In the summer, he wore a t-shirt, shorts and hiking boots. In the winter he wore wool pants, a sweater and the same hiking boots. He took pride in rarely purchasing new clothing. This and other staunch dogmas made long term relationships a rare occurrence in his life, but he had no shortage of one night stands.

His peaks were times of high adventure and danger, when he could be arrested, beat up, or made passionate love to by a total stranger. During his valleys he would retreat to his room and only come out to make trips down to the store. His floor mates, a girl and a boy from Brooklyn College, could here him in his room cursing himself, his family, god, life. Once, after hearing the impact of blows on skin, they called the police. They were mainly tolerant, concerned people and so rather than making a big deal about it, they choose to tolerate Noah, his highs and lows, that he could be the life of the party, that he could shut everything down with a sudden outburst.

Noah Goldstein's parents were dead. They had died one after the other in 2007-08, his father from a heart attack and his mother from a rare form of stomach cancer that took her swiftly. They left him 75,000 dollars and a house in Massachusetts, which he rented out, making him financially independent. Since he had studied history in college, he was otherwise unemployed although not totally without ambition.

In his spare time, he read zoology textbooks: he thought he might like doing something physical, and he had always loved animals, perhaps more than people. He could imagine himself someday working in a Zoo, tending to chimps perhaps. When he was happy, he took long walks through the city and occasionally made short lived friendships in neighborhood hang outs, mainly with outdoor enthusiasts and marijuana types who thought he was one of them.

During his peaks, he was extremely charismatic but simply didn't think straight. During his valleys, he felt mostly hate toward everything and everyone, especially God. But there were moments in between when he understood he had to change, and he drank the dregs of those moments, searching for answers within himself, finding only short term inspirations which, if he was lucky, vanished with the onset of a new emotional state and if he was unlucky continued to prey upon him as new obsessions.

***

He picked up an older woman in a midtown Starbucks. To be precise, she picked him up. He caught her staring at him. He approached her, stood looming over her, said, "Hi." She invited him back to her apartment on the upper east side.

"Oh, I think I like you," she said. "I think I'd like to take you home with me."

Her name was Julia. She was petite with long dark hair, dark skin. The way her jeans hung down over her heals spoke to him of wealth and grace and a state of being fairly distant from his own. Her building had a doorman, a chandelier in the mirror-lined lobby. Her apartment was truly nice, truly comfortable, like a big, expensive goose down pillow. The lap of luxury. The degree of comfort felt alien, strange, as if he had just returned home from a war. He laughed on the inside, feeling indifferent, scornful, aroused.

"We have the same skin," she said. "Are you Jewish?"

He answered her.

"Me too!" she walked to the large steel refrigerator, poured two glasses of white wine. "Ice cube? You know, have you been to Israel? I've always wanted to go!" said Julia, returning with the wine.

He laughed inwardly. It seemed like such a conversation piece, the obvious thing a 42-year-old Jewish woman would say lacking anything else to say. He muttered something, leaned in, kissed her.

"Go slowly!" she said.

In his memories, he remembers himself as a creature with no voice, just someone humping Julia on her upper east side couch. In his memories, he is present at the time without being fully, totally there. He is a ghostly presence throughout his past.

"You're such a tiger!" said Julia.

Tiger, he thought. Something an old Jewish lady says to her young lover.

They lay on the couch in each other's arms. "I think I'm going to like getting to know you. Are you going to like getting to know me?" she asked.

When she was in the bathroom, he fled. He encountered himself floating toward Central Park, overjoyed. It was a pure, chemical joy: a narcotic ecstasy. A moment later as he was crossing Amsterdam Ave, he crashed, realizing what happened, what it meant. It meant something. He treated it like nothing. She wanted it to mean something. She wanted meaning. She wanted to create a story with him, about a woman a little older, but still very youthful and attractive, and her younger wild lover. She didn't seek out men at random: she sought out him. She didn't care about wealth, about money. All she wanted was meaning. He recalled the things she said about things like that never happening to her, about her ordinarily not doing those wild, forbidden things. He recalled sitting there, an empty-headed slightly scornful sex-seeking vessel. That's when, walking down Broadway, the idea came. Time.

***

The problem is man's relationship with time, he wrote. We cannot let ourselves flow smoothly. His yellow curtain ruffled in the breeze. He could see out across his yard into his neighbors yard where a chubby lady in a bikini baked herself brown. "If we can only make peace with time," he wrote. Noah sat, pouring himself out onto one of the note pads he prefered over his laptop which he rarely used. He was sweating in the white t-shirt he bought in a packet of similar t-shirts which he pleanned to wear weak after weak until it became a ripped, tattered rag.

At night, he lay in his bed, remembering Julia's body. He could not seem to make peace with time. The memory of her body interceded. The memory was like a fury preying on him, pushing him toward an abyss. The memory was right there at the cusp of his mind, uncensored, uncut. She offered him her own self-same eden. What led him to treat the situation like that?

He shook himself out of his trance. Time. He wwas not letting time wash over him as he should have. He was swimming against God. He tried to empty his mind. He succeeded. He slept. In the morning, the memory of Julia's body seemed less pressing.

"Time is God and God is time," he announced to his flat mates studying in the living room. They exchanged worried looks. He marched out into the daylight, walking down Cony Island Avenue. He felt that he finally hit upon the proper current; was finally flowing in the proper direction.

Since it was Friday, the Jewish occupants of Midwood were busy shopping for the shabbos. He popped into the grocery store. He wanted bananas. He resolved to only eat bananas this week to see what becomes of him. The store was full of men with beards and hats and women with wigs, dark dresses. Time is god, time is god, time is god, he thought. Only he was not thinking it: he was saying it.

"What's do you mean, time is God?"

"Yes," he smiled, caught in his madness. "Time is God."

"Are you Jewish?"

"Yes."

"Would you like to come to shabbos? Come with me to shabbis! My name is Mordecai Decantalon."

"Decantalon."

"It's Ladino."

"Ladino."

"What's the matter? You only say one word at a time?"

"I'm fucked in the head."

"Come to shabbos with me. Here, come on."

He shopped with Mordecai Decantalon. "Onions, check, bread check, chicken, check," said Mordecai. "I usually don't buy wine. I don't see how alcohol enhances the gathering, but today, here, why don't we get some." He reached for a bottle.

He piled into Mordecai's car, sat in the passenger's seat. Mordecai told him about his life.

"My great grandfather was in the paper business, my grandfather was in the paper business, but my father wanted to work in show business and so moved to Hollywood where, at 40 he realized that he couldn't continue."

"What happened?"

"What do you think? He was living in a little room somewhere, writing screenplays, eating beans every meal. In short he was miserable."

"So, what did he do?"

"He moved to Israel. Went to live on a kibbutz. Met my mother, Sabina, the daughter of German Jews who had fled Germany in the 1930's."

"They got out just in time."

"Yes they did. And so my father decided to move back to New York with Sabina."

"But what did he do?"

"What do you mean, what did he do?"

"I mean, when he came back. Screenplays?"

"He made a life. He started as other men do, with nothing but the love of a good woman, and made a life. He worked in a restaurant for a while. Then, after a few years, he opened Perry's Pizza. Now we have three kosher pizza restaurants and it's the family business."

Noah had truly never conceived of life like this. You start out with the love of a good woman and then make a life. It ran totally counter current to his time theory, or to any of the other theories espoused to him by psychologists and self help books. It was totally backwards from everything he had learned.

"You can do that too, Noah."

"I guess I could."

"Of course you could! How old are you?"

"27."

"My father was 40 when he met my mother. When he was 42, he was a busboy at the Star Of David Cafe. When he was 43 he had me. When he was 44, he opened the first Perry's Pizza."

"How did you survive."

"What do you mean, how did we survive?"

"I mean at first, when you were born."

"My father and mother rented a room, lived cheaply, drank water instead of wine."

Noah laughed.

"Yeah! said Mordecai, not so hard. Life isn't so hard."

They pulled up on front of a nondescript brick house on a quiet street. Mordecai introduced Noah to his family, his wife Sylvia and his daughter Sabina and son Micah. The children came rushing up to him to embrace his legs. The evening seemed so full of quiet, moderated joy. As if a cork had been removed, after he told him about the death of his parents, language came to him in a torrent of child speak.

Then, later as they were walking through the quiet evening with the other promenading families, Mordecai said. "Come back next week and the week after and we'll discuss finding a good woman for you."

"First the woman and then the life?"

"The woman is always first, and then comes life. Without woman, life is impossible. That's how God intended it. We'll discuss it man to man."

Laying in bed at home in his room, the shabbos candles still dancing before his vision, he thought of Julia.

"I think I'm going to like getting to know you," Julia had said.

He wondered if things like that always happened to Julia. He wanted to tell her about the simplicity Mordecai envisioned. He wanted to ask for her forgiveness, and then if she granted it, sit with her at a table by candle light and to tell her all about his time theory.

The King's Highway Rabbi

Tony of Bensonhurst Brooklyn was feeling low as he stood out in front of Vincent's Barbershop with Mickey and Mikey and Joey.

"Can't we break this stereotype?" asked Tony, watching a pretty girl across the street walk by.

The girl was fine and they all wanted her with the unthinking, hopeful want of people who offer nothing but self-obliviousness.

"What stereotype?" Mickey and Mikey asked.

Joey belched. He was drinking out of one of those bottles of wine that come with the wicker holder.

None of them were doing anything with their lives. Their parents worked. Mickey's dad was a made man, commuted over to Jersey to muscle small contractors. Mikey's dad worked for transit authority and Joey dad owned a pizza parlor called Pisa Pie.

Tony's Dad sold medical equipment from his home office. He liked wop literature, Dante, old Roman stuff. He was always holding forth about ancient Rome. Tony knew it all by heart. From Romulus and Remus to the Decline and Fall.

"Scipio Africanus," Tony muttered out in front of Vincent's.

"What?" asked Giuseppe.

"Scipio Africanus defeated Hannibal in 202 BC."

"Did you say your mother's an animal and needs to pee? How rude!"

"Yes, that's exactly what I said," said Tony. "Listen, I gotta go."

"Where ya goin Tony?"

"I just got to get out of here."

"He wants to break free!" sang Mickey and Mikey.

"Yeah, well fuck you then!" said Joey. "Go suck a dick mother fucker, fagot, queer."

"Tony's a fagot!"

"Fuck you people, god damned stereotypes. You know what the problem with you people is?"

"What? What's the problem, Tony?"

"None of you have any information."

"Like what information should we have, Tony?"

"Like historical information."

"Like whose been sleeping with Mikey's sister?"

"Hey, fuck you Joey."

The farther he walked down toward the sea, the more he began to think about the things Stacey had told him.

"You've got to see the Rabbi," Stacey had said.

They were laying in Stacey's bed in her room in the Midwood apartment she shared with two other girls. Stacey was an orderly at Beth Israel hospital. That's where she heard about the Rabbi. She was a gorgeous blond. Tony never had bad luck with women.

"I don't need to see no Rabbi."

"He'll help you!" she said. "He helped my brother, you know my brother Barry? You know Barry, don't you, red hair, big head, tiny face, kind of mongoloid."

"Yeah, I know Barry."

Barry was one of those guys all he ever does is walk. If you lived in the neighborhood for long enough, you'd know him: that redheaded guy always walking, carrying on conversations with himself. Once they had cleaned up Stacey's yard together. Someone left a bunch of plywood back there and they wanted to have a barbecue.

"We'll, the doctor said he had Tourette's Syndrome, do you know what that is? Tony? Are you listening to me baby?"

"Yeah, I'm listening."

"Well, so we're there, Barry, me and Doctor Hershel, when Doctor Hershel's brother walks in, Noah Hershel. You know Noah Hershel?"

"How the fuck should I know Noah Hershel?"

"Well, Noah Hershel says he doesn't have Tourette's. He's just got to see the Rabbi. The Kings Highway Rabbi. Of course, Doctor Hershel didn't like that, but after when we were leaving, I got his address from Noah Hershel and we went to visit and look, now Barry, my brother Barry's got a job!"

"Where's he working?"

"At the biali place on Avenue T."

"That's a good place. Can he get me some free bialis?"

Tony lay looking at the ceiling listening to the gorgeous blond. He felt near and far, connected and loosened.

"See the Rabbi! You've got to see the Rabbi!"

***

Now, Tony was thinking about his life, how strangling himself with the extension cord just seemed the thing to do at the time. First he was out with Mickey and Mikey and some other so and sos. He hardly had anything to drink. The idea didn't seem that bad. It just popped in there when he got home.

"Get that cord off your head you stupid Umbrian jack ass! What are you doing?" his father said, taking out his swiss army knife, unfolding the blade and cutting the cord where it lay taught between the radiator and Tony's neck.

"I just wanted to see what it felt like!"

"What do you mean you just wanted to see what it felt like! You stupid wop. Look at you! I don't know what that gorgeous little blond dish sees in you, you stupid shit stick!"

"I'm sorry Dad!" Tony said.

Later than evening, Tony's Dad was sitting in front of the fireplace reading out of one of his jumbo books. He had stoked a roaring fire, although it was only October.

"Get the fuck out of here!" his father said sensing his presence at the entryway. "Kids getting his rocks polished ten times a week, and he's still a shit bird."

***

Standing around eating cheese fries at Nathan's on Cony Island, Tony decided to do two things. To see the Rabbi and then to propose to Stacey. He would say, "Look, Stacey, I saw the Rabbi. Now, will you marry me?"

And she would cry and of course she would say yes and then he would move in with her.

***

The Rabbi's house was located in the King's Highway neighborhood, which is a part of Brooklyn where a lot of different kinds of people lived mashed up against each other. It's a fairly decent part, lot's of bargains, cheap junk, restaurants. A fairly decent American place. Tony took the Q train up there.

He had been to King's Highways several times, usually by accident. It was the kind of place you ended up after you got drunk and wandered around at night. You'd come upon it and say, "King's Highway. Shit." It was a sure sign that your thoughts had strayed and it was 4 am.

Now it was about 3 pm on a Thursday. Tony wondered if the Rabbi would be home as he knocked on the door of the brick townhouse right around the corner from the shop and stores.

"Yeah, uh," I think I got the wrong house, he said when he saw the hippie.

It was a big hippie with blond dread locks, a blond beard and a red face.

"You won to see da Rabbi?" the hippie asked in a weird kind of accent.

"Yeah, does he live here?"

"Come on up," said the hippie.

The hippie followed him up a flight of steps. He opened the door at the top, entered a dark room. The rabbi sat at the opposite end of the room next to another door. Tony knew he was the rabbi for his Jewish regalia, although his white shirt was unbuttoned all the way, which was unusual. A slender white beard ran from his narrow face all the way down his chest to his crotch. The face itself was all nose and glasses and just a trace of mouth. He wore a large fedora. A loud stationary fan positioned against the wall jerkily craned its neck to the left and the right.

The hippie closed the door.

On the other side of the door was a large Chinese man. A Chinese body builder.

"What the fuck is this?" asked Tony.

"What the fuck do you think it is, mother fucker? You came to see me, didn't you? Now what's the problem," said the tiny Rabbi. His voice was disproportionately deep, melodic, mocking.

"What?"

"What's the fucking problem? How am I supposed to help you if you don't tell me what the god damned problem is you stupid Tuscan schmuck."

"Hey, fuck you!" said Tony, turning to leave.

But the hippie and the Chinese guy held him fast.

"Oh no you don't," said the rabbi. "You leave through this door, not that door, this door!" he patted the door next to him. "Enter in one end and come out the other, like a big piece of shit."

Tony suddenly felt afraid of the other door. It was painted those hippie rasta colors. The house wasn't that big, and he couldn't imagine what lay beyond. The room had no windows.

"Now, let's start at the top."

"Hey, fuck you I ain't telling you..."

The Chinese punched him in the side of his face, hard. Tony felt like he was about to black out. He had never been hit that hard before, or so he could recall. Suddenly, Tony was terror struck. "Do you know who I am? I have friends. Mickey's dad is a made man." Or was it Mikey's? At the spur of the moment, he couldn't remember.

"Do you think I give a fuck about Mickey's dad?" asked the Rabbi, turning his head. He had a two dimensional quality, as if, if he were to turn totally to the side all you would see would be a black line descending down from a nose with glasses attached to a large fedora.

"Now the sooner you start talking, Tony, the sooner this will be all over with."

"I'm depressed, ok?" Tony felt himself begin to speak the truth.

"What are you depressed about, nice slice of lasagna like you? I bet you got a nice big cock," said the rabbi.

Tony felt tears run down his cheeks.

The hippie and the Chinese body builder began to laugh.

"You want me to suck it for you?" asked the rabbi. "Suck your big cock? Would that make you feel better?"

"I ain't a fag!" Tony sobbed.

"What? Who's a fag? Are you calling me a fag, fagot?" asked the rabbi.

"No, I'm not calling you a fag. I'm just saying that I ain't a fag."

"Just teasing!" said the rabbi. "Stop being so sensative! There are no gay orthodox Jews, didn't you know that? Or so they say. And besides, I'm sure you got a nice girl, big calzone like you. You got a girl, Tony?"

"Yeah."

"What's her name?"

"Stacey."

"She a hot little blond who loves to suck..."

"Stop it!"

"Ok! I"m sorry! I'm sorry! Got a job?"

"No."

"What do you want to be?"

"I don't know. Maybe a hard hat."

"Hard hat? This boy says he wants to be a hat!"

The Chinese remained mute, but the hippie broke down laughing hysterically. "A hot!" he repeated. He had some weird European accent, said the word hat like hot. "He wans to be a hot!"

"No, come on, serious. What do you want to be? What did you want to be when you were a little kid?"

Tony thought back to when he was a little kid. He desperately searched his memories. At first there was nothing, but then it all came back. There was only one thing he really wanted to be, ever. And did he ever want to be that thing. He wanted it like nothing else. He wanted it like gold in his pockets, like endless Christmas, like a 1st grade love dream. "A cowboy," he muttered.

"What?" asked the rabbi.

"A cowboy."

"What? Speak up!"

"A cowboy!" Tony shouted, tears running down his cheeks.

"That's more like it! Pepperoni dick says he wants to be a cowboy. So, you got a girl with a nice little bod who loves to suck your big Italian bread stick, and you want to ride the range and rope buffalo or whatever those people do, those cowboys! There you go! Life ain't so bad, ain't it? Bring the cowboy here."

The Chinese and the Euro hippie lifted Tony up by his elbows and brought him over to the little Rabbi. The Rabbi placed his hands on both of his shoulders, squeezed, leaned in close and began to speak rapidly. Tony felt the little hands on his shoulders tense, smelled the rabbi's onion breath. The incomprehensible words washed over him pouring out from someplace deep, like an old kind of forgotten music released from a cave. All of a sudden Tony felt some kind of warmth spread down through his shoulders and flow through his entire body, and whatever was there, the thing that fed off him and slowly strangled the life out of him, dissolved. Then, the hippie opened the door and the Chinese shoved him out into the light. And now he was falling, falling through open space down onto a pile of old mattresses. Tony sprang up.

"You're so dumb your pants fall down!" chanted a little boy in the neighboring yard.

Tony ran down the street.

The Sound My Hometown Makes

...Get back Jojo!
--John Lennon

I remember when I was a kid but wasn't. I was 21, home for a little while, back in that place that still resonates in my mind as a place of monkish solitude. As it turns out, everywhere since then has reflected that experience more or less, to varying degrees. Although there the experience seemed stark, as if I could live a million years and no one would ever find me.

And for as long as I was there, no one did.


That summer, I got a part time job in the Western Washington University mail room. Every morning at around 11 I rode my brother's old bike downtown past the big Horizon bank clock where as a kid I used to check the temperature, excited as the thermometer dropped and as things looked more and more like snow. The colder the better. My child self loved the cold.

My adolescent self craved the tropics.

And now my adult self again craves the cold.

I rode passed the little shops, the kids skateboarding in the little parking lot by the bus stop, up State street, passed the Y, passed the Food Co Op, up the steep, grated hills passed Nash hall, onto the university campus, through red square, passed the big iron statue, passed all the 60'ish university architecture, to the mail room where I began sorting.

And then, after making my deliveries in the delivery van, carrying the mail to various departments and dorms, I would coast all the way home, occasionally stopping at the 3-B to have a Newcastle and to read.

Once I met a girl there with whom I drank and played pool. Then we went to the Royal across the street where she ate what appeared to be a large, drunken meal of fettuccine Alfredo. She said the food there was good, although it looked like a lot to eat after 4 beers. I loaned her my book. I forgot what I was reading. Something serious, worth loaning in a way a serious reader loans a book.

Later, after the summer was over when I was about to return to college we met again so she could return the book whose title just evades my memory. The girl seemed significantly older if only due to the fact that she drank a lot and played pool and had a premature smoker's voice and seemed a part of the college life there where I had always watched the college students and even after taking some classes there, viewed them as much older than myself.


Bellingham lay right on Puget Sound anchored in the south by the Fairhaven fairy terminal, in the center by the Georgia Pacific Paper Mill, and in the North by the ambiguous industrial sector: a cement factory, a distant oil processing facility. And then inland, there were rolling hills that didn't seem to grow anything. There was just land and frosty tall grasses and evergreens stretching toward Mt. Baker, a mecca for ski bums who hitchhiked up their on the weekends.


People cut me, repulsed me, and the one's I wanted to get to know seemed utterly remote, intertwined with the hostile factions, the rebellious young men whose motives for doing what they did I absolutely didn't understand, who seemed part of one tremendous fashion statement that somehow set itself up as a way of life.



Driving into that landscape, my mother's skiing, smoking, architecture designing boyfriend behind the wheel of his Cherokee, I didn't see the beauty of that place. When does one start noticing the beauty of a landscape? I think for me it was when I had left all the pain behind after I left that place and found myself in a totally different landscape. And there, pre cut by everything, this new beauty cut me. It carved a huge gash into my soul which healed over like a tree's wound darkening my vision to everything that came after, spinning me around and around and then setting me loose into the labyrinth of early adulthood.



That's what the view of the Aegean was from the prow of a ship. Meanwhile, the people in Athens seemed totally different, immersed in cafe life, Vodka Lemones, sex and politics, intellectual-ness of a different order. Love seemed everywhere. The possibility was not utterly remote as it always felt in the Pacific Northwest. In Greece, it seemed like if I would have stayed long enough, I would have met a girl into being a girl, liking me in the unthinking, accepting way a girl likes a boy who doesn't know how to be other than how he is.



And so, coming home was like plunging back into this strange state of constant inadequacy, not being quite good enough. Return created a continuous link from my Californian childhood, the strife of growing up with parents whose egos were immeasurably larger than my own. An experience of the link with the past was in and of itself a stressful thing to feel. Although there was something else, something about the place itself, so relaxed, so intent on experiencing a condition of pureness, which was also stressful.

The people in my hometown seemed more than elsewhere intent on being pure, in terms of the things they ate, the clothing they wore. I heard them speak of going into the woods as an act of purification. They came out renewed. They spoke of their renewal, of their plans to baptize themselves again in the wilderness.

One year, I had a biology teacher who told us that she lived in a tepee. She lived in the tepee with her boyfriend. It seemed so odd. At 14, I didn't know what to think of it -- none of us did, and so we instinctively understood that something like that is best mocked rather than fully comprehended.

Although, looking back on it, I can almost fathom the weird series of ruptures and voids that led to her life in the tepee with her boyfriend, just as my own series of snakes and ladders has led to a life in Russia on the fringes of a profession.


I tried to avoid growing up for as long as possible perhaps because instinctively I knew it would be horrible. And the older I got, the more I filled out the shoes of my own solitude which was always somehow connected with the place itself which fed the odd germ in me which resulted in the odder plant. I fed off that place as a chia pet feeds off the sunlight in an inverse photo synthetic process producing an image's negative: the opposite of the home grown, organic, dirt fed native. I was a fraud, a secret Californian, an crypto Jew/Bostonian or else something, I'm not sure what.

"Are you from Boston?" I was often asked by the incomprehensible bumpkins of that ville. I had never been to Boston and still have not.

Going away felt like stepping out of that binding set of untraceable cultural signifiers that make a solitary a solitary. First Greece, then Eastern Europe, then Spain. I conceived of making travel into a kind of life. Elsewhere, I did not feel like an outcast. People noticed me, took interest in me even.

At first I thought they took interest in me just because I was a foreigner. But I am not so sure anymore. I was 19, 20. I must have been just like any young person of that age, worthy of contact. Only back home, I could never adapt to the elaborate cultural signifiers. I wasn't a part of a fraternity. I was a nerd, a blank. I wasn't even that. I was a map maker, a bag pipe player, a myth reader, an atavism, a slip of the collective unconscious. Alchemically, I was enmeshed within a different dimension and so could not fully participate in this one.

I think my undesirability was less felt by foreigners who did not understand that my hairstyle and clothing weren't hip, didn't care that I didn't snowboard or hike, weren't looking for pick up lines, but through the miserable European centuries, had come to appreciate my own brand of oblivious, open-faced interest. And so while I was probably noticed for my nationality, I must have been at least somewhat accepted for the fact that others weren't as aware of my unacceptability and thus must have noticed some of the creature that lay beneath all that American-bread misery.

I met a girl. I went to visit her where she lived on the Canaries. We rented a car and stopped to swim at every beach. We ate shrimps and calamaris in roadside cafes, and then I convinced myself that I had to return. The whole thing happened blindingly fast. I traced my way back in dreams, but somehow that wasn't good enough.



The sound of my hometown is the distant sound of the Georgia Pacific factory on an early December morning when the grass is frosty and your dog's finger nails skate along the icy sidewalk as you throw papers on front porches and look up at the stars dangling above the church steeple with your American religiosity intact contemplating the onset of the Christmas season and the holiness of winter which is the holiness of your own lost childhood, which is perhaps the holiness of humanity's lost Ithaca.

Those early mornings were some of the most beautiful mornings of my late childhood, when everyone was still asleep, when the people were all concealed. The human world drawn back like a curtain, something deeper revealed. An internal state of a universe brimming over with God. Not love. What was that? Love was contact. Love was something so far out of reach you did not even want to think about it. This was the eternal, the immediate unknown, and so on those early mornings you were all you and even a little less than you, a part of yourself lost within a distant star field.



The summer I returned to deliver the mail was not the summer of the Canary girl which seemed to breed 2 years of misery and longing which drove me nearly insane as I sought to replicate the simplicity of that encounter with college girls who expected in me some sort of simulacrum they heard about from somewhere; or else, in that fine-tuned economic way Americans have of spotting a wooden nickel, they knew from the start that I didn't quite belong.

Thankfully, that summer I returned to the mail room was only after Greece and so coming back was almost like re entering the meditative state of my childhood if I could forget the stress of linkages and the stresses of that human world which seemed at once incipiently relaxed and ideological.

On the way back from the mail room, I stopped in at Henderson's bookstore. The owner Robert was a taciturn man from elsewhere who, along with his girlfriend/companion/wife, loved Bellingham's natural looks and hated people in general. He especially hated Michael, the guy who owned "Michael's Books" across the street, who evaded his taxes and later became a Christian fundamentalist tombstone carver. I browsed the titles I always browsed then, Baudelaire, Kafka, Boll, Italo Calvino.

"What is it about guys who like Italo Calvino," said a blind woman 10 years later.

She was a beautiful blind woman who I met out in front of a Brooklyn cafe with her dog.

I didn't tell her that I had been one of those Italo Calvino readers, although I only really read the Baron in the Trees because long ago, in his desolate, divorcee flat in San Francisco, my father had mentioned the title.

I read the titles my father read, adopted the literary tastes of my father, but I also discovered other things like Irish and Welsh myths, the Mabinogian, the Icelandic sagas, Nikos Kazantzakis, Knut Hamson and Herman Hesse,. I read the entirety of Herodotus and even read about 200 pages of the Kalevala about those human Finnish gods occupying their various marshes way up north.

Later, after sifting through required readings no one likes but all pretentious people verse themselves in: Ezra Pound, Virginia Wolff, James Joyce -- I can't even begin to put forward a list of the books I read in class as a literature major simply because they were so god awful I couldn't read them thoroughly -- I gradually found my way back to imaginative writing in the form of Borges, Haruki Murakami, Celine, Orson Scott Card, W.G. Sebald who died tragically at the height of his powers.

Looking back on the sexy cafe life of Greece, I can't imagine having read these things growing up an Athenian, a beautiful Athenian girl in tow, my life neatly planned and satisfied containing other miseries I don't understand.

I can't imagine anyone reading the Kalevala who also drinks Vodka Lemones and sits in the Kolonaki whispering sweet nothing to a spandex-clad dark-haired politically-activated beauty. I can't imagine someone who knows what the Kalevala is, who isn't Finnish, being even faintly intelligible in any sense. To discover something like the Kalevala, on your own, at 15, you have to be nearly totally on the outskirts of society with a huge used bookstore on hand, and I can't recall seeing any huge used bookstores in the Balkans or in Russia for that matter. Although, I remember some in Krakow, which further delineates in my mind the marker which divides true authoritarian and post-authoritarian cultures from the rest of the world. Used bookstores. Bookstores in airports. People reading in public. Dictators turn reading into an idolatrous grind. Although Greece in many ways straddled that divide and was in any event a place I learned little about.



After getting my Newcastle, I would perhaps ride over the Stuarts coffee house where they had the poetry reading MC'd by Bob who dated all the girls in town. On one occasion I met a girl at Stuarts. I began to talk to her, heartened by my time away, heartened by my sense of having been someone else. We spoke of Greece. She said she wanted to go. I told her I had photos and offered to meet her the following day.

The next day after delivering the mail, I came equipped with the photos. She was in a hurry and so thanked me and departed. I wondered if she just came to honor her obligation. Later, I saw her on her scooter, a young man riding along back. For some reason, I still remember the young man, his black hair, yellow shirt, brown shorts, hiking boots. A wild child of nature. I was not a wild child of nature. I was a medieval child of forgotten 80's movie.



"You're scaring me," Miriam said.

We had camped out on a beach. Africa lay somewhere out over the water. I had crawled out of the tent to look at the panorama.

"Just, quiet, for a second," I said, overwhelmed by a feeling of perfection, that I was dong the exact right thing, the exact thing God intended I do which was camp out on a beach with Miriam Suarez on the Canary Islands. The sensation was overwhelming.

It was like a spore of that old place, that old solitary Christmas within my heart lingered. I was an unmellowed wine. And so instead of letting that moment pass over me like a civilized person, I momentarily divorced myself from the fellow creature who had helped bring it on in order to relish it like a desert saint, like a madman, like a Steppenwolf.

"I'm sorry," I said.

Later, she walked down to wash her hair in the ocean.

I was still whole then. The return wrecked me, as did the subsequent departures, farther and farther into the unknown, Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasaus, trying to recapture an experience that was not totally produced out of being a stranger in a strange land, but just from being 22, innocent, as worthwhile as any other 22 year old, not into sports, not particularly handsome or tall, but not ugly either, with things to offer.

I didn't know how to hold onto those moments. And the tawdriness of everything which came after still teaches me lessons if I am lucky.



I wonder why now the idea of a tropical landscape stresses me in a way that the landscape of my hometown doesn't. I currently have no desire for a Spanish beach, a Greek island. I want to be someplace where it's cold in the winter, where the frost blankets the grass in the autumn, where the leaves fall and where everything goes to sleep. Maybe Finland, like in the Kalevala, with the fir trees so green they're blue, the snow clinging to the branches in huge clumps and the dawn exploding with coldness, silencing the human world; where the stars hang over church steeples in empty, Dylan Thomas-singing streets.

No more desire for Greece: even for the Island of Hydra where Leonard Cohen went to live and where he met Marianne which gave birth to the song I wanted to listen to as I sailed across the Caspian Sea, as I trained across Siberia. No more desire for that Spanish island: just an ingrained knowledge of that place where she still lives lost to me with another who knows how to hold onto what is important.

I want to freeze in Siberia, to visit Freuchen land in Greenland, to live with the Sami, the Inuit.



I still on occasion return to that home that was never really a home but was as inhospitable and odd as a mechanically designated asteroid, an MX-37, and every time I return I feel the same feelings. Every time I return, I see the same people. I don't know these people. Perhaps once I was one of them making the rounds in Bellingham, from the coffee shop to the bookstore to the water's edge. We never found each other. Maybe if I had stayed, we would have, or else I would have grown into a solitude equivalently deep, in a way deeper than St. Joseph's hallucinatory desert realm of the spirit, and then it wouldn't have mattered.

There was that tall guy with the big glasses and ginger hair parted on the side. He wore his pants hiked high. I always saw him walking down by Michaels books where I think he might have worked, although I couldn't be sure.

There was the girl who walked everywhere. She was once small, but with all the walking grew bigger and bigger until she had massive, walkers thighs. She strode everywhere, downtown, all the way across town to the ferry terminal which sent ferries to Juno. Sometimes, I saw her out by the mall, having traversed Cornwall Park, striding through the inhospitable strip where nary a pedestrian tread.

There was the lonesome Michael Jackson impersonator, moonwalking on State Street.

There was Uncle Frank (the fake uncle of a friend) whom I always saw in cafes and who, as I aged, began to awkwardly ignore my presence, although this was a common practice among Bellingham residents, and I could count on being ignored by a variety of acquaintances. I think everyone could.

There was Bob the poetry MC who always kind of mocked me and who, as if by way of apology, had tattooed in large green lettering the words "Forgive Me" on the inside of his arm.

There were the ultra hip video store clerks who looked like characters from old Velvet Underground videos who acted like you were insane for talking with them about the movies you watched.

There was that guy who used to live across the street from us who practiced yoga in Broadway park and who had a correspondingly gentile yoga voice. One day as we played basketball in the street at dusk, he came out onto his balcony and shouted at us something along the lines of, "Shut up! My mother is sleeping!" I always saw him in coffee shops reading the paper.

There was the lady who as a 15 year old I occasionally chatted with in Henderson's bookstore. We once spoke of Sir Walter Scott. She was on a Scott kick. She spoke enthusiastically of the Waverly Novels. She had a pretty, bookish quality and I wondered if I were a bit older if there might not have been a spark. Years later, I saw her at Village Books in Fairhaven. She said she worked there for the discount. She was a great lover of books! And then, at last she was a person whom I saw muttering to herself in a coffee shop. Maybe she was having a bad day, and god knows I have been that same solitary coffee shop mutterer! But it was also as if she had grown so distant from the world, now in her 40's, she only had herself for company. I remember there was something cruel in me which kept me from reaching out to her, broaching her silence, reminding her of the day when she spoke enthusiastically of Sir Walter Scott.

I wonder what pain rips people from the rout toward love which at a certain point seems so blisteringly apparent! I wonder what strange, religious spirit drives people into a confusion so deep and a solitude so resounding it is beyond the solitude of the monk and the hermit because it is invisible and unacknowledged and unassisted and untended by the tender hands of supplicants!

As I write, I begin to remember. It's as if, at 33, I am picking up the pieces, remembering like a broken stick about when it was a part of a tree. I wonder if there is a way to grow back into that edifice of wholeness?



That summer when I returned to deliver the mail, I saw someone else I hadn't seen in years and never saw again. I saw Celeste the Tepee woman. She was at the Food Co Op. I don't know why I had stopped at The Food Co Op. It smelled like all health food stores smell. I think there was something about that smell, something which strikes some people as vaguely unwholesome but others as some kind of rallying cry, to join a band of brothers, to radically alter until all the vestiges of the old self die out and something new is born.

She stood before a bin of cashews. I said I remembered her from the old days. I found her voice as insincerely ebullient as I had found it years ago. She must have been just as old as I am now.



I am grateful that I have not wasted my youth in a tepee, but I wish I could go back to reconstruct myself as I was on the Canaries to not feel so much like I am dying.

I wonder if there's a way back, if I can sit here for long enough capturing all those moments and thereby regain my soul?

I remember the inbound flight, arriving in Las Palmas, Miriam awaiting me in the airport. I remember throwing my crab net into Bellingham bay, the way the line felt slick with sea water. I remember her skin so dark on her back there were patches of pink, I remember the way the sea air smelled on days the smoke from Georgia Pacific was blowing out; I remember her fearlessly kicking at bees that had hived in her phone booth, she as she was, complete, abundant, someone who I could never imagine wanting me yet somehow did; I remember Christmas Eve trying to believe in God but in the end trying to find something sublime in the attempt; I remember the way she cried when I left, the way I felt like I could return to the United States and be something more than what America saw in me.

Everything totally unrelated to these memories and the act of writing them down, my ambitions, my professional pursuits, is impure.