The Long Road Backwards

Let’s take a trip in time. From where I sit on this velvet couch, it looks like backwards, but time moves in all directions, and the arrows bend and shift depending on the light and drugs, and so nothing is clear. Everything is clouded in the fuzziness of uncertainty and this purple haze that seems to follow me in my musings.
But let’s take a trip. My carpet is in the corner, still maroon and soft after all these years. Step up, and watch your head on the Dogwood branches, they try to bite this time of year. Sit and relax, let the air from these heights fill your being, and like a balloon, we’ll go.
Rainbows and flames, the flapping of our carpet corners beat like footsteps. Down the road of history we travel, up the tales of time, through the stories inked and spoken. The echoes of generations fill my ears. Can you hear their murmuring?
The reflection lies up ahead, a strange mirror that stretches across the horizon, the merciless eye of time. Below I can see a brick road, gold and faded red and shaped like a helix. This is the path of DNA, written by an unknown hand and a fine tipped brush, carving its secret messages into each of our cells. Messages so simple and pure, so earth-shattering in their truth.

The questions begin to mount:
Where have we come from?
What stories have I forgotten?
Who am I?
Where did I get this funny looking monkey suit?

In an effort to reveal a link in my own chain, I face the carpet east, towards the land of my grandparents, Croatia. It’s time to go back. I pluck my father sleeping from his bed, in his gown and black socks. He is coming. He has never gone back, not in forty years. He has washed the questions away with time and weak wine, and a marriage that was built to last, but now, with me, he’s going.

And here I am. Holding a picture of my Dad in front of me. A picture of when he was young and full of answers that could have been easily broken. It was taken here, in Croatia, 42 years ago. He’s standing in front of the local church with his younger brother, both in their crisp altar boy outfits and shy smiles. In the middle of them is the local priest, staring into the camera lens solemnly.

I hold the photo like it’s the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. I let the image watch me from the past. They look at me, they look into the man they’ll come to know much later. I let their forms seep into my awareness and I begin to feel how the echoes of the past can vibrate into the present. The clarity of the moment shakes me, grips me with solid arms. In my Dad’s twelve-year-old eyes I can see myself, but I can also see his father, and the eyes of his father’s father, and back down the line of men until I can only hear the sound of a baby crying.

A wide, silent tear forms in my heart. There isn’t sadness. It’s something resembling joy, but not exactly. It’s white and clear and bright. Thoughts are absent, and I just look, holding the photo. I can see farther into time than ever before, farther into the line of men that would one day make me. The whiplash from the vision sends me spinning headlong into something that I call “now.”

Beneath me is a velvet couch, in the corner, a rolled up maroon carpet. Holding my thoughts is a pale flesh-covered body. Around me is fire and the past is but a burning ember in my hands. The photograph melts, turning into ashes of memory that float upwards, towards some distant planet, the place of forgotten memories.

In The Theater

I went to the movies yesterday, when the sun was bright and the sky was clear and the entire city seemed to be busy doing other things. I didn’t have a movie in mind, any would do. I walked through carpeted halls that smelled of popcorn, entering different theaters at random, number 12, then 2, then 7. I pulled the heavy doors open, just getting a quick glimpse of what was going on at the moment. Men yelling in the trenches, a girl walking down a forest path, a teenager in the back seat of a car, a man with a gun. I tried to avoid the temptation of staying in one place, I forced my feet to move, pushed my own elbows off the armrests by sheer will, quickly walking into the light-filled halls once again.
Soon, I realized that there was one theater I didn’t want to visit, I kept avoiding it with each pass. The door was covered by a maroon curtain, and just walking in front of it gave me an overwhelming feeling of dread and impending doom. Like a strange tide, I felt my body pulling me in the other direction, while another part of me knew what must be done. I escaped the light, the popcorn and the safe patterns of the thin carpet. I went in.
The previews were just ending. The movie was about to start and I looked into the rows of empty seats. I was alone. I realized they were showing the feature to an empty room. Not one sign of life. No oxygen, no carbon, no breath. And then the questions began: Why would they do that? Who would do that? Was the process so mechanized that the movie just begins and ends regardless of the audience? Was there a man up there, behind the flickering light, responding to orders? I looked at my ticket, I should not be here, not in this theater. The ticket I bought was for another movie, another theater, another audience, other seats. This show couldn’t be running just for me…they couldn’t know I was here, the lone man in an empty theater.
I sat down twelve rows from the front and in the center. In the film, aliens make the whole city fall asleep to steal their memories. Halfway through the movie, I realized I had fallen asleep on cue. Someone had yelled at me to stop snoring, but I looked around and found the same lonely chairs, the same quiet stench. There was no one with me. I had dreamed the yell.
I kept watching the movie and looked around every so often to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I found no evidence one way or the other, except that the movie seemed to be just ordinary scenes of ordinary people doing nothing in particular, and I wondered what had happened to the aliens.
I found myself becoming more intrigued by the green ‘exit’ sign to the left of the screen. I wanted to get up and go through it, to find the door or stairs or another world with an alien carrying my memories. I wished to walk beneath the sign’s green glow, only I seemed to be glued to my seat. A heavy metallic atmosphere pushed me down. The smell of plantain soup would come and go. I was confused by the green sign and its message. Was it informing me of the exit? Was it a suggestion? A command?
Meanwhile, the movie on the screen continued. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. And me, here, watching.

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.”