Her Voice

In the distance I can hear her soft voice singing. They are small little words on her short little red tongue.
"Tini-tini-tini-tini..."
Such a tiny little voice in a tiny little body. I can hear her singing somewhere in the distance. Maybe a few feet away, perhaps in the garden beyond the window, or maybe, even closer. With each note she shakes off a little more dirt, finding her way out of the coffin hidden in my scattered memory. The broken rusty nails have done their job, but now is another time, and the song awaits. The melody dances in the air, like a silk curtain catching a spring breeze. It comes out into the open air, wild and slightly chaotic in its form and carries me with it. I see it all.
I see El Salvador and my old small house. The house I left for the great open and cold expanse of the north. The people and buildings that are made of steel and scrubbed clean of their sweat-filled dirt. The people I left that lived in the sun, in the thick air that threatened to choke us all. We lived with the threat of fire, of revenge and anger. Even the ground birthed its demon and left it there, left it as a signal for all of us to remember. I looked out the window each morning at the volcano that shadowed us, always waiting, lurking so close, speaking only with a silent threat.
And I hear her voice. It has never faded. I hear my name and the voices of my sisters and mom slightly further away. Are they still nailed in there? Are they out there or in here? The darkness shows me nothing. I look and look. The garden is empty, the rooms are deserted. They must be in here. Buried deeper beneath a thousand memories and desires. How did they get there and how do they call to me now? They call my name in unison, like a chant. I take a deep breath and lunge forward. The corridors are dark, almost black, but the air is hot and so sticky. I drip with effort as my bare feet carry me further in.
Then everything explodes. The black turns into a million crystals and I watch them tumble towards me…all those little moments of light. It happens so fast, but I watch it stretch through lifetimes. Her voice calls to me and I watch the little beads fall. There is no end. No ground. No place to ever fall to. So I watch them move, up or down no longer matters. The categorization is as useless as the thought. They just go, and I watch the little beads of light trail away like shooting stars.
I hear her voice and see her little tongue once again. Her little body. The broken nails. The melody that drifts over me like a soft river. I look into the darkness and see an explosion once again, we tumble together, sounds, flesh, and memories, all dying together once again.

In The Labyrinth of Dreams

Ghosts and demons and aliens, all manifestations of my extreme paranoia, my Phillip K. Dick style mania. The world is not what you are. It is not what you are suspended in. It is a photograph, a movie projected on a screen in front of a paralyzed test subject. God’s test subject, watching the film called Life again and again and again, crying and laughing and twitching and wondering why. Why am I here? Why am I seeing this, feeling this? What possible purpose can it serve? Fleeing from captivity into the activity of the film, fleeing from the film into fantasies from fantasies about freedom back through fantasies that reflect the state of captivity. What if I am my own test subject? What if I strapped myself into this chair to see what worlds I could make in the shifting halls of smoke and mirrors called mind? I am God imprisoned by myself, encapsulated in magick and movies and dreams, lost in my worlds within worlds within worlds, murmuring I am this, I am that, I am, I am. The tiniest crack in the sidewalk is my greatest creation, the escape, the route from the surface to the depths and from the depths to the surface. The teardrop was an unexpected side effect, the beaker bursting. I thought it would hold. I thought I would hold. I thought, “I” and it was too small and it ran away without me, a shadow without the first form to command it. I am Peter Pan chasing my shadow, begging it to come back and stay with me, trying to make it stick with soap, but of course it wants to get away. It doesn’t want to break , but I break it just trying to be closer to it, trying to get inside of it, trying to be one with my creation. The Other. Another myself. It runs and I chase it. I am running. I am chasing, I am being chased and the illusion is being spun, the illusion that something is moving, when really I am sweating, strapped into the chair paralyzed, drugged. I have been given the injection. Something from outside was put in me. Did I volunteer for this? I never volunteered for this. They call me his most beloved because I volunteered for this, to be a creator like the creator. I volunteered to be his partner in this experiment, to create worlds within worlds, to be made in his image. Now it’s swimming in me, I am swimming in it. Oh to dream. To dream of white houses and children playing jacks on the kitchen floor and petting kittens in the garden and I cook the dinners and he comes home and hangs his hat and the children clamber into his lap and we hold hands and go to bed together to dream another dream. A dream. A place with four walls, a place that holds you down, holds you still, keeps you in so that you don’t spill out. A place that keeps the big one out, a place where the little hider can evade the big seeker, dreaming more specters to keep itself company. Here in the world of specters and houses with white walls they give you pills to keep you safe. Paranoid is sick. But the paranoid schizophrenic is made in God’s image. God is sick because you are running away, the thoughts spilling from her cracked and weary head. Not dead, but broken, and you, you demon, you devil, you runaway dream, you housewife in your yellow apron and posy pink rubber gloves are doing the breaking because you fear being broken.

Whirling Dervish

I was a young girl of eight years. Pale and soft, still smiling with the slightest provocation, still open to the world as it came in through my eyes and bedroom window. I had on a new white dress with yards of soft cotton fabric that lifted with the movement of my legs and floated like clouds and mermaid hair. It was my habit to stand barefoot on the front yawn and spin. On sunny days or the cool afternoons of fall, I would stand there and twirl with my arms raised, open, inviting the sun and wind to come to me. Layers of air would cut past me as I moved through space, cutting the air with my outstretched palms.
Sometimes I would close my eyes and just focus on the feeling of turning and turning, but most of the time I would keep my eyes open and see the blur of colors. Streaks of green and brown and blue. My eyes were a camera lens that didn’t have time to focus, just gagged streaks that darted and soft colors that called me “friend.” I caught the hazy image of a red car and the hedges dotted with pink flowers and red flowers. I was like a ballerina in a music box, turning because it was the only thing I wanted, the only thing I was. In my peripheral vision I could see the white of my flowing skirt and the tender neon green of the grass turning around my small white feet.
After many rotations, I would lose control of my head and the weight of it would pull back hard towards my back and I could then see the blue sky through the blurry green and yellow tree tops and the golden glow of sunlight. With my eyes closed now, I concentrated on the feel of the tingling wind on my face and hands and bare ankles. It rushed past, softly grazing my bulging cheeks. My beating heart thudded in a chest that didn’t seem completely my own.
With each pivot more air filled my lungs and the excitement grew in my belly. It was the edge, the verge of chaos. How long could I spin, how long could the skirt twirl around my thin legs and my smile hold? How long could my stomach hang on for the ride? How long before my eyes gave up on their attempt to identify the blurred fragments of forgotten forms? Just when would I collapse? When would the chaos topple me over, sending me back to safe stability?
My little feet turned and turned, moving in the same small space, turning and turning, taking me for the ride I wanted, always on the cusp of too much. Something that begins, must always end, and though I learned to endure and turn longer than I ever thought possible, breaking my own limits again and again, at some point I would always fall over, my body simply unable to handle the circles any longer.
When I finally succumbed to gravity and tired muscles, I would lie on the grass, the dew soaking through my dress, cooling my hot skin. Laying there with my eyes open, the world continued to move even though I had stopped. It contracted and pulsed in the flowing pattern of a giant kaleidoscope. I watched it continue to turn without me. An overwhelming, slightly scary feeling would wash over me as I realized, " I am part of the pattern. The shapes, the movement. It moves through me, it is me, and also nothing at all.”

City Soundscape

The sounds of a city rise and fall. The low rumbling of a Number 19 bus, the spurting of steam from stacks of silver pipes, the screeching of a wheel in desperate need of oil. Then silence…for a fraction of a second every noise vanishes in unison…then the jackhammer begins again. Then the Harley roars to life when the light turns green, it cuts through the city like a metallic knife, slicing it in two. And in the darkness, as the sun slips below the skyline of cement pillars, the volume is turned low by an unseen hand. Just the occasional bursting glass bottle, the sporadic deep throaty shout into the night. A lone car cruising on an empty city street. Just the drug addicts and work obsessed and graveyard-duty custodians move in the blackness of a near-silent night. The signal of light is the early morning grinding of the first train. Its riders, the sleepy-eyed occupiers of a fluorescent capsule travel through permanent darkness below ground. An airplane coasts along high above, giving off a rumble so deep it seems inaudible.
The city is the grind and noise of eccentric youth in a dimly lit garage. The music of metal meeting stick. The sound of rocks on asphalt, screeching vocals, un-tuned chords.
It is not composed. Not practiced. Each sound exists as an individual, bursting forth and dying without a thought of the overall piece, without any purposeful connection to the entire city soundscape. These sounds can never learn another way, they will never be a conscious symphony. The bus will always be guided, the plane on its own course. The birds move on their own time, with the wind and the sun. The shouting comes sporadically, from anger, from alcohol, from confrontation. Each sound bursts forth like the wind, unplanned and spontaneous. Let the young conductor walk away in frustration, some things cannot be guided.
The sounds simply Are. Rising and falling with the moon and subsequent sun. They can not be tuned or made into something pleasing. You cannot blow life and consciousness into the subway, you cannot regulate the sounds of construction work to peak in the last measure. And once it is understood that the behemoth of gears and steam and metal cannot be molded, your mind might then be free to hear it as it is. Their sources might be as dead as metal, but their noises, moving through you as they will, can induce moods and emotion. As the vibrations travel through muscle and fiber, through you symbolic constructs and your private inner language, you might be changed.
Approach it softly. You can find life in the grinding of machines, just listen. That is all that can be done. It cannot be constructed. Its sounds cannot be reformed. Just listen. Listen as the birds squeak hidden in a tree, listen as the sound of a motorcycle peaks perfectly with the clicking of high heels on a sidewalk. It cannot be tuned, but you can tune yourself. The city cannot be molded, the orchestra moves in its own random order, without thought and planning and careful practice. The sounds cannot be changed, but you can learn to hear the perfect beauty in its clashes, clanks and booms. Your perception is the one thing that can be consciously altered. Listen to what is here before you. Listen for what is and not for what isn’t. Maybe in that small change lies the secret of its roaring music.

Inevitable

The night is dark and the window opens unto only more of the same, blackness. My eyes are open, so open that I can see beyond the room and beyond the green lawn outside the front door and further down the street and around the corner and many miles and many freeways ahead of me.
I see him, in his small chamber. Not a sacred space cultivated by love and attention and smelling of sage and musty sex. I can smell the burnt spoons and the burnt foil and the rotting garbage that is never attended to. I see his hunched form, so pathetically large and small at the same time. I hear the soft buzzing of the single light, how can such a small bulb emit so much energy? How come I can hear it worlds away, here in this small blackened room, my wife next to me sleeping, undisturbed by the vision of a crumbling man. A man alone. A man that weeps without tears.
The burden is mine alone. In the hours before light, while the moon creeps across the sky, I know that he is awake too. I feel his heart racing…racing so fast. Not from lovemaking or any other activity, he has sat on that bed for hours, days perhaps, pissing into jugs when he feels the need. He only moves his hands and arms. From his chest to the plastic bag to the glass tube to the lighter, then back down to his chest as the rush comes over him and takes him on a ride away from sadness and those unstoppable tears and that pain that never seems to quiet down. Those couple of seconds, that buzzing ride, is the only respite he will have until the need comes once again. And it will come. And he will answer.
“RRRIINNNgggggggg!!!!”
I am startled out of thoughts, my wife jumps, grabbing onto me from habit. I walk quickly to my cell phone on the other side of the room, picking it up off the desk. I do not recognize the number.
“Hello?”
I hear an automated voice.
“This is a collect call from a correctional facility. If you wish to accept the charges, please press 1, now.”
I press one. So he is there, he is finally in the place I hoped for him to always avoid. He is not in the filthy chamber I imagined, but in another made of glass and concrete and populated with the cruelest of eyes. Even more decrepit, lacking even more warmth. Truly windowless. This is it. He is there and I listen to his silence, see his brown eyes darting back and forth, looking for my shape and hearing only the buzzing and beeping of an institution and the automatons that inhabit it.
I feel sorrow, pity, and pain. I hear his breath in the phone, it is erratic. Neither of us speak.
Why do I spend so much time, so much energy and attention on my brother’s needs? On his wishes? It is the middle of the night, his dreams take the space of my own. His nightmares fill me. His unconscious shapes and struggles, they hold my eyes open in the darkness. Do I fear his death more than my own? How long have I tried to protect him? From himself…from my visions…from my daydreams…
He is cold and shivering, surrounded by brick walls and with far more enemies than friends. He is trembling, and I know that his trembling is the result of another frightening vision. He has seen the monster. It rushes towards him, and it is terrible and ugly and distorted, but it is his face. His body that has bulged on the top and shrunk at the bottom. He has seen himself, the terrible vision of a man never known. A man that demons calls their servant. I stand right next to him. I watch him and his friends as they are attacked by a group three times their size. I hear the sounds of bones turning to pulp. I hear the soft whistling that accompanies pain.
I feel his fear, his loneliness.
I fall down into a dark abyss. I let myself be consumed in an immense void that seems to open up from within the center of my being.
Death itself roams the rooms of my house, it tramples the green lawn outside, it takes the brother I once had. Fear is upon me. Total fear. My body is a sweaty cage.
He is alone, and he weeps.
I’m escaping…I’m escaping…
“Hello?” he says.
“Yeah, I’m here. I was just thinking about you.”

The Ritual

The small window lets in no light, not even a flickering star finds its way to the bedside. The dark sky looms like a giant, encompassing totality in its blackened gaze. I raise my head slightly and look to the end table. A red light informs me of our tilt on a spinning orb: 4:31AM. My neck releases its weight and I fall to the pillow like a rock thrown to a still lake. Soundlessly. Effortlessly, cast by an absent hand, a missing intention. Rain falls on the window, it hits so silently, like a thought never spoken. Just a moist, quiet mood is revealed. Just me and the perception of movement and inaudible splashes. Rain clouds open in the night, opening and releasing the pregnant fullness of water, quietly fucking the land that waits below. And if their meeting is silent, what is it that speaks in whispers? Who brings the nameless mists into this dark room, the reverberating echoes of ancient Espers?
Bindhi meows. I hear his plea, his hunger unconcerned with the red light of the clock or the dark time or the tired bodies that drift between lands. I feel Heather’s weight shift and the bed moves and I hear a door opening. A small jingle bell catches my ears. The bed shifts again, I feel a hand on my stomach, "You didn’t complete the ritual," I say. Like a child’s voice she would later say, in the arms of the night, my words, my sounds, were untainted by demands and adult interactions and years of accumulated memory. Like a child’s voice, she would say when light had shaken me and all hints of that innocence were well hidden once again.
Other stories call and the dreams start to tear at the known and I think of all the little people inside, looking out but rarely speaking. And I know that I am them, and their fears are mine, and my unspoken truths are theirs. All of us, on the edge of being completely forgotten, quietly watching the shadow show like a TV with no switch. Like faded family photographs, portals into the memories of birthday parties and the first bicycle and siblings in front of a Christmas tree. All these faces silently watch me, looking into me, seeing my future, wondering where I am.
Suddenly Bindhi jumps on the bed, he walks to the edge and nuzzles my head. I hear his need, his plea once again. As silently as the rain, I pull the warm covers away and step onto the forgiving carpet. I walk to the kitchen, the small jingling sound following me for thirty feet. I pour some dried food into his bowl and then I use the bathroom. He follows me back to bed and the ritual is complete.

The Warm People

Oh the things that they do, the warm people, the people with lovers and pets and warm beds. They have rituals. At a certain time, food is prepared, stories are read, television is watched, baths are had. Things are cleaned and prepared for the invocation of life. There is a woman in the kitchen and she cleans it and then she cooks in it and all of the many creatures of the household are fed. Her life, her love flows out from this central place, the hearth, the kitchen where the stove burns warm and she dances from counter to counter preparing the magick that will keep them all turning and dancing. They will dance out the doors and into the world and will toil and work there. They will find reasons to smile, moments of greatness, and also moments to weep, moments when they are injured by cruel words or harsh glances or casual accidents. Then they will dance back into the home, drawn by the golden threads of the hearth, led back to the place where they will be nourished and prepared for new conquest, new triumphs, new failures. Each one has a place in the dance. The soft cat curled on a chair, the bristly dog sniffing in the yard, the woman and the man and the little people. The warm people thriving in their special place, their place where they can be all together.
Are they real? Or are they a dream? A dream of the cold people who lie alone and gray, who rise and wonder why, whose stoves are cold and whose refrigerators are empty. They eat ramen from the microwave. If there is more than one sharing the same roof, they eat their ramen separately at different times whenever their stomachs growl. They watch television, but not together, each in their own room, each tuned to a different station. If there is a man and a woman, then they sleep with their backs to one another, aching with loneliness. If there is only one or the other, they sleep very little, staying up late to chat in online forums, to play computer games, or to read penny romance novels in a bathtub scented with lilac bubbles until the precious heat is gone.
Are there any warm people? I have always supposed that there were. Watching the Cosby show on the television late at night in a giant empty house where the lights are kept off to save electricity. A house set at the foot of a dark mountain where there are children and a mother but the father is gone, where the dog and the cat sleep in a wooden house set in a lonesome field. Sometimes the mother brings the cat inside, because it is a baby, small and white, and the father is not there to enforce the rules of the house. They eat cold food off of a platter and sit on blankets spread over a hard wood floor and watch the warm people on the television set.
For a while they are the warm people. The people who laugh and hug and have what they need and are happy with what they have. Then the kitten goes back outside to huddle with the dog and the children travel down the long dark hall, running so that nothing grabs their legs from the inky darkness. They crawl into an enormous bed and the mother sings until they sleep and goes away down the long dark hall and finds her own enormous bed adrift in the black night and then she sleeps or she weeps.
I know that the cold people are real. I have lived among them. I am still one of them. I strive to be the warm on one hand and on the other, my life unfolds as it was set to unfold. In the beginning I was among the cold, and in the end I will be among the cold. The father is always missing, the kitchen is always cold. The darkness is always encroaching, and the kitten is kept out of the home.