Writing about writing

Objects spark single thoughts that turn into stories. The sweater on the ground, Isabel gave it to me long ago when we shared a converted barn in the Sicilian countryside. She washed it and gave it to me as a gift, it was the first time I wore green. I loved it. I wore it until I washed it in hot water and shrunk it down to a baby size, but I still carry it around.
There is a scrawled note hiding on the edge of my desk. I wrote it yesterday when I was groggy with sleep, the message was the only thing that kept me from crawling back into bed. These are objects that I want to write about, that I could spend the next lifetime weaving into interlocking tales that mingle with new worlds of understanding.

Fingers are positioned on the keyboard awaiting electric messages from my brain, but what if I could turn the fingers into the brain? This brain is a few seconds behind.

This is the tail and we have come to take over. No more agonizing, these fingers are alive, not moving from the brain but from that deeper voice that lives in the folds of the body, in between the finger nail and the resting place where the earth lies. That little space between order and chaos, that widening spot, ever expanding.
These are the fingers, the tail, moving across the screen. My eyes are almost closed, the fingers move, let them move, dance, what words does the tail have to write now?
The fingers aim to keep up, don’t let the head get in the way. It wants to think, agonize. What will they all think of me?
No, this text will not be like that. We are not writing for prizes. Here. We are not hoping someone will fuck us for these words. We are fucking with these words. Now. Right now.
Universe, it's ok, open up. These words are coming straight from the tail, no flourishes to coat the spinning movements.

I am writing about writing. I am writing about these fingers on the keyboard. My fingers moving faster than I have ever seen. I watch, detached, watching the body take over. I have a seat like a woman in a box office at the opera, I watch the body go.
I am writing about writing, and writing about writing does not win awards, but I am moving and the experiment goes on without permission.
Move aside to let the body dance. I am so tired, it moves without me. I take a slow breath in, narrating the space in time that I occupy.

The fan is spinning constantly, drowning out the footsteps above. There is the heavy scent of smoke outside seeping in through the holes in the roof.
Where is the fire? The sirens? I check outside and then write about writing. Again.

My eyes are closing. My body is almost asleep, it goes faster than it ever has, there are typos and types and I think about the green sweater, how she folded it all up and came to me. We stood in the hallway under a bright light, a bare bulb, all the Sicilian hills covered by the absent sun, the volcano scattering ash and red fire outside the window.
It was the first time I ever wore green. She gave me the algae of the sea and I amassed a collection of turquoise and blue and green and all the colors of the mermaid palette.

Eyes squinting, straining to see the thread to weave a tale. Nothing is there, but then it comes, a rainbow of words that ekes out its breath on the back of a mouse’s tale. Two words, matched only by language.
Come to me, you rainbow, let me take you to where the story begins, where I think it begins. I can only see as far as the light shines, other worlds and times are left in the shadows of this planet.

This is where I think it begins, at the birth of a new sun, a son. A sun that shines on, giving its dark parts to the gods and its light to the mortals that will one day cause havoc.
Nothing is coming to me! Everything comes. Dry eyes are stinging, pupils dilating to adjust to the brightness of the screen at one in the morning. It’s too bright.
But thoughts on Mondays in the sun come to me, I think of the story started long ago, so long I almost forgot about it. And then there I was.

I should get up. My body wants to stay in place, the pillow, a cloud of delusion. But I can hear something urging me up, the moment is passing, soon it will be a memory. What could have been written, what might have come out from the space between thought and fingers and feelings, from the hidden tube that links all of the universe.
One hit, one body, keyboard and screen.

The words flow, but my mind can stop them up like an old plastic stopper in an bathtub. Thoughts of recognition, awards, competition, oh those thoughts will stop this flow, stop it dead.
The fingers keep moving, my right hand is itchy, stinging, yes, the habits of the body will stop these words too. Not just ego, for if that does not work they will send the itches, the bitches.
Brilliant ideas are few and far between, but the words come out anyway. Brilliance will be judged by the few who read this. The mouse and its rainbow tail.

I write about writing, write about the words coming, write about the fingers and my eyes that are shutting and the body that longs to itch or go back to the pillow. This is a mouse’s tale, a mouse’s tail.
What you are reading is the middle of the story, there was a beginning, a place where the light does not, cannot, reach, a place not even I can see, me the teller of this tale.
There will be an end, an end of the page, my death, the end of these words. But the story will continue. One day a star will blink and she will pass me the sweater. It was the first time I ever wore green.

Schism

It is so easy to fall, fall, fall. You think that you have a place, that if you were to vanish people would notice. They really know me. That’s the way you feel when they look you in the eye and say your name, your parents, your lovers, your co-workers, your friends and teachers. There is so much power in a name.

Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles. Me as I thought of myself. Tromping up the stairs to my third floor studio apartment, heating water in the microwave, stirring ramen in a Styrofoam cup, flopping over the blue coach, watching the hands of the clock dance gracefully around.
I work in a bookstore on Valencia; Hargroves. We are the oldest booksellers in the city, dealing in used and rare books as well as new. Every genre. I collect occult treasures. Why?
When I was 7 my father came home with a bag full of toys and books he had found in a dumpster. One of them, a lime green paperback with purple trees on the cover, he shelved without examination and forgot. I forgot it too.
Six years later I was thirteen and bored. Scanning the shelf I realized that as many times as I had seen this lime green book nestled among the others, I had never read it. I had never even noticed the title. What was it like, opening that book and discovering that something so extraordinary had been sitting there on the periphery of ordinary life? Dizzying. There was everything in that strange book, from instructions for using soda pop as a douche, to conjuring the devil by killing a black rooster at a crossroads.
The point at which I became frightened was the moment when I discovered the invisibility spell. It called for boiling a white kitten alive. It upset me enough that I never finished the book. I gave it away with a lot destined for the local thrift store.
Gone but not forgotten, the many mysteries it suggested clung to my mind, the impossible set side by side with the probable, ritual sacrifice and home remedies printed hand in hand. You could say that it haunted me. The strange thing, the most disturbing thing, was that while other details remained crystal clear, the title vanished from my memory.
At Hargroves I purchased and sold books, shelved books, boxed books and even wrapped them. I studied every occult title that came through our doors looking for that one unnamable book, because its mystery clung to me. I thought that if I could only set eyes upon it again, see the name of it printed clearly between the two purple trees, then I could face it as an adult, dispelling with unerring cynicism the awe and terror it had evoked in the child.

I have fallen in this black hole. This no place, no face nothingness. Still life goes on, whirling twirling figures of a cuckoo clock. Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short-cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, still works at Hargroves. She still lives in the studio on the third floor. Her boyfriend Thom still takes her out for ice cream on Sundays, a movie or a show on Fridays. Her flighty friend Tess still texts her when she wants to swing by for a cup of Ramen and a jam session, Tess on bass, Sam on the Theremin. Margaret Pearson recently sent her daughter an Easter card with a pair of pastel toe socks.
But I don’t know who that is reading the card, wiggling toes in new socks, kissing Thom under a lamppost. I don’t know who is in there because I am out here hanging on the fringe of the abyss, watching this curious cuckoo dance, observing the name and face I once believed was my self, now functioning autonomously.

I was spread over the couch, legs dangling over the armrest, inspecting a new acquisition. No, it was not THE BOOK, but simply a book that reminded me of the first. It was an independently printed publication bound in the early 70’s, filled with an odd assortment of spells and drawings and rife with misprints. I generally only glanced through the insides of these books, sometimes leaving post it notes on pages I would scan later.
I was not a practitioner of magick, only a collector, an amateur archivist. It had never occurred to me to try any of the spells or rituals suggested in these curious volumes, at least not since my encounter with the unnamed book of my youth. What then happened to me that night, a Sunday after 6pm, which made me change my habit?
As I said, it reminded me of that book my father had rescued from a waste bin in San Bernardino in 1986. Like the first, it contained hand drawn flourishes upon each page to add a mystic edge to the courier type.
I was alone. Thom was out of town for the funeral of a great uncle. The afternoon sun was spilling in through the window like liquid gold drenching the sofa in radiance. The page I was looking at was so vague. It said:
“To free your real self… burn a candle and write your name on a mirror three times before bed. Extinguish the candle and leave the names over night.”
It seemed so benign. There were no demons to summon, no animals to sacrifice, no rhyming chants to twist my tongue over. It sounded like a nice empowering psychomagical act, something a feminist hippie psychotherapist invented for slumber parties.
I put the book away and went for a leisurely bike ride around the lake. I ate my customary cup of ramen, took a long shower, slipped into my footed pajamas and lip-synched to lady gaga in front of the mirror. When my performance was over I grinned at my reflection, and, on a whim, I lit the cinnamon cookie scented candle that was accumulating dust on the bathroom sink. I popped the cap off my tube of red lipstick and wrote “Samantha James Pearson” across the length of the mirror three times. Then I snuffed out the candle, hit the light switch and felt my way to bed.

I can’t say that I dreamed, or if I did then I can’t say that the dreaming has stopped. I awoke to the buzzing of my alarm and was immediately disoriented. It seemed as if my entire bedroom had been flipped, inverted. What had been left was right, what once was right was left. I sat on the edge of the bed in a panic asking myself, “What the fuck?” over and over until the threat of being late for work overruled the urge to scream. I hurried into the bathroom and was confronted by my reflection.
Samantha James Pearson was already dressed and ready for work, brushing her teeth into a frothy foam. My jaw dropped. I approached the mirror with my name now written backward across its surface and stared as my reflection spat and rinsed. Groggily my reflection set the toothbrush in the holder and looked up, at me, still dressed in the plush footed jamies.
Our eyes met and she screamed, three sharp bursts before she clapped a hand over her mouth, grabbed the wash cloth and started rubbing the name away, smearing crimson everywhere.
I reached for the mirror, for the vanishing name. I touched it, cooling gelatin, liquid mercury, rainbow colors of an oil slick in a rain puddle. The worlds rushed away from me as I fell up uncontrollably, like a helium balloon come off its tether. I struggled with all of my might to stop, to return to my room, but all I could do was get close enough to watch. Samantha cleaning the mirror with Windex, examining her now compliant reflection. Samantha sighing relief as I struggled to stay near, to see her.

I thought, at first that someone would notice that she was not me. I waited for Isaac or Scott working at Hargroves to comment on a perceived difference. I watched later that night as she picked Thom up from the airport. I watched their lips lock and thought: “He knows me, he really knows me.” He would shove the doppelganger away, he would demand to know what she had done with me. Instead he came home with her. I watched them make love. The following day she had lunch with Tess, she spoke to my mother for an hour, the neighbor chatted with her in the hall for 30 minutes. No one noticed that I was gone.

I have fallen in this black hole. This no place, no face nothingness. Life goes on, whirling twirling figures of a cuckoo clock. Samantha James Pearson, 24, long dark hair, short-cropped bangs, green eyes, a smattering of freckles, still works at Hargroves. She still lives in the studio on the third floor. Her boyfriend Thom still takes her out for ice cream on Sundays, a movie or a show on Fridays. Her flighty friend Tess still texts her when she wants to swing by for a cup of Ramen and a jam session. Margaret James recently sent her daughter an Easter card with a pair of pastel toe socks.
But I don’t know who that is reading the card, wiggling toes in new socks, kissing Thom on the couch. I don’t know who is in there because I am out here, hanging on the fringe of the abyss, watching this curious cuckoo dance, observing the name and face I once believed were my own functioning autonomously. As I recede bit by bit into the darkness, I watch the face and the name carry on without me and I wonder; who is free of whom?

Out of the Sleeping Tunnel

Bright sunlight streams in though my narrow window, filling the white walled room with the newness only a cold winter morning can bring. The bed seems to hug me in a tight embrace, holding onto my skin like a lover reluctant to let me go. The sheets are soft and warm from a night between its folds and outside these quilted walls the air is bitter and blue.
I know that soon I will leave this bed and begin to move, gathering various journals and pens and musical instruments, but I’ll feel the bed calling me back all day, not just the murmuring of the soft mattress and bouncy pillows, but the state of relaxed oblivion, staring into the blue sky of the morning, thoughts bouncing like ping pong balls off the walls of my cranium with no control or order to them, springing from word to thought to word again quicker than my breath.
After breakfast that state of sleep calls my name. All through the morning, as I eat breakfast, as I deviate and stare into the mirror looking at minute pores and tiny freckles, spending precious minutes on the problems of the body- I hear the bed calling.
When the sun starts to set or I finish a small writing exercise or in the contented moments after lunch when I think of watching a TV show, the bed is calling. And it is not just the relaxed state, nor the way it holds my body in its malleable contours, it is the state of apathy, of pure laziness, the way I could spend hours staring out the window from the corner tucked onto the grooves of a pillow.
The state of sleep is always there, a sheer drop from where I sit now typing these words. One glance and I could be there, one word misinterpreted, one look or tone. The bed takes many shapes, transforming easily from fluffy comforter to dark hole. That darkness made not of all colors and lights, but the fumbling land of squinted eyes and unsaid hatred and stinging tears that rob my laughter.
I stand at the edge, I can see though this one tiny tunnel of clear attention- I see that the call, the voice of that bed, the voice of sleep, the voice urging me to relax, pointing to all the deserved reasons, spelling out the logic with charts and graphs, my body is primed for sleep, willing it on as I push into the cold winter light. The voice of reason is the seducer of the lazy, the perfect bride for my machine. It does not want transformation, it does not want to sit clothed in a bathrobe and turn time into something visible on a page. To claw myself away from the bed I must do something else, something radical to turn body into intentional action.
And so I write these goals, simple chicken scratches that only I can read. But they are clear and there, sitting right in front of me, a blaring light that shines into the rough-skinned slab of meat at the computer.
And though some days I trudge through those goals, just barely able to complete them as I sit tired and desiring those feather-filled arms. Some days I can see so clearly, that it is not enough just to do, but it is how I do. The delicacy of the flow, the breath as it travels in and out, my expression as day turns into black night. I write out those goals, I fulfill them and I move on to the next task, the never-ending flow of creative waves, moons of opportunity. I smile into the moonlight that I cannot see, part of me is ready.

The Next Step

I cut through you with my glorious knife, letting blood, rending flesh. You know my name, ha, ha, it is formless, it is soundless, but you feel it as your flesh is stripped from bone and pulled into the icy whirlwind. The hierarchy of organic existence is a house of cards that I huff and puff and blow down, down, down into the swirling abyss. And you push and pull to set her back up and see your own reflection in her structure, but let me set you straight, it is really my image that you see in your own and I have none, ha, ha.
So you see, what you see, is a trick of light, a light bending game. You are a magician and I am a big black box; through me things manifest and through me they vanish, never to be found again. Ha, ha. I am the magician and I am the box, but as a matter of fission, of division and variation, you proclaim yourself “I that I am” and run about making the grass green, making the sad man sad, ha, ha, and the angry woman angry.
You are the “I am I”, and I am the something that you bump blindly into and then name to make it visible in your magickal kingdom. It’s your fairytale. It’s my fairytale. Our fairytale. Fusion my dear, my dear, occurs when you put yourself back in the box, ha, ha, and we vanish together, in unity enlightenment, death.
But isn’t it funny that you keep wriggling away from my embrace? My red hot love endlessly flowing, devouring flesh, with razor sharp teeth, my adoring clown grin begging for one more kissssssssssssssss.
Forget the name darling, you know ME. Maybe you’d rather forget, ha, ha, ha, but you know, you know… The normal escape route is out into the myriad of forms and beings and existences that constitute the expansion and flowing destiny of what is, and everything is, radiating out from a bubble in space, ha, ha, a little cosmic indigestion.
And me, I am the inverse of that space bubble. You know what that is, don’t you? You have a name for that too, ha, ha. But you could just call me mommy, standing here with my knife, my glorious knife, you could call me huntress, or Tyger, Tyger or you could just shut up.
Because, you see, my darling, I’m going to get you, and bring you home, one way or another, and where we’re going, a scream is a silent thing, ha, ha. Where we’re going there are no names. Narrow is the way, and few are the chosen, ha, ha. It is formless, it is soundless, but you feel it as your flesh is stripped from bone and pulled into the icy whirlwind.
I’ve been waiting for this kiss, letting blood, rending flesh, grinding bone. I cut through you with my glorious knife and you know ME, you remember me now, ha, ha. Ha, ha ,ha.

Through the Veil

At the top of the hierarchy of organic existence, where many a man has thought he belongs, just like the oils and fats at the top of the modern food pyramid, which perhaps should have been discredited long ago as a “beneficial back rub” for the agricultural lobby; at the top where man, with his large brain and malevolent ego believes he belongs, there is a "something" that man does not achieve. For the majority it is not achieved, though that achievement is indeed possible, however difficult it may be.

And that something, which eludes the majority of mankind, we can allude to it with beautiful words, a thesaurus of verse and synonym which could fill the ears of wondrous, flowery Maria. We could delight her with visions and the smells of every rose and describe the sky and all its wonders, but that something would still remain intangible, unknowable, because it is not of words, not made or created or coaxed into being by the statements of finality that language attempts to keep locked in the metal boxes of the attic.

Jacques, that character of a man with white notebook and fountain pen, perhaps we could twist tales and seduce him with wise plants of the desert and old pipes exhaling smoke. We could try, many have certainly attempted to describe that ‘something,’ but it can never be fully held, either by Jaques or the others that stand beside him at the top of the pyramid drenched in oil and salt.

I myself, the writer of these words, supposedly at the top of this mountain made from As and Bs, I struggle with their placement, dance around the loops made for my capture. Words! You bastards! I purge you with these metaphors, I run though the gaps in your iron walls, looking, finessing, rubbing against that ‘something’ that stays hidden, beyond the grasp of your control. Maria, where are you hidden?

There is a veil, a division, between us and the next form of existence. Like the widow’s black curtain that obscures the ocean and sun, we live out earthly existence mired by our eventual demise. This fear is masked by a thousand other names, different configurations of the same basic structure. Sex, marriage, adventure and orgasm, children, vacation; the division is thick, winds like a serpents tail around the ankle of my infant, infected through mother’s milk and generations of spoken sound.

Words! This veil, the division, is called death. Death. Death, that takes our Maria, transforming that milky body into ashes. Take of her, but do not make her blind. Push though the veil Maria! Push through the widow’s gauze which I refuse to wear and search for that ‘something’ I could not explain to you in life. Jacques, pick up the stone, move further to the right. Yes. Now to the left around the open hell-mouth of finality. For this moment, let the gates of your chest open. The ego, the malevolent beast, sacrifice it to the veil, the black division which obscured death and the other forms which lay beyond its promise. Jacques, sacrifice the body and leave it for the scavengers of pride and word.

Listen to my voice. These words, which failed us in life, they may bring us to the bolts of energy that wait transfixed in space, climbing, climbing. Walk up and open your arms, for the world is one and now you can understand. Language, you words! They are ours, shapes of mushrooms in the darkened clouds, plants colored as the ocean’s smell.

Words! You bastards! Climb the steps, Jacques, open you arms, and for this moment, open the gates of your chest. There is no more you, but the ego, slay it so that we may enter. Slay it and leave it for the others to feast, the ghosts are hungry. Maria, you are there, flowers at your feet. Open your mouth, let the blue light of that something, let it drip in.

We are here. The divine dance of orbital light and chance, that something is here.

Bunny

We met again many years after that initial incident, in a pub on main street. His fur was matted and dirty and one ear seemed to have gone floppy, but it was none other than him, the same one that I had encountered on a fateful spring morning 4 years ago.
He was looking worse for the wear, it’s true, but I couldn’t have looked much better, save for the symmetry of my own audio sensory perception devices. That is to say, that my ears were still rightfully positioned on either side of my head. I had lost a good deal of hair from my crown though, and what was left was streaked with silver. Aging prematurely and at an accelerated rate, I had made great progress towards the picture of a ruined man forged under the anvil of stress. This was, without a doubt, an unwholesome process of deterioration catalyzed by the incident itself.

Forget Harvey, the untouchably kind and fortunate Mr. Dodson. In this world that I inhabit, when you tell people you’ve seen a six foot rabbit, the shit really hits the fan. My wife, for starters, left me.
Which is why I was in a pub on main street on July 4th, our anniversary, intent on drinking myself into oblivion. It had seemed like such a good idea at the time, marrying on the national independence day, because of the fireworks and the general atmosphere of merriment.
Now of course it meant that the day was twice as hard to forget and impossible to blot out, unless I was in a coma. It would seem that the holidays are hard on all kinds of unstable idiosyncratic characters, because there he was too, slumping over the counter, nose twitching under the meager sallow light. The fierce stature he had accumulated in my memory was diminished by that posture, by the whimpering of another nearby drunk, by the way he demanded “another tin and gonic” and only sniffled when the barkeep in his white apron shook his head and said, “You’ve had enough fella.”

But I was saying that after we met that first time, (if you can call it a meeting), after he more or less threatened me, ( I say more, he says less), my jellybeans weren’t the only thing that went to hell in a hand basket. After my wife, I lost my teaching job, naturally, and went on the road as a traveling encyclopedia salesman.
Not a big deal, all that time hopping along dusty trails, because my talk of an enormous rabbit, and the money I had borrowed to pay for therapy, and the phobia of eggs that made me a hard person to break bread with, left me emotionally estranged from even the most devout of my family and friends. It’s funny how an issue like that can snowball.

For example I’d gotten into the habit of removing pages containing certain verses from every Gideon's bible in the motel rooms that I frequented as part of my new and dying profession. Matthew 27:50-53, John 11:25-26, Romans 1:4-5, anything that might be read from the pulpit on a certain Sunday in spring.
I found that the harder I looked, the more I would find, until I was looking over pages as though they were word searches and letters from separate words contained in descending lines began to spell out the messages that I feared most; hidden verses about the Leporidean sons of Yaldabaoth.
I couldn’t sleep until I’d purged these books of such nightmares and had hidden the unwholesome pages in the bottom of a wastebasket beneath emptied cartons of Chinese take out. There were plentiful nights of monstrous discovery to leach the fear of Wikipedia, unreachable quotas, and insufficient commissions from my consciousness by dawn.
In retrospect, it is no mean feat that I avoided formal institutionalization during this dark chapter of my existence. It was a depraved shadow life that I led, a life which took its root in that brief encounter in a shiny past many years before I found myself once again face to face with that improbable individual, this time inside of a small pub on Main Street.

Every city, every town everywhere has a Main Street. I have come to believe that by some mystical power each of these may act as a portal to any other Main Street so that a person could travel from one city to the next, state to state, coast to coast without ever leaving Main Street. Whether you really had or hadn’t, you wouldn’t know the difference, because they all look essentially the same.
So I will simply say that the pub was on Main Street and that was where I found him, by accident, at around 6pm on a July 4th.
He was there when I came in from the heat, a wall of air conditioned air paralyzing me momentarily while my eyes adjusted to the dimness. For this reason, I was standing just within the door when my sight became clearer and fell upon the abysmal figure of that individual whom I had been simultaneously eluding and pursuing for 4 years.
I knew him right away and I felt the old fear. It made me hesitate. I considered going back out the way I had come. But in the end I decided to face him.
I bowed my head and, avoiding eye contact, took the seat beside him. If he recognized me at all he gave no sign of it. “What are you drinking Mac?” the barman asked and I ordered whiskey. I breathed in the odor of his grimy gin soaked fur and moved my fingers anxiously over the bar top, unable to turn my gaze on him.
I had relived that first meeting in memory countless times and had tried to play it differently, cooler, braver, standing my ground. I had also imagined this, a second encounter in which I could redeem myself, maybe in a bout of fisticuffs.

I slammed the shot and let the bartender pour me another. Then I turned to the hiccuping rabbit at my side and asked,
“Do you remember me?”
He gazed blearily at me, weaving on the barstool.
“You threatened to hide an egg under me 4 years ago.” I told him.
His eyes widened a little and rolled around in his head as he mumbled something in what I presumed was Gaelic. Then he flung an arm around my shoulder and said,
“I hate the bleedin 4th of July, don’t you? Pie eating. Who the fig wants to eat pie? And all that noise.” he sighed heavily.
Leaning on me he launched into another attempt at little bunny foo foo.

This was not at all the frightful leering beastie I had remembered or imagined. It was he that I had met 4 years ago, the patch of black fur at the tip of his left ear was unmistakable. But he was not as monstrous as my mind had made him.
Here at last sat the source of my nightly terrors, just one more Joe drowning away the indignities one suffers through the course of trying to earn a living.
I imagined, for the first time, that long ago morning from his perspective. I saw myself as one of those who in my own present profession made an already embarrassing job all the harder. I saw myself in him.
Again and again he tried to sing verses of little bunny foo foo until they devolved into the gibberish of slurred speech and absent mindedness. Despite myself, I joined in and found that I knew all the words.

Doorways

I walked for a couple of blocks in the night thick with fog. Everything appeared white and moist and, although I tried to pull myself away from the recurring thoughts, it also appeared sinister. I walked like a ghost in a sleeping city. There were no cars speeding through the deserted streets, no women in rags promising good times and used condoms. There was no one around me at all.
I walked alone on the gray sidewalks and darkened neon signs until I came to a short alley that appeared familiar in its disarray. It path was covered with trash and the remains of dead dreams: old newspapers with forgotten headlines, empty ripped cardboard boxes, old coats now spotted with blood, broken bottles that somehow managed to twinkle green and brown despite the foggy sky, half of a magazine cover and a couple of soda cans that had been dented and used as pipes. It extended for half a block and ended with a black metal garage door and a little wooden stairway to its right.
I stepped through the strewn madness, finding small, safe pockets to step on. Walking though the ancient graffiti markings on either side of me, names scrawled in red and white paint, I made my way through the chaos easily. Beside the stairs, shadowed by the building, I saw the gatekeeper, a dwarf waiting for me in the darkness.
He held out his wrinkled hand.
"A dollar is all I ask... you still can't go through the main portal but you can go up the stairway. Be careful with your choice this time."
I thought I heard a sound, a chuckle, a stifled laugh.
I gave him what he asked for and walked up the stairway to a gray door, assuming he had confused me with someone else and curious to discover what was on the other side of the decaying metal door. I knocked and the door opened into darkness.
I smelled something familiar, a mixture of freshly rained upon soil and used cooking grease. I walked into the space further, down a long hallway. I could see shapes, but there were no colors. I was barely able to glimpse a feminine hand holding the doorknob behind me. A disembodied appendage, it appeared smooth and delicate with its long white fingers and tapered nails. It had been the hand that responded to my knock, allowing me entrance into the chamber.
I stood then in darkness and silence, waiting for something to happen. I became aware of the soft breathing of a woman. It was close to me at first, but I heard it move away slowly, moving down the hall until it disappeared altogether. I waited for what seemed painfully long, I waited and waited, but there was no further movement around me.
Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the darkness. I was then able to see the details of a long narrow hallway stretching into darkness before me. The flooring was made of old and worn wooden planks, a floor walked so many times that it had lost all its original luster. There was a long sequence of doors on either side of the hallway and each door had a little cutout window at eye level.
I started walking slowly down the hallway, afraid to disturb anyone that might be present, yet unable to stay where I was. As I walked past the first door I noticed a soft yellow light coming from inside. Checking around me to make sure nobody was watching, I moved my eyes close to the small window.
Inside I saw two men playing poker on a low wooden coffee table. One was short and stocky, the other tall and skinny. They both shared the same light coffee-colored skin, their faces were both shaved and like the wooden flooring of the hallway, worn by time. They moved their cards carefully, with the grace of experienced players whose bodies had memorized the gestures, the timing. It was all done fluidly and without thought.
I could see two walls clearly through the little window in the door. On them were photographs of the two men, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with others. Some of the photos were large and protected in frames of thin metal and glass, others were tacked to the wall in what appeared to me a haphazard style.
I was particularly mystified by a little photo that showed the stocky man when he was young. I was aware of the intense difference, how slender he had been then, his muscles firm and flat. His smile was less forced, as though it came from a place that did not need protection, that had not known pain or disappointment. In the photograph he held a yellow flower in his hand.
The man smiling now at his card game was very different, he was a cunning man who appeared to know the tricks of life and had a method for avoiding them. I turned from the chamber and continued walking down the hall.
I walked carefully, putting attention on each step to avoid creaking the old floorboards. I felt like I had to be quiet, to breath more slowly, to move more softly than I ever had. I passed a couple of dark doors without light and then turned to one where the inner light was bright, like the white light from a naked bulb.
I peeked inside, a little more brave now, somehow realizing that there was nobody around to be afraid of. These were benevolent ghosts and I had been permitted to walk amongst them.
This time there was nobody in the room, just a carefully made bed that could fit two people easily, a little night lamp with a bright bulb (the source of the room’s illumination) and several rows of bookshelves against the back walls. I opened the door, unable to control my eagerness to examine the rows of paperbacks and the thick bound hardcover books more closely.
I had placed one foot inside the door when I heard laughter coming from another room. With that lighthearted laugh coming from someplace close by, my attention and curiosity dissolved and I quickly closed the door and walked further down the hallway, reasoning with myself that I would come back later.
I looked for the source of the laughter and found it easily. She had long black hair and shining dark eyes which fell upon me as soon as I peeked through the small window of a blood-red door. She was there, in the center of the room, standing barefoot on a thin, worn maroon carpet. She, and the entire room, were bathed in the glow of bright red light. She was naked, her skin appeared red in the light, the shade made by her breasts and hips and ample contours was dark, like a simple charcoal drawing.
She looked at me directly through the window, gesturing with her right hand, asking me to come in. I began to turn the creaky knob and suddenly felt the sensation of warmth on my back. With this feeling I hesitated and turned around.
Again my attention dissipated. My curiosity for the woman fluttered away as I saw another stairway leading up, ending in a brightly illuminated open door. The staircase was longer, more worn, more fragile than the one outside. I thought it might break apart as soon as I set foot on it.
Feeling torn between the adventure of the stairway, the eyes of the woman and the mystery of the books, I decided to walk a little further down the hallway in case there were even more choices. There were many more doors, with other lights and other scenes.
But I could never decide, I could never make a final decision, turn the knob, enter the space and let the door shut behind me. There was always the promise of another choice, another door, something even better.
I kept walking down the hall until the light got darker and then I realized there were no more doors, no little windows, no options. I heard a voice that whispered to my left:
"Thanks for coming. Before you now there is only Death. Do come back."
Then, in front of me, a door opened. I heard the loud creaking of ancient rusted metal. A bright blinding light hit me and I found myself on a busy street, with cars honking, children crying and adults complaining about the price of gasoline.
My eyes took a while to adjust to the blinding light. Then I looked around and recognized the familiar street. I felt the pull of hunger and started to walk home.