If All Else Fails

I would like to
introduce you to a collection of small night­mares of great consequence. My most startling
discovery in a recent trip to the United States was the writer whose works are now before you.
His discovery (one of the focal points of my obsessions is that perhaps it was I who was
dis­covered) encompassed a certain pervasive amount of envy in me.

In my histories of
nightmares I myself am about to dream, I would like to have written (and perhaps I will) some of
the nightmares in this book.

Witnessing the
birth of a new voice in literature requires a different sort of compassionate appreciation. We
must ap­proach the birth of a new kind of dream, never dreamt until this moment, without caution
or reproach.

What is before us?
What new thing in a world without new things? Detailed myths, relived tribal epiphanies,
du­plicated realities that were once closed off, walled off into a conspiracy of
isolation.

These are
prenightmares from the approaching Ice Age of the lost, the damned, the cruelly assimilated, Los
Indios. These stories before you, like shattered chains of brilliance, are therefore all the more
awesome. The reality of Los Indios, the American Indian you would call him in your country, is
both terrifying and beautiful. Perhaps it is even fatal.

These stories,
then, are like harps of temptations, thrum­ming with the crude power of an undiscovered cosmos.
To be heard by us, cowering like tamed beasts behind the walls of our curiously mundane
civilizations, the player of this or­chestra of harps must have a special, prophetic genius, else
we would never hear the notes he chooses to play.

And how brilliantly
the melody anticipates us in these sto­ries! We are in the presence of a beautiful performer,
within whose voice we find absent our own standards and panto­mimed mythologies. What is the
world herein depicted, its absences and excesses?

Of its excesses, I
know nothing or very little. This is a newer reality and we can only catalogue it by what is
miss­ing. For example, in this writer's wanton lexicon, the idea of chance is absent, as it has
been absent from the world of all children and all primitive peoples. In the presence, then, of
this man's writings, I am drawn into a religion of possession.

Each story, each
vision in this book, is a throw of the dice. The act of reading makes me a gambler. The role of
gambler is a familiar one to me and I have, as a consequence, ac­quired familiar expectations,
predictable compulsions based on chance, a comfortable part of my reality.

But with each of
these stories, with each throw of the dice, I, the reader, the gambler trapped in a changing
real­ity, feel in the service of an alien power. This then is a dan­gerous realm for the reader,
the gambler, to enter.

For with this book,
we risk the dangerous power of genius —of one who can construct a universe within the skull, to
rival the real. And it is a universe, we are sternly cautioned, in "The Bleeding Man" and in
other stories herein, that ex­ists, in desperation, without polite, civilized limits. For we are
told, are we not, IF ALL ELSE FAILS, WE CAN WHIP THE HORSE'S EYES AND MAKE HIM CRY AND
SLEEP!

Jorge Luis Borges,
1976

We was in there, a
place so posh they served old jokes in stirrup cups. Him out of prison, me studying for it. Both
Cherokee kazoo birds, getting high in high society, leaping up at the cocktail and catching flies
while the air whistled through our kazoo sides.

Yeah, we got
noticed. I think, patronwise, they was more thinking of having, you know, a full course of
orchestra or opera, maybe ballet watchers under glass. Anything but Turquoise Ties.

You tell us why we
were eating out, we wouldn't know. We were better at biting the dust than dining out. We
shouldn't have been there, but all the girls we knew walked sideways and we wanted to see one
that knew how to sit down straight without surprising anybody.

The waiter, with a
coat sharp enough to slice Puerto Ricans, is hovering around us dangerously, like a tree afraid
of losing its leaves. He's making us as nervous as we are making him. We can't take it much more.
It's worse than waiting for a flood to recede. We were all ready to go when she came
in.

Her. She sat down
so straight the chair barked. All the waiters fell down, covered with dirt, when they saw her. To
look at her was to feel unzipped in public. Her eyes looked like they would never tell you about
it either. She moved
like a sedate
funeral oration, no wasted motion. She had learned to arch her carefully pruned eyebrows at
Wimble­don. Just looking, you knew she had a Billie Jean King handshake and a Bobby Riggs
foreplay. You could talk about her but never quite touch her. She was the fifth ace in a
third-wheel deck. Too much.

"Wouldn't you like
to run your train over that?" he says and I am thinking I guess I would.

"She could get your
wheels really wet." Yeah. He's think­ing he would like it too. She's the woman hardhats aren't
al­lowed to have.

No good being rich
unless you know how to wear it. She wore it good. Clothes arranged by cyclotron and the work of
ten thousand generations of sleepless peasants, stitching their lives away into the hem of the
perfect garment. She had a cigarette-lighting routine with the gold case and ta­pered, contoured
lighter that said, TOULOUSE LAUTREC SLEPT HERE BUT ONLY ONCE. She was just about too dainty to
touch, all shot full of arts and crafts and Manhat­tan Uptown. A narrow face but beautiful if you
read women's magazines and believed what you read. Refined, cultured, pottie trained by the
proper schools and the proper family. Closest she ever got to dirt was flying over Pennsylvania
in a jet.

Even our waiter
ducked away because she came in like an event and stuck out like a horizon. Everybody rushed to
ride off into her sunset. Her voice, ordering with a nun's for­bidden-life quality, smooth,
repressed syllables, words that haven't lived until she utters them. The waiter bobs up and down
in front of her as if she were about to hand him a hand grenade with her fragrance on
it.

She was so very,
very good at being her. Everything about her was so exceedingly. Her perfectly formed feet were
exceedingly. Her cultured hands, Vassar nose, Jamaica
Midnight eyes, slow drizzle in them, maybe sexual. Every­thing about her was so very
exceedingly . . . something.

Her waiter, once
ours, galloped away like a tame dog to fetch a pair of slippers. She said thank you so
graciously, the waiter's hands perspired.

"I was thinking,
scratching my prison mentality for wormy thoughts and it occurs to me, we oughta look around for
a camera. Or maybe armed guards. I don't think we should be allowed to look at her without a
license. She's the Royal Crown Jewels with legs," he says.

"I gotta know her,"
I said. "She's the kind of woman who can have rubber balls for breasts and still be forgiven. I
wanna meet her."

He looks at me the
wrong way through the wrong end of his drink. "Are you out of your mind? You could get arrested
for rape for touching her used napkins! She wouldn't touch you with a ten-foot Indian agent." He
can't believe I said that. He sticks his nose in his drink and blows bubbles derisively. He
doesn't think I am serious.

"No. Really. I have
to try to talk to her, shake her hand, knee her accidentally in the tail, something. Just so I
can say I did it once. I want to comprehend her. I want to under­stand her enough to lose my
fascination for it."

"Huh? You're
drunk." Yeah. He's right. I'm drunk. Every­one is, one way or another.

"Man, just between
you and me and the rodeo circuit, I want to teach her how to make her belly button laugh and
cry.

He waves his arms,
disgusted. "She'll pull a tear-gas gun out of her lap and blow your eyes out the back of your
head," he said. He's really disgusted. "Course, I could be wrong; New York City women may wear
them in the higher hair. Maybe she'll pull it out of her armpit. Blow your face off
anyway."

The waiter comes
out in a one-man procession and gives
birth to a dietetic salad which he puts in front of her, hoping she will take it to her
breast and nurse it. She blinks once and he jumps away like he is afraid his hands will give
birth to another one.

"I wonder what she
does for a living."

That expression of
disgust again. I am making him consis­tent. "You're stupid. Hell, she just lives and everybody
else does for her. Forget her, she's out of our laps. Let's go someplace else. Goddamn waiter can
shove this place! The food's probably lousy here anyway. None of the truck drivers eat
here."

He gets up to
leave, the prison suit they gave him, tight around the shoulders. I'm still sitting there,
looking.

"You go ahead. I'm
going to follow her."