No one notices the negative space around life. Surrounding this town, between trees and businesses. Around the chatter of the afternoon; around our rustlings in your room, the negative space tracing the contours of your insomniac sleep of the undead… Walking down your street I passed by your house. The window was open and from out on the street I could see you, very small in the little wooden window frame lying down on your bed. It was noisy outside but I could tell it was quiet in there like nothing could touch you. A hot patch of air was hanging down on you, low down and all around you like a careful cloud while you slept. Wind whipped at my ankles and I could hear it gathering all the power of the neighborhood up with the dust and leaves. I had walked for two days to this spot. Pressing my hands against the sidewalk — your sidewalk — brought back all the soot and sticks scratching along the surface. My gaze fastened on a leaf rising on the wind and it brought me up to you, seeing you through your window but you can’t see me. Oh Seth! What am I doing out here without you?
Let me in, baby, I’m tired out here. I walked so far. I’m desperate for your love!
I found an open window and crawled inside —
My face suctioned to oozing particles in the dark, seeping grey languid memories chewing nostrils bristling with acrid-smelling flesh, pure inedible stain of memory, we nibbled at each other. I’m beginning to see you for what you always were, a nice boy whose whole life was spent avoiding potential scams. I knew you never had anything to do with any of this. I’m not so sure now that you even ever left your room. But now that you’re back there, amongst your things, it just seems so
right
.
You sweet sweet little pony-man. Why did I ever think I could keep you?
Birds and twigs scampered around on the wooden floorboards leaving scratches in the dust at my feet. Your blood had dried in tan crusty pleats all over your stomach, all marks your ex-girlfriends had made in an effort to get to your soul. I guess I never thought of you that way. Listen to my heart, you said, as I petted your forelock in a downward motion with the palm of my hand… The most tragic room in the world! No one would ever know.
Solid grey sheets of dusted cobwebs connect leaves and shoots. A thousand forest flies buzz their wings in the tall trees. The cats are in hunting mode today. Elsewhere the stolid hum of a dirt bike sneers off in the distance. All this, mingling with your fridge — that vibrating plastic trap — makes the whole place seem like it’s ready to blow. Any given slip of paper can only be folded in half exactly seven times. I read this once, but thought of it again this morning, not quite awake, but y’know not quite sleeping. And it’s true, I tried it over and over again and each time seven is the magic number.
Taste me as a way of being me
. We hide inside our thoughts and wrack our brains trying to come up with something to say. There is nothing to say, this is it. That last bit was all that was left.
I got in bed next to you.
It’s all right
.
The sky darkened on one of our last conversations. The one where he asked, “What’s important are feelings — do you have any?”
“Not really,” I replied, a little surprised there had been so little resistance on my part in letting that out of my mouth. “I’ll be your robot, c’mon.”
“That’s bullshit. That’s a cop out and you’re a lazy fraud,” he cried, rushing toward me.
There’s no way to really end this discussion gracefully, I thought.
“How can you live like this?”
“I guess I just keep thinking that one day it’s going to catch up with me and I’ll just be devoured by the crisis of the century. Until then it’s business as usual.”
“You can’t live this way —
people
don’t live this way.”
He tacked that on as if I aspired to join their ranks. The truth was, I was lazy and stubborn — a control freak of the highest order and I was never coming down. The story about the robot that woke up feeling human feelings was the most epic disaster of them all.
Cabbage moths, animal tracks: fresh? Old ones. Sand on the beach makes holes for my feet.
I singed my hair with long white candles and covered my face with tar. I lived as if in mourning on the edge of a lake. No one messed with me. I baked my own bread out of acorn meal and gathered flower seeds in the middle of a many-stringed storm of red raindrops at the top of a hill.
Further away at the mouth of a beach cave there was a large sea anemone, a static guard I wasn’t sure was even alive, only that it sat there like several hundred pounds of raw meat, salivating. Oregon beaches are like some space landscape, total unreality. Finding some dog prints in the sand I followed them up a trail to the edge of a ravine full of stinky feathers trapped with sand.
Rough rocks ground underfoot and cracked into smaller and smaller pieces with each move I made.
Mother hatched from the sea. The breath of a solid white shell enclosed her. She was cursed to walk up and down the beaches, tethered at the ankle by a stretch of kelp half a mile long held at one central point below the water. Her leash lay curled around a rock. She was bound; her hair swirled around her like an ancient cloud, banishing all sound.
In our twisting at the length of our restraints we began to recognize each other. Out of the mutual language of dead dust, dusted years, the two of us would never be the same.
She looked in the mirror and saw her future-body staring back at her, emerging out of the cloudless glass, a shadow inching across and blinking through two eyes like plastic eggs. She had hatched into a perception of her own future-self, however much it remained still tethered to her dreams, cast to the bottom of the ocean on an anchor of kelp, stones, and bubbles.
Passed out in a fever fog, under a black sky and the beach, where the only trees were horizontal brown stalks sorted and skinned by the tides; carbon dioxide seeped into my brain and poisoned me with its noxious dream coma — all I can call my own is this. There is nothing else in this world I can claim. I own this sickness, this poisonous fog. And I own these thoughts, orange and sticky.
I shook my head and thought, “Too many words.”
I get the sinking feeling that I’m gonna be here forever
. I traced into the sky: f-o-r-e-v-e-r… In this world, there’s no edge, no junctions or seams, just endless rounded corners — the sanded contours of hell —
Summer ticks away
What have you been up to lately? they all asked her, poking their heads into view as she sat scrunched on the sidewalk. She turned squinting into the sun and inertly replied, “nothing,” then slowly lost consciousness until they all walked away. Kim’s rule of thumb, as I took it to heart was, “don’t think hard, think deep.” It carried over into every facet of my life… We receded to the edges of life. Concerned only with seams, borders, rims, outskirts, we took refuge in these places. Where actual life became real. We hid inside you —
A dish of salt and cat food sat at the mouth of the cave, the crystallized remnants of some kibble left out a long time ago for some neighborhood animals. Where had they been? Did anyone notice that all of the raccoons and cats in town have disappeared? Uneaten saltwater kibble in dishes all over town — something tremendously suspect had occurred.
Close by, a coven of “witches” stirred a cauldron of wax on the beach. Their sea rituals consisted of nights and days spent without sleep. Grabbing at whatever was meant to keep them awake. This particular afternoon: wax.
All tribes convened on the beach. It was usually dark enough so that no one could really see anyone else’s markings too clearly. This beach was not like others. It looked to have been visited, like a shopping mall came by and shook out its clothes on the sand and all the little mites fell out and crawled away. The beach is a public place, like a park. Some are fancier than others, some more policed. This one seemed to cushion the bodies from all walks of life, providing shelter for all kinds of itchy semi-legal activities. The peasants have gutted the palace of the old regime and now lie sleeping in piles of shavings in every crevice. The beach offered precious few places to hide so inhabitants pulled in partitions from various sources, erecting shelter in recognizable shapes from all over town. I walked until I thought I passed all the people to where it was just sand again. I felt my body fusing with a man I loved — only I didn’t know him. He held me at arm’s length and it drove me crazy. Why couldn’t I just walk away? What had he gotten from me that I needed so bad I couldn’t leave without? I didn’t even recognize myself anymore.
Crunchy ropes of red kelp wrapped around the tree trunks — a mass of many-legged seething shells crossed leaves and twigs from one bank of foam to another. Snakes slipped quietly from leaf-mulch gruel into foam at the place where the banks dissolved into water and traced a path to the bottom of the ocean. This world is black. Shiny black water filled with salt and many stones, hard leaves cracking into many pieces — swirl of twigs and salty foam. Seahawk nest fibers floating and sticking to tree trunks. It’s all over now. The hawk dips silently into the foam and skims forth a sea snake with its jaws held steady open and — lunge. Bite. Who falls? — dies?
I gathered slivers of white soap out of a grey-water runoff into a rough basket. Gathered flower seeds off of the hill, scraping grasses into tightly woven disc-like baskets. All along the beach reed tents stood next to giant piles of stones and mussel shells. Steam came out of holes in the sand and rocks hid baskets full of salty flowers.
I pounded piles of flowers and roots with a mortar stone and pestle and dumped it into a hole in the sand lined with fern leaves.Fern leaf juice leeched out into the sand. And I felt something in common with the sand as I sucked fern juice into my mouth, chewing on the briny poultice. Fire pits in the sand. Piles of charred flowers. Sea salt, seeds roasted in baskets of coals. A mountain of mussel shells as high as a tree blowing up in angelic clouds of razor dust in the offshore wind. Seagulls approached with seeds for eyes; I whipped stems at the sea birds.
Piles of shells. Flakes of barnacles caked underfoot. Seeds made shapes at the bottom of baskets. Reed mats twisted under piles of coals. I pierced tufted beads of chamomile with small rabbit bones. Rabbit bones clanked in the fire. Pits in the sand filled with cooking rocks, ashes — and rabbit bones. Rabbits rustled at the edges of the grass. I blew into my fist like the sound of a cornered rabbit and all around huge bulging eyes rushed to the edge of the bush.
Foxes woke up from their long winter sleep at the sound of the cornered rabbit across the clearing. Across the beach cornered embers spit themselves against the sides of pits dug in the sand, charring perforations in the fern leaves lining the pit.
A young boy/man appeared before me, long blond hair of the warriors of the lumber town squats to the north. I recognized his kind. The rough Pendleton jacket reeking of polluted coffee. He stood solidly upright, as his kind tended to do, but he was eyeing me with a perplexing look that I didn’t recognize, like it shifted so fast my eyes couldn’t gather focus and hold it even though I fixed his gaze. It was as if it was oscillating between two sides of a coin. I wasn’t sure if I could “master” him, and it churned my stomach. He got closer and appeared to have no legitimate business on this part of the beach. “What are you doing?” Just kicking stuff around. He approached me and his voice was slight and forgettable. He settled on a big flat rock, staring at the empty space behind me, hair blowing slightly in the wind. That
killed
me. I had never seen such a ludicrous head of hair as this: long and blond like a babe’s but unkempt, neglected and dusty like a man’s. Is this a lumber town thing or what? He was more than a little pasty. But then again this wasn’t a beach that ever really saw the sun. I stared hard. He was pointy, underfed, but still big and unwieldy with light, unfocused eyes that looked like he might be legally blind.
He pounced, fastening himself to me; he brought me to the ground. Sand got everywhere, most of it came from him. “Who are you? What are you doing on the beach?” “No,” he kissed me. The boy/man seemed to appear out of coordinates fastened to my animal mind. He seemed assembled out of my own fractured territory of desire. There he was, bounding out of this landscape fully formed, his coat of armor strong but spongy, punctured in all the right places to let his poison flows of love seep out and stain me. He acted like he already knew me. The more he talked the less I listened and pretty soon I discovered that he adored me; he swept in and I felt him hanging right in front of my face, a trick fog stinging my face and clouding my mind. I didn’t know him. I felt him take my lips — he may well have been touching them with his eyes. He gathered my mouth and sighed inaudibly, I felt it rattle my teeth. He sighed and said I want you, I want you —
His flesh felt like it was suffering. I could taste it on him, the mortification of the only one left alive… He was so young. He was on top of me and out of the corner of my eye I spied a crappy shed and wished I could be inside as he abruptly stopped and shifted away from me. He moved around agitated and perched, catlike, with his eyes fixed to the horizon. He stretched out in the last swallow of sunlight on a large flat rock in front of me. “You cannot be comfortable there,” I said. “But I am.” His body smelled of salt and laundry detergent, fairly consistent with every other man under thirty I had ever been with. Do you know who I am? I asked, Why did you choose me?… He gathered me up in his arms and turned me to face him. He kissed me. “I’m in love with you, I’ve been watching you from far away. I followed you here.” I choked on a lump in my throat and was getting ready to cry. My heart soaked through my shirt. “Please tell me you understand,” he said. “I don’t know.” He kissed me he nipped and sucked at my throat, “Please tell me it’s okay.” “I don’t know if it’s okay… who are you? Where did you come from? Do you live here on the beach?” I felt like I was folding in on myself, seven times, half, half, half, and tightened when I found I couldn’t fold any smaller. I lay frozen, my hand moving over his body, shifting, conflicted, unsettled. I felt the sand locked in his hair. I shook it but it stayed. “Were you born here?” I asked. He kissed me, “No but I will die here — ”I will die here with you.